Cognitive Warfare
The Psychology of Black Magic
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In my September 12, 2023 podcast “Beyond Color” (now available to all readers) I discussed how culture was coming at us like a unstoppable freight train. But I also said that there are forces that want to stop the organic progression of culture and replace it with an elite vision that will subvert the future. LARPing in their own little bubble believing that they are dark wizards from Mordor who can direct their power and control the world these creepy control-freaks do exist and this essay is dedicated to understanding modern day black magic.
I understand the necessity of defending oneself, family, and (by extension) country from threats. However, today that basic call for defense has been rewritten in the world of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and other non-human platforms. What in the past was protection of our homeland is now an odd assortment of ones and zeros that make up lines of computer code so that strategic decisions are abstracted allowing the old fashion warmonger to hide under the mantle of cognitive warfare and other gimmicks.
“Hacking the Individual” is one of the opening segments in this Matrix-like psychological science fiction thriller but unfortunately it is not the title of a new book nor is it part of a movie review. This is a the major theme of a NATO research report that is promoting the future of warfare entitled Cognitive Warfare (CW).
The report tells us, “The revolution in information technology has enabled cognitive manipulations of a new kind, on an unprecedented and highly elaborate scale.”1 In other words, “NATO is developing new forms of warfare to wage a ‘battle for the brain,’ as the military alliance put it.”
It is old frontier, attempts to control people’s mind, that has been used with varying degrees of success throughout the history of government. Coercion, fear, brutality, bribery, superstition, and other well know techniques have been used to acquire loyalty or at least obedience.
So the goal of the latest cliché in control, Cognitive Warfare, is little changed since the local strongman beat his neighbors into submission with a rock in order take their possessions. Whether for money or authority the story of coercion has not changed from earlier times except CW has put a sexy new digital spin on this old battle-axe.
There have been millions (or perhaps billions) of Euros spent on accomplishing the same objectives that are a well ploughed field for the would-be tyrants of the world. Because NATO is minor league client for the USA it can be assumed that the real beneficiary is the various Non-Governmental Organizations (NGO) that make policy and actually run the United States military bureaucracy. However, the aching U.S. taxpayer foots the bill for this sort of nonsense paying ~80% of the bloated NATO budget while domestic priorities languish in the shade of the global hanging tree known under the grand rubric of the North Atlantic Alliance.
Let me take you back a couple months on The Road Ahead to the podcast entitled “Beyond Color”. In it I sketched out what is coming at us as the light of modern materialism continues to dim. I referenced Andrew Breitbart’s observation about politics being downstream from culture. Although savagely maligned by the elites as simplistic his point is self evident.
I go on to say that culture is always changing, however, due to the accelerated nature of the post-WWI social reality the great dragon of change has grown new wings. He is faster and hungrier. He is the freight train loaded with surprises that occupies all the tracks heading in our direction.
Added to this are a cast of people who may see the dragon train and believe they can influence its speed and direction. This coterie of highbrow apparatchiks believes that because of developments in computers and communications a new model of social control can be repackaged by manipulating the public brain of their own people as well as any other “enemy” they choose.
One of these sad souls and the author of the Cognitive Warfare report, François du Cluzel, is a less than well known French military personage and “inventor” of the Innovation Hub a threadbare concept that was new when the Tav_istock Institute was an infant.
Rebooting the old synergy of the nexus Mr. Cluzel took this chestnut and clothed it in some clinical psychology wrappings and sold it to NATO. Frankly, good for him, he outsmarted the NATO brass, made a tidy profit, and got a job at the Old Dominion University.2
The following are some highlights from Mr. Cluzel’s Executive Summary:
As written in the Warfighting 2040 Paper, the nature of warfare has changed. The majority of current conflicts remain below the threshold of the traditionally accepted definition of warfare, but new forms of warfare have emerged such as Cognitive Warfare (CW), while the human mind is now being considered as a new domain of war.
With the increasing role of technology and information overload, individual cognitive abilities will no longer be sufficient to ensure an informed and timely decision-making, leading to the new concept of Cognitive Warfare, which has become a recurring term in military terminology in recent years.
Cognitive Warfare causes an insidious challenge. It disrupts the ordinary understandings and reactions to events in a gradual and subtle way, but with significant harmful effects over time. Cognitive warfare has universal reach, from the individual to states and multinational organisations. It feeds on the techniques of disinformation and propaganda aimed at psychologically exhausting the receptors of information. Everyone contributes to it, to varying degrees, consciously or sub consciously and it provides invaluable knowledge on society, especially open societies, such as those in the West. This knowledge can then be easily weaponised…
The instruments of information warfare, along with the addition of “neuro-weapons” adds to future technological perspectives, suggesting that the cognitive field will be one of tomorrow’s battlefields. This perspective is further strengthened in by the rapid advances of NBICs (Nanotechnology, Biotechnology, Information Technology and Cognitive Sciences) and the understanding of the brain…
NATO needs to anticipate advances in these technologies by raising the awareness on the true potential of CW. Whatever the nature and object of warfare, it always comes down to a clash of human wills, and therefore what defines victory will be the ability to impose a desired be- haviour on a chosen audience. Actions undertaken in the five domains - air, land, sea, space and cyber - are all executed in order to have an effect on the human domain. It is therefore time for NATO to recognise the renewed importance of the sixth operational domain, namely the Human Domain.3
Trust is the target…
Cognitive warfare pursues the objective of undermining trust (public trust in electoral processes, trust in institutions, allies, politicians…)., therefore the individual becomes the weapon, while the goal is not to attack what individuals think but rather the way they think6.
