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We Need to Rethink the 'Information War' with RussiaPeter PomerantsevOn November 9th, 2019 we mark the thirty year anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall—a year synonymous with the end of the Cold War, the ideological defeat of the USSR, the victory of freedom of expression over censorship, democracy over authoritarianism. Thirty years later talk of Cold War with the Soviet Union have been replaced with “Information War†with Russia, referring to the mix of hacks and covert social media campaigns the Kremlin used to influence the 2016 U.S. election, a mere psy-op scratch compared to the larger campaigns it launches against its neighbours in the region. Barely a week goes by without some new policy report (I’ve authored at least two myself) or a former official warning the U.S. is losing the ‘information war’. But it’s a concept that should be treated with caution. Inside Russia ‘information war’ has grown to represent much more than a mere set of media tricks. It’s a worldview and an interpretation of history that annuls the values victorious in 1989, and it’s becoming more popular across the world. As I explored in my latest book, the most dangerous part of information war could be the idea of information war itself.Using “information war†as a way to understand history first obsessed a certain breed of Russian geopolitical analyst looking to explain the failure of the Soviet Union. In the very late 1990s and the 2000s they began to assert the Soviet Empire collapsed not because of its poor economic policies, human rights abuses, lies, but because of “information viruses†planted by Western security services through Trojan horse ideas such as freedom of speech and economic reform. According to this revisionist version of history, alleged agents in the Soviet Establishment who posed as so-called modernisers, allied with a Washington-dictated fifth column of anti-Soviet dissidents, oversaw the dissemination of these ‘viruses’.Read more at: https://time.com/5722805/rethink-information-war-russia/
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Topic: TIME: We Need to Rethink the 'Information War' with Russia (Read 223 times)
