Recent Items

Is Europe Preparing for War Against Russia or Against Own Populations?

Posted on by

Defense spending by EU member states is now projected to reach 381 billion euros this year, up over last year’s record of 343 billion. Despite all the money being burned at the altar of Project Ukraine, sober analysts conclude that European nations are woefully ill-equipped to successfully do much of any fighting there and no amount of money is going to change that for the foreseeable future. There are a variety of reasons for that, which we have been well covered and we won’t go into here.

But all the additional weaponry and surveillance goodies that aren’t immediately tossed into the corrupt pit of death that is Ukraine could be more likely to be used on an increasingly discontented population rather than against Russia. We’re already seeing it happen.

Militarized police are roughing up anti-genocide protestors in Berlin, in Cologne they just injured dozens participating in an anti-war march, which is now a weekly occurrence in Germany. there are draconian crackdowns on speech where the police are raiding the homes of anti-genocide and free speech protest organizers and charging them with terrorism offenses. And in most EU countries, the “war on terror” has already been used as a pretext to put soldiers on the streets and reinforce state repression as terrorists and protestors against social inequality become synonymous in the eyes of the ruling class.

In France where the economy is falling apart and workers bear the brunt of the pain, we’ve seen militarization of the police and frequent use of armored vehicles to help quell protests. And the army in the past had authorization to shoot yellow vest protestors.

Those protests might look like child’s play once the current European leadership is finished decimating national economies with endless self-destructive decisions all stemming from a ruling class dream to balkanize Russia. In the name of that goal, they have replaced cheap and affordable energy with the expensive kind, killed industry, engaged in economic warfare with much of the rest of the world in a failed bid to isolate Moscow, and become completely beholden to American vultures.

And it’s likely only to get worse.

Will Backlash Intensify as War on Workers Does? 

Even the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR) admits that the public is not on board with the whole ruling class militarization fever dream, and while it recommends media efforts to sway them, none have been effective enough over the past three years.

ECFR also provides some communication tips, such as promising that guns will equal butter, but we’re already seeing that those promises will not become reality. What happens when that realization sets in among the public as standards of living continue to decline?

If we take a closer look at EU elite obsession with competitiveness, much of it is simply code for a war on workers. The big prescriptions in a Mario Draghi report requested by Ursula’s European Commission last year—many of which are already being adopted incrementally by national governments—include the following:

  • Less Labor Law for “Innovative” Companies
  • Free Rein to AI and Tech Start Ups
  • More “Disruption”
  • Learn from Hyper-globalization which Decimated Labor by Embracing AI in an effort to Decimate Labor
  • Overhaul Education “Skills Investment” With a Focus on Training Workers to Become Productive Tools for Capital
  • And continue to slice away at the welfare state through budget cuts and privatizations that, of course, increase “competitiveness.”

Yes, the “peace dividend” is “finally over,” the vultures declare. They should know as they were the ones who ended it. Yet, oddly enough, the knockout blow to European competitiveness—severing itself from the East and deciding to become evermore reliant on the US—rarely gets a mention from the people who decided on such a course of action. And now European and transnational capital say workers must sacrifice more and social systems be destroyed in the name of “competitiveness.”

One wonders whether the welfare states are the cost of the failed Project Ukraine wager or they were part of the target all along. Either way the panic over the bill is being used to pursue privatizations, benefits cuts, public money transfers to defense industries, and a more exploitable workforce.

Outfits like the ECFR can provide an uplifting guns vs. butter communication strategy, but the real deal EU rulers are imposing is clear: More work for less butter to compensate for our mistakes and so we can buy more guns that might eventually be used against you to force you to do what we say.

The War at Home Is Here

A dimwit elite obsessed with military toys that will be useless on the Eurasian Steppe. Economies that no longer function for the working class. A ramp up of the welfare state bust out. Meanwhile, business is good for some.

How long until this sight is more common?

As NC reader Munchausen notes about the above “tanks”:

Those are not tanks, but lightly armored wheeled vehicles. Useful against insurgents and civilians, not so much in case Russia/China visits with real tanks. That should answer the “Who’s the enemy?” question.

And many of the preparations being made ostensibly for war with Russia could also apply to war with their own citizenry. For example, in Germany the Bundeswehr are paying visits to districts to help prepare them for what’s described as the growing possibility of war on German soil. According to CORRECTIV, these planning sessions are focused on identifying critical infrastructure to be guarded and ways to “intercept saboteurs.”

