6.     Sensing War Propaganda

Similar to the lack of current education about war and peace is, the core o such education missing. Sensing propaganda must be the number one act even for governments to recognize what is happening worldwide. During WWI and WWII, many countries had been drawn into those wars without even fully comprehending their magnitude. Even if alliances no longer exist like today, relationships between countries can still be easily influenced by propaganda measures.

06.01 THE DANGEROUS WAR PROPAGANDA
War propaganda is the single most potent weapon in making war. Without the support of the population, war is impossible. Most people believe potent people do what they want, but that is not true. Every political leader knows that. A sad but well-known testimony of that was Adolf Hitler asking his population in Berlin in a vast gathering: “Wollt Ihr den totalen Krieg?” Do you want total war? And a very loud yes was the answer. The population was so fearful and, at the same time, angry that they instead wanted war more than anything else. And at that point, war propaganda was steered up for several YEARS.

06.02 PROPAGANDA TIMELINE
Propaganda starts by dividing the world into good guys and bad guys. The bad guys may be called by their flags, symbols, or something to make it clear whom the aggressors are talking about. It’s essential to recognize that the language is so simple that even the least educated people understand. The aggressor knows that they have time, there is no reason to rush, and the population needs to build up anger over at least one or two or three years to make it sit even in those who have been a skeptic. After a while, situations get constructed that make the other party do things so that fear gets created. The fear is built up over time so that the bad guy is known to be wrong, and now we need to fear them. The more people fear and hate, the more support is created for war. If they reach a specific limit of anger or fear, war can be declared with the reason to protect the pore population of a tyran and rebuild the country for a free country with whatever political model they want.

06.03 PROPAGANDA FOR INSTIGATION
One of the most tricky propaganda mechanisms is to work with a third country, stimulate war between them and the country that should be attacked, and let them fight a war. Then come in as a helping hand, help the third country and jointly fight, including their alias against the targeted country. Also, here propaganda is prepared for years until everybody feels that those who were declared bad guys need to suffer.

06.04 PROPAGANDA FOR REBUILDING A FAVORITE STRUCTURE
Often a putsch is organized to bring down a government and install one that is in line with the ideals of the aggressor. The previous government is destroyed, and a new government comes to power. That new government is operating in the interest of the aggressor. Many people would not see this as a war, but it is worst than war as the overpowered country is now directed by the aggressor and has no idea what is going on.

06.05 PROPAGANDA CONTENT
1) Usually, there are pictures showing civilian who are punished, tortured, killed, and so forth. Whether the pictures are real or not does not matter because ordinary people would not be able to analyze them. Those who do and uncover the crime can easily be called conspiracy theorists or even people who are considered a risk to the nation.

2) A series of stories are artificially constructed that declare one party the bad guy and the other the good guys or victims. The story stimulates the desire to help the victim to the degree that one day, most people agree that the war is ok. One key mechanic is that the news get to report the stories over and over and over again.

3) The closer it gets to the day when the start of the war was planned, the messages are coming in with high frequency and intensity. Part of the message is also to demonstrate that the bad guys have been bad for a while or even a long time, and the good guys have been the best pretty much all the time.

4) Important: the stories always come loud and clear from the aggressor, no matter who or where they are. And the construction is so that all allays have to communicate the same story locally. On the contrary the party defined as “bad guys” are neither heard nor seen. War is actually happening.

NOTE: There is much more to be said about war propaganda, but that would exceed the purpose of this book.

7.     Recognizing Hostile Forces

This has been the hardest nut to crack in our effort to develop a strategy to make and maintain peace. In many cases, the “obvious bad guy” was just a tool in solid hands to make war for many different and equally nonobvious reasons. Cracking this nut was a breakthrough in better understanding and preventing war.

07.01 RECOGNIZING HOSTILE INTERESTS
One of the most strategic questions everybody should ask first and before any conclusion:
1) What is the most probable motive to start, support or instigate a war?
2) Who has the most significant benefits from the possible war? This includes the party that is considered a) initiated the war, b) the victim of the war, and c) other parties one way or the other involved in that war.
3) Who are the parties most engaged in communicating about the war?
4) What would be a possible outcome scenario when any one of the parties involved wins?
The second step of understanding hostility is the way or ways aggression is reasoned or simply performed.

