 Pentagon wants to return Special Ops propagandists to Ukraine. An article by The Washington Post titled Pentagon Looks to Restart Top Secret Programs in Ukraine contains some interesting information about what U.S. Special Ops forces were doing in Ukraine in the lead-up to the Russian invasion last year, and what they are slated to be doing there in the future. The Pentagon is urging Congress to resume funding a pair of top secret programs in Ukraine suspended ahead of Russia's invasion last year, according to current and former U.S. officials, writes the Post's Wesley Morgan. If approved, the move would allow American Special Operations troops to employ Ukrainian operatives to observe Russian military movements and counter disinformation. Much further down in the article, we learn the specifics of what those two top secret programs were. One of them entailed U.S. commandos sending Ukrainian operatives on surreptitious reconnaissance missions in Ukraine's east to collect intelligence on Russia. The other entailed secretly administering online propaganda, though of course the Washington Post does not describe it as such. We had people taking apart Russian propaganda and telling the true story on blogs. Wapo was told by a source described as a person in the Special Operations community. Now, U.S. Special Forces employing Ukrainian operatives to take apart Russian propaganda and tell the true story on blogs is just U.S. Special Ops forces administering U.S. propaganda online. Whether or not they actually see themselves as telling the true story or taking apart Russian propaganda does not change the fact that they are administering U.S. government propaganda. A government circulating media which advances its information interests is precisely the thing that state propaganda is. The U.S. government is theoretically prohibited from directly administering propaganda to its own population, though even that line has been deliberately eroded in recent years with measures like the Smith-Mont Modernization Act and U.S. government infiltration of Silicon Valley. But there's nothing stopping the funding and directing of foreign bodies to circulate propaganda on the Internet, which has no national borders. Back when U.S. propaganda was limited to old media like the CIA's Radio Free Europe and Radio Free Asia, it was possible to claim that the propaganda was solely being targeted at the populations where that media was broadcast. But propaganda circulated online will necessarily trickle over everywhere, including to U.S. audiences. The Washington Post explains that these secret programs were discontinued ahead of the Russian invasion last year because a stipulation in the 2018 NDAA law, which permitted their funding, forbids their use during a traditional armed conflict. So the Pentagon is working to persuade Congress to repeal that condition. Part of its sales pitch to Congress to get those secret operations restarted is that they will be, quote, what the U.S. military calls non-kinetic or non-violent missions, end quote, which the administering of propaganda would certainly qualify as. As we discussed recently, it's very silly that there's a major push in the U.S. power alliance to begin administering more government propaganda in order to counter Russian propaganda when Russian propaganda has no meaningful influence in the Western world. Before RT was shut down, it was drawing just 0.04% of the U.K.'s total TV audience. The much-touted Russian election interference campaign on Facebook was mostly unrelated to the election and affected approximately one out of every 23,000 pieces of content according to Facebook. While research by New York University into Russian trolling behavior on Twitter in the lead up to the 2016 election found no evidence of a meaningful relationship between exposure to the Russian foreign influence campaign and changes in attitudes, polarization, or voting behavior. A study by the University of Adelaide found that despite all the warnings of Russian bots and trolls following Russia's invasion of Ukraine, the overwhelming majority of inauthentic behavior on Twitter during that time was anti-Russian in nature. In reality, this push we've been seeing to pour more and more energy into propaganda, censorship, and other forms of narrative control has nothing to do with taking apart Russian propaganda and everything to do with suppressing dissent. The U.S. Empire has been frantically ramping up propaganda and censorship because the great power competition it has been preparing against Russia and China is going to require economic warfare, massive military spending, and nuclear brinkmanship that no one would consent to without lots of manipulation. Russia is going to consent to being made poorer, colder, and less safe over some global power struggle that doesn't benefit them unless that consent is actively manufactured. That's why the media have been acting so weird lately. That's why dissident voices are getting harder and harder to find online. That's the purpose of the new fact checking industry and other forms of narrative control. And that's why the Pentagon wants congressional funding for its propaganda operations in Ukraine. The fact that the Empire's great power competition happens to be occurring at the same time as widespread access to the Internet means that drastic measures must be made to ensure its information dominance so it can march the public into playing along with this agenda. The more desperate our rulers grow to secure unipolar planetary domination, the more important controlling the narrative becomes.