How the State Wages War Against Its Own People

The Application of Cognitive Warfare on Domestic Populations

The modern era of conflict, since the destruction of the USSR, has largely been defined by Non-Traditional Warfare. Guerilla Warfare and Asymmetrical Warfare; the modern battlefield has seemingly no end to the ways that organized, structured, and opposed groups of people may struggle to kill each other without two States declaring war or regular military units engaging in traditional battle, and using an evolving array of tools and methods specific to each individual conflict and nation. The same concepts underlying these methods of war, distilled into Sun Tzu’s axiom “The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting,” are applied to our governments’ wars against their own people. The culmination of these efforts is Cognitive Warfare, where cultural ideas, ways of thinking, and emotional, ideological views are used to turn societies against themselves.

“It seeks to sow doubt, to introduce conflicting narratives, to polarise opinion, to radicalise groups, and to motivate them to acts that can disrupt or fragment an otherwise cohesive society. And the widespread use of social media and smart device technologies in Alliance member countries may make them particularly vulnerable to this kind of attack.”

While much of the focus of study has been applied to the Guerilla's way of war (a natural response of the States trying to fight them), State forces have developed their own Non-Traditional, Asymmetrical methods of war, in a mirroring of the Guerilla; Hybrid Warfare. We do not mean simply the use of Special Forces, counter-insurgency operations, etc. to try to counter the Insurgents and Guerillas of the world, but a new and systematic way of fighting other States, enabled by the interconnected global economy, networks of trade and finance, and the ideas that motivate these societies. Just as the Guerilla wants to harm the enemy without exposing himself to retaliation by superior firepower, States also pursue this goal through Hybrid Warfare, and reaches its height with Cognitive Warfare.

This is a natural evolution of conflict, born out of the very nature of States and military force; States are not ideas, ideals which animate their people, but real, physical things. States are their industry, their resources, and the real living people who make use of them, and their ruling classes which control them; and it is these things that need to be beaten in war. The State, seen from a military perspective, is best stratified into multiple layers, with the leadership (its government and nodes of political power) at its heart, surrounded by its people, the second layer. These collectively operate and control the third layer, which is economy, the financial and industrial means of producing and exchanging things. The final two layers are the supporting echelons such as logistics, command and control, intelligence, etc., and lastly the direct combat forces in the field. Throughout the development of warfare, we have seen successive evolutions of the means and methods to bypass these layers, begining with attacking foraging parties and baggage trains with cavalry, to naval blockade, propoganda, etc. Strategic bombing was the most significant development in the last 200 years until the emergence of Globalization, and allowed one nation to target the infrastructure and people of a Nation, which supported and enabled its armies in the field. Where previously only the first layers of a State, its front-line military forces, and perhaps close rear-echelon units such as engineers, logistical units, etc. could be directly targeted, the airplane let another State strike at the industrial base, infrastructure, and people wich put that army in the field, and directly degrade its ability to support a combat force.

However as the economy has become more interconnected and globalized, economic warfare has grown to rival direct combat power in significance. In the Ukraine conflict, we have seen how even energy supply can be turned into both a weapon and a battlespace. It would be almost unimaginable for the Russians to have imposed a total cut off of Natural Gas to Europe, even though in a purely military consideration it would have been enormously beneficial in the opening blows to cripple the European economy before it could transition away from Russian energy supplies, and before it could mobilize significant support for Ukraine.

Europe's economy would have taken an enormous blow from this opening economic salvo, with most of Europe's manufacturing coming under threat. The simple cut off of energy resources, nominally about equal to Western sanctions in dollar value, would have impacted the whole of Europe economically and potentially killed millions without the Russians firing a single shot, and would have essentially escalated the hybrid method of warfare to it's extreme form taken under Total War, where whole societies are drawn into conflict and participate in an organized war effort. In some sense, this has already happened with the separation of the “the West” into a cultural identity for the Imperialists; the idea of defending “western democracy” has been pivotal to the narratives around Ukraine. However, leaving millions without power would have presented the people in Western Europe with a problem that they would blame Russia for, and would have presented a unifying force and politically enabled more support for Ukraine, as well as depriving Russia of revenue (though likely this would have been a tolerable trade-off), and so Russia did not cut off energy supplies.

