The Writer’s Section at Socotra House was working on a piece on the American Justice system. You know why. The media took three recent trials and turned them into prime-time entertainment, surrounded by a storm of opinion in full color and amplified with dramatic body-camera imagery.

You will not be surprised that there was some general satisfaction in the results. Twelve citizens were selected from a broad base of eligible participants. They were permitted to vote on the verdicts which were unanimous. Their considerations were guarded by long-standing traditions that in some cases appeared to be under direct assault from network correspondents seeking to identify jurors. The consequences of that are unknown, but are in keeping with the new technique of “Doxxing” opponents, or exposing personal residence information to enable crowds of partisans to show up and make life painful for the targets.

That collision is still in progress, with old concepts like “innocent until proven guilty” colliding with an instant news cycle promoting opinion as fact, and undermining the very fundament on how our justice system is supposed to work with a presumption of innocence. There was mild surprise that the three white guys who chased down a black citizen and shot him when he resisted their private act. They were convicted of murder. Or that the withdrawal of police in the face of armed and violent rioters left local merchants defenseless against the destruction of their properties. What appeared to be legitimate self defense by a young man was placed at the center of a prosecution contention that citizens should not defend themselves when the local authorities refuse to do so.

He was let go. By unanimous decision. And the latest verdict, the one in which a minor media celebrity was tried for concocting a curious event in which his sexuality and the color of his skin made him the victim of a hate crime. He was found guilty on five of six counts by a jury composed of a multi-racial and gender mix of citizens.

There is a longer tale to all that, but production slipped. The perfect title, according to some Section members, would have been “Here Comes the Judge.” The title would have conveyed the idea that our system actually still works to provide a sort of fairness in our chaotic world. There was immediate resistance to the idea. The phrase about judges was initially popularized by an entertainer-of-color with a name that might be considered offensive in today’s alert society. That would be another case worthy of some examination, but like every topic today, would have immediately driven discussion into pastures further afield than the one directly behind the Bunkroom.

DeMille is an engineer, qualified to deal with nuclear devices of small size and remarkable mobility. He looked at the rest of us, stopping at Splash. “You guys served in the Cold War. A major component of conflict short of kinetic action is the influence of manipulated information. How did it work?”

Splash was alert, possibly because of the massive winds that swept over The Farm in the hours of darkness. He rose slowly and combined a short walk to the coffee urn with a short monologue. In fact, a remarkably short one. “Maskirovka,” he said, with a phony Cyrillic lilt to his pronunciation. “The mask that all military operations used to have.”

Rocket snorted, his mop of now-gray hair moving across his ears. “It was part of everything we dealt with. We called it by the Soviet name, but deception has been a part of effective military operations since forever. The USSR was pretty good at it. They perfected what we knew as ‘military deception’ in the Great Patriotic War against the Germans. It had a Marxist component, of course, or we would have a Japanese or Chinese word for it. Marx said “War puts nations to the test. Just as mummies crumble to dust the moment they are exposed to air, so war pronounces its sentence of death on those social institutions which have become ossified.”

“That is poetic. What does ‘ossified’ mean these days?”

DeMille glanced at his phone, flipped his finger on the screen and looked up. “Changed to bone or something resembling bone; hardened by deposits of mineral matter of any kind.”

Loma sighed. “Well, we did live with some boneheads back in the day. But it actually was one of the fundaments of how the Russians did things. One of the first precepts of a military operation was what the deception plan was to conceal the actual objective of the operation. It was a universal concept, and applied to all operations, whether military or political.”

DeMille nodded. “Sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn’t. But that was the first thing to consider when it looked like something was going on. That meant a requirement for deep understanding about their process and how it worked. It did not start with some idiocy like “Commies are bad.” It started with “What are the Commies doing, and what do they hope to achieve? Not a partisan exercise. Just an attempt to find out what is happening.”

Splash laughed and Loma frowned. He put down his mug on the rock next to his seat. “We don’t do analysis of anything very well these days. All information the media produces is lined out against the narrative desired by those in power. These days, it is shaped by Critical Thinking, which starts with the premise that everything that exists is the product of some malevolent social force and must be changed.”

Loma scowled. “Or burned down.”

That made Splash pick up the poker and prod the fire in the ring in the middle. “We know- or better said, we knew how to deal with it. We would take the facts that we could validate, and then examine the branches and sequels to determine what was possible. Then, we would take that and see what was likely to actually be going on. Ws it training? Diversion of attention from something else they did not want us to pay attention to? There are fairly routine ways to incorporate that into the process of providing a response.”

“Is that why the Bureau of Labor Standards is changing the way they calculate the Consumer Price Index?” Loma waved his tablet round with a website highlighted in a font so small as to be unreadable.

“That is unkind. But it is a means by which our old training is useful to understand a modern operation in progress.” DeMille paused. “For example, one of the factors to consider in the alteration of numbers is what the consequences might be. Some reports are that inflation is currently about the same as it was in 1981.”

“That was bad. Worse, it implies Washington is doing something that is causing it to happen, with the consequences felt not by the wealthy, but by people to whom filling a tank of gas is a relatively big deal.”

“Precisely. The actual facts of the matter are that housing, food and energy prices have a direct impact on people without much financial flexibility. Not so much on folks who can just move some stuff around at the bank or the broker.”

“Well, that is relatively straightforward. Wouldn’t you then try to adjust the system to make things easier on the people who are hurting?”

“They are. They are altering the way Consumer Prices are calculated. They are going to start with 2019 as the baseline for calculating inflation. That will eliminate all that other data and enable folks to think that things are not really that bad. And we can- and should- just suck it up.”

“But that isn’t the truth. It cuts out the surprising economic improvement right before the pandemic shut everything down.”

There was general laughter at that and one hoot from an Intern. DeMille slipped his phone back in a vest pocket. “The key to understand the concept of modern maskirovka is to figure out what it is trying to protect. That was always the first step. In this case, it is to try to get people not to associate the current economic conditions with the people who have created it. The point is to protect power, and to continue the transformation of the form of government that works pretty well into something that has never worked before. Anywhere.”

Splash raised his mug of coffee. “Mask away…” he said. Another m-phrase followed it in conclusion, apparently referring to the intimate behavioral practices of proponents. But that gets personal, and there is no place at Socotra House for those sorts of truthful shenanigans. That would be….oh, never mind.

Copyright 2021 Vic Socotra
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