07.02 RECOGNIZING WORLD DOMINATION.
One motive for creating war, maybe world domination or something along those lines. That motive may be communicated as a peaceful action because the promised outcome may be peace on earth. The obvious question is who’s peace, which defines the rules, structure, laws, behavior, ethics, morals, and so forth. What may be suitable for one society can be coercion for another society. Hence, peace by domination will never be sustainable peace. The aim to dominate the world or create a new world order has cost millions of lives, destruction, and loss in prosperity with zero gain. One of nature’s superior concepts for prosperity and advancement is diversity. Diversity is close connected to specialization, another concept of nature. Those concepts have worked to humanity’s advantage. World domination is an ill-minded attempt to bring “order” to the world by forcing the entire world to live by the standards of whoever developed those standards, morals, belief systems, and so forth.

Whatever the theoretical motive, world domination is an act of enforcing somebody’s will and power onto somebody else, which is against natural diversity, specialization, progress, advancement, and competitive behavior.

07.03 RECOGNIZING DESTABILIZATION
The most common instrument to weaken a country is destabilizing a country or society. Strategically structured and good understanding of organizational behavior, destabilizing an entire country is relatively simple. Consider yourself trying to organize a demonstration for or against something. You will quickly notice that you cannot. The more you learn how it is done, the more you recognize the pattern of propaganda and motivating people into something they usually would not care about. You begin to promote certain aspects with fear, other aspects where you ask for help, and so forth. Large, sometimes country-wide demonstrations require managing planning, strategic thinking, and quite a budget. If one can do it, it can tear up a whole nation. If one can organize two demonstrations for oppositional reasons, you can split a nation very quickly. And nobody knows who organized it – unless you conduct some primary research. So how do you recognize it? Suppose a group protests against something it is almost certain that it will create a conflict between a group and another or political leaders, and the other group gives in very unexpectedly. In that case, you may notice that the demonstration continues. Why? Because those actions are hard to plan for a third party who organizes such a destabilization mechanism.
Another behavior that needs to be carefully observed, is when thousands of people demonstrate against or for something rather irrational. You may wonder why it may be just to split the society into two groups.
The difficulty is to differentiate between a well-meant demonstration and destabilization. Today, it is tough to tell.
Also conspiracies are especially dangerous as the destabilizer who starts a conspiracy to destabilize a region or other country also quickly provides its conspiracy theories. The country under attack now has a tough time announcing a conspiracy as people would laugh at them and talk about the conspiracy theory they already heard. For example, if group X stimulates another group to create an intervention with the region they want to destabilize, group X would immediately provide a conspiracy theory about how they attack another group. This double confusion splits a nation very quickly, and the offender wins no matter what. Moreover, the organizers of those destabilization attacks are hard to identify.

07.04 RECOGNIZING DIGITAL WARFARE
Technological advancements are almost always also advancements in military aggression. Social Media is great for advancing networks and getting connected. But people with different motives can also be abused to get influenced without noticing. Artificial Intelligence-based Deep Fake videos can show terrible scenes that can make a population support war – yet those scenes may have been digitally produced and have never happened. And since propaganda is the key to mobilizing the nation, digital warfare became the most severe weapon weakening or destabilizing a nation.

Modern warfare has moved from tanks, bombers, and ground troops to socio-digital warfare. Nations get split up and provoked differently, so they demonstrate about anything, and less educated get to collide with more educated. Affected nations, mainly in Europe or the U.S., have a tough time keeping their nation peaceful. Today it takes no more than a team of 100 underground troops to inspire conflicts and separation of nations, which weakens their economy and more.

07.05 PREVENTING WAR INSTIGATION
Almost all wars have been instigated or fueled by a third party, seeing an opportunity to gain an advantage from a war. In other words, the hostile force is not the one that started the war but instigated a war somebody else started and was declared the bad guy. This ancient tactic has been designed to perfection today. Moreover, that hidden hostile force ofen then shows up as the helping hand and leaves the place with catastrophic disaster.

