Is ecology the world’s new totem? Eco-citizen responsibility and the ecological preaching broadcasted daily by the media seem to be melting into the great project of the Green New Deal, or even “green civilization”, displayed by the two great geopolitical powers of the moment. Virtually everyone is now turning their attention to this polysemous notion, which has become a priority and a key idea to be reckoned with, and whose rise in the zeitgeist has clearly been remarkable over the last century.
The fact is that ecology, and its co-disciple the environment, is now an inescapable societal issue, in the West and beyond. At times nagging, omnipresent, vindictive or divisive, the issue is nonetheless poorly understood, in both its conceptual and conflictual dimensions. On the one hand, the popularity of ecology and its widespread dissemination have significantly eroded its historical, scientific and conceptual content. On the other, it has evolved into a more or less virulent and radical “ecologism”, capable of creating power relations in various fields, be they ideological, political or economic. However, analysts have focused on the downstream belligerent dimensions of the phenomenon, leaving in the shadows much of its conflictual origins, which are inseparable from its very existence.
As a combination of science, beliefs and ideologies, the contemporary notion of ecology is in practice inseparable from the crystallization of a new type of conflictual matrix in the 21st century, irrigated by earlier historical elements. This is far from being confined strictly to interactions within the living and natural world. Other thematic fields combine with it. They are linked by a common thread leading to an art of combat practised in an indirect, systemic and, one might say, “environmental” way. In other words, ecologism conveys an offensive action on what constitutes a target’s internal or external environment, with the aim to retroacting on the target itself. An individual, a group or a society can thus be altered, shaped or even “reprogrammed” from one step to the next, in the perspective to adopt behavior that favors specific strategic interests. Ecology and environmentalism are thus two sides of the same coin. The former mentally delimits the relationship between society and the biosphere, thus defining a theater of operations. The second refers to a mode of combat whose use has become considerably more widespread, and today extends beyond the strict framework of issues linked to interactions with the biosphere. Despite being at the heart of the contemporary strategic panorama, this type of conflict dynamics remains poorly understood in many countries.
In order to understand this, we will look at the genesis and physiognomy of the culture of combat conveyed today by environmentalism.
The birth of two ecological currents
Before being confused with ecologism or any other form of conflictual action, ecology is first and foremost a knowledge of nature that originates in all civilizations. This knowledge emanates from observation and experience of the natural environment, through the prism of a geocultural relationship with Nature, which may differ from one civilization to another. A retrospective look at the genesis of the notion of ecology brings out these cardinal principles and highlights the emergence of the concept in close relation to the pivotal stages in the evolution of geopolitical relations and interdependencies.
During the first period of Muslim globalization, from the 8th to the 15th century, the sociologist Ibn Khaldun was one of the first to venture into the construction of a universal way of thinking, not only on the history and sociology of empires, but also on geography and the living world. Other Persian and Arab authors (Al-Jahiz, Al-Dinawari) made significant contributions to the description of the natural environment.
The second globalization, driven by Hispanic expansion at the end of the 15th century, projected Ibero-American thought into a New World in the making. The Jesuits, heirs to the European Renaissance and the Salamanca School, produced geographical, anthropological and naturalist précis, whose writing was clearly distinct from religious thought. In 1590, José de Acosta wrote De Natura orvi orbis and the monumental Natural and Moral History of the Indies. The latter prefigures an early ecological approach, addressing the interaction between the different branches of natural and social knowledge. Acosta interpreted natural history and moral history as part of the same reality, and laid down the scientific categories that would later form the basis of the Earth and Life sciences. Half a century before Charles Darwin, the Chilean Jesuit Juan Ignacio Molina set out his first theory of species evolution in his Lesser Observed Analogies of the Three Kingdoms of Nature (1815). In Europe, all these contributions were deliberately ostracized by the Illustration and by the cultural war waged against Spain by Protestantism.
