Author: T.P. Wilkinson

  • Down at my grocer’s for half a dozen eggs and some melon, I answered the usual question about my well being openly as accustomed. My neighbour is a friend and his query is sincere. After recounting local concerns he expresses his frustration, one more people certainly share, that they can witness audio-visual depictions of the rampage in the Gaza concentration camp of occupied Palestine on television and hear the words of the ostensible leaders of the great states in the United Nations assembled say little and do less to stop the carnage. Of course neither of us is in a position to raise more than private outrage. I add, however, that this performance of mass murder has been escalating since the end of the Great War when the great states of British Empire, the French Republic and the United States agreed to the European colonization of a strategic prize from the defeat of the Ottoman Empire in 1918.

    Neither of us was alive at the time. Nor were we contemporary with the declaration of statehood by those colonizers on 14 May 1948. The stories we were told to explain and justify European colonization at the same time when those states had proclaimed in San Francisco the universal rights to self-government even for brown people, were that the Europeans concerned had been so punished by the Great Powers through the centuries, especially most recently by the two-time loser among the Great Powers—Germany, that as an act of contrition the population of Palestine had been chosen for collective retribution. That is to say, the brown inhabitants of Palestine in the British Mandate were chosen as a people to be punished, deprived of life, liberty and property, as a penalty for the evils inflicted upon a mass of Europeans whose most important characteristic was that they had been identified as Jews. In the case of Germany under the NSDAP many of the Europeans in question had been deprived of their citizenship as Germans and defined as Jewish by nationality. Thus, under the NSDAP tyranny they were deprived of all their rights as citizens of the state in which they had been born and to whom they had owed allegiance, by operation of law and administrative procedure. One of the principles formalized in the conventions adopted with the United Nations Charter stipulated that no one could be deprived of their nationality against their will. Thus, it would seem the acts of the German regime were declared retroactively violations of human rights. Unfortunately, this principle, like so many others adopted by the Great Powers, was not taken very seriously when skin complexions or geographical locations differed from those of the charter members of the League of Nations successor club. Very little in the stories we were told addressed the obvious inconsistencies between the expressed prohibitions, e.g. collective punishment and deprivation of nationality, when applied to skin colours.

    Moreover the stories we were told conflated the victims of the NSDAP regime, a tyranny that enjoyed massive financial and covert political support from the commanding heights of Western industry and finance, with an established settler-colonial movement about which so little was said as possible. While we were entertained by Hollywood productions—beginning with the show trials in Nuremberg and their later film adaptation cast with famous stars of American stage and screen— and continuing with the Leon Uris’s pulp fiction, also adapted for propaganda cinema—the settler-colonial movement was busy practicing what they had no doubt learned from seminars with experts like Adolf Eichmann behind a screen of genuine NSDAP victims and displaced persons manipulated to lend legitimacy to the crimes it continues to perpetrate, live on TV as this is being written. All of this was known to representatives, high and low, of the Great Powers that gave license to this invasion. Where reports of the crimes were not suppressed, the amazing control over mass media and brutal assassinations silenced them quickly.

    It has often been said that those methodical Germans were so disciplined that they kept careful records, which could be used to incriminate them later. Thomas Suárez (State of Terror, 2016) found he could reconstruct enough of the criminal history of Zionist occupation of Palestine from the perpetrators records to suggest that not only the NSDAP regime was proud of its attention to detail. As we have seen over the past four years, one of the principal functions of mass media is to inoculate the population at large so as to make them resistant to facts. The details Suárez relates based on research in the National Archives (Kew, UK) cover the period until the declaration of statehood by the settler-colonial regime in Tel Aviv: in other words the behaviour of the founders before we were told that Tel Aviv was the only “democracy” in the Middle East with “the most moral army” on the planet. The book is worth reading if only as a corrective to the amnesiac shock suffered by millions who only discovered that there was “savage and relentless killing in Gaza” a year ago.

    Suárez’s story is full of aid workers and UN officials being abused, attacked and murdered. The archives showed that meticulous account was taken of how many Palestinians the invaders were able to rape, torture, kill or otherwise violate and eliminate from the country in which they had been born. Deep intelligence operations throughout the West combined with well-funded and effective mass media campaigns in the US and Britain were as prevalent then as they are today. Innovations in lethality and terror accompanied every effort leading to statehood—and as can be seen beyond. Nobel Peace laureate Menachem Begin, a proud veteran of that era, could justifiably claim—as he indeed once did (in a January 1974 television interview when Russell Warren Howe asked Begin: “How does it feel, in the light of all that’s going on, to be the father of terrorism in the Middle East? “In the Middle East”, Begin bellowed, “in all the world”)—that they (Irgun et al.) had invented terrorism. Striking is the account of youth cadres, some as young as 13, who had been trained as terrorists within the trinity of Zionist paramilitary organisations (Hagana, Irgun and Lehi). Innumerable operations were performed by these highly indoctrinated cadres disguised in the attire typical of the natives (dressed as Arabs). Chronologically it becomes obvious that the methods of terrorism attributed in the West to Muslims were in fact all standard operating procedures for Zionist paramilitary death squads—long before there was any armed resistance to the Zionist invasion and occupation of Palestine.

    None of this historical context was part of our history lessons. Nor is it part of the ranting that counts for reporting now. I have heard enough said about my compatriots and their supposed affinity for fascism or natural racism—all based on the interminable repetition of increasingly bizarre films about the NSDAP era in Germany. That all ended in 1945. The insinuations have not stopped, although their application in the past four years defies coherent explanation. However the same regime has been in power in Palestine, de facto since the establishment of the Jewish Agency and de jure since statehood was declared.

    It is worth noting that settler-colonialism was still high fashion in 1948 since the Union of South Africa and Rhodesia (also under British rule with a close relationship to Cecil Rhodes’ principal financial advisor) also proclaimed their nationalist version of white supremacy, apartheid. Despite many predictions to the contrary, they have not survived as long as the regime in Tel Aviv. The Afrikaner nationalist attempt to establish a racial-ethnic state with its own language (Afrikaans) and culture also failed. (see also Church Clothes: Land, Mission and the End of Apartheid, 2024) Decades of National Party rule were predicated on the potential onslaught awaiting whites on the continent if a strong white government did not defend them. There was no onslaught. In 1991, the feared horror of Bantu/ Black/ African communism had disappeared. Even the Afrikaner nationalist attempt to support its racial-ethnic state with a “white African” language and culture failed. Although Afrikaans remains one of South Africa’s nine official languages, there is no longer a single Afrikaans-medium university in the country since the apartheid constitution was abolished. The “Cape Dutch” had been established in South Africa since the 1600s and within a mere decade the whole edifice was gone.

    That leaves us with the question; especially if one dares to take the absurd woke ideology currently propagated in the West at its word, why settler-colonialism can prevail in Palestine in forms that even heads of state are now likening to those of the NSDAP tyranny? While all manner of institutions, monuments, and artefacts are being renamed, removed or vandalized because of their imputed relationship to racism, colonialism, slavery or some other grave injustice (mainly in Britain and the US), the uninterrupted century of settler-colonial terror in Palestine barely caused a ripple. Is it ignorance, hypocrisy, or plain stupidity? What seems long ago now, Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky (The Manufacturing of Consent: The Political Economy of Mass Media, 1988) nearly popularized the distinction between “worthy and unworthy victims”. In their propaganda model the mass media—and those who own it—decide which victims are worthy and hence treated as victims whose suffering is acknowledged and which victims are unworthy and whose suffering can be and is dismissed. This distinction is certainly helpful in calling attention to the silence and invisibility of a century of mass murder and terrorism, after 1948 state terrorism. In order to understand the source of silence, obfuscation, and mendacity, it is necessary to ask the questions how the “worthy victims” are chosen and also by whom?

    What we say we know about the past is a construct. Even in the course of a conversation develops as a construct by which the exchange continues on the assumptions of two speakers as to the appropriate way to respond to what was just uttered. Each of us is unwittingly a small scale amateur historian when confronted with utterances, like “what did you mean?” or “what I meant to say was.” There is no way to know definitively what someone was thinking in the past. One can only judge the utterance, either as memory (covertly) or as recording (written or audio), to have some chronological significance and respond to it as one deems appropriate. We have all heard people respond with statements like, “when I said that I did not mean what you think” or “the situation was different then” or “I can change my mind, can’t I? (When someone refuses or denies the interpretation of an utterance assigned to the past). We all know people whom we say are unreliable because in our judgement statements “in the past” do not permit predictions of future behaviour. “Oh he never comes on time” or “he always says one thing and does another”. In all these cases the purpose of our assessment is to control our own behaviour, our reaction to others. We can call it prediction if it means that it controls what we will do (it cannot control what we already have done.) At the same time we have certainly all heard “Oh you are being unfair. He is not always like that” or “He is never like that with me”. In other words the judgement that “he never does what he says he is going to do” is judged by someone else to be an inappropriate explanation and prediction for that person’s behaviour. At the same time it is certainly reasonable to reply, “maybe he does not behave that way with you but he does with me. I cannot rely on him.” At this point, one is acknowledging that although it may be inappropriate to claim that “he is universally unreliable”, it is reasonable to say that “he is unreliable for me”—and it is my interest in reliability that is important here. My interest is another way of saying, reliability is a category of personal conduct which I value and which controls my interaction with others.

    Explanations are unavoidable. Whether they are good explanations or bad explanations depends on the judgement of someone and on the interests controlling that judgement. Those interests may also include rendering no judgement that deviates from those others consider appropriate. So in more explicitly historical research, reflection and debate, the interests of the investigator may be controlled by the desire to be treated as a “serious historian” or “serious scholar”, another way of saying that investigation will be governed not only by one’s personal judgement but by what one perceives as the judgement of others as to the appropriateness of one’s work. Academic institutions and other venues where history (often conflated with the past) are the focus of human activity are not only repositories of data but organizations for structuring the use of that data. Structuring the use is another way of saying controlling the way those who are engaged in historical research or study respond to the artefacts and the utterances of other investigators or members of the research institution. There is data, e.g. documents, and utterances and redundancies in response to the data. In that sense historical research is no different from the activity in a chemistry laboratory. It is impossible to separate the utterances and redundancies of response that form an institution from the research product. There is no pure objective fact in the test tube or the archive that is self-evident. Explanations arise from attempts to respond to data in meaningful ways, for instance to control or predict our responses to other data. Even the most abstract forms of research constitute controls on the researcher, what he sees; what he may discover; what he discards or ignores.

    A historical explanation, regardless of the volume and nature of the data available (whether known or unknown in scope), will always be a selection of data and its organization. It will always be governed by interests of the researcher or of other researchers or those on whose behalf the research is selected and performed or even of those to whom the researcher addresses his work, e.g. readership, students, public policy, etc.

    The armistice of 1918 ended the open hostilities between the regular forces of the alliance (the British Empire, the French Republic and the United States) against those of Austria-Hungary, the German Empire and the Ottoman Empire, the so-called Central Powers. However, it by no means ended the organized military operations on the Continent or the non-military warfare, as might have been expected by anyone who took the Wilsonian rhetoric at face value. War continued in Eastern Europe. The United States fought with Czech legions, Japanese troops and White Russians against the new Bolshevik government in the Soviet Union until 1922. Economic warfare continued throughout the interwar period despite negotiations and the conclusion of a plethora of treaties known under the rubric of Versailles. The Allies fought overtly or covertly to capture and allocate the extinguished empires among themselves while reinforcing their hold on the empires with which they began the war.

    If war aims are not defined by what is announced in declarations but are ascertained by examining forensically the results, then such imputed war aims can be said to constitute a pattern. In other words, a sequence of distinguishable outcomes can form the basis for interpretation of belligerent conduct, specifying general aims or attitudes to explain present and future wars. Such patterns may be classified as instructions by which belligerents chose to wage war or analysis can identify the latent or implicit culture that drives the behaviour. The forensic examination serves to identify redundancies that must be practiced in order to sustain the institutional behaviour underlying the belligerence.

    None of the foregoing would have been practically relevant in the 19th century. However, the adoption and ratification of the General Treaty for Renunciation of War as an Instrument of National Policy aka Kellogg – Briand Pact (1928) which declared war illegal as a means of resolving international disputes; a violation of international law also known as the law of nations. This pact has yet to be renounced by any of its principal signatories. Thus the prohibition stands. Therefore the determination of war aims and the causes attributed to such wars by those who wage them becomes highly relevant.

    If the aims of a given war are not clearly understood, neither the appropriate defence nor a realistic negotiating position to end hostilities can be found, let alone pursued.

    In battle, the assailing force seeks to magnify its impact by concealing the actual targets or objectives from the defender. In waging war itself the aggressor is obliged to justify the use of force within the rhetorical framework of the law of nations as commonly understood. Rhetorical legitimacy is no trivial weapon in the aggressor’s arsenal, especially under the League of Nations/ United Nations framework. The more intensely the claims are asserted, the more difficult it becomes to ascertain the effective aims. This is a peculiar aspect of modern ideological warfare. Silencing the defender in public opinion and international fora relies on domination of the totality of communications channels.

    The history of modern warfare actually begins with the Crusades. These centuries of assaults against the declared enemies of Christendom always comprised both psychological and physical orders of battle. The papal-rabbinical infrastructure under the command of the Roman pontiff “preached” the Crusades. The military force unleashed through the vassals of the Latin Church wielded the swords and other instruments of death. The pulpit and ecclesiastical apparatus mustered the support needed to drain manpower and other resources for the campaigns of slaughter, demolition and plunder. Prospects of plunder and intangible wealth (salvation) have been essential to convince all those who sacrifice that they will be rewarded on Earth as it is in Heaven, or at least compensated for the material and bodily losses they have to bear.

    This is no less true in the 21st century than it was in the 11th.

    It is really quite remarkable that while the NSDAP era has been an almost obsessive target of historical research for as long as I can remember, the era in which the settler-colony in Palestine was established receives so little attention although its ostensible legitimation is derived from (retroactively) and enhanced by the very existence of the German fascist regime from 1936 until 1945. Although the ideological roots of Afrikaner nationalism and its close relationship to the doctrinal authors of German National Socialism have been investigated and publicly debated. The relationship between Zionism and Nazism has been given more muted attention. When Zionism and Nazism are discussed generally then there is a tendentious context, which fosters the conflation of Herzl’s ambitions with the campaign to funnel all displaced Jews from Europe into Mandatory Palestine under administration of the Jewish Agency. The implication is that Zionism anticipated the Nuremberg laws, the deprivation of Germans once classified as Jewish of their German nationality and their relocation – disposal, including enslavement and murder. However, any attempt to examine the practices of the Tel Aviv regime over the past century in historical context, including comparison of those practices with practices under other regimes, has been vigorously discouraged.

    While it is understandable that the practitioners in the “only democracy” with the “most moral army” may be reluctant to discuss their conduct and utterances in comparative context, it ought to be asked why this reluctance is so widespread beyond the 1967 borders? The most obvious, if somewhat superficial, reason is that the regime in Tel Aviv is the state incarnation of “worthy victims” whose every suffering, real or imagined, must be smothered in sympathy and adoration. Whatever its misdeeds, these are the understandable errors of a distraught, somewhat paranoiac victim for whom at least pity but not punishment is appropriate. The traumatized maiden amidst the bearded, brown-skinned hordes must be forgiven for every act taken in defence of her purity. The mythological, cinematic clichés that can be applied are innumerable. Like cinema, they also distract from serious observation and assessment of the utterances current and past, i.e. the documentary evidence.

     (Americans do not realize) the extent to which partition was refused acceptance as a final settlement by the Zionists in Palestine, (nor the conviction among Zionists that) they cannot be satisfied with Palestine alone, that they must have not only all of Palestine but Trans-Jordan, parts of Syria and Lebanon, parts of Iraq and Egypt as well…” Kermit Roosevelt, Jr., CIA officer who led Operation Ajax (TPAJAX) to overthrow Iran’s elected prime minister in 1953. He was the grandson of Theodore Roosevelt. From a lecture to the US National War College in 1948.

    Comparison of practices across countries and periods presents theoretical and methodological problems. These are in part due to the aforementioned institutional constraints. For example, there are material incentives and penalties within academic as well as general research that reward or punish investigation and publication according to the degree of conformity with official, i.e. establishment opinion. A scholar who is successful at promoting established views on any subject would be rewarded with grants, promotions, publication, lecture fees and other favourable attention to his works. The reverse applies. A well-rewarded scholar serves as a model for correct scholarship and indirectly a monitor against deviance. The capacity to reward, also known as patronage, is also the ability to propagate views, defined questions and types of research product desired. It implies the capacity to suppress other views, if only by the stampede for patronage, which a generous investor triggers. This is often called “soft power” in contrast to exile, imprisonment or assassination of dissidents—hard power.

    Caroll Quigley argued forcefully (The Anglo-American Establishment From Rhodes to Cliveden, 1981) that one of the principal accomplishments of the Round Table/ Milner Group was to dominate the institutions that wrote and disseminated the history of the British Empire. From fellowships at All Souls and other Oxford colleges in their gift to ownership or control of the newspapers of record and the major publishing houses, members of what would become the Royal Institute for International Affairs (and its imperial franchises in the US — the Council on Foreign Relations — and Commonwealth), “legitimate” history could be propagated and alternative histories excluded. The revolving doors between government and academia also gave the mouthpieces of the Empire the additional credibility lent by access to decision-makers and the official record, both public and confidential. Herbert Hoover, in his capacity as head of the private-public partnership Commission for Relief in Belgium and later the US Food Administration, contributed to this effort after the Great War by confiscating untold volumes of government archives wherever he dispensed “aid” to the distressed countries after the war had ended. The Hoover Institution at Stanford received his loot by bequest thus assuring that this data remained in private hands. After World War II the occupation forces repeated the procedure by capturing the archives of the Axis wherever they went. Access to this treasure has remained subject to the control of friendly agents to this day. Hence the evidence of what conquered nations actually intended or did can be selectively disclosed in ways that are consistent with the established history. Alternative research is largely derived from either accidental discovery or inference. Such alternatives can always be attacked because they necessarily rely on interpretive methodologies at odds with the published record where no “smoking guns” are available. Moreover, the sheer volume of redundant accounts of the official history propagated by those same leading publishing houses and academic institutions effectively buries the alternative publication landscape.

