Iron grip of "soft power"
New technologies of social engineering in action9 July 2012 at the Meeting of Ambassadors and Permanent Representatives of Russia, Russian President Vladimir Putin, for the first time, drew the attention of national diplomacy to the need to use “soft power” in their work. This implies "the promotion of their interests and attitudes by convincing and attracting sympathy for their country, based on its achievements not only in the material, but also in the spiritual culture and intellectual sphere." The President acknowledged that “the image of Russia abroad is not formed by us, so it is often distorted and does not reflect the real situation in our country, nor its contribution to world civilization, science, culture, and our country's position in international affairs is now highlighted as it is one-sided. Those who shoot and constantly deliver rocket attacks here and there, they are great, and those who warn about the need for restrained dialogue are guilty of something. And we are to blame for the fact that we poorly explain our position. That is where we are to blame. ”
The time has come to correct the mistakes made, to redeem the old guilt: “soft power” is becoming one of the pillars of Russian foreign policy.
Concept and conceptualists soft power
The role and importance of “soft power” (MC), which was used in the preparation of the collapse of the Soviet system and up to the implementation of the project “twitter revolutions” in the Arab world, is constantly increasing. Today, almost no significant event in world politics takes place without the use of the IS, many times reinforced by the latest information and cognitive technologies. Moreover, in modern conditions it is “soft power” that often provides information artillery preparation, prepares a springboard for direct military intervention.
Various ways of influencing the mind, methods of non-violent processing of power and other groups have long been known. N. Machiavelli and the French Encyclopedists, G. Toro and M. Gandhi, T. Liri and R. Wilson wrote about this. However, the appearance of a harmonious is not so much a scientific, as a purely practical concept of soft power associated with the name of Joseph Samuel Nye, professor of the Public Administrative School. J. Kennedy at Harvard University, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Diplomatic Academy. The main achievement of Naya was not only a concentrated and capacious description of the nature and meaning of “soft power”, which played a certain role in the Cold War, but also the definition of its capabilities, which in the 21st century, the century of information technologies and cognitive wars, become truly unlimited.
The term “soft power” itself was proposed by Hiring in the 1990 year, and only after 14 years, in the 2004 year; perhaps his most famous book was published - Soft Power: Means of Success in World Politics. Currently, Nye is actively continuing his research and is shaping the agenda of “smart power” for the current administration of the White House, understanding it as “the ability to combine hard and soft resources of power into successful strategies in various contexts.”
Successes in promoting the concept of “soft power” are connected, of course, not with its scientific significance, but with its wide use in big politics: the developments of J. Nye were taken into account by the US government when making major political decisions. In 1977 – 1979, he is Assistant US Assistant Secretary of State for Security, Science and Technology, Chairman of the National Security Council Group on Nuclear Nonproliferation weapons. In the Clinton administration, Nay worked as an assistant to the head of the Pentagon for international security, headed the National Intelligence Council of the United States, and also represented the United States on the UN Disarmament Committee. During the presidential campaign, J. Kerry claimed the position of national security adviser.
In addition, Nay was a senior member of the Aspen Institute (USA), the Director of the Aspen Strategic Group and a member of the Executive Committee of the Tripartite Commission, a member of several meetings of the Council on Foreign Relations. The Aspen Institute was founded in 1950 by billionaire Walter Papke, one of the initiators of the 68 directive of the United States National Security Council, which established the Cold War doctrine. Today, the institute is headed by Walter Isaacson, former chairman and chief executive officer of CNN and Time magazine, and the Board of Directors includes such significant figures as Saudi Arabian Prince Bandar bin Sultan, former US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and Condoleezza Rice, Disney corporation president Michael Eisner , UN Deputy Secretary General Olara Otunu, former head of the EU and NATO Council, Javier Solana, and others. In other words, the Aspen Group is a closed club of high-ranking politicians who develop strategies for the world order. Returning to Nay, we note that he managed to be a director at the East-West Institute for Security Studies and at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, and under Obama he was directly involved in two new research projects - at the Center for New American Security and at the National Security Reform Project USA.
Similar transitions from science to politics, from politics to intelligence, from intelligence to science, etc. - a widespread practice in the West. Suffice it to recall the ST. Brzezinski, F. Gordon, G. Kissinger, M. McFaul, C. Rice. This practice is designed to promote and implement the interests of certain elite groups. As for the concept of soft power, in particular, this fact testifies to its practical significance for the US government. The presentation of the book by J. Nye Soft power, translated into Russian ("Flexible Power. How to achieve success in world politics"), was held in 2006 under the auspices of the US Embassy at the Carnegie Moscow Center.