Alexander von Humboldt, a fervent admirer of Acosta’s work, was nevertheless to draw inspiration from it in the following century. He also defended a more comprehensive approach to living things, which formed the basis of environmentalist reasoning. After him, von Linné and Lamarck, and above all Darwin and Wallace, set the seal on “physicalist” and evolutionist theories in the mid-nineteenth century. Darwin, though pragmatic and cautious in his philosophical approaches, did indeed inscribe in the imagination the idea of hereditary, phylogenetic1, and therefore materialistic, origins of Life. This had the direct effect of diluting the myth of man’s divine or supernatural filiation. The rupture opened up a gulf between religious spirituality, morality and science, creating a huge call to rebuild an intellectual base capable of resignifying the whole. At the same time, in the early 19th century, biology and the life sciences began to formalize and gradually mature, at the cost of increasing compartmentalization of knowledge and a loss of overall vision.
Against this backdrop, the First Industrial Revolution, and even more so the second at the end of the 19th century, altered our relationship with nature, in the sense of modifying our relationship with what exists, as the French economist Michel Volle points out. Their leap forward was part and parcel of Europe’s fantastic colonial expansion into the rest of the world, and was intrinsically accompanied by a racial and cognitive hierarchy, supported here and there by scientific theses. The industrial era ratified the laws of thermodynamics, leading on the one hand to the partial degradation of the environment (entropy) and natural resources to generate social organization, and on the other to the development of interdependencies between the natural environment, energy and human societies. Later, the quest to reduce entropy would emerge within economic thought, notably with the work of Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen in the 1970s.
Elsewhere, the Chinese Empire, which with rare exceptions applies the imposition of its will to others, forms what might be called an ecological power. Its political mandate derives a major part of its legitimacy from the state of equilibrium between the natural environment and a population that is larger than elsewhere. What’s more, the notion of harmony will remain constantly present in Chinese geopolitical projection, even with the adoption of the capitalist matrix in the last quarter of the 20th century.
In Europe, the industrial era brought both social progress and power, as well as disorientation insofar as it led to a veritable upheaval of reference points. In the early 19th century, Humboldt was among the first to openly address the impact of the industrial world. As we all know, Engels, Marx and others also addressed the issue, from the angle of socio-economic relations. Humboldt spoke of “mankind’s bad behavior […] disturbing the natural order”. The human species could become “sterile” and “go so far as to devastate the distant stars”, he wrote2 in 1801. Other observers, such as Thomas Malthus and Francis Galton, also expressed their reluctance towards material progress, formulating objections mixed with conservative theories.
A century later, Ernst Haeckel followed the same aspiration for a global vision, laying out the contours of oekology. A convinced Darwinist, he set out a unified vision of the living realm, which quickly spilled over into the realm of human ends, as he promoted a eugenicist and utopian conception, ostensibly unsympathetic to industrial mutation. For him, modern civilization is being pushed forward by science and technology, but “suffers from the risk of dismemberment and moral and social deficiencies3”. The concept of ecology was officially formulated at the end of the 19th century. Like the Darwinian breakthrough with the past, it reflected a change in the scale of analysis and, above all, a shift in approach that placed it at the crossroads between a large number of scientific disciplines concerned with the study of living organisms, and the teleological field relating to conceptions of man and his development. As a result, the concept of ecology was drawn into the slippery slope of ideologies designed to control and restrict human development.
In fact, two divergent approaches emerged from the very beginning of the concept, and would endure over time. One, based on scientific and naturalistic ecology, is concerned with the study of interrelationships within the living world at a time of expanding industrial productivism and its integration into the biosphere, while keeping its distance from moral and philosophical debate. The other, inclined towards a political and utopian ecology, starts from the same general concern, but is already moving into teleological territory by embracing utopian ideologies, underpinned by the intention to rectify the direction taken by human behaviour deemed hostile or unfavourable to terrestrial life.