    No later than with the inception of the Manhattan Project, the leading sciences were captured by the national security state. The largesse expended to produce atomic weapons and other vile instruments of death created a scholarly and scientific cartel of enviable wealth. Those who did not benefit directly by participation in death and destruction science were induced to shape their work so that it would qualify for funding at the various troughs the national security state had built. The comprehensive focus of all scholarship and scientific research on classified development projects included the imposition of an extensive security system including loyalty tests and secrecy oaths. In short, participation in funded research required membership or at least submission to the rules of the national security cult, not unlike the induction practices for the infamous NSDAP paramilitary organisations.

    Britain, as a monarchy, constitutionalism notwithstanding, retained a long tradition of regulated scholarship and research inherited from the Latin Church where the Crown assumed the authority of the Papacy and Episcopate. The extension of this system and practice to North America was a logical consequence of the Round Table project. Cecil Rhodes, and presumably his executor Lord Rothschild, was determined to modernize and thus preserve the British Empire, especially by “recovering” the United States as a member of the English-speaking commonwealth. The intention behind Winston Churchill’s propaganda, A History of English-speaking Peoples (started in 1937 and published in 1956-58 in four volumes), aside from earning money to redeem his chronic indebtedness, was to popularize the idea that America and the Empire (to be renamed more innocuously the Commonwealth) were one race destined to rule the world for the usual benefits its acolytes ascribed to it—democracy, free trade, etc. The meanwhile infamous CIA “Mockingbird” operation emerged from established British intelligence (covert action) practice.

    The ability to wage psychological warfare or promote criminal enterprise was centralized in the US very early, despite the republican and federal structure of the State, because its ruling elite had the benefit of treating the country as terra nulla, exterminating the indigenous culture and brainwashing those it selectively admitted to its shores. Despite all claims to diversity today, the “melting pot” myth was a 20th century invention by its propagandists, i.e., the advertising and public relations industry. That machine grew from the massive economic concentration that accelerated after the 1893 depression. Although the Standard Oil trust was dissolved by enforcement of the Sherman Anti-Trust Act (1890), cartels continued to be formed. Rothschild agent JP Morgan negotiated the merger that resulted in US Steel. General Electric, General Motors and American Telephone and Telegraph (AT&T) and other conglomerates gained control over the US economy. The Federal Reserve Act of 1913 gave control over the country’s fiscal and economic policy to an Anglo-American banking cartel functioning through a parastatal “system” which preserved the illusion of a de-centralized economy while consolidating the foundations for the permanent war economy that the US became. The necessity to sell the output of these massive industrial enterprises promoted warmongering and consumerism. The advertising and public relations industry became the American version of the Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith.

    After the Great War, the Volstead Act (1919) that enforced the 18th Amendment that introduced prohibition also made crime ripe for national organization. Prohibition of alcoholic beverages was depicted as an anti-drug measure when in fact it was part of a variety of anti-immigrant political legislation. Wine and beer consumption was common in the social venues of Germans (socialists) and Italians (anarchists) and other politically threatening working class elements. Their meeting places could be closed and social events circumscribed on the pretext that illegal alcoholic beverages were consumed, thus disrupting unwanted political activism. “Organized crime has traditionally made its profit from providing goods and services people are not supposed to want… Prohibition was responsible for the organization of crime on a national scale and it was the genius of Al Capone to realize that the way to proceed was to organize crime on the model of national business organizations or corporations.” Thus organized crime as “counter-business” is primarily concerned with control over people. (Peckham, 1995). In fact, contrary to the Hollywood history, organized crime owes its effectiveness not to Sicilians but to the crime cartel led discretely by Meyer Lansky. It was far more dramatic and politically advantageous to put Italians in the limelight, initiating a standing tradition by which the term “Mafia” is applied almost exclusively to undesirable immigrants. At no time was there a serious decrease in alcohol consumption. However the federal and state police forces together with their counter-enforcers could protect the development of the legal and illegal drug cartels.

    This natural and incestuous relationship was instrumentalized for the establishment of the US national security apparatus. (Douglas Valentine, The Strength of the Wolf, 2004; The Strength of the Pack, 2010)  National crime meant national law enforcement and international crime meant international (extra-territorial) policing. The Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Federal Bureau of Narcotics were the precursors to what is called euphemistically today the “Intelligence Community”.

    National drug cartels needed national control over venues, points of sale as well as marketing vehicles. The wealth generated also had to be laundered. The most natural downstream extension of organized counter-business was the entertainment industry. Not only racetracks, gambling casinos where permitted, bars and houses of prostitution (with the attendant human trafficking) were used. Drug money (alcohol and narcotics profits) created the studio system in the film industry, i.e. Hollywood. The “lifestyle” of the famous and temporarily rich appearing on the silver screen was rightly criticised by the residues of Puritan America—if somewhat hypocritically—as a major source of corruption, both overt and covert. The social managers in Washington and more discrete locations recognized the magnificent power in the Hollywood cartel for instilling whatever tastes or opinions were needed among the entertained public. War Department money enriched Du Pont and other weapons manufacturers. It also filled the coffers of those who produced the thousands of films promoting war against whomever the ruling elite had designated as enemy. As Malcolm X once pointed out the American propaganda machine was able to turn Germans from friends to enemies and back to friends again in a space of time in which no effort was made to alter the perception of Blacks as inferior.

    Just as in Britain, the Anglo-American Establishment controlled most of the print media directly. The entertainment industry and the drug system were managed at arm’s length. The cartel was assisted in its international mission by discriminatory legislation that placed Hollywood product in a highly competitive advantage capable of overwhelming the film industries of all other countries. Winning the Second World War meant that with the exception of France, American movie conglomerates were able to flood the world with the “American Way of Life” as defined by the moguls of Southern California and their financial backers, both licit and illicit.

    The business corporation had evolved into the single most effective means of power projection. Its single-mindedness, reduced rhetorically to the pursuit of profit, made it efficient in regulating the “market” whether for goods, services or ideas. The legality of the business was irrelevant for the organizational form. Legality is merely a criterion for public appearances, not underlying purposes or methods.

    It has been one of the singular deficiencies of common education that attention is devoted to formal rules and government that have little to do with the actual processes of rule. Even those who study the ecclesiastical tradition of business education from the late 19th century are only taught computation. Altogether the strict compartmentalization of what counts as socially relevant knowledge prevents all but a tiny few from ever recognizing how any significant decision is made or executed. Even those who devote their energy to exposing conspiracies, real or imagined, neglect the published and advertised rules and procedures by which Business, that is to say the business corporations, trusts and similar entities are constituted and governed. They do not analyse the principal-agent conflicts that comprise an important part of business litigation. The intricacies and complexities are indeed daunting. Yet even a rudimentary grasp of the allocation of power and authority and its operation would reveal more than a thousand books on political science.

    In the US, millions of people occupy single-family dwellings, which they call their homes while they pay over their lifetimes two to three times the ostensible purchase price to a bank to redeem a mortgage bond before they die. This is called in the vernacular “home ownership”. Peter Drucker, a liberal among the Austro-fascists who came to rationalize modern economic exploitation, argued years ago that Americans were all shareholders since their deductions from their pay, essentially deferred compensation, was invested through pension funds in the nation’s economy. Hence, according to Drucker the mere voter had been elevated to the status of mass capitalist. What he did not say was that these pension funds would be held by cartels of asset managers. The most infamous of those hedge funds, better called plantation funds perhaps, are the big three, BlackRock, State Street and Vanguard. These corporations, owned and managed by a miniscule clique of financial magnates, control virtually all the economic assets of Drucker’s popular capitalists. John D Rockefeller did not control much of the world’s oil industry by prospecting for oil but by rendering it impossible to pump oil from the ground without paying him for the privilege. His Standard Oil controlled everything, directly or indirectly, before the well and after the well, upstream and downstream. This gave Standard Oil what the US Defense Department calls “full spectrum dominance”, which he shared with what were once six other “sisters”. Although as mentioned above, the trust was dissolved by court order, more than a century later the Standard Oil successors, Exxon and Mobil, are still in the top four worldwide. Most of the world’s media is owned by six corporations, National Amusements, Disney, TimeWarner, Comcast, News Corp, and Sony. Whatever one believes the purpose of “media” to be, it is not free and certainly not democratically organized.

    Whatever one believes about the nature of the “market”, “democracy” or even something as banal as consumer choice, we live in a world in which three financial entities, six media corporations and four energy companies exercise effective control over fundamental instruments of power: money, information and fuel. Needless to say they control a lot more. So when the 0.1 or more accurately the 0.01% are mentioned there is no need to be abstract. We can talk about an almost microscopic portion of the human population that decides what is good for themselves and how they get it from us. They may be what Larry Fink and his friends like to call “passive investors”. However they own the State and therefore have the capabilities at their disposal to be exceptionally active to increase the value and power of their investments—value and power that can only come at our expense.

    What we are told we know about the world (what constitutes accepted “knowledge”) and what is deemed important are matters decided under the foregoing conditions. If we do not understand the extent and depth of control we cannot imagine the full meaning of what Stuart Ewen called Captains of Consciousness (1976). He explored the invention of public relations (propaganda or public diplomacy) in his 1986 book PR! A Social History of Spin, which formed the basis of an Adam Curtis film, Century of the Self (2002). The economic concentration that began in the late 19th century continued unabated by war, war against the body, against populations and against the mind.

    Consciousness became an industrial product first by training humans to identify with the consumer goods they did not need but were expected to buy with money they did not have. Thus like the home mortgage, the individual or family invested a lifetime of earnings in constant replacement of things designed to be obsolete or worn out almost as soon as the purchase price had been paid. Thus opportunities for long-term security were compulsively squandered. Excess wages paid to workers in an expanding empire were recovered through artificially high rates of consumption. Once this kind of extraction was exhausted—or in the case of the West rendered ideologically superfluous—the individual himself was converted into a self-consuming product.

    The defeats inflicted upon the post-WWII independence movements, by primarily US wars, were also suffered by those in the industrialized West who had struggled to end historical racial oppression at home. This process was highly selective but no less brutal. The most influential leaders among Black Americans fighting to end racial discrimination and oppression were assassinated, imprisoned or driven into exile. This wave of murders occurred within a relatively short space of time at the end of the 1960s in the US and continued beyond its borders far longer, e.g. Guyana scholar and activist, Walter Rodney was murdered in 1980. Malcolm X was assassinated in 1965. Martin Luther King Jr. was murdered in 1968.

    Norman Finkelstein (The Holocaust Industry, 2000) who is possibly the first American scholar to openly criticize the American Jewish establishment and what has become the central consciousness myth in America and hence in the world of consciousness the US makes and shapes. In order to explain his position, he addresses the relationship of Jews to other groups in US society. The Holocaust is first and foremost an event portrayed as exemplary of Jewish victimhood. Hence Finkelstein asked how Jewish Americans stand as victims along with other victims in the US, in particular the “founding victims”, the African slaves who as James Baldwin said to the Cambridge Union (1965)—built America. The history books and Hollywood films portray American Jews as the allies of Black Americans in their struggle for human rights. (They do not talk about Jewish slave traders or plantation owners.) He observed (that) “the end of Jewish ‘solidarity’ in the US began in the 1960s when Blacks in the North began to challenge the class position of Jews rather than the racial status as in the South… American Jewish elites turned to the Right to defend their class interests—this coincided with increased support for the occupation and colonization of Israel.” Whitney Webb, in her One Nation under Blackmail (2022) documents the intimate personal and political links of organized crime, Jewish “philanthropy” and the espionage business that operates behind and in addition to the “Holocaust Industry”, with many of the same managers.

    Is it a coincidence that between the murder of Malcolm X in 1965 and King’s 1968 assassination lay the Six Day War in 1967? During that war Israel attacked the USS Liberty, killing 34 and wounding another 171 of the crew in an attempt to sink the vessel. Malcolm X was vilified but only executed after returning from the Hajj, when he declared that Black Americans must abandon their “victim” status and join with the rest of the world’s oppressed in facing the class war. King was not murdered after his Riverside Church sermon against the war in Vietnam but while in Memphis to support striking workers.

    If, as Finkelstein argues, organized Jewry saw reasons to support the civil rights movement in the 1950s because they comprehended them as “race” issues, was this a way of asserting the underlying Zionist argument that Jews constitute a race and also a victim race in a country where race was the most fundamental discriminatory category, e.g., the old “one drop” rule. Calling attention to Jewish race directly would have been counter-productive. However, magnifying the factor race as a trans-historical category for oppression, while ostensibly working to eliminate Blacks from the race of the oppressed could be seen as an intuitive strategy for reserving the race card as a positive political instrument. As explained above, there is no way to know how sincere or pure individual motives for supporting the civil rights movement were among American Jews. However, it is possible to observe the trajectory between 1965 and 1980 when Ronald Reagan was appointed POTUS.

    There are those who assert that the key shift in US policy toward the settler-colonial regime was the assassination of John F. Kennedy, replaced by a POTUS notoriously pro-Israel. Laurent Guyénot and others argue that Kennedy’s determination to prevent the Tel Aviv regime from acquiring atomic weapons capability was a strong incentive for Mossad intervention. Johnson turned a blind eye to the Liberty attack and Dimona.  Taken as a whole one could argue that the wave of political murders that followed Kennedy’s assassination exemplifies the alignment of the ruling elite, which had been fighting decolonization tooth and nail, with the settler-colonial state in Palestine as a vehicle for de-centring the counter-revolution. The category of race oppression would have been cultivated, only to be hijacked by elites who needed a cast for their legitimation through victimhood.

    Finkelstein shows that the great magnification of the Holocaust in American life, and hence in all the means by which it is psychologically and economically managed, coincided with the victory of the IDF in 1967. An event, which had been insignificant in mass American consciousness, along with all but the American participation in the Second World War, was rapidly transformed into something more average Americans could identify than landmarks in its own history. Like “recovered memory” Americans have been taught (as well as all those taught by American mass media) that they were culpable for crimes committed in places even US soldiers had never been during that war. At the same time the crimes actually committed by their own forefathers on American soil were barely mentioned. Thus it seems this magnification not only served the interests of the Jewish elite in concealing class conflict.

    While there is no doubt that some twenty million or more people were killed in Eastern Europe and especially the Soviet Union by the Nazi regime’s war against the Soviet Union, it strains logic and plausibility to assert that the only mass murder was committed only against European Jews. Yet the story of the Holocaust that is taught and force fed everywhere in the West with the round number of six million, conspicuously omitting the elderly and disabled, communists, socialists, Roma and Sinti, and Slavs of every description. As details recorded not only by Finkelstein but also by many other historians show, the consciousness product Holocaust begins to corrode once one examines the claims for the numbers of survivors of the war and the camps. The 1961 film, Judgement at Nuremberg, dramatizes the discrepancy when the defence argument that no other war crimes were tried except the ones committed by the NSDAP regime is belittled rather than answered. Even Justice Jackson, for the prosecution, insinuated that the trials were problematic by warning that the manner in which they were held could be applied to others. The Soviet Union had insisted that war criminals be tried against the resistance of the British and Americans. As in many cases before and since, the Soviet Union was forced to accept the limitations of the trials in order to have any trials at all. Throughout the occupation, the Western allies conspired to prevent favoured persons from being arrested, let alone charged, hiding them or aiding their escape from jurisdiction. In the Asia-Pacific theatre they effectively prevented Soviet participation in war crimes trials against Japan. In other words, even the official proceedings against those accused of seeking to annihilate all Jews were tainted by serious irregularities. Yet this thoroughly corrupted official record has been used to support the claim that Jews were the paramount victims of World War II.

    Though too many people were worked to death, murdered individually and through mass actions by so-called Einsatzkommandos of the regular and Waffen-SS in Eastern Europe. The rescue of whole Waffen-SS divisions from war crimes prosecutions, e.g. the Waffen-SS Division Galizia composed of Ukrainians, further demonstrates the insincerity of the Western Allies in their condemnations. The story, the foundational myth of unique Jewish victimhood, is so riddled with inconsistencies and corruption that its integrity ought to be questioned by any serious historian—not to mention all those in the world who had nothing to do with World War II. Is it possible that the reason is the same as that for the peculiar change in the policy/ attitude of organized Jewish elites with regard to race in the US (and elsewhere)? Could it be that when the US regime defended its leniency and clemency for whole divisions, without even the pretence of criminal investigation in the interest of opposing alleged Soviet communist expansionism, it was expressing the crucial priority of class over any other interest?

    Suárez, Finkelstein, and Brenner (Zionism in the Age of Dictators, 1983 and 51 Documents: Zionist Collaboration with the Nazis, 2002) supply evidence from the Zionist leadership from the very beginning of the movement’s ascendancy to support such a hypothesis. When today’s regime in Kiev, supported by Zionists too, not only disregards the war crimes committed by Ukrainian Waffen-SS units, but has integrated military and paramilitary formations whose insignia are the same as those notorious divisions, e.g. SS-Leibstandart Adolf Hitler and Waffen-SS division Das Reich (the Azov Battalion) in its regular army in the continued war against Russia, it is hard to ignore the true war aims of the West—then and now. It was the foremost objective of Paul Hausser, one of the last commanders of these Waffen-SS forces (Das Reich, II SS Panzer Corps) after 1945 until his death to rehabilitate the Waffen-SS (which had been declared a criminal organization per se) as a brave, multi-national force defending European values, just like any other Western army. From the high official pronouncements throughout the EU, the Ukrainian Armed Forces with its Waffen-SS legacy fights Russia for everything the West holds dear. Just as do the armed forces of the settler-colonial state in occupied Palestine. Ukraine is a victim, as are those who invaded Palestine and declared their conquest to be the Jewish state of Israel in 1948.

