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In March, the United States Special Operations Command, the section of the Defense Department supervising the US Special Forces, held a conference on the theme of "Sovereignty in the Information Age." The conference brought together Special Forces officers with domestic police forces, including officials from the New York Police Department, and representatives from technology companies such as Microsoft.
This meeting of top military, police and corporate representatives went unreported and unpublicized at the time. However, the Atlantic Council recently published a 21-page document summarizing the orientation of the proceedings. It is authored by John T. Watts, a former Australian Army officer and consultant to the US Department of Defense and Department of Homeland Security.
[...] The private sector, therefore, must do the dirty work of the government, because government propaganda is viewed with suspicion by the population. "Business and the private sector may not naturally understand the role they play in combating disinformation, but theirs is one of the most important.... In the West at least, they have been thrust into a central role due to the general public's increased trust in them as institutions."
But this is only the beginning. Online newspapers should "consider disabling commentary systems—the function of allowing the general public to leave comments beneath a particular media item," while social media companies should "use a grading system akin to that used to rate the cleanliness of restaurants" to rate their users' political statements.
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2018/10/05/pers-o05.html
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Thexalon on Tuesday October 09 2018, @06:36PM (8 children)
The US military brass firmly believes that the reason they lost the Vietnam War was that they were "stabbed in the back" by the lefties at home. (Sound familiar? That's exactly what the Nazis claimed was the reason that Germany lost WWI.) They of course determined that they had to correct that problem with the US war machine, and thus have made a great deal of effort to ensure that never happens again.
Some things that are definitely not an accident:
- There's absolutely no TV footage ever of any KIA soldiers after Vietnam ended. Heck, there's barely any footage of any wounded soldiers either. They'll claim this is out of respect for the families, but typically the US soldiers that are killed are not even named in news reports, much less pictured or filmed coming home in a coffin. In short, the losses are invisible.
- There's all the shiny and ridiculous recruitment ads that regularly lie about what will happen after your service if you enlist. In short, those promises of a college education are often bogus.
- There's the propaganda at public events like football games and NASCAR races. Why do you think they pay those leagues big bucks for the right to fly military jets overhead or use uniformed military personnel as props in lavish displays?
- The Pentagon cultivates journalists who will print what they want them to print by giving them scoops and possibly cash. They punish journalists who print anything else by denying them access to events that journalists normally have access to. This process means that it's not uncommon for the front page of, say, the New York Times, to look an awful lot like a Pentagon press release. An example of this sort is Judith Miller.
- Journalists who want to report on events in war zones are strongly encouraged to take advantage of the Pentagon's program to manage reporting. Which of course means that the military controls where those journalists go, what they see, and who they talk to. Which sure helps ensure that any in-country reporting is whatever the military wants it to be.
- What can happen to journalists who don't follow the rules set forth by the Pentagon is that they're killed by the US military [youtube.com].
- Those that spread the information the Pentagon doesn't want spread around get tortured [theguardian.com] or imprisoned without legal justification [theguardian.com].
I wish I could be shocked by the push for government censorship of Americans. I'm not.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 09 2018, @07:05PM (2 children)
Thanks for the rundown.
As much as I dislike Violently Imposed Monopoly guy and the ideological naivete there is something to be said for reducing the hierarchical command structure that humanity has grown so comfortable with. It is pretty basic human nature, people look for leaders. However, as with the rest of society we need to use our intelligence to patch up the flaws in the system. We need a better feedback loop for citizens to interact with government. The general populace should be able to put the breaks on war, we should never have gone into Vietnam.
It is a tough problem, sometimes what is needed is one person to make the tough choice, but then again that is so rarely needed that we shouldn't base our entire society around the concept.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Azuma Hazuki on Tuesday October 09 2018, @10:17PM
The problem with guys like Mr. Vim is they have a small kernel of truth, but they surround it by a giant, rancid overripe avocado of bullshit, much of which is contradictory to the truth they insist they are working to preserve and promote. This is something I've noticed with the right-wingers I've interacted with who aren't actually sociopaths: there is much to be said for controlling immigration, making sure a social safety net isn't abused, and cultivating personal responsibility.
What I see in people like this is something like an ideological autoimmune disorder. They've got the metaphorical immune response, which is good (and yes, I would characterize many people on the social and economic left as being metaphorically immunodeficient...), but it's attacking things it shouldn't, much too powerfully, and damaging the very basis of itself.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Wednesday October 10 2018, @08:30AM
The great thing about artificial intelligence as well as progress in control systems is that when a future American President decides to ensure their place in history by murdering a hundred million foreigners, the American public won't object because none of our children will have their lives put at risk.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 2) by PartTimeZombie on Tuesday October 09 2018, @09:37PM
Thank you for putting the effort into this post.
It is already modded +5 but in my view ought to be modded +6.
As you noted, the US military learned an awful lot of lessons from Vietnam, one of which may have been that there's no need to win a war, the population just needs to accept the need to keep fighting.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 10 2018, @12:58AM
Interesting idea, but as counterexamples, I've often seen stories on combat wounded veterans, arrays of coffins arriving in Dover, and stories about casualties and their families, not just famous ones like Pat Tillmann.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 10 2018, @12:59AM (2 children)
They were. The lefties in the State Department forbid the air force from bombing strategic assets in North Korea, forcing them to waste massive amounts of money bombing roads in the forest. A lefty at Reuters wrote a fake news article that led the lefties at the CIA to assassinate President Diem who had been holding the south together. The lefties in the media claimed that the North had won the Tet Offensive,which wiped out most of the irregular Viet Cong. A lefty in the Pentagon named Morton Halperin wrote a fake history of the war and gave it to the lefties at the New York Times who claimed it was the Pentagon's official history and used it to condemn the Pentagon. (Halperin is now a major figure in George Soros' operation.) Then in the 1970s the Democrats elected a lefty majority to Congress who imposed an arms embargo on the South as punishment for being invaded by the North after signing a peace treaty. Then the lefties, being the victors, wrote the histories so that no one could have the hindsight to stop the same thing from happening in Afghanistan and Iraq.
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Wednesday October 10 2018, @08:33AM (1 child)
In my actual experience, the people who gripe about George Soros bear a great deal in common with that rogue USAF General in "Dr. Strangelove" who said "I only drink distilled water and clear grain alcohol because water fluoridation is a Communist plot to corrupt our precious bodily fluids".
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Wednesday October 10 2018, @05:49PM
So, uhhhhhhh - WTF you think rich people do with their money? You have the Carnegies, the Rockefellers, the Melons, and more who have returned some of the riches they've exploited from the commoners, in the form of museums and such. Soros? He wants to build a different kind of "legacy". He's an ideologue. He hopes to be remembered up there with Karl Marx. Then, there are the Kock brothers. I think they want to be remembered up there with Adolph Hitler. Neither Soros nor the Cock brothers are returning anything to the common working man. Instead, the manipulate the common - mostly non-working - men and women to push their ideologies.