You Are the Target of Hybrid Warfare

This article is a slightly-edited transcript of a presentation delivered to Panel 4 of the Schiller Institute online conference by Harley Schlanger, on June 16, 2024.  Schlanger is the Vice-President of the Board of the Schiller Institute.  The video of the June 15-16 conference is linked here: The World on the Brink: For a New Peace of Westphalia!

by Harley Schlanger

Is it possible that you think "wrong"? That how you think and what you believe makes you an enemy of the state? That what you assume are your own ideas -- for example, that you don't want hundreds of billions of tax dollars going to fight unwinnable and endless wars, ending up in the pockets of Ukrainian kleptocrats and U.S. defense contractors -- actually have been planted in your mind by that devious war criminal, Vladimir Putin? And that your opposition to the slaughter of children and women in Palestine is proof that you are antisemitic?

Whether you know it or not, you are the target of what is called "hybrid warfare". And if it doesn't lead to the extinction of mankind in thermonuclear war, it means minimally that if you are an American, the protection of your rights and freedoms, which you believe to be enshrined in the Constitution, is being taken away. There is a name for this suppression of freedom of speech and inquiry -- it's called "fascism."

I will present a glimpse into how this works, and how we have allowed this to happen. It begins with the concept of TRUTH.

KEATS VERSUS HYBRID WARFARE

"Beauty is truth, truth beauty -- that is all

Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know."

In his "Ode on a Grecian Urn" the poet John Keats investigates the relationship between truth and beauty; beauty may be preserved in art, and like truth is eternal, but what makes it so? That both beauty and truth are products of the human mind, the result of creative discovery; and both may be elusive, difficult to describe in words, but they are knowable, particularly through a uniquely human mental process of discovery that requires the use of irony, and metaphor -- as in Keats' use of the Grecian urn.

There is a different, subversive view of truth, as expressed by Lord Bertrand Russell, who Lyndon LaRouche described as the most evil man of the 20th century.

In his 1952 "Impact of Science on Society," Russell wrote:

"The social psychologists of the future will have a number of classes of school children on whom they will try different methods of producing an unshakable conviction that snow is black. Various results will soon be arrived at. First, that the influence of home is obstructive. Second, that not much can be done unless indoctrination begins before the age of ten. Third, that verses set to music and repeatedly intoned are very effective. Fourth, that the opinion that snow is white must be held to show a morbid taste for eccentricity.... It is for future scientists to make these maxims precise and discover exactly how much it costs per head to make children believe that snow is black.…"

He concludes this section by warning, "While this science will be diligently studied, it will be rigidly confined to the governing class. The populace will not be allowed to know how its convictions were generated. When the technique has been perfected, every government that has been in charge of education for a generation will be able to control its subjects securely without the need of armies or policemen."

Russell was one of the creators of what some today call the "post-truth era". Create a "narrative", e.g., that "snow is black"; reinforce it in schools, in culture; isolate and punish those who believe otherwise -- "If you still believe snow is white, you must be a puppet of Putin."

Here is a more recent statement of this view of truth, from the dystopian futurist Yuval Harari, from 2018:

"A cursory look at history reveals that propaganda and disinformation are nothing new. In fact, humans have always lived in the age of post-truth. Homo sapiens is a post-truth species.... We are the only mammals that can cooperate with numerous strangers because only we can invent fictional stories, spread them around, and convince millions of others to believe in them. As long as everybody believes in the same fictions, we all obey the same laws and can thereby cooperate effectively."

"The truth is, truth has never been high on the agenda of Homo sapiens. If you stick to unalloyed reality, few people will follow you. False stories have an intrinsic advantage over the truth when it comes to uniting people."

This is the key to what is called "hybrid warfare". Lyndon LaRouche described this in a June 2004 article, "What Does Culture Do?" He wrote about the creation, in 1950 by the Dulles networks in the CIA, in collaboration with British psychological warfare experts, of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, with the goal of inducing mass insanity -- a "dumbing down" of the population -- through the deliberate destruction of children's ability to engage in the process of the creative discovery of truth. This is not new, he wrote, tracing its origins back to the enemies of Plato in Greece among the Sophists and Aristotle. But today, there are more sophisticated weapons available, in digital technologies, in social media, which reinforce what he bluntly called "brainwashing."

