The most disturbing video you’ll see today: the weird-ass recruitment video from the US Army’s 4th Psychological Operations (PSYOP) Group.
“Have you ever wondered who’s pulling the strings?”.
For example the big russian psyop that led to Trump getting elected turned out to be around 100k monthly in facebook ads this sounds like much but is not that manpower intensive and also like really cheap, this is of course assuming that this is what led to Trump winning which I somewhat doubt. This is the one big win but I’m sure there’s a lot of others.
This is contrasted with US psyops, the National Endowment for Democracy gets a grant of around 130 millions per year. this one little arm of the US government has probably fifty times more money available than all of the russian psyops combined. So US psyops are much better funded and they are just more effective historically, the amount of CIA coups and psyops that the CIA themselves say they’ve done dwarf any other country.
This isn’t even getting into what the effects actually are US psyops are often responsible for fascist coups or heightening ethnic tensions between groups to destabilize a country leading to horrible ethnic conflicts and this isn’t limited to just a psyops they’ll arm turkish fascist that do violence against kurds and back home there’ll be concern but no condemnation of decades.
If I start listing everything I’ll become more and more like a Charlie from IASIP so before this all starts. I’d recommend Manufacturing Consent by Noam Chomsky that goes over the US media and its analysis on how US propaganda works. It is much better than going down the rabbit hole I’m about to go down.
So the most obvious to point out is the U.S. Agency for Global Media with a yearly budget of 810 millions and they have several outlets like Radio Free Europe, Voice of America, Radio Free Asia and more the CEO of the USAGM is always appointed by the President of the United States and you can probably guess that they very pro-USA. This is the most obvious most out there ongoing US psyop but wait there’s more.
A ton of Hollywood movies, TV series and even video games all have a very interesting relationship with the US government, you might already know this but never hurts to write this again the various US armies will happily rent out ships, jets, helicopters etc. to bigger productions in return for being able to approve their scrips and they’ve requested changes to the script before so the US army has and is currently influencing movies and the CIA likes to ‘be an advisor on shows’ for example Jack Ryan where around the same time the whole Juan Guaidó thing went down their series was about how brutal Venezuela is and how CIA agent Jack Ryan helps bring democracy to that country and how it’s very cool and good. They’ve also done this with several video games, I think you’ll allow this small indulgence when I say that for example the latest Call of Duty seems to have been influenced by the US army because they show the infamous ‘Highway of Death’ but instead of correctly attributing it to the US it is attributed to the Russians so basically historical revisionism.
I’ll go off a small tangent because things are going to get tangled here the other one that is quite insidious is USAID, they have a budget of around 27.2bn USD obviously giving disaster relief is good but USAID has also been used as both a stabilizing force, if they want to keep a certain US aligned president in power, and as a destabilizing force if the population votes wrong. A good example would be Peru with its President Fujimori, a huge piece of shit by the way, who was favored by the CIA because he was an anti-communist and fascist, after he got in USAID gave a lot of disaster relief towards Peru which helped him stabilize his regime, USAID also did forced sterilizations for good old boy Fuji. One the other hand when Yemen voted in the UN against the USA using force against Iraq in 1990 they’ve lost all all from the USA within days, Yemen is one of the poorest nation in the world and this of course sent a message. So this is more in the whole ‘bribery’ category but USAID has certainly been used by the US government to get US friendly guys into government and keep those dang commies out which is why a lot of south american countries have basically expelled them.
Ok I said more and more conspiracy theories and now we get to the Deus Ex part so yeah lets go. The US government is also funding dozens of think tanks that influence politicians all around the world, I’m getting a bit eepy so I’ll blitz through this, ‘think tanks’ like the Atlantic Council are funded by the US government and they are basically lobbying all the time and trying to get politicians that agree with their worldview in higher positions of power. A good current example would be the German Marshall Fund a US funded think tank with around 40mil yearly budget, one of their ‘promoted politicians’ is the current foreign minister Anna Baerbock.
I feel like this is way too much and that I’ve been writing for too long about stuff that would be much better to read about so yeah.
Edit: Also this is all done while functionally being a puddle in my 29C appartment so.
I’d recommend Manufacturing Consent by Noam Chomsky that goes over the US media and its analysis on how US propaganda works. It is much better than going down the rabbit hole I’m about to go down.
Additionally, in just 2021, the Senate dropped another cool half a billion on """countering Chinese and Russian influence"""
Michael Parenti’s To Kill a Nation is about this process as it was usedcommitted in Yugoslavia.
