Speaker A
Sergey Borisovich, from the new territories, territories that have gone through military actions, how is the issue of information warfare perceived?
Sergey Pereslegin discusses the differences between propaganda and information warfare, emphasizing respect for opponents and the complexity of conflict resolution.
Key Takeaways
- Propaganda dehumanizes the enemy, complicating peace negotiations.
- Information warfare targets the opponent’s mindset and social bonds.
- Respecting the adversary is crucial for timely conflict resolution.
- War is inevitable but temporary, requiring pragmatic negotiation.
- Political culture influences the nature and impact of propaganda.
What the video covers
- Information warfare is perceived differently in conflict zones compared to outside perspectives.
- Propaganda simplifies war by dehumanizing the enemy, making it easier to justify violence.
- Human history shows conflict is inevitable, but dehumanizing the enemy is a moral and strategic error.
- War is transient and must end with negotiation, which propaganda often undermines by demanding total enemy destruction.
- Mutual dehumanization fueled by propaganda prevents peace and prolongs conflict.
- Respect for the opponent is essential for ending wars and gaining benefits from them.
- Information warfare aims to change the thinking of the opponent by destroying social cohesion.
- Russia's cultural openness makes it vulnerable to foreign information warfare.
- Effective propaganda requires political will and culture, and can coexist with respect for the enemy.
- Historical examples like the Russo-Japanese War illustrate how respect limited conflict duration.
Chapters
- 00:00Perception of Information Warfare in Conflict Zones
- 02:02Differences Between Propaganda and Information Warfare
- 04:00The Inevitability of Conflict in Human History
- 05:48Limits of Enemy Destruction and the Need for Negotiation
- 07:54How Propaganda Prevents Peace
- 09:47Respect for the Opponent as a Key to Ending War
- 11:27Complexity of Information Warfare and Its Impact
- 14:48Political Will, Culture, and Historical Examples
Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown
Speaker A
And in general, is it viewed differently now? Well, it's not by chance that we held a seminar on information warfare here, our own internal one, so, of course, everything looks completely different here.
Speaker A
Well, I would even say a very simple thing. For example, from the perspective of even well-informed people who seem to understand the situation—and I am speaking for myself here as well—there is still a sense that a combat zone is, well, directly a combat zone.
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The risks are high here, and there is a struggle going on every second, continuously. But you arrive and realize that people live here, and their anxieties regarding a counteroffensive, for example—and they do exist—are no higher than our own anxieties.
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People live differently, and some things naturally affect them much less. In what way less? Well, for example, in discussions about the enemy having already launched an offensive, already advancing, us thinking about evacuation—they just shrug, because they are on the ground and know that isn't the case.
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But this isn't related to information warfare; it's simply related to consciousness. So, the first answer to your question. Yes, it looks different here.
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And the second point, actually, is that here I finally clearly understood for myself something that was already obvious, but it is one thing to know it and another to internalize it.
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I realized how much information warfare and propaganda differ. Let's start with the fact that propaganda is always very simple. There is even a concept: wartime propaganda, where everything must be simple.
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There is the enemy, here are our own, the enemy must be killed, defeated, and so on. And at the same time, regarding the enemy, one can use anything at all.
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What you call their sabotage group is terrorists. Our sabotage group is heroes fighting for their country. That is exactly what propaganda is.
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The main task of any propaganda is the dehumanization of the enemy. Because if the enemy ceases to be a human, it is significantly easier to fight them.
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But I want to note here that almost all of human history—which we know more or less decently since the third millennium BC—is essentially the attempts of people, the attempts of humanity's teachers, to explain two simple things.
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First, history is conflict-ridden. Many conflicts in history end in internal or external war, for it is simply the extreme form of historical conflict.
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And the human socio-system, oversaturated with contradictions, cannot and will not develop without conflict. And that is the first truth.
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So, you shouldn't think that there will ever be a time of total peace, tranquility, and development, where the wolves are fed, the sheep are safe, and so on. That never happens.
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But there was a second thought. The essence of the second thought was that in these conflicts, people fight people, and dehumanizing the enemy is a sin.
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I will note that I am using the word "sin" here in two senses. Our classic figurative sense, meaning that which does not align with the will of the Lord, and the original meaning, where sin is simply a miss.
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It was a term used in archery. Uh, how much you have sinned is how much you have missed. So, it is also simply an erroneous decision.
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So, the essence of propaganda is always dehumanization. On one hand, it seems good; your military efforts increase because you are fighting those who are subhuman, and accordingly, everything is permissible toward them, and you must go to the end, everything is fine.
