[ad_1]
For a lot of his life, Milton Leitenberg has been finding out, with a uncommon devotion, the propaganda techniques of the Soviet Union.
From “Operation Infektion”, launched within the Eighties to allege the US had invented HIV and Aids, to allegations made within the early Nineteen Fifties asserting that Washington was utilizing organic weapons within the Korean conflict, Leitenberg has documented the falsehoods in additional than 30 books and articles.
Now, on the age of 88, he’s turning his consideration to the claims being made by Vladimir Putin over Ukraine, and discovering there’s a clear sample.
“Disinformation for the Putin administration will not be new,” he tells The Unbiased.
“It began not less than so far as again as 2004, with the “color” revolutions in Ukraine, and Georgia, and Tajikistan. You then bought the invasion of Georgia, and earlier than that you just had the poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko with polonium. After that you’ve the invasion of Ukraine, and the capturing down of the airliner, the Skripal poisoning in England, after which the Navalny poisoning.”
He provides: “Every is a case examine. The sample is identical. The Russian authorities doesn’t provide or distribute one disinformation info story, however 12, 15 or 17. They’re all mutually contradictory.”
He says the disinformation response by Moscow to the July 2014 capturing down of Malaysia Airways flight MH17, which was blamed by unbiased investigators on pro-Russian rebels in jap Ukraine, and which killed nearly 300 individuals, was “extraordinary”.
“They went to such lengths to concoct false satellite tv for pc plane tracks – that could be a little bit of labor. That isn’t simply verbal bulls***,” he provides.
In 1968, Leitenberg grew to become the primary American to work on the Stockholm Worldwide Peace Analysis Institute. He says that when he started his educational profession, a variety of his colleagues had been eager to dismiss or ignore the importance of the Soviet Union’s use of disinformation, viewing it as “trivial rubbish”.
However Leitenberg, at present a senior analysis affiliate on the Centre for Worldwide and Safety Research on the College of Maryland, says that disinformation has been a central tenet of each the Soviet and Russian states.
“It’s a structural, core aspect of their home and overseas coverage. You can not merely wave it off and say, ‘Properly, that’s nonsense so we don’t have to concentrate to it,’” he says, including: “If it was the Turkish authorities, or the Peruvian authorities, trotting out a bit of disinformation, perhaps you could possibly.”
‘Russia has not had unity like this for very long time’ Putin tells crowd
Within the Eighties, one of many disinformation campaigns launched by the KGB concerned spreading false claims {that a} US-funded analysis mission in Pakistan was sending “killer mosquitoes” into Afghanistan.
Leitenberg, who in 2012 co-authored a extremely regarded e-book, The Soviet Organic Weapons Program: A Historical past, wrote final yr that “from 1949 till 1988, the Soviet Union carried out an almost steady marketing campaign of false allegations of biological-weapon (BW) use by the USA. In 1995, senior Russian army officers revived this sample of false allegations, which continues to the current day.”
He says the extensively debunked claims made by Putin and different officers over the US’s backing of organic weapons manufacture in Ukraine – claims which were given further oxygen within the US by conspiracy theorists reminiscent of Alex Jones of InfoWars, and Fox Information’s Tucker Carlson – match the identical sample.
Leitenberg acknowledges that all through the interval of the Chilly Struggle, the US and different western nations, such because the UK, engaged in widespread nefarious enterprise – together with formulating a coup towards the elected chief of Iran, supporting the Indonesian army’s mass homicide of political opponents within the Sixties, and backing Pinochet’s takeover of Chile.
In 2000, The New York Instances revealed a categorized historical past of the CIA’s 1953 operation in Iran to oust the prime minister and bolster Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. It included planting articles and editorial cartoons in newspapers.
Reuters reported that the CIA had additionally used disinformation techniques in Latin America, utilizing radio broadcasts beneath the identify “Voice of Liberation” to assist topple the federal government of Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala in 1954.
After the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, the CIA would yearly plant false notices carrying the Soviet army seal in newspapers in Muslim nations, asserting invasion day “celebrations at Soviet embassies”, one former US intelligence officer informed the information company in a report revealed in 2002.
“These notices simply drove them loopy”, making it seem that the Soviets had been crowing over the invasion, he stated.
Leitenberg admits that the US did numerous “dodgy” issues throughout this era. But he attracts a technical, educational distinction between what he says had been Soviet actions and the US’s “energetic measures”. “The purpose of those is exactly that they’re covert, nobody is meant to know who’s doing it,” he says.
“A disinformation marketing campaign is the alternative. The actor – the federal government doing it – does so brazenly. Its officers make the statements, the state media carries the tales.”
Moscow’s claims about America’s alleged manufacturing of bioweapons in Ukraine began at the start of March, when Russia’s defence and overseas ministries claimed that, following the invasion, Russian troops had uncovered clean-up efforts by the Ukrainians, which they stated had been an try at “eradicating traces of the military-biological programme”.