While its operations are frequently portrayed as a simple advancment on propoganda, Cognitive Warfare is a natural extension of, and an integral part of modern Hybrid Warfare, where by influencing the thoughts and ideas within an opposing civilian population, greater conventional and economic firepower can be brought to bear without provoking the civilian population to a response. If the European population were, for example, strongly behind the Russians, then they would not blame Russia for economically retaliating against the sanctions, but instead blame their own governments, demanding a de-escalation of their own participation in the conflict. The decisive factor in how the people respond to these objecive events is how they are ideologically and culturally conditioned to view and understand them.

We see here how Economic matters tie directly into military operations, how managment of economic relations is carried out in reflection of this fact, and how civilian sentiment acts as a constraining or enabling factor. Just as with Western sanctions, the Russians have also maneuvered their economic forces exactly as a commander in the field might order a SAM battery or a Tank Battalion to redeploy to another section of the front line, whether to concentrate for an attack, or to defend against one. And critically, civilian ideas about these events, and how they think, impose constraints on operations in exactly the same way that terrain or logistics might impose constraints on a fighting force.

We have to understand that the States which govern us take this very seriously, and are actively applying the principles and lessons of Cognitive Warfare against their own populations, just as they know, study, and plan for how road networks, terrain, etc. would impact military operations on their own territory. It has real, tangible implications for their economic policy, geopolitical strategy, and ultimately the fate of the State.

We must also understand that this new reality, where society itself becomes a both a military asset and a battlespace, is also impacted by the US Doctrine of Full Spectrum Dominance, the express desire to militarily dominate all areas and aspects of battle. In a world where economy and cyberspace become weapons and battlefields, the United States seeks to weaponize and control the economy, cyber infrastructure, encryption technology, and areas such as social media; the war for public opinion. But when that battle turns to the culture, thinking, and ideas, then the State fundamentally becomes engaged in conflict against its own people. Like Guerilla Warfare, it's not fought by opposing armies and soldiers in open battle, but by the tools and methods unique to each conflict. Guerilla Warfare and Counter-insurgency turn into Cognitive Warfare.

“Together, these two words paint a definition of Cognitive Warfare: the activities conducted in synchronization with other instruments of power, to affect attitudes and behaviours by influencing, protecting, and/or disrupting individual and group cognitions to gain an advantage. These activities vary greatly, and may encompass supporting or conflicting cultural or personalized components – social psychology, Game Theory, and ethics are all contributing factors.”

The reason for this is simple: when public opinion, our ideas, and ways of thinking become both a battlefield, and a weapon, the State is not interested in what is objectively correct, but what is militarily beneficial. As Carl von Clausewitz wrote, “War is the continuation of politics by other means.” Just as in armed conflict, they ignore the morality and interests of their own peoples, and the people they use to fight their proxy wars for what militarily benefits the State. And when the truth, such as the fact that support of Ukraine has harmed us, is opposed to the military interests of the State, we become engaged in confict with our own governments. Or rather more correctly, our States find that it is necessary to treat us as an oppositional force acting against their political ends. When that conflict of interests reaches a critical point, politics continues by other means.

So, what methods and means does the State use to wage this conflict against us? Broadly, we should consider 4 main categories of threats posed by our own States, with the understanding that each may be used both separately or in conjunction to achieve different specific objectives, depending on the specific conditions the State finds imposed on it. However, we will focus on the last two categories for the time being, as taken together they represent the main line of resistance by the State.

1. Conventional military force

2. Lawfare

3. Informational warfare

4. Cognitive Warfare

The State fights this war against us in two primary ways; firstly by supporting ideas and ways of thinking that are compatible with its foreign policy, through which it supports it's own existence, and by counter-attacking ideas and ways of thinking which pose a threat to its operations. Together, these represent the defensive and offensive strategies by which the Bourgeois State fights its Cognitive campaign for cultural dominance over society.

Defensively it's objectives are to prevent the popular sentiment from further restricting it's military operations, and to prevent or slow the spread of ideologies and thinking that has a higher likelihood of creating this change in popular ideas. Our States would love nothing more than to freely use their armed forces, as they did in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan, to name only a few conflicts involving open use of conventional military force. But the new conditions they are forced to operate under make this impractical, and the result is that threats from domestic politics become more strategically significant for global Imperialism.

