The strange game of active measures is one in which the practise of deception invokes the erasure of facts in ways that can only ever offset, displace of delay their eventual broad acknowledgement and discovery by that long-suffering internal audience for whom misdirection and compliant fear under autocracy is normative to the point of cliché.
A brutal truth once hidden is not diminished in time; we can expect to see an immediate ramping up and amplification of the same well-worn narrative idioms to attempt to conceal facts so ugly that there can be no effective counter-narrative when their population more broadly discovers and perceives the reality of what has been done in their name.
Certainly, the amygdala hijack is leveraged for all its worth and those who having once stepped across the event horizon of half-mirrored conspiratorial fiction rarely return. I can’t help but wonder if the endless supply of manufactured narratives (on a spectrum from mixed truth through to rank absurdity) represents the constitutive invocation of a mask that does not hide any more significant fact than that they have misled their own people for so long that the storytellers are now themselves incapable of distinguishing fantasy from reality.
Context: countering disinformation over Bucha atrocities
Daedelus Kite 