The visions grafted onto this second current were first and foremost those of Francis Galton, Karl Pearson, Houston Chamberlain and Arthur de Gobineau, who extended the idea of biological and intellectual inequality within human races, based on a pseudo-science of eugenics. Then there’s the view expressed by Thomas Malthus at the height of the First Industrial Revolution, and later taken up by Paul Ehrlich, that population growth must be capped or even reduced because of the scarcity of material resources, particularly food. And finally, the work of William Stanley Jevons, who put forward the limited availability of fossil fuels, particularly coal, at the heart of the new industrial engine of Victorian England. From different angles, these three currents put forward various theses that were criticized by the scientific ecologists themselves4 and led to the consolidation of justifying ideological bases. In the case of the Malthusian vision, the posture of demographic limitation was put into practice first in Ireland, then in India at the very end of the 19th century, with the aim of legitimizing a colonial policy of subjugation through famine5.
As for the first current of scientific ecology, it opened the field to a multitude of authors and disciplines, initially pivoting on three thematic entries – physical chemistry, demography and botany – which would branch out as knowledge developed. A century after its initial formulation, ecology was thus linked to fields of study ranging from climatology, global ecology and biogeochemistry to genetic ecology, phytosociology and biogeography6.
The bifurcation of the 1940s
These two ecological currents, still discreet and far removed from the turmoil of world power, entered a twentieth century swept for better or worse by the twin fevers of the Second Industrial Revolution and European nationalist rivalries. The resulting explosions reverberated through a part of the world community that had just been literally flogged by violence. A second issue, strongly emphasized by the Anglo-Saxon historian Arnold Toynbee7, was added to that of warlike violence: the contradiction between the political fragmentation of the planet into sovereign states and the global unification brought about by technology and the economy. Some see in these challenges the imperative of a new supranational governance, capable of containing the instability of the international system. Others see the need to redress a supposed imbalance between the industrial system and the biosphere.
In the inter-war years, and then after 1945 as the world’s new arbiter, the United States tackled this dual challenge. On the one hand, it laid the foundations for a global governance architecture, tailored to its needs and dressed in the finest international relations finery. On the other, they endeavored to modify the current balance of power by shaping the perceptual and cultural environment of the target societies, which in turn led to the revival of utopian ecological theories. By the end of the 1940s, the United States was laying the foundations for a new architecture of global governance that would center the international agenda around its own interests. The IMF, the World Bank, UNESCO, the WHO, the Pan-American Health Organization (PAHO), the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), NATO, etc. were successively created, in parallel with the Marshall Plan and the containment of Soviet communism.
In 1947, the beginnings of offensive action by the environmental community were tested in the Brazilian Amazon, under the cover of UNESCO, whose head was none other than Julian Huxley, biologist and active supporter of the eugenics movement. Under the guise of natural heritage conservation and the creation of the International Institute of the Amazon Rainforest, the aim of the manoeuvre is to curb the sub-region’s development and “internationalize” the South American tropical area, in other words, to make it dependent on standards dictated by tutelary powers. A little further back, in 1902, the creation of the South American OPAS, later headed by Frederick Lowe Soper, an emissary of the Rockefeller Foundation, suggested a first form of interference through the health issue (eradication of tropical diseases).
In the same 1940s, a vast scientific initiative was launched by the North American apparatus, with the aim of deepening knowledge of the functioning of the human mind and exploring its interactions with changes in its psychosocial environment. Arnold Toynbee’s secretly guarded ulterior motive was indeed to refine the tools for controlling behavior, in the quest for standardization. Mathematics, logic, anthropology, psychology and economics were brought into play through a series of initiatives, interconnecting with Anglo-Saxon economic and military intelligence centers. The Macy conferences, the Man-Machine project, Paperclip, MK-Ultra, the Tavistock Institute, the Aspen Institute and the Palo Alto School all brought together renowned scientists such as Norbert Wiener, Heinz von Foerster, Edward Bernays, Kurt Lewin, John von Neumann, Theodor Adorno, Gregory Bateson, Warren McCulloch and Claude Shannon, to name but a few. From this work would emerge no less than cybernetics, cognitive science and information science, essential ferments of the Third Industrial Revolution that would spread from the mid-1970s with the advent of microcomputing.