Now about the concept of "soft power" (MC). The main meaning of soft power is to form an attractive power, i.e. in the ability to influence the behavior of people, indirectly forcing them to do something that otherwise they would never have done. Such power becomes, based not only on persuasion, persuasion or the ability to motivate people to do something with the help of arguments, but also on “assets” that produce its attractiveness. To achieve this, according to Nai, perhaps using the “power of information and images,” the power of meanings. In other words, the core of “soft power” is immateriality, informational content and mobility.
Whose "soft power", that and area
In turn, the creation of “attractiveness” is impossible without linguistic design, without interpreting reality, without focusing on mutually opposing value judgments (such as God the devil, good-evil, freedom-slavery, democracy-dictatorship, etc.). Moreover, it is the conductors of “soft power” who determine what is “good” or “fair”, which country becomes an outcast or model of democratic transformation, thereby pushing the rest of the political process to agree with this interpretation in exchange for support from the subject of soft power.
"Ride the laws stories(IV Stalin), as practice convincingly proved, only by force is impossible. Therefore, in modern conditions, “soft power” is so important, manifesting itself as a special type of influence, a special kind of power directly connected with the information revolution, with the volume of information itself and its growth exponentially, as well as with the speed and breadth of dissemination of this information thanks to the latest communicative technologies. The information revolution allows transcoding consciousness, starting with a change in historical memory and ending with the world of symbolic meanings. And it is precisely the meaning-symbolic world that is most significant, since the social memory of society is largely oriented towards it, which allows it to withstand both destruction from the outside and self-destruction.
Man has always lived in three dimensions - in the real world, the information world and the symbolic world. However, it is in the modern world that new technologies and means of communication have such a powerful effect on consciousness that real actions and events only become significant when they are presented in the media, that is, they become a function of virtuality. Events, as it were, are not in real life, if it is not written in the newspaper or it is not reflected in the Web. This is one side of the matter. It is also important that modern technologies allow you to easily and quickly manipulate the consciousness of large masses of people, to form the images and symbols necessary for the manipulator.
It is on this that the “soft power” of the West relies, working with the consciousness of man, or rather, the masses through information, knowledge and culture. Mild-force impact on large masses of people can be carried out in a rather short period - as a rule, it does not exceed several months. In this case, the most effective soft power tools are the media, traditional and new social media.
In the long term, the MC is less dependent on rhetoric, but more related to practical activities. In this case, the effective tools of “soft power” are: the provision of higher education services, as well as the development of sciences, including public ones, whose main task is to produce meanings — theories and concepts that legitimize the position and views of the state pursuing the MC policy. The combination of these strategies allows us to influence the system of sociocultural filters or the “belief matrix” of a particular individual, a society in relation to which this type of influence is applied, forcing him to eventually change his behavior.
Specifically, this is manifested in the following. As J. Nye writes, “ideals and values“ exported ”by America to the minds of more than half a million foreign students who study at American universities every year and then return to their home countries, or to the consciousness of Asian entrepreneurs who return home after an internship or work in Silicon Valley, aimed at "getting" to the power elites ". In the long-term strategy of the MC, by means of education only, “allows us to form a certain worldview among foreign guests, reflecting the value orientations of the host state itself and allowing them to expect a favorable attitude to the host country from their side in the future.”
The formation of a "certain worldview" is as follows. First, the presence of participants in educational programs in the country implies familiarization with its political and economic model, familiarization with its culture and values. Upon returning home, students or trainees do not just use this experience. In the case of the preparation or adoption of certain decisions, they are guided by the obtained value reference points.
Secondly, the competitive selection of recipients of grants and scholarships involves the selection of the most promising representatives in certain areas of activity or scientific knowledge. After completing the training with graduates, close ties remain within the network communities, various research centers, so the MS state conductor reserves the opportunity to influence foreign elites or use their intellectual resources in their own interests. It is well known how such an approach is widely used by the United States, Britain, and China. This practice was widely used in the USSR.
Modern Russia has almost voluntarily resigned from the duties of preparing, cultivating the elites loyal to it. While, according to data for only 2011 a year, over 10,000 foreign students studied in the US, over 10,000 in the UK, over 10,000 in Britain, and about 10,000 in Australia. By the British Council, the Association of Universities of Great Britain and the company IDP (Australia) will study in higher educational institutions of Western countries about 700 million people (!). And these are only students, not to mention specific and specific training programs for civic activists, bloggers, etc.
