This article appears in the December 23, 2022 issue of Executive Intelligence Review.
NATO War-Drive Ramps Up IT Programs for Mind-Control, Pre-Bunking in Schools, ‘Nudging’ for Democracy
[Print version of this article]
Dec. 17—The war-addicted bureaucracy known as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) is on a full-scale offensive, not only against Russia—which NATO spent years provoking so that Russia would react militarily against Ukraine—but increasingly in efforts to bring under dictatorship its own presumed allies. The NATO system, linked to a labyrinth of think tanks and semi-official intelligence outlets, is aggressively deploying “Information Technology” (IT) capabilities to suppress spreading opposition to its war agenda both in the U.S. and Europe, and to gain “mind-control” over the populations in its own member countries.
Pressure on social media platforms and news agencies, to “toe the line” and faithfully echo official accounts of how Russia, China, and Iran (in particular) carry out “foreign interference” using the internet, or in elections, or through secret channels of political subversion, has mounted in recent years to the point that the pressure from government bureaucracies to impose official narratives for circulation by media about these “malign” actors, has become a normal, accepted part of life.
But, starting in mid-2022, more insidious measures began to be unleashed, resulting in a mounting kickback in many locations. The NATO system is in fact the power-wielding agency looming over the targeting of educational institutions, including schools at the K-12 level, for human behavior programming under the recently invented label “digital literacy.” To be able to continue the policy of protracted war in Europe and beyond, NATO must be able to intimidate the populations of many nations into submission to the requirements of war. NATO’s diverse tentacles are acting to suffocate any chance of resistance against the war policy. Despite a climate of fear and even indifference, which has allowed the war dynamic to come to this point, all of this could very suddenly change direction.
Thus, the NATO system is not only going after its “enemies.” It is moving to better control its apparent friends. The turn towards “militarization” of education began to take off at the beginning of the fall 2022 school year.
Europe: ‘Tackling Disinformation’
On October 11, the European Commission (EC) made public that it had circulated to member countries, a 40-page document, “Guidelines for Teachers and Educators on Tackling Disinformation and Promoting Digital Literacy through Education and Training” for schools Europe-wide, and “assessment instruments” to “measure” students on their “digital literacy.” This move into the educational system, including the targeting of the youngest children, shocked high-level political circles, for example, in Germany.
The pretext for the guidelines was tests done on students, showing how disinterested most are in deciphering the internet.
According to a release from eubusiness.com, “one in three 13-year-olds lack basic digital skills… [and] only a little over half of 15-year-olds in the EU reported being taught how to detect whether information [is] biased.”
Similar test results turned up in the United States. A Los Angeles Times article from Oct. 22, 2022, portraying student reaction to these “digital literacy” tests admitted that most students find the whole process of “studying” how internet pages are designed, and what the difference is between advertisements and articles, very boring and hard to concentrate on.
As any serious educator would quickly agree, such exercises are a far cry from the classical education which all students deserve, and in fact, undermine a growing person’s cognitive potential.
Then, on November 21, in the U.S., the New Jersey legislature became the first state to pass a bill, S588, requiring that children in elementary schools (age 5-12 years old), be instructed and tested for “media literacy,” defined as learning which sources to believe when verifying whether an article on the internet is to be trusted. The idea behind this peculiar bill (after all, how could 7-year-old children care about adults telling them why they should trust The New York Times), which had been around since 2016, was rather ludicrous. It was suddenly rammed through in the Fall of 2022, with only seven Republican Assemblymen voting against it.
The New Jersey bill followed by one year the passing and implementation in Illinois of legislation making such courses obligatory in high schools.
While lobbying efforts for these laws began during the Obama presidency, the 2021 bill in Illinois was the first ever to be adopted. That Illinois would lead the drive for legislative requirements for this debasement of education, is not surprising since Illinois is the home of former President Obama, and headquarters of his youth-oriented Obama Foundation.
During 2022, Obama emerged as one of the world’s most outspoken fanatics crossing swords to defeat “Disinformation.” Following the outbreak of armed conflict between Russia and Ukraine, Obama was prominently featured at events targetting youth audiences, first at the University of Chicago, April 6-8 conference sponsored by The Atlantic, “Disinformation and the Erosion of Democracy,” and then at a Stanford University symposium on April 21, where standing before a packed audience, Obama was reportedly beamed over Zoom to 250,000 students worldwide. On June 9, he was invited to be the concluding speaker at the annual Copenhagen Democracy Summit[fn_1], a forum created by NATO Supreme Commander Anders Fogh Rasmussen upon his retirement in 2018 to disseminate the NATO doctrine that the world is now irrevocably divided between “Democracies versus Autocracies,” the latter being the source of global media war and “disinformation.”
Obama’s appearances are carefully scripted by speechwriters and journalists who regularly interview him, such as The Atlantic magazine editor in chief Jeffrey Goldberg. In a November 16, 2020, interview, Obama told Goldberg that disinformation is “the single biggest threat to our democracy,” and every speech Obama has delivered since elaborately expands upon that assertion. When he spoke at the Democracy Summit on June 9 at Rasmussen’s request, the audience was filled, they claimed, with young Europeans already hooked up to the Obama Foundation.
Obama’s role underlines that the accelerated moves by a number of NATO countries to, at the same time, ram IT-based methods of “social engineering” into school systems, is being coordinated “from the top,” shaped by the same NATO-centered political bureaucracy responsible for generating endless warfare, currently focused on Russia, but with the intention to spread armed conflict worldwide.