    The campaigns waged to generate the “victims’ immunity” claimed by these regimes are atrocious. They both rely on a patent of racial superiority but unlike that of classical “white supremacy”, this racial superiority is based on alleged victimhood. They are not superior because of their virtue. Instead their superiority derives from the blanket assertion that all others are perpetrators, latent or active, against whom any measure can be justified as pre-emptive and therefore defensive. Every high official must and does use all the power at his or her disposal to defend the aggression by these self-identified victims.

    Self-identification has become a primary instrument of psychological manipulation and warfare. The self-identified not only asserts a whim or personal predilection. He also demands that he is the sole judge of what evidence may be used to support or refute his claims. As a strategy however it must have a mass component. One person alone cannot maintain self-identification against a crowd or against a group with a genuinely recognizable set of features that can be generally classified. Therefore, it is necessary to spread the dogma of self-identification. This is a corollary to the conversion of the individual consumer into a consumed individual, the emergent consciousness strategy of what for want of a better term can be called finance capitalism. That finance capitalism it has been argued above is the contemporary formation of the ruling class, the 0.01%.

    If we are experiencing the climax of a massive reaction in the West, one that has intensified since the French Revolution, then the process by which the latest manifestation of feudal empire, presents us with a kind of global feudalism. The doctrines promulgated for this restoration are studied and preached from such altitudes as the Swiss Alps. However, we can understand them better if we examine the history of the West’s paramount merger of power and consciousness, the Latin Church.

    Before the Holocaust, the spectre of anti-Semitism (a misnomer if one is talking about European Jews) was first raised by the Latin Church. It is the Latin Church that created the legal and ecclesiastical regime by which Jews in Europe were subjected to special laws of all sorts. Practically speaking however the most intense application of these laws and the persecution they entailed coincided with the wars of Aragon (Spain) to conquer then entire Iberian peninsula and Christianize it. That meant expelling Muslims and Jews who together inhabited the southern half of the peninsula. These wars were called the “Reconquista” so as to imply that Christian Aragon was recovering for the Faith what had been lost to the infidels. Missing from that story is the fact that North Africa — from Egypt to Morocco and Iberia had indeed been “Christian” to the extent that the great landowners who ruled the region self-identified as Christians. It was the systematic oppression of the masses in these “Christian” territories that led them to join the armies of Islam to drive this Christian elite out of the country and restore decent living conditions for them. Islam was an organized force for liberation that would scarcely have taken root had the region’s Christians been civilized people with a sense of justice and equity. When Augustine of Hippo (in North Africa) went to Rome it was as a leader of a putsch driven by this Christian landowning class. Rome was established as the capital of a schismatic church, one that fundamentally contradicted the ecclesiastical plurality that had been characteristic of Christianity with its several centres, e.g. in Antioch and Constantinople. Augustine’s Roman Catholicism claimed to be the sole centre of Christianity. Moreover, it usurped the de-centralized episcopate and installed an absolutist monarchy. The papacy with its cardinalate rejected the Greek elements of Christianity and adopted a form of government that more closely resembled the Talmudic rabbinate. It was therefore hardly surprising that the Pentateuch would be merged with the New Testament and that later the idea of “Judeo-Christian” culture would emerge. If one examines closely the economic policies and political enforcement measures that evolved as pontifical power grew, the papal persecution of Christians who maintained belief in the real poverty preached by Jesus in the New Testament since this was entirely at odds with the class that had established the Latin rite. It was entirely at odds with the beliefs of the great landowners that Islam had driven from North Africa and Iberia. (Islam once extended all the way to the southern provinces of France.) Just as Christianity had grown out of opposition to the Jewish elite’s abuse of the masses, Islam gained its foothold in the most Christian part of the world because the Christian elite so viciously oppressed the common people (Deschner, Die Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums). The Roman support for Aragon was not for the restoration of Christianity of the common man. Those Christians continued to live along with Muslims and ordinary Jews throughout the two caliphates. The House of Aragon was fighting holy class war as the Latin Church has from its inception. The peoples who have traditionally inhabited North Africa were mainly nomadic except in those areas like the Nile Valley where intensive agriculture was established or in the cities from which crafts and trade were practiced. To call a group of people a diaspora—in some elevated, sacrificial form—is another incomplete depiction of population movements in the African continent. Christians and Muslims practicing their religion in other parts of the world are not considered a diaspora, although both religions originate in the same place as the religion of Jews. The myth of the Reconquista and the suppression of Judaism in Spain are facets of political expansion and territorial conquest, not serial universal anti-Semitism. The myth of the unique diaspora is ahistorical since it actually negates any other genuinely diasporic population, e.g., Africans transported throughout the world by slave traders.

    Henry Lea, in his multi-volume studies of the Inquisition, made it very clear that the driving force behind the Holy and Universal Inquisition was economic enrichment and not matters of faith or heresy. Alexander Herculano, in his history of the Inquisition in Portugal, supplies ample evidence that the question of whether one was considered a “Jew” in the meaning of the act depended on how much one was able and willing to pay to the Portuguese crown or the Roman pontiff for protection. Certainly poor people were persecuted too. However, exile of Jews or heretics also provided the Portuguese crown with bonded labour for its colonial enterprises while selectively manipulating the domestic labour market, as well as for political ends. The historical monochrome by which the history of Europe is reduced to the persecution of Jews, creating an original sin for all Christians for which they must atone, is a serious distortion of a far more complex fabric of class conflict and struggles for power among the ruling elite.

    This supposed blind and irrational persecution of Jews in Europe—there is no evidence to prove it occurred anywhere else—cannot be sustained once the political-economic conditions are seriously examined. What can be said is that ecclesiastical operations and canon law were applied in the same way that anti-communist legislation and repression have been applied—and for the same reasons. At the same time, the realities of political-economic confrontation between merchants, landowners, clergy and military require a sober appraisal of the intra-class conflicts waged just as perniciously and dishonestly then as today. During the US war against Vietnam, the unwritten rule was “if you do not do what you are told (by the Saigon government or any of its officers and beneficiaries), then you are VC (a communist). If you were declared VC, you were an outlaw. (Valentine, The Phoenix Program, 1990) So if someone unaware of this or disregarding this were to examine the National Police records of the era they would no doubt find innumerable “communists”, with no way of knowing if those in the files were communists in fact. Communists have not been able to attain universal victim status, even though the Nazis killed communists before they even thought of killing Jews.

    Yet we still have to consider the question: how did this universal Jewish victimhood become established as a dogma in the West? Naturally it is helpful to consider who is served by it. Clearly it is not only Jews who profit from this status. It has been a source of unending contention whether the benefits that accrue to the settler-colonial state are primary or incidental to the institution of Jewish victimhood. I would argue that Jewish victimhood is not even primarily a benefit enjoyed by the regime in Tel Aviv. Finkelstein has shown how it benefits the organized Jewish elite as a running extortion racket. However, as I have tried to show above, that extortion racket is just one operation in a web of activity driven by the 0.01%, those nameable and unnamed who presently own and operate the world’s drug, weapons, money-laundering, and primary resource cartels. However, more than that the concept of Jewish victimhood stands really for class victimhood. The ruling class itself, from the moment it adopted the Latin rite, has endeavoured to present itself as the victims for whom salvation is intended. Jesus did not die to save the poor. He died to save the rich. That is the literal reading of the Passion and it is the only one that makes sense. Given that the Vulgate is largely a forgery over the ages, it is no wonder that the central document upon which Christianity is supposedly based was prohibited to the masses of the faithful upon pain of death until the Reformation. (Another interpretation of the Reformation is beyond the scope of this discussion.) The Roman Church has devoted centuries of effort proving that poverty and damnation are the wages of sin and that the poor deserve their lot. Every attempt, including the last major effort in Latin American liberation theology, to change this dogma and practice has been viciously suppressed by the hierarchy. The first pontiff to retire rather than die in office (Joseph Ratzinger, a child of the Hitler Youth and the close cooperation between the Vatican and the NSDAP) was the leader of that most recent wave of purges.

    The portion of the world’s population with the most relative wealth to plunder is still concentrated in North America and Western Europe. They have long ceased to pay their tithes or even go to mass or prayers. The Latin Church and its semi-autonomous Protestant sisters are sustained mainly by the unaccounted wealth accumulated in the past or state subsidies. Although the current pontiff still enjoys the professional media attention and due respect among the faithful in all the poor and populous nations, there is no growth potential where there is still cash to be had. The short-lived Soviet Union and with it the Red threat also lost its salvific attraction. Only the professional killers and sadists were willing to drive through desert sands in search of Muslims for the sake of their souls. A return to the 11th century requires the kind of crusades that enriched the Church then. Quo vadis?

    The ruling elite has always been cutthroat and vicious. A major function of their charity is to pay for a better image or assuage opposition when it is impossible or inopportune to exterminate it. So we are constantly served performances that suggest that either there is no ruling elite with shared interests and purposes or that that elite is incapable of overcoming its internal conflicts, thus depriving it of the vast plenitude of power needed to rule us. In fact, the ruling elite constitutes a critical mass of individuals who are born and die but who also reproduce. They reproduce organically like other mammals. However, they also create structures capable of cultivating future members and preserving the class cohesion needed to dominate the rest of us who have no class cohesion, despite regular efforts to instil it. While tyrannicide has its obvious attractions, the hydra-like character of class power means that no sooner is a Rockefeller, Gates or Soros gone, either naturally or assisted, someone else grows into his place. Like the birth and death cycle to which we are all subject, the struggle to deal with the ruling class never ends. There is no salvific moment in which the heavens open to deliver a shower of love, happiness and justice. What class cohesion offers the members of the ruling class are simplifications. With few exceptions if they have to choose between us or one of their own, we will lose. And yet they are also biological individuals whose personal tastes and styles need to be satisfied. The stronger eat the weaker in their homes too.

    That means there are different goals for different members of the ruling class. They harmonize to the extent that class interests prevail. However, the impact of their actions is rarely uniform. The problem is generally solved by betting on both sides of any risk. Thus, the hedge fund is the most natural form for the retrograde process of neo-feudalism. When someone like Klaus Schwab repeats the dogma, “you will own nothing and be happy”, he is as ambiguous as a true oracle can be. The hedge fund “owns” nothing and therefore has no risks of loss, but controls all the essential cash flow and therefore can be happy. The rest of us own nothing because all forms of material title are to be converted to various types of lease or rental agreements where possession is merely a transitional status but payment a permanent obligation. Feudalism in the 11th century was not a popularly chosen societal form. It was the sanctification of theft and extortion, which the Roman pontiff tried to monopolize. It was sustained by the active policing of the feudal gangs led by barons and princes. It was justified by the ideological propaganda operations of the clergy in the Latin Church. Sometimes the priest/ missionary came first and then the armed brigands, sometimes the brigands came first. In the end the indigenous culture was absorbed or destroyed and the people subjugated. Taking their land and whatever religions they may have had were both necessary if the theft was to remain permanent.

    Since the defeat of the Soviet Union, after the decolonization process had been stopped dead in its tracks, the crusade to steal back everything that had been accumulated by ordinary people over the past two centuries began in earnest. There is no longer a cohesive ecclesiastical instrument and sufficient blind faith in traditional modes of belief. Ironically the traditional modes of belief have become a threat to those charged with organizing the restoration. Whether in the Orthodox Church or the conservative Latin congregations, the ruling class finds resistance built around preservation of family and old-fashioned morality. It is no wonder then that these traditional religious communities are under attack from the armed propaganda gangs of Wokism and transhumanism. These ideologies were developed from what could be called cultural reverse engineering.

    When the real social movements were decapitated, they were only partially destroyed. Instead, academically trained cadres were promoted to replace the dead or neutralized activists. They brought with them synthetic ideologies that were made by a kind of recombinant intellectual process, like gene editing. The basic liberation language was dismantled and the dangerous parts replaced with narcissistic code. Self-identification became an individual choice not the recognition of one’s consciousness in a community of real human beings sharing the same material and spiritual conditions. The identity itself becomes the consumable product. In order for this identity to be fully commodified it also had to “perform” like a commodity, i.e. subject to unlimited power of the market. Previously the dissatisfaction or fear induced by the propaganda apparatus was to be satisfied through purchase and consumption of goods and services. Since the body itself—the consumer—is that which is to be consumed a contradiction arises. This contradiction has to be expressed in some material threat or fear. Thus, Wokism achieves its insidious purpose by turning the “woke” person into an individual victim. The model for this chimeric victimhood is the universal Jewish victimhood fuelled by the Holocaust story machine. The total victim is threatened and persecuted by everything and by everyone who does not actively nurture the narcissism upon which this permanent immanent victimhood is based. That is the meaning of all this rhetoric about “safe environments”, “affirming care” and the hysterical chanting of whatever political slogans have been conceived to fuel the internal threat machine. One wears senseless face masks, accepts toxic injections, applauds the injuries to female athletes by male pugilists in skirts, and cheers institutional child abuse and medical mutilation as “affirming care”, while engaged in constant panic reactions to the latest bogus CO2 or pandemic scare. The woke person has established the right to be protected from unpleasant or dissenting utterances or experiences, especially if they could erode the carefully engineered edifice of narcissism. Liberty has been replaced by libertinism. Unwittingly – for most—they are adopting the archaic entertainments of the ruling class, offered as a sensuous reward for all the material well being they will surrender as a result of toxic substances or poisonous propaganda. The traditionalists are attacked for rejecting those poisons and because they support everything these new narcissists have been taught to despise. The woke are constantly threatened by the traditionalists who deprive them of their “safe environment”. On the other hand this gives them another opportunity to exercise victimhood.

    By now the social management strategy ought to be clear. Whereas the medieval crusades offered the poor salvation if they would take the cross and die to conquer the Holy Land, the Woke faith is based on salvation offered to those who take the cross and crucify themselves, surrendering everything to those who not only have taken the Holy Land but are taking everyone else’s land too.

    In order to place the present conflict, most visible in the radical expansion of the mass murder perpetrated by the settler-colonial regime in Palestine as I write, in cultural historical context, I have argued that it is entirely legitimate to deduce the aims of an action, like a war, from the consequences of that action. In fact, such a studied conclusion is the only type of assessment we can ever make since the past is irretrievable. The character of any conclusion is inseparable from the kind of questions that are asked and the actions contemplated depending on the response to those questions. There is a significant relationship between the organized, sustained mass murder by the Tel Aviv regime and wider social-political-economic aims. Naturally there are inconsistencies and deficits in the information, which, were, they resolved, might permit more precise prediction of what can be found in the near or long-term future.  Yet there is a preponderance of consistency between the war waged in Palestine and the aims of those supporting the war in Ukraine against Russia. This consistency can be found on the one hand by examining the facts. On the other hand it can be found by recognising the “overlapping directorates” at work.

    Were the war waged to create Greater Israel the project of a fanatical sect in Tel Aviv, it would be apparent that such mild measures as removing the offending persons to another place, dead or alive, might suffice at least to diffuse the situation. But there is more at stake. Even though Arthur Koestler, who was no enemy of the settler-colonial regime, has been challenged on many points, his The Thirteenth Tribe (1976), draws conclusions from the historical conversion of the Khazars (a people who inhabited the much of the area of today’s Eastern Ukraine) to Judaism. The Soviet era, Russian historian, geographer and ethnologist, Lev Gumilev called it “chimeric”.  By that he meant that a parasitical relationship. He argued that a fanatical Jewish sect, the Radhanites, essentially infiltrated the Khazar ruling class and converted them by decree to Rabbinical Judaism. This turned Khazaria into a “merchant octopus” which extended its commercial power both to the East and West. The power they enjoyed straddled the East-West land routes of international trade at the time. This empire collapsed in 965 after wars with Kieven Rus. If there was any diaspora it was not dispersal from the grounds of a mythical Solomon’s temple but the real dispersal of an empire in Central Eurasia (Guyénot, 2022, From Yahweh to Zion, 2018).

    When Benjamin Netanyahu told the UN General Assembly that his regime was going to join with its partners to create some channel parallel to China’s new Silk Road and BRI, for which Iran had to be neutralized, could he have meant a restoration of the Khazar Empire and not just the expansion of the settler-colonial regime to the territories Kermit Roosevelt identified as the regime’s ambitions in 1948? In A Jewish State (1904), Theodor Herzl emphasized that Zionism aimed to create what in essence was a commercial empire not unlike Rhodes British South Africa Company (originally seeking to conquer from the Cape to Cairo), religion was the pretext but not the aim. (In fact, contrary to mass media depictions, the pious Jew has traditionally been viewed as a threat to the Zionist colonial project.) Could the man in Kiev who said once that he saw the Tel Aviv regime as a model for Ukraine have been uttering a vision intuitively or instructively underlying the verbosity between bomb explosions in occupied Palestine? Did he mean that Russians in the Donbass were “his Palestinians”? Tel Aviv officials were once routinely cited as telling Americans that the Palestinians are “our Indian problem”.

    If we imagine that the war aims are not those declared but quite different ones, then a cultural historical examination might offer another comprehensive interpretation. Namely, the class of people who really own important stuff, like the mass media, the oil channels, the money supply, are closely connected in every way. In a world that has seen the return of manufacturing and much of the world’s productive economy return to Asia, while the West has been de-industrialized and its population reduced to varying degrees of indebtedness and penury, why would not those owners, the great captains of finance capital, see their future power as the foot on the hoses that China and Russia would want between their productive economies and those countries where there is a demand for that output? Wouldn’t it be practical to be the troll at the bridge charging everyone to go across? Isn’t this kind of business something for specialists, like the one banks control? It should not be forgotten that while the outcome of the war with Russia remains uncertain, for many in the West forced to take one of the COVID injections it is their personal future that is uncertain.

