Strategy of tension

The strategy of tension is an umbrella term used for longer term campaigns of operations by governments aimed at destabilising or unsettling target populations or states, for example a series of false flag attacks.

Strategy of tension   (Social control,  Psychological warfare,  third rail topic,  phobia induction,  deep politics)
At the bombing of the Bologna main station in 1980, 85 people died. Agents of the Italian intelligence agencies and the secret society Propaganda Due hindered the investigation by laying false tracks.
Interest of	• Richard Cottrell • Le Cercle • Operatiën en Inlichtingen • The Bombers Affair (Luxembourg)
An umbrella term used for long series of covert operations by governments aimed at stressing, destabilising or unsettling target populations or states. First used in Italy to describe Operation Gladio bombings.

The strategy of tension is a method of social control involving a series of covert attacks upon a population, intended to promote stress and fear amongst them. The purpose is, by inducing a mistrust of one another and of the world at large, to increase child-like dependence upon perceived authority figures (such as national governments). The English phrase originates from the Italian (strategia della tensione), which was first applied to Operation Gladio in Italy during the years of lead.

“When you were on the Right you were not supposed to attack the State or its representatives. You were supposed to attack civilians, women, children, innocent people from outside the political arena. For one simple reason: To force the Italian public to turn to the State turn to the regime and ask for greater security. This was precisely the role of the right in Italy. It placed itself at the service of the State which created a strategy aptly called the "Strategy of Tension" in so far as they had to get ordinary people to accept that at any moment over a period of 30 years, from 1960 to the mid eighties a state of emergency could be declared. So, people would willingly trade part of their freedom for the security of being able to walk the streets, go on trains or enter a bank. This is the political logic behind all the bombings. They remain unpunished because the state cannot condemn itself.”
Vincenzo Vinciguerra

Methods

The methods used are most obviously illegal and violent i.e. assassinations, kidnapping, paramilitary operations but also include propaganda, economic sanctions, support of civil unrest, fake grassroots movements, promotion of disruptive memes or technologies and the escalation of formerly peaceful protests by use of agents provocateurs. These are typically carried out under a false flag and combined with disinformation and use of enemy images to demonise uninvolved third party. If state agencies engage in staging or promoting acts of terrorism the term "state terrorism" is used, e.g. by former German chancellor Helmut Schmidt.

Deniability

Strategy of tension operations are potentially disastrous if uncovered, so require a high level of secrecy to afford their perpetrators plausible deniability. To be effective, they must be sustained, and they are therefore the preserve of intelligence agencies, the military or national governments. Organizations used are infiltrated and controlled but not directly affiliated with their controllers (e.g. Propaganda Due, Ordine Nuovo, ISIS, ...). Nevertheless, some government-backed strategies of tension have been uncovered since WW2.

The PsyOp component of a strategy of tension

The main target of a strategy of tension is the public opinion, to manipulate votes, created a casus belli to legitimate a war, to call for a strong leader or roll out mass surveillance and denounce peacemakers as 'unpatriotic'. False flag terrorist attacks are just the tip of the iceberg of possible measures to achieve these goals. In fact any scare tactic will do.

In "Interdoc and West European Psychological Warfare", Giles Scott-Smith puts the strategy of tension in a broader context.

“Ultimately, Interdoc’s value comes from it being a remarkable example of the way European security services sought to engage with and manipulate the public sphere, initially out of serious concerns for the effects of peaceful coexistence on Western ideological solidity, and eventually as a means to secure a strategic advantage in the Cold War.”
Giles Scott-Smith (2011) 

"Peaceful coexistence" refers to the Russian policy after Stalin, meaning the absence of a Soviet threat - therefore the absence of tension.

Based on official statements he shows that prolonged periods of peace are seen as a threat to Western power structures, the established order and political 'stability' by the establishment (i.e. threat to multibillion profits).

The proposed 'solution' to this is - in the propagandists phrasing - to "raise awareness" of external threats or to "encourage a responsible citizenry as part of the process of maintaining a democratic society". The result may be called fine-tuning of democracy and included staged terror attacks under a false flag in the past.

