3/28/23
Info war
Info war
It’s as if Alex Jones rushed in where the others had abandoned territory: Public outreach. To be fair, Jones and his “Info Wars” are merely an assault on the minds of the American people. But the American government has given up its effort to bring the case for democracy and freedom to the rest of the world.
From World War II and throughout the Cold War, the American government spent considerable money and effort on public relations abroad, extolling the virtues of free, democratic, liberal forms of government. This outreach argued and persuaded foreign audiences that liberal democracy and economics were superior to authoritarian governments in just about every way.
The end of the Cold War found America’s own elected officials promising (and overpromising) massive savings from an hypothetical peace dividend, ready to be squandered on eternally expansive programs at home—programs for everyone and everything.
The PR spending abroad was not very high considering the payoff. It was propaganda, sure, but it responded to propaganda from rival and hostile regimes. And now, the propaganda against us goes virtually unopposed worldwide, to long-term deleterious effect. In fact, it often enough seems as if anti-American propaganda has overtaken the minds and imaginations of most Americans when it comes to their attitudes about liberal democratic society.
These trends were called to mind by a recent article by the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies’ Ivana Stradner and Anthony Ruggiero, America is Still Losing the Information War against Russia. A sample:
The Kremlin honed many of these techniques in the Cold War, when the KGB conducted Operation Denver, a successful disinformation campaign that blamed the U.S. government for creating and releasing HIV, the virus that causes AIDS and killed millions of people worldwide before treatments were developed. This fake news was picked up and spread by media around the world, especially in developing countries. This narrative and others like it were part of Moscow’s agenda to systematically frame Washington as a nefarious actor with a secret agenda to subjugate—and even exterminate—populations, especially in the developing world.
While the Kremlin is skilled at this type of campaign, we appear to have given up—to the point where even domestic broadcasters like Fox get in on spreading Kremlin propaganda at home. But Fox is the easy, obvious example. Other media outlets and tech companies shy away from producing content critical of the People’s Republic of China for fear of losing market access.
It would be nice if some of our loud, angry political ideologues were to expend a bit of their energies fighting truly hostile players abroad, rather than just chasing some elusive total victory against the one or other half of the country they’ve declared high-decibel screech-war on. It should be unacceptable to let hostile and enemy powers define the global information space unopposed.
Good morning. Daughter D and I went to the library yesterday afternoon, and I read a book to a therapy dog. The program is supposed to encourage children to read, but there were no children doing it at the time, so I got a book about wolf pups out of D's bag and read it to the dog. Then a lady from India and her son came along and read another book.
It was a very fluffy dog, lying in a sunbeam and sighing a great deal.
I wish everyone had the opportunity to live abroad for a while. I feel certain that nearly all those who see only our faults, would recognize that we have it really good here after all.