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But history teaches a third thing as well. War is inevitable, but war is transient; it begins and ends. Yes, there have been very long wars, but even those long wars had an end.
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And this means that sooner or later, you somehow have to negotiate on some terms. And if at the level of propaganda you have no conditions other than the complete destruction of the enemy, at least as an organized entity,
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then in reality you eventually begin to understand very well that further weakening and destroying this enemy is not actually what you need yourself.
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Well, as a simple example, everyone understands now that in the event of a total Russian victory over Ukraine, the main beneficiary of this victory would be Poland, not Russia at all.
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And from this point of view, Russia is certainly better off with a situation where peace is concluded before Poland can reap the main benefits. This is perfectly clear.
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But here the question arises: if you need to talk, then how can the occupiers even negotiate with each other? The standard Ukrainian, and, by the way, Wikipedia term for Russia is Nazis. The standard Russian term for Ukrainians.
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How, in principle, can these people negotiate with each other? How can you negotiate if, before talks even begin, you set and voice to the entire globe conditions that you know for a fact are absolutely unacceptable to the other side?
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In this case, I am speaking more about Zelensky, for he loves to do this very much. We are relatively quiet about this, since a phrase like "the condition for peace is the destruction of Nazism in Ukraine" is not specific.
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And from this point of view, one could imply, in general, anything at all if one wishes. And the phrase about not talking about any kind of peace until Crimea, Donetsk, and Luhansk are joined, and the guilty are punished—well, excuse me, but that simply means negotiations are impossible until Russia is completely defeated.
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What to expect, in general, is not very easy even from the West, and from Ukraine, well, let’s be frank, it’s difficult. But in the end, look at what propaganda does.
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Propaganda clearly prevents us from ending the war. And it does so precisely through mutual dehumanization and a wild simplification of the situation.
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A funny picture. After Austerlitz, or rather, to be more precise, after Friedland, Alexander realized that he needed to make peace with Napoleon. And it was truly necessary.
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And, actually, the great victory of 1812 could not have happened without that peace. But then a question arises; strangely enough, there was propaganda back then, too, and the soldiers started whispering: "How can this be? Napoleon is the Antichrist, yet we are making peace with him."
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And this wasn't just a question of emotion. The Tsar is the Tsar. He said: "Peace means peace." They didn't argue with that.
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They had a different question: how can the Tsar physically meet with the Antichrist at all? That’s just impossible. They are actually talking to each other somehow.
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And for the people, it was, in general, an upending of their consciousness and a complete failure to understand what was happening.
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But notice, it would seem that based on this example, one should clearly understand that elementary respect for the opponent is a vital condition not just for ending a war in time, but also for gaining benefits from it.
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I have quoted Sun Tzu: "He who does not understand the full danger of war cannot understand the benefits of war." I will take the liberty of saying that he who is consumed by his own propaganda cannot understand the benefits of war nor the benefits of peace, and thus, from the perspective of history, ceases to be a subject and becomes an object—an object of those forces awakened by the egregors of this very propaganda.
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And from this point of view, I would say everything is very simple. In principle, propaganda is a matter of political will and political culture.
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One can fight, and fight hard, and achieve one's goals in a war without losing respect for the opponent. By the way, a good example. The Russo-Japanese War, where, of course, there was often talk on the Russian side about "yellow monkeys," but the Japanese, who won the war and gained much from it, were generally ready to negotiate with a Russian partner they respected, which, in fact, kept that war limited.
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And let's notice, imagine if the Japanese side
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here as such, or at least it isn't noticeable. But, by the way, there is indeed very little of it here, and I would say there is less of it here than in Saint Petersburg.
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On the other hand, a certain difference arises between people here who have seen certain facts, for whom certain things are completely obvious. They observed them, they were direct participants, and all of us, so to speak, in greater Russia, who are far
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from it, who only read some opinions about what is happening here, who who seriously believe that nothing more terrifying than a drone hitting the Kremlin can even be imagined.
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Yes. They read certain interpretations of what is happening here. And so which of these two groups is more susceptible to information warfare, and why, strictly speaking?
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I can say quite clearly that those Russians who are not in the DPR, those who are deep in the rear, are much more susceptible to information warfare.
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Again, I emphasize, we strictly distinguish it from propaganda, although, it would seem, their lives are calmer, more secure, and fewer changes have occurred in them since the start of the SVO than here.
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Yes, for the most part, they haven't occurred, because no, of course, there would be strong changes with the world closing off, but there was COVID before that.
