There is only one person who is truly satisfied with the report of the Committee on intelligence and security on Russia’s intervention in British politics, which was finally published on Tuesday, July 21, and this man is Vladimir Putin. In this report, Russia is represented as an amorphous and formidable enemy — in the first place due to the fact that this is inconclusive and heavily edited document, virtually no charges, which would be supported by the facts. Russia seems to be a phantom, an incomprehensible threat, and this in turn will generate a lot of conspiracy theories that will have a much more detrimental impact on our politics than any Moscow provoked a storm on Twitter or leak any documents.
Indisputable evidence that Moscow has had a significant impact on the outcome of voting on Brexia, no. However, the fact that the government has so long delayed the publication of the report, allows those who believe in the intervention of Moscow, to make assumptions about the attempts of the authorities to hide important information. Even addressed to the government urged to do more to prevent a new intervention of Russia plays into the hands of Putin. The fear of Russian interference in the British elections led to chaos and discord, and that is exactly what is the true goal of Putin.
Perhaps Russia is now desperately trying to cope with the effects of the fall in oil prices and one of the highest levels of morbidity covid-19 in the world, but Moscow continues to promote the idea that the cause of all troubles is the West, exhausted from the brutal cultural wars and suffering from a General loss of faith in their own values. New party line of the Kremlin is the following: maybe we are unsweetened, but the crisis is much worse. Putin’s propagandists promoting this idea, and it hackers and trolls actively them the second.
Judging by recent history, sharp differences over the movement Black Lives Matter, too, are a convenient topic for the Russian trolls who actively fanned the flames of self-immolation of the West — in the United Kingdom in the European Union and mainly in the United States. Committee on intelligence United States Senate, who conducted the investigation concerning the American presidential election of 2016, came to the conclusion that the Russian campaign to spread the fake news was mainly related to African Americans. Russian agents used social media to reduce turnout of black voters and foment racial tension. By September 2017, one such Facebook page — Blacktivist — collected 11.2 million forms of user engagement and 360 thousand likes, while the official Facebook account of the movement Black Lives Matter gathered 310 thousand likes.
Russian trolls are provocateurs that are actively using the theme of equal opportunities. From 2014 to 2017, the Agency Internet research — Troll factory in St. Petersburg, which is funded by a close ally of Putin, Yevgeny Prigozhin, — led on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and YouTube thousands of accounts to support the rights of black people and culture of the American South, and in support of Scottish independence and Breccia. The results of a thorough study, which in 2018, held University of Washington, showed that the Russians controlled Twitter accounts, marked with the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter, has spread not only information in support of this movement, but ironic memes mocking BlackLivesMatter, for example, “Where is the world now if you can’t even point the gun at cops without having to get shot? #BlackLivesMatter”. And as if it seemed to them insufficiently cynical Russian trolls even tried to discredit the movement, promoting the idea that “#BlackLivesMatter is the “arm of the Russian government”.
Did the Agency Internet to research their old tricks in a period of violence and civil strife that has spread across America and then spread to the United Kingdom? Certainly, as he said seven American officials familiar with the new intelligence, who recently gave an interview to the newspaper The New York Times. These officials warned that the Russian foreign intelligence Service has increased the complexity and scale of their attempts to stir up controversy. “We see that Russia is ready to host more daring and devastating operations of influence, and this is how she perceives your conflict with the West, said David porter (David Porter), one of the leading experts in the Operational group on countering foreign influence FBI (Foreign Influence Task Force) at the conference on election security, held in Washington in February. — Simply put, Russia wants to observe how we do tear yourself to pieces.”
Although the company’s “Twitter” and “Facebook” have started paying much more attention to tracking fake news, the Russians are much better able to cover his tracks. After the investigations of the Congress was made public the details of how it tracked the fake news, the trolls began to pay much more attention to remove all watermarks from their pictures and to avoid openly racist statements that automated systems are able to notice. Instead of using public pages to spread their messages to the widest possible audience, as was done in 2016, and now Russian agents — according to one of those officials, who gave an interview to The New York Times, — use private Facebook groups, publish posts on anonymous web forum 4chan and in private chat, which is much harder to track. And, as if becoming an echo of those strategies that have been developed by the company Cambridge Analytica, these messages and activities of these groups are primarily aimed at undecided voters in swing States.
It is not surprising that Russia masterfully conducts operations influence in the West, considering how long she is doing. In the 1920s and 1930s, the years of the German Communist and the brilliant propagandist Willi munzenberg, who enjoyed the support of Moscow, sent dozens of front organizations, from the League against imperialism to the International working assistance to attract thousands of liberal-minded people to volunteer, which is secretly financed the Communist international. Munzenberg called these people his “innocents clubs”. These organizations had a much greater impact than explicit Soviet propaganda organs, such as the French newspaper L’humanité, or the American newspaper the Daily Worker.
In 1927, long before Europe became a cultural suburb of the United States, which it is today, a network of Münzenberg triggered global protests against the execution of a couple of American anarchists, Nicola Sacco (Nicola Sacco) and Bartolomeo Vanzetti (Bartolomeo Vanzetti), which are found guilty of double murder. The campaign in support of Sacco and Vanzetti were held in all major cities in North America and Europe as well as in Tokyo, Sydney, Melbourne, são Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Buenos Aires, Montevideo, Johannesburg, Auckland and even in Dubai. After Sacco and Vanzetti was executed in the electric chair just after midnight on 23 August 1927, angry protesters began to smash everything in his path in Paris, London and other European cities.
The Soviet Union secretly sent money to the Campaign for nuclear disarmament and National Union of Mineworkers during the strike in 1984. And, although suspicions of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover (J. Edgar Hoover), Martin Luther king receives funds from Russia were unfounded, the Soviet propagandists used American racism to discredit the claims of Washington for moral leadership in the cold war era. Whenever the USSR was criticized for human rights violations, a common response was the phrase “and you lenquete blacks”, which soon turned into a Soviet clichés.
Today, the Russian propagandists don’t need to recruit useful idiots to promote their ideas. They can directly contact to millions of people via social networks. And today, they face an easier task because they do not need to spread the ideas of communism, and it is only necessary to impose the opposite of what they say in the famous prayer of Francis of Assisi: to bring discord instead of harmony, confusion instead of truth and despair instead of hope.
However, the most frightening in the current situation, perhaps, is that for the first time since the great depression, the disastrous intervention of Russia takes place when not only America’s leadership in the free world, but also the faith in the world in their own strength begin to diminish. Hostile takeover of the once-moderate Republican party Tarnowskie nationalists on the right and the destruction of classical liberalism under the influence of fanatical political correctness on the left take America as never vulnerable to exposure to toxic nihilism, imposed by the Kremlin.
Brakcet and the ongoing crisis of confidence in the European Union, that continent, too, were music to the ears of the Kremlin. Any differences in the West serve as a reinforcement of the underlying idea, which Putin imposes his people and the world, — the idea that democracy is a weakness, not a strength. Quoting Nikolai Chernyshevsky, Vladimir Lenin wrote about the collapse of the tsarist regime: “the worse, the better”. Putin thinks exactly the same. The more fragmented becomes the West under the influence of its own culture wars, the good looks of the Putin regime. Driving corrupt and weakening economy, the size of which is only one-fifteenth part of the economy of the United States, Putin can not count on to destroy someone, the KGB call their main enemy. But Russia could help — and actively helping — America and her allies to destroy themselves.
