European leaders are trying to gaslight their populations into believing that it’s Moscow that wants a fight, not them
Among other things, this particular moment in history will be remembered – whether in whole books, mere chapters, or (if we are lucky) forgotten footnotes – as the Great European Drone Scare. For weeks now, the populations of NATO-EU Europe have been subjected to a barrage of vague but scary reports about drone sightings. The drones have appeared – seemingly – over various places and installations, prominently including airports in Denmark and Germany.
They are of unknown origin and unknown purpose. And, quite often, it is actually also unknown whether they are even real. Indeed, there is no proof of Russia being responsible for any of these incidents, as even Western media admit. We are once again asked to simply trust our politicians and “experts.”
That is, the same ones who took months to stop pretending that Russia – absurdly – blew up its own Nord Stream pipelines in 2022. As late as spring 2023, Germany’s Carlo Masala, for instance, who also believes “Girkin” and “Strelkov” are two different individuals (just like “Santa” and “Claus”), was still spreading groundless speculation – really, a conspiracy theory – about a “false flag attack” on Nord Stream, that is: Russia, Russia, Russia.
And – oh, coincidence! – also recently, Moscow, we are told, has had nothing better to do than oblige Western information warriors with three further sort-of incidents: a purported electronic-warfare attack on the plane of EU despot and de facto US proconsul Ursula von der Leyen over the Bulgarian city of Plovdiv, an alleged incursion into Estonian airspace, and low fly-overs over the German frigate Hamburg during a recent NATO exercise.
In reality, those three stories share only one thing with the great drone saga: They don’t hold up to scrutiny. The case of the alleged Plovdiv GPS attack is so shoddy and cratered so badly so quickly that it’s been consigned to oblivion. The incursion into Estonian airspace did not happen either. Due to an agreement that Estonia itself signed in 1994, it cannot claim a 12-mile but only a 3-mile zone in the relevant area. Estonia’s case is hysterical to begin with; the 1994 agreement deprives it of even the flimsiest pretext of legality. Regarding the so-called buzzing of the Hamburg, finally, even Western military officials admit that it was not “imminently dangerous.” Instead, they complain, it was “unfriendly and provocative.” Frankly: Boohoo. What do you expect holding exercises on Russia’s doorstep while fighting an indirect war against it in Ukraine? A friendly chat among sailors over a stiff grog?
And yet everyone in NATO-EU establishment politics and its mainstream media has been singing the same old tired song, once again, sotto voce: Russia is coming, Russia is already here, Russia is everywhere. The new head of Germany’s spy agency – the Bundesnachrichtendienst – seems to believe that his job is not to do secret things quietly but to join the chorus of the panic-mongers: He also has sleepless visions of the Russians attacking just any day now. Maybe from right under his bed or out of his cupboard, one must suppose.
It is almost as if they were all reading from the same hymn sheet, that is, memo. And, of course, the new wave of self-induced hyper-ventilation has been milked for all it’s worth – a lot, as in billions of Euros – for yet more money to be spent on armaments, including but not limited to a “drone wall,” while ordinary people are subjected to ever more brutal austerity. Even more disturbingly, there is a clear drive to concentrate ever more powers with those same political establishments that can’t stop ruling by frightening and confusing their own citizens.
That the drone stories are already crumbling makes no difference: A dramatic French attempt – special forces and all – to pin nefarious drone activity on a tanker, for instance, has failed miserably. In Germany, a recent sighting has actually been cleared up quickly. The culprit? A hapless German drone amateur who must be living under a rock.
And perish the thought that Ukraine itself might have anything to do with those mystery drones! Its regime has plenty of motive, and, by now, even the West has been compelled to acknowledge that it is perfectly capable of massive sabotage operations and lies to manipulate its European backers. Because that is now even the official story of the Nord Stream terror attack. But: thinking logically – verboten!