    Whether this mass murder eliminates enough or all of the Palestinians the Tel Aviv regime has been trying to destroy for the past century, the flow of refugees of all sorts from this region has been uninterrupted since the US launched its first assault on Iraq in 1991. The secret recruitment of mercenary terrorists under cover of religious radicalism has also continued unchecked since Zbigniew Brzezinski conceived the terrorist war in Afghanistan at the end of the 1970s.  Thus, the IMO will be assured of a continuous flow of displaced persons. These displaced persons are the true “human shields” behind which organized crime and state terrorism are waged. The war against Russia or China, just as Orwell’s 1984 described is first and foremost a war against the civilian populations of the world. These they will transfer to wherever labour is needed at the expense of the indigenous populations where these refugees are injected. As the indigenous of the Ukraine, Middle East and other attractive zones for exploitation are evacuated or eliminated, the underlying land and resources are confiscated by those who have been funding the wars and the migration in the first place. As I have argued elsewhere, global cash flow is to be matched by globally managed human trafficking. These are realities. This business is being conducted in just this manner. Does it mean that the intent of the actions is to create this system of extraction flows? That is the wrong question. We cannot change intent. What we can change is action and the kinds of consequences agreed by the righteous to be inimical to the welfare of real human beings. It helps if we have a grasp of the enormous cultural historical context in which the assessments must be made and courses of response found.

    The same organized criminality that formed the financial and managerial base of the world’s biggest propaganda industry shares power with those who build the weapons of mass depopulation, i.e., the guns and pharmaceuticals sectors. Needless to say interlocking directorates and socialization through exclusive institutions from birth until bodily demise instill the shared values that lead Schwab to preach without the least embarrassment that the World (as property of the elite for whom he speaks) is threatened by the rest of us. When the prelates of the World Economic Forum preach that the “Planet” must be saved, what they really mean is that their world is a victim of popular persecution. By calling this feigned victimhood the threat to the Planet, the mass of ordinary inhabitants is implicated, in fact, vociferously accused, of destroying their world. Their answer to this threat is to destroy us. However, it is more efficient if we can be persuaded to destroy ourselves. So we are commanded to self-identify as threats to “the Planet”. Those who see the Planet as their property also take George Carlin seriously. “The Planet is not going anywhere, we are…” The Zionist war against Palestinians is the ostentatious crucifixion that exemplifies unambiguously the depth of viciousness with which the universal victims represented on Swiss ski slopes and spas wage class war. The evil of communism was used to deny genuine independence and self-government to millions in Africa, East Asia and Latin America. Now the evil of carbon dioxide, a gas essential for human life as well as plant life on Earth as a pretext for continuing to deny and obstruct human development in all those same countries. Their populations are excessive and can only be supplied with energy and food at the expense of “the Planet”—i.e. those victims represented by the annual councils in Davos (and the less publicized or secret meetings). Morse Peckham wrote, “Man does not live by bread alone, but mainly by platitudes.” Victimhood is a part of the rhetoric of power. It has to be repeated in every conceivable form as a means of controlling the range of mass behaviour. The ideology of victimhood does not veil the terrorism and mass murder in Palestine perpetrated by the Tel Aviv regime. Instead it sanctifies it, converts it into a holy sacrifice. It is the logical extension of the pectoral cross worn by the Roman pontiff and other prelates who preached the original crusades against the inhabitants of the critical interface between the centre of the world economy and population and the real victims of Western tyranny in Africa.

    The Portuguese and Spanish were the first of the barbarian kingdoms that went to sea to circumvent the bottleneck of the Middle East and the land routes linking a sparsely populated peninsula of the Eurasian continent, impoverished and oppressed by its feudal lords, temporal and spiritual. The recovery of China and the core of human population have meant that the seas are no longer the only channels of communications among the peoples of the world. Captain Mahan’s (The Influence of Sea Power upon History, 1890) doctrine is now seriously challenged by the BRI, which could easily link China to Africa as it once was before the Portuguese pirate fleets disrupted the Indian Ocean trade five centuries ago (Gunder Frank, ReOrient: Global Economy in the Asian Age, 1998). This strategic transformation cannot be blocked by direct confrontation; only by annihilation (atomic war) or perpetual war waged by the masters of espionage, covert action, and psychological warfare, in the service of the oligarchic cult of finance capital in the West and their vassals throughout the world. Armed propaganda is the tradition of the Church militant and its descendants in London, Brussels, and New York. The success of the COVID campaign in paralysing the world’s commerce demonstrates the power still held by that 0.01%. This war has only really begun.

    The post Economical Explanations: Reflection on the Aims of Past Wars and Wars to Come first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • We should be clear about one thing. Death is not preventable. In fact it is assured. Even David Rockefeller, third generation patriarch of the gangster family on the Hudson, bit the dust at 101 in 2017. There may be some of his kind with ambitions of greater longevity but Daoist immortality has so far escaped them. However we may find that the improvements rendered notorious by Christiaan Barnard’s surgical experiments may reach a level to satisfy the most Methuselahaic of our ruling oligarchy. Perhaps some of these ancients are still around us nostalgically forcing the world back to the century in which they were born. Meanwhile the rest of us expire after shelf lives between 60 and 90 years.

    In 1946, Simone de Beauvoir published a fine, little novel called All Men are Mortal (Tous les hommes sont mortels). The hero of her fable, Raimon Fosca, is a loyal patriot of his Italian city-state who desperate for a means to lift a deadly siege accepts a potion from a man who says it will give immortality. At first he is sceptical, suspecting the vial contains poison. When a mouse on whom he has tested it recovers from a mortal blow, Fosca is convinced. Yet he asks why the man has not taken it himself. He tells Fosca that he just could not dare. Fosca dismisses the man’s cowardice, and after drinking all the potion escapes the city. He is able to lift the siege and becomes a hero to his home city. The story continues to relate Fosca’s adventures.

    The book does not begin in the castle of the besieged Italian city. It opens with a group of holidaymakers in the countryside. One of whom is a successful actress of great ambition named Regine. She notices in the course of those proverbially long August vacation seasons in France that on the terrace of a nearby house lies a man in a chaise longe, day and night with no sign of moving. Tired of watching this scene from the house where she is staying, she goes to the house and manages to reach the man she has been watching for days. Her opening question is what does the man do and why does he lie in this position, on the terrace in a chaise longe apparently every day. She explains how much she has to do to promote her acting career and how surely a man of his age—he appears somewhere in his late thirties or early 40s—must have great plans and potential.

    He replies that he has no need to do anything else. In fact, doing anything else is pointless. Regine cannot understand how doing anything could be pointless. Fosca then tells his life story, one spanning roughly five hundred years. Fosca is a patrician and his newly won immortality not only permitted him to save his city but to perform incredible feats for a succession of princes, monarchs and emperors. In each context he offered his services to the potentate. Each time he fell in love. However, he never grew old. His patrons died. Their empires withered. His lovers died as did his children. He survived. After the recitation of all these accomplishments he explains to Regine that there is no point in anything he has done. His greatest accomplishments all collapsed. He survived everyone he ever loved. In the end, his message to Regine is that immortality is a curse. When all is said and done, no one will survive on the planet except him and the mouse he fed the same potion.

    Fosca abandons every form of activity because his immortality invests everything with indifference. On the other hand, he notices the passion and the importance attached to everything by those whose life is finite—whether or not they are aware of death all the time. He in turn cannot imagine anything surviving him. At the end of the story, Regine is overwhelmed and unable to contemplate the consequences of the immortality Fosca describes.

    The Western pursuit of immortality is also an obsession with the power exercised over life and its conditions. The immortal—whether literally or fictively imagined—do not understand present value since they imagine that in their world without death nothing else is eternal.

    On 26 July 2024, it was reported by UN News that the fascist parastatal, World Health Organization, announced that more than a million doses of a polio vaccine was being sent to Gaza “after the discovery of the highly infectious disease in sewage samples”. According to the press report, the corrupt former Ethiopian government minister, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, appointed as director general of the pharmaments consortium dba as a United Nations agency said although no cases of polio had been recorded, it was “just a matter of time before it reaches the thousands of children who have been left unprotected.” Dr Ayadil Saparbekov, named as “team lead for health emergencies at WHO in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, was to have warned that “the spread of polio and other communicable disease could lead to more people dying of preventable illness than from war-related injuries—currently 39,000, according to local health authorities.” Allegedly vaccine-derived poliovirus type two had been identified in sewage samples taken from cities bombarded by the IDF, the terrorist forces of the occupying regime in Tel Aviv.

    On 26 August 2024, UN News reported that 1.2 million doses of vital polio vaccines had arrived in besieged Gaza, Palestine. “More than 640,000 children are targeted to receive the polio type two (nOPV) vaccines”, according to UNICEF sources quoted in the press report. The occupying and besieging regime in Tel Aviv dba the State of Israel announced through its agency COGAT that vaccine shipments had arrived in Gaza and that the vaccination campaign would be conducted in coordination with its combined terror forces as part of their “routine” humanitarian activity.

    In a century of cynicism and public amnesia, even the language used by those engaged in this operation—which ought to induce moral outrage—scarcely elicits curiosity. Naturally there are the usual suspects censored, ignored and/or maligned, i.e., the people who have been opposed to the permanent occupation and siege of Palestine by the settler-colonial entity in Tel Aviv combined with those who have been monitoring the belligerence of the pharmaments industry, who have objected, not to meaningful healthcare measures but to the fact that this WHO operation is anything but meaningful healthcare, let alone humanitarian. The criticisms deserve to be summarized because together they indicate the type and scope of full-spectrum warfare against the majority of humanity that has been intensifying as we speak.

    The most obvious criticism asks how is it possible that the Tel Aviv regime and its terrorist forces are willing to permit a campaign for polio vaccination of Palestinian children while multiple eyewitness reports testify to those forces targeting children deliberately with lethal lead vaccinations, i.e. shooting them dead? This apparent incoherence is obfuscated mainly by the method of segregated reporting characteristic of most journalistic practice. That is the WHO actions and the operations on the ground are described in texts, broadcasts, and other media separately from whatever reports are filed about the assassinations, bombing and other killing activities by Tel Aviv’s terrorists. This results partly from intentional deception but also from the organisation of work in the industry, where subject matter treated by strictly separate categories. Often those “beats” are divided to match the underlying product or ideological marketing segment to be served. To the extent the incoherence cannot be ignored, the siege operations are described as were they natural catastrophes. Famine and disease are labelled serious risks arising from the destruction of infrastructure and the inability to deliver food to the inhabitants. However the fact that siege is not a condition of nature and therefore its consequences are not “acts of god” is unmentioned. Quite the contrary, the assumption underlying most reporting is that whether or not Tel Aviv’s occupation and siege of Palestine is divinely inspired, god or gods have not been on the side of the besieged. The vast majority of the Gaza population comprises women, children and youth. Thus the siege is ultimately punishment of unarmed, non-combatants. These families are implicitly held responsible for the collateral dismemberment and death on the premise that they are constituents of armed units comprising adult males. To the extent they are recognised as victims, those adult male Palestinians are deemed the perpetrators. Tel Aviv’s terrorists are defending the unarmed women and children of Palestine from their wayward manhood. The paramount leader of the terrorist onslaught, his lieutenants and allies all proclaim the divine righteousness with which they annihilate. It has been the duty of journalism to dilute their demonic language. For the scribbling battalions, such a vaccination campaign is a welcome theatrical performance to report. The Righteous (terrorists) deign to “pause” in their execution of god’s will in order to prevent the targeted population from becoming lame or paralysed. Could it be they are afraid the paralysed survivors will be unable to walk across the borders into permanent exile?

    Another point of criticism, even less obvious but also more difficult to comprehend, is focused on the vaccine itself. If the pathogen allegedly detected itself derives from a previously introduced vaccine, then what assurance does anyone have that the vaccine brought to Gaza in August by the UN agencies are any safer or efficacious than the contaminating substances against which they are supposedly intended to work? On 27 August 2024, the UN News published official insistence that the polio vaccine is “safe and effective” (where have we heard that before?) and in the media briefing by UN spokesperson Stephane Dujarric denied claims in “several news stories (that) have appeared online in Israel and the United States, quoting two Israeli scientists falsely asserting that the polio vaccine due to be used in Gaza is ‘experimental’”. Dujarric is cited as saying that “This vaccine is safe, it is effective, and it offers top quality protection. It is a vaccine globally recommended for variant type two polio virus outbreaks by the World Heath Organization.” Late journalist Claude Cockburn, father of the late Alexander and his sibling journalists, was to have observed that the time to believe the government is doing something is once they start denying it. In the decades since 2001, official denials are routine.

    According to Dujarric, the vaccine was rolled out in March 2021. What a coincidence? In the midst of unveiling the “mother of all vaccines”, a new polio vaccine was released for public consumption. Where did the pharmaments industry ever get the time to create a vaccine to prevent the spread of a vaccine-induced virus while they were working at warp speed to produce the mRNA miracle-maker to combat COVID-19? Is it possible that this was just another off the back shelf product waiting for the right sales opportunity. US patent agent David Martin demonstrated with painstaking research published in the midst of the PHEIC pandemic that all the active components of the mRNA bullet and its target pathogen had been patented long before 2019 when the first flare was fired in Wuhan. When one should ask was the testing of the 2021 polio vaccine? What Dujarric actually means is that the responsible entities authorized the vaccine to be deployed which, like in the case of the mRNA bullets, ended their experimental status de jure.

    Perhaps the 2021 vaccine procured in such enormous quantities are a product of another investment by misanthropic capitalist William Gates III, known as Bill Gates, dba the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF) with its special polio focus. According to the foundation, their focus on polio is warranted because “despite this progress (in eliminating wild polio), several challenges remain in reaching all children with vaccines.” Interestingly enough they also report that “wild polio virus type 2 was declared eradicated in 2015, and wild poliovirus type 3 was declared eradicated in October 2019 (the month in which Event 201 was held). A reasonably literate person could be forgiven for asking, if wild polio type 2 (and type 3) have been eradicated what is the source of the polio threat now? The answer of course is polio vaccines!

    For example, according to an article in New Indian Express (23 October 2019) “in 2019 at least 400 children would have developed polio after receiving the oral polio vaccine over the past five years… India has been free from wild polio since 2011, but the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare has never released data on vaccine-associated polio paralysis, a rare adverse effect of OPV (oral polio vaccine) that causes infantile paralysis.” If there has been no data disclosure how can anyone know whether the adverse effect is “rare”? In the OPV given to children worldwide, Type 2 vaccine viruses were withdrawn from use in 2016, it continues to contain Type 1 and 3 strains that can cause VAPP.” The study cited highlighted a fact documented elsewhere, namely that cases of polio caused by vaccine viruses have outnumbered those of polio caused by wild polio viruses. Which according to those so credible authorities like the WHO have been eradicated. Although the WHO has benefited not only from the largesse of its quasi-owners but also from the combined forces of global mass media cartels at those owners disposal, occasionally it is impossible to conceal either the corruption (SOP) or the outright mendacity of the organization’s operatives.

    In a WHO press release (6 June 2019), it was reported that the government where the WHO director-general made his reputation for integrity in public service, Ethiopia, a total of 57,193 vials of type 2 OPV (mOPV2) were destroyed under official supervision, presumably to prevent their contents entering the sewage system of Addis Ababa. “According to the Global Action Plan Version III (GAP III) guidelines, type 2 polio virus containing or potentially containing materials post switch should always be thoroughly handled and destroyed using methods that can automatically inactivate the virus for minimizing the risks of infection of vulnerable population.” The OPV is a product pushed by the Global Polio Eradication Initiative (GPEI) another consortium, like GAVI, funded by the BMGF. Another BMGF funded activity from which the foundation has done its best to distance itself was a notorious tetanus vaccination wave in 2013 where its WHO cut-out, together with the local government vaccinated women in rural areas of reproductive age ostensibly for tetanus. It was discovered that the “vaccine” was laced with ingredients that would inhibit fertility. The otherwise Business-oriented Latin Church had not yet abandoned what one writer has called “procreationism”. Local Roman Catholics were outraged that young women would be sterilized by the State. It is no secret that the misanthropic capitalists in Seattle have often articulated their preference for population reduction methods through healthcare delivery. Even the former spouse of Mr Gates, a member of the Latin Church, has been a vocal supporter of enabling women in developing countries to choose not to have children. Is it inconceivable that an oral polio vaccine might be enhanced with other biologics? Are these vaccines or blankets for the “Indians”?

    Thus we can see there is not only apparent incoherence between the supposed humanitarian objective of vaccinating somewhat more than half a million children in Gaza before they are shot by terrorist snipers or buried dead or alive by bombs. Yet there is a school of thought—or a state of mind—which forbids criticism of any act which in isolation is “good” no matter the context in which it is performed. To condemn the vaccination campaign is to be heartless and inhumane. One ought to appreciate every instant of goodness or generosity even in the midst of evil.

    The vaccine itself—and the obsession with vaccinating the world—can also be criticised. However, the vast majority still believe what they have been taught—that vaccines have been the miracle of modern public health. Any criticism of vaccination or the vaccine industry is dismissed or disparaged as an attack on sound public health policy. Probably most people have had some kind of vaccine in the course of their lives and see their continued survival as well as relative good health as prima facie evidence that vaccines are right, good and necessary for civilized life. Like infant baptism, it is impossible to prove or disprove its efficacy. The only authoritative testimony from the dead we have so far is a compilation of clerical forgeries and fantasies for which no further apologies are needed.

    Elsewhere in my discussion of the military and intelligence origins of public health, I described the history of the government agencies today treated as world authorities on disease, cures and prevention. These agencies were not captured by corporations. They were created within the military-industrial complex and endowed with the powers of the State. They formed the template for virtually all modern public health institutions worldwide. A template is not only a tool of simplification, like any model, it is also a frame or limit placed on subsequent institutions established using it. Selling or imposing a model may not guarantee full control over the institution but it definitely eases future manipulation by the modeller. That is why the British, French and US Americans have always spent considerable sums educating foreigners in the military academies and elite universities. It is also why foreign aid includes continuous training and indoctrination events and exercises. These create and maintain the interfaces and personal relationships needed for the modeller to manipulate the models wherever they may be.

    In 2020, I described the PHEIC (Public health emergency of international concern) aka as the COVID-19 pandemic as a massive worldwide counter-insurgency operation. It is an element of the global terrorism that constitutes the controlling instrument for the financial oligarchy that rules us. Many of the tactics and strategies best theorized by the French and applied by the US in the 20th century actually have precedents in the long history of Western colonization and imperialism. However, the emergence of systems theory in the 20th century and the full militarization of science and medicine through the Manhattan Project have significantly magnified the organization of terror. A cultural convergence can be identified throughout the political power elite of the West by which industrial laborers, peasants and indigenous populations were all classified as resources to be managed scientifically. The scientific-technological revolution of the 20th century was foremost the translation of enormous productive capacity—capable of satisfying most of humanities basic needs—into the capacity for annihilating the population rendered surplus by all that industrial plant (now digital).