The resource base of the MC, of course, is not limited to training programs. Soft power uses the whole range of cultural, informational, intelligence, network, psychological and other technologies. All this together allows us to agree with the opinion of the German publisher J. Joffe regarding the “soft power” of America, which “is even more significant than its economic or military power. American culture, be it low or high, penetrates everywhere with the intensity that was observed only in the times of the Roman Empire, but with a new characteristic feature. The influence of Rome or the Soviet Union in the field of culture seemed to stop at the level of their military borders, while American “soft power” rules an empire where the sun never sets. ”
You can’t argue with this, but still the main tool of soft power used in the manipulation of historical memory, and not requiring direct presence in the country - the initiator of pressure, are both traditional and new - network - media. It is the media that are translators of the new vision of the world, not only in a journalistic or popular science form, but also through works of art that appropriately interpret certain historical facts. At one time, Napoleon Bonaparte remarked: "I am afraid of more than three newspapers than a hundred thousand bayonets." Today, the influence of the media has increased by orders of magnitude.
Being present daily, and sometimes hourly, in the life of every person, the media actually control opinions and assessments, integrate individual human minds into the “mass mind” (another question is how reasonable it is). As a result, people produce the same thoughts, generate the same images that correspond to the goals and objectives of the people controlling the global communication media. The Russian psychologist Corresponding Member of the Russian Academy of Sciences, A.V. Brushlinsky: “When this actually happens, one can observe an exciting, unforgettable spectacle, as a multitude of anonymous individuals who have never seen each other, not in contact with each other, are covered by the same emotion, react as one to music or a slogan merged spontaneously in a single collective being. "
Without exaggeration in the twenty-first century, modern means of mass communications, reducing the once insuperable distances between the continents, became the most important tool of “soft power” that gave it dynamism and mobility. Now it is not only possible to form the worldview of a specific country's society, the organization and conduct of a coup d'etat does not require the direct presence of interested parties: regimes can be overthrown remotely, by transmitting information through various networks.
One cannot but agree with the opinion of domestic researchers G.Yu. Filimonova and S.A. Tsaturyan is that the modern world, “connected by the Internet, television, radio and newspapers, more and more resembles a web that unites humanity into a single information space, thereby giving any state the status of an outside observer, able to restore the status quo only by violence. Forming through these channels the liberal-democratic cultural environment, social networks and media (primarily American) open the way to changing undesirable regimes on a scale never seen before ... The increased role of information in the life of a modern person, the historical flywheel accelerates the creation of a global network society divorced from traditions and national cultures. "
In other words, “soft power” in the 21st century is becoming one of the main ways to fight for influence, for territories and resources. The world seems to be returning to the late Middle Ages. If after the Augsburg Peace of 1555 in Europe, the principle of cuius region, eius religio was established (literally: “whose area, faith and faith”), then modernity establishes a different principle - “whose“ soft power ”, that and the region”.
Network technologies as a resource of MS
The development and importance of soft power technologies is largely due to scientific and technological progress, thanks to which modern man is immersed in cyberspace. Within its borders, the reasonable activity of the individual becomes the determining factor of development. Digitalization (digitization of information) of all aspects of life and the rapid development of network electronic technologies contribute to the creation of a new information paradigm. At the same time, the following contradiction turns out to be significant: information technologies are developing much faster than people adapt to them, which is due to their physiological and psychological characteristics. As a result, awareness of the true role of new technologies in the formation of information, and therefore social and political spaces, comes to people with a delay, and homo digitalis is defenseless before the owners of information technologies.
Strategically minded politicians should understand the true nature and direction of this or that technological innovation. That is why it is necessary to know that network technologies, being one of the most important resources of “soft power,” have become the most significant tool in the twenty-first century of the struggle for power and influence. Assessing the role and importance of social networks in shaping the mood of the masses, in their exaltation and organization suggests that, firstly, social networks are a cognitive technology; secondly, an organizational weapon, and thirdly, a business product. One of the first in Russia to notice I.Yu. Sundiyev. Leaving business issues aside, let's pay more attention to the first two characteristics.
Under cognitive or cognitive it is customary to understand information technology, describing the basic human thought processes. They are one of the most "intellectual" sections of the theory of artificial intelligence. In contrast to the fundamental principle of Western rationalism formulated by Descartes in the Discourse on Method (1637 Year), “I think, therefore I exist” (cogito ergo sum) - today, not only thinking processes but also any forms of interaction apply to the concept of cognitive man and environment based on the construction of the image of the situation. In the modern world, the well-known statement “Who owns information, rules the world” has given way to the principle of cognitive science: “Who knows how to systematize information and get knowledge from it, he rules the world”.
