By Mohd Khairuddin Othman
PhD Student
Chaos may seems to carry a negative connotation or consequences on people’s life and behaviour. It generally refer to the dark side of the situation that affected human life. But surprisingly, chaos could also be very useful to certain people, if it is organise in certain manner and situations. Those who are effected by chaos may claimed it as devastating, while those who benefited the situation, would claim it as a useful mechanism to gain benefit. Nicolo Machiavelli through his book the Prince, claimed that immoral strategy is a must for the government in power, to ensure the successful in maintaining their power. Hancock (2018) wrote how Machiavelli argued, that a leader must know how to use a necessary wrong doing as long it benefit the leader themselves. The main objectives, is to ensure that the leader are not being outnumber by their adversaries. But despite effort to maintain strong position, the leader must avoid seeking assistance from the foreign strength, as he will face difficulties in governing, as the foreign power will treat the favour given, as their equal power sharing, leading to resentment. Thus, the best way to ensure power preservation, is to ensure that the people supporting the government are not being oppressed, and verse versa, the people living under the enemy’s control are being oppressed through a special covert operations. As Kermit Roosevelt Jr stated, to ensure the successful of covert operations against the adversaries, the military and people living in the adversary country must supported the outcome organised under the covert operations warfare, otherwise, it is only proper to deploy a hard power approaches (Hancock, 2018).
Creating chaos could be deem to be a covert political psychological warfare instrument against the adversaries. The main objectives of the warfare is to create internal chaos and thereafter destabilize the enemy internal ecosystem. This was proven during the Cold War, by both United States and Soviet Union, from the fell of Soviet Union until the US Presidential Election. The Cold War between American and Soviet Union after 1947 has educated the Soviet to make advance move in dominating the world politics. In 2016, The Russian, being a largest country in the world by area, has long prepared for the new cyber war attack. The Russian related companies studied and relied on the modern weapons to undermine the internal affairs of US (through the 2016 US Presidential Election) and UK (through the 2016 UK Brexit) using social media, website, internet trolls to spread news which resulted chaos in the country. Russian studied well the operation of the media social and they also understand the nature of the targeted audience in US and UK before spreading the news or fake news for their benefit. It was reported by the Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, that Russian had created 1,000 trolls to push out fake news content and general misinformation. It has been reported by the Twitter official, that the official had identified a total of 36,000 Russian linked accounts, which created 1.4 Million news during the US Presidential Election in 2016. It was revealed that 700,000 twitter users has been communicating with the Russian troll agent without realizing it (Walters, 2018).
The consequences of chaos will directly affected the trust and hope of the people against the government of the day. The feeling of people upon the state, will raise to a point where they could mistrust the government and realize that the government in power, had failed to stabilize the country. The people will judge the system, politician, institutional, authorities which thereafter influence the behaviour during the election (Levi et. al., 2000). The peoples’ hope vested on a government might also run to a delusional.
In Malaysia, we experienced so many events that was deemed to be in a state of chaos. Malaysian experienced many internal chaos, inter alia, racial tension 1969, Chief Justice sacking from judiciary in 1988, financial crisis in 1998, political Sheraton Moves turmoil in 2020, Covid19 economic crisis in 2020 and many other incidents. But the question remain, was it a genuine coincidence? Who was behind such chaos?. and what was a motive to it?.
** The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of M-Update