The same rhetoric is put forward by the Joint Statement of European Ministers of the Interior after the Charlie Hebdo terrorist attack:

“In order to tackle the root causes of radicalization ("Radicalization" refers to a value shift towards fovouring a more equal distribution of wealth) in particular of young people, the EU should consider strengthening targeted actions designed to raise awareness and promote the respect of fundamental rights and values".”
European Ministers of the Interior (2015) 

Research

Full article: Daniele Ganser

Daniele Ganser is a scholar who investigated the strategy of tension in his phd and books.

“It is probably fair to say that of the roughly seven billion people who live on our planet today, far less than one percent has ever heard of the "strategy of tension." And only a very few of these could illustrate the strategy with specific historical examples. It is indeed a strategy of a shadow world, known only to a few military and intelligence officers (and some criminals) who have carried it out, a few police officers and judges who fought against it, and a handful of journalists and academics who have written about it.

In its essence, the strategy of tension targets the emotions of human beings and aims to spread maximum fear among the target group. “Tension” refers to emotional distress and psychological fear, whereas “strategy” refers to the technique of bringing about such distress and fear. A terrorist attack in a public place, such as a railway station, a market place, or a school bus, is the typical technique through which the strategy of tension is implemented. After the attack — and this is a crucial element — the secret agents who carried out the crime blame it on a political opponent by removing and planting evidence.

It must be noted that the targets of the strategy of tension are not the dead and the wounded of the terrorist attacks, as many might assume. The targets are the political opponents, who are discredited through the attack, and those who remain unharmed but learn of the attack, thereby coming to fear for their lives and those of their loved ones. Since the aims of the strategy are to discredit opponents and to create fear, the real targets are not the people who were killed, whether they number in the dozens or even thousands, but the millions of people who survive physically unharmed but emotionally distressed.”
Daniele Ganser (May 2014) 

Fear and Enemy images

Full articles: Fear, Enemy Images

The coverpage of UK's Daily Express from 23 July, 2005, the day after Jean Charles de Menezes, an unarmed man, was shot dead by the Metropolitan Police (in circumstances that they lied about).

Through the strategy of tension people learn to expect that something "bad" will happen in the near future, something which can not be controlled and that happens intermittently. In behavioral psychology this is a special case of operant conditioning which is associated with dependence or addiction - dependence on (political) leaders in this case, who promote a "solution" to "rescue" people from their distressed state.

A normal reaction when an expected event happens is a release of tension - even if it is troublesome - including release of endogenous opiates.

Thus people can learn to enjoy pain and may get addicted to violence or trained to accept violence to cope with stress and anxiety. The ambivalence of joy and pain, however, leads to confusion and regression into earlier coping mechanisms such as splitting and projection. It may be used to install enemy images and direct anger and aggression towards designated culprits.

“It can be regarded as a stroke of genius on Hitler's part that for purposes of projection he offered the Jews to the Germans, who had been brought up to be self-controlled and obedient and to suppress their feelings. But the use of this mechanism is by no means new. It can be observed in most wars of conquest, in the Crusades, and in the Inquisition, as well as in recent history.”
Alice Miller (1983) 

Another effect of scare tactics is that people turn towards their leaders - even if these are violent:

"People in general, and children in particular, seek increased attachment in the face of external danger. Pain, fear, fatigue, and loss of loved ones and protectors all evoke efforts to attract increased care and most cultures have rituals designed to provide it.

When there is no access to ordinary sources of comfort, people may turn toward their tormentors. Adults as well as children may develop strong emotional ties with people who intermittently harass, beat, and threaten them. Hostages have put up bail for their captors, expressed a wish to marry them, or had sexual relations with them; abused children often cling to their parents and resist being removed from the home; inmates of Nazi prison camps sometimes imitated their captors [...]." Bessel v.d. Kolk

The extraordinary need for attachment and protection in the face of danger may explain why there is so little public outcry when false flags are made public. The ambivalence and confusion when protective figures are simultainously a source of terror

"lead to hyperarousal states for which the memory can be state-dependent or dissociated, and this memory only returns fully during renewed terror. This interferes with good judgment about these relationships." Bessel v.d. Kolk

Thus the idea that parts of a democratic state may be involved in acts of state terrorism may be split off and denied as a psychological defense of basic beliefs. Especially under conditions of isolation or social distancing tormentors come to be viewed simultaneously as "rescuers" in a regressed state of child-like dependence or learned helplessness.

