THREE FAKES: ANTIFA STABBING, CRUCIFIED CHILD AND GANG RAPE
Illustrated Guide to Fakes and Propaganda Strategies
In the modern mind war, Russian and American alt-right propagandists often use techniques coined by Hitler and developed by Goebbels. Third Reich used a psychological pattern behind human behavior: rational and irrational (emotional) responses differ. Facts do not work against beliefs.
Below are the break-down of the two methods, “rotten herring” and “Big Lie,” and three examples from recent events in Ukraine, Germany and USA.
- A false accusation is produced, with the use of visceral images (visual/verbal.)
- It is circulated in social media. Russian bots and trolls push hashtags/topic.
- Mainstream media reports the story. It is echoed by many outlets.
- A public discussion ensues. Experts, prominent public figures, laymen join in with opinions, repeating the story until it becomes a common knowledge.
- After a certain number of repetition, the negative emotional response is formed.
- The individuals or groups, targeted by the propagandist, are compromised.
- Even if/when the fake is debunked, the negative associations stay. It is an irrational reaction.
WHAT IS “ROTTEN HERRING”?
A propagandist makes a compromising accusation (child or women abuse, murder, stabbing, etc.) “Proving the charge is not the purpose of rotten herring. The purpose is to invite a broad, public discussion of its …unfairness and injustice. The nature of the human psyche is such that as soon as the charge becomes a subject of public discussion, “supporters” and “opponents”, “specialists” and “experts”, rabid “prosecutors” and ardent “defenders” of the accused inevitably enter the scene. But regardless of the views of the discussion participants use the name of the accused in conjunction with dirty and scandalous accusations, over and over, thus rubbing more “rotten herring” in his “clothes,” until the “smell” follows him everywhere. And the question whether he “killed, stole, seduced or did not” becomes associated with his name,” writes Vladimir Yakovlev.
EXAMPLE 1: STABBING IN BERKELEY, USA
Goal: to manipulate Jewish and pro-Israeli population of the US; normalize alt-right and justify the future violence against the opposition.
CLAIM
On September 15, 2017, 2:06 AM, an alt-right personality with a history of the criminal offense and white supremacist and Neo-Nazi affiliation tweeted: “A Ben Shapiro supporter was stabbed in the neck by Antifa terrorists last night in Berekley [sic] CA. Fucking demon scum leftist. Please pray 4her.”
REPETITION
By noon, the post had been retweeted more than 2,000 times and garnered more than 2,000 reactions on Facebook.
Milo Yiannopoulos’ website followed up with an article “Psychotic Antifa Allegedly stabs Woman for Holding a Sign.”
Proud Boys Magazine followed with an article claiming that “Reports have stated that as the Jewish woman was being loaded into a ambulance suffering from her wound “that’s what you get for being a Nazi” was shouted by representatives of the compassionate left.”
MYTH-MAKING VS. FACTS
- Berkeley Police tweeted that “online accounts surrounding a stabbing” is false.
- Riya Bhattacharjee, an NBC Bay Area reporter, replied to the second tweet, writing: “This is true, I witnessed the whole thing.”
- As we have reported from the site, Antifa members did not appear at this peaceful Speak Out by Berkeley students.
- On September 16, 10:46 AM, Celeste Paradise, a victim in question, posted on FB that the stabbing story was “misreported.”
- Paradise is a member of Yes to the Pope: Catholics for Restoring Christian Unity FB group; there is no mention of Judaism/being Jewish on her social media.
- Recounting the events of the night in a video interview, Paradise said she was standing outside Walgreens, holding her sign, when someone came up and seized it. She said she tried to hold onto it, but the sign was grabbed away by two men, according to Berkeleyside. In the video below, another “eyewitness” claims that she was pushed by “another girl.”
Notably, this is not the first incident when Paradise complains about being a victim of the attack.
On November 12, 2016, Paradise, a long-term and ardent proponent of gun ownership, posted on FB about being “roughed-up” by teenagers during high school students walk out on November 10, 2016. Her frequent companion, Jose Ornelas, posted on FB that she was “battered” and posted a photo of her bruised arm.
Paradise and Ornelas have been involved in politics since at least 2008 and travel around the country often taking photos with Republicans like Rand and Ron Paul or dressed as presidential candidates, according to their public posts on social media.
On August 17, 2017, Ornelas observed about Charlottesville: “there are no Civil War monuments around here…However, there are a score of Colleges and Universities here…For the record The Nazi’s[sic] had a permitted rally to support their monument… the left sought to physically threaten them.” In the same post, he complained about being “threatened by 7th graders” in Oakland and Paradise “being assaulted at Todos Santos.”
MORE REPETITION
Ornelas was also on site in Berkeley and is seen shouting obscenities in a Youtube video called “Antifa STABS Jewish Female Shapiro Supporter at Berkeley.”
The video is shared by TNT The Narrative Time, co-founded by Michael Moates, White House Correspondent. It was viewed 7,870 times in five days.
Starting September 14, Russian bots pushed #BenAtBerkeley hashtag on Twitter, with an increase of 11,300% in eight hours and added Shapiro and Ben Shapiro as trending topics. Below are screenshots from Twitter and Hamilton68, a site that monitors activity from 600 Twitter accounts linked to Russian influence operations.
In addition, on September 15, a post in Russian about Ben Shapiro, “the pride of Jewish people,” “our fearless little David” and “our national treasure,” appeared and was shared on multiple Russian-American social media sources and groups. Written in a typical style of a Kremlin pamphlet, it played Shapiro’s faith, thus manipulating the religious and national sentiment of the targeted population, as well as presenting Antifa and the left as a danger to Jews.
