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The EU, UK, and Ukraine are using a mix of expanded surveillance, censorship, and spin in an attempt to control the narrative in Europe and influence it in the U.S.
As I wrote in the first installment of this mini-series, Delusion, Deception and Dipshittery: Hasbara on the 8th Front, the western powers seem to be making competing desperate bids to maintain narrative control, and it is very hard to parse the difference between deliberate deception, delusion, and what is just plain dipshittery.
I’ve covered Israel’s battles on its “8th front” in part one and will talk about the Trump administration’s narrative management efforts in part three.
This edition will cover the efforts of the EU, UK, and Ukraine to redirect the narrative energy in their home countries and especially in the U.S., with a goal of re-establishing the proxy war in Ukraine as a top priority.
They are also resorting to expanded censorship and surveillance in an effort to keep their local populations onside with increasingly unpopular policies and governments.
Ukraine has always been winning
One sign that things are getting desperate is the revival of 2022-style agit prop from The Financial Times:
https://t.co/o2DEyLO1rT pic.twitter.com/AJXZssGUu5
— Nat Wilson Turner (@natwilsonturner) September 29, 2025
The article itself isn’t worth engaging with as the content is just a rehash of Biden-era gaslighting that even the NY Times has been moving away from in recent months.
In August, Gallup revealed that their polling showed support for continuing the war had plummeted among Ukrainians:
https://t.co/dKq76XgkbR pic.twitter.com/8yRvfmLbZX
— Nat Wilson Turner (@natwilsonturner) September 29, 2025
Much of the urgency, which is also expressed in recent calls to shoot down Russian jets allegedly flying in Estonian airspace, alleged Russian drone attacks on Poland, mystery drones over Denmark, can be attributed to concern over Donald Trump’s “Ukraine, with the support of the European Union, is in a position to fight and WIN all of Ukraine back in its original form” Truth social post, which seems to be abandoning Europe and Ukraine to their fate.
Naked Capitalism covered that previously and noted:
For anyone looking at the conflict at a remove, Biden lavishing money on that “bring Russia down” misadventure and stripping the US and its allies bare of weapons stocks did keep Ukraine fighting and limited territorial losses, which is what the press and most observers focused on. And the press was only haltingly starting to become candid about Ukraine’s increasingly desperate condition in the second half of 2024.
By contrast, war-watchers are now providing many indicators of Ukraine’s military collapse becoming more and more imminent, such as extremely thin manning on the front lines and Ukraine’s one solace, its supposed drone prowess, now being outmatched by Russia.
With the pressure building Zelensky is trying to position Ukraine as the protector of Europe, as Tusk of Poland tries to declare a European war on Russiaper The Guardian:
Volodymyr Zelenskyy, speaking to a security forum in Warsaw, said his country was offering “to Poland and all our partners to build a joint, truly reliable shield against Russian aerial threats”, drawing on Ukraine’s experience.
He said his country’s military “can counter all types of Russian drones and missiles” and argued that “if Russia loses the ability to strike in the skies, it will be unable to continue the war”.
Poland, Romania and Denmark have all been subject to drone incursions during the last month, which have forced the closure of airports and revealed gaps in the ability of Nato to respond effectively.
Donald Tusk, Poland’s prime minister, said the scale of the drone incursions was such that “the entire western, transatlantic community” needed to realise “this is war”. He added: “We didn’t want it, it’s sometimes strange, a war of new type, but it’s still a war.”
Starmer, Surveillance, Censorship, and Digital Grift
German journalist Patrick Baab pointed out on the Glenn Diesen YouTube channel that:
My hypothesis is Western elites, especially Western European elites, are heading for war. They want to drive their own countries into a fullscale war with Russia. They let their countries into a dead end street and they they are unable to make a U-turn right now. So I’d like to substantiate that in terms of economic, political, cultural, psychological and military reasons and all these reasons and tendencies convene in a single direction the direction to war.
Baab also points out another angle behind European elite support for endless war, surveillance, censorship, and opposition to popular will, the opportunity to dramatically expand digital grift:
The next point is the digitalization and the digital capitalism. In war, states become the original venture capitalist for digital companies. You can see that at Elon Musk’s Starink with with its satellites that are monitoring the whole front line of 1,400 kilometers. Elon Musk is making billions of dollars completely paid by the military. With this venture capital of the state, Elon Musk brings himself in an econ economic pole position. These companies don’t have an interest to stop the war. …
And for the transformation from neoliberal capitalism to digital capitalism, war is necessary. And the enforcement of digital companies is exactly what the Trump administration wants for bringing the US economy into a pole position in the competition with China. Microchips and artificial intelligence are the important fields to make America strong again militarily and economically.
