Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by vijayr02 1920 days ago
is this not just propaganda by another name?

Seems to me that everyone wants to cast their war as a just war [0]. If that means deniable approaches or false flag operations [1] then so be it. In particular I found this excerpt from [1] ironic in the context of your comment:

> Russo-Swedish War

In 1788, the head tailor at the Royal Swedish Opera received an order to sew a number of Russian military uniforms. These were then used by the Swedes to stage an attack on Puumala, a Swedish outpost on the Russo-Swedish border, on 27 June 1788. This caused an outrage in Stockholm and impressed the Riksdag of the Estates, the Swedish national assembly, who until then had refused to agree to an offensive war against Russia. The Puumala incident allowed King Gustav III of Sweden, who lacked the constitutional authority to initiate unprovoked hostilities without the Estates' consent, to launch the Russo-Swedish War (1788–1790).

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just_war_theory [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_flag

1 comments

We can define propaganda in contrast to psychological warfare. Whereas psychological warfare is the dissemination of cultural products by a military to the population of a foreign adversary in pursuit of a strategic objective, propaganda is the dissemination of cultural products by a government to their own people in the pursuit of strategic objectives. This definition serves the discussion of propaganda in the broader context of warfare well.
Where in your classification would you place outlets like RT or Voice of America then?
That would be considered propaganda. I was too strict by claiming propaganda can only be done to a government's own citizens.

In contrast a good example of psychological warfare would be when Russia organized a protest and an attendant counter-protest in Texas that were made to appear "organic."[0] So the difference between the two is that one proudly has an official "Russia" label on it and the other is clandestine.

[0] https://www.texastribune.org/2017/11/01/russian-facebook-pag...