ISDEI Instituto de Seguridad, Defensa y Estudios Internacionales

A special ‘thank you!’ to my Director of Research, Scott, for providing me with the background info for this article Everything we were told about the Soviet Union turned out to be a lie,  but everything we were told about the West turned out to be true Russian joke In May of 2016 I wrote an article for the Unz Review entitled “ Counter-Propaganda, Russian Style ” in which I tried to show the immense difference between the old, Soviet, approach to propaganda and counter-propaganda and the approach taken by the Russian authorities today. The main difference was this: if the Soviet went out of their way to prevent western propaganda from reaching the Soviet people, the Russians are nowadays doing the exact opposite: they are going out of their way to make sure that western propaganda is immediately translated and beamed into every single Russian household. What I propose to do today is to share with you a few recent examples of what Russian households are regularly exposed to. ...

Psychological Operations  or  PSYOP  are planned operations to convey selected information and indicators to audiences to influence their emotions, motives, objective reasoning, and ultimately the behavior of organizations, groups, and individuals. The beginning of interest in post-Cold War information operations can be traced to the UN intervention in Somalia and the Rwanda Genocide. Relatively honest and direct reporting from these war zones meant that the public opinion of Western countries was a factor that had to be considered by the political classes. Hence the  complaining at the time about the so-called “CNN Effect” which forced the politicians to send and/or withdraw troops irrespective of what the elites actually wanted to happen at the time. The early methods of influencing the public opinion by manipulating the media, though reasonably effective, were not enough. We have seen their strengths and limitations during both wars against Iraq, in which the...

FILE IMAGE On October 18, the Lebanese State Security announced in an official statement that it has arrested four members of an ISIS cell in Hasbaya area in southern Lebanon. The Lebanese authorities said that the four ISIS members are Syrian citizens. According to the official statement, the head of the cell, Khalid M, confessed that he found “pro-ISIS groups on social media networks and published instructions and photos on how to make explosives belts, and mines”. Khaled also confessed that he announced in a record that he is willing to conduct a suicide attack, according to the statement. Moreover, the Lebanese authorities revealed that Khalid took photos of a UNIFIL helicopter that was taking off and landing in Marjayoun area in southern Lebanon. The statement added that the four ISIS members confessed that they planned to conduct terrorist attacks again a unspecified Lebanese party (likely Hezbollah), Casino du Liban and night clubs. Furthermore, the cell was regular...