‘Combat Propaganda’ with Zarina Zabrisky
A fierce compilation of Zarina Zabrisky’s archives to combat weapon’s grade propaganda + other women who rock
I kicked off my birthday weekend with a behind-the-scenes’ tour of Mount Wilson’s 100-inch telescope. It’s actually 101-inches, but who’s counting. Driving up to the Mount Wilson Observatory through the clouds and fog, there was a moment when we suddenly emerged above the clouds. Here is what that moment looked like…
For seven years, I have used my words to try to help people navigate their way above the fog of unknowability and into the world of clarity. So seeing that image before me now, I think of that.
Last night, I wanted to think of other things - of stardust and expanding universes and to learn of the woman whose work studying stars tipped us off to the universe’s accelerating expansion. Henrietta Swan Leavitt’s research transformed what we know about astrophysics. She was a stargazer.
“By discovering a relationship for some stars between how bright they appear and how fast they blink, Henrietta Leavitt gave us a tool to gauge the size and expansion rate of the universe,” said Adam Reiss, a Nobel Prize winner who used her foundational work to determine the universe expansion is accelerating. “That tool remains to this day one of our very best for studying the universe.”
Henrietta died 100 years ago, and her work was so important it led Edwin Hubble to determine that the universe was expanding in the first place. So she is responsible for two of the most important discoveries in the history of astrophysics.
(Henrietta, right, Hubble center, her work, left)
Because women rarely wrote the history books, we know too little about the groundbreaking women who came before us. I often feel that these words I leave behind are for future generations to know that mothers like me resisted.
In 2016, I had left behind news. I was writing screenplays, directing pilots, and creating shows. I was recovering from my post traumatic news syndrome. Well, you know the story from there. I saw a fraud being perpetuated on my country, a fraud using the vocabulary of misogyny, a fraud who stole from innocent victims who believed his pyramid schemes - who believed what they saw on TV.
We didn’t have the armor for the psychological abuse the country was undergoing. We didn’t even have words for it yet. I deployed the term ‘gaslighting’ in November of 2016, in a Maewestside blog post, a realization I had on a plane when reflecting on the Charles Boyer - Ingrid Bergman film ‘Gas Light.’
The more I wrote, the more often I would see my words stolen, twisted, misused by Trump and his growing cult - their heads filled with Russian troll mind war. The cult didn’t know that Trump to Putin was just another Yanukovych.
The words I have written in the last seven years on disinformation and radicalization could probably wrap around the sun, which I learned last night has ‘earthquakes’ but we don’t call them that.
Zarina
As I plan the Hollywood premiere of ‘Eastern Front - Terror & Torture in Ukraine’ with Zarina Zabrisky - a poet and author turned war correspondent who is among the reporters featured in the film, I am continually mining her incredible mind for ways to combat Putin’s insidious propaganda machine.
Zarina has been publicly opposing Putin since 2011, when she organized a protest in front of the San Francisco Russian embassy in support of Pussy Riot - a Russian punk band arrested for staging an anti-Putin ‘punk prayer’ in a Moscow church.
Zarina’s history proved very valuable in the war for truth. Born in St. Petersburg, Russia, she spent summers in Odesa in her youth. Up until the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, she had lived in San Francisco for the last 25 years. She flew to the front in 2022 and her on the ground reporting has been vital to our understanding of Putin’s war of terror.
Her keen insights into Combat Propaganda come from being forced to take four years of propaganda studies in college. I have been pouring through her archives all night. I know her to be a brilliant writer, and have cited her work often on these pages - the story below is one example…
But even so, her archives have my jaw dropping continuously. There is a vast wealth of information for anyone who wants to get serious about arming yourself and loved ones from Putin’s psycho war machine.
Here are some key excerpts from a post that compiles all her main reporting on Russian Cyberwar and Propaganda:
I have been reporting on the Russian cyberwar against the US since 2015. Forced to study “combat-propaganda” or “spetz-propaganda” at LGU, Leningrad State University, in order to get my degree in English and American Literature, I understand the principles and strategies behind the Kremlin campaign. Putin, Medvedev, and Sechin attended the same school.
The main goal of spetz-propaganda is to cause confusion in the enemy’s population.
Combat, or “black” propaganda allows to distort the real facts in order to achieve its goals. It is an effective weapon used for the sole purpose of killing — smashing — the opponent’s brains.
Methods of black propaganda impact the audience at the deep psychological level and consequently conventional logical arguments can’t undo its effects. …
‘Psychological War Strategies’
It is critical to understand the basics in order to resist brainwashing… psychological manipulation on a subconscious level.
“You can’t shoot everyone” claims a famous Russian slogan. True—but you can gradually brainwash most of them.