“…very elegantly and appropriately, he tagged the crowd outside as “bunch of idiots,” “stupid assholes,” and more…he said at the end of the lecture that if you do not pepper your speech with such phrases, the students will not understand you.
He was not afraid to touch the three sacred taboos, the three sacred cows of American society: Negroes, women and gays, ridiculing their roles of eternal victims, always adopted by the worst representatives of these three groups. He said that if Negroes bother to finish high school, avoid knocking up their women outside of marriage, and work — they would not have to envy anyone. This sounded admirably courageous, because no one ever dares to say it out loud, despite the common understanding. He also said that if there is one group of people discriminated against in America…it was white heterosexual male Christians...hearing this from the lips of a conservative young Jew was more than gratifying.
Jews, you — or, rather, we all — had a rare case to feel proud for our people due to Benya Shapiro. Rare, because way too often American Jews took and take the “wrong side” in the struggle between good and evil. They give their influence and endless fund to Obama, Hilary, DNC, BLM, and other evil spirits…
What personal courage one must have to do what Ben Shapiro did on the evening of September 14. After all, his predecessor, also a conservative columnist, with the long Greek name Milo Yiannopoulos, whom the Antifa Huns, armed with chains and baseball bats, almost lynched in February this year, tried to get to the lecture hall, where, ironically, he intended to give a lecture on freedom of speech in the American campuses. The police hardly saved the young gorgeous man from a violent death...
I listened to Ben Shapiro and thought about his Jewish mother...”
The joint effort of American alt-right, the White House journalists, and Russian trolls and bots resulted in normalizing the alt-right narrative, spreading disinformation about the violence of the left amongst the general public and splitting and weakening the resistance.
WHAT IS “BIG LIE”?
“The idea is feeding the audience a lie so terrible, so overwhelming — and with such a maximum degree of certainty — that it is almost impossible to believe that one can lie about such a thing. The trick here is that a properly arranged and well-devised big lie causes a deep emotional trauma in the listener or viewer. Later the trauma determines his or her beliefs that withstand all arguments of logic and reason.
False descriptions of violent abuse of children or women work particularly well for these purposes,” writes Vladimir Yakovlev in the article on the principles of combat-propaganda.
“The grossly impudent lie always leaves traces behind it, even after it has been nailed down,” wrote Hitler in Mein Kampf. “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it,” echoed Goebbels.
EXAMPLE 1: CRUCIFIED BOY, UKRAINE
Goal: to incite hatred to Ukrainians and justify the Russian invasion of Ukraine to the Russian population and the world
CLAIM
On July 12, 2014, in the midst of the Russian intervention in Ukraine, Russian state-run TV Channel One aired an eyewitness account: a mother of four told a story about a three-year-old Russian child nailed to a billboard and his mother tied to a tank and tortured to death by Ukrainian military in a public execution in Slovyansk.
REPETITION
The story was shared in social media and became a sensation.
MYTH-MAKING VS.FACTS
On July 9, 2014, three days before Channel One aired the story, Alexander Dugin, an ultraconservative political scientist with ties to the Kremlin and American Neo-Nazi, posted on his Facebook account with 16,000 followers a story about a public execution in Slovyansk: a six-year-old boy nailed to a billboard and his father shot. The post started with a question “These creatures not to be ‘killed, killed, killed’?” (a reference to his earlier call to “kill Ukrainians.”)
The plot echoed The Game of Thrones episode, 4th season, in which one hundred sixty three slave children are crucified along the road and was used for Channel One story as a script.
Multiple investigations by Ukrainian, Russian and Western journalists established that the story was a fake:
- According to The Moscow Times, Alan Cullison, Moscow Correspondent for the Wall Street Journal, on assignment in Slovyansk at the time, wrote on FB, “I spoke with dozens of people, but strangely, none of them mentioned anything about the crucifixion of a 3-year-old boy,”
- The woman claimed that the episode happened at the Lenin Square(there is no such square in Slovyansk; there is an October Revolution square with a monument to Lenin.)
- According to the multiple sources, social media data and photo archives, Galina Pyshnayk, aka Astapenko, is a wife of Konstantin Pyshniak, a Russian separatist in Ukraine.
At a press conference in December 2014, Putin did not respond to the question about the story.
In December 2014, Channel One stated that its reporters couldn’t verify the story due to their journalists banned by Ukrainian authorities from entering Slavyansk. A journalist who produced the story kept her job.
EXAMPLE 2: GANG RAPE, GERMANY
Goal: to manipulate Russian-speaking immigrants in the West to incite hatred, bigotry amongst local population and undermine the local government.
CLAIM
On 11 January 2016, a13-year-old Russian-German girl named Lisa went missing in Berlin and reappeared after thirty hours, her face injured. She claimed that she had been kidnapped and raped by three men of Middle Eastern or North African origin.
MYTH-MAKING VS. FACTS
Three days later, Lisa “admitted that the story of the rape was not true.”
REPETITION
The Russian propaganda machine picked up the story from the source called Genosse, “The site of Soviet Germans.” Channel One interviewed the girl’s aunt and a crowd of Russian immigrants. Other Russian media sources published the story with titles like “A Crowd of Immigrants Raped a 13-Year-old Russian Girl in Berlin.” The story was widely circulated online.
According to The Daily Beast, Channel One broadcast with German subtitles has been viewed by more than 1.3 million people on FB. More than 28,000 of them have left nearly 3,500 vicious xenophobic comments.
At a news conference in Moscow, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov accused German officials of a politically-motivated cover-up.
Knowing these methods and basic psychology behind them is crucial at the time of cyberwar.
Read more about RUSSIAN CYBERWAR AND PROPAGANDA here.
*All facts and photos are in public domain and available through Google. Links to the original sources are included.
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