Britain at War

Just look at the state the United Kingdom is in right now. Divided as it's never been since the 17th century. Friends and families no longer on speaking terms. Brexit has the potential to bring about Scottish independence and Irish reunification - can the UK remain united? There's increasing anger in the hearts and minds, inflamed by dangerous political rhetoric. A famously tolerant, easy-going nation, the envy of the world in terms of governance, the leading global soft power - has become an international laughing stock within the space of a few short years.

A time-travelling visitor coming to Britain today from 2012 could be forgiven for thinking that an enemy power had managed to poison the UK's drinking water with a biological agent that could turn a rational population into a country of baying furies, willing to swallow and amplify any falsehood that seemed to confirm their notions.

An enemy power has indeed been at the UK - not using physical poison but psychological agents, carefully positioned propaganda, designed to open up and exaggerate every fault line in society. Conservative vs liberal, traditionalist vs progressive, open vs closed, tolerant vs intolerant, educated vs uneducated, upper class vs middle class vs working class.

Once upon a time, Moscow tried to convince Britons of the righteousness of its Marxist-Leninist policies through the daily organ of the Communist Party of Great Britain, the Morning Star. So obviously tendentious and so tedious, the paper was only read by few misguided individuals and propped up financially by bulk sales from the Soviet embassy. Its influence on British society was less than minimal.

But today's Russia has two huge advantages over the USSR. One is that it's no longer restricted by an ideological straitjacket. Russia can pour out disinformation that shifts easily from far left to far right to suit tactical needs. Or both at the same time. The second is technology - newspapers are pathetically limited in their reach compared to online media.

The key Russian concept is known as maskirovka, masking or camouflage. No one would think of riding into battle in a tank painted day-glo orange. Russia extends that notion all the way up to what its leaders say. They'd never think of telling the unmasked truth. That is Russian doctrine, that is Russia's strategy.

The West is not at war with Russia, but Russia is at war with the West; it's an undeclared war, unrelenting, ceaseless, low-level, operating just below the red lines that would trigger response. Unattributable. " It was not us that tried to kill Skripal,' lied Lavrov." " 'It was not us that bombed children's hospitals in Syria,' lied Lavrov." " 'There are no little green men in Crimea', " lied Putin. " 'We did not interfere in America's elections,'" lied Putin." Once you get the code, you'll learn to believe the opposite of everything the Kremlin says, in the same way as a soldier learns to recognise tell-tale signs... under the foliage and netting at the edge of that field sits hidden an enemy tank.

Russia is currently using all the means at its disposal to weaken the West by dividing it.

If Russia today has an ideology, it is sovereignism - the notion that rulers should rule; subjects should be subordinated to the sovereigns. In other words, zamordizm - the Polish word meaning the strong holding the weak 'by the snout'. This stands in contract to the networked model of governance; the cooperation between humans based on consensus, openness, transparency, distributed power, checks and balances, power devolved from the state to the municipality. Which is the natural state of evolution from the barbaric towards a more enlightened society.

Two new books set out how Russia (and indeed others) are playing the West, using the very openness of the social media against the very societies that use them.

One is Daniel P. Bagge's Unmasking Maskirovka. Written by a Czech military information analyst, it draws heavily on published documents that set out Russia's military doctrine over the years, the book shows how Russia fights the information war. Cyberwar is not just about hackers attacking critical software with malicious code, causing power blackouts or crashing big IT systems. Cyberwar is about content - about using IT to deliver messages that muddy the brains of Western society. Code and content. Hackers' footprints are easy to spot. But it is much harder - and easier for Russia to deny - the content part of its cyberwar against us.

Mr Bagge makes it clear that Russia has long been at war with the West, though fighting it without attribution, denying its mischief, ensuring that no red lines are crossed, no wires tripped. Unmasking Maskirovka is not an easy book to read - there's much military jargon, lots of translation of euphemistically-phrased Russian documents, but it is a crucial book. It makes the point that Russia's 'code-and-content' approach to cyberwar means that the West's IT code warriors are unusually relaxed about what's going on over at Twitter, Facebook and the rest of social media, because the content is placed there openly, without resorting to malicious hacking.

Concrete examples are given. One which I remember well is the story of the USS Donald Cook. The US Navy destroyer was on manoeuvres in the Black Sea at the time of the Russian invasion of Crimea. On 12 April, 2014, the ship was buzzed by a Russian Su-24 attack aircraft. The Pentagon, alarmed by reports of how dangerously close the Sukhoi approached the destroyer, issued a statement denouncing the fly-by. This was parodied by a Russian website, suggesting that the US sailors crapped themselves with fear, 27 of them deserted when the ship berthed in a Romanian port. More - that the Su-24 was deploying an advanced electronic weapon which rendered all the shipboard countermeasures useless. The Russian plane had effectively knocked out an American ship without firing a shot. But that story quickly went viral, accepted as the truth.

What is alarming is how this fake news spread in the West, aided and abetted by 'useful idiots' - unknowing tools of the Russian maskirovka machine from left and right - and soon this report was being published by papers like the New York Times, the Sun, the Daily Mail, by TV outlets like Fox News and countless websites. I remember reading about the electronic destruction of the USS Donald Cook from British anti-imperialist lefties, from American anarchists, from German nationalists - all convinced that the story was true. Or were these people who they claimed there were? Or rather were these Russian trolls?

The book is worth reading to understand the harsh reality of how the Russian war against us is being conducted. The effects of that effort can be seen by one and all across the West, in particular in Brexit Britain, which for whatever reason, doesn't seem to care. The links to Russia are clear, and are not being investigated enough by the British state.

[More about the cyber-war that's currently being fought against us here.]

The second book, Peter Pomerantsev's This Is Not Propaganda, will be covered in my next post.

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