In a mind war, the dead, wounded or imprisoned do not change the course of events. They are just photo-shopped off the record, if they are lucky, or proclaimed to be traitors, murderers and child rapists over all channels of national TV-and that would be the only TV existing in the psycho-totalitarian state.
The main principles behind combat propaganda: demoralization of the enemy by using implements and modes both blatant and subtle, and sowing seeds of doubt by distorting reality in a way familiar to the enemy, using his own vocabulary and emotional arsenal.
In the age of psychological and information wars, the mind is the only weapon and the only defense.
Coming to the street with a loudspeaker and shouting is as efficient as shooting feathered arrows and throwing darts into the heart of a nuclear mushroom.
It might feel good, but if we care about the fate of the world, we need to turn to books, documentaries, cartoons, films, high art. To education. To thinking passionately.
For it is a war. A war in which no blood is shed but the minds are corrupted slowly and, overall, inconspicuously.
We need to resist slowly and diligently, with poise and determination, keeping our feelings restrained, keeping our vocabulary precise and acute, using our minds and hearts, not fists, shooting words like bullets—to strip the Mind Monster of its imaginary power and open up the zombie-box that closed over Russia.
You see what I mean about jaw-dropping? And that is only the surface layer.
Here, she offers 17 Kremlin Disinformation Techniques and you need to know them all. Among the most critical:
Pushing Kremlin narratives
Amplifying Extreme Voices
Rapid Fire Conspiracy/Overload
The 60/40 Method (a sinister Goebbels contrivance)
Distraction/Deflection
Trolling
Trolling people that Russia perceives as its opponents in the West is a long established ploy across forums, social networks, portals, chat rooms and news sites. This includes aggressive, mocking or abusive messages. Trolls can cause significant damage: spoil online public discussions, spread harmful or destructive ideas, destroy a sense of mutual trust in a community and discredit opponents. RT’s use of trolling methods are acknowledged by its editor-in-chief.
Repetition
Positive Image Engineering
Rotten Herring/The Big Lie
False Equivalence
Gaslighting
Gaslighting makes the opponent doubt reality and facts.
She wrote these 17 tips more than three years ago, and each category has been used like blunt instruments on the minds of Americans, who have no protection from of any of this.
I asked Zarina to write a slim volume like Timothy Snyder’s ‘On Tyranny’ that we can all refer to, and she said she has written, and written, and spoken and spoken on this topic to the point where she fears educating Americans is like educating cats. She is now in the kinetic war-zone, and that is understandably her focus.
But even she wants to be wrong about the US. Having lived in America for much of her life, she has hope because Americans have a spirit that the Russians have long ago lost - and it’s why the Russians will lose this war.
The spirit of the Ukrainian people is strong and formidable, she says, and it’s why she can’t wait to be back in Ukraine after our premiere in two weeks.
And so we keep fighting.
I fight here from the US, doing everything I can to expose and document the criminal traitors in America. She works from the war zone, bringing stories of the human spirit, and stories of art, and resistance. She also documents the torture - both physically and emotionally.
Her archives - which so brilliantly expose psychological war strategies, also expose the necessity of poetry and film and books and music.
Strewn throughout her writings are quotes from Jean Cocteau films like ‘Blood of a Poet’ and the French literary theorist, philosopher, and linguist Roland Barthes, who writes of mythifying myths. Zarina is inspired by the surrealists and the theater of absurd, as she writes:
After the formal collapse of the USSR, the formaldehyde-soaked corpse of a political criminal in the middle of the central square of the country took on a new, reverse, mirror meaning of no-meaning. An ideal simulacrum, it established the natural order of the world that was no more.
In its place, came the mind war, and as Zarina writes, at its core “Putin and his close circle of allies invest in information warfare in order to secure their wealth and security.”
Zarina recalls what saved her mind from the capture of thieves:
What saved my sanity and moral dignity during the years of dull drills about tank parts, AK-47 assembling and disassembling, and writing pamphlets to the imaginary American soldiers during my university years:
William Blake. The Songs of Innocence and Experience.
Fitzgerald. Tender is the Night.
Jim Morrison. “When the music over…”
In one particularly moving passage, she writes of “the root of the terror, war, totalitarian power, is the vulgarity of the human nature” and how the only antidote is poetry.
Words are what we have.
They are sacred.
Words such as these on pages like this hold the clues to give us safe passage back to sanity, away from broken people who are trying to control our minds for their endless gluttony.
They are thieves.
They plunder minds and countries.
We are the people who will stop them.
****
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“I say a silent prayer of thanksgiving as I walk upon the earth.”-Audrey Peterman.
“May the viral hope for truth and humanity wash away the chaos of these years.”-S.C., Bette community member
“Something Sacred never dies in almost all of us, that can hear the invitation of Truth…”-words from a Bette Dangerous community member
“Nothing but blue skies from now on…”-Irving Berlin
(Zarina reporting from Ukraine)