multistability posted:

Lmao this is literally straight out of Edward Lansdale's counterinsurgency playbook (the following is all paraphrased from Radio War Nerd ep 39 — Cold War Counterinsurgencies):

Lansdale was an advertiser who ended up working for the OSS during WWII. He was really into the idea that terror must be used to pacify or reorient regions where people might be sympathetic to insurgents and argued that you must terrorise the local population in “funny” or “humorous” ways.

There was one “prank” in particular that he loved to brag about and found very funny which his men carried out during their campaign against the Huk insurgency in the Philippines:

In one of the villages there was a sympathetic courier who used to carry supplies between the village where the food was grown and the hills a bit further away where the Huk were hiding out. One day, the courier was caught bringing some supplies to the Huk, and when he was interrogated by Lansdale’s people, he confessed to everything on tape and was murdered. His body was brought back out to the trail between the hills and the village and left there until it was found by some local villager. They spread rumours to the people in the village that it was actually the Huk who killed him. The villagers buried him and then in the middle of the night they set up these loudspeakers and put in the tape recorder and the villagers all of a sudden hear the guy’s voice confessing to all of his crimes from the cemetery. They didn’t know what a tape recorder or loudspeakers were, and so apparently they all fled, leaving the village completely cleared the next day.

Jetto Jagga posted:

Haha wow stupid superstitious natives, being scared of psychotic freaks who will torture you to death 🤣

StashAugustine posted:

I like ghost's theory that the CIA just released tropical birds into the area for laughs

StashAugustine posted:

Iirc that was also where they faked vampire attacks by draining corpses of blood

William Blum, Killing Hope posted:

"Another Lansdale-initiated "psywar" operation played on the superstitious dread in the Philippine countryside of the asuang, a mythical vampire. A psywar squad entered a town and planted rumors that an asuang lived in the neighboring hill where the Huks were based, a location from which government forces were anxious to have them out. Two nights later, after giving the rumors time to circulate among Huk sympathizers in the town and make their way up the hill, the psywar squad laid an ambush for the rebels along a trail used by them. When a Huk patrol passed, the ambushers silently snatched the last man, punctured his neck vampire-fashion with two holes, held his body by the heels until the blood drained out, and put the corpse back on the trail. When the Huks, as superstitious as any other Filipinos, discovered the bloodless comrade, they fled from the region."

https://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/life/features/the-war-against-the-ira-and-the-birth-of-fake-news-36947153.html posted:

Propaganda also accused terrorists of dabbling in witchcraft and black magic, with the British even going as far as planting black altars and placing upside-down crucifixes in parts of Belfast. Colin Wallace, an Army intelligence officer, claimed: "We used to collect chicken blood from the cookhouse at the Army barracks and put that on the altars, so it looked like there had been a sacrifice, or something".

Laterite posted:

i'm going to become the mothman

multistability posted:

Incidentally, this reminds me some of the poo poo the Brits were running out of the Information Research Department's psy-ops unit 'Information Policy' in Northern Ireland during the Troubles:

Google Colin Wallace, he is one spooky motherfucker

Shima Honnou posted:

weird birds and aerosolized lsd

Ross DaouThot posted:

ok so show of hands who here has read programmed to kill by David McGowan

StashAugustine posted:

Iirc that was also where they faked vampire attacks by draining corpses of blood

quote:

A male voice was recorded through an echo chamber that represented the soul of the dead soldier. In some cases, the recording was actually too persuasive for its own good. The tape was so effective that we were instructed not to play it within earshot of the South Vietnamese forces, because they were as susceptible as the Viet Cong or North Vietnamese Army.

multistability posted:

Shear Modulus posted:

i've read elsewhere that none of this poo poo actually worked and that all the locals knew it was the american troops known to be in the area mutilating the corpses and not vampires

multistability posted:

Yeah now that I actually think about it psy-ops such as Lansdale's and Wallace's are reflective of a certain bigoted colonial or imperialistic attitude towards the people who are being subjected to them, and I have no doubt that if you see a corpse hanging upside down completely drained of blood you would be so terrified you would just get the gently caress out of there regardless. Like the point of counterinsurgency isn't so much the means rather than the end, which is to terrify the insurgency and the population which supports that insurgency into submission

Azathoth posted:

Yeah, I think there was an overarching goal to make the community believe the craziest possible poo poo as a marginalization tactic, but I would agree that most of it was throwing a ton of poo poo out there and seeing what stuck. I do think that there were some researchers who absolutely took government money under the table, and I do legit believe that Barker was a target, but I shouldn't have said for sure that he was a part of it, even if I do believe that he was.

Danger posted:

man it’s be crazy if like all this poo poo kicked off as a way to discredit civil rights and leftist groups. like if the first and most famous case of it was exactly that.

StashAugustine posted:

I like ghost's theory that the CIA just released tropical birds into the area for laughs

Fried Watermelon posted:

If it didn't work in Afghanistan then what are the chances it will work at home lol

TrixRabbi posted:

https://twitter.com/kept_simple/status/1428046405986394117?s=21

Shear Modulus posted:

i've read elsewhere that none of this poo poo actually worked and that all the locals knew it was the american troops known to be in the area mutilating the corpses and not vampires

multistability posted:

Yeah now that I actually think about it psy-ops such as Lansdale's and Wallace's are reflective of a certain bigoted colonial or imperialistic attitude towards the people who are being subjected to them, and I have no doubt that if you see a corpse hanging upside down completely drained of blood you would be so terrified you would just get the gently caress out of there regardless. Like the point of counterinsurgency isn't so much the means rather than the end, which is to terrify the insurgency and the population which supports that insurgency into submission

Shear Modulus posted:

i've read elsewhere that none of this poo poo actually worked and that all the locals knew it was the american troops known to be in the area mutilating the corpses and not vampires

TrixRabbi posted:

https://twitter.com/kept_simple/status/1428046405986394117?s=21

gradenko_2000 posted:

https://twitter.com/Xaniken/status/1415908463344066560?s=19

gradenko_2000 posted:

https://twitter.com/Xaniken/status/1415908463344066560?s=19

Proust Malone posted:

https://twitter.com/alexandereylar/status/1428113363058397187?s=21