Implementation

“The West sees how the process of forming a multipolar world order is gaining momentum. And in order to restrain development of independent, sovereign countries, to split the world majority, they use the same means. (these forces, sic) want the epidemic of vigilance and hatred (to engulf not just the middle east, but Eurasia)”
Vladimir Putin (2023) 

Recognizable patterns include, but are not limited to:

• An official narrative is quickly agreed upon and blames either "Lone nuts" or the enemy du jour
• "Lone nuts" that die shortly after the event and/or have no chance to explain their side of the story
• The number of reported perpetrators, decreases as the official narrative unfolds
• Evidence which is quickly destroyed and/or made inaccessible to public or to journalists because of "national security"
• Obviously pre-fabricated statements: responses are made which are far too quick - exploiting the targets' moment of psychological shock
• Politicians and commercially-controlled media: blaming designated culprit before any investigation, hate speech, revenge, threating war or sanctions, fostering police state legislation
• Name changes or misspelling of suspected lone nuts and/or intelligence links emerge
• Imagery of low quality emerges, with mismatching details in different versions or viewing angels, time stamps and origin obscured
• Presented evidence and history of Lone nuts contains bold archetypes, letters, testaments, even passports
• Eye witness accounts are incompatible with press reports
• Lost and Found ID leads a direct trail to allow the official narrative's perpetrators to be identified
• Any ideas apart from this are termed "conspiracy theories" and dismissed by the establishment
• The commercially-controlled media is resentful of any serious criticism of its own early reporting, citing mostly sources from government, so called experts, the police or news agencies, i.e. Reuters, AP.
• Official investigation avoided, delayed or quick trial, may be flawed, i.e deaths, not answering questions, accepting bogus "proofs"
• Media blackout regarding targets' and intelligence agencies' foreknowledge and/or facts that don't fit the official narrative and spurious statements by attendents
• Intelligence services stick to the doctrine of plausible deniability even decades after the event

An incomplete list of implementations of the strategy of tension since WW2 may include

• Greece 1944, 1950s - Battle of Athens (Dekemvriana), Greek civil war, Lochoi Oreinōn Katadromōn, Red Sheepskin
• France/Italy 1948ff - Operation Demagnetize
• Israel/Egypt 1950s - Suez Crisis
• USA 1960s - Operation Northwoods was planned but not carried out
• Germany 1960s,70s,80s - RAF terrorists are protected, infiltrated, trained and freed from prison by the Verfassungsschutz
• Germany 1970s - train station bombings in Hamburg, Nürnberg, Köln and Bremen
• Turkey 1970s,80s,90s,2000s - Gladio, 1977: Taksim Massacre, 1996: Susurluk Scandal
• Italy 1970s - Gladio - The best publicised and the origin of the term.
• Spain 1977 - Atocha Massacre
• Chile 1970s - Project FUBELT
• USA/Nicaragua 1980s - CIA promoted bloody guerrilla war
• Argentina, Chile, Paraguay, Uruguay, Bolivia and Brazil 1970s, 1980s - Operation Condor
• El Salvador 1980s - El Mozote Massacre, Killing of >800 civilians by School of the Americas trained forces
• Belgium 1980s - Brabant Massacres, Operation Gladio
• France/Algeria 1990s - Groupe Islamique Armé (GIA)
• South Africa 1990s - against the ANC
• USA 1990s - OKC Bombing
• Russia 1999 - Russian apartment bombings - FSB
• USA 2000s - War on Terror
• Germany 2010s - right wing terror, NSU killings, firebombing of Muslim immigrants
• Europe since 2015
  • France Jan. 2015 Charlie Hebdo shooting, July 2016 Nice Truck event
  • Transferring large numbers of people from the Middle East to Europe, than have the commercially-controlled media report about acts of violence commited by these people or even worse announce a "crisis" introduces tension (psychological stress) in the target population. European governments rejecting this policy are pressured to comply.
  • South Germany July 2016 – Terror in Würzburg und Ansbach. In Munich a mall shooting occurs.
  • Germany 2. June 2019 - typical Gladio style execution of Regierungspräsident Walter Lübcke, featuring right wing paramilitary underground, a weapons cache and a implausible lone nut theory.