And that brings us to the UK’s moves to impose Digital ID, with the help of Larry Ellison of Oracle.
But first, let’s look at some of the pressures surveillance, censorship UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer is under. He’s historically unpopular:
Keir Starmer is now the most unpopular British Prime Minister in recorded history.
This is what happens when you make endless pledges you don’t keep, and do endless things you promised not to do. pic.twitter.com/CkFcZaAEfp— Piers Morgan (@piersmorgan) September 28, 2025
Starmer’s unpopularity is only encouraging the Labour government’s enthusiastic enforcement of increasingly draconian censorship laws, as Taylor Lorenz wrote in the Guardian last month:
the UK has reportedly blocked internet users’ access to everything from SpongeBob SquarePants gifs to Spotify playlists. Information about Joe Biden’s police funding plan has been restricted, along with a post about an up-and-coming political party. Gamers say they have been unable to tweak colours in games such as Minecraft. And it’s all because of a new age verification law.
…the law and others like it claim to be narrowly focused on pornographic content and material that promotes suicide, self-harm, eating disorders or abusive and hateful behaviour, the subjective nature of the restrictions has led to mass censorship, with the de facto removal of vast swaths of content from the web. Tech companies find it easier and cheaper to simply remove mass amounts of information than have something slip through and be deemed non-compliant.
Starmer has adopted an anti-immigration frame for the introduction of Digital ID:
I know working people are worried about the level of illegal migration into this country. A secure border and controlled migration are reasonable demands, and this government is listening and delivering.
Digital ID is an enormous opportunity for the UK. It will make it tougher to work illegally in this country, making our borders more secure. And it will also offer ordinary citizens countless benefits, like being able to prove your identity to access key services swiftly – rather than hunting around for an old utility bill.
We are doing the hard graft to deliver a fairer Britain for those who want to see change, not division. That is at the heart of our Plan for Change, which is focused on delivering for those who want to see their communities thrive again.
So far the opposition to the UK Digital ID scheme is coming from the right-wing Reform party and certain elements of the online left. Time will tell how it plays out, but I doubt it will reverse the general trends of Starmer’s unpopularity.
Unfortunately for Starmer, the more he clamps down, the more unpopular he becomes, which leads to more clamp downs, which leads to…a surveillance, censorship doomloop.
The EU says digital currency will protect freedom
Not to be left out, Ursula von der Leyen, President of the European Commission, is pushing a digital euro, per Politico and she’s even made some concessions to national governments to get it done:
The Frankfurt-based ECB wants to get its plan for a purely digital version of the euro signed off as soon as possible, fearing a major delay will mean it loses ground to U.S.-based private sector payment systems — particularly dollar-denominated “stablecoin” cryptocurrencies that have become a popular cross-border payment method.
…
The earlier proposal, seen by POLITICO, gave governments three months, potentially extended to six, to decide on the limit and the chance for a qualified majority to veto it. In case of no decision, the ECB could go ahead and set the limit and issue the digital euro.The last pitch, again presented just one week before a ministers’ meeting, doesn’t change the silence-approval mechanism in case of no decision by governments, but in exchange sets a clearer and longer timeline, requires more countries to agree on the limit, and also addresses doubts raised by countries such as Germany and Austria on what will happen after the launch.
Piero Cipollone, Member of the Executive Board of the ECB, saw no need to compromise on his utopian/Orwellian rhetoric when extolling the promise of the digital Euro in a recent speech entitled “Digital euro: protecting our freedom, autonomy and security.”
The EU is also working on a major new step in online surveillance, chat control:
The Danish presidency of the EU Council is pushing for a vote on the proposals, dubbed “Chat Control” – which advocate mass scanning of mobile phones and computers to identify suspected child abuse material sent by encrypted communications services used by the pubic – by 14 October.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation sums up the case against:
Chat Control is a dangerous legislative proposal that would make it mandatory for service providers, including end-to-end encrypted communication and storage services, to scan all communications and files to detect “abusive material.” This would happen through a method called client-side scanning, which scans for specific content on a device before it’s sent. In practice, Chat Control is chat surveillance and functions by having access to everything on a device with indiscriminate monitoring of everything. In a memo, the Danish Presidency claimed this does not break end-to-end encryption.
