Thanks to Left(Flank)…not behind for contributing this article.
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How the West Was Won: Counterinsurgency, PSYOPS and the Military Origins of the Internet, Part 2
Updated: Apr 5
Continued from Part 1
Part 2: The War is Over, The Good Guys Lost
If insurgency is defined as an organised political struggle by a hostile minority, attempting to seize power through revolutionary means, then counterinsurgency is the military doctrine historically used against non-state actors, that sets out to infiltrate and eradicate those movements.
Unlike conventional soldiers, insurgents are considered dangerous, not because of their physical presence on the battlefield, but because of their ideology.
As David Galula, a French commander who was an expert in counterinsurgency warfare during the Algerian War, emphasised:
“In any situation, whatever the cause, there will be an active minority for the cause, a neutral majority, and an active minority against the cause. The technique of power consists in relying on the favourable minority in order to rally the neutral majority and to neutralise or eliminate the hostile minority.”
Overtime, however, the intelligence state lost touch with reality, as the focus of its counterinsurgency programs shifted from foreign to domestic populations, from national security risks to ordinary citizens. Particularly in the wake of 9/11, when the NSA and its British counterpart, GCHQ, began mapping out the Internet.
Thanks to Edward Snowden’s revelations in 2013, we now know that the NSA were collecting 200 billion pieces of data every month, including the cell phone records, emails, web searches and live chats of more than 200 million ordinary Americans. This was extracted from the world's largest internet companies via a lesser-known, data mining program called Prism.
There’s another name for this, and its total information awareness. The highest attainment of a paranoid state seeking absolute control over its population. What ceases to be worth the candle is that peoples right to privacy is enshrined under the US Constitution's fourth amendment.
Few understand how lockdowns are ripples on these troubled waters. Decades of counterinsurgency waged against one subset of society, branded insurgents for their Marxist ideals has, overtime, shifted to anyone holding anti-establishment views. The predictive policing of track and trace and the theory of asymptomatic transmission are the unwelcome repercussions of the intelligence state seeking total information awareness over its citizens.
Throughout COVID-19 anyone audacious enough to want to think for themselves or do their own research has had a target painted on their back. But according to the EU, one third of Europe is unvaccinated. This correlates precisely with David Galula’s theory of counterinsurgency, that suggests one third of society is the active minority ‘against the cause,’ who must be neutralised or eliminated.
And for good reason. People are within sniffing distance of mobilising popular support from the neutral majority and toppling the house of cards. What follows is a protracted campaign by the establishment to neutralise the opposition.
It was not so long ago that journalists were called muckrakers, for digging up dirt on the Robber Barrons who, overtime, learned how to sling muck back, using smear and innuendo, such as ‘conspiracy theorists', ‘anti-vaxxer’ and ‘right-wing extremist.’
When Domestic Populations Become the Battlefield
The use of counterinsurgency in the UK goes back to colonial India in the 1800s. According to historians, this is the first time the British government used methods of repression and social control against indigenous communities who were audacious enough to want to liberate their homeland from Imperialist rule.
Counterinsurgency was used extensively during The Troubles in Northern Ireland against another anti-imperialist faction, also looking to liberate their homeland from The Crown. Much of the lessons learned in Northern Ireland were later transferred into the everyday policing and criminal justice policies of mainland Britain. And it wasn't just dissenters who were targeted by these operations, it was anyone with left wing ideals, particularly trade unionists who, it could be argued, were conspiring with the Kremlin to overthrow parliamentary democracy.
I draw your attention to the spying and dirty tricks operations against the 1980s miners' strike. This continued right up until 2012, when the police and intelligence communities were implicated in a plot to blacklist construction industry workers deemed troublesome for their union views. The existence of a secret blacklist was first exposed in 2009, when investigators from the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) raided an unassuming office in Droitwich, Worcestershire, and discovered an extensive database used by construction firms to vet and ultimately blacklist workers belonging to trade unions. More than 40 construction firms, including Balfour Beatty and Sir Robert McAlpine, had been funding the confidential database and keeping people out of work for many years.
