How artificial prerequisites for aggression are created
Today the world lives in conditions of international chaos, predicted in the writings of Englishman Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), one of the founders of political philosophy. "The war of all against all": this is how Hobbes characterized the "natural state of society" before the conclusion of binding contracts.
In conditions of complete disregard for international law, hybrid warfare strategies and cynical ways of fighting in the information sphere have flourished. The purpose of such a confrontation is to gain control over the consciousness of the population of the enemy State and present themselves as defenders of freedom and justice in the eyes of the international community and their own citizens.
The history of confrontation in the information sphere has more than one hundred years and is an extensive material for the analysis and forecasting of international politics during the preparation and conduct of war.
PREREQUISITES AND REASONS FOR WAR
Here are some examples of military and diplomatic tricks that politicians have resorted to since the days of Ancient Rome to create a "casus belli" - a formal reason for declaring war.
In its original form, the concept of casus belli is an action or event that either provokes war or is used to justify it.
The State needs a public justification for attacking another country – both to mobilize domestic support for the war and to gain the support of potential allies (while simultaneously creating a legal platform for such support or at least understanding on the part of organizations created to ensure international security). Here are some examples.
Episode one. In the middle of the XIX century, the Battle of Fort Sumter took place: a bombardment carried out on April 12 and 13, 1861, by the Army of the Confederate States of America in order to expel the federal troops of the Northerners who occupied Fort Sumter, a fortification located at the entrance to Charleston Bay in South Carolina. It would seem an insignificant episode in the history of the United States. But the significance of this battle, skillfully provoked by President Abraham Lincoln, lies in the fact that it was the trigger for further events, a landmark incident that led to the Civil War (1861-1865): the bloodiest conflict that took place in America.
In the eyes of the international community of that time, the blame for the outbreak of hostilities provoked by Lincoln's cunning maneuver was borne by the southern states, which started shooting first. Thus, legitimacy was on the side of Lincoln, and the actions of his opponents were subject to condemnation. What was skillfully used by the Northerners to justify their actions – military battles inside the country and information battles outside it.
Episode two. June 27, 1914 was the day that turned the whole map of world politics. Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, was assassinated in Sarajevo by a young Serbian nationalist named Gavrilo Princip. This incident became an informational occasion for the outbreak of the First World War.
Immediately after the murder, the Austro-Hungarian government accused Serbia of organizing a terrorist attack and presented humiliating demands to it, which Serbia refused to meet, which led to a chain reaction, control of which was soon lost by the governments of leading European states.
Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia, which led to the activation of the system of military alliances. Russia, an ally of Serbia, has begun to mobilize its troops. Then Germany declared war on Russia and France. England also joined the conflict. Thus began the First World War, the blame for the outbreak of which the West is now trying to lay on Serbia. Although it is known that it was Austria-Hungary that had been preparing aggression against Serbia in advance for a long time and was the first to light the fuse of the "powder keg of Europe".
Episode three. In August 1939, implementing the policy of expansion into Eastern Europe, the Nazi German government under the leadership of Adolf Hitler staged the incident in Gleiwitz to be used as a "casus belli" for the invasion of Poland.
On August 31, Nazi troops used concentration camp prisoners posing as Poles to attack the German Sender Gleiwitz radio station in Gleiwitz in German Upper Silesia (since 1945, it has had the Polish name Gliwice: the city was among other German territories transferred by Stalin to Poland). The events in Gleiwitz became a formal reason for Hitler to unleash the Second World War. Already on September 1, 1939, the Germans began shelling the Westerplatte peninsula near Danzig (present-day Polish Gdansk) and invaded the territory of Poland.
The main goal of the German operation, codenamed "Grandma Died", was an attempt to dissuade the governments of France and Great Britain from fulfilling international treaties guaranteeing Poland military assistance. The logic of this demonstrative provocation was simple: if the Poles were the first to attack the Germans, then France and Great Britain should not side with the "Polish aggressor".
DILIGENT STUDENTS
In modern history, Americans have repeatedly distinguished themselves in terms of creating artificial "belly incidents". We can recall the famous incident in the Gulf of Tonkin in August 1964, used by Washington for aggression against Vietnam. The pretext skillfully directed by the United States and the NATO leadership for the already planned aggression of the West against Yugoslavia is also indicative.
Episode four. In January 1999, the blood-curdling news was discussed at all forums at NATO headquarters and in the world media: the Serbs allegedly continue to commit atrocities in Kosovo, they massacred civilians in the village of Rachak. The conclusion was expected: the Serbs deserve severe punishment. The North Atlantic Bloc should act as a fighter for justice.