    That said, with the long-standing political and military objective of the regime in Tel Aviv the total evacuation/ elimination of the indigenous population of Palestine, there ought to be no doubt that evacuation/ elimination involves more than just “Indian removal”. For decades, the Palestinian diaspora has demanded the “right to return” to lands they were forced at gunpoint to vacate over the past century. In other settler-colonial states the major domestic task has always been population replacement and extermination of title (eliminating any heirs with claims). The US has a peculiarity that bewilders the settled “Old World” land owners. Namely the absence of binding land registers. Buying a parcel of land in the United States is not completed by registration of the purchase in a central land registry administered by the State. Instead the buyer purchases a title warranted free of encumbrances (claims against his ownership) and purchases an insurance policy that will reimburse him the purchase price should there be a successful challenge to his title in court. The tenuousness of ownership of stolen land survives in this archaic form of real estate transaction. During the so-called “pandemic” the official COVID measures were applied in Australia to evict indigenous from the lands the federal government had ostensibly recognized as theirs. The collapse of much of the SME sector worldwide during the state of COVID siege resulted in substantial redistribution of assets, including land.

    During the US war against Vietnam, the CIA ran numerous programs which were eventually consolidated in what became known as the Phoenix Program. Two of those programs were interlocking pacification tactics included under the Rural Development schemes, e.g. through the Agency cut-out USAID. These were the strategic hamlet and census-grievance. Strategic hamlets were artificial villages forcibly constructed by the inhabitants of a theatre of operations in order to concentrate the population (yes, concentration camp) and isolate them from the National Liberation Front, also called the Vietcong (Vietnamese Communists). Census-grievance was a civil affairs operation. Villages were inspected, the population counted and registered, then a mirror version of the NLF alternative administration was installed. The US version was to operate according to what it thought was the structure and method of the NLF. Gene Sharp derived his colour revolution theories from analysis of these counter-insurgency strategies.

    One of the most important measurements for the Phoenix system was the force strength of the NLF. The general theory was that VC were the total population minus the percentage of the population under official control. However this was not very precise. Hence the census in census grievance. The Phoenix coordinators at all levels had to aggregate numbers and estimate the military strength of the NLF throughout the country. Since all Vietnamese look alike, this meant counting everyone. Of course sometimes counting was not necessary to determine the damage done. B-52 drops wiped out all traces of villager and insurgent alike. Yet monitoring population numbers and fluctuations throughout the country was considered a fair indirect measure. First of all where populations remained stable it was safe to say the NLF was protected or protecting. Where the rural population had been decimated it was safe to say the NLF would have little means of support. Either way numbers were crucial as were the other data collected about the inhabitants through the battery of civil operations disguised as Rural Development. That data went into the Phoenix Program Information System to generate “kill lists” for target acquisition. Every detail about families was fed into this system on the assumption that somewhere in every family there was an NLF member who had to counted and neutralized.

    It has been no secret that artificial intelligence tools are deployed by the Tel Aviv terrorists to produce similar assassination target lists. With the near total destruction of urban infrastructure and habitation in besieged Gaza, the essential controlling data for the counter-insurgency campaign is becoming more difficult to obtain. Whereas once the occupation health authorities were registering fatalities, about two million minus 40,000, the counter has been stuck for months now. While it is in the interest of the Tel Aviv regime to conceal the actual number of deaths from the general public, it is essential for their military operations to know how many more have to go. There is no substitute for a physical inventory—supervised by the IDF. Clearly they can no longer ask the inhabitants to come out for food and drink. However, the past four years have created a psychological condition worldwide by which vast numbers of people obviously can still be manipulated—the fear of disease.

    As another author also observed, the WHO vaccination campaign targets children AND the rest of the world’s population suffering from the trauma of the COVID-19 siege and the largely forced vaccination of untold millions. I say forced because this mass vaccination was performed using either by irrationally-induced fear or repressive measures imposed by the Corporate State. The staged micro-PHEIC, following the COVID-19 handbook, enhances through redundancy the PHEIC fear strategy, also embodied in covert WHO negotiations to amend the International Health Regulations (IHR), and it provides the IDF cover for a census-type intelligence operation. Those are the minimum advantages accruing to the West’s ruling oligarchy and its franchise in Tel Aviv. However if the more sinister possibilities are considered in this suite, then the vaccination campaign is targeting children (like so many other aggressive policies today) to assure that there will in fact be few of them in the future. If the children of those who survive the annihilation of the Gaza concentration camp are rendered handicapped or even sterilized by the concoctions they have been fed, then the experimental vaccine will have proven its worth to the vaccinators of the world. The best way to prevent a death is still to prevent the inception of life in the first place.

    The post Preventable Death first appeared on Dissident Voice.

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  • Critical cultural historical perspective is not easy to obtain. Yet its importance as an orientation is immeasurable. One episode in the past American century of war is still virtually unknown and/ or misrepresented, the longest single armed conflict in the history of the North American republic—its campaign against Korea. In terms of active hostilities conducted by military formations, the United States dba the United Nations fought in Korea between 1951 and 1953, until a ceasefire and armistice was agreed between the United Nations and the People’s Democratic Republic of Korea. In practice, war by other means has continued with scarcely an abatement to this day.

    This persistence of this condition is well understood in Korea, China and Japan, even if the public statements diverge among the governments of these three. In the United States one can say that the vast majority of the population has little or no idea about the campaign beyond the few lines in school history books, occasional sentimental films and the ignorant as well as outright dishonest statements by the US government. Since Barack Obama announced the regime’s “pivot to Asia”, there have been occasional eruptions of sensitivity to events and developments on the Korean peninsula. These remain largely incoherent. As I have argued elsewhere this incoherence and general ignorance can be explained by the fact that although every US school pupil has heard the term “manifest destiny” very few have ever understood it. In contrast, one can hear almost anyone preach with authoritative tones about the Monroe Doctrine as if this were an institution of international law and not an arrogant gesture, mainly addressed to the British Empire in the 19th century (when it was barely capable of defending its own merchantmen).

    Without a clear understanding of manifest destiny: the US absorption of the Philippines and denial of its hard fought independence after Spain had ceded it in the Treaty of Paris (1898), the promotion of Japanese expansion into the Asian mainland including colonization, the transfer of Germany’s China assets to Japan after the Great War, and the covert operations against Japan that led to the provoked (and staged) Pearl Harbor “surprise”, as well as the “loss of China” in 1949, it is impossible to explain the comprehensiveness of US imperial engagement in Asia and the importance of Korea in this constellation (or Vietnam for that matter). The “pivot” announced under Barack Obama was not a new policy. It was a relabelling of a policy that emerged from manifest destiny long before the US was capable of projecting the naval, military and economic power to actively pursue it.

    At the end of the campaign against Japan in 1945, the immediate consequence of Japan’s defeat at the hands of the Soviet Union was surrender and withdrawal from its Korean colony. Prosaically, the almost hereditary military governor of the Philippines, Douglas MacArthur (father had been military governor while son had commanded the Philippine armed forces until the Japanese invasion), played a significant role in executing in Korea the same manoeuver perpetrated by Admiral Dewey in Manila Bay. Just as the Spanish had been forced to cede the Philippines to the US, the Japanese were to surrender their Korean possession to the United States. However, after waging four years of bloody war again for democracy, the high representatives of the Allies had declared in Cairo that Korean independence was to be restored. Thus, the US designs had to be cloaked in other garb.

    This is the most reasonable perspective from which to see the beginnings of the war in Korea as far as the United States is concerned. It is the simplest and most consistent explanation not only for Dean Acheson’s action in 1951 but also for the policies pursued today by the permanent state that directs the foreign policy a reigning POTUS is permitted to pronounce.

    Of course, there are many complexities involving conflicts among the interested parties which make it impossible to reduce all the events and phenomena of the war to just one cause or effect. Several political conflicts arose among the US Establishment because of the Korean campaign. The impact on occupied Germany and relations with the temporary “ally”, the Soviet Union, as well as emerging independent states like India, was substantial. Therefore, to argue for a controlling cultural historical perspective is not to claim a linear or analogue explanation for everything that happened between 1951 and 1953.

    This is the fundamental strength of the numerous books Bruce Cumings has written about the Korean War, including his participation in a highly controversial Thames TV documentary called Korea: The Unknown War. The importance of the latter lies in its unparalleled compilation of eyewitness interviews and archival film material about a war that predated “TV war fetishism”. The interpretative work was so controversial in the production that Professor Cumings later wrote a critical analysis and partially distanced himself from the end product. Nonetheless, as “diluted” as some evidence and critique in the film was, two versions had to be distributed. US television broadcasters found the original British documentary to negative for American audiences.

    In 2010, The Korean War: A History was published in the Modern Library, an established series characterized by titles that widely recognized as “classics”. Perhaps that is why David Martin assumed for the purpose of his review that Bruce Cumings account and interpretations of this period in US and Korean (as well as Chinese) history are now Establishment or mainstream. He supports this assumption by reminding the reader of Professor Cumings’ pedigree, a distinguished professor emeritus from a top-tier American university and former chair of that institution’s history department. Dr Martin then concludes that The Korean War, as narrated by Professor Cumings, is best assigned to that bin of radical Leftist revisionism he imagines—like many conservatives—dominates the apex of US power. Alas Dr Martin is gravely mistaken. Ever since Bruce Cumings published his Origins of the Korean War, the Establishment has done its best to ignore, if not discredit, the conclusions he drew—as they were unable to refute the copious historical record with which the book is supported. If appearances in the think tank/ talkshow circuit are any measure of ideological acceptance, Bruce Cumings is probably one of the rarest figures to be found in public debate about Korea or US Asia policy. His standing in the academy entitles him to more respect among colleagues but that hardly constitutes political influence in high places. As far as I know it has not earned him a place in that cesspool of the Anglo-American Establishment, the Council on Foreign Relations—usually the first sign of elevation to the rank of official sage.

    Dr Martin opens his salvo against The Korean War by reporting that he was in Korea as an ROTC candidate at about the same time that Bruce Cumings was in Korea serving in the Peace Corps. The invidious distinction between these two assignments is almost amusingly nostalgic, reminiscent of the sneers of newly-minted patriotic butter bars leaving for Saigon amidst protesting college students. Accusing Professor Cumings of a lack of martial spirit and patriotism may reflect the naive feelings of a fresh officer candidate fifty years ago, it is certainly not a serious way to approach the published research of a senior scholar, regardless of political coloration. However, the publication of this digest of Professor Cumings decades-long research in the Modern Library does at least suggest that the content has been prepared for a mass market, lay audience. In that sense The Korean War, while by no means Establishment orthodoxy, has crept a few rungs to be admitted to educated debate beyond the university. That is something Dr Martin should greet. Since before one can adequately argue with an analysis or judgement it is necessary to understand it. That is certainly the aim of the publishers—not to approve the views but to render them susceptible to broader understanding and thus foster intelligent debate about a continuing conflict in US foreign policy.

    Yet, David Martin, a retired economist, employed mainly in government service, reviews Bruce Cumings’ book as if it were the established, standard history of the war. Of course it never was and still isn’t. Dr Martin also disparages I.F. Stone’s Hidden History of the Korean War, one of the few contemporary critical analyses of the Korean campaign, based entirely on public sources available at the time. All this is based on the conviction that these are Left-wing views of the matter and therefore inherently incorrect.

    The review does not confine itself to ad hominem. Dr Martin asserts that aside from an anti-American bias, Professor Cumings makes statements that also lead to substantive questions that he does not answer. To the extent this is accurate, it is beside the point. The Korean War makes no claims to comprehensiveness. On the contrary it is a compact digest. Professor Cumings explains in the introduction that every effort was made to keep the evidentiary apparatus to a minimum in the interest of broader readership. In the two-volume Origins of the Korean War lie the answers to numerous questions Dr Martin sees as unresolved. On the narrative as a whole he is more than candid:

    I wish I could write with the serene confidence that other historians do in similarly short books, offering their settled interpretations unencumbered by footnotes and sources. So many things about this war are still so controversial, however, vehemently debated and hotly affirmed or denied (or simply unknown)…

    Having read both volumes of the Origins, his other books on the subject, viewed Korea: The Unknown War, several times as well as corresponding directly with him, I can only attest to the caution with which Professor Cumings drew any conclusions from his research. Rather than trying to prove who may have started the armed hostilities that became a major military conflict for three years, his work has focussed on the context in which this war began, the various aims, interests and objectives pursued by those persons involved and those of the institutions through which they acted. The limitations on historical documentation are never overlooked. Interpretation is always an act in the present. However it always is an interpretation of what we call the past. Hence new documents may lead to reassessment of previously known documents. The Korean War is “a history”—not “the history” as would be implied by a genuinely Establishment narrative.

    At one point Dr Martin writes:

    To be sure there would have been social unrest such as occurred on Jeju Island and in South Jeolla Province, but it’s hard to see how it could have developed into an all-out war. Backing someone like Kim Ku, who seems to have had wider public support, instead of Syngman Rhee might have been a wiser course for the United States.

    Dr Martin is primarily concerned with the US interest in Korea—“a wiser course for the United States” (or for that matter all of Asia-Pacific) and not with what Koreans wanted or may still want.

    In fact, the massacre on Jeju island was not “social unrest.” It was the first in the extermination campaigns of the communists (or those opponents the US and Rhee regime declared to be communists) in all of Korea. These actions began with the overt and covert support of the USMGIK which gladly deployed Japanese and Korean collaborators peninsula-wide. Backing Kim Ku might have led to a peaceful Korea, but that is not what the US wanted at all. The US wanted a dictatorship and wanted to turn all of Korea into a war platform against China. It also wanted to Christianize all of Korea.

    Unfortunately, even attempts to popularize his Korea research have largely failed, if one considers that US Korean policy and the ignorance of the US population about Korea have scarcely changed since Theodore Roosevelt got his Nobel prize for helping Japan colonize it.

    David Martin’s review is also an example of the importance of the overall perspective. The perspective with which one examines the facts is a crucial distinction. Since Martin reads Korean history only as relevant for US history he cannot entertain the idea that Koreans did not want their country divided and occupied. Unlike Germany, Korea was not a party to the war. It was a conquered colony of Japan. Dean Rusk, who claimed to have chosen the 38th parallel as the dividing line, long before he became a cabinet secretary, explained how arbitrary the choice was. In other words, division of the peninsula was decided based on factors that had little or nothing to do with the interests or needs of Koreans, a people with a settled nationality in the peninsula spanning more than a millennium. That such a decision could be taken by people from a country with barely 150 years of history is insulting on its face. It would have been decent if Martin could have overcome his anti-communism sufficiently to examine the copious evidence Cumings produced to show what the real US role in Korea was and how it has done everything possible to maintain the ROK as a launch pad against China, as it remains today.

    In an environment of such enhanced belligerence, guided by military doctrines of perpetual war, an organizer of Veterans for Peace (as stated in Dr Martin’s biography) might contribute by dispelling some of the illusions that still nurture manifest destiny in the hearts and minds of those who rule the US.

    The post Another War Diary Entry first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Actually, I limit my exposure to daily media considerably. My experience as a journalist, when there was still some conventional meaning assignable to that term, began in school. I had become the news editor of the school paper. Whereas previously the monthly student production was devoted to athletic events and other entertainments, I introduced reporting on issues both in the school and those off the school grounds that nonetheless were relevant for pupils and the routines to which we were all subject. My model in those days was The Economist, still published in the UK and reasonably free from cant. Our school paper received several prizes from the journalism school at the state university that I would later attend. There, I tried to write for the university paper. However the closer one got to the ambitious professionals, the less interest in substance was to be found. The pinnacle of my experience was a two-year tour as an accredited freelance journalist in the UN Headquarters, New York. That was back in the ancient 80s when the regime over which Ronald Reagan nominally presided made its ownership of the United Nations more explicit than it had been since using it to cover its war against Korea (and China). I attended innumerable press conferences including those held by such luminaries as Margaret Thatcher, Rajiv Gandhi, Roland Dumas and some figures from states that receive less attention.

    It was the year when then New Zealand prime minister David Lange accused France of state terrorism before the entire General Assembly—a speech French foreign minister Dumas told me he had not heard. 1985 was a jubilee in which the United Nations organisation celebrated that it had reached 45 years of age. Heads of state and government accumulated in the East Side nest donated by the Rockefeller dynasty to house that august preserver of the world’s peace and prosperity—as the United States defined. There was still a Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and a German Democratic Republic. The CIA was still waging counter-insurgency throughout Central America and all was Right in the world. That is to the extent one still could imagine what Left meant.

    Through accident or design, I travelled to Brazil the following year and studied the process of apparent return to civilian rule after the 1964 military coup the US initiated. In 1989, I drove to Berlin for a common weekend visit only to find that by 10 November the last meaningful preservative of Eastern European sovereignty was to be removed. In 1991, I was again surprised. I had booked my flight to South Africa before the announcement of Nelson Mandela’s release. What I witnessed in the first half of that year was prescient. Twenty years later, the book I wrote about that experience has been re-published. Whether it will get any more notice today is anyone’s guess.

    In other words, I have been fortunate enough to enjoy proximity to noteworthy political personalities, remarkable historical events, and those whose ostensible task was to report on them for many years. As I have said to my sporting friends, I prefer observant participation to the spectacles. My cricketing skills are minimal. Yet I would rather play than just watch. Of course I am no politician, “playing” for me is personal observation, not following what others tell me is important.

    This year the war commenced among the imperial powers of the Western peninsula of Eurasia, led by the British Empire and its vassals, has been waged for more than a century, 120 years to be precise. In his 1947 book, The Future in Perspective, German historian Sigmun Neumann called the era 1914-1945 the “second Thirty Years War”. Perhaps we should call the era in which we live the “second Hundred Years War”. That would still only cover a small part of the events of the past century. Given the present situation the most comprehensive designation I can imagine is the “second Fourth Crusade”.