Essentially, Yugoslavia remained communist instead of surrendering to capitalism like it was “supposed” to, like the USSR and the rest of the Eastern block had. So the CIA began an intense propaganda campaign to turn the different nationalities living within the state against each other. The result was a horrific war, with ethnic cleansings committed by many groups, culminating in a brutal bombing campaign by NATO - the “defensive” alliance - and the splintering apart of a successful multinational socialist state.
I hope Operation Gladio is something you know part of that whole thing was supporting and training the grey wolves, during the cold war and up to 2000 they’ve trained various turkish nationalist/fascist groups that would target the PKK stoking turkish-kurdisch conflict. You have CIA involvement in the middle east in general like the whole Syria thing and of course the Balkans, for example the CIA backed the Kosovo Liberation Army stoking the serb-albanian ethnic conflict.
Yeah cannot recommend Jakarta Method enough, me and an irl anarchist friend of mine read it together and it was one of the most eye opening books I’ve ever read about the level of brutality the US used in stopping the spread of socialism in the third world. Now we both make a point of trying to get every liberal we know to read the book and ngl we’ve been pretty successful so far (we’ve got three people we know to read it).
Its like Jakarta method on steroids. It goes over their involvement in multiple countries from the GDR to Guatamala, the soviet union to egypt, and everything in between
its less eye opening and more like soul revealing on a scale yet known
although the albania chapter is hilarious because the CIA couldn’t do shit because the guy in charge of the operation was a double agent
Hey thanks for reaching out.
I think psyops suck, I think we shouldn’t intervene in other countries clandestinely or otherwise. I don’t think it’s good when Russia or China does it either. I’m responding to the fact that this post highlights the US basically admitting to doing these things, and even glorifying it, and your response seems to be “well what about China or Russia?”
I don’t think it is wrong to compare one to another, I think context is good and I think it is good when it is brought up that a country accusing others of something is also doing that thing itself. Generally I think whataboutism is a psy-op invented in order to obfuscate good discussion.
However I am here using “whataboutism” because my experience is that quite often when someone critiques China or Russia of something and it is highlighted that not only does America do the same, it arguably does it in a far more heinous way, the word “whataboutism” is thrown out.
Yet here the US is admitting to doing heinous actions, and the immediate response is “well, what about China or Russia?”
It strikes me as not being done in good faith.
“have you ever wondered who’s pulling the strings” over a news broadcast describing protests in China and the fall of the Soviet Union. the video directly implies the US was behind these actions.
They want their job to seem cool to potential applicants. I’m sure they do shit like this, because psyops is pretty broad and I’d expect the US to be good at it.
I don’t think that the video gives us anything new … I just see marketing BS.
Specifics will only be known much later, if at all.
I think that we can infer that the US involves itself anywhere where its business or security interests are threatened, or it could give them an advantage (also by denying competition). That’s because of well documented patterns of past behaviour.
How much of a role their psyops teams played/are playing pre/during/post these particular events, we may never know, but I sure would like to. This video doesn’t give us that though.
I’m probably just arguing a technicality at this point. 😛
That video is the equivalent of “I’d love to have shot that guy” after a body turns up with a bullet hole in it.
If you or I – people who don’t have the means to shoot that guy, or who would likely get caught if we tried – put out that video, sure, maybe we’re just talking shit and puffing up our chests. But when a state actor with functionally limitless resources puts it out, and we know for a fact they’ve shot guys before and tried to shoot many more, you’d have to be beyond credulous to write it off as “marketing BS.”
Maybe … but I’ve seen a lot of both slick and cringe marketing coming out of large corporations over the years. Reality is usually far more boring, full of ordinary people doing fairly ordinary work, making mistakes, etc.
It could also be that they are the best advertising agency in the US that we’ve never heard of.
But my money is on them having paid another company to make it, found it cool (probably while slightly drunk in the conference room one evening), got the approval from HQ and released it.
edit: I’m reminded of that video of the bond villains, going home after a hard day’s work… heh.
So, silly promo videos aside, what is the difference between US psyops, Russian psyops, and China psyops?
Is there a reason why one deserves more derision than the others?
It seems like BAU for “great powers” to try to extend their influence beyond their borders to the benefit of their national interests.
Scope and effectiveness I guess.
For example the big russian psyop that led to Trump getting elected turned out to be around 100k monthly in facebook ads this sounds like much but is not that manpower intensive and also like really cheap, this is of course assuming that this is what led to Trump winning which I somewhat doubt. This is the one big win but I’m sure there’s a lot of others.
This is contrasted with US psyops, the National Endowment for Democracy gets a grant of around 130 millions per year. this one little arm of the US government has probably fifty times more money available than all of the russian psyops combined. So US psyops are much better funded and they are just more effective historically, the amount of CIA coups and psyops that the CIA themselves say they’ve done dwarf any other country.
