OK. I am going to show my age. Not that I shy from it- I’ve earned the stripes I own. But, back when I was younger, I had to lie and say I was older. So that folks would take me seriously. (Yes, I passed for 18, 21, and 30 long before people faked ID’s to get a drink of booze- for business reasons.)

Long, long ago, we Americans laughed at the antics of the Soviets. No, not because they were communists. (I’ll leave that debate for someone else.) Nope. The fun was how the Soviets thought they could recreate history.

(Before I go much further, the concept the Soviets used was not much different from what TheDonald does. When the “Access Hollywood” tape came to light, TheDonald first proclaimed that “it wasn’t me”. Like he could erase himself out of the mess he created. Or, as he invents other facts. But, enough of that- let’s get back to the meat of this post.)

Back when the Bolshevik revolution was taking control of Czarist Russia, many of the leaders were Jews. No, not Lenin, but most of the others. (Karl Marx and Leon Trotsky are but two well-known names.) As the initial cadre, it wasn’t surprising that many of them managed to reach the upper echelons of the Politburo (the theoretical controlling agency of the Soviet Union.)  And, when Stalin took over, he decided that the Jews had to go.  (Yes, this was about the same time Hitler had his “grand plan”.   Hmm- so it’s not so surprising that Stalin and Hitler were initially allies.)

One such fellow was Nikolai Yezhov. After joining the revolution, he managed to become the secretary of the Central Committee by 1935. (This was about 15 years after the revolution). And, once there, he authored the system that became known as the “purges”- to rid the system of violence and terrorism. (You do remember that one man’s terrorist is another one’s freedom fighter, right? But, most of us agree that general assaults on civilian populations are always terrorism.) So, naturally, they put Nikolai in charge of the system.

Within two years or so, Nikolai managed to imprison- or kill- about ½ of the military and political establishment. For good measure, about 100,000 others were imprisoned for “disloyalty”.   But, by the eve of World War II, Nikolai Yezhov managed to get himself arrested for “excesses”. Within 10 months after that, he was killed.

What would Stalin do? To admit one of his right hand men was no good? Nah. He simply erased all memory of Yezhov. And, airbrushed his image out of documentary photographs, like the ones shown below.
And, it wasn’t just when Stalin was in the picture. Right after Stalin had Trotsky murdered via a pick axe in Mexico, Leon Trotsky was erased from the photograph showing Lenin preparing the troops to fight for the Bolshevik Revolution.

This practice continued under Khrushchev. And, it worked so well, the Chinese and Koreans employed it, too.

Now, you young folks are probably saying, “That’s so easy!”. Except this was done before there were computers, before anyone developed the program known as Photoshop. It took great artistic skills to pull this off.

Which brings up why I am writing this blog.

You see, now, technology exists that lets us create visual evidence from whole cloth. We can rearrange the words that people speak to make them say something completely different. In their own voice. We can have actors play the parts of the speakers (with fake backdrops, even) and then seamlessly change the face to match that of the person we want. (We call these  “deep fakes”.)

This is basically the same technique that game vendors use. They hire body actors to do all sorts of moves- and then morph fake bodies and faces on the action. And, the technology is simple, relying on the improvements in AI (artificial intelligence) over the years. (Before this, changes were limited to facial expressions- now, we can move the head, change the facial expressions, the direction of eye focus- even the blinking of eyes.) All in the name of virtual reality.

There’s even a deepfakes.club on the web. Providing tutorials and fora to perpetrate these treacherous images. And, they work because we (that’s you and me) believe implicitly in the veracity of video. The way folks believed in the veracity of photographs 70 years ago.

And, you thought what the Russians did in 2016 to screw up our elections was heinous. (And, most of us folks missed the signs we were getting sucked in by the “fake news” of Twitter and Facebook.)

Now, would be a great time to develop a healthy dose to skepticism to the “news” you elect to read on Facebook and find with your “Google” searches.  Because you have no idea if what you are examining has even a grain of truth behind it.