Re: <nettime> Wikileaks is a psyop!

[Brian Holmes <bhcontinentaldrift@gmail.com>]

 > The internet is indeed a vast battlefield, where the
> intelligence agencies of the US-UK, China, Israel, Russia, and many others
> clash every hour of the day, with commercial spies, hackers, anarchists,
> cultists, mercenary trolls, and psychotics all getting into the act as
> well. Intelligence agencies deliberately feed real and doctored material
> to various websites, sometimes using their own disgruntled employees as
> cutouts, conduits, and go-betweens.

The above is some truly lovely prose and evokes (though only faintly I'm 
afraid) the master of this genre to the nth degree, Konrad Becker, in 
his Strategic Reality Dictionary -- which however has the immense 
advantage of working back to the like of Giordano Bruno and John Dee as 
the original 16th-century psychowarriors whose black arts still make the 
unitiated tremble. Perhaps nettimers would like to drink this heady brew 
at the source?

http://tinyurl.com/strategic-reality

> Most recently, Wikileaks has played a role in the CIA’s new “Jasmine
> Revolution” in Tunisia by publishing some State Department cables about
> the sybaritic luxury and lavish lifestyle of the Ben Ali clan, leading to
> the downfall of that regime. The CIA is now gloating that with the help of
> Wikileaks it can now topple all the Arab regimes at will, from Mubarak to
> Qaddafi to Bouteflika, and replace them with new and more pliable puppets
> eager to clash with Iran, Russia, and China.

I am so glad to get this news! Why, to think that just the 
day-before-yesterday, after much soul-searching and chin-tugging and the 
like, in my heart of hearts I had rehabilitated that enigmatic tactician 
of the demos, Gene Sharp, yes, he of the Albert Einstein Institute, the 
one who writes the take-down manuals for dictatorships. He is, you know, 
widely suspected of being a "stoogie" for USAID, for the National 
Endowment for Democracy, for the CIA of course, and god knows, for Obama 
himself. OK, true enough, it is known that his writings and films have 
been distributed from time to time by certain agencies of the US 
government; and true enough, the Otpor movement in Serbia made use of 
them, as did the Color Revolutions in Georgia and the Ukraine. But in 
some moment of psychic weakness, you see, I decided to accept that this 
world is complex, that Gene Sharp actually is a rather awesome democracy 
activist operating out of two tiny rooms somewhere in Boston, and that 
people in Egypt just did deploy his writings and techniques of their 
very own free will. While at the same time, a putatively liberal regime 
like that of the US can indeed instrumentalize those same writings and 
tactics. Yes, the world is complex. But no, it isn't! It was all a plot 
and my mind was drugged with LSD, Anatensol, Diazepam, Haloperidol, 
Largactil, Mogadon, Serepax, Stelazine, Tegretol, Tofranil! My mother is 
Anne Hamilton-Byrne! My father is John Young! My uncle is Julian 
Assange! Thank god the CIA has finally taken out those useless US 
stoogies Ben-Ali and Mubarak, at last I can get back to my molecules and 
my family life....

yours on a higher plane,

BH





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