If you want to know what happened to the left, look no further than Project Camelot’s early warning radar system for left wing revolutionaries. Decades of infiltration has recalibrated the left into genuflections of establishment interests. It was the unions who scuppered the easing of lockdowns in the UK and consistently called on the Department of Education to postpone the reopening of schools. This is despite the impact which school closures had on marginalised families, who were statistically more at risk from the fallout of lockdowns, and supposedly represented by union interests.
From the infiltration of unions to the co-option of activism, a judge-led public enquiry in 2016 revealed 144 undercover police operations had infiltrated and spied on more than 1,000 political groups in long term deployments since 1968. With covert spymasters rising in the ranks to hold influential leadership positions, guiding policy and strategy, and in some cases, radicalising those movements from within to damage their reputation and weaken public support.
We also need to talk about big philanthropy. George Soros’ Open Foundation is the largest global donor to the twenty-first century’s equivalent of activist groups. The agitprop used in the former Soviet Union evolved, overtime, into the masthead of Extinction Rebellion. A motley crew of eco-warriors courted by high profile financial donors and aligned ideologically with the very multinational energy corporations they are supposedly at odds with. The theory of climate change came out of the UN, organiser of COP20, for what reason ER had to protest the event is anyone’s guess.
ER doner, George Soros, is also a seed investor in Avaaz, often cited as the world’s largest and most powerful online activist network. When the US was on the brink of insurrection, following the first lockdown, Black Lives Matter entered the fray, not so much a grassroots movement, but a proxy for the Democrats to essentially redirect the public’s outrage against lockdowns into the wrong, established-endorsed cause.
Counterinsurgency in the US
In the US, COINTELPRO was a series of illegal operations conducted by the FBI between 1956-1971, to disrupt, discredit and neutralise anyone considered a threat to national security. In the loosest possible definition, this included members of the Women's Liberation Movement and even the Boy Scouts of America.
And it wasn't just the customary wiretapping, infiltration and media manipulation, the FBI committed blackmail and murder.
Take for example the infamous forced suicide letter addressed to Martin Luther King that threatened to release a sex tape of the civil rights leaders’ extramarital activities, unless he took his own life. Consider also the FBI’s assassination of Black Panther Party chairman Fred Hampton.
In the 1960’s a Washington Post expose by army intelligence whistle-blower, Christopher Pyle, revealed a massive surveillance operation run by the Army, called CONUS Intel, involving thousands of undercover military agents infiltrating and spying on virtually everybody active on what they deemed ‘civil disturbances.’ It turns out, many of those targeted had done nothing even remotely subversive, unless you consider attending a left-wing college presentation or church meeting, revolutionary.
These programs came to a head in the 1970’s, when an investigation by the US Senate, conducted by the Church Committee, uncovered decades of serious, systemic abuse by the CIA. This included intercepting the mail and eavesdropping on the telephone calls of civil rights and anti-war leaders over two decades. As if predicting the internet as an instrument for mass surveillance, Senator Frank Church warned that the NSA's capabilities could "at any time could be turned around on the American people."
And turned around they were.
USAGM
Before the internet, the deployment of PSYOPS was limited to legacy media and permitted only on foreign soil. But that all changed in 2013, when the government granted themselves permission to target ordinary Americans.
Conceived at the end of the cold war as the Broadcasting Board of Governors, USAGM is a lesser-known government agency charged with broadcasting thousands of weekly hours of US propaganda to foreign audiences, that has played a major role in pushing pro-American stories to former Soviet Bloc countries ever since Perestroika.
Ostensibly concerned with maintaining US interests abroad, USAGM has also been the primary funder of the Tor Project since inception. Tor, also known as The Onion Browser, is the mainstay of encrypted, anonymous search used by activists, hackers, and the anonymous community, if you can get your head around the fact that the confidential internet activity of anarchists has been framed by a PSYOP since the get-go.