But they also led to a series of doctrines, as murky as they were confidential, in terms of social and behavioral transformation. Yet it is precisely this new methodological corpus that will form the mother cell of an offensive action by the environment, understood not in the strict sense of the natural environment, but rather as the psychosocial, cultural and relational substratum of individuals and society. It has been observed that selectively altering this substrate, through action that is at once overt, stealthy, violent or non-violent, can modify the conditions of equilibrium between an individual or collective being and its environment, and elicit new behaviours in a desired direction. In so doing, we retroact on subjects whose organic functioning is based, as cybernetics and ecology emphasize, on interaction loops with their environment. In short, these methods lie at the crossroads between social engineering, political warfare and mind control. But far from being just another indirect action technique, this perspective opens up a wide horizon of possibilities, and hence a genuine conflict “revolution”. The door is open to an art form – in part already pre-existing, but this time more penetrating – of transforming structures in order to transform individuals.
This is the basis of our triangulation between ecology, the material and natural environment, and offensive action through the psychosocial substratum. The environment, extended to the psychosocial structure of the individual or a group, thus becomes the cornerstone of a combat modality in which the aim is to exploit the result of a modification of this substrate. This modification may be the result of stress, trauma of greater or lesser intensity, real or insinuated pressure, or a disturbance caused by a new social dynamic, such as a social movement, on the target’s substrate. In this way, the belligerent element becomes less a power, a criminal network or even a subversive ideology, and more an almost autonomous component of the social and relational fabric of a group or nation. One thing leading to another, we can see how ecology became a protagonist of this conflictuality, insofar as it coincides precisely with the notion of system and environment. It offers a theater of operation among many others, such as energy, the economy, education, health and culture.
A partial overview of these doctrines is provided by the classified report Silent Weapons for Quiet Wars, An Introductory Programming Manual8, drawn up in 1979 by the Anglo-Saxon strategic and military intelligence community. It contains the following definitions:
- The silent weapon is a type of biological warfare. It attacks the vitality, options and mobility of the individuals of a society by knowing, understanding, manipulating and attacking their sources of natural and social energy, and their physical, and their physical, mental, and emotional strengths and weaknesses”.
- “It is patently impossible to discuss social engineering or the automation of a society, i.e., the engineering of social automation systems (silent weapons) on a national or worldwide scale without implying extensive objectives of social control and destruction of human life, i.e., slavery and genocide. […]
- This publication marks the 25th anniversary of the Third World War, called the “Quiet War”, being conducted using subjective biological warfare, fought with “silent weapons”. Silent weapon technology has evolved from Operations Research (O.R.), a strategic and tactical methodology developed under the Military Management in England during World War II […].
- The original purpose of Operations Research was to study the strategic and tactical problems of air and land defense with the objective of effective use of limited military resources against foreign enemies (i.e., logistics). It was soon recognized by those in positions of power that the same methods might be useful for totally controlling a society. But better tools were necessary. […] Social engineering (the analysis and automation of a society) requires the correlation of great amounts of constantly changing economic information (data), so a high-speed computerized data-processing system was necessary which could race ahead of the society and predict when society would arrive for capitulation”. […]
- In the interest of future world order, peace, and tranquillity, it was decided to privately wage a quiet war with an ultimate objective of permanently shifting the natural and social energy (wealth) of the undisciplined and irresponsible many into the hands of the self-disciplined, responsible, and worthy few.
- The Quiet War was quietly declared by the International Elite at a meeting held in 1954. Although the silent weapons system was nearly exposed 13 years later, the evolution of the new weapon-system has never suffered any major setbacks. […] This war has had many victories on many fronts throughout the world.
