[grc] Community Radio to reweave Civic Fabric - BECOME the Government ... or ... Weaponized Narrative Is the New Battlespace

[Max]

I have two articles here I'd love to use to start a discussion on WHAT
COMMUNITY RADIO CAN DO IN A POST-FACTUAL CULTURE.

Short Vers: Our very idea of reality is now being turned into a
battleground. What can Community Radio do to reweave our Civic Fabric
back together that we rely on for healthcare, healthy food, healthy
relationships, our very lives as we know it eventually?

Short Answer: In My Humble Opinion: Community Radio is UNIQUELY
positioned to reweave the civic fabric back together and back towards
a factual narrative or at least a narrative that includes the
typically ignored voices of a community.
              HOW: By increasing interactivity between neighbors by
FINDING EVERY EXCUSE TO GET THEM TO CALL-IN AND BE HEARD BY THEIR
NEIGHBORS.
   Basically, we need a crash course in Telephone Hybrids and start
using them every chance we get!
   NO OTHER MEDIA can make use of a telephone hybrid to connect
neighbor-to-neighbor like community radio!
   This *may* be the beginning of the end of American Democracy as we
know it as the battleground has moved into our computers and minds now
... viruses of many kinds hijacking our browsers and the space between
our eyebrows as well!


LONGER ANSWER:

I have long said that Fox News has been functioning as a kind of
"Hannoi Hannah" Propaganda arm of foreign forces (its owned by a Saudi
and an Australian refugee) whose purpose has been to drive a wedge
between our Civilians and our Civilization for the purpose of profit
with the effect of Counterrevolutionary "Fifth Column" forces of
slavers and tories that never agreed with the idea of "One Man One
Vote" going back centuries.
So what's different NOW?
Custom Crafted News ... Newsfeeds on Facebook, Defriending people that
break "Our Tribe's Narrative" etc. We are living in a new age where
Russia doesn't have to hack the vote COUNT. All they have to hack is
our perception!
Russia has basically taken what Fox News has been doing for decades
and WEAPONIZED it.
And there are forces for profit in the USA that are perfectly happy
with the outcome ... so far anyway.

WHAT CAN COMMUNITY RADIO DO ABOUT IT?
Short Ver: Become the connection from Neighbor-to-Neihbor .. a Bridge!
With LIVE CALL-IN connections.
I would say "talk radio" but that's ONLY ONE VERSION.

You can get people to call-in between songs, get them to talk
(briefly) about their reality! That's all it takes! You do not have to
turn into NPR!

Another Step: Carry the montly hearings of your local City Council,
County Supervisors, whatever they call themselves in your neck of the
woods.
Then possibly expand into carrying your state legislator's hearings
(select ones)
Then possibly carry Congresscritters holding forth on C-Span ...
Washington Bloviations have not been this gripping since Nixon!

Whatever level along that spectrum you can manage that STARTS WITH
PUTTING THE NEIGHBORS ON THE AIR TO BE HEARD BY OTHER NEIGHBORS and
getting them to share their reality will help reweave the civic fabric
back together in this post-factual world we are moving into!

THE GOAL IS TO FIND EVERY EXCUSE POSSIBLE FOR NEIGHBORS TO HEAR
NEIGHBORS DIRECTLY AND REMOVE THE WEAPONIZED NARRATIVE FILTERS WE GET
FROM THE NATIONAL MEDIA ORGANS.


THE NEW NARRATIVE: The Media is the Fourth Estate of Government and
thus by engaging, volunteering and supporting community media ... YOU
BECOME PART OF THE GOVERNMENT.
 ENGAGE your neighbors with a phone call. Learn each other's reality.
 VOLUNTEER to become part of your neighbor's solution (through the
radio station if possible!)
 SUPPORT the reweaving of the Civic Fabric (through the radio station
if possible!)

 "Take Back" our Government from large institutions that will only
treat you as a pawn!
  To paraphrase Jello Biafra, "Don't get mad at the Government, BECOME
the Government!", via the Fourth Estate: Community Radio.


The Two articles that inspired this are: (excerpting below)
http://www.defenseone.com/ideas/2017/01/weaponized-narrative-new-battlespace/134284/
Weaponized Narrative Is the New Battlespace

  and

https://medium.com/insurge-intelligence/pentagon-study-declares-american-empire-is-collapsing-746754cdaebf
Pentagon study declares American empire is ‘collapsing’







http://www.defenseone.com/ideas/2017/01/weaponized-narrative-new-battlespace/134284/

Weaponized Narrative Is the New Battlespace


Conventional military dominance is still critical to the superpower
status of the United States. But even in a military sense, it is no
longer enough: if an American election can be controlled by an
adversarial power, then stealth aircraft and special forces are not
the answer. With lawmakers poised to authorize $160 million to counter
Russian “fake news” and disinformation, and the CIA and the Congress
examining meddling in the U.S. election and democracies around the
world, it’s time to see weaponized narrative for what it is: a deep
threat to national security.