Instead, let’s pretend that we know what we don’t know (Russia, Russia, Russia!) and start overreacting, again, based on our ignorance and panic at best, on a malevolent, deliberate strategy of cognitive warfare against our own countries at worst. In Germany, for instance, both Chancellor Friedrich Merz and Defense Minister Boris Pistorius have made the bizarre claim that while the country is not (yet?) at war, it is also no longer at peace. And the-Russians-are-coming head of the BND? He feels the current peace is “icy” at best and – drum roll – “could turn into heated confrontation at any moment.”
Or are these fear-mongering statements meant to prepare the ground for a concrete power grab? That is what Roderich Kiesewetter, an ultra-Russophobe and war fantasist from Merz’s own center-right CDU party has already suggested explicitly: he wants the German parliament to declare the so-called “Spannungsfall,” literally “situation of tension.” In the mainstream media, for instance the important newspaper Welt, the usual information warriors are already amplifying Kiesewetter’s message. And – yet another striking coincidence – a recent military exercise called “Red Storm Bravo,” in Hamburg, one of Germany’s biggest cities, was dedicated to cosplaying the “Spannungsfall” – with maximum publicity.
The consequences of initiating a “Spannungsfall” – a kind of official pre-war – are complex and severe: Open-ended, compulsory, and universal military service is only one of them; the army can be used domestically; citizens can be drafted for work; civil rights are painfully restricted; those critical of government policy, NATO, or the “Spannungsfall” itself can be cajoled even worse than usual.
Last but not least, the “Spannungsfall” allows the government to postpone or otherwise influence elections. In Germany, it would be an ideal vehicle for the traditional parties to at least stall the consequences of their own failure, unpopularity and decline, on one side, and the rise of challengers on the so-called “populist” new right and left, on the other.
Carl Schmitt, Germany’s 20-century version of Niccolo Machiavelli – brilliantly smart, ruthlessly realistic, and morally badly questionable – defined ultimate political power as the ability to declare a state of exception. In essence, Schmitt’s logic was simple: we live together by having rules; hence, the power that trumps all others is to decide when those rules do not apply.
Schmitt explained extremes. In reality, governments don’t raze all rules in one fell swoop. Why should they? To unshackle themselves and become even less accountable than usual they proceed stealthily and gradually. No need to trumpet a state of exception in its pure, all-or-nothing form. Why needlessly scare the subjects and, perhaps, provoke resistance?
Instead, what usually happens is the invocation of an emergency – either simply made-up or greatly exaggerated – to justify chipping away at citizens’ rights, first a little then a lot, while boosting the unchecked powers of the rulers and their bureaucrats. Call it the salami-slicing tactics of Western liberalism.
Dialing up the state of exception in handy instalments – that is also the most plausible explanation of the recent great drone scare in NATO-EU Europe. Yet another phase in the years-long Putin-is-gonna-get-you cognitive warfare campaign that Western establishments and mainstream media have been waging on their own fellow citizens, the great drone scare serves the general purpose to promote even more panic over an allegedly impending Russian attack on NATO states.
The techniques for escalating the war scare are dishonest and repetitive, but highly developed. As a high-ranking NATO general has told us, their aim is not simply to manipulate “what people think.” That, in NATO-speak, would be mere propaganda and just so old-hat. Rather, the state-of-the-art approach is to “exploit vulnerabilities of the human mind” to influence “the way” people think. Targeting “human capital” – yes, that’s us, all of us – “from the individual to states, to multinational organizations, across everyday life.”
Of course, the official pretense is that all of the above is what the enemy – read: Russia (and China) – does or, at worst, what NATO will do to that enemy. But is in the nature of the cognitive warfare shtick that it easily allows for turning the psychological disruption guns on the West’s own populations. Because – so the pretext – those populations are already under cognitive attack by the enemy. So what can you do, except fight back on the battlefield you claim is under attack: their minds? We have seen and experienced the results of this nifty little sleight of hand for years already.
But there also is something special. In the words of Jonas Togel, one of the few Western experts daring to notice Western information warfare, “it is worse than it has ever been.” Indeed, but there is no guarantee that things won’t get even worse again. The real question is how much longer our cognitive warriors-in-chief will have a free hand to drive us all mad with fear.