While some of the formulas, such as the ultra-voluntarist idea of a “Third World War”, may be symptomatic of the Cold War atmosphere, the offensive intent and rational seeds of a combat culture leave little room for doubt. The “silent war”, allegedly launched clandestinely by US elites in 1954, does indeed echo a more systemic and permanent state of conflictuality observed by other observers. Above all, as we shall see, the ambition for control and standardization, closely linked to a project for the neo-feudalization of the world and of the United States itself, were to align concretely with the events that began to unfold in the 1950s.
The conceptual background underlying this document clearly differs from the usual strategic culture. Its lexicon oscillates between classic socio-political language, that of living systems, and almost esoteric elements. The designated targets are the natural and social “energetic” springs of the population, i.e. its noumenon, the driving forces behind its actions, but also its economic capital. The economy, currency, family and community ties, the welfare state and even artificially-created “situations” are all used as weapons, which begs the question of the strange notion of “biological warfare”. As for strategies, there are two levels. On the one hand, there are the approaches of crisis creation and environmental disruption, through economic shock, the erosion of social and institutional links, or psychological “programming” (diversion, consent, alteration of identity). On the other, approaches inspired by the dynamics of autonomous systems: control of individual and collective capacities (capital, information and energy); conductance (control of the middle and working classes; control of economic infrastructures); limiting resistance (curbing social resistance; lowering educational levels, security and wealth); change by induction (norms, regulatory frameworks and policies inducing structural change).
Given the project’s messianic tone, it’s not beyond the bounds of possibility that this text was produced by a tiny group of abracadabra strategists engaged in a foresight exercise on a new global Leviathan. If this were the case, the aim would be less to build up such a fighting culture than to subjugate the population by destructive and unavowable means, as the authors themselves state. In addition, this manual appeared at a time when other initiatives[/note]https://escapekey.substack.com/p/silent-weapons-for-quiet-wars[/note] were converging on the same goal of establishing a culture of unconventional combat, first in the interwar period, then during the Cold War as the spectrum of conflict expanded. At around the same time, the North American George Kennan formalized the doctrine of political warfare in the late 1940s, in continuity with the same British heritage mentioned in this report, but a priori without frequenting the selective universe of these “peaceful warriors”. Later, in 1971, Frank Kitson posited a doctrine of low-intensity warfare, which endorsed a form of indirect combat through the environment and the social milieu. Elsewhere, the Soviet Union also set in motion a subversive war against its Western rival, in direct filiation with a communist combat culture whose effectiveness had nothing to envy its adversaries in terms of subversive struggle.
The blossoming of eco-warriorism
The time has come for “ecosystem wars” and the offensive “environmentalization” of the world. After the immemorial battle for control of the geosphere and its offensive use in various types of conflict, who would have imagined that the very fabric of living interdependencies would one day find itself in the middle of the crossfire between geo-economic powers and interests? For better or worse, the environment, and what the Jesuit Pierre Teilhard de Chardin called the noosphere, are irreversibly entangled in this new battle matrix. Three historical sequences enable us to trace its operational genesis in the perspective of the great conflict strategy that has been outlined.
First organizational bricks
The first sequence, from 1947 to 1968, saw the laying of the first organizational bricks and the beginnings of an international environmental movement. Following the climax of the two World Wars and the nuclear stranglehold of East-West tension, overtly imperialist and feudal aims naturally got a bad press. The challenge to Western supremacy gave rise to the decolonization movement and Third Worldism, further shifting the geometry of conflict towards persuasion and irregular warfare.