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Well, yes, therefore, in general, the world simply didn't open up, but it didn't close off any more than it had. And it is very interesting here to understand what information warfare is in general.
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Because, I emphasize again, when we talk about propaganda, it is not information warfare, it is specifically propaganda. It is a simpler thing.
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Information warfare is a complex thing. Information warfare can be defined as a set of information advantages, that is, those existing in a semiotic space, aimed at changing the thinking of one of the sides. Specifically, changing the thinking. Only then, on the second
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level, changing the cultural code. Only on the third. And as a rule, few people care about or find specific actions important in an information war. The essence of information warfare lies not in inciting unrest or in velvet revolutions. The essence of information
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warfare lies in undermining the opponent's ability to think independently. And that, strictly speaking, is both the goal and the very nature of this war. At the same time, look at how all this can be done. It is often said that Russia always loses in
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an information war. This exists even at the level of jokes. Even the Second World War, which, well, the Soviet Union won with a colossal advantage, is often portrayed as if there was no victory at all, and that the enemy was
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simply buried under corpses. Yes, and even then, they supposedly almost won. Who helped the USA win the Second World War?
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Yeah, yeah, yeah. And we, by the way, never really give a proper response to that. The question is, why? The answer is very interesting. The specific features of the Russian cultural code make Russian thinking extremely universal, capable of working with
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almost any concepts—Eastern, Western, Southern—whatever they may be, we handle them calmly and digest them.
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Exactly this also makes Russia exceptionally vulnerable to information warfare. The strongest side of our code , the ability to work with foreign concepts, proves in this case to be a fundamental weakness. We easily accept what is dictated to us. At the same
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time, look at what comes next. It would seem, in theory, we could answer in kind. And here, the following thing becomes clear. In Russia, communication is formed around activity. Information warfare is non-active. We cannot respond to it with communication based
Speaker A
on activity. We are forced to remain in the layer of pure communication, where, in fact, we have few developed techniques and practices, because for centuries we have historically learned to communicate around some physical process. The second side of the matter.
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The Russian cultural code includes— and this is part of Russian Orthodoxy, notice that in the categorically non-Orthodox, non-religious Soviet Union, this did not disappear at all.
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That is, this piece is so much at the core that it didn't even notice the change from Tsar to General Secretary.
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This is the categorical imperative: do not do to others what you would not want done to yourself. This is a very strict aspect of Christianity, connected specifically in the conditions of Russia. With active hesychasm. You reach goodness, you
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reach and come to God through activity, through deeds, but good deeds, for a bad deed distances you from God. This does not stop one from fighting. And Russia has always been a great military power. But this very much hinders lying
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in propaganda. Because by engaging in post-truth in propaganda, wishing for the enemy to change their thinking, to make them weaker and worse, you violate the categorical imperative and thereby cannot achieve the good. That is, you are effectively committing spiritual
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suicide. From this follows a simple conclusion. Yes, we are doomed to lose information wars, because we can only conduct an information war in a strictly defensive manner. We cannot go on the offensive in the information space.
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Well, at least we have some kind of antidote, some counteraction. Ah, look, the first counteraction is the simplest one. Since everything for us revolves around activity, then naturally, a physical victory is a very good antidote to, uh, an information
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war, just like with the Second World War. I really love that phrase from Anisimov, where Stalin thinks: "You go ahead and write, Field Marshal, write about your lost victories, about how you almost defeated the Russian colossus. Write away, we will read it.
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Just don't forget to prepare for your lecture, otherwise you'll be left without cigarettes." And this situation , where having a victory in your pocket , you can be very calm about the fact that your victory is wrong, ugly, or
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not quite right. Maybe you should have achieved a different victory, but you have this one in your hands, and you can use it and take pride in it. That is the first method. But there is a second. The second is much more
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interesting, as it actually lies within the informational plane. The problem consists of the following. When we were discussing this topic with you, in our group gathered here on the Sea of Azov, we talked about the fact that information warfare is, as I already
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said, aimed at thinking, but it is aimed at thinking in such a way as to destroy three basic social gluons. A gluon is the glue that binds particles together. Three basic social gluons, in conditions—perhaps it’s like this everywhere, but in the conditions of
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Russian civilization, it is for sure. It is trust. And trust at many levels. Trust between people, trust in the teacher, trust in parents, and, accordingly, in children, trust in a text, and trust, by the way, in the state. And what does trust mean? It
Speaker A
means that until proven otherwise, I believe that, in general, what is being done, people are doing what they should be doing in their positions, just as I am doing what I should be doing in my position. And until proven otherwise,
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it will be considered that I am doing it correctly. Yes, we discussed this with you regarding the logic of a meaningless circle and redirection. And why did you make this film about us? If instead you should have, yes,
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If you could spend money on, say, some kind of technology, or why invest so much in a nuclear tugboat if you don’t care about culture, and it all goes in an endless circle.