This isn’t even getting into what the effects actually are US psyops are often responsible for fascist coups or heightening ethnic tensions between groups to destabilize a country leading to horrible ethnic conflicts and this isn’t limited to just a psyops they’ll arm turkish fascist that do violence against kurds and back home there’ll be concern but no condemnation of decades.
I saw a RadioFreeEurope article the other day called Bandera “Controversial” and using phrasing like “being accused of pogroms”.
RFE, being a literal arm of the US federal governemt with millions in funding to put out history-erasing articles just like that daily.
I didn’t want to do the whole leftist meme of a listing everything because the guy had like 5 answers already.
List away, I’ll get to them. :-)
If I start listing everything I’ll become more and more like a Charlie from IASIP so before this all starts. I’d recommend Manufacturing Consent by Noam Chomsky that goes over the US media and its analysis on how US propaganda works. It is much better than going down the rabbit hole I’m about to go down.
So the most obvious to point out is the U.S. Agency for Global Media with a yearly budget of 810 millions and they have several outlets like Radio Free Europe, Voice of America, Radio Free Asia and more the CEO of the USAGM is always appointed by the President of the United States and you can probably guess that they very pro-USA. This is the most obvious most out there ongoing US psyop but wait there’s more.
A ton of Hollywood movies, TV series and even video games all have a very interesting relationship with the US government, you might already know this but never hurts to write this again the various US armies will happily rent out ships, jets, helicopters etc. to bigger productions in return for being able to approve their scrips and they’ve requested changes to the script before so the US army has and is currently influencing movies and the CIA likes to ‘be an advisor on shows’ for example Jack Ryan where around the same time the whole Juan Guaidó thing went down their series was about how brutal Venezuela is and how CIA agent Jack Ryan helps bring democracy to that country and how it’s very cool and good. They’ve also done this with several video games, I think you’ll allow this small indulgence when I say that for example the latest Call of Duty seems to have been influenced by the US army because they show the infamous ‘Highway of Death’ but instead of correctly attributing it to the US it is attributed to the Russians so basically historical revisionism.
Don’t wait now if you keep reading I’ll throw in this next part we have government institutions that are funded to get pro-US parties elected so here the big one is of course the National Endowment for Democracy, underneath it you have several smaller groups like the National Democratic Institute that after the death of Hugo Chávez funded the opposition parties and the International Republican Institute which was responsible for what went down in 2004 in Haiti. and the NED has been accused so far by the Chinese Government to be responsible for the protests in Hong Kong.
I’ll go off a small tangent because things are going to get tangled here the other one that is quite insidious is USAID, they have a budget of around 27.2bn USD obviously giving disaster relief is good but USAID has also been used as both a stabilizing force, if they want to keep a certain US aligned president in power, and as a destabilizing force if the population votes wrong. A good example would be Peru with its President Fujimori, a huge piece of shit by the way, who was favored by the CIA because he was an anti-communist and fascist, after he got in USAID gave a lot of disaster relief towards Peru which helped him stabilize his regime, USAID also did forced sterilizations for good old boy Fuji. One the other hand when Yemen voted in the UN against the USA using force against Iraq in 1990 they’ve lost all all from the USA within days, Yemen is one of the poorest nation in the world and this of course sent a message. So this is more in the whole ‘bribery’ category but USAID has certainly been used by the US government to get US friendly guys into government and keep those dang commies out which is why a lot of south american countries have basically expelled them.
Ok I said more and more conspiracy theories and now we get to the Deus Ex part so yeah lets go. The US government is also funding dozens of think tanks that influence politicians all around the world, I’m getting a bit eepy so I’ll blitz through this, ‘think tanks’ like the Atlantic Council are funded by the US government and they are basically lobbying all the time and trying to get politicians that agree with their worldview in higher positions of power. A good current example would be the German Marshall Fund a US funded think tank with around 40mil yearly budget, one of their ‘promoted politicians’ is the current foreign minister Anna Baerbock.
I feel like this is way too much and that I’ve been writing for too long about stuff that would be much better to read about so yeah.
Edit: Also this is all done while functionally being a puddle in my 29C appartment so.
Great, thanks! I’ve been reading Chomsky for years, but not every book.
and Inventing Reality by Michael Parenti
Additionally, in just 2021, the Senate dropped another cool half a billion on """countering Chinese and Russian influence"""
Their 'paid propaganda', our 'briefing'
With good reason: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-022-35576-9
I would like to know more about this, do you have any examples?