The origins of cognitive knowledge, according to which the brain is considered as a device for information processing, were laid back in the second half of the nineteenth century in the works of William James and G.L.F. Helmholtz background. However, it was only in 1960-s at the faculty of applied psychology of the University of Cambridge, headed by F. Bartlett, that it was possible to organize a wide range of works in the field of cognitive modeling. Although still in 1943, a student and follower of Bartlett K. Craig in his book The Nature of Explanation ("Nature of Explanation") made a strong case for the scientific study of such "mental" processes as persuasion and goal setting. Even then, Craig outlined the three phases of knowledge-based agent activities. First, the current stimulus must be transformed into an internal representation. Secondly, manipulations with the help of cognitive processes for the development of new internal representations must be performed with this representation. Thirdly, they must, in turn, be transformed into actions again.
Modern cognitive technologies as improved Crag installations are ways of transforming the properties and qualities of a person, his behavior by either modifying the psycho-physiological parameters of the organism, or including the individual in hybrid (human-machine) systems. A separate direction is represented by cognitive technologies that change social behavior. It must be said that information and cognitive technologies initially developed, mutually complementing each other, creating a reserve for a new technological order in which people become the object and subject of transformation. The rapid development of biotechnology in the late twentieth century, the emergence of nanotechnology led to the birth of NBIC convergence (by the first letters: N - nano, B - bio, I - info, C - cogno). As noted by I.Yu. Sundiyev, to date, NBIC convergence has already affected all areas of human activity, directly or indirectly defining the character, methods and dynamics of social interactions. Thanks to cloud computing, robotics, 3G and 4G wireless communications, Skype, Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, Twitter, iPad and cheap smartphones with Internet access, society has become not just connected, but hyper-connected and interdependent, transparent in the full sense of the word. NBIC convergence played a special role in the emergence of new forms and methods of committing crimes, and also changed the views on military strategy. The “strategy of indirect actions” and “strategy of non-leader resistance,” based on the network structures created among the population of a potential adversary, became dominant. Everything was based on this, starting with the Belgrade ≫ 2000 revolution, the political upheavals of the 21st century.
A significant achievement of cognitive technologies is the development of smart forms of pre-socialization - a voluntary, unconsciously unrecognizable by the subject method of rapidly changing social roles, statuses and positions. Smart forms are packed, wrapped in a countercultural shell of a harmless game of fun and act as ways of new consolidation of people. The best known among smartform flashmobs. The literal translation of the fl ashmob expression into Russian is “an instant crowd”, although it is more correctly understood as a “smart crowd”, i.e. a crowd that has a goal and clearly follows a prearranged scenario. Actually, this is not the crowd.
In 2002, Smart Mobs, an expert on cultural, social and political implications in the modern media, G. Reingold not only described flashmob in detail, emphasizing the new way of organizing social connections and structures, but in fact anticipated and described the wave new social revolutions. He believed that flash actions (smartmobs) are so mobile due to the fact that their participants use modern means of communication for self-organization. It is believed that the idea to organize a flash mob using the Internet as an organizational resource came to the creator of the first site for formatting such actions FlockSmart.com R. Zazueta after becoming acquainted with the works of Reingold. Today, flash mobs are used quite widely and form a very special reality.
The fact is that flash mobs are the mechanism for the formation of specific behavior at a given moment in a given space. The controllability of the “crowd” is achieved through the following basic principles of the organization. First, the action is prepared in advance through the official websites, where mobs are developing, offering and discussing scenarios for actions.
Secondly, the action starts at the same time by all participants, but is designed to look like spontaneous — participants must pretend that they do not know each other. To do this, the time is agreed or a special person (beacon) is appointed, who gives everyone a signal to start the action. Thirdly, the participants of the action do everything with the most serious look: the flash mob should cause bewilderment, but not laughter. Fourth, stocks must be regular, absurd in nature and not succumb to logical explanation.
At the same time, the flash mob is a completely voluntary exercise. But the most important thing is that all participants of the flash mob do not know and should not know the true reason for organizing this or that action. The most important sense of a smartmob as a “new social revolution” is that such actions form models of rash, imposed by the “beacon” behavior of large masses of people. At the time of the flash mobs, the performance of reality takes place, the individual loses his own personality, turning into an easily controlled cog in a social machine.
The role of social networks is not limited to the formation of smart tolpas. They had a significant impact on the public consciousness in the period of political crises, in some cases ending in a change of political regimes. So, wherever the events of the Arab Spring took place, protesters used new Internet applications and mobile phones to attract allies, transferring resources from cyberspace to urban space and back. Visitors to social networks had the impression that millions were involved in the protest actions. However, in reality, the number of real protesters and protesters on the Web differ many times. This is achieved with the help of special programs.