Without foreign support for example, it's only a matter of time until Israel is overwhelmed, and US Imperialism loses its primary foothold in the region, which would inevetably doom its illegal occupation of Syria, and have dire strategic implications for its regional arab partners such as Saudia Arabia and Jordan. Therefore, it is a strategic necessity for them to keep public support for Israel high enough that they are not forced to restrict the flow of material aid. To do this, the State pushes and backs narratives that ignore the genocidal nature of the Israeli State, exaggerates or even fabricates the history of Israel, and minimizes the fact that Israel was forcibly created by the UN out of the British-occupied Mandate of Palestine. They argue that it is a “progressive” State simply because LGBTQ people are not heavily discriminated against, and try to leverage the impact the Culture War has had on the political divisions within our countries and populations. They try to associate Israel, a specific State of a minority of the Jewish peoples across the globe, with Judaism universally. They support the Liberal notion of Israel as a historical victim, scraping out a living under the threat of a second Holocaust, rather than a regional oppressor, in the process of carrying out it's own genocide against the Palestinians.

These ideas, while not necessarily supporting their military operations, are at least tacitly permissive of them, and critically they are ideas that are long familiar to, and in some sense even native within, the Settler populations which (for the moment) still form the majority of US demographics. The Imperialists are already so weakened that they have difficulty in manufacturing and disseminating completely new viewpoints and narratives, and increasingly have to modify or repurpose the old ideas, which aren't wholey suited for these new tasks. This is a natural result of their narratives and ideology directly conflicting with reality. The people become distrustful as these contradictions are increasingly revealed, and tend to reject new ideas from the State that aren’t based in their existing conceptions; a twisted form of conformation bias layered underneath a fearful mistrust.

Therefore, the State uses whatever suitable tools it finds at hand in a supporting role, in addition to trying to create purpose-made narrative tools. This is particularly common where world events catch the Imperialists by surprise, such as the Hamas offensive, and they find themselves scrambling to organize a coherent narrative without time for deliberate preparation. The results are of course imperfect, even sloppy in a sense, and quickly dismissed by the people because its contradictions are very obvious, and neither half of the contradiction is directly tied up in their existing worldview. For example even the Settler-Colonial outlook, while supportive of the Israeli State generally, cannot ignore the fact that the Israeli Occupation Forces are wantonly commiting genocide.

Their efforts to create new narratives and ideas are best exemplified by their rhetoric around Mexican drug cartels, and a need for US intervention. While new domestic sources of critical resources such as Lithium and Nickle have made war with Mexico less likely, we see that they still push this idea that the Cartels (quietly supported by the United States), pose a problem that Mexico can't handle, and which demands US intervention. However these efforts are also specifically targeted at anti-Imperialist ideologies, with support of Milei and ideas such as those by “bronze age pervert” and other anarcho-capitalists aimed at presenting a viable, Imperialist-compatible Ideology to replace Libertarianism's former role as a controlled opposition force on their right flank.

They support these cognitive efforts with their control of information and propaganda. We need only to look at the censorship they regularly employ around Ukraine, under the guise of “Russian misinformation”, to see the general tactics they use. Lack of regular reporting on Ukrainian losses (as much as 200,000 in 2023 alone), inaccurate reporting on casualty figures, and generally a lack of a coherent picture of how the small localized events they do cover, such as the destruction of a T-90M by a Ukrainian M2 Bradley, fit into the broader events of the whole war, and the strategic implications of foreign policy. The restriction and control of information that the general public accesses is critical to the ways of thinking, and the outlook of the domestic population.