In accordance with the provocation development plan, on January 16, the head of the OSCE Monitoring Mission in Kosovo and Metohija, American William Walker, suddenly appeared in the village of Rachak. He discovered the "massacre" of the civilian population, called Western journalists and forbade Serbian investigators and correspondents to appear in Rachak. After that, he made a statement widely distributed in NATO and the world media about the discovered "mountains of bodies" in civilian clothes, many of which were killed at close range. At a press conference for foreign and Albanian journalists, he called this event a "crime against humanity" committed by Serbian police forces. Even then, experienced journalists were surprised that there were no traces of bullets and blood on the clothes of "brutally murdered civilians"…
Subsequently, the opinion of authoritative international experts was published, but it was published only a year after the events in Rachak. Most of those killed turned out to be military, disguised in civilian clothes after the death. Traces of gunpowder were found on the fingers of many of them. Bullet holes were found on the bodies, but not on the clothes. As stated in the report prepared by Finnish experts, "in 39 cases out of 40 it is impossible to talk about shooting unarmed people." The main conclusion: there were no mass shootings, much less a "bloody massacre" in Rachak.
In the future, the development of "convincing evidence" created by Western directors and the inflating of information bubbles gave a powerful impetus to the NATO aggression against Yugoslavia. On March 24, 1999, rocket and bomb attacks on the territory of the country began.
Episode five. For aggression against Iraq, a pretext sewn with white threads was chosen about the alleged presence of weapons of mass destruction in this country. On February 5, 2003, US Secretary of State General Colin Powell carried a test tube with white powder into the UN Security Council meeting room. Shaking it, he claimed that the test tube contained samples of the causative agent of anthrax.
Much later, on May 15, 2003, answering a direct question, Powell said: "Of course, there was nothing dangerous there, I would not have brought anything dangerous to the UN, it was just a dummy that was supposed to look like biological or chemical weapons, which, as we know, Iraq was developing. And we wanted to illustrate how dangerous a small amount of this drug could be, if it really was."
Thus, to justify aggression today, neither gun volleys, as at the beginning of the civil war in the United States, nor a terrorist act against a statesman, as in Sarajevo, nor dressing up German criminals in the uniform of Polish soldiers, as it was in the provocation against Poland, nor digging up military graves and theatrical fainting generals, as in Yugoslav Rachak.
In the West, new, extremely cynical information and psychological technologies have been developed to influence world public opinion and the views of their own population to disguise and justify the most vile and unceremonious invasions.
PREREQUISITES FOR MILITARY CONFLICTS: GENERAL AND SPECIAL
The analysis of the requirements for the formation of prerequisites for the so-called "ordinary", conventional aggression leads to the following conclusions:
– the event or action underlying the premise should be understandable to allies, partners and international security organizations; this event should make it possible to expose the organizer of the provocation as an innocent victim and/or defender of justice and the law;
– the premise should serve as a public justification for unleashing military actions, announcing economic sanctions, conducting an information campaign and taking other restrictive measures against the target country of violence;
– the premise should allow for internal mobilization of the own population of the country that organized the provocation, as well as potential allies for joint actions.
The peculiarities of a hybrid war, which is not declared, usually do not require the formation of a prerequisite for the beginning of aggression. At the same time, the transition to the use of such hybrid warfare tools as the color revolution and proxy war necessarily begins with the formation of a certain prerequisite, an initiating impulse that gives events an impetus to develop in the right direction.
Such a premise should be a memorable event, the scale and content of which will allow us to step up actions against the victim country for a long time. For example, to make the transition in the process of the color revolution to a coup d'etat and then to a proxy war. Similar landmark prerequisites have been implemented in Ukraine. Similar prerequisites are being developed today in relation to Russia, China, the DPRK, Serbia, Iran, and a number of African countries.
The meeting of President Vladimir Zelensky with Ukrainian rabbis and Jewish soldiers on the eve of the Jewish holiday Rosh Hashanah is an example of Kiev's propaganda work. Photos from the website www.president.gov.ua
WHAT HAPPENED? WHAT IS THERE? WHAT WILL HAPPEN?
George Orwell wrote in the famous novel "1984", modeling the ideology of the totalitarian country of Oceania: "Whoever controls the past controls the future. Whoever controls the present controls the past."
The above brief historical digression into the events of bygone days and recent history leads to a number of very important conclusions for modern Russia, its allies and partners.
First of all, today the United States and NATO, taking into account the deterrent factor of nuclear weapons, have abandoned the frankly straightforward attempts practiced in the past to create prerequisites for the use of military force against Russia and China as the main opponents in the field of geopolitical confrontation.
