Revision as of 20:30, 4 June 2015

‘Psychological Operations: Planned operations to convey selected information and indicators to foreign audiences to influence their emotions, motives, objective reasoning, and ultimately the behavior of foreign governments, organisations, groups, and individuals. The purpose of psychological operations is to induce or reinforce foreign attitudes and behavior favorable to the originator’s objectives. Also called PSYOP. See also consolidation psychological operations; overt peacetime psychological operations programs; perception management. ‘ US Department of Defense ^[1]

Propaganda of some sort has been used in warfare for centuries, but all the social, economic, industrial, and military factors that make propaganda a large-scale part of war, first made themselves seriously felt in World War I when it became a formal branch of many governments in the form of institutions such as the British Ministry of Information, the German Ministry of Propaganda and Public Enlightenment, the American Committee on Public Information (in World War I), the Office of War Information (in World War II), and their counterparts in many other countries.

The function of war propaganda is to picture military successes on the propagandist’s side, project armed might and economic power the adversary has to face, and the moral superiority of the cause against which the adversary is fighting. And to inform the people back home with a free flow of information that stimulates the war effort, strengthens the nation to hold steadfast through a long conflict, to take losses courageously, to make sacrifices bravely, to buy (war) bonds generously, and to cooperate in every way possible in the great national effort for victory. Give us your children ...

PsyOps

PSYOPS, as the military calls it, seek to exploit human vulnerabilities in enemy governments, militaries and populations to pursue national and battlefield objectives.

Known tricks

Rewriting history

Most (if not all) of the techniques used in rewriting history (revisionism) are for deception or denial and vary from using forged documents (the fog) as genuine sources (or inventing reasons to distrust genuine documents), to exploiting opinions by taking them out of their historical context.

Disinformation

Unlike traditional propaganda techniques designed to engage emotional support, disinformation is designed to manipulate the audience at the rational level by either discrediting conflicting information or supporting false conclusions.

Perception management

In the 1980s, the Reagan administration pioneered “perception management” to get the American people to “kick the Vietnam Syndrome” and accept more U.S. interventionism, but that propaganda structure continues to this day getting the public to buy into endless war …

New tricks

Digital morphing

Digital morphing — voice, video, and photo — has come of age and is in use in psychological operations. Has been on the rise, especially on twitter and facebook.

Promoting specific forms of intent

Pre-preparing the publics' minds for a specific event that catalyses a massive shift in governmental policy direction using films and documentary concepts is not a new thing. It is just much more advanced these days.

Countermoves

Digital morphing

If you suspect an image was morphed, use TinEye, it will show you previously uploaded images on the net. ^[2] If it isn't found by Tineye, it doesn't mean it's not morphed. The image may be new (and altered), or not in Tineye's database. But if an older version is found that is different, likely the image you have that is different was morphed.

Pre-predictive programming

Pre-predictive programming is a research field sifting carefully through a movies subtext, semiotics, dialogue the movies conceptual architecture and basically identifying the synchronous random anomalies with the subtly deliberate insertions in movie scripts that exist only to promote a specific form of intent in the collective publics mindset. Great for case studies, exercises and roleplay. Word of warning: Can easily lead to causal fallacies.

For example, The Grand Chessboard, a fictional novel using the traditional narratives of state-centric Westphalian order as a necessary condition of international relations, can be used as a DIY exercise in pre-predictive programming research, where you, the reader, are the central character of the novel. Word of warning: If taken serious, reading leads to an almost inevitable blindness to the role and impact of non-state actors.

News and watchdogs

• Public Intelligence https://publicintelligence.net/

Books

• Propaganda: The Formation of Men's Attitudes http://monoskop.org/images/4/44/Ellul_Jacques_Propaganda_The_Formation_of_Mens_Attitudes.pdf
• The grand chessboard: American primacy and its geostrategic imperatives http://www.takeoverworld.info/Grand_Chessboard.pdf
• The roots of behaviour in war https://www.icrc.org/eng/assets/files/other/icrc_002_0854.pdf
• The crowd: A study of the popular mind, 1896, Gustave Le Bon http://socserv2.socsci.mcmaster.ca/~econ/ugcm/3ll3/lebon/Crowds.pdf
• Group psychology and the analysis of the ego https://archive.org/details/grouppsychologya00freu

Documentaries

War made easy

• War Made Easy - How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us To Death https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R9DjSg6l9Vs

Psychological warfare

• Psywar https://vimeo.com/14772678
• A virus called fear https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O-VLHNpwju0
• The power of nightmares https://archive.org/details/ThePowerOfNightmares-Episode1BabyItsColdOutside

The century of the self

• Happiness Machines https://vimeo.com/48842811
• The Engineering of Consent https://vimeo.com/48842898
• There is a Policeman Inside All of Our Heads, He Must Be Destroyed https://vimeo.com/112533840
• Eight People Sipping Wine In Kettering https://vimeo.com/75784765

Who owns the future?

• Who Owns the Future? (interview) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XdEuII9cv-U
• A series of YouTube videos featuring actors performing melodramatic readings of Yelp reviews http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QEdXhH97Z7E

Related

• Propaganda
• Covert operations
• Surveillance
• Game of drones
• Censorship
• Petty tyrants

References

1. ↑ The information warfare site http://www.iwar.org.uk/psyops/
2. ↑ TinEye: Reverse image search https://www.tineye.com/