Curt Doolittle

Theme: Crisis

  • THE KREMLIN TOOLKIT – INFORMATION WARFARE • The Kremlin exploits the idea of fre

    THE KREMLIN TOOLKIT – INFORMATION WARFARE

    • The Kremlin exploits the idea of freedom of information to inject disinformation into society. The effect is not to persuade (as in classic public diplomacy) or earn credibility but to sow confusion via conspiracy theories and proliferate falsehoods.

    • The West’s acquiescence to sheltering corrupt Russian money demoralizes the Russian opposition while making the West more dependent on the Kremlin.

    • Unlike in the Cold War, when Soviets largely supported leftist groups, a fluid approach to ideology now allows the Kremlin to simultaneously back far-left and far-right movements, greens, anti-globalists and financial elites. The aim is to exacerbate divides and create an echo chamber of Kremlin support.

    • The Kremlin exploits the openness of liberal democracies to use the Orthodox Church and expatriate NGOs to further aggressive foreign policy goals.

    • There is an attempt to co-opt parts of the expert community in the West via such bodies as the Valdai Forum, which critics accuse of swapping access for acquiescence. Other senior Western experts are given positions in Russian companies and become de facto communications representatives of the Kremlin.

    • Financial PR firms and hired influencers help the Kremlin’s cause by arguing that “finance and politics should be kept separate.” But whereas the liberal idea of globalization sees money as politically neutral, with global commerce leading to peace and interdependence, the Kremlin uses the openness of global markets as an opportunity to employ money, commerce and energy as foreign policy weapons.

    • The Kremlin is increasing its “information war” budget. RT, which includes multilingual rolling news, a wire service and radio channels, has an estimated budget of over $300 million, set to increase by 41% to include German- and French- language channels. There is increasing use of social media to spread disinformation and trolls to attack publications and personalities.

    • The weaponization of information, culture and money is a vital part of the Kremlin’s hybrid, or non-linear, war, which combines the above elements with covert and small-scale military operations. The conflict in Ukraine saw non-linear war in action. Other rising authoritarian states will look to copy Moscow’s model of hybrid war—and the West has no institutional or analytical tools to deal with it.

    Defining Western Weak Spots

    • The Kremlin applies different approaches to different regions across the world, using local rivalries and resentments to divide and conquer.

    • The Kremlin exploits systemic weak spots in the Western system, providing a sort of X-ray of the underbelly of liberal democracy.

    • Offshore zones and opaque shell companies help sustain Kremlin corruption and aid its influence. For journalists, the threat of libel means few publications are ready to take on Kremlin-connected figures.

    • Lack of transparency in funding and the blurring of distinctions between think tanks and lobbying helps the Kremlin push its agendas forward without due scrutiny.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-12-10 05:15:00 UTC

  • APOCALYPSE AS UTOPIAN DREAM —“For movie audiences, the mainstream, the 99%, ca

    http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2013/10/01/the-zombie-apocalypse-has-arrived/?utm_content=buffer656e8&utm_source=buffer&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=BufferZOMBIE APOCALYPSE AS UTOPIAN DREAM

    —“For movie audiences, the mainstream, the 99%, catastrophes aren’t something to dread; they are something to look forward to. They are a catharsis, a conceptual clearing of the deck. They are the implosion of the banking towers at the end of Fight Club, they are the destruction of the White House in Independence Day, they are the wholesale destruction of the entire global map in 2012.”–

    I have a better idea: Revolution, voluntary association, and voluntary disassociation.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-12-07 03:15:00 UTC

  • second American Revolution

    http://conservativetribune.com/marines-sign-goes-viral/The second American Revolution

    Source date (UTC): 2014-12-01 07:54:00 UTC

  • Leninism’s Atavism

    —“Leninism’s development of the totally expropriating state was profoundly atavistic. So atavistic that, the Soviet Union managed to pass through ibn Khaldun’s state cycle in a single life time. “— Michael Phillip –“Lenin famously claimed that communism was socialism + electricity. Actually, it was an attempted return to the origins of the state + electricity. But bargaining states had let loose technological dynamism on the world, and mere expropriation was no longer the cutting edge in organising societies. The gap between Leninist pretension and economic reality became de-stabilisingly obvious. So, we have collapsed Leninist regimes or societies with notionally Leninist ruling regimes ruling very not-totalitarian societies or, in the case of North Korea, a regime that has embraced its atavism. History is how the present was created, but only provides understanding if we accurately grasp that history.”— Michael Phillip

    Ibn Khaldun’s State Cycle 
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ibn_Khaldun
    (I might recommend Carroll Quigley instead)

