Note:
In preparation for my upcoming essay series "The Bunker and the Void"
(related to the Weaponizing Time series), I have compiled this primer.
It aggregates the core concepts of some of my recent notes to provide a
cohesive overview of the theoretical framework I will be exploring in
depth over the coming months. Consider this the blueprint before we
enter the building.
George Grosz, "The Pillars of Society" (1926). A satire from the Neue
Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) movement, laying bare the grotesque
alliance of militarists, clergy, and capitalists that enabled the rise
of fascism in Weimar Germany.
We
need to be aware of a fundamental shift in the nature of Western
governance. The primacy of policy planning, including the expanding
sanctions regimes, has shifted from the political sphere (that of
elected politicians) to the sphere of what we might call the “Securitocracy.”
National policies are being mandated to align with a US-led Western
hegemonic framework (NATO and its allies) in mostly Western countries.
It is the military planners and “Foresight” technocrats who are
designing the policies; politicians merely implement them. In this
sense, while politicians bear the responsibility for allowing this to
happen, they are no longer the architects but the ones selling the
narrative to their constituents and citizens.
Thirdly,
this shift in who is doing the planning also means the narrative, as
well as the optics, is clearly affected. On the one hand, the narrative
has become absolutely clinical and cynical within the planning sphere
itself (in their reports, studies, conferences, etc.). On the other
hand, the shift is taking place silently and slowly; it is not
politically overt or out in the open, precisely so that people cannot
protest it because they remain unaware of the changes taking place
against their will and well-being. As the Defence Horizon Journal states regarding cognitive warfare:
"The
recognition of existential threats such as cognitive warfare is crucial
to avoid defeat. Western societies must address such threats by
leveraging their militaries’ adaptability. Relying solely on the military poses risks,
however, necessitating a comprehensive approach to national security.
Coordination among all the instruments of power under democratic control
is essential for effective outcomes. Western militaries should focus on deterrence and support political decision making."
This
is the language of a mobilized security state. And, tragically, it
represents a wide spread established doctrine for political
decision-making. In essence, this is just one of many examples that what
they are actually saying is that the military sphere will not only
support but also influence political decision-making. Hence, any
pretense of democracy is being erased in these reports that are actually
being put into practice. For example, Germany’s OPLAN DEU explicitly positions
the Bundeswehr as the coordinating authority preparing implementation
frameworks for political decisions, with military advice structured into
the pre-decisional phase. What’s worse is that similar patterns exist across NATO member states (e.g., in the UK, this is called the Fusion Doctrine, and for the EU, there’s the Military Planning and Conduct Capability (MPCC) mechanism),
with military institutions increasingly integrated into political
decision-making through advisory councils, planning mechanisms, and
other frameworks.
And
while democratic control mechanisms (such as elections) apparently
remain formally intact, i.e., you can still go out and vote, the
expansion of military advisory functions
into the core political sphere, while there is at the same time an
attempt at normalizing military-led “whole-of-society” planning,
represents a substantive shift in civil-military relations. This erosion
of the separation between the military and political spheres, however,
is not carried out through overt subversion or a military coup d’état,
but rather through a slow, silent institutional integration and advisory capture, which is also being normalized in the media and in public space.
A
profound societal crisis of the transatlantic elites drives this
transformation. Since around 2014, fearing the loss of political power
and material access to global resources, they have begun planning for a
specific contingency: Anti-Entropy. Instead of building a future of
prosperity in their own countries, they invest in staying the course and
trying to retain the “Global West” (hegemony) against the rising tide of the “Jungle” (the multipolar world).
This
ruling strata’s fear transforms into action when planning for the
development and well-being of society was superseded by preparing for
war. From the 1900s to the 1960s, Western planning had to compete with a
model centered on the “Common Good, that was primarily reflected in
Soviet planning. Indeed, the Russian Revolution and its popularity among
European working classes had forced Western elites and planners to
reimagine cities and regions to ameliorate social unrest. This planning
competition intensified during the Cold War, creating a welfare race
between capitalist and socialist blocs. Cities and regions were
developed to improve their residents’ quality of life as much as
possible. Grand ideas were formulated with their accompanying grand
long-term plans to achieve such a feat, e.g., through concepts such as
the Garden City concept (1900s), the recognition of housing as a social
right in Weimar Germany in 1919, the period of Red Vienna (1919-1933),
Le Corbusier’s a machine for living concept (1923), and much more. And
even though it was, again, the functional elite’s fear that drove these long-term planning projects, it still materially benefited its societies and raised living standards.