Wikipedia sources of interest

• http://de.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Schmutziger_Krieg&oldid=137593413#Beispiele [Ger]
• http://de.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Strategie_der_Spannung&oldid=137814826 [Ger]
• http://de.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Staatsterrorismus&oldid=135942085 [Ger]
• http://de.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Verdeckte_Operation&oldid=138170989 [Ger]
• http://de.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Folter&oldid=138331662#.E2.80.9EKrieg_gegen_den_Terror.E2.80.9C_ab_2001 [Ger]

 

Examples

Page name	Description
"War on Drugs"	A social control strategy that provides a lot of off-the-books funding for the US Deep state in particular. As a strategy of tension, it has served to scapegoat minorities and is used as a pretext for social militarization and the removal of civil liberties.
"War on Terror"	The campaign, launched by the USA under the Presidency of George W. Bush with the support of the UK, and most NATO members (at least formally) and other Western-aligned countries. Nominally a response to the events of 11 September 2001, its stated objective is the elimination of so called 'terrorist organisations', it was in fact conceived long before by a group of terrorist experts, including his father and the groundwork laid at a 1979 conference in Jerusalem as a propaganda term used to legitimise wars of aggression and a scare tactic.
2011 Alexandria bombing	An deadly attack on a church in Egypt to stoke tensions during the 2011 regime change.
2021 Washington D.C. Riots	One of the most fortified positions in the US gets violently overrun by a group of Trump Supporters after a demonstration... without a single shot fired by the mob. Official narrative soon blamed Trump and extremists. Official opposition narrative soon blamed the democratic party trying to fraud Joe Biden into the White House. Several other governments were briefed by intelligence services that the incident seemingly "was being allowed" to happen.
Bologna bombing	A murderous attack on the Italian public, carried out by the MI6/CIA led Operation Gladio, blamed on communists, as part of a wider program to prevent their electoral success in Italy.
Brabant Massacres	A set of murders between 1982 and 1985, in which 28 people died and 40 were injured. It became Belgium's most notorious unpunished crime spree.
Cold War	The official narrative had 2 diametrically opposed systems locked in combat with one another since soon after WW2. Each of the "superpowers" and its team of allies needed to outdo each other by creating ever more and deadlier weapons, creating a kind of perpetual war for perpetual peace, with the warring parties engaging mainly in covert/proxy wars. Deep state interests blossomed in the climate of fear and paranoia.
Cold War II	A rebooting of the original Cold War, that was definitely tied to the UK deep state in late 2018.
Gladio 3.0	Possible new version of Operation Gladio 2.0.
Israeli–Lebanese conflict
Israeli–Palestinian conflict
Operation Cage Action Plan
Operation Demagnetize	"The institutional hardening of Gladio", an expansion of Gladio in the late 1940s, early 1950s.
Operation Gladio/B	A development of Operation Gladio to help roll out the "war on terror" by promoting US/NATO-sponsored false flag attacks to be blamed on "Muslim terrorists".
Perpetual war
UK terror threat level	Threat of terrorism in the United Kingdom

 