All in all, these surveillance, censorship and spin moves are not the moves of confident powers enjoying broad public support for their proven policies. Rather, this is some weird mix of deception, delusion, and dipshittery.
I usually don´t mention typos but
“Raab also points out another angle behind European elite”
(there is a known German TV entertainer called Raab)
Thanks, fixed!
Also not to be confused with Dominic Raab, a strong contender for a place in the top 10 least competent UK politicians of all time.
😂
Too true!!
Thank you, Nat.
It’s interesting that you mention the Danish presidency.
When Denmark last presided over the EU Council, I worked with some of their officials on financial services regulation. Soon after the presidency, many of the Danish government officials joined US firms.
One hopes that, this round, the officials are getting their golden parachutes ready.
Don’t forget, Colonel, that the Kinnock nepo-babe Stephen, now a Labour minister, had his feet under the table in Danish politics for a while when his wife was prime minister. As 1960s Tory PM Harold Macmillan almost said, “connections dear boy, connections,”.
Who does Starmer think he’s fooling with the nonsense about digital ID preventing illegal immigration? It will make it tougher to work illegally in this country? Let me fix that for Starmer – it will make it tougher for those with a digital ID to work illegally in this country. Because clearly if you don’t have a digital ID, it will be much more difficult for the government to know what you are doing, which is how most non-psychopaths prefer things.
Also, a perfect implementation of digital UD for its stated purpose will do nothing to prevent illegal immigrants or reduce legal migration. It will merely create a vast and restive underclass of unemployable illegal migrants whom “hardworking voters” will have to subsidise. This is not what the man in the street wants!
This policy results in “Go directly to Reform!” for the twofer of actual anti-nigration policies and no to digital ID. Nigel Farage must be jouissant at this development.
> “This would happen through a method called client-side scanning, which scans for specific content on a device before it’s sent. In practice, Chat Control is chat surveillance and functions by having access to everything on a device with indiscriminate monitoring of everything. In a memo, the Danish Presidency claimed this does not break end-to-end encryption.”
Strictly speaking the Danish Presidency is correct. When we all switched to end-to-end encryption after Snowden the LEAs that had previously been monitoring the wires seemed not too concerned. It quickly became clear they don’t need to see the content of messages to get their job done. They monitor the wires to see who is talking to whom, where, how, when etc. and if they need to read the actual content of the messages then they hack the device, perhaps obtaining a warrant. That doesn’t break end-to-end encryption. It looks at the plaintext before it is encrypted and sent on the network or after it is decrypted to be read by the recipient.
The same technical but rather meaningless distinction applies to Chat Control, hence by mentioning it the Danish Presidency, in your three Ds analytic model, Nat, evinces deception. In the mis/dis/mal-information model it is mal.
It’s an example of what Baab mentioned, the public-private partnership for surveillance and censorship (licenced monopoly rent extraction in communications) extended to private chat apps. Twitter Files showed how that all works but presumably the tech has evolved and AI is being incorporated.
I can’t see Musk, Meta, or Alphabet having much problem with it. More interesting to see what Apple will do.
Btw, when Chat Control is implemented and runs on your phone it will be able to read your chat history. If you want to clean your device before Chat Control deploys, you need to get your correspondents to clean up theirs too because their chat history has your messages too.
Apple had little enough problem with it in 2021. I doubt they’d have a real problem with it now.
https://www.wired.com/story/apple-photo-scanning-csam-communication-safety-messages/
re: USA perspective on censorship
The War Dept’s War on Media
The Pentagon’s new restrictions will bar correspondents covering the American military from covering the American military, as the Trump regime attempts to exert full-spectrum control over media.
by Patrick Lawrence
https://consortiumnews.com/2025/09/30/patrick-lawrence-the-war-depts-war-on-media/
The F Word, the C Word & the N Word
They are all nouns. The F word can also be used as an adjective. They are all used as invectives. Today all these words are being overused. And misused.
by Joe Lauria
https://consortiumnews.com/2025/09/29/the-f-word-the-c-word-the-n-word/
At the beginning of the war, I remember an interview with a Russian Neo-Con type in Russian media on their need to change their first strike nuclear policy, and then a couple years later, Russia changed their first strike policy.