Today,
the idea of planning for the “Common Good” is dead or at least
gradually but surely losing its power, depending on the strength of
social planning of each country in the West (or its allies).
Infrastructure is no longer for the benefit of residents but is subsumed
under the term “Dual-Use”: infrastructure designed for use in case of crisis and, more explicitly, war. It now functions as a foundational planning principle,
not merely an incidental characteristic. What’s more, even regional
planning is being affected by the creation of explicit military mobility
corridors (the Central-Northern European military corridor, the
Tri-Baltic Zone, and the Baltic-Black Sea-Aegean corridor) designed for
rapid troop movement. The old world is being dismantled, the physical
and the immaterial, to make room for a new world of hybrid, all-domain,
everywhere-and-everytime warfare. The goal is maintenance of the
status-quo for now, even though the preferred route would be to regain
hegemony and unipolarity.
The
colonial method now being deployed against Western populations finds
its template in what philosopher Enrique Dussel identifies as the
foundational mechanism of modernity itself. His analysis of the Conquest
of the American continent reveals that overt violence requires a sacralizing logic:
“God
provided the foundation (Grund) for their enterprise... God is thus
used to legitimize actions that modernity would consider merely
secular... [T]hey needed to control native imagery by replacing it with a
new religious worldview.”
Dussel uncovers a process whereby domination and colonization is more than the seizure of land or bodies as resources, but the total replacement of one narrative universe with another. To command the physical, you must first conquer the imaginary and destroy the old. However, this logic of narrative tabula rasa was never exclusive to distant shores. As Silvia Federici details in Caliban and the Witch, the same toolkit, enforcing rigid dichotomies, destroying communal bonds, criminalizing alternative knowledge, was applied internally
in Europe during the witch hunts to discipline labor and reproduction,
just as it was applied externally in the Americas. Thus, in essence, it
is both: the control of resources and the of the worldview itself. You
cannot do one without the other.
Today, this enduring meta-framework, a dichotomous worldview
that sanctifies exploitation by dividing reality into
superior/inferior, civilized/savage, order/chaos, has completed its
boomerang trajectory. It now provides the justification for a new
internal class project, framing the fundamental struggle between elites
and non-elites (or capital and labor) as a metaphysical battle. This
Manichean lens justifies the systematic dismantling of a rival cosmology
of the non-dichotomous worldview of cooperation, communality, and the common good.
We
can trace the material defeat of this rival worldview in the West in
the realm of planning but also in the realm of the spaces of
communication and discussion. This shift does not necessarily reflect a
desire for total war, but the preferred model for capital accumulation and social control as well as building the capacity to halt or destroy other’s countries developments; a perfect fit for a profit-generating system operating within a Manichean geopolitical lens.
Thus,
the old temples of the common good are destroyed to clear ground for
the new world of hybrid, all-domain warfare. This project demands the
eradication of competing narratives, the severing of historical memory,
and the silencing of resistance. It is Dussel’s colonial mechanism
applied domestically: the colonization of the Western social imaginary
to secure elite power, transforming the citizen from a participant in a
shared political community into a managed resource in a secured, perpetual present. And below that surface, it is the dismantling of the commons and the reassertion of dichotomous elite versus non-elite logics
Another
piece in this puzzle of the shift of the nature of the state concerns
the so-called human domain. All-domain hybrid warfare with a
whole-of-society approach means not only that this is targeted at
“enemy” states, but also at members of the society within. Consequently,
every domain imaginable is targeted, both outside and inside, including
the cognitive domain, which this EU sanctions regime encompasses. The
cognitive domain according to a 2021 NATO paper that discusses the
nature of the concept of the cognitive or human domain, is described as follows:
“Well,
the Human Domain is the one defining us as individuals and structuring
our societies. It has its own specific complexity compared to other
domains, because of the large number of sciences it’s based upon. I’ll
list just a few and, trust me, these are the ones our adversaries are
focusing on to identify our centers of gravity, our vulnerabilities.
