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The opening paragraph of Philosophy of Information Warfare (1998) by Russian military analyst Sergei P. Rastorguev:

“Once there was a fox that wanted to eat a turtle, but whenever he tried to, it withdrew into its shell. One day there appeared a television hanging in a tree, displaying images of flocks of happy, naked turtles—flying! The turtle was a bit skeptical and amazed at the same time. Meanwhile, fox continued to pay for more broadcasts advertising flying turtles. One morning, when the sky seemed bigger and brighter than usual, the turtle removed its shell.

The turtle didn’t know and never will, that information warfare — it is the purposeful training of an enemy to remove its own shell.”

Acknowledgements

Hat tip to Eto Buziashvili at Atlantic Council

From Peter Pomerantsev:

In today’s Russia, by contrast, the idea of truth is irrelevant. On Russian ‘news’ broadcasts, the borders between fact and fiction have become utterly blurred. Russian current-affairs programs feature apparent actors posing as refugees from eastern Ukraine, crying for the cameras about invented threats from imagined fascist gangs. During one Russian news broadcast, a woman related how Ukrainian nationalists had crucified a child in the eastern Ukrainian city of Sloviansk. When Alexei Volin, Russia’s deputy minister of communications, was confronted with the fact that the crucifixion story was a fabrication, he showed no embarrassment, instead suggesting that all that mattered were ratings. “The public likes how our main TV channels present material, the tone of our programs,” he said. “The share of viewers for news programs on Russian TV has doubled over the last two months.”

…..The point of this new propaganda is not to persuade anyone, but to keep the viewer hooked and distracted—to disrupt Western narratives rather than provide a counternarrative. It is the perfect genre for conspiracy theories, which are all over Russian TV. When the Kremlin and its affiliated media outlets spat out outlandish stories about the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 over eastern Ukraine in July—reports that characterized the crash as everything from an assault by Ukrainian fighter jets following U.S. instructions, to an attempted NATO attack on Putin’s private jet—they were trying not so much to convince viewers of any one version of events, but rather to leave them confused, paranoid, and passive—living in a Kremlin-controlled virtual reality that can no longer be mediated or debated by any appeal to ‘truth.’

Tag: information warfare

What is information warfare?

Acknowledgements

How Russia Is Revolutionizing Information Warfare | Defense One