All the planning is ostensibly about transforming the country into a logistical hub supplying the Eastern front, but this Operation Plan Deutschland also notes how the “mindset of the population” is one of the greatest challenges.

Much less visible and perhaps more worrisome, however, is the proliferation of secret state surveillance. These dystopian tools are increasingly being used against European journalists, politicians, organizers, immigrants, and protestors as the EU draws inspiration and expertise from their favorite genocidaires in Israel.

Those committing genocide are also beneficiaries of all the increased EU spending on defense. As Nate Bear recently pointed out, the EU has given Israeli technology start-ups run by ex-IDF soldiers nearly half a billion euros in research grants since the start of the Gaza genocide.

And the same surveillance and population control tech used by Israel on Palestinians is being adopted by European governments. Who are they going to use it against?

Let’s take a look.

Rome-based RCS, considered a competitor of Israeli  NSO’s Pegasus, has its Hermit spyware, which can be used to remotely activate a phone’s microphone, as well as record calls, access messages, call logs, contacts, photos and other sensitive data. And it’s already widely in use in the EU.

Italy, which is a spyware hub of Europe, has other companies like Memento Labs, formerly known as Hacking Team; and IPS-Intelligence,  which are used by European governments. 

And there are others popping up, such as Invasys, a Czech firm offering its “offensive cyber” program Kelpie with the ability to access fully encrypted communications apps after hacking into iPhones and Android.  No doubt there will be more with the ramp up of defense spending. So we can look forward to more of what’s been going on in Greece. It was there that journalists and a member of the European Parliament—and at the time, the leading candidate to take over Greece’s center-left party—were targeted by Predator spyware, a product of the companies Intellexa, based in Greece, and North Macedonia-based Cytrox—both with ties to Israel Defense Force intelligence. 

A European Parliament report from last year shows the bloc’s secret state surveillance problem goes far beyond Pegasus and Predator. A few takeaways:

  • “Member States are not just customers of commercial spyware vendors, they also have other, different roles in the spyware trade. Some host spyware vendors, some are the preferred destination for finance and banking services, and yet others offer citizenship and residency to protagonists of the industry.”

  • “… concerns have been raised about certain countries’ permissive intelligence frameworks, ineffective checks, lax oversight practices and political interference.”

  • “Spyware is clearly also used by law enforcement, not just by intelligence agencies. There are serious concerns about the admissibility in court of such material as evidence in the context of EU police and justice cooperation, including within Europol and Eurojust, if such information were to originate from investigation methods applied without proper judicial oversight. Depending on the national legislation, the use of spyware is legitimate in investigations under judicial oversight.”

  • “It can be safely assumed that authorities in all Member States use spyware in one way or another, some legitimate, some illegitimate. Spyware may be acquired directly, or through a proxy, broker company or middleman. There may also be arrangements for specific services, instead of actually purchasing the software. Additional services may be offered, such as training of staff or the provision of servers. Spyware is not to be seen in isolation, but as part of a wide range of products and services offered in an expanding and lucrative global market. It is important to realise that the purchase and use of spyware is very costly, running into millions of euros. But in many Member States this expenditure is not included in the regular budget, and it may thus escape scrutiny.”

The EU is ramping up AI-driven population control intelligence, which has become notorious in Israel-Palestine. A host of companies claim they can detect suspicious behavior or other “anomalies” in all the data being vacuumed up.

For example, Israeli firm Toka Cyber has started to land contracts with European governments. According to Haaretz, it “straddles the world of active cyber and so-called passive intelligence: The company is secretive about its tech and when approached they refused to provide any details of their activities. When reminded that Haaretz revealed last year that the firm sells tech that hacks into security cameras and even alters their video feeds for intelligence and operational needs, Toka’s representatives responded: “allegedly.” 

Cobwebs, an Israeli firm which specializes in collecting data from across all social media, even scraping content from those that self-delete after a set period of time, was used by Israel as part of its attempt to “identify” and subsequently kill Palestinians.

It was acquired by American private equity firm Spire Capital in 2023 and develops cyber intelligence solutions for enforcement bodies, national security agencies, and financial services across the world, but with a particular focus on the U.S. and Western Europe.

It’s easy to see why Spire was attracted to that cash cow. Investors are licking their chops at all the opportunities as governments shovel public money into into the military-industrial-tech complex. There are a whole slate of “attractive” investment opportunities, according to Taylor Wessing, a “global law firm that serves the world’s most innovative people and businesses” (and notice how all of these technologies could be used for those “innovative” people against the lowly, non-innovative workers):

  • Unmanned systems.
  • Automated reconnaissance and surveillance.
  • Predictive maintenance.
  • Advanced data analytics and fusion.
  • Predictive decision-making.
  • Deception and counter-deception.

