David Slater

As I wrote in a recent piece debunking the “Russian hybrid warfare” narrative, a “hybrid war” is indeed being waged against Europe — but it is being waged by the EU-NATO establishment itself, against its own population. Europeans are being subjected to a sustained campaign of cognitive or psychological warfare aimed at conditioning them to believe that Europe is under attack from Russia, and that these hybrid attacks are a prelude to conventional hostilities — a claim for which, by and large, there is little or no proof. This leads to a disquieting question: given how much European governments and NATO have invested in — and come to depend on — the “hybrid war” narrative, and the broader idea of Russia as an existential threat to Europe, will they continue to limit themselves to inflating a threat that has little basis in reality? Or might they at some point feel compelled to go further? There is, after all, a historical precedent involving NATO. In October 1990, Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti confirmed to the Italian parliament the existence of “Gladio”: a secret paramilitary network, established in the early post-war years in various NATO countries under NATO auspices with CIA involvement, equipped with hidden arms caches and maintained for four decades outside any parliamentary oversight. The European Parliament’s resolution of November 1990 described an organisation that had “eluded all democratic control” and had been implicated in certain member states, “as evidenced by various judicial inquiries”, in serious cases of terrorism. Parliamentary inquiries followed in Italy, Belgium, Switzerland, and Germany. In Italy, those inquiries reached the sharpest conclusions. A decade later, a report by members of the parliamentary commission on massacres concluded that a “strategy of tension” — bombings of civilians in public places, blamed on the left to frighten the electorate towards the anti-communist right — had been “organised or promoted or supported by men inside Italian state institutions and, as has been discovered more recently, by men linked to the structures of United States intelligence”. This is what is commonly known today as a false flag: a covert operation designed to conceal who is really responsible and pin the blame on someone else. It is curious, then, that European and NATO officials have themselves accused Russia of planning false flag attacks. Could this be preparing the public for a scenario in which an attack bears no trace of Russia — and is nonetheless blamed on Moscow precisely for that reason, as a “Russian false flag”? Read my in-depth investigation here: thomasfazi.com/p/the-russian…