In particular, one year before the Arab Spring, in 2010, the US government entered into an agreement with HB Gary Federal to develop a computer program that can create numerous fictitious social media accounts to manipulate and influence public opinion on controversial issues. point of view. It can also be used to observe public opinion in order to find dangerous points of view.
Earlier, the US Air Force ordered the development of Persona Management Software, which can be used to create and manage fake accounts on social networking sites to distort the truth and create the impression that there is a generally accepted opinion on controversial issues. In June 2010, the program was launched.
In fact, today, new social engineering technologies are being actively introduced, creating previously unknown decision-making models that change the cognitive basis of modern man. And the Internet, being a planetary information highway, transforms such projects as WikiLeaks, Facebook and Twitter into an instrument of struggle for influence and specifically change of political regimes in target countries. With the help of Internet technologies, the “concrete aggression of molecular aggression into the core of the culture” is being described by A. Gramsci, the basis of national consensus is being destroyed, the situation inside the country and its environment is heating up to the limit. And all this fits into the concept of “soft power”.
Of course, social networks themselves do not produce a “virus of revolution”, but are an excellent channel for its spread. Take, for example, Twitter. This is, in fact, not a social network, rather a social media service. The reason Twitter can be viewed as a tool for warming up public opinion is hidden in its interface. Thanks to the design of this communicative channel, the user finds himself in a stream of messages of the same type, including “looped back”, repeated with the help of the so-called “retweet” in non-stop mode. In addition, Twitter forms the degrading language of "verbal gestures."
Facebook works on other principles with about one billion users. This network has become the most significant network tool of “soft power” in general and the political upheavals of 2011 – 2012. As a result, users have a sense of the significance of the events and its instant involvement in this process. Moreover, it seems that the development of the situation depends on the position, the reaction of a particular subject. Conventionally, if I go to the square, or at least virtually join the protest, the hated dictator will be defeated.
Evaluating the importance of Facebook in the “soft power” of the West, it is important to remember that the users of this resource are the most active part of the population of any country, besides being actively included in the context of information of a certain direction (as a rule, this is a critical assessment of the existing regime). However, not all countries Facebook mastered the masses. In Russia, Facebook, which by the end of 2012 of the year, reached the 7,5 bar of a million participants, representing 5,36% of the population, is not the most popular networking platform. Leading positions in the Russian Federation and a number of countries in the post-Soviet space are occupied by the VKontakte networks (more than 190 million) and Odnoklassniki (more than 148 million). Judging by the meter on the site, then active users (those who log into the network daily) of the VKontakte service have 41 million.
Analysis of the work of social networks allows you to build their peculiar hierarchy, both in degree of impact and in technological applicability. At the top of the network pyramid can be placed an intelligent portal for the most advanced and creative users - LiveJournal (LiveJournal). This is a place of "high" communication, self-assertion, or the so-called trolling - the placement of materials with the aim of causing conflict, provoking any assessments and even actions. In terms of their impact on public opinion, LJ is technologically applicable in much the same way as classical media. Another thing is Facebook, which occupies a central or central place in the network hierarchy, reaching millions of people. In Russia, this niche is occupied by VKontakte. Then follows Twitter.
Social networks today perform not so much the role of a platform for communication, as a detonator of an information explosion, capable of spreading data all over the world in a matter of seconds, thereby accelerating the course of an operation. This does not mean that television and radio are losing popularity. In modern conditions there is a symbiosis of the largest television giants with such networks as WikiLeaks, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, which ultimately increases the effect of information operations, bringing hundreds of thousands of protesters to the streets.
So, network structures are the most important tool of “soft power”, created to solve at least three tasks, and on a global scale. The first is the formation of new meanings, the meanings given by the “operator”, the “beacon”. If this task can be solved, then no military intervention will be needed.
The second task is to organize operational control over the activities of groups and individuals. The third task is the creation of a mechanism for the formation and manipulation of behavior in specific situations, as well as the involvement of people who do not understand these tasks and should not understand this.
Thus, by gaining multi-million dollar audiences, social networks have become cognitive, informational, and organizational weapons. As the eminent Soviet scientist P. Kapitsa noted in his time, “the mass media are no less dangerous than the means of mass destruction”. This fully applies to social networks as a means of implementing a soft power strategy.