As Taylor Wessing notes, the shift from hardware-centric to software-driven defence systems like AI-powered solutions for command and control, data analytics, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance, and autonomous decision-making is a major trend. And European “defense champions” like Thales, Leonardo, Saab and Hensoldt—as well as smaller, new entrants—are rushing to meet the demand created by a European ruling class gone mad.

While Israel has its Palestine Laboratory, EU countries have mostly fine tuned their surveillance, imprisonment tech, and AI predictive systems  on migrants and refugees. As Patrick Breyer, a European lawmaker with the German Pirate Party who  took the EU to court to uncover the secrets of its AI-powered lie detection systems, argued:

 “What we are seeing at the borders, and in treating foreign nationals generally, is that it’s often a testing field for technologies that are later used on Europeans as well,” he told the Associated Press. “And that’s why everyone should care, in their own self-interest.”

Breyer’s argument has proven correct as European governments are now using facial recognition, IMSI catchers, drones, and AI predictive policing against protestors, which means these governments are largely indistinguishable from so many of those “authoritarian regimes” they wax on about. How much more will they begin to resemble their favorite “democracy” in Israel? There we get to see livestreamed the reliance on more brutal forms of control and extermination necessitated by a ruling class’ unquenchable thirst for plunder of assets and people.

One can see similarities too in the mix of panic and paranoia with bloodlust and a sense of infallibility between the Zionist elite and the mania gripping the European ruling class.

This warning from few years ago looks increasingly accurate:

As protests pick up and we see the UK and other countries across Europe invest heavily in population control surveillance and go after anti-genocide, anti-war and labor organizers, it brings back memories of one of the most chilling quotes from an Israeli human rights lawyer in Antony Loewenstein’s book The Palestine Laboratory: 

“Because of surveillance tech, a country can avoid massacring protestors now. Today, we’re able to identify and stop surveillance of the next Nelson Mandela before he even knows he’s Nelson Mandela.”

We’ll see. The tech tyrants always overestimate the capabilities of their products. Do you surveil and stop hundreds? Thousands? More? Let’s end on an optimistic take:

Print Friendly, PDF & Email

Subscribe to Post Comments
13 comments

  1. ChalkLine

    Just a pedantic nitpick: multi-wheeled APCs have been in use since The Second World War, they are plenty useful in warfare as they protect primarily from artillery fragments which are the real killer in warfare. They are not supposed to be shot at by tanks, they stop well short of where a tank should be.

    Their role in the new drone-centric warfare is in flux, they might have to stay even further back or there may be ways to mitigate drone attacks. It’s far too early to tell.

    Reply ↓
    1. Munchausen

      They say that Stryker is an excelent vehicle, as long as you are on the road, and it is not raining, and you are not engaged in combat. Jokes aside, of course they are useful, but there are nuances (as Russians would say).

      Wheeled APCs are intended for more-or-less road based purposes. For example, Russians have been using their BTRs to patrol Syria. Also, French are known for using wheeled armored vehicles in their colonies. But, for a proper war in the muddy steppes, you need tracked vehicles and tanks leading the column (and taking hits). Drone influence comes after that, and they don’t care much about the type of the vehicle (unless it’s a barn tank).

      The MRAP vehicle class (on the second image to the right, in sand camo) was designed for policing hostile population (in the Sandbox). The West is sending those to the Ukraine only because that’s all they got on stock in large numbers. You don’t prepare for a large scale war in Eurasia by producing MRAPs.

      Reply ↓
  2. Patrick Donnelly

    Good article.

    TPTB will fail in this endeavour.

    But the lost opportunities will bring much tragedy.

    GAZA tactics …

    Reply ↓
  3. Ignacio

    May I write the summary I made for myself?

    –Narrative control in the media and developing tools to increase it in the web (hat tip Nick Corbishley). For instance, recently “showing” the Russians jamming vdL flights with a concerted effort by the MSM —> Rusians = predators. A contrarian example would be how Israel/Gaza narrative is “failing” and even changing to opposite narratives.

    -When narrative control does not suffice we need repression in the streets. So far i think this is is being applied the hardest in the UK and Germany, not in all of Europe, or at least not equally, because the failure mentioned in the first point.

    -Full control might be obtained by comprehensive surveillance. Here both Conor and Corbishley have contributed and it looks the “Europeans” want to follow the steps of uncle US though, here in Europe, the political and administrative landscape (Except may be the UK?) makes the effort somehow more difficult. How do you call someone obsessed with surveillance and control… paranoid? unsecure?