For decades an anti-propaganda law, known as the Smith-Mundt Act, made it illegal for the government to conduct PSYOPS against US citizens. But that all changed in 2013 when the National Defence Authorization Act repealed that law and granted USAGM a licence to broadcast pro-government propaganda inside the United States.
To what extent US citizens are being targeted by propaganda is anyone's guess, since PSYOPS largely take place online, where it's difficult to distinguish between foreign and domestic audiences.
What we do know is that in 2009 the military budget for winning hearts and minds at home and abroad had grown by 63% to $4.7 billion annually. At that time the Pentagon accounted for more than half the Federal Government's $1 billion PR Budget.
An Associated Press (AP) investigation in 2016 revealed that the Pentagon employed a staggering 40% of the 5,000 working in the Federal Government's PR machines, with the Department of Defence, far and wide, the largest and most expensive PR operation of the United States government, spending more money on public relations than all other departments combined.
Things are not so different in the UK.
During COVID-19 the British government became the biggest national advertiser. Even tick tock and snapchat were deployed by the Scottish government to push COVID PSYOPS to children.
Last year Boris Johnson announced record defence spending for an artificial intelligence agency and the creation of a national cyber force. That’s a group of militarised computer hackers to conduct offensive operations.
Offensive operations against who, you might ask.
Britain was not at war, but in an article for the Daily Mail last year, Britain’s top counter terrorism officer, Neil Basu confirmed that the UK was waging an ideological war against anti vaccination conspiracy theorists. Ideological wars of this nature typically take place online, where much of the government's military budget was being spent.
Since the vaccine roll-out there has been a protracted effort to paint the 33% of British citizens who have a problem with lockdowns and vaccine mandates, as violent extremists, with one member of the commentariat drawing parallels with US style militias.
It doesn’t take a genius to see where this is heading.
The Facebook’s-Intelligence-Harvard Connection
Consistent with the opaque nature of Facebook's origins, shortly after its launch in 2014, co-founders Mark Zuckerberg and Dustin Moskovitz brought Napster founder Sean Parker on board. At the age of 16, Parker hacked into the network of a Fortune 500 company and was later arrested and charged by the FBI. Around this time Parker was recruited by the CIA.
To what end, we don’t know.
What we do know is that Parker brought Peter Thiel to Facebook as its first outside investor. Theil, who remains on Facebook’s board, also sits on the Steering Committee of globalist think tank, the Bilderberg Group. As previously stated, Thiel is the founder of Palantir, the spooky intelligence firm pretending to be a private company.
The CIA would join the FBI, DoD and NSA in becoming a Palantir customer in 2005, later acquiring an equity stake in the firm through their venture capital arm, In-Q-Tel. At the time of his first meetings with Facebook, Theil had been working on resurrecting several controversial DARPA programs.
Which begs the question: With intelligence assets embedded in Facebook's management structure from the get-go, is everything as it seems at 1 Hacker Way?
According to Lauren Smith, writing for Wrong Kind of Green:
“Some of Facebook’s allure to users is that Mark Zuckerberg and his friends started the company from a Harvard dorm room and that he remains the chairman and chief operating officer. If he didn’t exist, he would need to be invented by Facebook’s marketing department.”
By the same token, if Facebook didn't exist it would need to be invented by the Pentagon.
To achieve this, you would need to embed government officials in Facebook's leadership and governance. Cherry picking your candidates from, say, the US Department of Treasury, and launching the platform from an academic institution, Harvard University, for example.
According to the official record, Zuckerberg built the first version of Facebook at Harvard in 2004. Like J.C.R Licklider before him, he was a psychology major.
Harvard's President at that time was economist Lawrence Summers, a career public servant who served as Chief Economist at the World Bank, Secretary of the Treasury under the Clinton Administration, and 8th Director of the National Economic Council.
Now here's where it gets interesting. Summers' protege, Sheryl Sandberg, is Facebook’s COO since 2008. Sandberg was at the dials during the Cambridge Analytica scandal, and predictably, manages Facebook’s Washington relationships. Before Facebook, Sandberg served as Chief of Staff at the Treasury under Summers and began her career as an economist, also under Summer, at the World Bank.