We’re talking political science, history, geography, biology, cognitive
science, business studies, medicine and health, psychology, demography,
economics, environmental studies, information sciences, international
studies, law, linguistics, management, media studies, philosophy, voting
systems, public administration, international politics, international
relations, religious studies, education, sociology, arts and culture…”
First of all, this is a targeting matrix
identifying every dimension of human existence as potential terrain for
military operations. This is not yet considered a distinct domain,
however, but a horizontal one, whether they refer to it as the human or
cognitive domain.
The NATO Allied Command Transformation's Innovation Challenge (Fall 2021) on "Countering Cognitive Warfare" explicitly states:
"Cognitive
warfare positions the mind as a battle space and contested domain. Its
objective is to sow dissonance, instigate conflicting narratives,
polarize opinion, and radicalize groups. Cognitive warfare can motivate
people to act in ways that can disrupt or fragment an otherwise cohesive society."
The cohesion of a society,
like everything else, is analyzed through the lens of whether it serves
the aims of security, defense, or simply war preparations. If NATO
conceives society a such, then the state as enforced of this hermetic
seal offers no provision, no conceptual space, for genuine opposition or
open discussion.
Similarly, the EU-related concept of FIMI (Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference) is defined as:
"intentional
and coordinated activities carried out by state or state-linked actors,
aimed at manipulating the information environment in a deceptive,
misleading, or coercive manner with the objective of undermining public
trust, weakening democratic processes, and advancing geopolitical goals".
Critically, FIMI describes "a pattern of behaviour that is mostly not illegal, but threatens or has the potential to negatively affect democratic values and political processes". This
is the crux: FIMI targets non-illegal behavior. Yet, it is
administratively punished. Interestingly, the US has developed parallel
frameworks, while NATO integrates FIMI within its broader cognitive
warfare doctrine.
The commonality is that it is nominally about foreign state actors and their operations but in practice it is about anyone designated as “proxy,” “facilitator,” or “supporter” of foreign information manipulation, including domestic journalists, activists, and dissidents. The practical effect is a coordinated transatlantic apparatus for identifying, analyzing, and administratively punishing speech.
Ultimately, the cognitive warfare framework and FIMI regulations embody a permanent state of exception
through the continuous identification of threats in speech, justifying
extra-judicial administrative punishment. This, too, is a symptom of a
shift in what the state is: not built on liberal rights-based
governance, but on total “security” management or war preparations
(however you want to look at it). Herein, the population is conceived as a battlespace
within a continuous cognitive war. The old world of rights, judicial
protections, and democratic self-determination is indeed being
dismantled, the physical and the immaterial alike, to make way for a new
world of hybrid, all-domain, everywhere-and-everytime warfare.
This
conceptual militarization of the human domain precipitates a
fundamental redefinition of the citizen. In the classical Liberal State,
the citizen was a “Subject”: an individual with an interior life,
private opinions, and inalienable rights that pre-existed the state,
which was tasked with protecting that private sphere.
In
the Bunker State, this relationship is inverted. The citizen is
redefined as an “Object,” a node in the security infrastructure. Just as
the state must secure its energy grid and transport networks, it must
now secure its human grid. Consequently, a
“glitch” in this grid such as dissent, or purported “disinformation”,
is no longer a valid exercise of freedom but a security vulnerability, a
crack in the bunker wall. The state sustains you not as a
rights-bearing individual, but as human capital needed for the permanent “competition” of a multipolar world.
This logic explains the nature of modern censorship. Tools like sanctions (EU) or deportations (US) are administrative, not judicial.
Their purpose is not to punish a proven crime but to remove a threat.
There is no effort to sustain a patina of democratic debate because, in a
bunker, you remove the saboteur. A dissenting viewpoint is neither
moral nor immoral, true nor false; it is strictly stabilizing or destabilizing.
Thus, measures like EU sanctions against speech are “sanitary measures”
to prevent “infection,” while the threat to deport protesting students
makes residency a privilege of compliance.
This
operates on a medical or technocratic model of war where the goal is
system stability, achieved through the pre-emptive containment of
“virality.”
