About four and a half million Ukrainian refugees live in Europe. (https://data2.unhcr.org/en/situations/ukraine) How's it going? Are they assimilating nicely? As France recently illustrates, it's dangerous to have unassimilated migrants. Another question: how's the war in Ukraine going? How did that offensive go? Great? No? (https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/zelensky-ukraine-wants-show-results-204324909.html) Oh no! NATO leadership might be in public denial, but as the Ukrainian offensive fizzles out, the next phase of the war queues up. We're more than half way through 2023 and Russian arms production seems to continue to expand at predicted rates. At the same time, NATO stockpiles of arms are depleted. Due to aid meant for both Ukraine and Afghanistan, the international terrorist/criminal network has become well armed. Arms don't move around as easily as cash does, so between the US dropping 'helicopter guns' on Ukraine (https://digitaledition.chicagotribune.com/tribune/article_popover.aspx?guid=24f52080-e110-41e4-b01d-87987375576b) and leaving a strategic arms cache behind in Afghanistan, (https://www.icct.nl/publication/weapons-afghanistan-talibans-spoils-war) one could call that an arms 'liquidity event.' Rebels are even taking guns from French police. They've got the lawyers, guns, and money now. For ancient memers, this is what we call a 'highly exploitable,' moment.
Which entities can take the biggest advantage of free floating cash and guns? Criminal enterprises and espionage agencies. And that's exactly what we've seen play out in France: Islamists and Antifa on the streets. (hey my spellcheck recognized 'Antifa' and didn't recognize 'Islamists' so that should tell you the ideological problem here extends to software engineers and their corporate masters...) As we have seen in the US with the George Floyd Brownshirt riots, Antifa is used to win street fights on behalf of the government, with plausible deniability. To think that only the US would stoop to such tactics is naive. Of course Antifa and even criminal entities are manipulated by espionage agencies. The CIA with cocaine traffickers, (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIA_involvement_in_Contra_cocaine_trafficking) or the Russian Mafia ties to the FSB, (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lubyanka_Criminal_Group) or the way arms traffickers like Viktor Bout (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viktor_Bout) flooded Africa with cheap Russian arms, which destabilized governments all over that continent. By design, these news stories exist, but are nearly impossible to find in whole with a single source. One must track a whole pastiche of news articles, interviews with whistle-blowers, studies, and of course remember that such stories exist once media companies decide to delete source data. We live in an age where our memories are more reliable than the electronic ephemera so easily censored. And so to those who claim that espionage agencies only bother themselves with military installations, and names of enemy spies, there is little I can do to prove my thesis to them. Espionage theses are QED: you either understand their logic or you don't. We can add a secondary layer of falsifiability: once evidence adds up to the contrary, one must deprioritize it. But at the same time, espionage tampers with evidence, inherently. That means that even falsified espionage theses must be considered. Contradicted espionage theses is the closest I can see to a nullified espionage thesis. This is because so long as one individual holds a belief, there is still a conspiracy of one. To be made aware of an espionage thesis is to become a collaborator in a way. Lavrov recently made the point that modern warfare needs a four to one ratio of non-combat assets to combat assets (having trouble finding the citation. I probably read it in Tass). He meant psyops, espionage, anything. Mobilizing espionage for offensive action fits into this model. Espionage is the HIV that attacks the immune cells of the defender, converting them to fellow attackers. This is Bezmenov's thesis: subversion leads to demoralization leads to crisis. In the US, any narrative counter to the Biden junta is condemned to being Russia propaganda and thus, denied discussion and evaluation. Media literally means the in-between portion: the medium. People mistake 'Media' to mean truthful information, as presented. In fact, it's just the mediator through which we can observe what is outside our personal purview. This is an excellent example of subversion in action... only it's the United States of America's own autocratic espionage state that has subverted its own media. It's well known in California that at least the CIA is in control of most of the Mexican drug gangs. If you read Sicario (https://archive.org/details/elsicarioautobio0000sica) you know that the cartels are run by the Mexican President and also they run the President in some strange symbiosis. Do you really think that one one wing of that Mexican Eagle is espionage (the gangs... which it is safer for me not to name, but which you can easily look up yourself) and that the other, the President, is not? The US rules Mexico with our espionage agencies. This is how it's done.