Growing Opposition
Fortunately, the gravity of the current situation is provoking opponents to this IT dictatorial system to step up and take action.
In its September 29 issue, NachDenkSeiten, (NDS) an influential newsletter in Germany, reported it had verified that a 10-page government document passed to NDS by a whistleblower on the mechanics for achieving “narrative synchronization” on the Ukraine war, was authentic. The document is entitled “Current activities of the departments and authorities against disinformation in connection with the RUS war against UKR” and lists “in detail” the activities being coordinated between various branches of the German government on this front since June 27, 2022. The NDS report expressed outrage that this drive by government agencies to impose censorship also included a plan to bring war-related propaganda into classrooms.
The NDS newsletter stated:
“We were able to verify the paper…. The document gives an illuminating insight into the extent of the horizontal and vertical structures of—there is no other way to put it—federal German state propaganda, in particular with regard to the official involvement of the media, … educational institutions and the so-called ‘fact-checkers.’ Even elementary school children are being targeted.”
As shown in the report, virtually every cabinet branch of the German government is assigned a role in this top-down battle against what is called Russian “hybrid-warfare.” Showing how elaborate the bureaucratic networking has become to drive this psychological warfare offensive forward, NDS further reports:
“According to the present document” the [German] Foreign Affairs Office ‘networks intensively and bilaterally’ with representatives of the USA on questions of disinformation. The International Partnership to Counter State-Sponsored Disinformation … and the Counter Foreign Interference Group … are explicitly mentioned in this context.”
NDS also notes: “Another project that raises question is the unspecified use of children reporters from the age of 6 against ‘disinformation’.”
Pre-Bunking and Nudging
Much of the apparatus which coordinates with NATO in penetrating this fanatic policy into the pores of the trans-Atlantic nations is housed at universities. In the U.S., the most important university location for weaving the arts of “human social engineering” has been, since the 1950s, Stanford University in California. In 2018, the Stanford History Education Group spearheaded training sessions which helped bring about the passing of S588 in the New Jersey State legislature in November 2022.[fn_2]
Fitting in with this trend, Swarthmore, the Pennsylvania suburban-based college, sent out a report to impress potential donors listing those of their graduates who have become internationally significant personalities in the global swamp of fighting MDM (misinformation/disinformation/malinformation) on behalf of NATO’s wars. Their circular quotes Alexander “Sasha” Rojavin, whose graduate thesis was on “the broadcasting landscape in Ukraine,” who “works as an intelligence, media, and policy analyst and also lectures on post-Soviet information warfare at the Middlebury School of Russian.” Rojavin summarizes the basic thesis behind the practice chosen by Cambridge University fanatics, namely “pre-bunking,” as the best method for defeating Russian or other assumed malign influence. He states:
“If we think of information warfare in biological terms, we can compare individual disinformation narratives to viral strains, and counter-disinformation measures improving digital literacy to vaccines, because they are preventative. And at this time, preventative measures are known to be more effective in combating disinformation spread.”
The insistence on using the word viruses to designate the thoughts of people who disagree, has been a common feature of the Nazi movements of the last century, including their spinoffs in Ukraine today. Nonetheless, this designation is now gaining traction in the ranks of the “disinformation” warriors.
Another name for this approach was spelled out by Harvard University Law Professor Cass Sunstein in January 2008, in his notorious article, “Conspiracy Theories,” arguing why the U.S. government should infiltrate political movements that foster conspiracy theories, or which insist on publicizing controversial ideas, such as questioning the justifications for the war with Iraq. Sunstein’s outrageous dissertation introduced a new word into political vocabulary, namely “nudging,” which is just another form of what Cambridge analysts now call pre-bunking.
In both cases, these mind-benders are suggesting that the best way to modify a human individual’s concept of what is real and true, is to bend their thought process with small doubts, to change their view in small doses. Then, the targeted individuals come to believe that what they are being altered to trust was something they found out by themselves. Sunstein called this process “nudging,” and produced a book with a co-author to that effect[fn_3]. Sunstein also recommended that the U.S. government systematically infiltrate political organizations that disagreed with its policy on Iraq, or which questioned the government’s interpretation of the events of Sept. 11, 2001, with the infiltrators assigned to be the “nudges” who would plant doubts aimed at disabling the group’s ability to function.
Sunstein was appointed to the Obama Administration soon after issuing the book, in order to apply his views on “nudging” to budget-cutting. He remains an important figure, along with his wife, Samantha Power, who was the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, and is now head of the USAID (U.S. Agency for International Development), playing a leading role in helping the NATO multi-headed hydra of power to pursue its goal of both war with Russia and with the minds and souls of mankind.
[fn_1] The Copenhagen Democracy Summit was launched by former NATO Supreme Commander Rasmussen in 2018, when he retired from his NATO post. The first keynote speaker for 2018 for this new forum was former U.S. Vice President Biden. The Summit is part of a fraudulent system of conferences used by the powers behind the NATO command to divide the world between “Democracies” and “Autocracies,” the latter sometimes also called “authoritarian regimes.” This division of the world is an insane approach to foreign and global economic policy which keeps alive the horrors of British Geopolitics, as it was crafted at the height of the power of the British Empire. [back to text for fn_1]
[fn_2] The April 2018 issue of School Administrator, publication of the American Association of School Administrators, lists the names and backgrounds of the five Stanford educators who pumped up support for what became S588. [back to text for fn_2]
[fn_3] Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth and Happiness, by Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein, 2008. [back to text for fn_3]
European Commission