    In 2001, the latent policies that had shaped the previous ten decades of malice and belligerence were articulated in the language most closely resembling the decrees of Innocent III. By 2020 those policies had become manifest in every aspect of Western political, military, economic and social practice. The Global War on Terror was successfully transformed from an episodic campaign against brown people associated with Islam to a general campaign to reduce the world’s population and subordinate the East, beginning with the successor to Orthodoxy in the Christian world. An incident in Wuhan in 2019 was exploited to create conditions for an expanded version of the Opium Wars against China—a war concealed by duplicity and hypocrisy that puts the Arrow incident to shame.

    The journalism to which so much reference is made—as to its virtues and failings—is scarcely able to imagine, let alone report, the era in which we live. Journalism as it has been taught and imitated dwells on the immediate or the fiction of the immediate to be exact. With the contraction of memory and the dissolution of the traditional forms of time and space, the journalist responds by limiting the scope of an already truncated perceptual scheme.

    Although the war being waged by Ukraine against Russia is based on consistent Western policies and methods, the bulk of the discussion and the reporting that feeds it focusses either on the battlefield (now called battlespace in military jargon) or on the relationships between Russia and Ukraine and NATO. At the beginning of Russia’s Special Military Operation, the Russian government stated that one of its key objectives is the de-Nazification of Ukraine. The journalistic response in the West has been mainly to ignore the substance upon which this aim is based. Of course there are references among the reasonably sane to the embarrassing or criminal inclusion of formations in the Ukrainian military that are “neo-Nazi”, the most notorious of these is the Azov Division/ Battalion. Although the US/ NATO spokespersons assert that these are not neo-Nazi elements, it has been necessary to downplay the appearance of NS insignia (not foreign to elements of US Forces either) in order to retain this fiction. A recent RIAS video, obtained from Italian journalists embedded in the Ukrainian units that invaded Kursk, shows a Ukrainian soldier wearing a fatigue cap with an NS badge. Shocked attention is given to the SS runes on the cap — see screenshot below.

    To illustrate how the journalistic microscope functions, the shock is focused on the rune “bacillus”. However the petri dish in which this bacillus was found is largely ignored. The SS runes may catch the superficially informed as formally objectionable national socialist (NS) symbols that make a good cause look bad. For those that oppose the war they may see this as proof that the Ukrainian regime is unscrupulous, willing to use anyone to fight its war. From this follow conclusions like, the NS symbols should be prohibited and purged (without addressing why they are worn in the first place) or the Ukrainian war is wrong because it is being fought by neo-Nazis.

    If the microscope is abandoned and higher magnification is applied, then we find a curious confirmation of the foregoing description of continuous war against the East. First of all, the cap badge the soldier is wearing is that of the SS-Leibstandart “Adolf Hitler”. This formation was an element of the II SS Panzer Gruppe, commanded by Paul Hausser, which waged the 1943 battle of Kursk in which the German Wehrmacht and SS paramilitary divisions were defeated. The Azov Battalion/ Division adopted the standard of the Waffen SS-Division “Das Reich” (also once under Hausser’s command). This could be interpreted as evidence that the vanguard of the Ukrainian Armed Forces is essentially composed of the reconstituted Waffen-SS. The organisation, training and operational deployment of these units is entirely consistent with the manner in which the Waffen-SS was created and deployed in the war against the Soviet Union, a war that only ended with latter’s dissolution.

    These are not neo-Nazi formations. They are fascist units created by the same forces that armed and deployed German military might against the Soviet Union in 1941. They were created from the legacy of the SS units rescued and conserved by the Anglo-American Empire since 1944. Seen in this way these insignia are the inheritance of the regimental history they claim as their own. The British Imperial Government and the United States Government both organized the rescue of at least 1,000 paramilitary men of the Waffen-SS Division Galizia in Italy. With the services of the Gehlen Org (the precursor to the Bundesnachrichtendienst, Federal Germany’s CIA franchise) and the ODESSA, Waffen-SS officers and men were provided with all manner of escape to safe havens, e.g. in North and South America. Officially the SS was declared to be a criminal organisation under the Basic Law for the Federal Republic of Germany after 1945. Even the display of insignia associated with the NSDAP (Nazi Party) and its infrastructure was made a crime. Occasionally, conspicuous trials were held, when unavoidable, to preserve the myth of Western innocence in the creation of the NS regime and conceal its complicity in Operation Barbarossa.

    SS-Oberst-Gruppenführer and Waffen-SS Generaloberst (deemed by the NSDAP regime equivalent to general officer rank in the regular army) Paul Hausser, in his capacity as spokesman for the Hilfsgemeinschaft auf Gegenseitigkeit (HIAG), a benevolent organisation (and lobby) devoted to the promoting the interests of Waffen-SS veterans, pled until his death in 1972 for the rehabilitation of the Waffen-SS; that they be treated on a par with the Wehrmacht veterans. Regular soldiers retained their pension and other benefits. These were denied to members of the Waffen-SS because in the view of the established military they were not soldiers and their organisation had been declared criminal as a whole. The law was cynically applied like much of so-called “de-Nazification” since civil servants who obtained “Persilscheine”, certificates of de-Nazification named after the leading laundry detergent Persil, were not only retained in office but continued their careers, even if they had been NSDAP members. German journalist Bernt Engelmann in his Roman à clef, Grosses Bundesverdienstkreuz (1974) and his 1975 Schwarzbuch: Strauß, Kohl und Co. and 1986 Schwarzbuch. Das Kohl & Co-Komplott, traced the careful erection of West Germany’s regime by the US intelligence services using first generation NSDAP functionaries like Franz-Joseph Strauss and second-generation fascists nurtured by the Heidelberg SS clique around Fritz Ries, including Hans-Martin Schleyer, e.g., the galleon figure for the final assault on the Soviet Union, Helmut Kohl. The first years of this story, including the Gladio terrorist operations of the early 1980s, were dramatized by GDR television in the series Das Unsichtbare Visier in the 1970s and 1980s. It was not until the 1990s that the BBC aired a documentary showing that most of the European “left-wing terrorism”, including the Bologna railway station bombing and the murder of Aldo Moro, were under the direction of the NATO Gladio operation, based on the structures imported from the Gehlen Org. None of this is ever even mentioned when trying to explain the curiously self-destructive policies of the current Berlin government.

    Hausser’s central argument, for which he also published in 1953 the book Waffen-SS im Einsatz (the Waffen-SS in battle) and in 1966 Soldaten wie andere auch (Soldiers like any other), was that the Waffen-SS was a true multi-national force which had honourably served in the defence of “European ideals.” Hausser’s personal defence was no doubt related to the fact that he had been a regular army officer prior to joining the SS. Until the end of the GDR and the Soviet Union, Hausser’s books and all those who followed in his train were attacked officially and in the German mass media for “historical revisionism”. In fact, as late as 1995, the so-called “Wehrmachtausstellung” produced by the Hamburg Institute for Social Research, caused a major scandal in military circles with documentary evidence to punch a huge hole in the “clean” Wehrmacht myth. It was also accused of incorrect attribution and captioning of photographs however the essential message was never fully rebutted. If the Waffen-SS was the vanguard of the West’s war of annihilation in the East, the Wehrmacht as a force was necessary for that war to be waged with due ferocity. While until 1990 historical revisionism was the technical term for defending the war in the East (against the Soviet Union), Hausser’s version of history has become the official doctrine of Berlin and Brussels. Today’s Ukrainian Armed Forces are praised as a multi-national force defending Europe. If one listens to any high imperial official, especially Mr Stoltenberg and Ms von der Leyne (NATO and EU, i.e. military and civil households of the Anglo-American Empire), the Ukrainian Armed Forces, commanded nominally from Kiev, are fighting “Europe’s fight”. HM’s Canadian Government in Ottawa even applauded the prior service of a Waffen-SS veteran because he too had been fighting for such ideals as a young man in SS paramilitary uniform. The barely implied declaration is that Russia is not Europe and certainly has no European “ideals”.

    Since the Anglo-American Empire and its vassals in western Eurasia are fully committed to Ukraine, it can be no surprise therefore that they are also fully committed to the IDF slaughter and conquest of Palestine, in absolute defence of European “ideals”. The declared “war of annihilation” (how else can one characterize the boldly proclaimed objectives of the Tel Aviv regime?) underway since 2023 is merely the “sacred right of self-defence”—with which no other state in the region is endowed. It takes enormous strains of the intellect not to compare the rhetoric today with that in NSDAP-ruled Germany from 1939 until 1945. However, the legions of scribes and megaphone operators in journalism assembled are obviously up to the task. Would anyone dare to compare the more than fifty standing ovations the head of that regime received in a joint session of the US Congress with the news reel footage of Reichstag sessions? Would anyone even understand such a comparison were it made?

    Two of the great propaganda slanders of the past hundred years are that the leader of the Soviet Union started the war to expand communism throughout the world—provoking the defensive-offensive response of the West through (its proxy) the National Socialist regime in Germany. Another version of that slander is that Stalin and Hitler were essentially the same, intending to divide the European peninsula between them. The other is that the Grand Mufti of Palestine, Amin al-Husseini, represented the nascent Arab war against Jews. These and other fabrications or distortions of the historical record are in part preserved by the overwhelming control of the world’s mass media and educational/ indoctrination system by the Anglo-American (in widest sense of that term) Establishment. The Establishment history of the past century either exaggerates casualties/ fatalities on its own side or minimises/ ignores them on the side of the victims of Western aggression. One only has to consider the Normandy farce and the refusal of “Western allies” to commemorate the Russian victory over the fascist invasion—not incursion. (Here note that journalists report about the Russian “invasion” of Ukraine but not about the Ukrainian “incursion”.)

    The Soviet Union, which bore the brunt of Western (Nazi) invasion at a cost of more than 20 million dead plus untold destruction, rightly demanded war crimes trials in London. Britain and the US reluctantly conceded. However in Nuremberg the Soviet Union had to be content with the trial of NS officials for crimes against Jews and not war crimes against the citizens of the Soviet Union. By 1967, everyone in the world knew the number “six million”, while scarcely anyone knew about the 20 million plus in the Soviet Union. This omission was so egregious that after a major, prime time 26-episode British documentary about the war between 1941 and 1945, entitled World at War (1973), with narration by Lawrence Olivier, had been broadcast throughout the English-speaking West with almost no mention of the Eastern front, massive protest by the Soviet Union forced the production and broadcast in 1978 of The Unknown War, another twenty episodes, narrated by Bruce Lancaster, to show where the war was really fought and won (episode 7 describes the Battle of Kursk). At least twenty million deaths in China were not counted at all. In a little country like Portugal a typical bookstore has more books on display about the Western theatre of that war, in which Portugal was neutral, and the NSDAP than books about its own national history.

    To this day the only casualties that are universally recognized from that phase of the “second Hundred Years War” are six million non-combatant forced labourers in the occupied East—where the war was fiercest. That fundamental disproportionality is also an essential part of the overall distortion and deception (along with a variety of serious commercial and criminal enforcement penalties) which prevents the daily journalist and his readership from seeing the “second Fourth Crusade” being waged from the Baltic Sea to the Gulf of Aden. It prevents them from recognizing the age in which we live and the conditions that have made it what it is.

    In an article titled, “The Crusade is Over” (The Unz Review, 7 September 2023), Laurent Guyénot argues that the Christian crusade constituted an innovation. He writes:

    The Crusade introduced a new way of individual salvation: penitential warfare. God, speaking through His vicar on earth, now granted full remission of sins (thence a place in Heaven) to whoever would swear to travel to the Holy Land and kill infidels or be killed by them. According to the historian Orderic Vitalis, writing around 1135, “the pope urged all who could bear arms to fight against the enemies of God, and on God’s authority he absolved all the penitent from all their since from the hour they took the Lord’s cross”.

    This idea survived even in the Protestant deviation. The Church militant hymn, The Son of God goes forth to war is just one gory example.

    When the Global War on Terror was proclaimed, the rechristening of the second Hundred Years War as the second Fourth Crusade, penitential warfare needed no mention. On the contrary, the justification offered by all those who preached the crusade was that something or some people embodying “radical Islam” or “Islamists” had sworn to fight the West to the death. A powerful propaganda strategy has always been to accuse the target of the acts, omissions, or policies one is covertly pursuing. Thus the target is seen as the author of the very aggression launched against him.

    Negotiation, both overt and covert, can be used to amplify this drama of guilt and enmity as the target is deceived into acts he believes will end hostilities, which are then shaped to enhance them. Analyst-participants like Scott Ritter—to mention someone everyone probably recognises—have been eyewitness to these deceits, even if late in recognizing them. With such overwhelming control over the world propaganda media for a century now, it is almost impossible for targets to expose the deceptions to which they have been subject. The few journalists who notice and try to report them are no better situated to alter the signal to noise ratio in favour of the defence.

    Details reported may help to correct errors of fact. However, without a fundamental orientation, including a critical, cultural historical point of view—one that necessarily extends beyond the horizon of daily news or even intensive analysis—it is very easy to remain a captive of marketing and info-fashion. New things—newly reported or learned—excite but without context obstruct rather than promote information. Joseph Weizenbaum, in his continued critique of AI before he died, insisted on the distinction between data and information. Information is the product of judgement. Data can be anything. Weizenbaum insisted that judgement can and ought only to be exercised by humans—not machines. Journalism functions as a soft machine. It generates data and packages it so that it appears without judgement or is saturated with judgements. Transfats were developed to enhance the shelf life of processed foods. Transfacts enhance the credibility of processed synthetic data. Like a drug it induces a kind of euphoria (dysphoria) called “being informed”. The actual exercise of judgement requires a level of sobriety that standard journalism—regardless of ideological orientation—was not designed to sustain.

    A great many terms used in reporting or discussing what happened, happens or may happen in our world are unanalysed. “Interests” is perhaps one of the worst but there are many others. To illustrate just how useless this term is consider the following substitution: “the person whom one has seized in the process of setting fire to one’s home, or perhaps with a douse of petrol to one’s self, was merely pursuing his interests.” This is not an absurd use. Another version of this is that a person who engages in a cash transaction on a public thoroughfare and is robbed in the process must expect that there are people who have an interest in theft where they believe it is possible. It is only the occasional enforcement of the criminal code that makes it probably safe to say that these kinds of “interest” are generally termed “criminal” and subject to punishment. However, once the word is applied to corporate or state entities, these actions are beyond judgement. The same applies to such terms as “right of self-defence” or “national security”. This shorthand is readily absorbed as a mark of sophistication when it is really a screen to obscure activities from scrutiny.

    While the objective blockade of Gaza that has been in place for two decades, only to be intensified by the centrally managed mass murder of the population that commenced October 2023, is occasionally mentioned, the compulsion to produce “news” leads to notices of IDF homicidal attacks on every form of food, medical or other relief to the besieged as if these were weather reports. A recent report that the WHO, a private-public partnership (euphemism for fascist parastatal), will launch an experimental polio inoculation campaign on the IDF’s targets of annihilation ought to remind people of the use to which Africans have been put by pharmaments manufacturers with misanthropic funds, or even the medical experiments conducted against captives during the war in the 20th century. Alas, not even the enormous fallout from the 2021-22 global injection terror is compared.

    Journalists swim in a cesspool with just enough water to distort their vision, especially their sense of distance. The “news” demands the appearance of unique data, unusual events or angles. Supposedly repetition is bad for the “news”. What is really meant is that “news” is based on titillation, combining voyeurism, desire, fear and what the Germans call Schadensfreude (enjoying when others are injured, a kind of abstract vengefulness). Of course, repetition is essential to the effect of the “news”. Redundancy in signalling serves to amplify a message as well as to squelch noise (undesired signals/ messages). The inability to accurately assess distance and engage critically is also aggravated by the addiction to unanalysed jargon, sometimes due to the journalist’s ignorance or laziness, but also because of infection with the culture of the powerful and their agents. This culture is transmitted not only by education but also by the rewards and punishments, the seduction and promotion, as both Philip Agee and the late Udo Ulfkotte explained, when one belongs to the scrivener guild at court. The economic and social privilege that accrues when one has been permitted into anterooms of power is hard to dismiss. The proximity to authority lends the charisma of authority. Even the opposition scribe can become complicit in this spectacle, out of vanity or because his benefits accrue (even if the ultimate sources are concealed). That is part of the power of pageantry and the miracle of philanthropy. Salvation is promised if one is willing to take up the cross or pay someone else to do so. The warriors have always had their chroniclers. At the end of the day all we have on which to base our judgements—and judgements we must make—are the legacies, the chronicles and the wasteland.

    The post War Diary: An Appreciation of Legacies first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Actually I have gotten tired of explaining to people the deception at the heart of airport security procedures. For years I have tried to show that the explanations given for the increasingly intrusive, not to mention time-consuming, controls to which passengers in international travel and for decades now domestic movement have nothing to do with safety or protection of travellers, nor the safety and protection of transport assets such as aircraft or railway rolling stock. I have told younger people how easy it was to board a train or enter an airport in the 1970s. The response was either incredulity or claims that the world has become more dangerous than in those “good old days”.

    Very recently I read a scholarly article in which the author attempted to summarize the history of US policy in Africa, dating from when the Kingdom of Morocco was the first government to recognize the newly formed confederation of North American states that had won their independence from Great Britain. The author supplied a diplomatic history which culminated in the regime’s focus on the risks of “terrorism” in Africa as a key element of its foreign policy. Nowhere in the article—and this is no exception—was the concept of terrorism defined or elaborated. Apparently there was no need to identify or even to investigate the content of a “terrorism” or “counter-terrorism” policy.

