The relationship of the Trumpists and the Republican Party to particular authoritarian movement provides an important perspective on the argument made by Buddhika Jayamaha and Jahara Matisek in an article for the US Army's Strategic Studies Institute's journal Parameters, "Social Media Warriors: Leveraging a New Battlespace" Parameters Winter 2018-19.
Jayamaha and Matisek make a disturbing argument treating foreign governments surreptitiously using Facebook ads as a form of warfare.
Hungary's Embassy put on a conference for Christian Right Republicans promoting Orbán's brand of völkish family policy in 2019. Ariana Eunjung Cha reported for the Washington Post. (2)
The conservative Christian Post carried this report by Samuel Smith, 'Make Families Great Again': Hungary seeing more babies, fewer abortions through pro-family policies 03/17/2019:
“I was very proud to be a minister here and hearing from our American friends how much they admired the Hungarian family policies,” Katalin Novák, the Hungarian minister of state for family, youth and international affairs who gave a keynote address at the event, told The Christian Post in an interview. ....The ever-odious Sebastian Gorka - whose public persona is that of a creepy James Bond movie villain - is now Senior Director for Counterterrorism in the Trump 2.0 regime. I'm not focusing here on Orbán's family policy, which is part of a broader xenophobic and anti-EU policy that promotes a conservative, traditionalist vision of society. It is also exceptionally unlikely to achieve even its stated goal of increasing Hungary's birth rate to the replacement rate by 2030. Rolling back time is just a hard thing to achieve.
Today, the Hungarian government spends nearly 5 percent of its GDP towards incentives for those in the predominantly-Christian nation to get married and have children — lots of them. ...
Participants in the conference included White House director of strategic communications Mercedes Schlapp, President Trump’s special assistant on domestic policy Kathryn Talento and Health and Human Services senior policy advisor Valerie Huber.
The event also included Reps. Chris Smith, R-N.J., Andy Harris, R-Md., Paul Gosar, R-Ariz and Jeff Fortenberry, R-Neb.
Others included Family Research Council President and USCIRF commissioner Tony Perkins, former White House advisor Sebastian Gorka, American Conservative Union Chair Matt Schlapp and as Emilie Kao, the director of the Heritage Foundation's DeVos Center for Religion & Civil Society.
“We are working closely with the U.S. administration on family issues. They would also like to get some detail on our pro-family policies and the measures that we have introduced in the last nine years,” Novák, who is also the vice president of the Fidesz Party explained. (3)
But that 2019 conference, explicitly approved by the Trump 1.0 White House, is an illustration of one of many ways that politics in one country provides ideas to people elsewhere. And how governments promote that effect in ways that cover a full range from perfectly legitimate to illegal.
Jayamaha and Jahara Matisek in Parameters are addressing a real and legitimate national security issue. But I'm struck by their framing, which on a generous interpretation could be easily adapted to justify authoritarian policies. They lay out their perspective this way:
Civil society presents a fundamental blind spot in the American military understanding of warfare. Long associated by philosophers as a bulwark against tyranny in liberal democracies, civil society has been weaponized by hostile actors, such as Russia and China, and violent nonstate actors, such as the Islamic State. The adversaries’ strategy involves infiltrating Western civil society in order to foment dissent and create breaches along ethnic, racial, religious, and socioeconomic lines.Let me interrupt here to point out that the population of Iceland is roughly 360,000. The city of Atlanta GA alone has around 486 thousand.
The new tactics create ideologically sympathetic individuals who desire policy changes that align with the adversarial state’s ideology or that promote detrimental and self-destructive views; these views, in turn, can undermine societal cohesion while disrupting foreign policy choices. This approach accentuates attacks on Western civil society across multiple dimensions by using social media warriors who indirectly receive orders from, and are secretly paid by, Moscow, Beijing, and other Western adversaries. These social media warriors and their handlers regard the internet as an unguarded, undersurveilled, and ill-defined human-to-human interface that can be easily manipulated. Subsequently, social media forums such as Facebook and Twitter become a battlespace of ideas, injected with disinformation in hopes of influencing individual, societal, and political behavior.
As a consequence, the discourse of Western civil society is shaped in ways fundamentally hostile to the effective functioning of pluralist liberal democracies. Fomenting dissension by spreading divisive social media posts and polarizing memes leads citizens in Western societies to like, and to share, the messages as well as to advocate for the ideas, thus creating a destructive civil discourse. In a homogenous society, such as Iceland, this type of campaign has less impact because the societal differences are primarily economic. [my emphasis]
But in countries with a variety of cultural and historical cleavages, malicious civil discourse deepens existing divisions that make social relations more acrimonious.The rest of the article is filled with words, phrases, and comments to describe this process like these quotes:
Disinformation tactics against civil societies in the United States and its Western allies are not particularly new. The novelty, however, is the use of free and open civil discourse, which is traditionally a Western strength, as the center of sociocultural strategy aimed at manipulating civil society into a new battlespace. The first component of this strategy relies on the existence of the internet and the use of social media. With the internet as the medium, individuals conduct essential societal interactions through a variety of apps and platforms that provide instantaneous, uberefficient, daily social contacts without the boundaries that affected civil interaction during the twentieth century. Anti-Western actors use these virtual networks to produce and to breed ideas degenerative to stable societal norms, which ultimately impact policy debates and elections. [my emphasis]
- Many virulent Salafi-Jihadists preach Western destruction in Western capitals and large cosmopolitan cities where their dialogue is legally protected.