It has the potential to unravel the entire social contract that underpins societies. 4
That is another brilliant goal of the Innovation Hub. Political Science 101, undermine your opponent but with a twist. Everyone is the opponent in the CW scenario.
Cognitive Warfare, a participatory propaganda
In many ways, cognitive warfare can be compared to propaganda, which can be defined as “a set of methods employed by an organised group that wants to bring about the active or passive participation in its actions of a mass of individuals, psychologically unified through psychological manipulations and incorporated in an organisation.5
Using Excess Data
The large digital economy companies have developed new data capture methods, allowing the inference of personal information that users may not necessarily intend to disclose. The excess data has become the basis for new prediction markets called targeted advertising. “Here is the origin of surveillance capitalism in an unprecedented and lucrative brew: behavioural surplus, data science, material infrastructure, computational power, algorithmic systems, and automated platforms”, claims Soshanna Zuboff.6
Succinctly put, take the excess data and turn it against the public and put a few dollars in you pocket.
Reshaping the Brain
Long-term impacts of technology on the brain
As Dr. James Giordano claims, “the brain will be the battlefield of the 21st century”. And when it comes to shaping the brain, the technological environment plays a key role.7
Militarizing the mind of citizens without permission might seem logical to the members of the CW gang within the boundaries that they set for themselves. However it is not a leap of imagination to see that this group or any other military using this as a worldview would not be able to discern the difference between good guys and bad guys given that the have already erased those lines.
This research was accomplished with the active help of Canada and the Canadian military/security complex with a blessing from NATO. That seems benign enough as Canada is a predictable and loyal ally in the mind of the American public. Unbeknownst to most people was the Canadian military clandestine testing of CW techniques on its own public to promote their government’s flawed narrative during the Covid Plague.8 Not a very friendly thing to do.
The whitewash covering that mess was not quite faded when disaster struck on September 25,2023.The curtains were pulled back on Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and the Canadian Parliament. In a massive creation of political theater the leadership staged yet another event to further the cause of President Zelensky and get Ukraine more money for the continuation of the civil war raging in that country since 2014.
During this event an aging WWII veteran, Yaroslav Hunka, was trotted out and given a hero’s welcome by the assembled Canadian political class. Prime Minister Trudeau, the House Speaker Anthony Rota, and honored guest Zelensky all stood and loudly cheered for Mr. Hunka who allegedly fought against the Russians.
Unfortunately Mr. Hunka was instead a Nazi SS officer. He actively participated in rounding up innocent Jews who were sent to concentration camps for extermination. The Canadian leadership cheered.9
Within hours the howls of protest fell upon the Canadian Prime Minister and his party as people discovered the truth. Nazi skeletons began to dance out of the closet revealing a history of supporting Nazis and protecting them after the War ended. It was a well known but quietly hidden ongoing policy of the Government. The Trudeau regime pleaded innocent claiming that they were ignorant of WWII history.
Hook this back to the Canadian research team that concocted the CW report and it will all begin to make sense.
Marie-Pierre Raymond, a retired Canadian lieutenant colonel readily admitted, “… that cognitive warfare also heavily overlaps with artificial intelligence, big data, and social media, and the rapid evolution of neurosciences as a tool of war”, furthermore, “Long gone are the days when war was fought to acquire more land,” Raymond said. “Now the new objective is to change the adversaries’ ideologies, which makes the brain the center of gravity of the human. And it makes the human the contested domain, and the mind becomes the battlefield.”10
Sounds like something spun up from the black arts achieves of Hitler’s Third Reich. After all “ideologies” are defined as, “The body of doctrine, myth, belief, etc., that guides an individual, social movement, institution, class, or large group”, such as a religion for instance. That is a broad battlefield for Col Raymond and the disgraced Canadian military/industrial mafia to play in.
Using coercion instead of persuasion is a secretive occult technique akin to black magic that seeks to control people against their will, known in the Islamic world as Sihr11. The black magic of political power is fleshed out in the essay, “Against the Archons”, by Michael Martin.12
What we are dealing with is neither science nor is it psychology, rather it is a elaborate system of control that any professional soldier in the U.S. military or legitimate psychologist should renounce as evil witchcraft.
The ~15,000 word text complete with charts, graphs, and annotations of the Cognitive Warfare Report is HERE
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Ibid p8
Ibid p9
Ibid p14
Ibid p16