    Atavistism : “The tendency to revert to Ancestral type”
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atavism

  • Leninism’s Atavism

    —“Leninism’s development of the totally expropriating state was profoundly atavistic. So atavistic that, the Soviet Union managed to pass through ibn Khaldun’s state cycle in a single life time. “— Michael Phillip –“Lenin famously claimed that communism was socialism + electricity. Actually, it was an attempted return to the origins of the state + electricity. But bargaining states had let loose technological dynamism on the world, and mere expropriation was no longer the cutting edge in organising societies. The gap between Leninist pretension and economic reality became de-stabilisingly obvious. So, we have collapsed Leninist regimes or societies with notionally Leninist ruling regimes ruling very not-totalitarian societies or, in the case of North Korea, a regime that has embraced its atavism. History is how the present was created, but only provides understanding if we accurately grasp that history.”— Michael Phillip

    Ibn Khaldun’s State Cycle 
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ibn_Khaldun
    (I might recommend Carroll Quigley instead)

    Atavistism : “The tendency to revert to Ancestral type”
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atavism

  • we keep even the existing sanctions for another 18 months the Russian economy wi

    http://disq.us/8l3rbkIf we keep even the existing sanctions for another 18 months the Russian economy will fail unrecoverably.

    Russia already gave Ukraine the Holodomor (the Stalin holocaust) – and Russians have demonstrated that they are far worse than Nazis ever desired to be.

    We do not need Russian brutality, ignorance, superstition, corruption and poverty. We are a gentle people.

    The only difference between Ukraine and Canada is that Canada has the States as its neighbor, and Ukraine has the capital of corruption – Russia – as its neighbor.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-11-26 00:46:00 UTC

  • THE WEST’S SANCTIONS ARE DESIGNED TO PRODUCE REGIME CHANGE IN RUSSIA – FOR GOOD

    http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/11/22/us-ukraine-crisis-idUSKCN0J609G20141122YES, THE WEST’S SANCTIONS ARE DESIGNED TO PRODUCE REGIME CHANGE IN RUSSIA – FOR GOOD REASON

    Source date (UTC): 2014-11-23 00:39:00 UTC

  • get this straight: 1) Mao Zedong: Victims 60 million 2) Joseph Stalin: Victims 4

    http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/moslive/article-2091670/Hitler-Stalin-The-murderous-regimes-world.htmlLets get this straight:

    1) Mao Zedong: Victims 60 million

    2) Joseph Stalin: Victims 40 million

    3) Adolf Hitler: Victims 30 million

    And it’s a struggle to attribute to hitler those numbers, while it is not a struggle to attribute to Mao or Stalin those numbers.

    Why do I care? RUSSIANS IN UKRAINE talking nonsense about fascists.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-11-22 14:12:00 UTC

  • Contrary to the Libertarian position the soviet union did not fail for economic

    Contrary to the Libertarian position the soviet union did not fail for economic reasons, it failed because of institutional problems and systemic corruption when a coup failed and dismantled the presumption of the persistence of power. The illusion was dispelled.

    Had this illusion been maintained, yes, the soviet union would have remained a poor and backward civilization but that was the price for unifying so many primitive peoples and so much territory.

    The undesirable nature of living life in such poverty, under such tyranny, by so many, particularly those of talents made flight attractive. But if we view it as a proletarian government trying to control natural elites, and seeking rents from them, I think that is the most concrete positioning. The soviets were an underclass movement, and they succeeded in walling in their talent, and neutralizing the economic differences between the talent groups in the most successful large scale redistribution from producer to the peasantry in history. However, this CAN WORK. The problem is that the cost of enforcing such a system produced and always will, externalities that are much more dangerous than redistributing only that which people are HAPPY to pay for the success of their KIN.

    The north sea people are as inbred as appalachian hill folk. That’s why they favor redistribution – everyone is family, and looks and acts like it.

    Source date (UTC): 2014-11-13 08:40:00 UTC

  • Consumer Capitalism? Or Is It Consumer Credit-Ism?


    [W]hy do we refer to our voluntary organization of production as Capitalism when that era ended at least half a century ago –  and call it Consumer Cedit-ism instead.

    Ukrainians are poor because they lack credit. Capitalism is a different social class problem altogether. And by historical standards we don’t really have any capitalists any longer – only people with enough trust to accumulate a lot if credit.  Our rich aren’t really rich enough to do much of anything other than try desperately to stay rich against all odds.

    In the 18th and 19th century, It was easy to amass a little capital and produce consumer goods.

    It was a lot harder to distribute consumer credit to all.  

    Consumer Credit-ism is how we operate our society – capitalism died with the end of the conversion of people from the farm.