The Doctor
My heart warms at all the impassioned articles and comments that defend the doctrine of free speech. People seem to have in mind what I call “gentlemen’s debate at the town hall” view of speech where we all respect each other and listen to each other’s point of view. It is a lovely notion that fills me with nostalgia.
But I think it is a dangerously outdated view. You see, the gentlemen’s debate view only works if all sides agree to follow the rules. The recent kerfuffle at Albert Park shows that those rules no longer apply.
This reminds me of an old war office saying popularised by Winston Churchill: Generals spend their time figuring out how to win the previous war rather than the current one.
You see, we are at war. It is 5th Generation warfare (5GW). The war is between narratives and the battlefield is the mind. On one side we have corporations (including governments), banks and the new world order. And on the other, we have ordinary people. The weapons are the psychological operation, misinformation and disinformation, economic warfare and the false flag attack.
Because it is war, the enemy does not respect the old gentlemen’s rules. And, more importantly, because it is an information war, speech can be seen as a kind of 5th generation attack. Thus, the enemy (who knows the new rules) accuses us of violence when we speak. From a 5th generation warfare perspective, they are right.
On the other hand, the use of kinetic violence (i.e., physical violence) as a tactic to silence speech is a logical defence, seen from a 5GW perspective.
It follows that if we want to win this war, we need to stop fighting the last one. We need to learn the new rules of war and adjust our strategies and tactics to suit. One of the features of 5GW is that the real initiators of the warfare are hidden. Therefore they cannot be engaged with directly.
Interestingly, sites like the BFD are critical to success in an information war. Here we can share narratives and rearm, so to speak, before going back into battle in the likes of Facebook, Twitter, Tic Tok and the real world.
To learn more about 5GW, I recommend General Michael Flynn’s new book: Introduction to 5GW – A Citizen’s Guide to Fifth Generation Warfare.
Definitions:
Fifth Generation Warfare (5GW): A contemporary war of competing narratives that can incorporate elements of traditional (kinetic) war, asymmetric (guerrilla) warfare, information warfare (propaganda), legal (lawfare), economic war and cultural warfare.
Psychological Operation (psyop): operations designed to convey selective information and indicators to audiences to influence their motives, emotions and objective reasoning in order to affect the behaviour of governments, groups, organisations and individuals. Citizen’s Guide 1:7
False Flag: an operation where agents of the enemy infiltrate friendly actor groups and undertake violent or outrageous actions to be blamed on friendly actors. For example, the neo-nazi operatives show up at Posie Parker’s speech so that Posey Parker’s supporters can be smeared as neo-nazis.