Another Summers-Harvard-Treasury connection is Facebook’s Board Member, Nancy Killefer, who served under Summers as CFO at the Treasury Department.
It doesn’t end there. Facebook’s Chief Business Officer, Marne Levine also served under Summers at the Department of Treasury, National Economic Council and Harvard University.
The CIA connection is Robert M. Kimmet. According to West Point, Kimmet “has contributed significantly to our nation’s security…seamlessly blending the roles of soldier, statesman and businessman. In addition to serving on Facebook's board of Directors, Kimmet is a National Security Adviser to the CIA, and the recipient of the CIA Director’s Award.
The icing on the cake, however, is former DAPRA Director, Regina Dugan, who joined Facebook’s hardware lab, Building 8, in 2016, to roll out a number of mysterious DARPA funded-projects that would hack people’s minds with brain-computer interfaces.
Dugan currently serves as CEO of Welcome Leap. A technology spin-off of the world's most powerful health foundation, concerned with the development of Artificial Intelligence (AI), including transdermal vaccines. Welcome Leap brings DARPA’s military-intelligence innovation to “the most pressing global health challenges of our time,” called COVID-19.
Connecting the dots: Welcome Leap was launched at the World Economic Forum, with funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Its founder is Jeremy Ferrar, former SAGE member, long-time collaborator of Chris Witty and Neil Ferguson and the patsy taking the wrap for the Wuhan leak cover-up story.
George Carlin wasn't joking when he said: ‘it's one big club, and you're not in it.’
As luck would have it, just before Duggan’s arrival at Facebook, the social media giant orchestrated the controversial mood manipulation PSYOP, known as the Social Contagion Study. The experiment would anticipate the role social media went onto play during the pandemic.
In the study, Facebook manipulated the posts of 700,000 unsuspecting Facebook users to determine the extent to which emotional states can be transmitted across social media. To achieve this, they altered the news feed content of users to control the number of posts that contained positive or negative charged emotions. As you would expect, the findings of the study revealed that negative feeds caused users to make negative posts, whereas positive feeds resulted in users making positive posts. In other words, Facebook is not only a fertile ground for emotional manipulation, but emotions can also be contagious across its networks.
Once we understand this, it becomes clear how fear of a disease, which predominantly targeted people beyond life expectancy with multiple comorbidities who were dying anyway, spread like wildfire in the wake of the Wuhan Virus. In locking down the UK, Boris Johnson warned the British public that we would all lose family members to the disease. When nothing could be further from the truth. The pandemic largely happened in the flawed doomsday modelling of epidemiologists, it happened across the corporate media, and it happened on social media platforms like Facebook. It wasn’t so much a pandemic, but the social contagion experiment playing out in real time.
But there was more than just social media manipulating our emotional states, fear, shame, and scapegoating was fife throughout as the British government deployed behavioural economics to, essentially, nudge the public towards compliance.
Launched under David Cameron's Government, the Behavioural Insights Team (BIT), (affectionately known as the Nudge Unit), are a team of crack psychologists and career civil servants tasked with positively influencing appropriate behaviour with tiny changes.
But according to whose measure of appropriate behaviour, exactly?
A clue lies in the fact that BIT was directed by Sir Mark Sedwill during the first lockdown. He’s one of Britain’s most senior national security advisors with links to M15 and MI6.
That’s an intelligence operative ruling by psychological manipulation. Though we are led to believe that in a democracy - government is an agency of the people and parliament is given force of law by the will of the people.
But what happens when our consent is manipulated by those in power?
One consequence is that the foxes take charge of the chicken coop. Another is that we begin to see drastic changes to the constitutional landscape. Politicians acquire impunity from public scrutiny and an entire nation is kept under house arrest.
