CBS101 - Lesson 3: How does the Blob Operate?
The 6 categories of Political Warfare Operations
REMINDER: UNDERLINED TEXT IS A LINK
If you haven’t already completed Lesson 2, you can find it here:
Lesson 3: How does the Blob Operate?
In Lessons 1 and 2, we learned about what the Blob is and what it broadly does.
To recap, the Blob consists mainly of the State Department, Pentagon, and Intelligence Community, and its mission is to achieve American national objectives through covert and overt methods.
We learned about the overlap between American corporate interests and national interests, and consequently how the Blob often partners with the private sector in its covert operations.
But what, exactly, does the blob do to achieve those national objectives, and how?
The Goal of Political Warfare
By this point, it should be abundantly clear that when faced with a question in Critical Blob Studies, our first step should be to consult George Kennan’s two foundational Blob documents; kind of like the Declaration of Independence and Constitution of the Blob: Inauguration and 10/2.
We should recall, once again, what the Blob is trying to achieve in order to better understand how they achieve it. In Inauguration, Kennan writes:
1. Political warfare is the logical application of Clausewitz’s doctrine in time of peace. In broadest definition, political warfare is the employment of all the means at a nation’s command, short of war, to achieve its national objectives.
This is in reference to early-19th century Prussian general Carl von Clausewitz’s magnum opus, Vom Kriege (On War), which states:
Force […] is thus the means of war; to impose our will on the enemy is its object. To secure that object we must render the enemy powerless; and that, in theory, is the true aim of warfare.
Kennan, in saying political warfare is the logical application of Clausewitz’s doctrine in time of peace, is proposing that the US Government employ all means necessary to use force, impose its will on its enemies, and render them powerless, even when there’s no formal war.
The 6 Methods of Political Warfare
Such operations are both overt and covert. They range from such overt actions as political alliances, economic measures (as ERP), and “white” propaganda to such covert operations as clandestine support of “friendly” foreign elements, “black” psychological warfare and even encouragement of underground resistance in hostile states.
Here, Kennan proposes 6 methods (3 overt and 3 covert) of political warfare, in descending order of overtness:
Political alliances: Forming international alliances with interest-aligned nations
Economic measures: Sanctions, development, and other economic warfare
Propaganda: Creating or infiltrating media organizations to spread information
Support of “friendly” foreign elements: Capacity building our enemies’ enemies
Psychological warfare: Influencing the minds of our enemies or their populations
Encouragement of Underground Resistance: Starting riots and insurrections
Though we don’t need to strictly stick to this framework, we can view the majority of all Blob operations as falling under at least one of these 6 categories.
Overt Methods
Forming political alliances is the quintessential overt political warfare tactic; it’s the foundation upon which the five other methods build. In all forms of competition, especially warfare, combining forces with interest-aligned parties is the quickest and easiest way to gain an advantage.
The most notable such alliance is the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), which was created by the North Atlantic Treaty in April of 1949, almost exactly one year after Kennan wrote Inauguration.
According to their own website, NATO was created to serve three purposes:
In fact, the Alliance’s creation was part of a broader effort to serve three purposes: deterring Soviet expansionism, forbidding the revival of nationalist militarism in Europe through a strong North American presence on the continent, and encouraging European political integration.
NATO’s expansion eastward from 1949 to 2004 allowed it to slowly encircle one of its primary targets, Russia. This is the other benefit of political alliances.
The economic measure referenced repeatedly in Inauguration is the European Recovery Program (ERP), also known as the Marshall Plan. This was the economic component of the Blob’s consolidation of Europe. After all, adding countries to an alliance means very little if those countries aren’t properly developed; if they aren’t capacity built.
In order to build the capacity of these allied countries, and in order to ensure that they remain allies, the Blob must have its hands in all four quadrants of that country’s society. Note that controlling the media quadrant is identical to Kennan’s propaganda method.
Covert Methods
While overt methods are primarily used to build up the Blob’s friends, covert methods are often used tear down the Blob’s enemies. Or in Clausewitz’s terms, to “render the enemy powerless”.
The first covert method Kennan suggests is support of “friendly” foreign elements. Note that he puts “friendly” in scare quotes. If you think about it, this is not dissimilar to the overt methods of political alliances and economic measures.
After all, the way to support “friendly” foreign elements is by developing and capacity building them. The only difference is that this method is covert rather than overt for the same reason that Kennan put scare quotes around “friendly”. It’s one thing to provide financial aid and military training to Estonia as a proxy against Russia. It’s quite a different thing to do the same with Islamist fundamentalist militant groups.
Or selling drugs and guns to find guerrilla militias in Nicaragua (Iran-Contra). Note that the author of the linked book, Gary Webb, was found dead with two gunshot wounds to the head. It was ruled a suicide.
