Tue, 03/22/2022 - 9:03pm
How Western Intelligence Mortally Wounded Russia’s War Effort in Ukraine
By Kane Tomlin
Predicting the future is a fool’s errand, but allow me to play the role of fool for a minute. According to the Victim Identity Model (VIM), I believe that the US and Western Intelligence Community (IC) played a pivotal role in the inevitable defeat of Russia in their war with Ukraine. The main hypothesis of the VIM is “that a prerequisite for organized forms of collective violence is a motivated organizational leadership element that convinces his or her followers of their in-group victim status. This vicarious in-group victimization legitimizes the stated retaliatory causes of the group, subsumes individual responsibility to the group, and enables psychologically normal group members to commit violence against their perceived aggressors.”
Here’s a quick infographic that shows each element necessary for a motivated population to commit large scale group violence. If you only have two, you typically don’t see real group violence committed by people who were otherwise not directly affected by a situation. If a robber breaks into my house, then I might be shooting at them, but it’s not likely my whole block is going to come out and help since they weren’t affected by it, that larger scale effect I call macrovictimization.
The IC’s contribution to Russia’s defeat is remarkable because this may be the first time that such a role was so instrumental to the war effort without the US firing a shot. As Dr. Joyner stated earlier at Outside the Beltway, US intelligence has preempted numerous false flag attacks prior to the Russian invasion; noting “[a]t some point, plausible deniability just isn’t plausible,” which is absolutely true. But the significance of this loss of justification by Putin may not be fully appreciated. People need to buy into a macrovictim mindset aka “victimization by proxy” in order to lower our normal inhibitions against out-group violence. Events like Pearl Harbor and 9/11 were highly effective macrovictimization events primarily because they happened to be true attacks on an “innocent US” from our perspective. I use quotes because nuance (like the sanctions of Japan by the US prior to 1941, our involvement in the Middle East prior to 9/11 etc.) is lost in these kind of rallying cries; war tends to be as binary as our elections. However, these events do not necessarily have to be factual to work for the targeted in-group, in this case the Russians, because the mechanism of injury doesn’t matter as much as the effect of the injury itself.
https://smallwarsjournal.com/index.php/jrnl/art/how-western-intelligence-mortally-wounded-russias-war-effort-ukraine
