Russian Active Measures
The manipulation of the American people
Collusion vs interference. There is a major difference between the two that is being overlooked not only by the media, but by the American people. On the surface, collusion sounds worse than interference. I believe that is because it implies intent by one of our fellow Americans to undermine us and work alongside a foreign power that is, make no mistake, hostile. To be clear, Donald Trump did collude with the Russians. However, it was long before he ran for office. In the early 2000s Trump was extremely down on his luck financially, and also had political aspirations. This is the perfect mark for the Russian FSB. Now, did the Russians actually swing the vote in his favor in 2016? I don’t know the answer to that. I do know that there is a very long, and very compelling paper trail of evidence directly tying Trump to several post-Soviet money laundering schemes. So yes, Trump did collude with the Russians, but as a private citizen. This does not excuse the fact that he is now our President who is, for obvious reasons, very likely compromised by a foreign power. With that being said we should all be equally if not more concerned about interference more than collusion for a multitude of reasons.
Russian interference has been proven to have existed in the 2016 election. Where the lines became blurred was not by the Russians, but by the American people. After it became clear what was taking place, each political party immediately accused the Russians of helping to elect the other and started screaming collusion. Both sides. Not just the Democrats regarding Trump. The point here is, what does it matter which side they’re backing? Why as a nation did we decide that we no longer cared about the sovereignty of our elections as long as we can spin it against the other candidate? From the perspective of the Russians, division is probably their most desirable outcome. I think we can all agree that our nation has never been more divided as the last four years. We have friendships and families coming apart based solely on political affiliation. How did it come to this America? When did basic human decency take a back seat to partisan politics? We have to remember, there are only two candidates for the office of President Of The United States. Two people, that is all. There are over three-hundred thirty million of us. We’ve allowed a foreign power to slowly over the last decade install small pieces of division and hatred into our country. The unfortunate part is, we’re not the first nation to fall for such deception from the Russians. Even with the history of the subject, the American people took the bait hook, line, and sinker.
The Russians have already had two successful active measure campaigns not that dissimilar to the one that has plagued us. In both Georgia and Ukraine the Russians were able to fracture the country and inflict massive socioeconomic damage without ever deploying a soldier. We had the playbook for exactly what they had done in these countries and we allowed the exact same thing to happen to us. Don’t get me wrong, the Russians certainly don’t mind having a candidate in office that has more pro-Russian ideals than the other. However, the main goal of the Russians active measure campaigns is to divide and collapse democracy from the inside. In the case of Ukraine, the people eventually had enough and sparked what is known as The Orange Revolution. I can only hope that our day of Orange Revolution is coming soon.
Active Measures in practice was initially developed in the early 1900s by the then Soviet Union. It employed many different forms of espionage and disinformation. As effective as this was in the early days, it became far more dangerous with the birth of the internet and social media. The Soviets and later the Russians quickly realized that with that amount of information available to everyone, it would become easier for them to install disinformation. Americans make an especially susceptible target for this kind of manipulation. We love to argue and debate regardless of the source information. All the Russians needed to do was play the long game, which they did very effectively. Slowly over the course of a decade infecting millions of feeds on social media sites favored by Americans. At first releasing accurate well reported articles. Once they had become common place in the daily feeds of millions of Americans they began to insert propaganda into their articles or posts. Starting out with nothing too jarring or unbelievable. Slowly building the palette of the American people to be more accepting of increasingly outlandish claims. Once this was accomplished, the American people did the rest. After a decent percentage of the population believed the propaganda hit pieces as fact, they would provide the division the Russians wanted to achieve. Through arguing with their neighbors, and friends, creating a splinter in American society that has both sides believing they hold the moral high ground. Thereby ensuring both sides will hold their ground and fight relentlessly with the other. This is an extremely low investment, low risk way of bringing a country to its knees. Unfortunately, the only real way to stop it is for Americans to realize what is happening and openly reject the hate. With all of the riots going on throughout the summer in the US one can’t help but wonder just how much the Russians influenced the feeds, and even the thoughts of those that turned to violence against their countrymen on both sides.
When it comes to politics and Russian inference, the best countermeasure to all of this is the American people. We have to come together and stop being divided by outside sources. Every day, all over the country, there are numerous acts of kindness that would not happen in the hate filled dystopia so many believe we are turning into. If we are turning into that, we only have ourselves to blame. Open argument and debate is a founding principle of our nation. Violence, bloodshed, and belittling of those with different opinions than our own is not. People will never respond to violence and hate. They will respond to empathy and compassion on the human level. Even if it is something as simple as putting your neighbor’s newspaper in their mailbox off the ground as it starts to rain. We have to get back to loving the country that we live in, and more importantly loving her people. Once we do that we can then begin to turn our attention toward how we strayed so far away from that.