The second covert method is psychological warfare. Once again, note that this is not dissimilar to the overt method of propaganda. But yet again, it’s one thing to set up a CIA proprietary radio station that spreads pro-Blob messaging to European populations. It’s quite another to fabricate UFO sightings or to use psychological pressure to get doctors and teachers to recruit revolutionary forces.
Here is an official video released by the US Army’s 4th Psychological Operations Group.
Encouragement of Underground Resistance
Probably the most interesting method of the 6 is the last one: encouragement of underground resistance. It’s so interesting, we’ve separated it into its own section, even though it falls under covert methods.
The unique part about this method is that it encompasses all 5 of the others. That is, in order for the Blob to successfully foment resistance movements within a target country, it must do all of the following:
Establish a robust network of political alliances
Develop those networks and diminish the country through economics means
Control of the information environment through propaganda and psyops
Fund and train dissident paramilitary groups
All while maintaining plausible deniability of US government involvement
Then, by using whichever pretext is most sellable to the public, it sets the stage for the upcoming violent coup to be perceived as a grassroots, peaceful, democratic uprising against a repressive dictatorship.
Finally, once everything is in place, Blob-backed riotous street mobs take to the streets, threatening continuation of the violence until the leader that the Blob opposes steps down or flees the country.
During the Cold War, this was primarily done through CIA-backed riots. From the CIA’s Psychological Operations in Guerrilla Warfare:
After the fall of the Soviet Union, the Blob started calling these color revolutions, and they were done through USAID, NED, and USIP rather than directly by CIA. The term “color revolution” comes from the fact that the Blob often associates specific “colors” with each of them:
The 1989 Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia
The 2004 Orange Revolution in Ukraine
The 2004 Rose Revolution in Georgia
The 2005 Tulip Revolution in Kyrgyzstan
Some color revolutions aren’t known by a specific color, but were achieved through the same methods:
The 2000 Otpor Revolution in Serbia
The 2011 Arab Spring in the Middle East
The 2014 Maidan Revolution in Ukraine
The 2020 BLM Summer of Love in America
The 2024 Aragalaya in Sri Lanka
This Competition Vignette from the US Army’s 1st Special Forces Command publication A Vision for 2021 and Beyond discusses a hypothetical scenario in which Army Special Operations Command elements start a color revolution in Africa to protect American business interests.
Conclusion and Homework: US Institute of Peace
Watch this video of Mike Benz reviewing training videos for “nonviolent” resistance from the US Institute of Peace. As you watch, consider the following questions:
Which of Kennan’s 6 political warfare methods are mentioned and how?
How do these resistance methods relate to last lesson’s homework article?
What could be some downsides of using these methods for the Blob?
What else, if anything, stands out?
Please write your answers in the comments section below.
Congratulations on completing Lesson 3 of CBS101. I’ll see you on the internet.
All six of Kennan’s political warfare methods are highlighted, including political alliances like with the Dalai Lama and Tibetan Buddhism against Chinese communism, economic measures such as sanctions like the recent ones against Russia, propaganda in the guise of news like from Radio Europe, psy-ops about UFOs that don’t truly exist, which seem incessant and nonstop today more so than ever before—a point which reflects how poorly they’ve lost control of the information space and the narrative for those in the know. Encouraging underground resistance, like Mark Levin recently has in speaking about “arming the Iranians” to fight the Iranian theocrats—this is supporting the crazies (trans, the anti-social criminal element, the mentally ill)—friendly foreign elements that act as a symbolic and literal “shit storm that they will beam out to the international community” in order to make us believe some CIA-started revolution is about freedom, as opposed to mineral or oil rights for Chevron, for example.
These resistance methods are embedded in the whole of society apparatus that moves the world the way the Blobsters require in their insatiable thirst for wealth, power and control. They are conspiring to break the law, but in a way that allows groups like CIA and Special Forces-fronts like The US Institution of Peace to help “angry mobs of people overthrow their opponents,” ie, Blobster opposition.
Downsides include second and third order effects, that they fail to anticipate or predict, like how the arrogance of the Ghost in the Machine video pulls back the curtain on the world being a stage, one that they manage, but also leads to hyper skepticism from anything given to us from official sources, like about how we should inject ourselves with the COVID-Wuhan Flu “vaccine.”
What stands out is how organized the Blob is. How nearly every major university, NGO, and civil and private groups conspires to not only treachery, but sedition and treason. How they’re able to break the law with impunity, using our tax money to teach useful idiots to do their—the donor-deal-maker-drafter class’s bidding—and to shut down governments and societies, ncluding our own in the BLM terrorist insurrections of 2020 and the planned J6 setup. They promote breaking the law and criminal conspiracy in any domain where their actions are restricted. They are an international mafia that seeks our enslavement, apparently.