Re: <nettime> Further on FSB 'dissident' voice

Ted, what I find intriguing about this fiction/fact dualism you reference, or one thing I find interesting, is the question of when do we know the war has started and who's involved? As you already implied. So yes, it's a privilege of peace (nice phrase) to debate if that guy in the FSB, or maybe not in the FSB, actually wrote that. We're at peace to debate this. But what if the war started a while ago also for 'us,' whoever 'we' might be, and we didn't quite register that fact? In the same way that global warming started, it's definitively no longer in the future. It's here, but we're not quite sure when we truly recognized that fact? There was no binary zero or one moment.

What I'm getting at is, was Brexit (with its mysterious sources of funding that the Tory government investigated, but found convenient not to release any findings concerning), when the war started? Was that ignorant wrecking ball Donald Trump squeaking into the White House after a significant campaign to benefit him on multiple social and other media fronts, etcetera, all originating you know where, when the war started? Both? Were they themselves examples of "forgeries used for escalation" on a particularly grand scale? Or was the first invasion of Ukraine and the seizing of Crimea in 2014 when it started? Or some temporal webwork combo of all of those? In other words, what's fiction: that we're at peace right now, or that we're already in another state, one that's not quite peace anymore? And if we're in that latter condition, when did it start?

That whole deadly serious game you reference when the Allies had to hide from the Axis that Bletchley Park geniuses had broken their codes, meaning convoys at sea and cities like Coventry had in practice to be sacrificed for the greater good of shortening the war, thus saving more live in total, is a great disturbing example. And it also resonates with how signals intercepts have been deployed in the last few months in a quite different way, to try to preempt escalatory/justificatory moves by Putin. So called false flag operations.

But maybe the false flag we're living under right now is the one indicating that we're at peace, when we're actually in another condition similar to the condition of all those independent journalists who've fled on short notice from Moscow and are setting up studios as we speak in Istanbul to try to broadcast on Telegram back into Russia. That is, not-peace. And haven't quite recognized it.

I'm not sure.

Best,

Michael

Message: 2
Date: Mon, 14 Mar 2022 14:50:24 -0400
From: Ted Byfield <tedbyfield@gmail.com>
To: nettime-l@kein.org
Cc: Michael Benson <kinpix2001@gmail.com>
Subject: Re: <nettime> Further on FSB 'dissident' voice
Message-ID: <FC30D1D5-7ACF-4492-BDA8-5C7BFB62FD36@gmail.com" target="_blank" style="font-family:Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif">FC30D1D5-7ACF-4492-BDA8-5C7BFB62FD36@gmail.com>
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What Michael said.

It's also worth noting that dwelling on whether that document is authentic is a privilege of peace. We could debate whether 'we' are 'at war,' what kind of war it is, etc etc, but that too is a privilege of peace. No one in Ukraine would doubt that we're at war; only those who at a remove from the hostilities would bother. I think the ethical stance is to acknowledge that while war might not be raging where you or I happen to be, there is one ? and the threat of being draw into direct hostilities implies that we're already involved. This, btw, is the logic that dominates pretty much *all* discussions about NATO engagement, weapons transfers, no-fly zones, and all the rest. We'd do well to apply those criteria in contexts like this one as well ? in part because the *systemic* risk is that forgeries will be used to justify escalation.

As for the document in question, when we ask whether it's authentic in practice that means we're asking about its provenance, as if it were an artwork or last will and testament. Hence the immediate nerdy turn toward questions about Bellingcat's and other sources' bona fides. Obviously, there are reasons to keep these aspects in mind, but we should also note their effect: attention shifts decisively away from the substance of what the document claims.

The go-to example: When Churchill feigned ignorance of Nazi plans to flatten Coventry, in order to hide the fact that Allies had cracked Nazi codes, that surely involved the production of fictional documents, and very probably planting some as well. Were those fictional docs 'authentic'? Well, yes and no. The Nazis would have paid close attention to any docs they captured, but for the people of Coventry that focus on provenance would have been both abstract and misleading.

If this doc purported to be minutely detailed Russian battle plans and the concern was that it might have been planted to mislead opponents in specific ways, yes ? but it doesn't do that at all, does it? So my hot take in *this* context: some fanfic is as good as the real thing, and some is even better.

Either way, does anyone doubt for a minute that it offers a reasonably accurate view into the mentality of Russian ~security bureaucracy? Or that it's at least as accurate as the overwhelming majority of what the Western media are publishing?

Cheers,
Ted

Michael Benson

Kinetikon Pictures

michael-benson.net

kinpix2001@gmail.com