Weaponized narrative seeks to undermine an opponent’s civilization,
identity, and will by generating complexity, confusion, and political
and social schisms. It can be used tactically, as part of explicit
military or geopolitical conflict; or strategically, as a way to
reduce, neutralize, and defeat a civilization, state, or organization.
Done well, it limits or even eliminates the need for armed force to
achieve political and military aims.

The efforts to muscle into the affairs of the American presidency,
Brexit, the Ukraine, the Baltics, and NATO reflect a shift to a
“post-factual” political and cultural environment that is vulnerable
to weaponized narrative. This begs three deeper questions:

-How global is this phenomenon?
-Are the underlying drivers temporary or systemic?
-What are the implications for an American military used to
technological dominance?


Far from being simply a U.S. or U.K. phenomenon, shifts to
“post-factualism” can be seen in Poland, Hungary, Turkey, France, and
the Philippines, among other democracies. Russia, whose own political
culture is deeply post-factual and indeed post-modern, is now ably
constructing ironic, highly cynical, weaponized narratives that were
effective in the Ukrainian invasion, and are now destabilizing the
Baltic states and the U.S. election process.

Such a large and varied shift to weaponized narrative implies that the
enablers are indeed systemic. One fundamental underpinning – often
overlooked – is the accelerating volume and velocity of information.
Cultures, institutions, and individuals are, among many other things,
information-processing mechanisms. As they become overwhelmed with
information complexity, the tendency to retreat into simpler
narratives becomes stronger.

Under this stress, cultures fragment. Institutions are stretched until
they become ineffective or even dysfunctional. Individuals who define
their identity primarily through the state – such as Americans,
Russians, Chinese, or Europeans – retreat to a mythic Golden Age
nationalism, while those who prioritize cultural and religious bonds
retreat to fundamentalism.

Narrative is as old as tribes.  Humans are pattern-seeking
storytelling animals.  We cannot endure an absence of meaning.  Rather
than look up at the distribution of lights in the night sky and deal
with randomness, we will eagerly connect those dots and adorn them
with the most elaborate – even poetic – tales of heroes and princesses
and bears and dippers.   We have a hard-wired need for myth.
Narrative is basic to what it means to be human.


What’s new is the extraordinary power of today’s weaponized narrative.
It attacks our group identity – our sense of who we are, our privilege
of not being identified as “other.” The rise of the Connected Age
allows attacks that tear down old identities that have bound us
together. But it also allows the creation of narratives that define
the new differences between “us” and “them” that are worth fighting
for.

Weaponized narrative comes at a critical juncture. The speed of
upheaval in our lives is unprecedented. It will be filled by
something. We are desperate for something to hang on to.

By offering cheap passage through a complex world, weaponized
narrative furnishes emotional certainty at the cost of rational
understanding. The emotionally satisfying decision to accept a
weaponized narrative — to believe, to have faith — inoculates
cultures, institutions, and individuals against counterarguments and
inconvenient facts.

This departure from rationality opens such ring-fenced belief
communities to manipulation and their societies to attack. These
communities can be strengthened through media tools and messages that
reinforce the narrative — crucially, by demonizing outsiders. Trust is
extended only to those who believe, leaving other institutional and
social structures to erode.

In the hands of professionals, the powerful emotions of anger and fear
can be used to control adversaries, limit their options, and disrupt
their functional capabilities. This is a unique form of soft power. In
such campaigns, facts are not necessary because – contrary to the old
memes of the Enlightenment – truth does not necessarily prevail. It
can be overwhelmed with constantly repeated and replenished falsehood.
Especially powerful are falsehoods or simplifications that the target
cohort has been primed to believe by the underlying narratives with
which they are also being supplied.

It’s a self-reinforcing loop. This process was clear in Ukraine, in
Brexit, in creation of alt-right and other far right and left
communities in many countries, and in the American presidential
election. All of these campaigns combine indigenous factors with known
or suspected Russian deployment of weaponized narrative, achieving
significant benefits for Russia with low risk of conventional military
responses by the West. Indeed, the response by America, NATO, and
European states has been confused, sporadic, and ineffective.