Help
Joseph Samuel Nye. A graduate of Princeton University, a PhD student and a Harvard teacher. His doctoral dissertation was nominated for the Cecil Rhodes Award, a well-known apologist for world domination in Britain and the Anglo-American establishment as a whole, the creator of the DeBeers diamond empire and the still closed structure called “The Group” (or “We”). By the way, according to Rhodes's will, after his death in 1902, about 3 million pounds (at that time a huge amount) was transferred to the establishment of student scholarships and professorial grants. At the same time, the testament stipulated that the scholarships are intended for natives of European countries, the United States and the British colonies "with leadership inclinations" in the framework of the education program for presidents, prime ministers and other high-ranking officials who "will manage nations and the world."
Joseph Samuel Nye. A graduate of Princeton University, a PhD student and a Harvard teacher. His doctoral dissertation was nominated for the Cecil Rhodes Award, a well-known apologist for world domination in Britain and the Anglo-American establishment as a whole, the creator of the DeBeers diamond empire and the still closed structure called “The Group” (or “We”). By the way, according to Rhodes's will, after his death in 1902, about 3 million pounds (at that time a huge amount) was transferred to the establishment of student scholarships and professorial grants. At the same time, the testament stipulated that the scholarships are intended for natives of European countries, the United States and the British colonies "with leadership inclinations" in the framework of the education program for presidents, prime ministers and other high-ranking officials who "will manage nations and the world."
NGO as a means of pressure
Globalization has created unique conditions for soft power pressure within a particular country. This directly deals with such agents as various foundations of funds and other so-called non-governmental organizations.
For example, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), founded in 1993, positions itself as a private non-profit organization whose activities are aimed at developing and strengthening democratic institutions around the world. At the same time, the fund was created jointly by the Republican and Democratic parties. The management of its activities is carried out by the Council, which includes a proportional number of representatives of both parties. Moreover, the official website states that the activities of the fund are “controlled at different levels by the US Congress, the State Department and an independent financial audit.” NED annually pays more than 1000 grants to support NGO projects in more than 90 countries. Another structure that implements the concept of American “soft power” is the National Institute for Democracy (NDI), created in 1993, under the patronage of the US Democratic Party. The institute, currently chaired by ex-Secretary of State M. Albright, is also financed by the federal government, various international development agencies and private foundations. As part of its mission, “NDI provides practical assistance to public and political figures promoting democratic values, practices and institutions. NDI works with democrats in every region of the world and helps create political and social organizations, ensure fair elections, and promote civic participation, openness and responsibility in governments. ” This “help” is currently carried out in 125 countries.
The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) was created by order of John F. Kennedy in 1961 and positions itself (I quote the official website of the agency) as an “independent agency of the US federal government. Responsible for non-military US assistance to other countries. The agency administrator and his deputy are appointed by the President of the United States with the consent of the Senate and act in coordination with the US Secretary of State. The agency works in more than 100 countries of the world. About 1% of the US federal budget is allocated annually for funding this organization’s programs. ” Has anyone, after reading this information, remained convinced that USAID is a non-governmental organization?
Among other structures of soft power, one way or another involved in the "promotion of democracy", but really - the formation of the image of the "attractive" US power, should be called RAND Corporation, Santa Fe Institute, Freedom House, Ford funds, MacArthur, Carnegie, etc. As well as Media and public policy of the School of Public Administration. Kennedy at Harvard University, Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School, Oxford Internet Institute, Alliance of Youth Movement, Columbia and Yale Law School, Albert Einstein Institute, perhaps the most famous ideologist of nonviolent resistance, Gene Sharp in 1983 year .
From the latest concrete results of the activities of the agents of the American “soft power,” we should recall the so-called “Arab Spring”. Today it is widely known that the opposition 6 Movement of April in Egypt was supported by such international organizational and informational resources as the GlobalVoices network financed by Ford and MacArthur funds, J.Soros Open Society, as well as IT manufacturers and distributors. It was through GlobalVoices, which regularly held international conferences and working meetings, that funds were allocated to specialized public structures - “Doctors for Changes”, “Journalists for Changes”, “Workers for Changes”, etc. Through separate channels they assisted associations of lawyers, women's organizations, and also structures of national minorities. Editors of publications, primarily political sites such as Al-Masrial Yume, and at the international level Al-Jazeera, also received targeted support. Even individual intellectuals, mainly from the media sphere, are masters of feuilleton and caricature genre. As follows from WikiLeaks, published on 29 on January 2011 of the year, after the uprising in Tahrir Square, US Ambassador to Egypt Margaret Scobie in her reports back in December 2008 of the year, who was to be one of the main organizers of protest actions , and one of the Egyptian oppositionists, Google top manager Vail Ghonim, was sent to a seminar organized by the US State Department of young activists on a false passport.
