He concludes this section by warning, “While this science will be diligently studied, it will be rigidly confined to the governing class. The populace will not be allowed to know how its convictions were generated. When the technique has been perfected, every government that has been in charge of education for a generation will be able to control its subjects securely without the need of armies or policemen.”

Russell was one of the creators of what some today call the “post-truth era”. Create a “narrative”, e.g., that “snow is black”; reinforce it in schools, in culture; isolate and punish those who believe otherwise — “If you still believe snow is white, you must be a puppet of Putin.”

Here is a more recent statement of this view of truth, from the dystopian futurist Yuval Harari, from 2018:

“A cursory look at history reveals that propaganda and disinformation are nothing new. In fact, humans have always lived in the age of post-truth. Homo sapiens is a post-truth species…. We are the only mammals that can cooperate with numerous strangers because only we can invent fictional stories, spread them around, and convince millions of others to believe in them. As long as everybody believes in the same fictions, we all obey the same laws and can thereby cooperate effectively.”

“The truth is, truth has never been high on the agenda of Homo sapiens. If you stick to unalloyed reality, few people will follow you. False stories have an intrinsic advantage over the truth when it comes to uniting people.”

This is the key to what is called “hybrid warfare”. Lyndon LaRouche described this in a June 2004 article, “What Does Culture Do?” He wrote about the creation, in 1950 by the Dulles networks in the CIA, in collaboration with British psychological warfare experts, of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, with the goal of inducing mass insanity — a “dumbing down” of the population — through the deliberate destruction of children’s ability to engage in the process of the creative discovery of truth. This is not new, he wrote, tracing its origins back to the enemies of Plato in Greece among the Sophists and Aristotle. But today, there are more sophisticated weapons available, in digital technologies, in social media, which reinforce what he bluntly called “brainwashing.”

HYBRID WARFARE

One year later, Marine Gen. James Mattis, coined the term “hybrid warfare” in a speech to the U.S. Naval Institute, when he delivered a paper co-authored by Lt. Col. Frank Hoffman. He argued that wars “cannot be won by focusing on [weapons] technology.” It is now necessary to engage in “information warfare.” The tools of choice for warfare today must become “misinformation, disinformation and mal-information.” Mattis later became NATO’s Supreme Allied Commander for Transformation, then served as Secretary of Defense in the Trump administration. What he presented was proliferated through numerous NATO conferences and papers. One paper presented by Stefano Marcuzzi at the NATO Foundation Defense College, asserted that in hybrid warfare, “the battle is everywhere, often simultaneously…it erodes the distinction between combatants and noncombatants….A pervasive and manipulated media can influence the development of a conflict,” as it is necessary to achieve “victory in the information space.”

Which brings us to NATO’s creation of a hybrid warfare operation embedded within the Zelensky government in Ukraine.