Posted on

A Question of Timing (Erasing History)

It’s may be a bit overused, but I’m going to start this essay with a Kundera quote from The Book of Laughter and Forgetting.

“In February 1948, the Communist leader Klement Gottwald stepped out on to the balcony of a Baroque palace in Prague to harangue hundreds of thousands of citizens massed in Old Town Square. That was the great turning point in the history of Bohemia. A fateful moment of the kind that occurs only once or twice a millennium.

“Gottwald was flanked by his comrades, with Clementis standing close by him. It was snowing and cold, and Gottwald was bareheaded. Bursting with solicitude, Clementis took off his fur hat and set it on Gottwald’s head.

“The propaganda section made hundreds of thousands of copies of the photograph taken on the balcony where Gottwald, in a fur hat and surrounded by his comrades, spoke to the people. On that balcony the history of Communist Bohemia began. Every child knew that photograph, from seeing it on posters and in schoolbooks and museums.

“Four years later, Clementis was charged with treason and hanged. The propaganda section immediately made him vanish from history, and of course, from all photographs. Ever since, Gottwald has been alone on that balcony. Where Clementis stood, there is only the bare palace wall. Nothing remains of Clementis but the fur hat on Gottwald’s head.”

There are numerous examples of removing someone from history, mostly from national leaders who didn’t need subtlety in their actions.

Some of the most obvious examples come from authoritarians and apart from Gottwald, include Stalin’s historical removal of Leon Trotsky and Nikolai Yezhov, or Mao’s removal of Bo Gu. But how else do we remove people from history? Does the inability to ever truly erase something online change this?

 

Let’s look at ways we choose to eliminate history and when we do it. Continue reading “A Question of Timing (Erasing History)”

Posted on

Bezmenov’s Steps (Ideological Subversion)

“I was engaged in something much more unpleasant than espionage. I was engaged in ideological subversion, which is seldom explained to people by your media, because the media is part of that process.”

That was one of the many quotes that made me take a closer look at some presentations and writings by Yuri Bezmenov (also known as Tomas Schuman) in the mid-1980s.

Bezmenov was a Soviet KGB propaganda agent. After defecting to Canada in 1970, he described the long process of national subversion used by the USSR on international targets. He died in 1993 and it looks like he was forgotten, though over the past decade summaries of his interviews pop up during crises. I (along with others) recently discovered his work and found that his framework for slow national subversion spoke to the modern era (and not just 2020).

I’ve written about disinformation several times in the past (Prester John and the Long History of Disinformation and Disinformation and Disease – Coronavirus Edition). Disinformation and subversion activities that Bezmenov refers to offer an opportunity to appreciate systems on an international scale and how they affect outcomes. Continue reading “Bezmenov’s Steps (Ideological Subversion)”

Posted on

Inevitable Surveillance?

What is the purpose of surveilling a domestic population? Is it inevitable?

Surveillance and spying are a little different but the benefits of each have long been understood. The purposes of spying are to know when an enemy is going to attack, their capabilities, the potential to attack them first, or what one might gain in making an attack, state to state or tribe to tribe. Learn plans, intentionally mislead, survive.

Domestic surveillance is different or at least thought of as being different. For some types of domestic surveillance the purpose seems to be that the population harbors enemies (overlapping with spying above), whether this means enemies of the state itself or those harmful to the rest of the population.

A version of that is that if there are people who have “wrong thinking,” then their “wrong thinking” can infect their neighbors, and eventually lead to violence or chaos. Continue reading “Inevitable Surveillance?”

Posted on

Prester John and the Long History of Disinformation

In his novel Baudolino, Umberto Eco writes of a medieval letter forging exercise. For their own political purposes, a group of friends write a realistic, but fake, letter addressed to Frederick I, Holy Roman Emperor. The fake letter is from Prester John.

Surely you know Prester John?

Let’s look at the tacit tradition of disinformation and what will change in the future. What is changing about the nature of truth? Will it be harder to tell what is true? Or was it always hard? What are the unintended consequences?

Continue reading “Prester John and the Long History of Disinformation”

Posted on

The Difficulties of Elimitigation

It’s said that to successfully eliminate something you must replace it with something new. We see this in the history of systems where people eliminated and replaced part of it long ago. They survived and so are examples of the cycle being applied well. But why is this method applied poorly? Where does it break down? Since there is uncertain ability and low desire to understand changes that might come after eliminating something, whether there is a replacement or not, how should we mitigate the risks that might emerge?

Between eliminating and replacing something there is another way, which I’ll call “elimitigation,” with “elimitigate” being a portmanteau of “eliminate” and “mitigate.” Continue reading “The Difficulties of Elimitigation”

Posted on

Destructive Collection (How We Destroy Things)

Some destruction is accidental. Some is intentional. Destruction works in different ways. And for different reasons.

These are types of destruction I’ve cataloged. I arranged this list according to what each type of destruction means, methods to achieve, first-order effects, second-order effects, and examples.

(Reminder: first-order effects are the direct, commonly noticeable changes. Second-order effects are the effects of the effects and often not obvious.)

Note that there is a lot of overlap between categories. I didn’t attempt a mutually exclusive, collectively exhaustive list. That just felt unrepresentative of the messiness of life. 

This is a destructive collection that I hope will change the way you think. Continue reading “Destructive Collection (How We Destroy Things)”