Perhaps the title of the post is too on the nose? An interesting new survey of US Army information warfare history basically concludes that it’s hard to do new things while conveying them to people schooled in old things.

Information operations gained its strongest institutional acceptance when it presented itself as a set of technological capabilities designed to affect an adversary in a discrete conventional conflict. This understanding was in accordance with an American way of war that favors technological solutions over human ones and that favors conventional over unconventional conflicts. […] The history of Army information doctrine contains three additional insights that are worth discussing further. The first is that information itself is an extraordinarily complex concept whose application to war possesses infinite versatility and variation. […] A second insight concerns the tension between technical and psychological interpretations of information. This tension has been at the heart of Army information operations doctrine for the past 40 years and is one of the reasons why creating a single, unified doctrine has been so difficult. […] A final insight is perhaps the most obvious one: that Army information doctrine has experienced consistent, frequent, and often radically vacillating change since its inception. With the exception of the period from 1981 to 1991, when the doctrine was at its most primitive, the Army has never had an opportunity to build meaningful capacity around a single doctrinal construct.

What?

I might be biased, since I tend to focus more on the 1800s and 1900s birth of modern information wafare (with the exception of energy), but the survey of “changes” seems too short.

In completely unrelated news a Psychological Operations Specialist assigned to the I Marine Expeditionary Force Information Group has been charged with assault and battery. His case spread quickly after a video was shared showing him verbally attacking two minority women and then quickly losing a physical fight.

I’m going to go out on a limb here and say it was hard to teach that young white man how to give up his obvious schooling in plain old American racism. Did his recruiters even check if he follows Elon Musk before letting him into boot camp?

It all reminds me of WWII information warfare reports that advocated censorship as a democracy preserving effort and holding a very narrow focus on anti-racism. It’s no coincidence anti-democratic foreign assets push Twitter into extremist uncensored racism. It’s all not really that complex.

[There are] three elementary forms of domination: control of violence (sovereignty), control of information (bureaucracy), and personal charisma (manifested, for example, in electoral politics).

You think the Governor of Florida banning Black history and crushing dissent is new or different? Nope that’s someone using charismatic elections to control violence (Police) and then pushing hard to control information. Basically a regression to Andrew Jackson’s illegal annexation of Florida to crush Black emancipation and prosperity (things now made illegal to teach in school).

Dare I say this becomes so easy it’s even… black and white? I mean let’s talk more about huge changes that came after the WWI U.S. Propaganda Office and nationalized networks, while we’re at it here.

The big question is why Enron, “the most innovative company in America“, ever got caught and held accountable for the thing Elon does constantly: lie and defraud people.

…Times story carried a quote from the closing arguments of the plaintiffs’ lawyer, Nicholas Porritt: “This case is about whether rules that apply to everybody else should apply to Elon Musk,” he said. On the one hand, sure, yes, that would be nice and good. On the other, it has become so radically implausible to the extent that it’s borderline absurd.

The answer, at least from a jury judging Tesla, was that they didn’t really understand how hateful constant improvisation and disregard for law and order by an American CEO would be a bad thing.

A jury was meant to recognize the harm in obvious crimes like, you know, intentional fraud.

Elon Musk’s own defense was that not everyone became his victim, therefore he couldn’t be held accountable for people he victimized.

Seriously, he said some people didn’t believe his fraud as if that should mean those who did have themselves to blame only. Imagine every bank robber ever saying “but whatabout the safe I didn’t crack” in order to avoid conviction.

Blame the victim didn’t move the jury to want to stop victimization. It reminds me of how hard it can be for rape victims to hold accountable their attackers.

[Laws] won’t be enough unless we change the culture that allows assault to happen in the first place.

And that touches on the thorny problem in American history, its sad record of injustice.

When British corporations in 1740s (e.g. James Oglethorpe, the founder of Georgia), and even their King decades later, started abolishing slavery the Americans revolted to find a way to legalize crime against humanity and keep it their primary source of wealth. President Washington used his lawyer to exploit loopholes and preserve slavery after he was ordered to abolish it.

Washington developed a canny strategy that would protect his property and allow him to avoid public scrutiny. Every six months, the president’s slaves would travel back to Mount Vernon or would journey with Mrs. Washington outside the boundaries of the state. In essence, the Washingtons reset the clock. The president was secretive when writing to his personal secretary Tobias Lear in 1791: “I request that these Sentiments and this advise may be known to none but yourself & Mrs. Washington.”

This racist and cruel “father” of America was selfishly manipulating laws through the late 1700s, according to his better peers. The Revolutionary War was about profit, not freedom; especially about profit derived from raping black women.

And we all know how the American courts treat black women plaintiffs let alone any woman.

What’s so bad about Musk undermining all inherent value to replace it with an arbitrarily controlled dictatorship that cruelly destroys society? And is it any wonder, as if mocking the American court system, his big project was announced as a robotic black woman to serve him?

History says it’s terrible to allow crimes like Musk’s, the worst because trust is erased by selfish predators, but then who is to say any American jury knows anything about history? (PDF of Killing Hope)

Former Chinese Premier Chou En-lai once observed: “One of the delightful things about Americans is that they have absolutely no historical memory.” It’s probably even worse than he realized. During the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant accident in Pennsylvania in 1979, a Japanese journalist, Atsuo Kaneko of the Japanese Kyoto News Service, spent several hours interviewing people temporarily housed at a hockey rink—mostly children, pregnant women and young mothers. He discovered that none of them had heard of Hiroshima. Mention of the name drew a blank. And in 1982, a judge in Oakland, California said he was appalled when some 50 prospective jurors for a death-penalty murder trial were questioned and “none of them knew who Hitler was”.

Those who know history are condemned to watch others repeat the worst of it.

Enron executives used fraud to inflate revenues and hide debt. The SEC, credit rating agencies, and investment banks were also accused of negligence—and, in some cases, outright deception—that enabled this massive fraud.

Now we can add jurors to that list, again.

In Musk’s case it seems to be taking a lot longer to convict someone for fraud than others like him. Maybe in the end Enron Musk will be like Ford and use his purchase of media to spread hate speech into every dashboard, even directly backing his loyal follower Adolf Hitler, yet get away with it all.