The New Capture - ‘Sick a Little Bit’
RadPod’s interview with podcasters from the Czech Republic reveal the dark global sickness of Russia’s pernicious information warfare being waged through psychocults and exploitation of media distrust
My dad was born in Czechoslovakia into a German family living in what was called Upper Silesia. I remember visiting his town when I was five, and I recall it being so depressing. So poor. A sense of despair permeated the village.
My dad talked rarely of the war - the Russian front coming to his hometown, hiding his sisters in haystacks so they wouldn’t be raped by the Russian soldiers. His widowed mother desperately trying to feed six starving children. Playing in abandoned tanks, seeing dead bodies, cleaning up the death, only for it to happen all over again. Post-war he was shipped to Germany on a cattle train, Bavarian farmers forced to take him in.
My father dreaming of San Francisco, being the only one in his family making it to America, and living that dream - the American dream. I wrote about my father in Byline Supplement, and just learned today that I made the Byline Times print edition, which for an old newsie is always special.
Ep65 of RadPod dropped yesterday and it features disinformation researchers Alex Alvarova and Josef Holy, who host the Czech Republic podcast, Canaries in the Net.
In our interview, we learned that some of the same bad actors pushing the QAnon radicalization cult are involved in pushing a cult aimed at Eastern Europeans which is using mindfulness and peace to lead people to believe that Putin is their savior and to ingest anti-science nonsense on climate change. There’s overlap between the cults, and like in America, they’re brainwashing people one at a time at scale.
Alex, who also appeared on Ep15 of RapPod, explained that growing up under Soviet-era rule made people ‘sick a little bit’.
“We grew up in constant war paranoia, they applied their warmongering culture on us,” said Alex. “It’s actually a part of our brain, so we are actually sick a little bit and infected a little bit with their way of thinking.”
“You in America trust one another, Canadians, the same way,” she said. “You say ‘misinformation’, we say ‘disinformation’ because it implies a bad intent, like someone is going to mindf**k your brain… this is what we say because we know the Russians.
“You say ‘misinformation’ because you expect that no one could be that bad, that someone could come and tell you lies but that’s the culture, to destroy your culture of trust. That’s their goal.”
Josef said he would double down on that.
“People always ask me what is the goal of Russia,” he said. “They are not naive. They’re not pushing their agenda that Russia is the best. We all know how the life looks in Russia. People don’t have flushing toilets in most parts of the country, so no one would really want to live there.
“What they are striving for is to seed conflict in a society, so any topic that can generate polarization, from culture wars like gender topics - what is the role of women in society - or an explanation of history. How World War II started and ended is still a big topic.
“We’ve been fed for 40 years that Russia liberated us, but when you look at it from a distance, it was not liberation, it was the new capture.”
He said the Russian propaganda pushes anti-Nato, anti-EU, anti-democracy narratives.
“They say the whole Western Europe is governed by Muslims and is broken, transgender people are everywhere, junkies everywhere, economy breaking up, Europe will fall very soon,” he said. “They say NATO is an aggressive pact, and NATO started the war in Ukraine. They try to paint all Western institutions in a bad light.”
He said they attack Czech’s Public Service Media and have been seeding doubt and distrust in what he said is a media with integrity.
It’s important to listen to the entire interview because it is reflective of how global and insidious the fight is for our collective minds.
I also believe what we are dealing with here in America is a new form of capture - those of us on the frontlines see how are minds are attacked.
We must awaken everyone to the battle, because we continue to allow people to get picked off one at a time at scale - whether through radicalization channels online or Fox News or other authoritarian right media or authoritarian churches and cults.
Eastern Europeans have seen this before so they have more inoculation to it than we do in the West, where it is still invisible to so many millions of people.
But even so, Alex said the repetition and abundance of lies erodes people’s ability to discern fact from fiction.
This is our tipping point.
Call the White House and demand Joe Biden address our crisis - this is the fight of our lifetime. It’s global, and it will not stop until we defeat it. We have allowed our freedoms to be exploited to destroy us from within, destroy our trust and our goodness. It must stop before we too are ‘sick a little bit’.
My dad made it out of Nazi rule, to live the American dream, only to be lured in his final years by a new kind of capture, one that targets and exploits minds.
My fight has always been for my children. I realize now it is also for my father, for our elders.
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More info about Bette Dangerous - This magazine is written by Heidi Siegmund Cuda, an Emmy-award winning investigative reporter, author, and veteran music and nightlife columnist. She is the cohost of RADICALIZED Truth Survives, an investigative show about disinformation and is part of the Byline Media team. Thank you for your support of independent investigative journalism.
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