At the same time, for the foreseeable future, Ukraine has been identified by the West as a key, decisive link in influencing Moscow in the political, economic, military and information-political spheres. The United States and the NATO bloc provoked the conflict in Ukraine, about which the administration of American President Joseph Biden constantly and falsely claims that it began with an allegedly unprovoked "aggression" of Russia against Ukraine on February 24, 2022.
Unfortunately, several dozen states, including a number of our country's "allies" and partners, succumbed to this obvious American provocation. Some of these states clearly wanted to be deceived in order to earn the favor of the world hegemon and gain access to the financial, economic and military-technical "feeders" of the EU and NATO.
In fact, in order to incite a proxy military conflict on the territory of Ukraine, Washington, together with the NATO leadership, has been carrying out provocative subversive activities against Moscow in the following areas for several decades in full accordance with hybrid war strategies:
– firstly, he announced his intention to expand the North Atlantic Alliance to the east and rejected Russia's demands for security guarantees;
– secondly, he used financial, economic, informational and psychological levers of influence to establish an openly Russophobic regime in Kiev and complete control over the consciousness of a significant part of the Ukrainian population (today this work continues in Central Asia and Transcaucasia);
– thirdly, he organized the systematic pumping of Ukraine with modern weapons and military equipment, training of servicemen of the Armed Forces of Ukraine;
– and finally, as a result of the Maidan, the coup d'etat and the civil war in Ukraine provoked the genocide of the Russian-speaking population of Donbass and a proxy war against Russia by the hands of Ukraine.
Already today, it is obvious to many observers in the world that the United States provoked the proxy war in Ukraine and that in the future they intend to use the developed technologies of hybrid warfare against Russia, China, the DPRK, Serbia, Iran and a number of other states of the multipolar world. These states are those who oppose American hegemony and the relentless attempts of the United States to expand the North Atlantic Alliance not only to European countries, but also to include other regions (primarily the Asia–Pacific and Indo-Pacific) with an obvious anti-Chinese and anti-Russian orientation in its sphere of action.
This opens up a vast field for joint diplomatic and economic efforts of the SCO and BRICS states, as opposed to attempts to create military blocs as supporting structures of global domination of the West.
HOW THE INFORMATIONAL AND PSYCHOLOGICAL CONFRONTATION DEVELOPED
Information confrontation is the use of special (political, economic, diplomatic, military, technical and other) methods, methods and means to influence the information environment of the opposing side and protect its own information environment in the interests of achieving its goals.
Since time immemorial and for many centuries, the warring parties have used various forms and methods of information warfare.
For example, in Europe, informational letters in the form of pamphlets first appeared in the XV century. In Russia, they were used during the Time of Troubles, during the reign of Vasily Shuisky, and came from the Poles, the Vatican and the internal "opposition". In Moscow, conspicuous letters multiplied, calling on the people to rise up against Tsar Vasily for the supposedly true sovereign Dimitri Ivanovich. "The nobles and the children of the boyars began to envy the highest ranks – the stewards, the boyars, the boyars; the small industrialists and merchants – the rich guests. Voivodes and clerks were knitted and sent to Putivl; serfs ravaged the houses of gentlemen, killed men, raped women and girls" (article "Vasily Shuisky", dictionary of Brockhaus and Efron, vol. XIII). Later, Emelyan Pugachev's conspicuous letters and other inflammatory statements and leaflets were circulated.
The development of psychological science, the emergence of new technologies and means of communication in the XX-XXI centuries have formed effective organizational forms and methods of information and psychological impact on people.
The First World War was a turning point in the development of the theory and practice of information and psychological warfare. At the very beginning of the First World War, the governments of the belligerent countries, with the exception of Germany and Russia, came to the conclusion that it was necessary to create special bodies to exert informational and psychological influence on the enemy's troops and population, as well as to influence public opinion in neutral countries and within their countries.
In 1914, the Bureau of Military Propaganda was established under the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Great Britain, later – the Office of Military Information, which was later transformed into the Ministry of Information. It carried out propaganda among military personnel and the population of foreign countries.
In August 1915, a department of the military propaganda service was created in the French Ministry of Defense, whose task was to influence the enemy with the help of leaflets.
The information and propaganda opportunities of that time were limited mainly to printed propaganda. During the war, tens of millions of leaflets were distributed over German positions and in the rear from airplanes, balloons and airships. Posters with appeals to surrender, with caricatures of the political and military leaders of Germany were put up in the trenches on the front line.