In the short term, then, weaponized narrative challenges existing
Western military and security institutions grown comfortable in their
post-Cold War conventional-force dominance. At least one major
adversary now has a capability – and indeed a new battlespace – that
is not just unfamiliar. It is one where institutional, historical, and
cultural factors put the U.S. at a significant disadvantage.

But the longer-term challenges are even more profound: Post-factual
politics weaken democratic governance. It enables what might be called
post-modern soft authoritarianism. Such authoritarianism is not
absolute in the traditional Nazi or Stalinist sense. Rather – much
like Putin’s Russia today – it relies on a sophisticated combination
of managed public expectations, a tenuous but real political
legitimacy, and the division of state power among otherwise isolated
communities. These then become easy to balance against each other, the
more readily to be dominated by authoritarian personalities and
institutions.

The mechanism, again, depends on weaponized narrative. Old
authoritarianism too often required large security forces, violent
repression of citizens, and absolute control of information (the Big
Lie). How much simpler to engineer human communities so that the
expensive and messy process of explicit authoritarianism can be
replaced by the far gentler – and more effective – mechanism of
narrative.

History is replete with examples. For centuries in Europe, the
Church’s narrative of the Great Chain of Being kept the peace.
Rebellion simply lay outside the reality within which most people
lived.

It is certainly not clear that weaponized narrative necessarily leads
to soft authoritarianism. But it is at least plausible that the
advance of inclusive democracy and universalist Western values has
been reversed. Authoritarian organizations and states are more
adaptive in this new post-factual political environment. Weaponized
narratives can only increase the possibility of soft authoritarian
outcomes if they are not understood and engaged.

At any rate, it is certainly a reasonable hypothesis that the
Enlightenment age of the individual – the core to any democratic
system – is clearly ending. Unprecedented complexity, and information
volumes and velocities, simply mean that individual cognitive
capabilities – no matter how brilliant – are overwhelmed. Power shifts
towards those who understand and deploy narrative, be they large
states, large corporations, or religious and cultural communities.
Power leaks away from the naïve faith in individual rationality that
has characterized the last three centuries in the West.

What this may mean for military and security organizations committed
to democratic states – or, indeed, for the United States as a whole –
is not entirely clear. But much of what has previously been assumed to
be fixed and unchanging is turning out to be, in fact, unpredictable,
unforeseeable, and random. And the rate of change is accelerating.

It is futile to wish this change away. Instead, we must recognize
weaponized narrative, to defend against it, and to put it to our own
uses. Our societies and institutions must adapt, or pass into history
alongside others that did not.



==========================================================
If that wasn't scary enough, consider THE SECOND ARTICLE:
-----------------------


https://medium.com/insurge-intelligence/pentagon-study-declares-american-empire-is-collapsing-746754cdaebf
Pentagon study declares American empire is ‘collapsing’

Excerpts:

An extraordinary new Pentagon study has concluded that the U.S.-backed
international order established after World War 2 is “fraying” and may
even be “collapsing”, leading the United States to lose its position
of “primacy” in world affairs.
The solution proposed to protect U.S. power in this new “post-primacy”
environment is, however, more of the same: more surveillance, more
propaganda (“strategic manipulation of perceptions”) and more military
expansionism.
The document concludes that the world has entered a fundamentally new
phase of transformation in which U.S. power is in decline,
international order is unravelling, and the authority of governments
everywhere is crumbling.

Danger comes not just from great power rivals like Russia and China,
both portrayed as rapidly growing threats to American interests, but
also from the increasing risk of “Arab Spring”-style events. These
will erupt not just in the Middle East, but all over the world,
potentially undermining trust in incumbent governments for the
foreseeable future.
The report, based on a year-long intensive research process involving
consultation with key agencies across the Department of Defense and
U.S. Army, calls for the U.S. government to invest in more
surveillance, better propaganda through “strategic manipulation” of
public opinion, and a “wider and more flexible” U.S. military.
The report was published in June by the U.S. Army War College’s
Strategic Studies Institute to evaluate the DoD’s approach to risk
assessment at all levels of Pentagon policy planning. The study was
supported and sponsored by the U.S. Army’s Strategic Plans and Policy
Directorate; the Joint Staff, J5 (Strategy and Policy Branch); the
Office of the Deputy Secretary of Defense for Strategy and Force
Develop­ment; and the Army Study Program Management Office.

The chief challenge is that they (Russia and China) “are bent on
revising the contemporary status quo” through the use of “gray zone”
techniques, involving “means and methods falling far short of
unambiguous or open provocation and conflict”.
Such “murkier, less obvious forms of state-based aggression”, despite
falling short of actual violence, are condemned — but then, losing any
sense of moral high-ground, the Pentagon study advocates that the U.S.
itself should “go gray or go home” to ensure U.S. influence.