Michael Parenti’s To Kill a Nation is about this process as it was
usedcommitted in Yugoslavia.Essentially, Yugoslavia remained communist instead of surrendering to capitalism like it was “supposed” to, like the USSR and the rest of the Eastern block had. So the CIA began an intense propaganda campaign to turn the different nationalities living within the state against each other. The result was a horrific war, with ethnic cleansings committed by many groups, culminating in a brutal bombing campaign by NATO - the “defensive” alliance - and the splintering apart of a successful multinational socialist state.
I hope Operation Gladio is something you know part of that whole thing was supporting and training the grey wolves, during the cold war and up to 2000 they’ve trained various turkish nationalist/fascist groups that would target the PKK stoking turkish-kurdisch conflict. You have CIA involvement in the middle east in general like the whole Syria thing and of course the Balkans, for example the CIA backed the Kosovo Liberation Army stoking the serb-albanian ethnic conflict.
deleted by creator
Thanks! I’ll add these to my reading list.
Yeah cannot recommend Jakarta Method enough, me and an irl anarchist friend of mine read it together and it was one of the most eye opening books I’ve ever read about the level of brutality the US used in stopping the spread of socialism in the third world. Now we both make a point of trying to get every liberal we know to read the book and ngl we’ve been pretty successful so far (we’ve got three people we know to read it).
Have you read killing hope?
No but I’ve heard of it, should I?
Its like Jakarta method on steroids. It goes over their involvement in multiple countries from the GDR to Guatamala, the soviet union to egypt, and everything in between
its less eye opening and more like soul revealing on a scale yet known
although the albania chapter is hilarious because the CIA couldn’t do shit because the guy in charge of the operation was a double agent
I looked up it’s reception in its section on Wikipedia and saw the best possible review to convince me to get it and read it lol
Hey Egon. What are your thoughts on this? I’d be happy to go private, if you prefer.
Hey thanks for reaching out.
I think psyops suck, I think we shouldn’t intervene in other countries clandestinely or otherwise. I don’t think it’s good when Russia or China does it either. I’m responding to the fact that this post highlights the US basically admitting to doing these things, and even glorifying it, and your response seems to be “well what about China or Russia?”
I don’t think it is wrong to compare one to another, I think context is good and I think it is good when it is brought up that a country accusing others of something is also doing that thing itself. Generally I think whataboutism is a psy-op invented in order to obfuscate good discussion.
However I am here using “whataboutism” because my experience is that quite often when someone critiques China or Russia of something and it is highlighted that not only does America do the same, it arguably does it in a far more heinous way, the word “whataboutism” is thrown out.
Yet here the US is admitting to doing heinous actions, and the immediate response is “well, what about China or Russia?”
It strikes me as not being done in good faith.
I’m with you on non-interventionist policies in general. Exceptions should be very exceptional, which is unfortunately not the case.
What do you think they are admitting to in the video though? It’s a promotional video, not a deposition.
“have you ever wondered who’s pulling the strings” over a news broadcast describing protests in China and the fall of the Soviet Union. the video directly implies the US was behind these actions.
They want their job to seem cool to potential applicants. I’m sure they do shit like this, because psyops is pretty broad and I’d expect the US to be good at it.
I don’t think that the video gives us anything new … I just see marketing BS.
What’s your bar for reasonable inference? Do we need to wait for the NED to make a post bragging about it in a few years?
Specifics will only be known much later, if at all.
I think that we can infer that the US involves itself anywhere where its business or security interests are threatened, or it could give them an advantage (also by denying competition). That’s because of well documented patterns of past behaviour.
How much of a role their psyops teams played/are playing pre/during/post these particular events, we may never know, but I sure would like to. This video doesn’t give us that though.
I’m probably just arguing a technicality at this point. 😛
That video is the equivalent of “I’d love to have shot that guy” after a body turns up with a bullet hole in it.
If you or I – people who don’t have the means to shoot that guy, or who would likely get caught if we tried – put out that video, sure, maybe we’re just talking shit and puffing up our chests. But when a state actor with functionally limitless resources puts it out, and we know for a fact they’ve shot guys before and tried to shoot many more, you’d have to be beyond credulous to write it off as “marketing BS.”
Maybe … but I’ve seen a lot of both slick and cringe marketing coming out of large corporations over the years. Reality is usually far more boring, full of ordinary people doing fairly ordinary work, making mistakes, etc.
It could also be that they are the best advertising agency in the US that we’ve never heard of.
But my money is on them having paid another company to make it, found it cool (probably while slightly drunk in the conference room one evening), got the approval from HQ and released it.
edit: I’m reminded of that video of the bond villains, going home after a hard day’s work… heh.