The Shrinking Corridor of Opinion
In
a society mobilized for siege, a whole-of-society approach to conflict,
the distinction between civilian and soldier vanishes. Everyone is part
of the defense (or offense). This creates an opinion corridor with a narrow “green” zone supporting the official Manichean myth
(We are Good, They are Evil). Any thought that humanizes the enemy or
questions the siege, anything loosely alignable with a “strategic
competitor”, falls into a “red” zone of treason-adjacent hybrid warfare.
This corridor has effectively become a tunnel.
You cannot turn back through diplomacy, because that would be
appeasement; nor can you stop through neutrality, which would be
complicity with the enemy. The sphere of legitimate controversy is
consumed by an enforced consensus. The corridor shrinks to the exact
width of Military Necessity, as defined by
transatlantic power elites and documents like the NATO Strategic
Concept. Step outside it, argue for a multipolar world or just analyze
it, and you face de-amplification, demonetization, sanction, or
deportation.
The Bunker Social Contract
The
classic liberal social contract was a bargain: individuals cede some
autonomy to the state in exchange for the protection of rights and the
provision of public goods, enabling personal liberty and the pursuit of
happiness. In very crude terms, the old social contract between the
citizen and the state was: I give up some liberty; you give me order and prosperity. The Bunker Social Contract is: I
give up my freedom, my reality, and my prosperity; the State protects
its own existence (and its functional elites) from an enemy (and maybe
allows me to survive inside the walls).
The
state admits it can no longer provide a “Good Life,” narratively
cloaking this failure by claiming “the Garden is dying” while promising
to keep the “Jungle” out. The citizen’s identity is now defined against a common enemy.
To be saved, you must align your internal reality with the state’s
threat assessment. You are “free” only insofar as your freedom
strengthens the Bunker; free to shop, free to hate the enemy. You are
not free to open the door. And you cannot even look through the windows.
Hence,
in the old social contract, dissent was just part of being in the
opposition, but you were still part of the polity. Now it is precisely
this membership, and thus the contract, that is being destroyed; people
sanctioned or deported because of their views are by definition not part
of the polity anymore.
All of these developments identified in the sphere of public debate represent the cancellation of the political
in its classical sense. Politics is the arena of legitimate conflict
over the distribution of power and the nature of the good life. By
defining the overriding good as systemic “security” and branding
fundamental dissent as a security threat, the state seeks to foreclose
politics itself. Which means, in practical terms, that the only
legitimate political stance is allegiance to the fortress and vigilance
against its enemies.
This end of politics is executed through a complete transformation in the nature, function, and meaning of state tools: Administrative tools function as technocratic mechanisms for population management. Judicial tools function as strategic weapons of pure coercion. Territory functions as operational zones within a total security architecture.
Here,
the citizen becomes a node in a security grid. The foreign leader is a
potential criminal defendant to be arrested by military operation. Law itself is no longer a constraint on power but its coercive instrument, the continuation of war by judicial and administrative means as well as other means, without a declaration of war.
This
is the Bunker State: every domain weaponized, whole-of-society meaning
total mobilization, hybrid warfare dissolving all distinctions between
law and war, justice and coercion, sovereignty and criminality. Whether
law is bypassed or weaponized, both serve the same function: maintaining
control through a coercive order,
deployed as hegemony has been lost. The tool chosen depends on the
target’s power, socio-political and economic, even its geographical
context, and the audience.
We are told that the German government declared the so-called Zeitenwende
(Turning Point) of 2022 in a sudden manner. Indeed, reflective of a
sort of awakening of the West (or rather transatlantic ruling strata) to
a new world of systemic rivalry. We are told that the militarization of
German society, and of Europe, is a frantic reaction to an unforeseen
emergency (the loss of hegemony as a sudden realization, or the
consequence of so-called abandonment by the US)… but is this true?
I recently uncovered a presentation delivered on June 8, 2017, at a “Track 1.5” defense roundtable in Ottawa. The speaker was Brigadier General Gerald Funke, then the Deputy Head of Planning I (Unterabteilungsleiter Planung I) at the German Ministry of Defence, the central brain of the Bundeswehr’s future analysis.