HYBRID WARFARE

One year later, Marine Gen. James Mattis, coined the term "hybrid warfare" in a speech to the U.S. Naval Institute, when he delivered a paper co-authored by Lt. Col. Frank Hoffman. He argued that wars "cannot be won by focusing on [weapons] technology." It is now necessary to engage in "information warfare." The tools of choice for warfare today must become "misinformation, disinformation and mal-information." Mattis later became NATO's Supreme Allied Commander for Transformation, then served as Secretary of Defense in the Trump administration. What he presented was proliferated through numerous NATO conferences and papers. One paper presented by Stefano Marcuzzi at the NATO Foundation Defense College, asserted that in hybrid warfare, "the battle is everywhere, often simultaneously...it erodes the distinction between combatants and noncombatants....A pervasive and manipulated media can influence the development of a conflict," as it is necessary to achieve "victory in the information space."

Which brings us to NATO's creation of a hybrid warfare operation embedded within the Zelensky government in Ukraine.

In the cover story of the online weekly Executive Intelligence review on May 31, 2024, we report that a succession of agencies were created, supposedly by the Ukrainian government and private sector, allegedly to counter the influence of Russian hybrid warfare. In reality, they were funded and run from the start by NATO, U.S. State Department, CIA and UK operatives, committed to weakening Russia, and possibly carrying out a regime change there -- as they did in Ukraine in February 2014, by running hybrid warfare operations against Russia. They were created to identify, intimidate and silence opposition to the post-Maidan Ukrainian dictatorship, and target them for "liquidation", to use their term for their operations.

This began with creation of "Stop Fake", created by Ukrainian neo-Nazis to defend the integrity of the Maidan regime change coup: to cover-up the role of Nazis, the Banderites, who worked with the U.S. State Department's Victoria Nuland, the CIA and George Soros, to overthrow the democratically-elected government of Viktor Yanukovic. This became a model for "fact checking", a pervasive instrument for censoring inconvenient truths.

Next was the creation of Myrotvoretz, which published lists of enemies, which included at one point more than 4,500 journalists and activists. Some of those on the list were killed, others driven into exile. For example, one prominent Russian activist, Daria Dugina, daughter of the Russian philosopher Alexander Dugin, was killed by a car bomb in August 2022. Her photo on the Myrotvoretz list was subsequently covered by a blood red line, with the word "liquidated" on it.

Further, such lists were used to justify shutting down opposition media and political parties in Ukraine, paving the way for the cancellation of the constitutionally mandated election for President, allowing Zelensky to remain in the office illegally. So much for the Rules-Based Order!

"THERE ARE NO NAZIS IN UKRAINE"

Myrotvoretz was supplemented by the creation in March 2021 of the Center for Combatting Disinformation (CCD), which was set up under the direction of the President Zelensky, and run out of his office. It published a "hit list" in July 2022 which included numerous members of the Schiller Institute, and individuals who spoke at SI conferences. The CCD identified them as "information terrorists", who must be prosecuted and punished. At the top of the list was Helga Zepp-LaRouche, the founder and chairwoman of the SI, and a number of Americans who oppose U.S. support for the proxy war in Ukraine; among them Ray McGovern, Scott Ritter, U.S. Senator Rand Paul, U.S. Senate candidate Diane Sare -- and me!

The CCD has been supplemented by the creation of Molfar OSINT (open source intelligence), and by TEXTY. Again, under the guise of defending Ukraine from hybrid warfare run by Russia, these agencies are funded by western intelligence. The first Kiev International Cyber Resilience Forum 2024 was openly funded, for example, by the U.S. State Department. In April 2024, a CCD team visited German federal security officials in Berlin, demanding action against a "large-scale Russian disinformation campaign in Germany." Among the targets they identified was the Schiller Institute as a "platform promoting Russian narratives", at a time when the German Defense Minister is calling for Germany to become "war ready," to fend off a coming invasion by Russia!

Molfar lists as its foreign "partners" the Royal United Services Institute, Britain's oldest military think tank; the U.S. Agency for International Development, which engages in organizing Color Revolutions and regime change coups; and the European Endowment for Democracy. Its clients include major press, such as the Times of London, Reuters, the Financial Times, the Economist, the Wall Street Journal, PBS and CNN. Molfar defends the Nazi Azov Batallion as "heroes", accusing anyone referring to them as "neo-Nazis" as a "Russian propagandist."