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In a circle, yes. And lying, and nothing gets done. That is exactly what mistrust is. The other side of this coin is gratitude. In general, for a normal person, it is natural to be grateful to their parents, their
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friends, their teachers, their country. I mean, this is a normal, natural state . The thought of "No, they were obligated to do all of that." Well, based on the principle: "Well, the roads have become good, they did that
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with our taxes, they were supposed to do that anyway." Yes, they were, but I am grateful to them for doing it.
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Brodsky reflected on this point very clearly, and we all know his famous quote, which is probably exactly about this, and only gratitude will be heard.
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Yes. Yes. The third point. And again, this is a very natural trait. By the way, it’s curious that regarding gratitude, even the Patriarch recalled this recently, speaking, by the way, about Orthodox Christians, about real parishioners, that everyone tells God how bad they
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have it, what their problems are, and asks God for help. And, in general, for a long time, no one says: "Thank you, Lord, that I am alive, that I live in this very interesting, complex world, and so on." But, in fact, gratitude to
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the Creator for a Christian should be more than natural. And even more so, gratitude to the Savior for a Christian . That is also an interesting point.
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And, of course, gratitude is heavily influenced by information warfare. The third point is service. And this is where things are at their worst, because the standard is that you should think about yourself and your own interests. We immediately start saying
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that when there is talk of family service, that a wife, for example, serves her husband in a family, it is abusive. Although, in reality, a wife serves her husband in the family, and the husband serves his wife in the
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family. Both of them serve their children, and the children serve them. And in normal human life, the primary activity is service. And there is no getting away from that. Otherwise, your activity is, well, it’s not human, it’s devoid of meaning. It’s just
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thrashing about, and, well, actually, behavior that is more animal than human . Well yes, that is the idea proposed to us within the framework of information warfare, that work is always just about earning money, that work is earning money, and not
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building a temple, not fulfilling a mission. And this is very strong, well, at least duties, yes, yes. It is quite a beautiful situation here. And so it turns out, look, there are four levels of information warfare.
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The first level: you are doing everything wrong. For example, you attacked Ukraine the wrong way. In fact , before the attack on Ukraine, this construct, "you are doing everything wrong," was voiced many times. This is the first, lowest level. And the second
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level: your history is wrong. This is the situation over which I once parted ways quite significantly with Pyotr Georgievich Shchedrovitsky. In fact, we disagreed on a purely theoretical issue : the assessment of industrialization, including the Russian, Stalinist, and
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Soviet industrialization. From his point of view, it was done incorrectly. It incorrectly mimicked Western industrialization. And because of this, Russia lives poorly. Well, that is precisely the logic. It was a waste to undergo industrialization, a waste to spend so much effort launching a man
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into space, a waste to film a movie in space. It was a waste to decide to move from positional, combination warfare— that is, from the Cold War—to a hot one. Your history is erroneous. This is the second level. Although, as I recall
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, if I am not mistaken, there is a very common thesis among Americans that whatever your history is, including your personal one, no matter how erroneous it may be, it made you, made you who you are now, and you should be
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grateful for it. That is why Americans are much less susceptible to information warfare. It is harder to manipulate them. This is their strength , by the way, for which I highly value and respect them. But there are two
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more levels. The third level: the West is development. Russia and the East in general are repetition, a patriarchal past. It is a desire not to develop, a desire to suck your thumb and stay in bear skins. To put it in simple terms.
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You say: "You have a Russian civilization." Yes, you have it, but our civilization is continuous progress that brought people into space. We won't clarify that, actually, you were the ones who went into it, but it was our progress that led you into space,
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you understand. And yours is the preservation of some useless cultural norms and traditions, without which the rest of humanity would be much better off. Essentially, they are telling you: "Your model of existence, your model of development is erroneous; you must
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adopt another one." By the way, note that at this level, there are a lot of people who say this without realizing it is information warfare. For them, it is simply, in a sense, advice to a neighbor: why are you living like this?