- ... undermining Western policy-making capacity and state power
- ... in liberal democracies that are easily exploitable by hybrid actors who face few mechanisms of enforcement.
- The value of freedom to liberal societies further complicates efforts to detect hostile attempts to create schismogenesis [social division] because recognizing the activity requires substantial domestic surveillance.
- ... the West’s adversaries rely on a strategy of socially embedding hostility into the political discourse, converting civil society from a constructive force into a destructive one.
- The strength of American democracy similarly promotes the same rights for all groups whether they are white supremacist groups in Charlottesville, Virginia, or Black Lives Matter marches in Houston, Texas.
- ... Western laws, traditions, and norms prevent governments from investigating the actions of civil society organizations without reasonable cause.
- Each individual has the potential to undermine the strengths of each aspect of civil society from within, sometimes with the complicity of individuals, sometimes via inadvertent foreign threats, and sometimes through soft power influence such as China’s educational exchanges through the Confucius Institute.
- Nefarious governments, state affiliated proxies, and nonstate actors can, and do, exploit this defining liberal principle.
- Many citizens with access to social media are subconsciously led to choose one side of a purely manufactured debate.
- Such warfare is difficult for political and military leaders to respond to adequately, which has dark implications for how democracies are supposed to work.
- ... the same Western culture and civil society institutions that made America and the West culturally stronger than the Soviet Union have been exploited by the losing side of the Cold War.
So, on the one hand, Jayamaha and Matisek are identifying some legitimate issues about information operations directed by governments.
But it's also striking that they raise some dilemmas that are as old as the concept of free speech as though they are dramatic new developments of the last decade or two. And they use vague, insinuating language that was actually common as dirt during the Cold War to blur distinctions that are actually not only much easier to make than their article suggests, but actually are extensively made in law and established political and diplomatic practices.
They allude to the dilemma of intolerant groups exploiting the freedom of expression in liberal states as though it were some relatively recent discovery. Here is how Rainer Forst in Toleration in Conflict (English version, 2013) describes the great liberal theorist John Locke's view on the limits of toleration as he laid them out in his Epistola de tolerantia (Letter Concerning Tolerance) of 1685:
In the second part of the essay, in which Locke rhetorically addresses the king, he recommends, for the sake of the preservation and stability of the kingdom, that the king should grant toleration to the Protestant Dissenters and also to the sects (which, in Locke's opinion, would then neutralise each other), but deny it to the 'papists'. For the latter defend opinions which are 'absolutely destructive' for the government because of their loyalty to the pope and possibly to foreign Catholic powers; they use toleration only for their own purposes but do not accept it as a claim on themselves; and) in contrast to Protestant groups) they cannot be integrated through toleration but would remain 'irreconcilable enemies'. Locke would continue to defend this, for his time typical, anti-Catholic position in the Epistola de tolerantia though he insists that in doing so he is guided not by dogmatic religious considerations but by political ones. [my emphasis]Which brings us back to the March 2019 conference on family values sponsored by the Hungarian Embassy and hosted by the Library of Congress. There are elaborate laws and practices associated with such events. There is nothing illegal about attending such a conference. Presumably the attendees were generally sympathetic to the cause being promoted. Although the Christian Post quotes one of them, Peter Sprigg of the Family Research Council, criticizing Hungary's program of providing direct government payments to encourage parenthood, apparently finding it too socialistic for his taste.
Is any of this illegal? No, certainly nothing that I see in these reports.
Is it somehow sinister? Well, I think pretty much anything to do with the hate group Family Research Council is politically sinister. But it's not because of the fact that they attended a Hungary-sponsored event.
I'm not attempting here to address in any detail the various issues raised in the Parameters piece. What I am doing is using the "Making Families Great Again" event as an illustration of how there is a broad, largely familiar range of official international functions that are well understood and well regulated under US and international law. If you go listen to a speech by a foreign ambassador, that's an entirely legitimate thing to do in the US. If you knowingly accept secret payments from a foreign government to do some kind of assignment for them, then you probably are violating the law against working as an unregistered foreign agent. (Although if you're as dumb as Don Trump, Jr., you might be able to convince a prosecutor that you're just not smart enough to have broken the law.)
Russian intelligence agencies using Facebook ads and troll farms is a legitimate legal concern. But that can be addressed without framing every idea that might transcend a national border as, "the same Western culture and civil society institutions that made America and the West culturally stronger than the Soviet Union have been exploited by the losing side of the Cold War." And, not to be picky. But I'm not sure that Russia, Hungary, or even China qualify as "the losing side of the Cold War."
It's also problematic to frame such efforts as cyber warfare. Knocking out a country's power grid or inserting malicious software into military communications systems, yes, those qualify.
But when military officials or spokespeople or publications start identifying civilian trolls, even ones paid by unfriendly foreign powers, as "warriors"; or describing people who repost memes from such trolls as "undermining Western policy-making capacity and state power" in a "battlespace" that benefits "nefarious governments, state affiliated proxies, and nonstate actors"; or griping that this here pussy-ass librul democracy nonsense is lettin' danjerous furriners git away with too much bad stuff - then it's worth it for people who actually support democracy to take a critical look at what's being advocated.
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