But this demonisation of the masses is also the backwash of a protracted counterinsurgency crusade waged on ordinary people. When the Berlin wall came down in the nineties and decades of counterinsurgency was rendered obsolete, the battle lines moved from East to the West, from the Soviets to the lower orders of society. The mythos of communist infiltration, that gave rise to the threat of terrorism, is the ancestor of today’s biosecurity state. A government that tightens its grip, using fear of a common enemy, will find no shortage of common enemies, to continue tightening its grip.
Conclusions
Strong-arming the world’s population under the rubric of biosecurity would not have been possible without the internet, and if the expulsion of the military and intelligence community from academic institutions in the 1960's had not resulted in the creation of Silicon Valley, they would not have acquired total information awareness, the precursor to the Green Pass.
But this formidable goal also caused the US to morph into the opponent it had been fighting during the cold war, as predicted by public intellectuals in the 1960s.
And so, with an annual budget of $750 billion and 23,000 military and civilian personnel in their employment, the Pentagon failed to denounce what many armchair researchers called out in the early days of the pandemic. That a global coup was underway was patently obvious, as crisis actors played dead in Wuhan, China.
Instead, those charged with protecting the west from Soviet-style putsch failed to apprehend it happening right under their noses. It's not so much that they were caught with their trousers down, it’s that they aided and abetted the coop. Years of fighting a statist, expansionist adversary, caused the intelligence state to mutate into their nemesis, namely China.
It is uncanny that the country with the worst human rights record on earth became the global pacemaker for lockdowns, as western democracies exonerated their existential threat and bowed to China’s distinct brand of tyranny.
As a result, the big tech data analytics pioneered by Silicon Valley luminaries, that was road tested in China, finally landed on the shorelines of western democracies.
Another story entirely is the infiltration of sovereign nation states by the United Nations, whose special agency, the WHO, sparked the events that would lead to the fall of the West. In keeping with tradition, the UN's foundation at Bretton Woods was infiltrated by communist spies, driven by socialist values, and funded by powerful petroleum dollars. The same corporations looking to shore up new markets for their monopolies, who would leave their legacy to Silicon Valley.
In an ironic twist of fate, the intelligence state created at the end of world war II, under the National Security Act, conceived the very corporations that would bring about the end of constitutional democracy, that would author a new bill of rights from their own community standards de jour, and that would shift us from sovereign nation states to global governance, into the collectivist future the Pentagon had been charged with protecting us from.
Nowadays, it doesn't matter if you're in the dusty slew of a Calcutta slum or enjoying pristine views over Central Park, everyone is subject to the same scrutiny and surveillance, policed by the same community standards, manipulated by the same algorithms, and indexed by the same intelligence agencies. No matter where you are, Silicon Valley is limiting what information you can see, share, communicate and learn from online. They are raising your kids, shaping your worldview and in the wake of COVID-19 and climate change, they have assumed the role of science administrator.
Founded on the principles of freedom of expression and heralded as a liberating new frontier for humanity, the internet has criminalised free speech, divorced it from our nature and ensnared us under a dragnet of surveillance.
But above all else, cyberspace has bought into existence a substructure of reality that is cannibalising the five-sensory world, while forcing humanity to embark on the greatest exodus in human history, from the tangible world to the digital nexus, from our real lives to the metaverse.
As Goethe quote goes ‘None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.’ Namely, anyone still looking through rose-tinted lenses in the digital age, oblivious to the fact they are victims of systematic addiction. The bread and circuses of the internet influences the same dopamine rewards centres and neural circuitry motivators as slot machines, cigarettes, and cocaine, as was originally intended by psychologists like JCR Licklider, at the helm of this new technology that would exploit basic vulnerabilities in the human psyche.
And as we descend further into the maelstrom of the digital age, the algorithms will get smarter, the psychological drivers will become more persuasive and digital rubric will become more real. Until eventually we will lose touch with reality altogether. But don't worry, this war of attrition is happening in conjunction with the roll out of new software and devices, and most will be too busy building their digital avatars or dissenting on social media to know any better.
Source: The Cogent