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You need to live differently. But this is the third, very serious level of warfare. And there is the last, the fourth. The fourth level. You do not understand your own interests and goals . You are the wrong individuals. You
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are the wrong kind of people. And look, as a rule, this isn't about you being the wrong kind of people because you attacked Ukraine. No, once again, I emphasize that attacking Ukraine is the first level; it’s an action. You are
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acting the wrong way. And this is the fourth. You think about society, your friends, your micro-group, your community. You are slaves, you have no will, you strive to be inside some structure, while in this world, individualism wins. Only individualism
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is the foundation and basis for innovation, for invention, for technological progress. You are the wrong kind of people, not living for your own interests. From this point of view, I’ll take the liberty of saying that this position isn't even Jack
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London. Jack London, by the way, as a gold prospector, a man who worked a lot with the real physical world, was extremely cautious about such an idea.
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And many of his stories are devoted precisely to the situation where a person gives up their personal interest for the sake of others, because otherwise, in the north, you won't survive. Therefore, this is not Jack London, this is Ayn Rand, this is Atlas
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Shrugged. If one could say that harmful books exist in the world, as, for example, our teacher Andrei Sedovich Paribok sometimes says—he’s a Buddhist, a Buddhologist, and so on— then I would say that of the many books I’ve read in my life, it is the most
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harmful. I would say it is significantly more harmful than Mein Kampf. And, at the same time, partly domestic.
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And at the same time, partly domestic, considering Rand's origins, this is roughly the fourth level of information warfare. And how is it easy to understand? Look, in all, yes, but another important point, which, by the way, Mikha, is exactly what you were
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saying about our seminar. A very important aspect of information warfare is that it is never addressed to the person as a whole. Oddly enough, even though they tell you, "You must be a human, a whole person," they always
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appeal to a part, in all cases to a part: to a part of society, a part of the state, or even in relation to a person, to one of their sub-personalities, to a part of the human. And, in this sense, a very
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important part of the strategy of this very information war is to disrupt the interaction between sub-personalities, to disrupt the harmony and symphony between them, to turn the whole into a set of parts unconnected to each other.
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Again, any whole, including a human being. And when they appeal to a part, and now we arrive at answering your questions: how can one generally cope with this? See, it is very difficult when you appeal to a part, but you can
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reintegrate by appealing to the whole. Again, everyone has their own whole, from family to God and the universe, but everyone has one. The problem is that appealing to the whole for reintegration is a meta-ontological approach. It suits a person who is
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rooted in their worldview, understands other worldviews, and can enter them without losing their own. At the very least, this requires a very high level of culture and education. It is the ability to work with others 'positions as if they were one's own, and one's
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own as one of the others. In order to learn this, a person must become more complex. And there is your general answer. The main task of information warfare is simplification through destruction, by removing social glue and the connections within a
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personality. Naturally, if the information warfare strategy is simplification, and we cannot use the same strategy against the enemy due to the categorical imperative, Russia's natural strategy is complication. A complex person capable of working with the whole, a complex city, complex
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worldviews. And, by the way, I must say —and I have had to verify this in my life—that when speaking at various conferences with people deeply rooted in the Western position, they are very good at, and take great pleasure in,
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teaching what is what. But when faced with complexity, with a meta-ontological approach, with construction, I can, of course, think in your categories. And in your categories, you have errors here, here, and here. Now we will return to my
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category, because it is more convenient for me to correct them within my own. This is where it starts—and it is scary and funny, because these are adults, smart people representing their research centers—they start having hysterics. We cannot speak like that,
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we cannot reason like that. You are putting too much pressure on us. I say, "I am not putting pressure on you. I am explaining your mistakes to you, just as you were trying to explain mine to me just now." Well, in the best case,
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of course, you get the answer: "But that is a different matter." And in the worst case, the person just runs away.
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It is interesting. And this leads to a curious question. We truly need an education, at all levels, including professional, engineering, and so on, that provokes complexity. And our conversation here is very important in this regard. I don't remember if it was
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recorded or not, but we talked about how in the 19th century, almost all major Russian writers, as it turns out, were not just officers, but officers with significant front-line experience and awards, starting with Count Tolstoy, or, for example, Mikhail Lermontov, who knew
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several languages and conducted literary or other cultural activities. In general, yes, they were very complex not...
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were very complex people. I would say that the main information pressure on Russia, the information strike, is the attempt to simplify us. Complexity must be our answer.
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Well, my friends, I wish you complexity ; become more complex, and people will be drawn to you.
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Thank you. Thank you.
Topics:information warfarepropagandawarconflict resolutiondehumanizationSergey PeresleginRussiaUkrainepolitical culturehistory of war
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