Reading
his slides today is quite revealing of a long-held Western intent to
premonition and plan. It reveals that the transformation of Germany into
a logistic hub (e.g., through OPLAN DEU) for NATO’s designated Eastern
Flank was, if anything, and like so much of what we are seeing today in
the EU, it was a bureaucratic milestone, agreed upon and socialized five
years before the first tank crossed the Ukrainian border. I want to
walk you through some of the points of these slides:
The Past
What
struck me about the 2017 Funke presentation is that the German planners
are actually not ignorant of history; they actively start with the
past. Indeed, the slides are divided into sections about the past,
present and the future. Thus, the slides explicitly demonstrate a
historical awareness. They list under the title “Integration into the West (6.5.55)” the joining of NATO and reference the Pleven Plan (the 1950 proposal for a pan-European army “with German divisions existing under multinational European command”). In other words, the Bundeswehr, which views Germany as a “Transit Nation,”
sees this as a logical continuation of that 1955 integration. So, even
back then, the requirements of American security were still the primary
design constraints, as they are nowadays.
The “Adaptation of National Plans”
One bullet point reads:
“Allies expect adaptation of national plans to fulfil NATO targets.”
This
basically means, on the one hand, a convergent evolution of NATO and
its allies through planning and implementation, but on the other hand,
of course, a loss of sovereignty: It is a frank admission that the sovereign spatial planning of the German state (Raumordnung), the democratic process of balancing housing, industry, and nature, is now subordinate to the military logic of the Alliance.
Germany
is voluntarily surrendering its planning autonomy to NATO’s
anti-entropic competitive necessity. So, there are no more plans that
serve the common good and the citizens. Instead, NATO is essentially
dictating that services and infrastructure be tailored to the Alliance’s
military requirements. The result is what is written in another slide: “Germany as a Transit Nation.”
This phrase, present on the slides, is the polite euphemism for the
rear area of the Eastern Flank. The country is re-conceptualized as a
mere corridor of equipment and troops in 2017 no less.
“Strategic Foresight 2040”
Perhaps the most damning revelation is the slide detailing the “Strategic Foresight 2040” scenarios according to a classified Bundeswehr plan:
Long before 2022, the Bundeswehr’s internal foresight modeled a future of “Block Confrontation” and “Multipolar Competition” driven by “Resource Scarcity” and “Climate Change.” This echoes the NATO Strategic Foresight Analysis’s points from 2023 almost to the letter.
And it proves that the current multipolar conflict was not an unforeseen accident but already a central planning assumption. Specifically, the behavior of Russia and China is cited as a destabilizing factor. While a scenario called “Global West”
is, by the way, the most positive scenario of all in this model (aka
Western or US hegemony). What’s more, why would the “West” be the model
for the whole world anyway? Again, NATO’s planners (in the clothes of
the German Bundeswehr) reveal their worldview effortlessly every time.
Thus,
the functional elite looked at the future, saw the collapse of their
“Garden,” and accepted the creation of a “Bunker” as inevitable. They
are planning to inhabit this scenario. Consequently, the Zeitenwende was merely the shift into the implementation phase
of a long-charted course toward entropy, toward maintaining the Global
West as is. But they actually know and fully understand themselves to be
in a scenario of Multipolar Competition, where the word “competition”
can be translated to hybrid warfare.
The Venue
Another important aspect is the venue of this presentation: Why Ottawa? Why 2017?
The
CDA Institute Roundtable is a closed-door, off-the-record environment
where allied planners socialize concepts to align their frameworks and
plans. In essence, a concept developed in Germany’s Planungsabteilung
(Planning Department) is exported, validated, and synchronized with
Canadian, American, and NATO planners before its implementation. This is
what we are seeing through these slides.
The
“Transit Nation” concept was simply Germany presenting its assigned
role within the NATO “Bunker” architecture for alliance approval. It was
the moment that a German officer pledged allegiance to the
transatlantic military-equity complex over
the national interest. And if the German military did this, I wouldn’t
be surprised if every NATO member and ally were processed in a similar
manner. Indeed, the regional stratification of NATO’s spatial planning
shows exactly this: Everybody is assigned a specific role in this hybrid
warfare of no limits.
