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Political warfare is the use of political means to compel an opponent to do one's will, based on hostile intent. The term political describes the calculated interaction between a government and a target audience to include another state's government, military, and/or general population. Governments use a variety of techniques to coerce certain actions, thereby gaining relative advantage over an opponent. The techniques include propaganda and psychological operations (PSYOP), which service national and military objectives respectively. Propaganda has many aspects and a hostile and coercive political purpose. Psychological operations are for strategic and tactical military objectives and may be intended for hostile military and civilian populations.[1]
Political warfare's coercive nature leads to weakening or destroying an opponent's political, social, or societal will, and forcing a course of action favorable to a state's interest. Political war may be combined with violence, economic pressure, subversion, and diplomacy, but its chief aspect is "the use of words, images and ideas".[2] The creation, deployment, and continuation of these coercive methods are a function of statecraft for nations and serve as a potential substitute for more direct military action.[3] For instance, methods like economic sanctions or embargoes are intended to inflict the necessary economic damage to force political change. The utilized methods and techniques in political war depend on the state's political vision and composition. Conduct will differ according to whether the state is totalitarian, authoritative, or democratic.[4]
The ultimate goal of political warfare is to alter an opponent's opinions and actions in favour of one state's interests without utilizing military power. This type of organized persuasion or coercion also has the practical purpose of saving lives through eschewing the use of violence in order to further political goals. Thus, political warfare also involves "the art of heartening friends and disheartening enemies, of gaining help for one's cause and causing the abandonment of the enemies'".[5] Generally, political warfare is distinguished by its hostile intent and through potential escalation; but the loss of life is an accepted consequence.
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The 1930’s has “returned as positive nostalgia for those who have changed or aspire to change democratic systems,” he said. In Russia, this is explicitly the case in Vladimir Putin’s exhumation and rehabilitation of the fascistic philosopher Ivan Ilyin (left).
For Ilyin, civil society and similar intermediate institutions are a source of evil, a source of contingency and the ’empirical variety’ of individuals that undermines the holistic ‘divine totality’ embodied by the state, Snyder said.
The exception to vulgar modernity is Russia, which has the greatest potential for total fascism, Ilyin claimed, because its culture is characterized by fraternity (as Putin has argued) and it is historically and inherently non-aggressive and virtuous. Ilyin shares Carl Schmitt’s view that politics is the art of identifying and neutralizing the enemy, Snyder added.
In the light of Ilyin’s rehabilitation as Russia’s leading ideologue, Moscow’s manipulations of elections should be seen not so much as a failure to implement democracy but as a subversion of the very concept of democracy.
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Russia’s interventions in foreign elections are the logical projection of the new ideology: Democracy is not a means of changing leadership at home, but a means of weakening enemies abroad. If we see politics as Ilyin did, Russia’s ritualization of elections becomes a virtue rather than a vice. Degrading democracy around the world would be a service to mankind