Ukraine, the US and the UN have denied there are organic weapons amenities within the nation, however all have stated there are organic analysis models that include a variety of harmful pathogens being researched. The World Heath Organisation has referred to as for officers to destroy such substances.
Leitenberg says he can hint 10 distinct phases of the Soviet Union’s disinformation programme about US organic weapons alone.
“Beginning just a few years after the top of World Struggle II, in 1949, and lasting till 1988 beneath Common Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev, the USSR maintained a close to steady marketing campaign of false allegations of organic weapon use by the USA. By no means in historical past had some other nation carried on such a marketing campaign of false BW allegations,” he wrote in a 2019 analysis paper.
He added: “After a pause of some years between 1988 and 1995, senior Russian army officers started repeating the outdated false allegations. Russian officers amplified the marketing campaign after the US authorities funded the transformation of former Soviet BW amenities.”
Who’s the meant viewers for such disinformation?
“Each home and worldwide,” says Leitenberg. “The Korean Struggle [disinformation campaign], that could be crucial, was each for home and worldwide audiences,” he says.
“Many tens of millions of individuals paraded in West European capitals – in Paris, Berlin, in London – in addition to in East European nations in regards to the ‘soiled American organic weapons’ used within the Korean Struggle,” he says.
(In 1999, paperwork launched by Russia confirmed that North Korea, China and the Soviet Union knew the claims they had been making had been false.)
“The Aids marketing campaign was not for home, that was for exterior. Clearly, they had been attempting to assert to Africa that the USA was attempting to depopulate Africa. And statistics [show] in some African nations and within the African American neighborhood in the USA, that’s enormously influential.”
Leitenberg says the Aids marketing campaign might have been the Soviet Union’s most profitable disinformation mission, and says 9 surveys carried out between between 1988 and 2008 amongst African Individuals within the US, discovered a median of 43 per cent believed the Aids virus was artifical.
He cites one other survey revealed in 2006 that discovered that 30 per cent of an African-American pattern responded “true” to the assertion “Aids is an agent of genocide created by the US authorities to kill off minority populations”.
Leitenberg tells The Unbiased: “In order that’s not trivial rubbish.”
And what does he suppose are the possibilities of Vladimir Putin’s newest disinformation marketing campaign gathering traction?
He says he has no method of measuring whether or not individuals imagine what Russia says, although he factors to an enormous operation, in varied languages and sometimes focusing on particular communities.
He says in early 2020, some Russian media beginning claiming that the US had manufactured the Covid virus, one thing that was highlighted on the time by the BBC’s information monitoring service. It reported in February 2020 {that a} main TV community, Channel One, launched an everyday slot dedicated to coronavirus conspiracy theories on its fundamental night information programme, Vremya, or Time.
“The fashion of the reporting is ambiguous, showing to debunk the theories whereas leaving viewers with the impression that they include a kernel of reality,” the BBC stated.
Because the pandemic bit deeper, Russian and Chinese language officers had been extra plain spoken.
In April 2020, Nikolai Patrushev, Russia’s Safety Council secretary, informed the Kommersant newspaper: “I counsel that you just take note of the truth that organic laboratories beneath US management are rising by leaps and bounds all around the world. And – by an odd coincidence – primarily close to the Russian and Chinese language borders.”
Patrushev previously served as director of the Russian Federal Safety Service (FSB), the principle successor to the KGB. Within the interview he was requested if the US was growing organic weapons in Europe. “Now we have good purpose to imagine that that is the case,” he stated.
The false claims had been additionally echoed by China.
China’s International Ministry’s spokesman, Lijian Zhao wrote on Twitter. “The US bio-military actions will not be clear, secure or justified. In Ukraine alone, the US has arrange 16 bio-labs. Why does the US want so many labs all around the world? What actions are carried out in these labs, together with the one in Fort Detrick?”
Leitenberg says that interval noticed a flood of disinformation from Russia.
“They put so many various tales there. That Soros did it, that Ukrainians did it that we meant to depopulate the entire world, that Gates put bio chips within the vaccines. You may’t think about what number of totally different tales,” he says.
“They only tried each attainable method to say that the US made Covid, distributed Covid. After which they began this enterprise with the 200 organic laboratories world wide.”
Leitenberg says he’s an everyday reader of the East StratCom Job Power webpage EUvsDisinfo operated by the European Union and which works to counter disinformation and false claims.
The web site says it was “established in 2015 to raised forecast, tackle, and reply to the Russian Federation’s ongoing disinformation campaigns affecting the European Union, its Member States, and nations within the shared neighbourhood”.
Leitenberg says he receives a weekly digest from the web site.
“Oh boy, they’ve about 30,000 logged disinformation postings on all of the sorts of topics from during the last six or seven years I might say,” he provides.
“It may drive you loopy studying these issues.”
[ad_2]
Source link