The Architect
Finally, we must look at the man, the presenter, himself. Then (2017): Brigadier General Funke acts as the architect, drawing the blueprints for a militarized logistics corridors. Now (2025): The same man, now Generalleutnant Funke, serves as the Commander of the Support Command (Unterstützungskommando).
Which means he is now responsible for executing the very plan he sold
to the allies eight years ago. The loop is closed. The planning cell has
become the command center, and the scenarios is now part of our daily
life.
Therefore,
the creation of a bunker state, the pre-emptiveness of excluding
dissent, the slowness and silence of policy implementation, all of it,
is actually an implementation of a strategy and a plan. Is it successful
for transatlantic elites? That’s another question entirely.
But
what ultimately struck me here is that if the plans are not to win
wars, but to do so by bleeding out the “enemies” and their allies, then
there’s no need for formal declarations of war. There’s also no need for
international law. Law now is what is “enforced”. There’s also no need
for international institutions. Because that act of aggression that is
stealthy or quick, or slow and covert, cannot be declared. And because
everything is now only useful if it serves a military purpose.
Lastly,
this very brazenness is what will accelerate the creation of
alternatives outside the West. But the question is how to stop the
machinery from the inside, if at all possible?
Introducing
“The Bunker and the Void”: an investigation into the new logic of power
that has shifted from building projects for a better tomorrow to
building Bunkers (projects for a permanent siege). Or, in other words,
why are we seeing a decaying public space vs. new military hubs, hearing
politicians’ empty slogans vs. reading the clinical language of NATO
planning documents? Its fuel is the management of entropy, which means
the effort to freeze a dying order in place. These vignettes, which I
have so far compiled through my notes, are part of this series that will
loosely be based on the following topics:
The Premise & Diagnosis
The
Return of the Planners, the End of the Future: Here, we will establish
the fundamental shift: from teleological planning (aimed at progress,
the “Common Good”) to anti-entropic planning (aimed at system
preservation). We’ll look at the explosion of “Foresight” and “Future”
commands that are planning for a controlled, yet dangerous, 2040.
How
Dichotomy Became an Operating System: To understand this shift, we must
dig into its historical source code. Drawing on thinkers like Silvia
Federici and Enrique Dussel, we will trace how a dichotomous worldview
(civilized/savage, mind/body, man/nature) was forged as a tool for
domination; first in the witch hunts and colonial conquests, and now, as
it boomerangs back to structure our own societies. Or as I like to call
it, this is about the action-guiding orientation frameworks of a
historically grown transatlantic ruling strata.
How It Works/ The Machinery
Convergent
Evolution: The Many Paths to the Bunker: This is not just an American
project and phenomenon. I will show how the US, Germany, France, the UK,
and maybe other allied countries, each with a different political and,
specifically, spatial planning history, are converging on the same model
of the securitized, planning state. And that different planning
cultures are not shielded from this convergence.
The
Securocracy: Who Runs the Foresight Machine: Who are the architects? We
will profile the hybrid elite of generals, private equity investors,
tech founders, and think-tank strategists who form a transnational
“Securocracy.” Their careers rotate between writing war plans and
funding the startups that fulfill them. Importantly, I would point out
that these are often specialists of violence and sometimes “new money”
in contrast to older structures of the transatlantic elite.
Omniplanning:
From Social City to Fortress Platform. Through the lens of urban and
regional planning, we will see how this logic materializes.
Infrastructure is no longer for public benefit but is “dual-use.” Cities
and whole regions are planned as resilient platforms. This is the
physical construction of the Bunker.
What It Does To Us / The Human Cost
From
Citizen to Asset: The New Social Contract: The old contract of rights
and flourishing is being rewritten. You are no longer a citizen-subject,
but human capital; a resource to be optimized and a vulnerability to be
patched. Being a member of the polity is now a privilege of compliance.
The
Security Tunnel: Censorship and Resilience: Dissent is being conceived
as systemic sabotage. We will examine how censorship has shifted from
moral judgment to administrative hygiene, using sanctions,
de-platforming, and algorithmic silencing to maintain a “secure”
cognitive environment. The public square is being sterilized.
Why It Happened, What To Do / History and Horizon
The
Nihilistic Core: Maintenance as the Only God. We will confront the
bleak heart of this system: its lack of a positive vision. The Bunker
has no windows. Its only purpose is its own perpetuation through a
politics of managed decay.