The environmental movement took shape around the denunciation of nuclear testing and the effects of industry on the environment. The first mobilizations took place in the 1950s around the Echo Park Dam project in the United States, while Rachel Carson’s The Silent Spring gained worldwide recognition in 1962. Her work, supported by militant environmentalists such as Frank Egler, nevertheless demonstrated the use of science for political ends, in particular her analysis of the effects of the pesticide DDT9 on human health. The conclusions were condemned in vain by part of the scientific community. The alert on DDT led to its international ban, even though the chemical compound was used effectively to combat malaria in tropical areas. The North American Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) was launched in 1970. At the same time, other authors, such as Murray Bookchin, author of The Problem of Chemicals in Food and then of Our Synthetic Environment in 1962, produced a significant rapprochement between ecological and social dimensions. In 1968, eugenic biologist Paul Ehrlich’s recommendations in his book The Population Bomb converged with those of futurist Richard Fuller’s Operating Manual For Spaceship Earth. For them, the human community needs to make a U-turn if it is to continue its destiny on the planet. At the same time, scientists such as Albert Allen Bartlett, Hyman Rickover and Marion Hubbert were sounding the alarm about the increasing scarcity of natural resources. Behind the scenes, this movement was backed by various intellectuals and institutional supporters, notably the Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace networks, created in 1969 and 1971 respectively, and around which British and North American intelligence gravitated.
At the political-institutional level, an institutional embryo was established along three main thematic lines. UNESCO, the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), the Conservation Foundation and the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) formed the first organizational network for nature conservation. On the moral and ethical front, the creation of the International Humanist and Ethical Union (IHEU) and other humanist networks filled the gap between science, human responsibility and social architecture. In 1963, global warming was put on the agenda for the first time at a conference organized by the Conservation Foundation under the auspices of the Ford and Rockefeller foundations. The Club of Rome was founded in 1968, the same year as the first UNESCO conference on the biosphere. Composed of members from strategic circles in the Western world, including David Rockefeller, Henry Kissinger, Paul Volcker and Samuel Huntington, this think-tank became the keystone in the rise of global environmentalism, positioning itself on the third conceptual and prospective ground. Importantly, this entire embryonic network is conceived or led by personalities who, in one way or another, defend the utopian ecology we mentioned earlier. Basically, it lays the foundations for a grand strategy to penetrate political systems and muzzle development, pivoting on the three thematic entry points mentioned above.
A prototype for global governance of (and by) the environment
The second sequence revolves around the establishment of a prototype for environmental governance, between 1968 and 1998. The report Limits to Growth was published by the Club of Rome in 1972. Almost simultaneous with the launch of the World Economic Forum, it was followed by the first United Nations Conference on the Environment, held in Stockholm the same year, and the study Only One Earth, concocted by the Aspen Institute. Maurice Strong, Barbara Ward and René Dubos, all Malthusians by the way, were the orchestra conductors. At the same time, a series of new elements entered the institutional fabric. The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) was created in 1972, while the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change came into being in 1988. At the 1979 World Climate Summit, a supposed consensus on carbon emerged as the winner, although in reality it was the result of a selective grouping of scientists rallying to the cause. In 1983, the World Commission on Environment and Development (Brutland Commission) delivered its verdict with the report Our Common Future.
It laid the foundations for sustainable development, calling for the environmental, social and economic spheres to be interlinked, united by an ethic of responsibility towards future generations and the protection of the planet. In 1992, the Earth Summit founded the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD). This was followed by the Agendas 21, which extended these measures to the territorial level, subject to a number of structural and financial conditions. In 1980, the Global 2000 Report10 officially took up the elements laid down by Henry Kissinger in 1974 around the Trilateral Commission and reiterated, in a barely concealed manner, one of the aims of this matrix of combat: to control the world’s population and its development.
During these three decades, there was a plethora of intellectual production on the subject of revolution and environmental risks. Authors include Schumacher, Nicholson, Catton, Sachs, Jantsch, Habermas, Tainter and Stokes. In France, this systemic and ecopolitical turning point was discreetly debated by the Group of Ten, active from 1969 to 1976, then renewed in the Collegium International from 2002, under the impetus of Michel Rocard and Stéphane Hessel. In 2009, this same group contributed to a charter for global governance11. Originating in South America, liberation theology in 1972 brought together deconstructionism, Third Worldism and revolutionary horizons, rooted on the one hand in the ideas of Teilhard de Chardin, and on the other in Pope Francis’ second encyclical Laudato Si. Finally, the end of the Soviet Union accelerated the crystallization of a green Marxism that transferred its materialist struggle to the questioning of biosphere-predatory capitalism. As a colorful symbol, Mikhail Gorbachev carried the flame of promoting the Earth Charter.