[ NOTE: HERE COMES THE SCARY PART ]

"Losing the propaganda war
Amidst the challenge posed by these competing powers, the Pentagon
study emphasizes the threat from non-state forces undermining the
“U.S.-led order” in different ways, primarily through information.
The “hyper-connectivity and weaponization of information,
disinformation, and dis­affection”, the study team observes, is
leading to the uncontrolled spread of information. The upshot is that
the Pentagon faces the “inevitable elimination of secrecy and
operational security”.


The U.S. homeland is flagged-up as being especially vulnerable to the
breakdown of “traditional authority structures”:
“The United States and its population are increasingly exposed to
substantial harm and an erosion of security from individuals and small
groups of motivated actors, leveraging the conflu­ence of
hyperconnectivity, fear, and increased vulner­ability to sow disorder
and uncertainty. This intensely disorienting and dislocating form of
resistance to author­ity arrives via physical, virtual, and
psychological vio­lence and can create effects that appear
substantially out of proportion to the origin and physical size or
scale of the proximate hazard or threat.”
There is little reflection, however, on the role of the US government
itself in fomenting such endemic distrust, through its own policies.

Bad facts
Among the most dangerous drivers of this risk of civil unrest and mass
destabilization, the document asserts, are different categories of
fact. Apart from the obvious “fact-free”, defined as information that
undermines “objective truth”, the other categories include actual
truths that, however, are damaging to America’s global reputation.
“Fact-inconvenient” information consists of the exposure of “details
that, by implication, un­dermine legitimate authority and erode the
relationships between governments and the governed” — facts, for
instance, that reveal how government policy is corrupt, incompetent or
undemocratic.
“Fact-perilous” information refers basically to national security
leaks from whistleblowers such as Edward Snowden or Chelsea Manning,
“exposing highly clas­sified, sensitive, or proprietary information
that can be used to accelerate a real loss of tactical, operational,
or strategic advantage.”
“Fact-toxic” information pertains to actual truths which, the document
complains, are “exposed in the absence of context”, and therefore
poison “important political discourse.” Such information is seen as
being most potent in triggering outbreaks of civil unrest, because it:
“… fatally weakens foundational security at an international,
regional, national, or personal level. Indeed, fact-toxic exposures
are those likeliest to trigger viral or contagious insecurity across
or within borders and between or among peoples.”
In short, the U.S. Army War College study team believe that the spread
of ‘facts’ challenging the legitimacy of American empire is a major
driver of its decline: not the actual behavior of the empire which
such facts point to.

[AND THE PENTAGON SOLUTION? PROPAGANDA, MORE OF IT!]

Mass surveillance and psychological warfare
The Pentagon study therefore comes up with two solutions to the
information threat.
The first is to make better use of U.S. mass surveillance
capabilities, which are described as “the largest and most
sophisticated and inte­grated intelligence complex in world.” The U.S.
can “generate insight faster and more reliably than its competitors
can, if it chooses to do so”. Combined with its “military forward
presence and power projection”, the U.S. is in “an enviable position
of strength.”
Supposedly, though, the problem is that the U.S. does not make full
use of this potential strength:
“That strength, however, is only as durable as the United States’
willingness to see and employ it to its advantage. To the extent that
the United States and its defense enterprise are seen to lead, others
will follow…”
The document also criticizes U.S. strategies for focusing too much on
trying to defend against foreign efforts to penetrate or disrupt U.S.
intelligence, at the expense of “the purposeful exploitation of the
same architecture for the strategic manipulation of perceptions and
its attendant influence on political and security outcomes.”
Pentagon officials need to simply accept, therefore, that:
“… the U.S. homeland, individual American citizens, and U.S. public
opinion and perceptions will increasingly become battlefields.”

[And just to be sure WHO is regarded as "The Enemy" by the Pentagon ...]

“… some are fighting globalization and globalization is also actively
fighting back. Combined, all of these forces are rending at the fabric
of security and stable governance that all states aspire to and rely
on for survival.”


PS: Can someone repost this to the NFCB list and tell me how it went there?



-- 
-- 
Sincerely, Christopher Maxwell
Richmond, Va.
Keep the long side to the sun (south) !!
And higher than the ground around.
Founder: http://www.WRIR.org <http://www.wrir.org/>
Founder: FOUR new community radio stations across Swing Voter
Districts of Virginia
Starting with : http://www.TheWorkFM.org  (WRWK-LP )