BY: FAJR INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL | DEC 2023
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PSYWAR or PsyOp have been known by many other names or terms, including Military Information Support Operations (MISO), "Hearts and Minds", and propaganda. The term is used "to denote any action which is practiced mainly by psychological methods with the aim of evoking a planned psychological reaction in other people".
DIRTY
LIVE
Various techniques are used, and are aimed at influencing a target audience's value system, belief system, emotions, motives, reasoning, or behavior. It is used to induce confessions or reinforce attitudes and behaviors favorable to the originator's objectives, and are sometimes combined with black operations or false flag tactics. It is also used to destroy the morale of enemies through tactics that aim to depress troops' psychological states.
YOU ARE A
2023
Target audiences can be governments, organizations, groups, and individuals, and is not just limited to soldiers. Civilians of foreign territories can also be targeted by technology and media so as to cause an effect on the government of their country.
NEWS AGENCIES OR
FOREVER
Mass communication such as radio allows for direct communication with an enemy populace, and therefore has been used in many efforts. Social media channels and the internet allow for campaigns of disinformation and misinformation performed by agents anywhere in the world.
ALWAYS
Methods
* Propaganda radio stations, such as BBC, VOA, RFE/RL. * False flag events. * Terrorism * The threat of chemical or nuclear weapons.
Daniel Lerner
7:00 PM
Most of these techniques were developed during World War II or earlier, and have been used to some degree in every conflict since. Daniel Lerner was in the OSS (the predecessor to the CIA) and in his book, attempts to analyze how effective the various strategies were. Measuring the success or failure of psychological warfare is very hard, as the conditions are very far from being a controlled experiment.
8:30 PM
* White propaganda (omissions and emphasis): Truthful and not strongly biased, where the source of information is acknowledged. * Grey propaganda (omissions, emphasis and racial/ethnic/religious bias): Largely truthful, containing no information that can be proven wrong; the source is not identified. * Black propaganda (commissions of falsification): Inherently deceitful, information given in the product is attributed to a source that was not responsible for its creation.
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Lerner says grey and black operations ultimately have a heavy cost, in that the target population sooner or later recognizes them as propaganda and discredits the source: "This is one of the few dogmas advanced by Sykewarriors that is likely to endure as an axiom of propaganda: Credibility is a condition of persuasion. Before you can make a man do as you say, you must make him believe what you say."
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