In this documentary, the authors demonstrate how falsification, information war, confidence tricks, financial pyramids and other unsavoury behaviour aimed to deceive the people works. I translated the first 10 minutes of the video, which would be of interest to an international viewer.

The original untranslated video is published here: Сети обмана. Фальшивая реальность.

After watching the documentary, I can recommend reading the following article by Lada Ray: How to Tell a Hoax from Targeted Info Dump (Navigating MSM and Alternative Media)

I could not include formatting for the subtitles, published on YouTube. The formatted subtitle file in ASS format can be downloaded separately. Full text of the script is below the video frame.

February 2003.
An extraordinary Security Council meeting is taking place at the UN Headquarters.
US State Secretary Colin Powel, while trying to prove that Iraq possesses chemical weapons, is demonstrating a small test tube to the assembly.
Here a teaspoon of Anthrax can be contained.
Iraq has tens, tens, tens of thousands of such teaspoons of such spores.
In our practice we call that glance for “a liar’s glance”.
He tells a block of lies, casts a glance around to make sure ‘am I being believed?’, if yes, then he would continue speaking.
Half a year later Baghdad becomes subjected to bombings.
However, no traces of the Anthrax or any other chemical weapons would ever be found there.
The statements of the Secretary of State turned out to be lies.
5 grammes of an unknown substance. 5 million people killed.
No one knows what was in that test tube.
But implying that Saddam Hussein has WMDs justified a global military operation against Iraq, which involved several countries.
It is often more difficult to uncover a lie than to concoct that same lie.
What is our life? One continuous illusion, which somebody makes us believe in.
We live in a world, woven from ideas, which often have very little to do with reality.
If a world of crafty inventions and fables, told to us in an entertaining way by untruthful politicians,
by unscrupulous historians, by incompetent “experts”.
THE NETS OF DECEPTION
FALSE REALITY
[Elena Lavrova. Psychologist. Teacher at the Faculty of psychology at the Military University of the Russian Ministry of Defence]
Our brain is working in such a way, that it does not want to check all of the incoming information all the time.
In the Internet, when it seems to us that we are more pro-actively selecting information,
our brain turns into a brain of a child, who got offered a lot of sweets to choose from,
and he starts grabbing this and that and is less critical in its perception.
The global network is a true paradise for liars and manipulators of all kinds.
A huge portion of the information, which appears in the Internet publications, often turns out to be untrue.
Sometimes lies camouflage under loud headlines.
While sometimes is takes such forms that it becomes difficult to discover the lie.
Mystifications, falsifications, defamations and bluffs have long ago become norms in the net-sphere.
Lies, presented as truths, make it possible to conduct wars.
Lies make it possible to justify crimes and to manipulate the consciousness of the masses.
They allow to score political points and to make profits out of thin air.
[Dmitrij Bondarenko. 2008-2014, Russian committee for education control]
A society has a lot of trustful, and outright stupid, people.
This is the foundation for all confidence trickster behaviour,
it’s based on their understanding of the fact that a society has a lot of stupid people.
And if there are so many of them, why not trick them?
[Igor Bruk. Marketologist]
They want to be deceived. They really want to be deceived.
And for some reason a dream of a magic wand exists all the time.
That if you buy a magic pill, a magic phone, take a magic loan, then all will be tip-top without requiring work.
A sweet lie clouds human mind and often appears as more appealing than the truth.
What makes people unconditionally trust those, who can’t be trusted?
Why is a false reality created around us?
How not to become entangled in the spider web of lies, especially if it is woven so masterfully?
31st of August 1939.
A group from the Nazi security service, following Hitler’s order, stages a take over of a German radio station in Gleiwitz by the Poles.
One of the participants of the provocation broadcasts a false radio message that the Polish army crossed the German border.
Then the provocator shoot German prisoners, clad in the Polish military uniforms.
In his speech explaining the invasion of Poland, the Furer also refers to the falsified incursion in Gleiwitz.
[Andrei Kondrashov. Host at Rossia-1 TV channel]
In the beginning simple pretexts, simple provocations were needed.
This way the two World Wars were started:
with the murder of the Austrian duke, with the falsified raid on a radio station by Poland, which was the pretext for the Nazi invasion.
Before only pretexts were needed. Nowadays justifications are required,