8.     Dealing with hostile forces

Recognizing hostile forces is the first step to being able to deal with them. Dealing with hostile forces is not as difficult as most people think. Starting with the base: 99% of people do not want war – not even those who are considered people in “bad countries.” No support – no war.

08.01 STRATEGIC TESTING

One way to deal with hostile forces is diplomacy. Diplomatic engagement may force a hostile force to either show their face and push their war through, no matter what, or retreat. Those tests are especially powerful in wars supported by alliances. If the alias recognizes the hostility of one of their members, they can ensure that there is no war by either leaving the alliance or fighting within the alliance. In either case, the hostile party has no way out and must retreat from their engagement. Even if that ends by playing the savior and, as such not showing that they give up, over time, it becomes more apparent, the more they have been involved in wars.

08.02 DIFFERENTIATE BETWEEN POPULATION AND WAR DRIVERS

Understand that the general population of any country has no interest in any war – at least 99%. It is a small group of influential people who see a need for a war to satisfy their interests. Those interests maybe fundamental needs for natural resources or other material or nonmaterial values such as maximizing influence and power. Because those needs are apparent, it gets ever harder to start a war to steal something from somebody else or just take over the reign of a country.

The more dangerous and sad type of war drivers is very useful people, maybe not even politicians, with psychopathic, narcissists or machiavellian disorders who made it all the way to the top and even controlled entire governments. This also explains that those leaders have no problem sacrificing hundreds or even millions of lives. While narcissism and psychopathy are considered mental disorders, Machiavellian is not. When high up in a society, they can play the defining role of a war, where the political leader is just a puppet in this war.

That also explains why it is essential to differentiate between the general population that is influenced by those leaders to go to war and the actual people who drive the instigation of such a war.

08.03 NEVER ALLOW ANY KIND OF LEADER TO ENGAGE OR SUPPORT A WAR.
With a well-educated population on how to recognize hostile interests and war propaganda, they should never allow an engagement in conducting a war or supporting somebody else’s war. In democratic countries, the people have the power to request a new vote, and in other models such as meritocracies, communism, monarchies, and so forth, they can still request the government not to engage. In a country with an autocratic government it may not be possible. Still, those countries are usually not able to conduct war against other nations in a big way – unless they are armed with weapons from developed yet not peace-embracing nations. If so, they out themselves as a hostile nation.

In summarizing, Propaganda, Demonstrations, and Conspiracy theories are mechanisms to involve less educated, emotional people to just blindly jump on those activities. It is the responsibility of every individual citizen to educate themselves before taking action.

9.     Ending Military Alliances

Military alliances are not a genuine reason for war but the reason for catastrophic world wars when initiated by an alliance. With the understanding of how to identify hostile leaders, their ability to develop mind-boggling propaganda, and then activating their alliance, we have a world war as we saw it with just a much bigger fatality and damage than the previous one.

09.01 REMOVING RISKS OF GLOBAL WARS
Military alliances bare an enormous risk of global wars by one more aggressive country pulling all others into a war they may otherwise have never supported. Moreover, it forces nations that realize a threat from such an alliance to build a counter alliance for themselves that also pull nations into their alliance that may have never joined otherwise. The mother of all global wars has been alliances. Even though they claim to be set up to prevent war, they are, with no exception to, set up to dominate.

09.02 NO GENERAL MILITARY ALLIANCES
A peace-embracing nation does not need any military alliance. It can defend itself as a souvereign nation with a track record of being a peace-embracing country. If an aggressor still attacks a country from another country, it may ask other peace-embracing countries for support in this one particular case.

09.03 EXITING EXISTING ALLIANCES
A peace-embracing nation shall have the right to exit any military alliance no matter what the contracts had dictated. If this is not possible for whatever reason, the alliaence and its members demonstrate they are not peace-embracing nations. Moreover, no international law should punish a country that wants to exit a military alliance or enforce its membership whether the alliance is already in a war or not. See also resolving existing alliances under chapter “20 Making Peace#.

09.04 NO THREATS TO BUILD AN ALLIANCE – Never push or even threaten an independent nation to join any military alliance. Never promises any benefits or advantages when building an alliance