Brian Holmes on Wed, 23 Feb 2011 20:41:11 +0100 (CET) |
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Re: <nettime> Wikileaks is a psyop! |
> The internet is indeed a vast battlefield, where the > intelligence agencies of the US-UK, China, Israel, Russia, and many others > clash every hour of the day, with commercial spies, hackers, anarchists, > cultists, mercenary trolls, and psychotics all getting into the act as > well. Intelligence agencies deliberately feed real and doctored material > to various websites, sometimes using their own disgruntled employees as > cutouts, conduits, and go-betweens. The above is some truly lovely prose and evokes (though only faintly I'm afraid) the master of this genre to the nth degree, Konrad Becker, in his Strategic Reality Dictionary -- which however has the immense advantage of working back to the like of Giordano Bruno and John Dee as the original 16th-century psychowarriors whose black arts still make the unitiated tremble. Perhaps nettimers would like to drink this heady brew at the source? http://tinyurl.com/strategic-reality > Most recently, Wikileaks has played a role in the CIA’s new “Jasmine > Revolution” in Tunisia by publishing some State Department cables about > the sybaritic luxury and lavish lifestyle of the Ben Ali clan, leading to > the downfall of that regime. The CIA is now gloating that with the help of > Wikileaks it can now topple all the Arab regimes at will, from Mubarak to > Qaddafi to Bouteflika, and replace them with new and more pliable puppets > eager to clash with Iran, Russia, and China. I am so glad to get this news! Why, to think that just the day-before-yesterday, after much soul-searching and chin-tugging and the like, in my heart of hearts I had rehabilitated that enigmatic tactician of the demos, Gene Sharp, yes, he of the Albert Einstein Institute, the one who writes the take-down manuals for dictatorships. He is, you know, widely suspected of being a "stoogie" for USAID, for the National Endowment for Democracy, for the CIA of course, and god knows, for Obama himself. OK, true enough, it is known that his writings and films have been distributed from time to time by certain agencies of the US government; and true enough, the Otpor movement in Serbia made use of them, as did the Color Revolutions in Georgia and the Ukraine. But in some moment of psychic weakness, you see, I decided to accept that this world is complex, that Gene Sharp actually is a rather awesome democracy activist operating out of two tiny rooms somewhere in Boston, and that people in Egypt just did deploy his writings and techniques of their very own free will. While at the same time, a putatively liberal regime like that of the US can indeed instrumentalize those same writings and tactics. Yes, the world is complex. But no, it isn't! It was all a plot and my mind was drugged with LSD, Anatensol, Diazepam, Haloperidol, Largactil, Mogadon, Serepax, Stelazine, Tegretol, Tofranil! My mother is Anne Hamilton-Byrne! My father is John Young! My uncle is Julian Assange! Thank god the CIA has finally taken out those useless US stoogies Ben-Ali and Mubarak, at last I can get back to my molecules and my family life.... yours on a higher plane, BH # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mail.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@kein.org