Related Quotations

Page	Quote	Author	Date
2021	“The Biden administration is revving up for a war against an enemy which the feds have chosen to never explicitly define.”	James Bovard	19 June 2021
Madeleine Albright	“There's a special place in hell for women who don't help each other”	Madeleine Albright	2016
COVID-19/Panic	“People in the UK widely believed that the pseudopandemic was real, not because the scientific or statistical evidence was clear but because the government spent billions with PR firms to run “hard-hitting” media campaigns designed to convince them of it.”	Iain Davis	16 August 2022
Document:Psychological Warfare for the West: Interdoc and Youth Politics in the 1960s	“Psychological warfare has two sides: The build-up of moral strength within one's own side and the undermining of the morale of the opposing side.”	Cees van den Heuvel	1959
Document:Psychological Warfare for the West: Interdoc and Youth Politics in the 1960s	“We say to the leaders of the capitalist states: Let us try out in practice whose system is better, let us compete without war... The main thing is to keep to the positions of ideological struggle, without resorting to arms in order to prove that one is right... We believe that ultimately that system will be victorious on the globe which will offer the nations greater opportunities for improving their material and spiritual life.”	Nikita Khrushchev	1959
Fear	“There are two ways in which people are controlled: first of all frighten them, and then demoralise them. An educated healthy, and confident nation is harder to govern.”	Tony Benn
Institute for Statecraft/Purposes	“We are at war, in a hybrid war, we cannot deter it - only fight it... We need to go away and seek to change the minds within uniformed services, and move away from a mentality of peacetime, to one of wartime.”	Integrity Initiative
Institute for Statecraft/Purposes	“The UK would love it's (sic.) own ballistic capabilities, both in a sovereign sense & to enable better cooperation. The range rings represent threats themselves, even if the capabilities are not matched by intent, there is an lack of will by politicians to provide the necessary protection. Not enough political drive enough, there is significant public blindness, if the public were kept in a state of - this would be easier, however politicians would prefer to have a blithe sense of safety. This represents a start difference to Putin, who has been whipping up the fear.”	Integrity Initiative
Ron Johnson	“We met delegation after delegation of European representatives. Basically the entire conversation was about Edward Snowden, about tapping Angela Merkel's phone. But then Charlie Hebdo happened. I haven't heard a word about Edward Snowden or what the American security services were trying to do. What I'm hearing now is 'Where's America?'”	Ron Johnson	2017
Political party	“the whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary.”	Henry L. Mencken	1918
Michael Rivero	“Once a government resorts to terror against its own population to get what it wants, it must keep using terror against its own population to get what it wants. A government that terrorizes its own people can never stop. If such a government ever lets the fear subside and rational thought return to the populace, that government is finished.”	Michael Rivero
The Road To 9-11	“(Headed by Frank Wisner, OPC's) first project was an arrangement for the creation and support of right wing stay behind groups in Europe... Gregor Geannatini (?), one of the Italian authors of this Strategy of Tension... came to America in 1961 to lecture at the Naval War College on techniques and possibilities of a coup d'état in Europe. In March 1962 the Joint Chiefs of Staff prepared their own documents developing Geannatini's strategy. This was Operation Northwoods... The plan... called for innocent people to be shot on American streets. (00:45:05)”	Peter Dale Scott	2007

 

Related Documents

Title	Type	Publication date	Author(s)	Description
Document:1980 Massacre in Bologna	article	6 July 2005	Thierry Meyssan
Document:Clarifications	essay	17 March 2020	Giorgio Agamben
Document:Field Manual 30-31b	Field Manual	10 March 1970	William Westmoreland Kenneth Wickham	An U.S. document describing top secret counterinsurgency tactics, including a "strategy of tension" involving violent attacks which are then blamed on radical left-wing groups in order to convince allied governments of the need for counter-action. It also points out the need for heavy recruiting among the officer corps and security forces in the host country.
Document:Gladio - The Secret U.S. War To Subvert Italian Democracy	essay	23 February 1996	Arthur E. Rowse
Document:Systemic Destabilization in Recent American History	article	24 September 2012	Peter Dale Scott
Document:The Terror Attacks in France. The Broader Geopolitical Implications	interview	10 January 2015	Umberto Pascali	Interview with Umberto Pascali – For Voice of the People, TV Sonce, Skipje, Macedonia
Document:The use of terrorism to construct world order	paper	10 September 2004	Ola Tunander

Rating

11 February 2019 Robin  An important topic
A reasonable overview of this undermentioned topic.

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