because in a globalised world, when we all have access to the mass media,
any of the motives of some “good” that sets out to fight the “evil”, can always be put into question.
Therefore the technologies nowadays are polished to the finest details, they become monstrously professional.
The criminal methods of igniting wars have changes little over the last decades, thinks the political observer Andrei Kondrashjov.
However, the methods of conducting said wars became different.
Nowadays, the wars are conducted not only in the trenches, but also on the newspaper pages, blogs and social networks.
The power of the information weapons is comparable to that of WMDs.
After all a virtual warfare leads to real victims.
[Andrei Kondrashov. Host at Rossia-1 TV channel]
The technology of brainwashing was first used around the time of the Korean War.
But now it’s been fully perfected.
We see how before our very eyes the brains of millions of people populating Ukraine are turned upside down.
It was enough to tell them that those people, whom you burnt in Odessa are not people, but some “Colorados”,
and millions were screaming in the social networks, that those who made the grill out of these so-called “Colorados” are such a clever bunch.
And if this is also accompanied by a huge amount of fakes, then the success of this ideological war is guaranteed.
Information falsifications, photo and video fakes were actively blossoming during the Balkan conflicts.
Back then, the West was actively making the Serbs look as real monsters.
The images that made the rounds across many of the world publications:
Worn out people behind barbed wire fence are reaching out a hand for a scrap of bread.
The press was stating: This is a concentration camp organised by the Serbs.
[Andrei Kondrashov. Host at Rossia-1 TV channel]
Look at the details. The distance between the barbed wires is half a meter.
Any normal, physically fit person, would climb out of such enclosure in three steps, if he’d feel so inclined.
Because that is not a concentration camp.
As it became known later, that was a muster point for the Bosnian refugees.
Those people were not repressed, they were simply staying at the refugee meeting point.
And they were talking to the journalists through the barbed wire, because the journalists asked them to.
however, this is what became the pretext to accuse Miloshevich of crimes against humanity,
when they were proving to everyone that he must become isolated.
Falsifications play a significant role in the modern information warfare.
And the technology of their creation is very simple.
One jsut has to unabashedly, many times over, and through various media repeat one and the same lie.
that, for example, the resistance are shooting at their own cities from their own “Grads”,
or that people burnt themselves on the Trade Union house in Odessa.
[Elena Lavrova. Psychologist. Teacher at the Faculty of psychology at the Military University of the Russian Ministry of Defence]
The information field is over-saturated. There are very many sources of information:
it’s the soicial networks, and simply Internet, and TV, and radio.
When we are inside such a current, there are two options:
for some critical thinking is reduced,
white another person stops trusting any sources of information,
he starts thinking that the goal is always to deceive him.
[Andrei Kondrashov. Host at Rossia-1 TV channel]
During our everyday work at the news studio,
we come across such examples of propaganda production of a global kind that it becomes laughable.
Because, for example, many pictures brought by our own reporters from Syria,
become twisted into the illustrations of the would-be fight of the resistance in the Donetsk or Lugansk People’s Republics.
And yet, the experts think it is possible to identify information falsification.
One just needs to remember that the devil is always in the details.
The easiest method is to find the original source.
It is enough to see whom it references. Who is the author of the photo or video published by it.
Where and when it was made. The date.
Are there anyone else, confirming this information, at least according to this source.
Sometimes they don’t even really bother to observe 2-3 common rules of journalism,
because the sensation that they are spewing out is intended to overshadow everything else.
It strikes emotionally. And that’s one of those cases:
if the emotions are off the charts of a frame that is intended to pass for a sensation,
and there is no common journalism practices behind that emotion, then it’s the first indicator of a fake.
However, if a sensationalist statement is not corroborated by photos or video from the scene of the events,
then it’s also a cause for concern that the statement may be false.
One must also become concerned if different sources give exactly the same text.
Don’t trust your own eyes – that must become a motto for all, who get information through the Internet.
There will be more lies.
And the deception will become even more sophisticated.