Tabula
Rasa: The New Worldview’s War on the Old: We will deepen the historical
parallel, showing how today’s dismantling of the “social” and “common
good” replicates the colonial logic of tabula rasa; erasing old temples
to build new ones. The target now is our own recent past.
Drawing
Blueprints: Seeds of a Post-Bunker Politics: The series will not end in
despair. We will look for the practices of relationality, commoning,
and a politics that already sketch the outlines of a different future,
one that reclaims the collective imagination of the good life.
This
is not a mere theory about what might happen. The 2017 German plans are
2026’s reality. The “Zeitenwende” is a political rollout of a
pre-existing script. And this is just the case for Germany, but every
NATO and allied country is caught in this web. It is my training as a
geographer and one familiar with planning history and culture that I can
see how these ideas are becoming reality through plans, zoning, and the
construction of infrastructure, not to mention the changing nature of
how law is applied and viewed, how the different branches of state power
are shifting in meaning. We are currently living through the
implementation phase.
And
more than geopolitics, particularly for those living in the West, this
is about the death of politics itself, through the end of collective
debate about the future and its replacement by technocratic risk
management of a permanent siege. It is about whether we will be citizens
or assets, builders of a city or occupants of a bunker.
This
series is an invitation to look behind the political theater and
examine the stage being built. It is an argument that the free-floating
feeling of trapped nihilism in our time is the atmosphere of the Bunker.
By tracing the lines from philosophy, to colonial plunder, to modern
planning documents, to the sanctions on a dissenter, to the
extraterritorial use of law, we can see the full, terrifying system. And
in seeing it, we can begin to imagine a way out.
The
state of exception is not a dictatorship… but a space devoid of law, a
zone of anomie in which all legal determinations are deactivated.” —
Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception, trans. Kevin Attell (University of Chicago Press, 2005).
These are the Notes that are the basis of this essay:
Administrative Warfare & The End of the Political
The Theological Roots of Geopolitics
The Shadow-Blacklist: A slow qualitative shift in governance
EU Militarization Was Ratified in 2017
A very good summary and explanation of the EU sanctions regime
Strategic Geography & Worldviews: EU Elites
If
this introductory tracing of the blueprint, from the 2017 archive to
the Bunker State’s implementation phase, clarifies the scale of the
enclosure being built around us, then the task of understanding, and
ultimately challenging, these processes becomes urgent. The silent
conversion of our cities into logistics hubs, our minds into a
battlespace, and our citizenship into a compliance protocol should not
remain a classified debate for securocrats and planners. It is the
framework that is actively reorganizing our collective reality into a
permanent state of exception.
Your critical engagement is the first step in breaking the silence of this managed consensus. The question posed earlier—how to stop the machinery from the inside, if at all possible?—cannot be answered alone. Leave a comment.
Corrections, counterpoints, additional sources, or leads for future
investigation are not only welcome but necessary. This is how we begin
to map the exits from the Bunker.
Leave a comment
To
map the architecture of the Bunker State, one must operate from a space
outside its logic. This project depends on the freedom to read, write,
and research without the institutional filters that reproduce the
fatalistic consensus of our time. Your support—through subscribing,
sharing this work, or the direct sustenance of a contribution—is
what allows this independent mapping to continue. It directly fuels the
hours of reading planning documents, tracing the convergent evolution
of national strategies, and synthesizing the historical codes that lock
us into this present.
I
am deeply grateful to every paid subscriber and contributor; your
belief in this work is what makes it possible to dedicate myself to it
full-time.
Subscribe for the forthcoming series, The Bunker and the Void, and join a community committed to long-form, qualitative analysis.
Share
this essay with friends, colleagues, or on platforms. Debate and
dissemination are the necessary antidotes to the shrinking corridor of
opinion.
Share
Contribute directly via Ko-fi.
If this analysis provided clarity, reflection, or a new perspective,
consider buying me a coffee. Each one genuinely supports the rigorous
work of dissecting the machinery of implementation and helps sustain
journalism and research free from the dictates of the securitocracy.
By
subscribing or sharing, you help sustain a vital, independent inquiry
into the forces dismantling the old world and constructing the new.
Thank you for being part of this.
