Alexsander Dugin is the politcal theorist whose ideas and ethics are at the heart of Putinism. Surkov is Putin's political strategist and the evil genius behind the gaslighting.
Surkov's methods are well summed up in this article:https://thinkprogress.org/when-everything-is-a-lie-power-is-the-only-truth-1e641751d150/#.kt9mbc96h
Here is an excerpt:
His aim is to undermine peoples’ perceptions of the world, so they never know what is really happening.
Surkov turned Russian politics into a bewildering, constantly changing piece of theater. He sponsored all kinds of groups, from neo-Nazi skinheads to liberal human rights groups. He even backed parties that were opposed to President Putin.
But the key thing was, that Surkov then let it be known that this was what he was doing, which meant that no one was sure what was real or fake. As one journalist put it: “It is a strategy of power that keeps any opposition constantly confused.”
A ceaseless shape-shifting that is unstoppable because it is undefinable. It is exactly what Surkov is alleged to have done in the Ukraine this year. In typical fashion, as the war began, Surkov published a short story about something he called non-linear war. A war where you never know what the enemy are really up to, or even who they are. The underlying aim, Surkov says, is not to win the war, but to use the conflict to create a constant state of destabilized perception, in order to manage and control.
Bannon and Trump deployed that strategy with aplomb throughout the primary. Because of the constant media focus on his campaign, Trump was able to bombard the airwaves with an unending stream of surreal falsehoods. At the same time, Bannon turned Breitbart News into a Trump Party organ and used it to disseminate further confusion. Independent of Trump and Bannon, a number of other fake news sites — an improbable number of which happened to be headquartered in Macedonia — inundated social media with inaccurate information. There is some evidence to suggest that Surkov’s employer contributed to the process as well, using the website Wikileaks as a conduit.
Many of the stories promulgated by Trump, Bannon, and their allies — such as Trump’s claim that Sen. Ted Cruz’s father was somehow involved in the Kennedy assassination — were obviously false and easily debunked. But the sheer volume of these stories had their intended effect. When fake news becomes omnipresent, all news becomes suspect. Everything starts to look like a lie.
The relentless downpour of inaccurate or useless information can make people lose trust in even their own minds. It happened to Washington Post reporter Ben Terris during the election.
In March, Terris reported that he had seen Corey Lewandowski, then Trump’s campaign manager, physically attack journalist Michelle Fields. The campaign lied about the incident and said nothing had happened. After days of being told his report had been wrong, Terris began to doubt what he had seen. Even when video was uncovered corroborating Terris’ report, the Trump campaign evaded the issue.
“Trump gaslighted me,” Fields later told Terris for an article about the incident. “I worry now that he’s gaslighting the country.”
In a world where nothing is true, the only real choice available to voters is between competing fictions. Trump offered a particularly compelling set of fictions, but he also found various ways to telegraph that he knew what he was doing. Through irony, evasion, self-contradiction, and obviously ridiculous claims, he let his supporters in on the joke. If everything is a lie, then the man who makes his lies obvious is practicing a peculiar form of honesty.
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Dugin's (Bannon, too) vision of a racist and nationalistic global cabal, acheived by employing Surkov's methods... This is much larger than just this election, folks. We are already waist deep in WWIII. The nationalistic fascism sweeping across western democracies are the proxy-battles of this new evolution of warfare. Russia is already many years and several "invasions" (in both real and cyber space) ahead of the rest of us even realizing we are already at war. It is time to wake up! We have to throw off our oppressors here before we can hope to stem the tide of the war on the international stage. America is the linchpin to this global coup... If we fall, so will the rest of the West. However, if we can prevail against this global fascism and its domestic deplorables, then we may yet hold the light for the rest of the West and Europe to follow.
A war in the 21st century need not be fought on the battlefield, when it can be fought in the minds of the masses. The movements of armies, munitions, and media are but the weapons of perception on this new battlefield.
We are already at war, My Friends... The question is: Will we return fire before it is too late?
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