A couple years later, he was interviewed stating that Europe had lost its respect for Russia’s nuclear deterrent, and it was probably necessary for Russia to provide a demonstration to re-instill that respect. Because this was a couple years ago, I forgot the gentleman’s name, although I think the second interview was on a Saudi news outlet with John Mearsheimer on the other side.
I really hope Ukraine doesn’t turn into a nuclear conflict, and I hope Europe understands that no one is going to sacrifice DC to avenge Paris and Berlin, because it appears that the EU is practically begging for Russians to start nuking them, which takes the conflict from merely economic suicide for Europe to actual suicide. It doesn’t appear that the EU/NATO has a significant nuclear deterrent unless the US decides it wants to commit suicide as well. Its like a pack of roosters trying to take out a grizzly bear.
The FT appears to be moving the goalposts. Probably in an effort to align with the EU trying to bolt together a war machine and ratchet up the supporting propaganda. IMO the FT got wobbly over Ukraine with the debacle of the ’23 summer offensive and knew that the game was up after Avdiivka. Their daily posts on the plucky, indomitable Ukie patriots decreased to every two or three days, and their chief gaslighter Max Seddon was sidelined. Now there may not be a peep on Ukie heroism for four days or more. Of course Orwell Prize winner Gideon Rachman continues with his cheerleading, but there are few cartwheels these days and more just waving the pom-poms.
via German Mulitpolar Magazine
(sorry if this is a repost)
machine-translation
Society of Abuses
The French philosopher Éric Sadin has studied the project of digitalization intensively and warned of its social consequences in numerous books. He explicitly argues that all actions and movements are being monitored and measured with the aim of making the world’s functioning dependent on digital programs. Society is thus entering a “regime of conformity.” Multipolar introduces the author, who is still relatively unknown in Germany, and his work.
https://archive.is/aOHXK
Sadin’s linked essays/works are saved for early morning coffee and splif.
the thing that bubbles up for me, when perusing the translated art: Silent Weapon for Quiet Wars…allegedly found in the buffer of an IBM printer sold at a garage sale in the late seventies, early 80’s…that described what we would now cll “Globalists or “Davos Man” operating Civilisation like a circuit board…with transistors, capacitors, resistors, et.
it was, and still is, considered classic “Conspiracy Theory”.
but when i came across it, circa 1999, when i 1st gained access to the web, i thought it was a compelling lens to look at geopolitics through.
now, it might not be so crazytown,lol
similar to Michael Ruppert’s post 9-11 book(cant recall name right now)…with all the confusing (to me) talk about PROMIS software that apparently sees everything.
turns out, that seems to be real, as well.
i read all these post and linked things about all this tech and surveillance stuff…and i wonder when to pull the ripcord on Hunker Down and Go Dark Mode.
the Muse grabbed my earlobe and pulled, and i put this on my supposedly farm oriented faceborg page,lol:
Seems that just about every more or less dystopian SciFi written over the last hundred years…often written as an at least Implicit Warning…has instead been used as a manual for how to implement the various “Bad Things” in those myriad novels and short stories.
So now we have, not merely an existential crisis(who am I and why am I in this ditch?), nor an additional teleological crisis(where the hell are we going?)…and not just an additional ontological crisis(what is “Real”?)…but now we are to be pulled(and I use that word advisedly) into an epistemic crisis(what is knowledge and how do we “Know”?)>
as a Feral Philosopher in the wilderness(the proper environs), this is one of the scariest things ive read this month:https://archive.is/aOHXK
I recommend it for those inclined to such esoterica.
Future cockroach historians, etc will marvel that we allowed the Humanities to wither on our watch.
In the early 2000s well before Wikileaks and certainly well before Ed Snowden I was surfing around what then was WWW and a few times ran across discussion boards where the participants would mention some mysterious government all-out surveillance program with the word “Blue” in it, like Big Blue or something. It sounded edgy or “Conspiracy Theory”-ish as you say and more from a movie or a novel albeit I did not discard it at all.
However the speculative level was so high that it was difficult to break it down to what it really would mean – especially to me as someone who was not that net-savvy – the posts were warning in a conspirational tone of what eventually turned out to be much worse than those posts. However doing this they were also fancying the liberty to just write about what most likely were only dark fantasies of potential but unlikely futures under the assumption that it remains a mystery and somehow “game-y” and under the line of scary visibility.