According to some reports, at that time, the April 6 group on the social networking site Facebook already had 70 thousand people, mostly from educated youth. Particular emphasis was placed on work with the Coptic minority. As in Sudan, since the beginning of the 1980's, the Christian minority in Egypt has been patronized by organizations specially set up for this purpose - the International Christian Solidarity (CSI) and the PaxChristi foundation. Thus, it can be argued that the United States fully utilized the resources of "soft power" to implement a regime change in Egypt and other countries in North Africa and the Middle East. It turned out to be right. J. Sharp, “a peaceful coup does not tolerate improvisations.” Thus, the coup in Tunisia was largely the result of the long preparatory work of the Center for Applied Nonviolent Actions and Strategies for CANVAS (The Center for Applied Non-Violent Action and Strategies).
Founded in 2003 in Belgrade on the basis of the “Otpor” movement, the main public force of the Belgrade “revolution”, CANVAS deals with the implementation of J. Sharp's methods. Members of the organization also participate in seminars sponsored by the OSCE and the UN. Cooperating with the “House of Freedom”, which, in turn, is supported by the National Endowment for Democracy, CANVAS prepared for 2011 activists from more than 50 countries, including Zimbabwe, Tunisia, Lebanon, Egypt, Iran, Georgia, Ukraine, Belarus, Kyrgyzstan and even North Korea.
It is important that the training program was built on ousting national governments from the process of forming the opinions of listeners who were supposed to dive into information flows from only the world (read, Western) media and social networks. By the way, Tunisia, which launched the “revolutionary wave” in 2011 year, then spread to Egypt and other countries of North Africa and the Middle East, twenty years earlier became the first Arab and African country to connect to the Network, and by the beginning of the revolution in terms of mobile telephony development from the countries of the Muslim world was second only to Turkey.
In this regard, it is fair to believe that the publication on the WikiLeaks website of materials compromising the family of Tunisian President Z. Ben Ali served as a detonator for public discontent. Exaltation even loyal to the power of Tunisians was achieved by broadcasting through networks of self-immolation of Mohammed Bouazizi. It should be noted here that the spectacle is an especially important technological method of “soft power”. He produces a collective feeling - syntony, which forms a new quality of relations between the objects of influence, that is, the audience. In addition, a role-playing spectacle (for example, theater, cinema, acts of self-immolation transmitted via social networks) complements synthony with self-identification with the hero or the assimilation of the hero’s passion. As a result, the fascination with a particular action can change the perception of reality. In addition, the development of modern technologies can seriously enhance the effect of neurotic syntony, increase suggestibility.
Modern means of communication have become one of the most important means of preparing and implementing political upheavals in the Arab world, primarily due to the fact that they have allowed to intensify the spectacular signal semantics. For example, YouTube, which is the third most visited website in the world (daily views reach 4 billion), allows you to instantly distribute genuine, retouched or simply created video clips that generate generalized horror reactions in a sensitized society, turning into a fierce aversion the culprit. As a rule, it is a political leader, members of the ruling party.
Mary S. Joyce, the publisher of the MetaActivism website, very clearly showed the role of networks in the events of the “Arab Spring”. Acts of self-immolation are "clearly, and it is shocking ... What made the stories of Bouazizi, Said and al-Khatib resonant?" Their extraordinary brutality, and visible on the photographs and video immediately after the incident. This produced a visceral (that is, before sensations in the internal organs. - Comm. Ed.) Emotional effect. To see these pictures is much more sensitive than to hear about them, and the anger against the regime already experienced reaches a feverish amplitude. ” Without going into a detailed analysis of the events of the “Arab Spring” - a lot has already been written about this - I note that after the events of 9 / 11, the United States mobilized huge financial resources to activate its soft power pressure. For this, we have created the 350 order (with what scale!) Of various new educational, cultural, and information programs to promote democracy and create a stratum of citizens in Arab countries focused on US values and policies. All programs were combined into a large-scale project called the Partnership for Middle East Partnership Initiative, which was supervised by the US Department of State.
In 2002, the State Department clearly outlined the goal of this project - to implement “democratic transformations” in such countries of the region as Algeria, Bahrain, Egypt, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Morocco, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, the United Arab Emirates, the Palestinian Territories, Iran , Iraq and Libya. These transformations were supposed to be launched with the help of soft-power projects aimed at (1) changing the political system through the creation of parties, the training of alternative politicians, the emancipation of women and the formation of loyal and democratically-minded youth; (2) change the economic climate by creating a layer of businessmen and lawyers who have received “Western education”, as well as changes in the laws of the countries; (3) reforming the entire education system by expanding women's access to education, revising curricula, and providing American schools with textbooks.