    In previous reflections I have attempted to clarify the political language used to manage and confuse both the ordinary person and those who for whatever reason have devoted professional efforts to understand the course of events since the end of what Eric Hobsbawm called the “long 19th century”. Economist Michael Hudson has argued that until the outbreak of the Great War (World War I) the world—at least the industrialised part—had in fact been moving toward socialism. Anglo-American scholarship has traditionally mocked this observation attributed most notably to Karl Marx. However such a denial of historical facts only served to justify the wars initiated by the British and American Empires to prevent this development. Professor Hudson argued that there were competing forms of socialism. Marx was a partisan for a particular tendency. However, Marx had every reason to believe that some form of socialism was inevitable. The successful October Revolution in Russia and the failed November revolution in Germany were not aberrations. On the contrary the two world wars and subsequent long war after 1945 were concerted efforts by the meanwhile merged Anglo-American Empire to resist and ultimately defeat socialism—except in China.

    The summary argument below is based on the assumption that the 20th century and its extension into the 21st century has been shaped by the Anglo-American war against any form of socialism, especially to the extent based upon popular democratic political culture. The principal obstacle to understanding this long war lies in a failure to properly comprehend the underlying philosophy of governance in the Anglo-American Empire and its idiosyncratic use of the term “democracy”. The US, due largely to its settler-colonial history, but also to the culturally diverse immigrant pool that would compose its population, has been the site of considerable conflict over the terms of “democracy” to the extent that immigrants from non-English-speaking countries also brought their own political and social culture with them. Hence, much of US political warfare has been the concerted effort by the Anglo-American elite to impose that idiosyncratic democracy model on ethnic communities with different social and political traditions. The imposition of a highly concentrated mass media propaganda apparatus and industrial management structure was facilitated by the absence of any surviving indigenous socio-political culture or entrenched population. Thus, it is hardly surprising that numerous foreign observers of US society were struck by the extreme conformism among the country’s inhabitants, something quite unfamiliar to visitors from the European continent or other parts of the world.

    Anglo-American political theory, going back at least as far as the so-called Glorious Revolution, defined democracy, not as a principle of popular political rule but as a model for the governance of joint stock companies. The franchise was not only explicitly restricted to property ownership. The scope of the franchise extended to the appointment of officers and servants and the allocation of profits generated by business operations. Following the example of the Dutch East India Company (VOC), the British East India Company became the model of the corporate state, where even the monarch was reduced to the role of shareholder. The “democracy” and democratic procedures formulated for directing the business of the chartered companies were never intended for determining, let alone implementing, policies for the general welfare. The general welfare, although occasionally the subject of English and Scottish theories, was effectively limited to the privileges and immunities of shareholders, individually or collectively. The origin of parties in this system was not the organised interest of citizens but of economic actors, i.e. adventurers (investors), landowners, and merchants. The fact that Anglo-American political theory has been extrapolated to include citizens, i.e. nominally independent commercial actors, does not mean that the underlying qualification for the franchise has been altered.

    Here it is important to note that the joint stock company is an exclusive not an inclusive entity. The substance of political struggle throughout the 19th and 20th centuries can also be understood as efforts to either reduce the entry barrier to shareholding or expand the scope of business interest to include elements of the general welfare. The so-called progressive movement was essentially an effort to subject social or general welfare interests to the principles of scientific management. Management principles that evolved in the concentration of industry were adapted to discipline populist demands. Professional specialisation in political, social and economic functions created experts in the fields to which citizen interests were allocated. Just as Frederick Taylor used time-motion studies to turn skilled work into discrete operations that could be performed by unskilled workers, the progressive movement and emerging social sciences turned complex social and economic interests into simplified business operations that could be performed without the need for educated, informed and interested deliberation. Politics was established as a management discipline within the dominant ideology of corporatism, the underlying theory of joint stock company governance.

    Fast forward to the post-colonial, liberation struggle epoch following the failed attempt to destroy the Soviet Union and prevent the emergence of New China: After the consensus-building diplomacy among the great powers of Europe and North America, culminating in the Berlin Conference, the allocation of overseas territories, mainly but not exclusively Africa, was inscribed in international law. When in 1918, the German Empire, Austria-Hungary, and the Ottoman Empire were subjugated militarily, their respective overseas territories or domains were allocated to the victors. In some cases they were absorbed into the winning empires properly and in other cases they were distributed after negotiations to the victors as so-called “mandates”. After WWII the remaining mandates were converted into so-called Trusteeships, reflecting the change in language between the League of Nations and its successor the United Nations. The mandate was a legal concept introduced to conceal the spoils system by which the losers of the Great War were punished by depriving them of their colonial possessions under the pretext of self-determination, whereby the victors’ colonies were not offered such benefits. The survival of the Soviet Union despite all attempts to destroy it since its foundation, left the Western powers, now led by the United States of America, with the unpleasant task of supporting the independence of former colonies while keeping the deep economic control over them that had made them so profitable for their owners. The USSR, which since the consolidation of the October Revolution had renounced imperial aspirations or legacy, became a vocal and occasionally material supporter of the rights to national self-determination which had first been proposed by the insincere US government presided over by Thomas Woodrow Wilson. Whether Wilson actually believed his famous 14 points or simply promoted them as beneficial for US interests can never be known for sure. The man who “kept the US out of war (in Europe)” to win election and then proceeded to approve US war mobilization efforts may be accused of insincerity or impotence (or both). The details are something for archivists and apologists to sort.

    One of the less directly advertised outcomes of the Great War was the consolidation of financial capital protected mainly in the City of London, New York City and the Swiss Confederation. The establishment of the Federal Reserve System in 1913 extended the private control of national economies exercised through the Bank of England in the British Empire to the once independent North American federation. Carroll Quigley, in his posthumously published The Anglo-American Establishment, describes the Cecil Rhodes Round Table project for reasserting the British Empire by integrating the United States. What later became known as the Milner group, after Rhodes protégé Alfred Milner, concentrated doctrinal control over the British media, through All Souls and Baliol and the Rhodes Scholarships over British academia, and through the Chatham House consortium (Royal Institute of International Affairs and Council on Foreign Relations) over the formulation of imperial policy. According to Quigley, this doctrinal control was imposed on what passes for journalism and historical scholarship. Thus in combination with its friends in North America, Herbert Hoover comes to mind, what counts as knowledge about the British Empire (and since 1945 the Anglo-American Empire) has been subject to the control and manipulation by a complex cadre structure extending through universities, publishers, research institutions and so-called “think tanks”. While this invisible ministry of truth, as George Orwell called it, has not been able to suppress all dissenting interpretations of the past three centuries of Anglo-American dominance, it has been able to force much of the dissent to the margins. This is done by a) denying access to regular teaching and research posts with the authority they confer; b) strict control of access to archives and official records much of which are held in secured private vaults like those of the Hoover Institution at Stanford University; c) exclusion from the reputable press and publishing entities who propagate the authorized history and interpretations; d) rewarding ideological compliance with all the preferment and largesse at the Empire’s disposal; e) the creation and promotion of innumerable institutions with real and simulated scholarly expertise to flood public space with the authorized version(s). Of course, there are less pleasant means available but despite the proliferation of alternative and social media these are sufficient to impose an enormous burden on anyone trying to present facts or interpretations inconsistent with the preservation of the Empire and the devotion it fosters.

    Quigley admits that he actually agreed with the objectives of the Establishment he described. As a sympathetic reporter he was more concerned about the potential failures than betraying any secrets that might impede the progress of the world he ardently supported. That is probably one reason why he discusses the problems created by the Rhodes testaments in their various versions, aggravated by the fact that Cecil Rhodes had no heirs to the fortune he had amassed through his British South Africa Company and other entities. Quigley gives little attention to Lord Rothschild, Rhodes’s friend and executor. In fact, the Rothschild interests are barely mentioned. Although the two branches of the infamous financial barony are notorious for the extent of their involvement in international affairs (business and political), discussion of their familial or business interests in the affairs of nations has been consistently trivialized if mentioned at all. In the era when the Habsburg dynasty ruled an “empire upon which the sun never set”—predating British claims to that distinction—no serious historian would ignore the matrimonial arrangements made to extend that control. Yet since the French Revolution, the only attention to dynastic profligacy has been given to the House of Saxe-Coburg/ Battenberg/ Windsor, in short the dispersion of the family of which Britain’s Victoria became “grandmother”. Monarchy, especially the British, is inseparable from pageantry. The display of opulence or even its conspicuous avoidance serves a critical function in maintaining the respect for the power behind it. Although apparently trivial, the fact that the recently deceased and longest reigning British monarch, Elizabeth Windsor, was casually called “the queen” even by people who were not imperial/ commonwealth subjects or citizens demonstrates how an archaic form of personal rule can be popularized even among ostensible republicans. In other words, what is displayed officially should never be treated as accidental. At the same time what is conspicuously absent from public view should not be considered careless omission.

    All that said, what does this tell us about the definition of the term “terrorism”? Meanwhile there is an enormous body of literature on the subject. The subject has been treated as a species of crime, as an instrument of political action, as a moral issue, and as a field of behavioural control, e.g. policing, prevention, protection, care for victims etc. Terrorism has been defined sociologically, psychologically and politically. It has been treated as a policing problem and a military threat. An industry has been established and thrives on the products of “counter-terrorism”, “anti-terrorism”, and security. Innumerable institutions have been founded and funded to handle the problem. In my youth the term “terrorism” was used to categorize violent crime or threatened violence by persons or organizations that were not entitled to use violence, usually against—at least it was claimed—unarmed, innocent or defenceless civilians. The most notorious “terrorist” act of my youth resulted in the death of an Israeli Olympic squad during the Munich Olympics. According to the story at the time, a group called “Black September” seized the Israeli Olympic team in Munich as a means of calling attention to the policies of the Israeli government in Palestine. The immediate result of this action was the deployment of a special weapons and tactics team, what became Grenzschutzgruppe Neun (GSG 9) to rescue the hostages whereby all hostages and Black September members were killed. The second result was the first regular and systematic searches of international airline traffic, initially applied to all flights to Israeli destinations.

    Of course the actions of the National Liberation Front in Vietnam were also called “terrorism,” but due to the fact that the US was waging a massive war in the then Republic of Vietnam (the scale of which only became apparent after Richard Nixon’s forced resignation) and that all these acts occurred in Vietnam, they were merely local matters for those in Vietnam. Terrorism in the western peninsula of Eurasia was mainly of interest to NATO bases and the political establishment that had been created by the US after 1945. Bombings and kidnapping in Italy or kidnapping and assassination in Germany were designated as terrorism but still treated as local matters. No later than the late 1990s it was revealed that much if not all of that European terrorism was organized by the Gladio network created by the Anglo-American intelligence services at the end of WWII. The term that emerged was the “strategy of tension” whereby covert NATO forces intended to purge what remained of the Left from European politics by associating it with supposed “left-wing terrorism”. The immediate effect of this covert action campaign, aside from the selective death and destruction caused, was the adoption of internal security legislation and proliferation of special police powers throughout the West European Union/ EEC/ EU. Those powers and legislation have only been increased and radicalized with time.

    The ideological premise of the “strategy of tension” was that the Soviet Union and its communist allies was funding and arming groups of dissidents (mainly youth) in order to foment revolution and overthrow the “basic democratic order” in the West. In some cases these terrorists were supposed to be Maoists or even Trotskyists. These distinctions added to public confusion and permitted the actual sponsors to manipulate competing groups. As operatives have occasionally admitted, the funding of a Maoist group of “ultra-leftists” was a powerful strategy for dividing mainstream socialist and communist parties, thus diluting their electoral impact in countries like France and Italy where they enjoyed substantial support.

    With the demise and annexation of the German Democratic Republic and subsequent collapse of the Soviet Union with the entire Eastern European infrastructure it had created, terrorism could no longer be presented as the work of the “Evil Empire” headquartered in Moscow. The only useful terrorist venue remaining was in Palestine where the terrorist regime that established the Israeli State had been waging war against the remainder of the indigenous inhabitants (their “Indians”) at least since 1948. The expansion of the occupation to part of Egypt and parts of the other states reluctantly carved by the French and British out of their Sykes-Picot mandates had elevated the armed resistance to international terrorism. Despite United Nations resolutions adopted with the license given to European and Ottoman terrorists to found an independent state by the name of Israel, recognizing the inherent rights of the indigenous inhabitants as at least equal to those of the invading immigrants, the Israeli terrorist forces were regularized as a national army while the indigenous self-defence was relegated to the status of terrorists. The expansion of territorial control—i.e. conquest and imposition of vassalage—in neighbouring countries created the conditions de facto whereby the indigenous resistance became “international terrorism”. Countries that explicitly supported what would become the Palestine Liberation Organization in compliance with the UN resolutions licensing the establishment of Israel and the inherent rights of Palestine’s historic inhabitants were denounced by the former mandatory powers, under aegis of the Anglo-American Empire, as sponsors of “international terrorism”. While the term terrorism continued to be used in US-led counter-insurgency operations throughout Southeast Asia and Latin America, the focus of attention became the Middle East. Terrorism was popularized as a kind of generic trait of “Arabs”, itself a term of distortion applied now to all people in the Middle East who are not European Jews or their descendants living under the state of Israel.

    In 1997, William Kristol and Robert Kagan, founded the Project for the New American Century (PNAC). In this context, such notions as “a new Pearl Harbor” began to circulate in what are called neo-conservative political circles. The “new” American Century refers to the appellation attributed to Henry Luce, that the 20th century, especially in the wake of World War II, was the American century. Kristol, Kagan and their like argued that with the elimination of the Soviet Union as the archenemy the world had essentially been made free for US supremacy. However, such supremacy would be challenged. They asserted that just as “Pearl Harbor” brought Americans together behind strong leadership to wage an international war for American values, it would take extreme stimulus to move the American people from their inherent lethargy and turn them into a force capable of assuring US supremacy around the world. This stood in stark contrast to the idea held widely beyond American shores that the end of the Soviet Union and hence the end of the so-called Cold War would bring the long-desired “peace dividend”. Kristol, Kagan and those who supported them were worried—just as their fathers had been in 1945—that peace would break out. Members of the permanent foreign policy establishment, like George Kennan, and the arms industry, like the DuPont family, were seriously concerned that the enormous profits and power accrued waging covert war against the Soviet Union and counter-insurgency everywhere else would stop once the public on both sides of the Atlantic recognized that there was no more enemy. In fact, the principal occupation of the policy elite in the Anglo-American Empire as it emerged in 1913 has been the threat of peace. Once one understands the implications of that principle then it is no longer a mystery that the longest continuing war since 1945 is the United Nations invasion of the Korean peninsula in 1951.

    Just as Carroll Quigley pays almost no attention to the interest the Rothschild dynasty could have in the Round Table project, almost no attention is given to the role of the Rockefeller dynasty—acting mainly, but not exclusively, through the Rockefeller Foundation—in the establishment of the United Nations. However, a sober recognition of the function of so-called philanthropy (the corporate successor to papal or royal patronage and preferment) ought to induce more critical attention to dynastic power. The League of Nations is inconceivable without the establishment of the Federal Reserve System with its merger of Rockefeller and Rothschild interests. The shift from Geneva to New York was an acknowledgement of where industrial and military power lay. The invisible pseudo-neutrality of the imperial-based League was replaced by the unabashed display of US power, managed by its paramount dynasty. While it is true that the Du Pont dynasty is the senior “noble house” in North America it lacked the international scope that the Standard Oil magnates had acquired when dividing the world of petroleum with their British counterparts. The October Revolution and the failure to destroy the Soviet Union by 1943 meant that Standard Oil was simply the more powerful of the two energy kingdoms. Naturally it can only be speculation but it is reasonable to assume that the Anglo-American financial oligarchy consummated in 1913 and baptised in 1918 was ready to wed in 1945.

    The preeminence of the financial oligarchy, not just in the latter half of the 20th century, but for the entirety of the 20th century, must be understood in order to grasp what terrorism really means today. Political-economist Michael Hudson has argued—in support of Karl Marx but based on historical analysis—that in fact everyone in the industrialized economies saw socialism as inevitable by the end of the 19th century. Marx was not utopian. Nor did the 1918 German revolutionaries, murdered at the behest of their Social Democratic and aristocratic enemies, err in the judgement that the collapse of the Hohenzollern monarchy was the signal for socialism in the German Reich. It took enormous violent effort to prevent socialism from becoming the dominant political-economic form in the West. That effort began with the Great War, later World War I, which despite propaganda at the time and since was a class war intended to destroy working class movements throughout Europe and impose the new world financial order on what had been an agricultural and industrial economic system. A lot of popular debate, stimulated by attacks on China, focusses on the deindustrialization of the major Western economies. This is attributed to free trade agreements and expanding offshore manufacturing promoted by the policies introduced under Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. While it is true that the end of the war against Vietnam and the artificial oil crisis nominally caused by the 1973 oil boycott were inducements for major manufacturers to look for cheaper labour, this was opportunity not novelty. The end of World War II would have returned the US to massive unemployment had the destruction of competing industrial base not been so thorough, leaving US cartels with seemingly infinite markets for excess production. By 1973 this was no longer the case. European manufacturing, especially in Germany had recovered and was demonstrably more competitive than anything the US had to offer. Thus, the oil boycott purged the SME sector and—because of the secret agreements between the US and the main Arab producers to only bill oil in US dollars—allowed the US to continue to increase its financial stranglehold on much of the world economy that now needed USD liquidity to buy fuel and feed stock. The official media practically equated the results of this covert deal-making with “economic terrorism” by Arab states taking advantage of their nominal sovereignty over much of the world’s known oil reserves in an attempt to impose a solution to the expansion of the Israeli state in the region.

    The confluence of interests that led to the so-called Oil Crisis can be grasped by anyone who has read John Blair’s book The Control of Oil (1976), based on his work as a researcher for the US Congress investigating transnational corporations. The original report upon which Blair based his book exposed the intricate workings of the “Seven Sisters”, the world oil cartel, but was suppressed by order of President Eisenhower since its publication would possibly impair national security. Specifically the report showed how the oil cartel, led by Standard Oil (Esso), controlled the world supply of oil—and not the Arab potentates most of whom had been installed through the efforts of those very oil companies. Naturally the Eisenhower administration did not want to expose a key element of its international economic power. More importantly, as the 1973 fixing of oil prices to US dollars demonstrated, the control of oil was integral to the power of the Anglo-American financial oligarchy. Although the Bretton Woods institutions, World Bank and IMF, were initially designed so that the US dollar would replace sterling and subordinate the franc, the oil coup in 1973 gave the regime virtually unlimited power to bankrupt its collective bete noir, the newly independent countries of the fallen empires.