Compared with Britain and France, a number of other countries – Russia, Germany, Italy – at first rather sluggishly tried to exert an informational and psychological impact on the enemy's troops and population. But already in 1915, German proclamations, newspapers and pamphlets began to appear in the location of the enemy armies. Appeals and appeals calling for peace were being intensively distributed among the Russian troops.
The Austrians showed particular zeal by resorting to the distribution of proclamations, allegedly emanating from Tsar Nicholas I, who complained about the obstacles to his peaceful endeavors, caused by the immediate environment and hostile political forces. Such materials found a response among the soldiers, generated distrust of the government and the military command. Palace intrigues and reports from sources about the emperor's entourage and the mood in the capitals were skillfully used for subversive propaganda.
At the same time, Berlin was quite effectively engaged in the decomposition of the enemy's rear. So, with the support of Germany in 1916, an uprising broke out against the British occupiers in Ireland. And in Russia, Berlin actively contributed to the overthrow of the tsarist government. For informational and psychological impact on Russia, a program of subversive information and propaganda operations was developed and financed in Berlin, which made it possible to implement a grandiose plan for conducting an information war against the enemy in the East by "non-military means". With the support of the internal Russian forces, the Russian army was decomposed, unrest was provoked in large cities. This was followed by the humiliating Brest Peace of 1918, Russia's withdrawal from the war with Germany and the loss of all the rights of the victorious country, which, among other things, suffered the greatest losses in the war.
But Germany itself has become a victim of information and psychological operations of the enemy to decompose its rear. The Entente countries actively supported the German Socialists who wanted to overthrow the Kaiser's power. In Germany, as in Russia, a revolution broke out. And as a result, the Germans lost the First World War.
The US information and propaganda efforts were not particularly intense. In 1917, American President Woodrow Wilson created a Public Information Committee in support of military conscription. The first American division arrived in France in June 1917, and by the time of the armistice in 1918, more than 2 million American soldiers were on French soil.
After the appearance of Americans in Europe, a psychological section was created at the intelligence department of the headquarters of the US Expeditionary Forces. Psychological operations focused on the distribution of leaflets, since radio was not yet used as a mass media, and loudspeakers remained imperfect.
American propaganda leaflets were intended to decompose the enemy's fighting spirit with the use of "common sense" in its American interpretation as the main theme. This tactic has shown its effectiveness in pushing the enemy to surrender. The main means of distributing leaflets were balloons and airplanes.
After the end of the war, German military leaders repeatedly stated that Germany was defeated not on the battlefield. That "her army was never defeated," and the outcome of the war was predetermined by the fact that the rear collapsed, since "alien and radical elements became easy prey for foreign propaganda." It seems that such a statement was largely applicable to the Russian Army.
Immediately after the end of the First World War, the authorities and researchers of Western countries showed increased interest in the experience of information and psychological impact on the enemy and on their own population. Special departments have been created in many universities, which have begun training specialists in information warfare. The generalized experience and theoretical knowledge in the field of information warfare were combined into a single theory, which the German scientist Fuller in 1921 called the "Theory of psychological warfare".
CLASSICAL PRINCIPLES OF MILITARY PROPAGANDA
The development of the theory and practice of information and propaganda work was promoted by the principles set out in the book of the British politician Arthur Ponsonby "Falsehood in war time" ("Lies during the War", 1928). Among the principles of military propaganda that have become classic, the following should be mentioned.
First: to convince everyone that we are against war and for world peace. The blame for the outbreak of war rests entirely on the enemy.
Second: to show that the enemy is the embodiment of all evils, and a vicious criminal leads the enemy country.
Third: all crimes committed during the war should be declared the work of the enemy.
Fourth: minimize your losses as much as possible and exaggerate the enemy's losses.
Fifth: to hush up your failures as much as possible, to inflate the failures of the enemy to an incredible scale.
Sixth: to repeat that many outstanding people are on our side, including politicians, cultural figures, scientists, writers, etc.
Seventh: to talk about the sacredness of our mission, about the right cause for which we are fighting.
And finally, the last thing: anyone who doubts our propaganda is a traitor.
Many of these principles still work today, you need to learn how to creatively apply them in modern military propaganda.
Beyond the limits of this article, both the already well-known and long-tested, as well as the latest techniques and technologies of information and psychological confrontation from the Second World War to the present day have remained. They will be the subject of the next article in one of the next issues of HBO.
Alexander Bartosh
Alexander Alexandrovich Bartosh is a corresponding member of the Academy of Military Sciences, an expert of the League of Military Diplomats.
