Are Correctiv and the Institute for Strategic Dialogue "military and intelligence front groups"?

Correctiv propagandist-in-chief David Shraven with his problem glasses in 2017.

Everybody is talking about Gregor Baszak’s great new piece at Public, detailing how “Government-Funded NGOs, Linked To NATO, Are Interfering In European Elections.” It’s paywalled, but maybe you’ll consider a subscription: Michael Shellenberger does good work there.

Baszak focuses specifically on the non-profit “investigative journalism” outfit Correctiv and the equally shady Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a think tank and “political advocacy organisation” that, among other things, produces a lot of dense reports whining about disinformation. He argues that both operations are presently acting as “military and intelligence front groups” to spread “disinformation” ahead of this year’s elections.

The creeps at Correctiv have featured in the plague chronicle before. They’re the ones who likely coordinated with German domestic intelligence to produce a massively overpromoted story about a “secret meeting” in Potsdam, where AfD politicians allegedly plotted the mass deportation of migrants, including naturalised German citizens. In fact this secret meeting was a private conference, where the Austrian identitarian activist Martin Sellner spoke about his rather less sensational proposal for “remigration.” The Scholz government used Correctiv’s misleading “reporting” as an occasion to call for massive Germany-wide street demonstrations against the right, with the plain goal of marginalising the farmer protests, drawing attention away from their own unpopularity and directing public ire against the political opposition. Millions of Germans, organised partly by the apron organisations of coalition government parties, took to the streets, and for weeks the press would report about little else. The discursive uniformity and the artificial hysteria that accompanied the episode were powerfully reminiscent of the Covid panic from 2020.

Baszak further considers several recent reports issued by the Institute for Strategic Dialogue. These are inartful and superficial documents which it is easy to underestimate. Have a taste of this one, on the “delegitimisation of the ‘demos gegen rechts’ by pro-Russian and far-right actors in Germany”:

Germans are taking to the streets against far-right extremism and anti-democratic ambitions that have been gaining support in Germany for years. Since the research centre Correctiv published its revelations about far-right mass expulsion plans on 10 January 2024, hundreds of thousands of people have engaged in protest. However, while the Demos gegen Rechts are forming into an enormous pro-democracy movement that has not been seen for decades and are met with a great deal of support from both the general public and politicians across Germany, the movement also faces backlash in the form of disinformation, harmful conspiracy theories and attempts to shift the blame, fomenting in far-right chat groups and on alternative media sites.   

This short qualitative analysis shows how far-right, pro-Kremlin or alternative media and chat groups on Telegram strategically spread disinformation and conspiracy theories about the Demos gegen Rechts. The following tactics were identified: Discrediting the research centre Correctiv; claiming that the demonstrations were state-orchestrated; echoing narratives of state control and an attempt to deflect blame; GDR and Nazi comparisons; conspiracy theories that the demonstrations served as a distraction from anti-government farmer protests; the claim that the Demos gegen Rechts were ineffective; and the use of ‘whataboutism’ as a diversionary tactic. Finally, the amplification of these tactics and disinformation by pro-Kremlin accounts on X (formerly Twitter) is also analysed.   

I’ve read a lot of Atlanticist think-tank pieces like this, and they’re all the same. Their stated purpose is not to address anybody’s arguments or even to shape public opinion, but merely to provide something like casual intelligence (“analysis”) on what the political opposition is saying and thinking. They are so ideologically incontinent, though, that they can only ever produce this highly propagandised slop even for their own consumption. Thus the arguments of the opposition have to be slurred as “tactics” to spare our analysts the project of actually addressing what anyone says. Those who oppose present levels of military aid to Ukraine – a majority of Germans – are smeared as having “pro-Kremlin” views, and every substantive point these sleazy analysts disagree with becomes “disinformation.” It is all so tiresome.

Despite the poor writing and the glaring unsophistication, major German media like Der Spiegel often recycle the material of ISD reports, and Baszak argues that in this way their work “has … a major impact on public debate and on voters” in Germany. He further notices that the authors of these reports appear to have a history of employment with NATO and its affiliate organisations. The entire Correctiv-inspired freakout “against the right” thus becomes, in his view, a NATO-adjacent operation to influence public opinion and keep military aid flowing to Ukraine.

While I don’t disagree with this point at all, I do have a mild criticism. It is common, especially in the Anglosphere, to foreground military and intelligence influences in all the unsettling political developments we’ve witnessed since 2020. These influences are surely there, but they’re but a few voices in a vast sea. Taken too far, this framing lends the impression that our political systems are fundamentally sound and that all would be good if it weren’t for the subversion of specific actors from the intelligence community. That’s not Baszak’s argument, but I’ve seen versions of this thesis argued elsewhere. In fact, the ISD and Correctiv are both densely embedded in complex webs of philanthropic and government funding; everybody from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to Google to Pierre Omidyar and the Mercator Stiftung steer money to these organisations and dozens of others like them; the result is in every case oceans of the same bland globalist slop, oozing from every pore of the Western managerial behemoth.

The Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV), Germany’s domestic intelligence agency, may well have helped Correctiv spy on the “secret meeting” in Potsdam, but their involvement is little more than a footnote to the ensuing controversy. The BfV is run out of Nancy Faeser’s Interior Ministry, and Correctiv has been caught attending various secret meetings with Scholz government officials. Correctiv, in other words, are less a front for domestic intelligence, than they are state-adjacent propagandists, who coordinate their reporting with leading politicians to manipulate public opinion. ISD, for its part, channels a wide range of voices, NATO boosters among them. Military interests are just as much a product of the many-tentacled internationalist ideological machine as they are the shapers of it. The greatest strength of this system is its widely distributed and decentralised nature; its actions are the sum of many, many influences, and there appears to be no clear centre of control.