… I don’t speak Russian, but as an amateur Sovietologist I’m aware of the KGB’s rich lexicon of “information warfare”. Disinformation is, of course, either a loan word or a calque, depending on how you want to look at it — dezinformatsiya. (A loan word comes over directly, like “concerto”; a calque is a literal translation of a foreign term, like “flea market”). And then there’s the maskirovka, a whole class of specifically military deceptions. No nation poured more resources into this stuff than the Soviets. A KGB defector named Golitsyn wrote a study, New Lies for Old, that’s interesting. A general in the Securitate, the Romanian secret police, named Ion Mihail Pacepa wrote another, called Disinformation. Good stuff.
Looking at the “news” these days is a fraternal socialist experience, comrades. Of course, we must be careful to distinguish between disinformation and propaganda. As we know from Theodore Dalrymple, propaganda is designed to humiliate you. All the “Biden won” stories, obviously, are pure propaganda — we know they’re not true, they know they’re not true, but by shoving them down our throats, they emphasize the almost total power differential between them and us. This is obvious, therefore uninteresting.
The dezinformatsiya, though, that’s fun. You know it’s a lie — is it in the Media? then it’s a lie — but the purpose of the lie is often opaque. For instance, this new variant of COVID supposedly making the rounds in England. You don’t have to wear a tinfoil hat to find the timing of that pretty damn suspicious. After all, we’re all supposed to have our “warp speed” mandatory goop shots here in a month, which means no more masks, no more lockdowns, no more of the führer-iffic fun our Glorious Leaders are jonesing for. We can’t be having that, and so hey, whaddaya know, just in time for Christmas, a new pox …
[…]
The problem with any disinfo op, of course, is that you have to pitch it at not just how smart the enemy actually is, but how smart he thinks he is. The KGB used to use two-stage deceptions all the time. There was a clumsy, obvious ploy that was designed to fail. The counterintelligence people would sniff it out, then congratulate themselves for seeing through those goofy commies and their hilarious misunderstandings of the free world. Meanwhile, the second caper sailed right through, because the counterintel boys stopped looking after busting the first one.
Severian, “Stojak”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2020-12-22.
April 30, 2023
QotD: Propaganda, dezinformatsiya, and maskirovka in the Current Year
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