Maskirovka for fun and profit

A dentist pulled out a hypodermic to give his patient a painkiller.

‘No way! No needles! I hate needles,’ the patient said.

So the dentist started to hook up the nitrous oxide and once again the bloke objected.
‘I can’t do the gas thing. The thought of having the gas mask on is suffocating me!’

The dentist then asked the patient if he had any objection to taking a pill.
‘No problem,’ the bloke said. ‘I’m fine with pills.’

The dentist said, ‘Here’s a Viagra tablet.’

The bloke gasped, ‘Wow! I didn’t know Viagra worked as a painkiller!’

‘It doesn’t.’ Said the dentist. ‘But it will give you something to hold on to while I extract your tooth.

A diversion, from the main focus. Always serves as a handy tool to get something done while attention is focused elsewhere.

Diversionary tactics has always been a good trick in order to get real work done. Get your detractors thinking of something else, putting their focus and efforts into it while you’re now free to work on the subject at hand without annoying nuisances throwing spanners into the works.

It is a long used tactic, so common that the erstwhile Soviets had a Russian word for it in war and espionage, maskirovka. And it worked, so many times. Give a dog a bone to chase, and you keep him happy while you’re preparing his bath or taking him for shots at the vet.

And its a trick many people use, even if they sometimes do it subconsciously to their friends, family and associates.

And what governments use when they choose to divert the attention of their citizens away from the real problems, towards a manufactured problem. Like the APCO-Israeli link, to avoid questions on delivery of promises. An artificial creation, to allow the void to be filled, thereby drawing attention away from the real void.

It’s what corporations use, when they chose to have you see something else apart from commercial scam they pulling on you. Like the hype Steve Jobs builds around the iPad, to prevent you from seeing what a nonperforming device it actually is.

It is the little gifts your friend or lover gives you, to make you forget the transgressions committed. Or to have you gloss over why you were betrayed, with a sweet apology and some roses.

Every time a parent points out an interesting object to get his child to stop bawling, every time a friend says “Let’s drink up, now who’s getting this round ?” to avoid a drunken argument from escalating, every time Arsene Wenger or Sir Alex Ferguson moan over an injured player, it’s maskirovka.

The art of diversion, a strong tool to have when you play information games on a large scale. PT Barnum notwithstanding, it is sometimes possible to fool all of the people all of the time.

If you do your maskirovka right.

For most people are sheep, and they will believe what they yearn to believe.

C’est l’vie.

First published on April 11, 2010 on Facebook.