The Inevitable American Tragedy
In 1984, Yuri Bezmenov, a former KGB propaganda expert, warned the West that the Kremlin’s political technologists, propagandists, and ideologues aggressively employ “active measures” against the United States. Whilst the West ignored Bezmenov, Alexander Dugin, a right wing intellectual and political strategist with close connections to the Kremlin, went a step further and in 1997 published The Foundations of Geopolitics: The Geopolitical Future of Russia—an infamous blueprint for thwarting the self-proposed conspiracy of “Atlanticism” led by the United States and NATO. According to Dugin, the key to introducing geopolitical disorder into American society is to provoke all forms of destabilization and separatism inside America’s borders through encouraging social and racial conflicts. Today, in light of the reignited fire of racial antagonism, the United States is, yet again, extremely vulnerable to Russia’s influence and manipulation campaigns, which aim to destabilize internal socio-political processes and support all dissident movements in the country.
As part of this strategy, in 2015, the Kremlin flooded American society, and specifically audiences in race-centric hotspots such as Ferguson and Baltimore, with computational propaganda, which aimed to encourage ideologically opposed groups to act violently against one another. Moscow’s tactics, inspired in philosophical terms by “whataboutism,” have always focused on domestic strife in the United States, employing phony sanctimony in the name of division. In the words of Dr. Mark R. Jacobson, Professor at the Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University, “Russia will overtly and covertly support organizations seeking secession or seeking to politically divide the United States and they will covertly press protest movements to move towards the extreme and ultimately violence.”
The structured duality of the Kremlin’s propaganda playbook is clear and effective. For example, the Russian-based pro-Trump Facebook page "Being Patriotic,” which managed to garner 6.3 million “likes” before being closed, actively propagated violence against Black Lives Matter activists. Conversely, another Russia-linked group, “Blacktivist,” engaged in anti-establishment sentiment, communicated anti-police messages, and even stated, "Black people have to do something. An eye for an eye. The law enforcement officers keep harassing and killing us without consequences." Prior to being terminated, the page’s total reach amounted to 6.18 million shares. As a result, in April 2017, Facebook published a white paper outlining the Kremlin’s organized attempts to misuse its social platform. According to its data, between June 2015 and May 2017, approximately $100,000 in ad spending—associated with roughly 3,000 ads and 470 inauthentic accounts—was affiliated with Russian operators. “False Amplifiers” were injected into social media platforms to sow discontent and manipulate political discussion surrounding sensitive social and racial topics.
In a shocking twist, in 2018, the Dossier Center, an investigative institution financed by the exiled Russian opposition figure Mikhail Khodorkovsky, discovered strategic documents that contained ambitious Russian schemes to foster civil unrest inside the U.S. The plans included a blueprint, entitled “Development Strategy of a Pan-African State on U.S. Territory,” which proposed the idea of recruiting African-Americans living in the poorest U.S cities who have “prior experience in organized crime,” as well as members of “radical black movements for participation in civil disobedience campaigns in the largest American cities.” A year later, in an interview with VOA Russian Service, Mikhail Khodorkovsky confidently stated, “The infrastructure for this project already exists, and, like we all know, the American society is not immune to such a project.”
The Kremlin’s agitation specialists understand the psychological effectiveness of race-centric ideological vehicles in the U.S and how they can be machinated to advance Russia’s geopolitical agenda. Through the brand of the Kremlin-linked Internet Research Agency (IRA), Russia utilizes its cyber “troll factories” and financial resources to strategically amplify existing racial tensions. Just between 2015 and 2017, over 30 million users shared the IRA’s Facebook and Instagram politicized posts with their “friends and family, liking, reacting to, and commenting on them along the way.” Unfortunately, in their current state, the algorithmic technologies of social media platforms reward virality and provocation over reason and truth, and thus are perfect conduits for the Kremlin’s overt and covert digital warfare.
Today, disenfranchised segments of the African-American population constitute a powerful and vulnerable minority. In the past three months, senior Russian politicians and officials projected statements discrediting America’s institutions and governing practices. According to the Russian Foreign Ministry, “The United States has certainly accumulated systemic human rights problems: race, ethnic and religious discrimination, police brutality, bias of justice, crowded prisons and uncontrolled use of firearms and self-defense weapons by individuals, to name a few.” In response, the United States should focus on exposing and investigating any financial and political links between Russian intelligence or its proxies and extremist groups within the country. Similarly, in the information and media ecosystem, the U.S. should be more assertive and confrontational; working with social media companies and independent fact-checkers to actively burst “echo-chambers” and flag misleading information, half-truths, and race-baiting rhetoric. It’s become clear in the past decade, that internal socio-racial divisions are a matter of national security as their digital exploitation could do the most damage to America’s social fabric.