That is: even if we think we all are surveilled it won´t impede with out banal daily lives. What we don´t know doesn´t bother us.
As long as “Matrix” was “Neuromancer” and resistance was supposedly cool and it wasn´t about getting organised on some square in midtown on a rainy afternoon but about doing martial arts in slow-mo the real world was not a threat.
When, as you say, they still only write fiction about it, we need not worry. But when the dystopia has lost its appeal to fantasy you know it has caught up with our real lives.
I recently talked to colleagues and we agreed that there need to be again some movies that can picture technology in a positive way. Just by entertainment standards. Not meaning that we stop scrutinizing it. But to kinda offer the mind a path to recover for a little while. The more out real world resembles the fantastic pictures of our fiction entertainment products offered in the past the less we seem to be able to create new narrative tropes in our present that offer an escapist vision intriguing enough to engage with it.
If one wants to see the future these psychopaths are trying to implement, one just needs to look at the proving ground – Occupied Palestine.
As a British citizen, I suspect that at the next election the advantage will lie with the political parties who commit to observing the traditional liberties of the English, Scottish, Welsh and Irish people and reject the concept of “human rights” as conceived by Starmer, the EU nabobs and the European Court of Human Rights and rejecting the “freedom” of government institutions and corporations and powerful individuals to overide the people’s liberties by Acts of Parliament passed by the least popular government since the Norman conquest backed, as it is, by an oversized majority based on the sheer unpopularity of the major parties, a lack of real electoral choice because of the tight grip of the party system on the electoral machinery, and a First Past the Post System in which very few candidates gain an absolute majority of the votes.
In the late forties, Harold Wilson began his “bonfire of controls” which had been put on place during the war years and the immediate post-war period, an action which gave a tired Labour government its small majority in the 1950 election, only to lose the next election in 1951 when the Tories took up the same slogan and promised to make the bonfire taller.
As President of the Board of Trade “Harold Wilson set out his first Bonfire to the House of Commons on 4 November 1948. The announcement, delivered as a response to a Parliamentary question, represented the largest relaxation of physical controls since the government had famously ‘tightened belts’ the previous year. With it, regulations covering over sixty commodities, which had necessitated 200 000 differentpermits, were consigned to ashes.11 Having hinted at such a move a week earlier, the announcement was timed so that its press would coincide with the nation’s Guy Fawkes’ celebrations. In line with Wilson’s intentions, the move was widely supported and even won plaudits from usually hostile commentators. The Daily Telegraph, to give one example, noted that it was ‘clearly a step in the right direction’. 12 In the months that followed, Wilson continued on this course by announcing further deregulation. On 31 January 1949, for instance, it was announced that consumer restrictions were to be removed from most woollen goods. 13 Just six weeks later, Wilson and his wife appeared in front of the press to declare that the entire clothes rationing scheme had ended and symbolically tore their coupon books in two. 14 Following this theatrical flourish, Wilson’s actions culminated when a second Bonfire was announced to Parliament on 22 March 1949. Extending upon the November announcement, this blaze removed a further 900 000 licences and released twenty five more materials from quantitative control. 15 Taken together, these highly visible announcements consigned over one hundred pieces of legislation, the requirement for a million licences, restrictions covering almost 130 different categories of material, and 1300 jobs to ashes. They were, for The Times, a significant ‘clearing [of] the jungle of controls’. https://eprints.leedsbeckett.ac.uk/id/eprint/2324/2/The%20birth%20of%20a%20politician_%20Harold%20Wilson%20and%20the%20bonfires%20of%20controls%2C%201948-9.pdf
What the people of Britain require is a bonfire of restrictions on individual liberty, be it speech, supporting the “wrong” political party, refusing to be forced to accept that a man is a women because that is how they wish to style themselvessupporting the victims of genocide, not rejecting election results when they do not suit a government or the EU, declaring that the Deep State is the enemy of all and it’s action should be continuously examined in clear light by everyone with an interest in doing, and so on and so forth, as we say. I suspect the he people of most, if not all, nations in Europe would share this ambition if it were offered to them. And it would be nice to turn the EU back into a Common Market whose only focus is the effective operation of the Single Market.