The proliferation of civil campaigns and NGOs, echoing the presence of social movements, went hand in hand with this dynamics. They created the sensation of a spontaneous mass that would occupy the field for a long time to come, covering a wide range of themes. From global citizenship and environmental protection to ethics, inter-religious dialogue, sustainable development and the low-carbon economy, this social and financial maelstrom established the scene that inevitably shapes perceptions and political orientations.
Enlargement and the 2045 goal
Over the last twenty years, this combat matrix has both maintained its foundations and extended its strategic reach. The issue of sustainable development, galvanized by the first Johannesburg Summit in 2002, now forms a strategic binomial with the multilateral climate agenda. Since 1963, the characterization of atmospheric risk has gone through the successive stages of temperature cooling, acid rain, ozone depletion, warming and climate change, a highly complex subject on which there is no scientific unanimity. The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and Agenda 2030, ratified in 2015, have succeeded Agendas 21 in local and international institutions. The Pact for the Future of the 2000s and the Global Compact, rallying major corporations to the sustainability agenda, are the counterparts of the Summit for the Future, just held in New York in September 2024. The latter continues and partially reformulates the roadmap of this matrix of global governance by objectives for the coming years.
In such an institutional snowball, those who can chart their political course without falling into the lap of combative ecology and sustainable development are quite lucky. Indeed, political ecology, once embodied by the likes of René Dumont, Antoine Waechter and Brice Lalonde, has literally fallen under the steamroller of media-political warriors such as Al Gore, Jeremy Rifkin, Greta Thunberg, and even Jean-Marc Jancovici and Nicolas Hulot.
Beyond the tentacular extension of the network and its transmission belts, the most observable trend is that of its tightening by ratchet effect and psychological harassment. Pressure from the very top of architecture is combined with social and media agitation, making full use of the urgency created by notions of ecocide, intangible planetary limits, the Anthropocene and the “sixth extinction” of biodiversity. Accompanying this pressure is the rise of a diffuse violence, exercised either with a view to dramatizing crises (provoked forest fires, sabotage, etc.), or in the implementation of targeted actions (attacks on managers or companies, illegal actions, etc.). The monetization of carbon after the year 2000 established a first prototype of articulation between finance, social issues and energy. The fraudulent alteration of weather and climate data provided by certain international agencies now goes hand in hand with media censorship of voices challenging the climate consensus. With the new blue economy developing on the oceans, approaches to normative conquest and privatization, again under the guise of conservation, are now in full swing.
Strategic reading
Let’s try not to lose sight of the strategic thread running through this culture of combat, whose ramifications now form a veritable parallel hierarchy and a prototype for global governance. This is a system. It is based on all the components of society from which it draws cohesion. Its aim is precisely to build a long-term superstructure, stretching from the local to the global, while penetrating target societies through various forms of combat. This matrix is, of course, superimposed on other combat cultures practiced on the geopolitical chessboard between powers.
The fact is that conceiving such a matrix poses a real challenge, first and foremost to the thinking itself. The authors of the above-mentioned confidential report confess: “although the silent weapons system was nearly exposed 13 years later , the evolution of the new weapon-system has never suffered any major setbacks”. In other words, even out in the open, such a combat culture seems to enjoy a kind of immunity inherent in its excessiveness, duplicity and stealth. To clarify matters pragmatically, let’s say that this environmentalization of the world is another name for an alternative societal project, intended to replace others. It has both overt and covert aims, an ideological framework, a strategic and institutional backbone, and logistical, informational and financial resources. Its distinctive feature, however, is that it is total and global, i.e. it envisages a hold on the entire biological and societal architecture, at least those with which it is likely to establish interdependencies in the current state of international relations.
