Nicholas West – A new project has been announced by Arizona State University’s Center on the Future of War and think tank New America. This collaboration has created a subset within ASU titled, “The Weaponized Narrative Initiative.” Two Co-directors, Brad Allenby and Joel Garreau, have penned a must-read opinion piece at Defense One, wherein they have employed the Orwellian catchphrase of “weaponized narrative” to replace what’s commonly known as propaganda.
The two authors center their piece with a premise of apocalyptic concern about foreign State actors and influence peddling, saying that “in the hands of professionals” the emotional techniques of narrative are a cornerstone of perception control over the target populace.
In the hands of professionals, the powerful emotions of anger and fear can be used to control adversaries, limit their options, and disrupt their functional capabilities.
Ironically their justifications for the U.S. government to make propaganda Mission #1 begin with two embedded links to dubious claims and outright falsehoods stemming from the discredited Washington Post promoting the idea that the Russians hacked the U.S. election and are supposedly employing a battery of alternative news outlets, to produce “fake news.”
Other motives cited by the authors for taking extreme action are everything from Brexit to Ukraine and basically anything else that would see people awakening en masse to the gross mismanagement of their feudal leaders. These populist uprisings are instead seen as coordinated efforts by a cadre of mind terrorists who apparently want to “undermine an opponent’s civilization, identity, and will by generating complexity, confusion, and political and social schisms.”