Alamut: Information Warfare and Disorder

[Cain]

Originally written for my blog, therefore a slightly different tone to the stuff I write here.  Nevertheless, I'm gonna post it, simply because.

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So, as you've no doubt noticed, my longer term readers, this is a new site.  I decided I wanted to take a different direction from my previous blog, which was, well, a little "unfocused", to say the least.

As some of you probably know, I consider myself a Discordian.  I like chaos and disorder, as a rule, and consider freedom and disorder two of the highest values, at least as far as I am concerned.  The problem is this world is rather low on disorder, except in a very narrow sense.  Surveillance, checks, body scans, the database society, the hatred of anonymity, discipline, the (ab)use of reason as a process to control others, the increasing stratification of the social structure...all this and much more is what I dislike about modern society.

Even the domain of foreign policy and international conflict, the most unruly and "chaotic" of our political endeavours, really only works to feed back into systems of domination and control.  Our wars and interventions cause responses or help legitimate the propaganda put about by our geopolitical rivals, which then justify not only our presence in whatever country we are invading this week, but also excessive "security" measures back at home – measures which will always eventually end up being used against that home population, or at least certain dissident elements of it.  It is also done to protect certain resources which help prop up those economic inequalities back home, and perpetuate the current social trends.

Religion is for the most part no better.  Political order originally derived from religious authority, which sought to take those values I so dislike and give them an imaginary, metaphysical "validity".  Even today, religion is more often than not another pillar in excusing and propping up the existing system.

And all this makes me a sad panda.  As far as I can see, the aim of our elites is to insulate themselves from the world entirely, to make their lives neat, orderly and predictable.  Disorder is only ever deployed in a limited faction, usually against those who may threaten any of the above.  But placing limits on where and where disorder can happen...you see the problem here?  I'm sure you do.

Of course, I don't do this out of the goodness of my own heart.  There is likely not much of a place in the Empire of Order for someone like myself, except as a tool, to be discarded once my use has passed, which would likely be very quickly, given my tendency towards rebellion and autonomy.  So in that sense, I am entirely self-interested.

I chose the name of Alamut for this blog for a particular reason.  Well, two particular reasons, one of them being it was (amazingly) free and so I decided to snap it up before anyone else could get to it.  The other is I have always had a fascination with the Nizari sect better known as the Assassins, from when I was about ten years old and tried to teach myself the history of the Crusades with the Encyclopaedia Britannica.  There is, of course, a certain romanticism to the Order, if you are able to overlook all the dead bodies.

But my main interest in the Nizari sect is in how they perfected a form of information warfare, almost a thousand years before any government in the world would investigate it.  They pioneered this because they were a small and heretical cult in a world filled with larger and far more dangerous powers, who viewed their very existence as a threat.  Yet through clever manipulation and highly targeted operations, they were able to preserve their autonomy and unique culture for nearly three hundred years, where they had the misfortune to be targeted by an enemy who came from too far away to be infiltrated (though to be fair, almost everyone failed against the strategic and tactical brilliance of the Mongol armies that poured out of central Asia).

A lot of research has been done since information warfare (or psychological operations, or political warfare, or weltanschauungskrieg, depending on which term you prefer) since World War Two though, and of course some of those who dabble in such things cannot help but attempt to use them on psychologies they understand the best – that of their own populations.  It is clever though, which I approve of, even if I don't necessarily benefit from it.  Robbing someone of a justification for fighting, by making it futile, by making it seem doomed to failure, unjust etc is a very good way to stop a war with minimal damage being caused.  The problem is such techniques seem to operate in a top-down manner, whether directed against a domestic population or a foreign one.  Again, the neat, tidy little bubble in which our elites exist, they are never disturbed. 

That is, of course, only one example among many.  But it is a pertinent one, I feel.  If the techniques which were used by such people to control others were broken down and explained, if they were dispersed, then, perhaps, some things would start to change.  That is the theory anyway, and one I am willing to test.  In this sense, spreading information is itself a form of information warfare, I guess.

Failing that, I can always just take amusing pot-shots at the scribes and hagiographers of the powers that be, something I do seem to have a knack for.  But for now, the above goal will do quite nicely.

[Requia ☣]

I think I'll have to follow this.