This first one was recorded in 2009 right after the inauguration of president Obama with Andrey Fursov, who is a historian at the Institute of Scientific Information on Social Sciences of the Russian Academy of Sciences.
This one is from yesterday with Ezra Levant and an author who recently released a book on Soviet disinformation.
I assume the first video was presented as an example of Russian disinformation (or propoganda or whatnot).
The over intellectual sound to it is meant to be poorly understood and hard to follow. The speed of delivery and massive amount of different information is also meant to make it hard to follow.
That is important. It leaves the listener who doesn’t know better thinking that the problem with comprehension comes from themselves, rather than it being a specific technique that is supposed to engender confusion.
The listener might think they themselves are dim witted in comparison to the bullsh*t artist they’re listening to. That is intentional. It makes us subordinate to the oh so obviously smart person who’s dribbling this type of crap.
The manner of speaking and tone of voice are integral to the performance. A variation is how Noam Chomsky “performs”. That kind of droning ultra boring tone of speach is meant to hypnotize.
But the confusion, anxiety and doubt are what the speaker wants to impart to the audience, rather than any specific hard information. The listener might veaguely recall a general something or snippets from the stream of bullsh*t but there’s no coherent over all point that is spoken or retained – even though it all sounds so gosh darned intellectual.
I’ve heard western socialists do the exact same thing and it’s common on RT clips.
Truthiocity:
Thanks for that. Right or wrong, that was a great comment and I suspect there is some truth to it at least.
Yep Truthi, you’ve nailed it.
I’ve been subjected to what you rightly call a “performance” style before. From Chomsky and other professors.
As well as Spanish trade union reps, who got way too much traction with it. And they were outright communists. (Of course that was years ago; things may be entirely different now.)
Hard to follow, a few assertions were flat-out wrong. Any nugget of substance slipped past me.
Yes. One more thing about this sort of propoganda performance.
It’s meant to make your head spin so that your critical faculties get enmeshed in wondering about the intellectual sounding veague and intentionally unclear gobblety gook. This sends the audience into a sort of mild trance.
Then, when the audiences defences are down, the propogandist hits them with the propoganda. I first heard of the technique in a lecture by a former radical leftist and then realized I’d experienced that exact phenomena first hand from a socialist mayoral candidate in Chicago. After his ten minute rambling everyone in the room’s head had turned to mush and we found it hard to get back to the discussion at hand.
2. The experience as a whole is meant to leave the viewer with a general sense of unsease or anxiety. To that end the speaker uses language that sounds like it’s a concrete measurement of something or specific but when you examine it you can see it’s veague and without a commonly understood meaning = but the speaker speaks as if what he is saying would naturally be understood by the audience. (I’m not sure I explained that well enough). It’s done with concepts but MORE IMPORTANTLY it’s done with turns of phrase. The speaker uses language that sounds like common turns of phrase but are in fact made up or intentionally obscure.
“The Muslim Brotherhood is not a monolitic entitiy”. Is a perfect example of that. It sounds like it means something but doesn’t. (actually what it means is “just because all terrorists have been Muslim Brotherhood, not all Muslim Brotherhood are terrorists, have the same goals or believe in the same methods as the terrorists. It’s a patent lie but sounds meaningfull because it uses a big ole fancy mysticalish word.
HOWEVER. It could also be meant to F with the listener’s head because it makes them associate the muslim Brotherhood with a big ancient powerful monolith – (just because the two words are in the same sentance- it’s that simple). so iin one sentance they are denying it’s a terrorist organization – but subconciously planting a general feeling about the group as superior in some way in the mind of the listener.
That is to say the sentance appears to deny something, yet at the same time imprint the very concept it appears to deny into the subconcious.
I’m not just blathering at random about that. Subversion utilizes statements that have within them opposing meanings, statements that have veague meanings and statements that use strange new turns of phrase. Those are hallmarks of subversion as described by Sun Tzu.
So we can put “The Muslim Brotherhood is not a monolithic entity” right next to “I don’t know where this is coming from but I don’t know how to feel about the death of Bin Ladin” together as examples of Islamist subversion.
Ug. sorry for over posting but I do need to explain what I mean by subversion. It’s 1 insinuating an agent into the enemy government in order to subvert it. and 2 making the enemy country neurotic on the subject of the enemy by using all sorts of ambivalence and ambiguity. Statements that seem to be “in the air” rather than coming from anywhere specific. Statments that are carefully crafted to have two opposite meanings.
One form of subversive attack goes like this. The subverisve does something provocative with a streight face. The provocation often has both an innocuous meaning and a sinister meaning at the same time. When people point out the sinister meaning the subversive attacks them for being intolerant. This cleaves those who would oppose the aggressors away from the general public.
That’s what the GZM vs Pammala Gellar and Poppy Burners vs EDL were about. Cleaving off opposition from the general public so as to make islamist advances easier in future.
Truthi,
Your analysis of the tactic is clear and sound.
Though I didn’t know the term, I’ve seen and heard it ‘deployed’, so to speak. You get it from journalists and academics and “pundits”. Usually the triad. BBC and RT offer plenty of examples.
If you trash the opposition – or if those who disagree simply turn-off and go elsewhere – you’re speaking to a general public unable to distinguish chicken-salad from chicken-Shiitte.
Who’s GZM?
Truthiocity you are right, the tactic is common in the west and hangs on because it is so successful.
Study: Palestinian High Road Lower Than Most Others’ Low Roads
June 27 – Topographers at the Palestine Institute of Geography (PIG) have published a study indicating that the altitude of Palestinian societal thoroughfares locally considered morally elevated are nevertheless less elevated than the lower routes of other societies.
A PIG survey looked at Palestinian behaviors regarding high and low roads since 1950, and compared the data with other countries’ usages of their own roads. They concluded that decisions in Palestinian society, principally those at a policy level, do not rise to the same altitude as even the baser policies of, for example, Western European countries. The average difference in height between other societies’ low roads and the Palestinian high road has been two levels of moral turpitude in the other countries’ favor on the Ethical Value Indicated Level (EVIL) scale.
EVIL is inverse, meaning that a higher EVIL value denotes a lower ethical level. The Palestinian high road has fluctuated in its EVIL data, but has never dipped below 7. […]
The only areas with a high road consistently the same altitude or lower than that of the Palestinians are Sub-Saharan Africa, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria, where the researchers were unable to detect any remnants of a high road. […]
http://www.preoccupiedterritory.com/study-palestinian-high-road-lower-than-most-others-low-roads/