What do you think will happen to all those Western settled Ukrainian refugees when Russia reasserts control over Ukraine? Do you think they're going to be placid and assimilate into their new country? Or will they be disgruntled, unable to speak the local language, stuck in low wage jobs? How long will that last before individuals start getting approached by Russian intelligence? The problem with low wage laborers is that they aren't paid enough to be loyal. Add the problems of an unassimilated migrant population and it doesn't matter if it's Muslim clerics or Russian GRU officers, assets will be cultivated and action will be taken.
France is caught in the crossfire of being a socialist country targeted for conquest by Islamists, and a socialist state that uses Islamists as brownshirts to quell the opposition, both morally (“religion of peace, you bigot...”) and physically (riots, which are then used to demoralize and insult the French more, because that much violence just shows that the anti-Muslim sentiment is correct). Because it's a socialist country that uses the government to crush dissent, large numbers of disgruntled French are members of all sorts of direct action organizations. And all direct action organizations are eventually taken over by espionage agencies. Since Islam is a religion, its chain of command can't be targeted without such actions being denounced as bigoted. Even if all the clerics were targeted, the religion itself inspires and requires militant organization. It's a self-healing war-machine. Whereas the ideological Left has censored all internal discourse, leaving it with no real ideology other than communism—which it does its best to conceal and deny. And therefore it's quite easy to infiltrate and destroy. The old communists couldn't be destroyed, because they welcomed internal discourse until a complete ideology could be formed. And once it was established in Russia, there was a stronghold from which the ideology could be propagated. Only now, Russia's ideological agenda is to normalize greater Russia. That means that highly exploitable rubes in the form of Antifa, communists, criminals, and Islamists are all tools Russia can use to damage or even dismantle the governments that oppose Russia—including France.
“Send Lawyers...”
Open societies are not open for their own citizens: what they mean when they say 'open society' is that the elites are open to be bribed by anyone. Ordinary citizens lack the money and power to offer adequate bribes.
“... Guns...”
In John Lecarre's The Night Manager, the horror that the hero was fighting against was small arms traffickers. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Night_Manager) Back in 1993 and even before when he was writing it, Lecarre envisioned how unchecked Russian arms flooding the world would kill millions of people: a horror worse than any single war since the World Wars. This is a horror that actually unfolded over my lifetime. People want to talk about 'child soldiers' and ignore that child soldiers need small arms to become killers. Biden has committed at least an equal evil, having flooded the world with guns.
“... And Money.”
Globalization of the ultra wealthy has enabled international tax shelters that are defended by powerful nations, but purportedly are 'independent' and thus 'able to charge whatever tax rate they like.' As if the Bahamas was actually a real sovereign nation that actually had all that money there. Oh, it's there in ones and zeroes, but for having so many numbers, it sure doesn't have many factories, plantations, or other physical aspects of what is so obviously 'wealth.' And it is this fiction that enables espionage agencies and criminals free reign over the world and impunity that goes beyond national borders into the 'international' space that belongs only to the ultra wealthy—of which nation states and their agents are the wealthiest.
Maybe the US tried bribing Wagner with it's magic $6 billion Pentagon magic money from a secret slush fund (https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-06-20/pentagon-says-a-6-billion-accounting-error-allows-more-arms-for-ukraine), but that's only because other State Department bribery mechanisms have been shut down due to Russia's foreign agent law.(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_foreign_agent_law). I wonder how many French policemen $6 billion in Russian bribes can kill.
Here's some fun math: $6 billion divided by 45k French police = $133.3k each.
How much do you think it costs to train, equip, and field one soldier?
The war is about to get interesting for those least interested.