These same general tactics have been applied to Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, the Spanish occupation of Morroco, French military presence in Western Africa, the US's own support of drug cartels and narco states, etc. etc. But the objective of this censorship is to keep the public separated from information which directly conflicts with the Liberal world outlook that is compatible with International Imperialism, not necessarily to keep up support for the immediate subject of this information. It's role is to curate and tailor what the public sees into a bubble that reinforces or supports this existing way of thinking, and these narrative tools the State uses to justify its actions to the public, serving both an offensive and defensive function. The core ideas and perhaps more critically the ways of thinking are always the primary concern of the State, even if this is not immediately obvious, or directly articulated by the State. Most of the ideas and narratives behind both Left and Right interpretations of Liberalism, such as the idea that the US could win a war against Russia or China, can be quickly proven to be either inaccurate, or outright falsifications in some cases, with a simple half-hour of googling, but people will never search for what they don’t know exists. And more importantly people will have no reason to look further into the inconsistencies presented by the State’s narratives if they can be explained through mechanisms in their existing world-outlook, such as dismissing things as being a result of “wokeism” or racist or otherwise bigoted motivations on part of individual actors.

The specific tactics and means used by Cognitive Warfare aren't new, but what is new is the concrete, doctrinal understanding of this theater of operations, objectives, and the nature of the forces involved. While this specific understanding has given the State a much more precise, and deliberate control over the immediate results of their own activity, they appear to not understand the exact nature of either their own forces or the opposition. The State and its human actors still appear to lack a fundamental understanding of what the State is, and only crudely grasp at the class basis of their own society through their direct experiences, without fully comprehending it. As a result, they are flying half blind; until they develop a practical experience operating in this new era of declining Imperialism, they only have a general heading, and poorly understand how these social forces interact.

Offensively, the objectives of the State are two-fold; first, to degrade the ability of the people holding world views and philosophical outlooks that are incompatible with their Economic Imperialism and the Military operations to enable and enforce it. Second, they aim to create conflict between Anti-Imperialists and those otherwise opposed to the State, whereby these Liberal tailists might serve as a proxy force for the State. This encompases both left and right, as the right has also shown itself to produce ideologies that are not compatible with Imperialism as it currently exists, even if they are not ideologically opposed to the Capitalist nature of their governments.

On both the Left and Right, the State's offensive strategy has been defined by a need to split the workers into different camps, rather than the need to defend specific events from the general public's scrutiny. Rather than trying to confront a unified mass, the State has pursued a tactic of Defeat in Detail, where the division of the Workers into different social groups has allowed the State to focus its resources on the smaller threats each of them pose in isolation. While they may pose simultaneous threats, we must remember that just as two armies separated by physical space may be unable to support each other, and be vulnerable to defeat by a smaller total force, the State has isolated sections of the Workers mentally and ideologically, and left them unable to support each other in practice.

Historically this had been accomplished through Imperialism's superprofits. If we look at the situation objectively, it's impossible to deny prior to the 2000’s that significant contingents of the Settler working class benefited more from Imperialism than they were exploited by their own internal system of Capitalism. And this was supported by smaller but still substantial cadres of Black, Latino, and Indigenous workers in similar positions. These people formed a Labor Aristocracy who had a net interests in supporting the Capitalist ruling class and their state, and sold the lie that Imperialism benefited all the workers alike. In the context of the United States’ history of genocide, slavery, and oppression of all kinds, the workers then naturally began to divide themselves fighting over how the spoils of Imperialism should be divided.

But now that Imperialism is on the decline, this tactic for dividing the workers is no longer viable, and the State has had to adopt new ways of fighting the Class Struggle. Again we turn to Ukraine, where the Petit-Bourgeoisie and the socially right-leaning workers have become opposed to further military aid, with the understanding that this has negatively impacted their standards of living. The State's assets, in an effort to prevent this idea from spreading to the Left, tries to portray this as an inherently “right wing” view by presenting the MAGA movement as economically representing all right-leaning workers, by pushing the narrative that it's Russian-backed, and Russia as a socially reactionary country that needs to be stopped because of its social contradictions (despite the fact that the US and Ukraine are hardly better even in the areas they try to defend, such as real, practical equality for LGBTQ people). It is reinforced through information control, such as lack of coverage of the fact that there was no evidence of collusion between Trump and Russia, censorship and lack of coverage critical of Ukraine such as the Odessa Massacre, and obfuscating information on domestic issues related to Ukraine such as inflation and the effectiveness of sanctions.