The first component of this combat matrix is therefore teleological. Over several decades, we have seen that it has succeeded in integrating within global society, at relatively variable levels of depth, the idea that a new mode of coexistence is necessary within the earthly vessel, inducing a whole series of economic and social reforms. Hence the strategic role of ethics as the new guiding foundation for individual and collective conduct. Ultimately, it conveys a social meta-contract, competing with the constitutional framework established between peoples and their Nations. Carus, Marx and Teilhard de Chardin, among others, are two central theoretical sources. They postulate the integrity of the world, its historical materialism, the link between science, morality and religion, and the cohesion to be sought between the individual and the collective.
Its second component is that of governance, intimately linked to the first. According to the proposed alternative model, governing public affairs must be based on the contours of a universalist and global ethic, which presupposes the migration of current politico-administrative approaches towards a logic of subsidiarity to transnational power, the relativization of State powers, the transversal articulation of policies, and the monitoring and transparency of the governed. Ironically, respect for the law and access to information are also part of this, echoing the search for adaptive management, again inspired by ethics and systems theory. This perspective is based on the contemporary theories of Vernadsky, Laszlo, Plotinus, Leontief, von Bertalanffy, Boulding and Jantsch, which have helped lay the foundations for a general modeling of systems and a new relative hierarchy between them.
Its third component is social and economic. The economy must inevitably be re-embedded in the integrity of the social, the living, in a way that is compatible with intergenerational links. Hence the search for coupling with energy, the carbon market or digital currency, backed by central banks and the use of energy. The promotion of “inductive” economic policies is part of this arsenal. These include increasing the budgetary weight of the state, its indebtedness, fiscal and monetary imbalance, and social compensation. Between the lines of this framework lies the art of geo-economic warfare, the practice of which aims to install dependencies and forms of predation on target countries. At this point, we should point out that such a vision, based on the scarcity of energy and natural resources, comes up against a major innovation brought about by the third industrial revolution. The latter is ultimately the offshoot of the emulation of electronics, cybernetics and the military-economic alliance that took place mainly in the United States. But unlike the two previous revolutions, this one no longer introduces entropy into the economy, but rather negentropy, i.e. organization based on information, with no significant impact on the biosphere. Is it any coincidence that this rupture has gone virtually unnoticed in the economic debates of recent decades, along with other economic ruptures engendered by the computerization of the world? In this field of economics, the references of the environmental combat matrix are those of Keynes, Friedman, Krugman and Jeffrey Sachs.
The fourth component is information, which is crucial to the whole edifice. A matrix of this kind, fundamentally dual, must be capable of permanently dissociating its true aims from the justifying base that constitutes its social legitimacy and therefore its capacity to drive. The conflictual use of information is therefore a means par excellence of concealment, cognitive dissociation and the exclusion of resistance, drawing on all the known registers of information warfare. In the same vein, we have seen that the cognitive dimension is put to full use. It operates from two angles: the use of scientific knowledge for political ends; and the stealthy modification of target societies’ frames of reference, making it possible to favorably reprogram the ways of thinking of the political systems to be penetrated. In addition, information is seen as a structuring element of the conquering alternative system. The idea of a “Fourth Industrial Revolution” put forward by the World Economic Forum bears witness to this. On the one hand, it ensures the surveillance and security control of the population; on the other, it enables all the components of the model to function.
This whole edifice forms a combat culture that is as formidable as it is remarkable in terms of strategic intelligence. Given its weight in the contemporary conflict landscape, it deserves to be much more widely recognized and studied with clear-sightedness and realism, overcoming the ideological divides that exist in the geopolitical and strategic field. As for its less-than-stellar objectives, is it worth pointing out that it would be a good idea to organize ourselves to better combat, or at least resist, the advance of such a fighting machine, and curb its expansion?
- Phylogeny is the study of phylogenetic relationships between living beings and those that have become extinct.
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- The document is classified, but was filtered in 1986. Available at https://archive.org/details/silent-weapons-for-quiet-wars-original-document-copy_202404
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