    Hypothesis of this article: military spending might be, at least in part, a disguise for investment in repression and surveillance tools (here again Germany looks leading). So far I buy it.

    Reply ↓
    1. Ignacio

      “War against their own populations” is in my opinion somehow excessive wording, specially for a headline. It wouldn’t be that noisy in the content of the article. This reflects how all of us become contaminated, unwillingly but relentlessly, by the narrative. The Department of War. It does not help. In any case, I liked the article.

      Reply ↓
      1. Ignacio

        Let’s say: Europe increasing military spending: Is it for defence as stated or for surveillance & repression of the populaces?

        I know this is not better headline but we avoid two wars in the headline.

        Reply ↓
  4. Candide

    The silencing of a humane instinct shown in the BBC-commissioned documentary on children surviving in a genocide is an important illustration of data swept up en masse. My family called on the agricultural extension service for help when our tomatoes were shriveling. I remembered that “incriminating” detail when I learned the zionist attackers blocking the airing of the documentary had learned that one of the children had a family member who was a petty official in Gaza agriculture. That was enough to cover our eyes across the world, and in Gaza it would target the entire family for murder in a drone strike against “Hamas.” These data sweeps place any of us in the crosshairs for elimination.

    Reply ↓
  5. The Rev Kev

    I heard that the Coalition of the Willing thinks that they can assemble about 20,000 troops to go into the Ukraine. I most emphatically call bs on this claim as I reckon that the numbers will be much lower. But supposing that a 20,000 man NATO formation went into the Ukraine, that it would take the Russians about a week to annihilate it with the remnants fleeing to the Polish or Romanian border. This being the case, then those troops can be only for suppressing dissent in the EU. Consider. Since Maastrict, the elites have set fire to Europe and it is now a train wreck. The reliable, cheap Russian energy is now heading to China and it will never come back. Country after country is being deindustrialized and the elites are demanding that the people give up holidays, work an extra day, have their pensions, infrastructure, healthcare and education and all at the same time they plunge the EU into debt so that a non-EU country can be supported, even if it destroys their economies. Of course people will be rebelling at this and that is the real reason why the military is being boosted and conscription being brought back.

    Reply ↓
    2. vao

      Two points — not rebuttals, just some added nuance.

      1) The article is a good description of the strong interest from EU governments in relying upon AI tools to automate large-scale surveillance, and of their eager adoption of spyware to target selected persons of interest.

      These moves have a good underlying reason: just like armed forces, police forces lack sufficient personnel to perform all the surveillance and security tasks entrusted to them by governments.

      Let us take France as an example: during the “gilets jaunes” movement, the government had to mobilise the police and the gendarmerie (then formally a branch of the military, with the same duties and powers as the police but outside urban areas), and within those two corps, drawing on absolutely every department — even those that had nothing to do with crowd control and were not even trained for it.

      2) When it comes to the assertion that “of course people will be rebelling at this”, I have the uneasy feeling that this will become increasingly more arduous and ineffective as time passes. Not necessarily because that sypware and newfangled AI software will prove particularly effective, but rather because European societies are aging fast, and are factually already quite old (see Germany or Italy). How can a rebellion achieve the critical mass of outraged, active participants in a sustained campaign if the cohorts of young, dynamic protesters are small, possibly further depleted by emigration?

      Reply ↓
  6. bertl

    The UK tested its National Emergency alert system on 4g and 5g mobiles yesterday and from the moment I got a government message announcing it a week or two ago and, given recent events, I automatically assumed that HMG was preparing for war and/or a false flag leading to rounding up and disappearing leading figures opposing the government in every city, town, village and hamlet in the UK. Interestingly, my ancient 2g mobile which I still have occasion to use to verify my identity also received to alert. I am informed that such alerts can inform the authorities of the location of any mobile owned or used by any person of interest.

    Reply ↓
  7. Munchausen

    LOL. As I got to the “Tanks rolling into Brussels’ …” part, I thought to myself “those are not tanks” (a Pavlovian reflex of a military technology enthusiast I guess), and got the déjà vu feeling.

    Reply ↓
  8. Kane

    To me the EU seems like the USSR would’ve been if they came upon the technology for algorithmic governance decades ago. They’re undergoing some weird process of Sovietization, not only in terms of surveillance and authoritarianism but also incompetent leadership and consistently poor economic policy.

    Reply ↓

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *