Mental or cognitive warfare : Reminiscing Popular Will as a Negative Paradigm : A different resistance is required
Part I – Mental or cognitive warfare
Part 2 – A practical example of such warfare
Part 3 – Venezuela as a laboratory of how to withstand
Part 1 : What is mental or cognitive warfare?
Recently Scott Ritter wrote an essay on mental warfare and it is better known as cognitive warfare. The essay was focused on Russia and as part of his work, he quotes a Russian Lieutenant General Andrei I’lnitsky. We will use that quote. Tactically, it has wide implications and although a Russian Lieutenant General penned the concept, it is not confined to Russia.
Missión Verdad gives us a practical glimpse of cognitive warfare in Venezuela, using a specific organization. Venezuela has not given up. They operate under coercion. This goes for Delcy Rodriques as well and commentators keep dismissing her as a traitor, having given Venezuela away to the Empire. That cannot be further from the truth. Delcy is looking after the Venezuelan heart and cognition, very specifically against cognitive warfare, despite having to cooperate with the new imperial masters. Venezuela is economically starting to show wear and tear since the empire took them. The empire’s hope in the Latin Americans is much further than neo-colonialism. They are intending to create a neo-serfdom.
Let us look at I’lnitsky’s view of mental warfare and then continue to Missión Verdad for the practical.
Mental warfare is a concept in contemporary Russian military and strategic thought that denotes a distinct, standalone type of modern warfare waged primarily in the mental, cognitive, axiological, and ontological domains. It is defined as a systematic, triune (tactical-operational-strategic) strategy aimed at the capture, occupation, and radical transformation of an adversary’s mental space — including collective consciousness, national identity, historical memory, value systems, and civilizational foundations — in order to paralyze political will, erode sovereignty, and deprive the target society of its capacity to function as an independent civilizational and geopolitical actor.
Mental warfare is the highest existential-civilizational form of conflict. It integrates informational, cognitive, and spiritual-worldview spheres into a holistic technological architecture. While advanced technologies, including artificial intelligence, serve as instruments — particularly for penetrating archetypal layers of the collective unconscious — the primary operational environment is the mental sphere of a civilization: its axiological (value-based) and ontological (being-related) foundations.
Mental warfare emphasizes a triune ontology comprising three mutually reinforcing levels:
• Tactical level: Immediate information-psychological operations (including disinformation, deepfakes, fabricated orders, and classical PsyOps) designed to create localized chaos, demoralization, and disorientation.
• Operational level: Broader efforts to undermine trust in institutions, attack national identity, exacerbate internal contradictions, and fragment elites and society into isolated informational echo chambers.
This is one take-away:
• Strategic (civilizational) level: Long-term transformation of fundamental civilizational structures through the rewriting or “cancellation” of history, revision of culture and traditions, and imposition of alien value matrices.
A central analytical feature of mental warfare is the cumulative and often irreversible effect arising from the synergy of these levels. Tactical actions accumulate into operational shifts in mass consciousness, which in turn enable profound strategic, civilizational changes. This nonlinear dynamic allows mental warfare to achieve existential outcomes — moral and political capitulation — with relatively low material costs compared to kinetic warfare, potentially rendering a state incapable of sovereign civilizational reproduction even while formal state structures remain intact.
And this is the final take-away:
Mental warfare is characterized by the total penetration of the logic of war into the ontological and civilizational space of the adversary. It is framed as a struggle not primarily for territory or resources, but for control over the direction of global transformation and the establishment of a new world order.
From this we can easily reason that we are in a war for the direction of global transformation and what a new world should look like. This is why the current direction of our world affects all of us and Venezuela now is a laboratory of the doctrine.
Part II : A practical example of mental warfare
Missión Verdad gives us the operational step-by-step functioning of such a cognitive war in Venezuela, titled:
Reminiscing Popular Will as a Negative Paradigm – A prototype of anti-politics, coup and calculated violence
It is necessary to return to elementary discussions about politics in Venezuela, in a context where spaces are certainly opening up for debate, dialogue and an increasing inclusion of heterogeneous actors with heritage in society. Among them, political parties are necessary gears of the national, regional and local reality that can (and in some cases must) be rethought, configured and even in some cases reformed taking into account the present panorama.
In that sense, first we recall the performance of some parties that have had a prominent performance on the Venezuelan stage; some have been infamous, others markedly destructive.
Most opposition political parties, especially from 2013 onwards, are sui generis devices in their political configuration, precisely because they have dismantled any traditional articulation of their proceeding in favor of other non-political dimensions to try to achieve their objectives.
Paradigmatic at this point has been Popular Will (VP), a hybrid warfare device designed to dismantle institutions, fracture the state and replace the democratic dispute with the logic of overthrow.
On the Venezuelan political board, VP has never operated as a conventional partisan organization. Far from electoral competition, programmatic construction or social dialogue, it has been consolidated as a paradigm of destitutional anti-politics, a transnational coup gear and a systematic operator of focused violence.
Its existence does not respond to the dynamics of the democratic dispute, but to the architecture of hybrid warfare: to dismantle, to saturate with chaos and to facilitate foreign intervention.
There are three axes that define VP as an operating model of institutional rupture, foreign funding and armed confrontation. Let’s see.
Anti-politics as a destituent doctrine
VP was not born to compete in elections or to represent sectoral interests within the constitutional framework. His doctrinal line is explicitly anti-political: historically he dedicated himself to rejecting the dialogue tables, fracturing internal coalitions such as the Democratic Unity Table (MUD) and betting on the rupture of institutional channels as a way to impose his agenda.
The party functioned as a vertical and reactive structure, subordinate to the guidelines of Leopoldo López and his immediate circle. His methodology incorporated Gene Sharp’s tactics on “nonviolent struggle”: thus denying partisan logic as a tool for citizen participation; rather asserting itself as a manual of destabilization adapted to the contexts of the so-called “color revolutions”.
To legitimize this strategy, VP weaved alliances with NGOs, media operators and figures of “progressive causes”, creating a propaganda ecosystem that masks its true objective: the demolition of the Venezuelan state through institutional attrition and the symbolic saturation of public space.
The coup DNA: training, financing and international encirclement
The VP coup knock has been structural and is imported; it was certainly never circumstantial. Its main leaders, such as Leopoldo López, are products of Harvard University and the Belfer Center, a strategic think tank of the American establishment that has trained operators of the unipolar order and intervention managers in peripheral countries. This academic background translates into a geopolitical vision aligned with the financial and corporate elite of certain American sectors.
External funding is widely documented: from the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), a body linked to the U.S. State Department, to Wall Street corporations and oligarchic networks historically linked to the looting of the Venezuelan treasury during the point-fixed era.
Therefore, VP always behaved like a device that, in order not to compete for the vote, was dedicated to bid for open interference.
His record confirms this vocation: López’s active participation in the context of the April 2002 coup; design and execution of the “The Exit” plan in 2014 as an attempt to overthrow; and international coordination with figures like Luis Almagro in the OAS to activate sanctions, apply the Inter-American Democratic Charter and deepen the diplomatic siege.
The goal was never to govern, but to facilitate regime change through non-election channels.
Guarimbas, organized crime and asymmetric warfare
Violence is not a “collateral damage” to VP’s strategy; it is its operational language. The toll of 43 dead and more than 870 injured in 2014 was the direct result of a call designed to saturate the state, paralyze services and generate governance crises.
Far from deposing this tactic, VP professionalized it.
In 2016, mayoralties ruled by the party in Táchira, Barinas, Trujillo, Zulia and Guárico became epicenters of looting focused on public supply networks. VP leaders and mayors provided logistics, insider information and, in documented cases, direct payment to irregular groups to generate riots under the excuse of shortages.
The objective was clear: to affect the distribution of regulated food, to sabotage the general distribution of food and to wear down the operational capacity of the State.
The evidence of violent planning is forceful: the capture of Yon Goicoechea with explosives, the pendrive seized from Daniel Ceballos with destabilization plans and operational links with criminal gangs such as El Tren de Aragua and border paramilitarized groups.
VP was in the habit of operating as a node of hybrid violence: the combination of tactics of asymmetric warfare, media saturation, and criminalization of state infrastructure to generate the “critical mass” that justified a coup or external intervention.
UA model to dismantle
Popular Will never tried to stand as a political party in the classical sense of representation and democratic competition. As a hybrid war device, its raison d’être has been based on institutional anti-politics, financed coup and instrumentalised violence. There is no better definition of these characteristics than the representative figure of Juan Guaidó, with additional components of corruption.
His project was committed, not to the construction of a government program, but to the dismantling of Venezuelan institutions; without systematically competing at the polls, but in the streets, in international offices and in global public opinion.
Understanding VP as the paradigm of this triad—anti-political, coup and violence—means understanding the nature of the Venezuelan political conflict over the past decade. The construction of a logic of chaos, from outside the country, put this “party” in the vanguard of the factions associated with violent confrontation in the detriment of dialogue and democratic dynamics.
Its nature, in fact, is allergic to the legitimacy of the political game, like so many other parties of the most extreme oppositions. It is clear that, in that sense, VP is an ideal model to dismantle any claim of political construction. And for this reason, a model that should not be repeated in political history to be built in Venezuela.
Part III : How to withstand
Let us see what Delcy Rodriques does, in opposition to this kind of mental warfare, at the times when she is not forced to deal with the IMF and the US Embassy. See, she works with the people. The US tells her to do something, and she changes it, and asks the people. She travels in the country, with a simple t-shirt and pair of pants, dressing just like the rest. There is no fancy clothing, except what she needs for formal occasions. Everyone knows that she has been given the direction that she should go into, but everyone also knows that these actions keep everyone together. Here are a few:
Happy National Tree Day!
Putting our hands in the earth is sowing life and the future. We celebrate the start of the Chuquisaca National Reforestation Plan, reclaiming the Chuquisaca Decree of our Father Bolívar to regenerate soils, protect waters, and plant trees.
Now see the message that everyone understands. We plant these trees as an icon and hope for our future when we will get back to our own lives. This is resistance of a depth of spiritual structure. Venezuela could not fight back, as they were told not to fight, by Nícholas Maduro, who bought the opportunity for the Venezuelans to keep their dream.
A Venezuela free from sanctions
An extraordinary day on our second day of Pilgrimage in Anzoátegui for a Venezuela free from sanctions. We visited the Eulalia Buroz Commercial Port, interacted with our fishermen, and got to know the Bio Aloe plant, witnessing the economic boom, creativity, and productive diversity that are driving this state today.
What we saw in Anzoátegui is a people who have not surrendered in the face of difficulties; who, through hard work, continue to advance in national unity for the economic development, peace, and social happiness of our nation.
Reminding the Venezuelan people that the promises of lifting sanctions are only promises, and to stand firm!
Continuance of the communal structures
I greeted and sent a big hug to all the communards who participated in the I Encounter of the Communal Coffee Plan from the Portuguesa state, where the communal economy continues to advance with organization and productivity. We saw the start of operations of the roastery “El Cafetal” and highlighted that Venezuela, between the years 2025 and 2026, reached close to 4 million quintals of coffee, destined for national consumption and exportation.
These are positive news to show what is being done in our country, which, with productive unity and self-effort, continues on the path of economic recovery and the material and spiritual well-being of the Venezuelan people.
This is a similar message speaking to the well-being, community orientation (she did not mention socialism because she is being watched) and spiritual ancestry of the people, despite their current circumstances.
Maintenance of oil fields through predictive models
We continue to take firm steps towards the future of Venezuela. With great pride, we inaugurated the Hydrocarbon Technological and Data Management Center, and together with its workers, we toured this new space that will house the data bank, the information systems and the automation of our entire industry, allowing us to strengthen the maintenance of oil fields through predictive models, improve productive capacities and incorporate artificial intelligence into every process; and it will also be at the service of our youth.
Do you see the message? I think of the song – Teach your children well!
Elderly
On the National Day of the Elderly, we continue to be deployed throughout our country with more than 5,000 Integrated Care Brigades. We have already found more than 365,000 grandparents in a vulnerable situation and we are providing them with health, social protection, companionship, and all the love of the grandchildren of Venezuela.
Our pensioners have rights, and we will not rest until we fully restore the well-being of those who have given so much for this nation. Let’s unite in caring for the most needy!
This is Delcy’s message: Let’s Unite. This is her message against the mental warfare. This is her message to keep the people whole. And that is a resistance that symbolizes a whole different methodology.
Russia has just asked her to withstand the request (no, of course it is not a request but let’s remain polite), to provide money and weapons to Ukraine. This is the kind of weapon against her head.
“Russia has urged Venezuela to reject any US- or NATO-backed efforts to transfer military equipment to Ukraine. During a meeting in Moscow, Russian Security Council Secretary Sergei Shoigu called on Venezuelan authorities to refuse “arms supply schemes” linked to the war in Ukraine, while reaffirming Moscow’s support for Caracas amid growing US influence in the country. The meeting also came as Washington and Caracas deepen cooperation following the January 3 attacks and the installation of Acting President Delcy Rodríguez.”
This woman has my respect thus far. One only needs to understand and avoid the chihuahuas in the alternative media space that consistently say … The Sky is Falling. They have learned a different resistance from Iran, and their brains are too little to understand that resistance is a state of mind, and not a state of war. We see that state of mind in Iran as it is now plus day 90 and they are still in the streets and squares, every night. Arguably Iran could not be as successful in making war, if it is not for this people’s resistance. It is there, in Venezuela, and Rodriquez builds it, every day.
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