Among the "lessons" promoted by these networks are:

1. Everybody and every communication must be monitored;

6. "Punitive measures are a must". To counter disinformation, there must be efforts "to punish and deter their activities",

10. "The West should do what Ukraine is doing."

Among the institutions demanding application of hybrid warfare against opponents is the rabidly pro-war Atlantic Council, which is funded by U.S. and U.K. government agencies and corporations of the Military-Industrial-Financial Complex. The Atlantic Council's operations include the Digital Forensic Research Laboratory, which is hyper-active -- and well-funded -- to pursue the opponents of the corporate war machine.

Finally, there is the academic side of what Ray McGovern calls the MICIMATT. For example, the Beasley School of Law at Temple University has become "part of President Zelensky’s ambitious vision: he sees this Center [the CCD], becoming a vital hub of counter-disinformation strategy and resources not just domestically, but internationally." (2.)

CIA FUNDS THE "POST-TRUTH ERA"

So, I leave you with this question: Will you stand for Truth, as envisioned in the moving metaphor of the poet John Keats? Or will you submit to the hellish subversion of creativity demanded by the Satanic Bertrand Russell? Russell's commitment to mass brainwashing was taken up by the Congress for Cultural Freedom, of which he was a Board member. The CCF was a forerunner of today's CCD. It was created in 1950 as an instrument of British geopolitics, to bring the U.S. in as a military enforcer of the empire then run out of the City of London. At its founding convention, one of its initiators, Nicolas Nabokov said, "With this Congress, we must build a war organization." The U.S. State Department provided funding for the Berlin conference, and the CIA, through its Office of Policy Coordination, under Allen Dulles' confidante, Frank Wisner, was its guiding hand. It was created to recruit writers and artists to counter Soviet peace initiatives in the early days of the Cold War. Its "Freedom manifesto" was introduced by Arthur Koestler, who declared, "Friends, freedom has seized the initiative." It was described accurately by a Defense Department representative, General John Magruder, as a "subtle covert operation, carried out on the highest intellectual level," as "unconventional warfare at its best."

Sidney Hook, one of the "academic" initiators of the CCF, said this about the intent of this "unconventional warfare", as he was organizing recruits for the founding convention:

"Give me a hundred million dollars and a thousand dedicated people, and I will guarantee to generate such a wave of democratic unrest among the masses—yes, even among the soldiers of Stalin’s own empire, that all his problems for a long period of time, to come will be internal. I can find the people."

True to his word, he did "find the people." The CCF was established shortly after the April 1949 creation of NATO, as a parallel operation, to justify the Cold War against the U.S. World War II ally, the Soviet Union. The first head of NATO, Lord Ismay declared the purpose of NATO is to "keep the Russians out, the Americans in, and the Germans down." That remains its intent, to the present day, using hybrid warfare as a critical means for achieving this goal.

Footnotes:

1. LaRouche, Lyndon, "What Does Culture Do?" (Executive Intelligence Review, June 25, 2004)

2. Temple University newspaper, "Ukraine Shows the Way Forward on Combating Disinformation"

April 16, 2021

Temple University Beasley School of Law

On April 5, Ukraine’s new Center for Countering Disinformation officially came online. Framed by its inaugural director Polina Lysenko as aiming to “to counteract propaganda, destructive disinformation and campaigns, as well as to prevent manipulation of public opinion,” the Center is designed to be a flagship of the Zelensky administration’s counter-disinformation efforts. The administration has every reason to hope for the Center’s success, and if it is indeed successful, the resulting benefits would be widespread—global, in fact.

Such an outcome is exactly part of President Zelensky’s ambitious vision: he sees this Center becoming a vital hub of counter-disinformation strategy and resources not just domestically, but internationally.... Much as Ukraine’s military has spent seven years in a de facto state of war, so have Ukraine’s journalists and civil society spent seven years operating on the front lines in a state of information war. Consequently, journalists like Savik Shuster and Dmytro Gordon, and NGOs like StopFake can offer a veritable arsenal of knowledge on what forms disinformation takes, what works well against it, and how it is likely to evolve. And the new Center would do well to foster intimate cross-sector ties with Ukrainian civil society, draw on this considerable, battle-tested arsenal, and relay it to its international partners.Though many democracies have been plagued by the Kremlin’s disinformation efforts, Ukraine, as the President’s office put it, has served for several years as a “testing ground” for the Kremlin’s disinformation experiments.