Where previously the division between right and left was at least partially a natural consequence of economic interests, it has now been artificially supported against economic forces which naturally unify the workers. And in this new form, propped up by deliberately intensifying the Culture War, this division in and of itself is now being directly weaponized by the State. Their operational objective is to isolate the right-leaning workers, keeping the Left ideologically opposed to these real, concrete actions that benefit the working class as a whole, and leaving them unable to overcome the obstacles of State propaganda and information control. If left stagnating in this condition for long enough, their movement will eventually petre out, eliminating that particular threat for a substantial period of time as we have seen with every anti-war movement since the Vietnam era.

While on the Left (excluding the Marxist-Leninists), their more fragmented and combative ideology has made it unnecessary to actively isolate their movements, and the State has found that propaganda and information control is sufficient to keep them from unifying in any meaningful way. For example, the Anarchists’ Liberalism and historical defeats in the Ukraine region inherently predisposed them towards support of Ukraine, or at least opposition to Russia, which for the State amount to the same thing. While this would otherwise incline them to cooperation with the SocDems, the Anarchist ideological opposition to all States generally means they are at odds regarding concrete strategy and tactics, making them effectively a non-threat. Even those who are opposed to US support of Ukraine and try to act on their beliefs represent such a small subculture, formed around such specific ideas and moral frameworks that they are already isolated from the average worker’s daily experiences.

And as for the Marxian socialists, most are already fragmented into an array of theoretical interpretations, and have been so far tainted by Liberalism and past bad blood that working together in any concrete way is simply out of the question for most. Only the few organizations willing to step outside of the Leftists’ niche kaleidoscope of ideologies pose even a hypothetical threat to the State, and it's no surprise that these organizations have faced the brunt of the Cognitive Operations the State employs against the Left.

Instead of large operations to isolate a portion of the workers on the Left, Imperialism has found ideologies that they can use to provide a screening force for their real maneuvers against genuine anti-Imperialist organizations, just as the Right had previously done for the State when Imperialism was strong, and they could plunder the world relatively freely. While these Leftists aren't directly aligned with the State in the same ways as the Democratic Party, they are nevertheless a force which the State has found to be compatible with its concrete aims at the immediate moment. In much the same way as the Imperialists were able to cooperate with tribal entities, semi-national factions, and religious and political groups which served as co-belligerent, circumstantial allies in Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria, such as Suni tribal militia, the Kurdish Peshmerga fighters, and “moderate rebels” in Syria, the State has also found ideologies which are not friendly to them, but who's separate interests are useful for the State.

The Left’s co-opting of Pro-Palestinian sentiment to support to the State’s legal attack on the APSP is the most pressing example. While the State continues its struggle against the anti-colonial movement at home, organizations like PSL use their organizing work for Palestine to suppress the Uhuru movements’s efforts to defend itself. We have no reason to believe that the individual members within PSL don't actually support Palestine, or that they individually support the State, but it's simply that they see the Class War as being identical with the Culture War. This has caused them to see any organization who is branching out from Leftist circles such as Uhuru or the Marxists within RATWM as enemies, simply because these organizations don't focus on the cultural struggle between the Synthetic Left and Right. So when the State targets these organizations with Lawfare, the Leftists see it as an opportunity for themselves, rather than them knowingly helping the State. It's this opportunistic and idealist perspective that makes organizations such as PSL or CPUSA useful to the State, rather than an alliance between Left Workers and the Bourgeoisie, as was formerly the case with the Labor Aristocracy represented by the Reactionary Right.

These operations by the State obviously pose significant challenges for the Workers’ Movement to overcome, though they are not insurmountable. The global struggle against Imperialism will have the natural result of intensifying struggle within our own States, and drive events forward independently of our own internal politics. What this means is that the Marxists have to focus on overcoming the Bourgeoisie State's efforts to keep us isolated from the masses, and that we have to adapt ourselves to these new conditions of struggle, without ignoring the real, on-the-ground impact of historical developments.

How well we adapt and respond to the State and their ideological proxy forces will determine how well we are prepared to meet each future opportunity presented by the decline of Imperialism on a global scale. Only the Marxist science of Dialectical-Materialism can let us accurately navigate these challenges we face, and bring us towards uniting the Working Class.