A fundamental innovation was tested in the implementation of these projects - the United States for the first time changed the target audience of training programs. Now, instead of the current elite, the military and the dissident intelligentsia, the US government began to educate young people up to 25 years and women. In addition, the State Department modified the tactics of promoting "soft power". Instead of supporting political regimes and the army, Washington began to create alternative parties, non-profit organizations, to reform the education system.
As a result, in just ten years of implementation of such a strategy, firstly, there has been a significant increase in the number of the Arab population who have undergone political training in the United States or by American methods in their homeland. If at the end of 2000, thousands of citizens were involved in exchange or training programs, then already in 2004 – 2009 - hundreds of thousands. So, only from Egypt in the 1998 year, the USA invited about 3300 people to study in the field of democracy development, in 2007, they were already 47, 300 people, and in 2008, 148 700 people.
Secondly, the State Department managed to “process” young people, who represent not the most well-to-do segments of society and are deprived of the opportunity to get an education. These groups of youth - the so-called under served youth, or youth at risk - had a high chance of becoming members of terrorist groups. After studying in special schools to teach "the fundamentals of democracy and civil society," having studied political technologies and the fundamentals of the protest movement, they became a shock detachment of "democratic transformations" and only waited for the “X” hour.
Thirdly, this is the creation of a series of information programs. Starting from 2002-2004, about ten new radio stations and television channels were created with the money of the US government and its allies. The most famous among them are the channels Sava, Farda, Free Iraq, Voice of America in Kurdish, and Persian Network News”And others. Most of them appeared in the Middle East. The most ambitious is the Alhurra TV channel, which covers all countries of North Africa and the Middle East. Being a highly politicized channel, Alhurra managed to attract the attention of young people through such programs as The Hour of Democracy, Women's Opinions, etc.
Special attention was paid to the preparation of blogger activists. For example, only on the basis of the Columbia University Law School before the organizers of future actions were held "presentations" of key employees from the Obama team who ensured his election. Another entity responsible for training oppositionists was Alliance for Youth Movements, also funded by the US State Department. In addition, the development of scenarios for the revolution and the preparation of the opposition core were directly involved: the New America Foundation — the co-founder of Global Voices and a partner of Google, the Center for Media and Public Policy of the School of Public Administration. Kennedy at Harvard, Berkman Center "Internet and Society" at the Harvard Law School, NEXACenter, Oxford Internet Institute and others. And this is just the tip of the American soft power iceberg.
Are there antidotes to Western "soft power"? In fact, it is a complex of high-tech cognitive and organizational techniques that are used to promote and realize their interests. In the modern world, any state striving to preserve itself and pursue national interests beyond its own boundaries should have, in the arsenal, firstly, a number of instruments that limit or minimize the effectiveness of the manipulative effect of “soft power” from outside. Secondly, develop your own strategy of soft power. These tools can be called resistant factors, that is, causing opposition, protection and struggle of the object of manipulation for their independence, for their interests.
First of all, such factors are:
- education - it determines the channels for obtaining information, as well as the level of analysis and criticality; all those who have received education or grants abroad can be considered as potential bearers of the values of the sponsor country;
- ideology that increases the negative attitude and criticality to information from alternative sources (at the same time reducing the criticality to the main channel). For example, the preservation of internal stability and the presence of immunity to political upheavals in the Republic of Belarus are largely explained by a special attention to ideology. In all government agencies work ideological departments; The Academy of Management under the President of the Republic of Belarus prepares ideologues, etc .;
- socio-cultural and religious identity, protecting the subject of manipulation on the same partial principle as ideology;
- social and political experience.
At the same time, it should be remembered that “soft power”, supplemented by the latest technologies, makes it possible to quite easily and quickly influence people's minds, change historical memory, form new meanings. At the same time, the resistance of the target state to the effect of alien values, information aggression, psychohistorical invasion is suppressed with the help of such forms of MC as “tolerance”, “political correctness”, “universal values”, etc. First, the victim is deprived of the opportunity to resist, and then, as noted by J. Agamben, deprived of the status of the victim. The MS of a foreign country deprives the state and weakens it in the face of a “non-leader” twitter revolution (Tunisia, Egypt). Well, where the MS does not work, “democratizers” do not appear of a soft type (Libya, Syria).
An alien, “soft power” that has come from outside is successful only when and where there is no opposition to this process, and it must be active, offensive. In this situation, there is only one way out - to create and distribute the antidote of American “soft power”. And this work is facilitated by the fact that the concept does not need to be developed. It is only necessary to invest in it new meanings, values and goals, realizing that Russia will be able to ensure not only its own interests, but also offer the modern world an alternative way of development. And once the political will is manifested, then the matter is small - to forge your own soft power armor.
Information