Hope & Change... And Disinformation & Glasnost

I just finished one of the most eye-opening political books that I’ve read in a long time. In Disinformation, former Romanian Lt. General – and current PJ Media columnist – Ion Mihai Pacepa and cowriter Ronald Rychlak shed light on the Soviet technique of disinformation, and they demonstrate how we’ve seen it throughout history and even today. The authors define disinformation as “a secret intelligence tool, intended to bestow a Western, nongovernment cachet on government [i.e., Soviet] lies.”  Pacepa shares plenty of examples of how Soviet, Eastern Bloc and Russian leaders from Stalin to Khrushchev to Ceausescu to Putin have employed disinformation to change public perception of the West and even alter the course of history.

In one particular chapter, Pacepa delves into the 2008 and 2012 presidential campaigns to demonstrate how a senator from Illinois used the same type of disinformation techniques to catapult himself to the presidency. Pacepa admits that “the 2008 election campaign for the White House was, for me, a major case of deja vu” as he witnessed how the Democratic Party, and Barack Obama in particular, used the mainstream news media to paint redistribution of wealth as the solution to our country’s problems:

In the same way, the establishment US media painted America as a decaying, racist, predatory capitalist realm unable to provide medical care for the poor, rebuild her “crumbling schools,” or replace the “shuttered mills that once provided a decent life for men and women of every race,” and promised all this could be changed by redistributing the country’s wealth.

[…]

…the quintessence of Marxism is change, which is built on the dialectical materialist tenet that quantitative changes generate qualitative transformations. Thus, “change,” through the redistribution of wealth, became the electoral slogan in all Soviet bloc countries.

Alas, change through wealth redistribution also became the electoral slogan of the Democratic Party during American’s 2008 electoral campaign.

Obama and his camp continued to use disinformation techniques to denigrate capitalism into the 2012 campaign cycle until, in Pacepa’s words, “Capitalism lost elections for the first time in the history of the United States.”

Pacepa also demonstrates how Obama used another Soviet technique – glasnost – to promote himself. You may have grown up as I did believing that glasnost was, as Wikipedia defines it, ” a policy that called for increased openness and transparency in government institutions and activities in the Soviet Union.” Not so fast, as Pacepa informs us that “glasnost is an old Russian term for polishing the ruler’s image.” Obama and his speechwriters used this form of glasnost indeed, neutralizing Obama’s far-left voting record and associations, as well as portraying the Senator as the country’s savior, much in the same way that leaders like Ceausescu did:

Just as Ceausescu loved to remind everyone that someone as great as he “is born once every five hundred years,” so did Sen. Barack Obama portentously proclaim, “We are the ones we have been waiting for,” artfully substituting the regal “we” to convey his actual meaning: I am the One you have been waiting for.”

[…]

The Democratic Party and the media both portrayed Obama as an American messiah, and the senator agreed: On June 8, 2008, during an electoral speech in New Hampshire, he stated that the beginning of his presidency would be “the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.”

After listing some statistics citing the number of times Obama referred to himself in speeches during his first term, Pacepa notes that, “Self-serving speeches have always been an important facet of glasnost.”

Disinformation opened my eyes to quite a few new truths about the history of the 20th and 21st centuries, and Pacepa’s perspective on Obama in particular supports my notion that the current occupant of the White House is a stealth socialist bent on changing American forever from the inside out. (For more on the idea of Obama’s stealth socialism, please check out Stanley Kurtz’ Radical In Chief.) This knowledge gives me an even greater sense of urgency that we must turn back the tide of the last five years if we want America to be the land of freedom that we’ve always wanted it to be.