    Jamaican prime minister at the time, Michael Manley, made the point clear. When the Bretton Woods accords were signed, Jamaica as well as practically all the newly independent countries were part of either the sterling or franc system. They had no national currencies. Needless to say they were not represented in the negotiations. Until 1973 they imported or exported based on fixed exchange rates for their own currencies. With the Oil Crisis (coup) all these countries had to buy US dollars at exchange rates that could only drive their economies into debt spirals. Meanwhile the US Treasury could issue as many dollars as it needed to buy whatever it desired. Its banks, as owners of the World Bank and IMF, could dictate terms to any country without its own oil reserves and refining capacity. As Cuba learned, US refiners would not process alternative oil supplies from the Soviet Union, forcing it to nationalize plants built and operated by US multinationals. The capacity to manipulate both energy markets and currency markets was lodged in the two biggest banking and oil cartels, those of the Rockefeller and Rothschild families. The story of the international debt crisis is to extensive and complex to elaborate here. Yet it is crucial to recognize that energy and finance are two sides of the same institutional power. There is no financial power without control over energy and no energy policy without brute financial power.

    The familial or dynastic element in this analysis will strike many as excessively personal and others as insufficiently dialectical. However, even if men do not make history as they choose, history is nonetheless made by men. Men make history through organized action and through the capacity to shape the perceptions upon which others base their action. Men create institutions and they shape them, even if no one man ever completely controls even the institutions he creates. As I pointed out at the start of this appreciation, there are methods for investigating or at least describing how history is made or how power is exercised. Yet, many of these methods are incomplete or even insincerely applied. Political science and history offer explanations, but these are actually fairly low order descriptions of group behaviour or the results attributed to such actions. The terms of reference are simply too restricted. In the case of the Anglo-American Empire, Quigley argued that these restrictions are not accidental or incidental to some scholarly process which, were it refined, would give better results. Instead, Anglo-American historiography and hence its political science are skewed by those upon whose patronage they ultimately depend. This patronage has long ceased to be merely the gentlemen’s agreements made at All Souls or White’s. It did not take a century, but more than a hundred years have lapsed in which generations of cadre have spread throughout the imperial system. There is a plenitude of institutions whose staff and members may never have heard of let alone seen a Rockefeller or a Rothschild. The last thing that would occur to them is that they are domestic servants or courtiers in some great aristocratic household. However, they were born and raised in a culture which sustains the ideas, values and practices of those who engendered these dynasties. That is what distinguished institutions do. It is their primary function. Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard and Yale do have the capacity to educate but their foremost role is to indoctrinate, to instil loyalty first to the alma mater but also the culture for which she stands. While the fashions may change, the petty morality be modified, the essence which made these institutions possible and continues to sustain them is spiritual, in the Hegelian sense (cultural in Peckham’s sense). Hence it is from the capacity for cultural continuity along with the capability of undermining or destroying competing cultures that any serious analysis must accept as a foundation to extended power.

    It must be added here that the focus on the Rockefeller or Rothschild dynasties is historically accidental. They did not invent the financial system they currently dominate. The central elements of the modern financial system were internationalized by the papal-rabbinical regime in Rome. Meanwhile, these instruments have been digitalized. However the root of them all is the complex of indulgences, auricular confession, Inquisition and crusades. There is really nothing available to the IMF or Goldman Sachs that was not in the purview of Innocent III when waging the Fourth Crusade.

    Finance and energy are governed by two rarely stated but cardinal rules: “other people’s money” and “other people’s oil”. Since whatever is called money in any society is ultimately arbitrary, there is no natural limit to the supply. Financial power derives from controlling other people’s money. The Standard Oil trust was established not by owning the oil supplies but by controlling the transport, refining, sale and distribution of oil and oil products. The Anglo-American “central bank” cartel does not create money—that is solely the prerogative of the State. It creates debt for which the State farms taxes and other charges or provides enforcement. This is plain from the statutes establishing the Federal Reserve, the charter of the Bank of England and the agreements by which the Bank of International Settlements, World Bank, International Monetary Fund and their subsidiaries were formed as international entities beyond the reach of sovereign states or their citizens.

    Terrorism is not really what masked men do when they try to kidnap someone or seize something to extort a favourable political decision. It is not something Arabs, Muslims or communists do to achieve their aims. Terrorism is not a phenomenon against which one can be protected like locking one’s car or home or wearing safety belts. There is no armour or surveillance that can prevent or interrupt terrorism. Airport controls or entry controls at other public spaces cannot prevent terrorism or limit any damage attributed to it. Neither the amount of fluids carried in hand luggage, nor the prohibition of cutlery or small arms can have any impact on terrorism. Moreover, none of the foregoing are relevant to terrorism at all—in the way has been consistently and deceptively defined for decades.

    In order to understand terrorism and its relationship to the innumerable activities supposedly conducted or promoted to counter terrorism, one has to have a proper understanding of the overall cultural system in which this term is applied. It is necessary to examine what behaviour corresponds to terrorism, not the term is used to label. In other words one has to move from the explicit to the implicit or the stated to the unstated. Watch what is done. Do not be distracted by what is said. The overall cultural system is financial. That means that the instructions for performance at the highest explanatory level are governed by what can be called the imperatives of cash flow. Cash flow describes the movement of money, energy, primary commodities, and people (who for all intents and purposes are just another commodity).

    In the process of transforming the agricultural – industrial society back into a system of rents (or to use the papal-rabbinical terminology, the trade in grace), an model of allocating economic surplus was replaced with a model for managing scarcity. This model, sometimes attributed to Alfred Marshall but in fact developed by his successors, has been called marginalism. Coincidentally the economic theories upon which marginalism is based were articulated and popularized about the same time chattel slavery was being abolished, at least formally. One can speculate whether a restored theory of economic scarcity just happened to become popular once bonded labour was withdrawn from the market and newly freed labour could demand some of the surplus it had been forced to generate. It is not necessary to prove that the economists of the day devised theories to diminish any demands by freed slaves. If one accepts the premise that an emerging financial oligarchy funding and guiding the direction of teaching and research raises the questions that scholars and scientists ought to answer—as is clearly the case today—then no explicit instruction was needed to shape the overall agenda. At the same time as the political economy of surplus allocation was being realigned to reflect planned scarcity, free labour and other popular movements were being guided by what became known as progressivism in North America and Fabianism in Britain. There many of the proponents were more explicit that professional or expert solutions were needed for systemic problems (disorder) to prevent popular movements from asserting themselves in such a way as to threaten the oligarchy materially. Again the trail of philanthropy can be found. Without disparaging actual improvements in the daily lives of millions, the purpose of philanthropy is not to end the plunder and exploitation which enriches the donor but to selectively dilute resistance to the donor’s plunder and exploitation. Philanthropy is like the fluid a parasite injects into its host to conceal extraction or make it less painful. Progressivism evolved from the same cultural swamp as Frederick Taylor’s scientific management. By analysing the complaints among populists, the pwog administrator performs the equivalent of a time-motion study on the movement under study. Like Frederick Taylor who saw this dissection as a means of replacing skilled workers with interchangeable employees performing subroutines that could be easily taught and learned, the pwog or Fabian sought to identify the elements of discontent which could be corrected by employing professional staff and permanent bureaucrats who were able to perform the needed tasks but immune to the political or social concerns from which they arose.

    Parallel to these organizational developments the chartered/ public accounting profession was launched. The financial oligarchy was able to prevent legislation which would oblige public companies (joint stock corporations) to submit their books to government regulators for inspection. Based, among other things, on assertions of intellectual and trade property rights vis a vis competitors but also the State, the legislatures adopted laws which permitted companies to hire their own inspectors whose certificates would be accepted in lieu of government inspection or public disclosure. The employees of these accounting companies would be examined and certified by boards of their peers. Only accountants so credentialed by their peers would be permitted to issue certificates for the accuracy and completeness of corporate financial records. Thus corporate financial records could remain secret and the public demand for disclosure diverted. Certified accountants and lawyers together would protect the public interest in fair dealing vicariously.

    For this system to function in an environment dominated by huge, international trusts, internal corporate structures had to change too. Slowly major manufacturing enterprises managed by engineers or men with experience in their respective fields were to be subordinated to the new financial management ideology. The certified accountant gave birth to the controller. The controller or financial controlling department had two basic tasks. One was to translate all the manufacturing management data into accounting figures that could then be rendered in company reports, either to shareholders or regulatory/ tax authorities. The other task was to police material production processes using accounting and measurement criteria. That is to say the physical operations had to be reduced to measurable cash flows. The pinnacle of controlling was articulated in what became known as systems theory. From this controlling function all manner of operations were translated and integrated to produce reporting routines. Reporting, the regular production of measurement data and its application to internal corporate management, expanded wherever there was some movement from which value accumulation or loss could be expected. The bigger the corporation and more diverse the operations, e.g. in the trusts and conglomerates, the more powerful the controlling/ reporting function became. Economic concentration, which has not ceased since the end of the 19th century, has made central controlling, reporting and planning indispensable. The central controlling and reporting departments do not add value or increase the effectiveness of any manufacturing or other enterprise operation. They provide the means for regulating the extraction of value from the enterprise both upstream in terms of reporting and downstream by dictating which activities are to be preferred or abandoned (because of their impact on key performance indicators). The controlling department is not interested in the end customer, the employee, the supplier of inputs or any other material quality relevant for actual business operation. It is a surveillance instrument. Its mere presence in the form of reporting requirements and planning targets imposes limits on all those doing real work, buying or selling, or anything else entrepreneurial. The demand to reduce everything to some numerical value shapes the corporate environment internally and at all the interfaces between corporation and other actors and entities.

    To say that this controlling ideology is a metaphor for observable institutional behaviour beyond the factory gate is too little. The introduction of analogue computing machines in the 1940s found immediate application in state operations. An IBM subsidiary supplied state of the art computing machines to partially automate the administration of forced labour camps in Germany under the NSDAP regime. The creators of the Phoenix Program in the CIA developed—in collaboration with renowned academic institutions—the Phoenix Information System. This computer system reduced the digested interrogation and police surveillance data collected by units of the Republic of Vietnam on behalf of the CIA to numerical input to generate “kill lists” for the US counter-insurgency campaign against the National Liberation Front in Vietnam. One former CIA officer later called it “computerized mass murder”. Recent reporting from occupied Palestine told of a system called “Lavender” that supplies Israeli forces with similar “kill lists”. The controlling systems have been developed and deployed without interruption.

    As horrifying as the use of computer technology for planned assassination or mass murder is, that is only the most spectacular and infamous application. The underlying controlling ideology is far more insidious. Controversy, albeit superficial, about the dangers of artificial intelligence (AI) beyond the industrial applications already common focus on the error rate or the capacity of someone, presumably decent and law-abiding, to control the AI systems and prevent their abuse or defective performance. They only rarely address the ideology embedded in the technology and its social-political genealogy, i.e. its cultural historical content. In a recent interview I was asked if AI, with its military-policing history, could not be converted to benign civilian uses? My reply was simple. Why should any society be spending extraordinary amounts for military technology to convert to civilian use? Would it not make more sense to invest in civilian uses from the very beginning? This economic aspect was so obvious to me that I cannot understand why it is so rarely asked—except as Joan Roelofs has shown, so much of the economy has been literally bought to support military over civilian purposes in return for token support of residual community needs. It is therefore tempting to ask if there really is any meaningful civilian sector in today’s economy or society?

    The Anglo-American Empire in its conversion (or reversion) to a quasi-feudal formation ruled by a financial oligarchy adopted or restored systems for policing, regulating, expanding or restricting the flows of money and energy as well as people and primary commodities. The highest order principle in this organization (and hence explanation) is the numerical control of data flows. In the system of domination and enrichment (capital accumulation) these data flows can be distinguished as cash, energy, “contraband”, primary commodities or raw materials, and human populations. In the first two decades of the 21st century, the overall objective of the financial oligarchy or the output of the system it has created can be represented as the rearrangement of human populations such that they are removed from areas where the underlying resources are deemed more valuable than any labour that could be extracted by the inhabitants. These populations are being transferred to the spaces where populations are declining or actively being reduced. This population transfer policy is global and it is organized and conducted by a combination of actors including intergovernmental private-public partnerships (a euphemism for fascist organizations). At the same time resource flows are increasing, e.g., plundering of oil and grain from states under attack and subject to deliberate deportation efforts. One of the ancient professionals using this business model is George Soros, who by his own public admission already enriched himself at the age of 14 with the help of Nazi occupiers of his native Hungary. Another class of professionals use the World Health Organization and related agencies. They follow the Bill Gates version for neutralizing the recalcitrant and profiting through the entire value chain. Those are simply the most notorious. They are creatures of the financial oligarchy and its controlling system. As has been said often enough even Soros or Gates will die, like David Rockefeller finally did. However the proclamation “the king is dead, long live the king” does not apply solely to crowned monarchs. A culture’s resilience, even as a pathology or parasitical form, is reflected in the survival of the system even after the demise of its bodily representatives.

    So having said what terrorism is not as well as recounting in summary form a lot of 20th century history, something ought to be said about what terrorism is, besides a much abused and confusing word. When the Project for the New American Century “anticipated” the “new Pearl Harbor” as the bonding moment for another century of US (Anglo-American) supremacy, to the extent that they were honest and not just true believers, they would have understood that they were calling for a state sponsored act that could be manipulated in order to impose a war that no ordinary person otherwise would have demanded—certainly not in the great and insular United States of America. Here is not the place to elaborate the means by which the demolition of the NY World Trade Center towers on 11 September 2001 was executed. The crucial point is that this event was branded as the “new Pearl Harbor” and led to the declaration of the Global War on Terror and the adoption of the USA Patriot Act.

    A “war on terror” reflects language dating back to the presidency of Lyndon Johnson who while presiding over the war against Vietnam also led the launch of a “war against poverty”. This would be followed by “the war on drugs.” This habit of applying war as an instrument of social policy has been called “Wilsonian”. Thomas Woodrow Wilson, kept the US briefly out of the Great War only to turn it into the “war to end war”. American presidents would also advertise “war for democracy”. The real fact, however, has been that the financial oligarchy that seized power in 1913 transformed the US into a war economy and a war society. It was both financialized and militarized at the same time. The Great War—to end war—also gave birth to what is now the largest psychological warfare industry on the planet, comprising Hollywood and Madison Avenue, plus the “Beltway”. The Valstead Act (prohibition of alcoholic beverages) was the first step in the creation of what can now be called the pharmaceutical-military-industrial complex. The 20th century marked the transformation of the United States from a continental empire into the most heavily armed, full spectrum belligerent on the planet. In other words, every aspect of American life was defined by warfare in one form or another. This is reflected in the vernacular as well as the astronomical sums expended officially (the unofficial or concealed budget is immeasurable) for national defence.

    What is the Global War on Terror, if it is more than a slogan like so many in American politics? I believe the answer can be found by returning to the cultural historical context—to the conditions under which the financial oligarchy seized power and maintains it. The project for the new American century is undoubtedly a program for permanent war. Yet that is restating the obvious. What is not so obvious, but bears closer scrutiny, are the beneficiaries of permanent war. For much of the twentieth century, the financial oligarchy could be and was identified with the dynasties responsible for its inception, specifically the Rockefeller and Rothschild families, their relatives and retainers. Today the public faces of the financial oligarchy are the CEOs of a small group of hedge funds, BlackRock being the most notorious among them. The hedge fund is the modern manifestation of the financial framework created by the papal-rabbinical monarchy in Rome—it is the modern market-maker in sin, grace and salvation. The hedge fund and its precursors in the evolution of the financial oligarchy rely on the accounting-controlling ideology originally applied within corporations but as the corporation and the State merged was extended to the management of the State itself. Just as the controlling department became the central policing, surveillance and regulatory element of the corporation, its equivalent has become the organizational heart of the State. The corporation is managed using surveillance and reporting the results of which are distilled into key performance indicators and many other measurements. The corporate state is not only a merger of interests, whereby the corporation excludes any previous claims against the State by citizens, it is also a merger of methods and instruments. These methods and instruments are applied to control the flows of cash, energy, contraband, raw materials and crucially people. While cash, energy, contraband and raw materials have historical economic measures that can be easily applied within the controlling framework. People, especially those who are neither bonded labour nor serfs, require intermediary methods and instruments in order to translate them into accounting values. When travel was relatively rare and largely restricted to upper classes, there was little need for mass surveillance. Even the great immigration waves of until the early 1920s were one-time policing actions, except for dissident deportations and race removals on the Pacific coast. Both the relative improvement of living standards in North America and post-war Europe added to the human traffic but not significantly.

    The most significant challenges for population control began during the Central American counter-insurgency waged under Ronald Reagan. Eliminating about 20% of the population of El Salvador, by death or migration, was considered sufficient to suppress any nationalist movements that could threaten US domination. As long as the Soviet Union existed immigration/ migration in Western Europe was largely confined to movements from former colonies to the urban conurbations of the colonizers. The defeat of the Soviet Union and with it the expected potential to redesign the planet in the interests of the Anglo-American Empire (financial oligarchy) called for an entirely different scale of management. That was what the Project for the New American Century was actually proposing. That new management system is terrorism. Terrorism is not the advertised acts of politically or economically dissident individuals or groups. Those advertised acts are epiphenomena within what should properly be called the “terrorism system” or “terrorism resource management system”. When the US government—in the widest sense of that term—declared the Global War on Terror they were announcing the introduction of a global surveillance and accounting system intended to manage human flows worldwide. Just as Taylorism once had to be imposed by force in factories, terrorism has been imposed as a management tool wherever humans congregate, labour or are in transit. The arbitrary inspection and “security” measures, whether at airports or other nodes of human movement, are accounting instruments. They are dictated by the controlling department of the corporate state for operational management as well as reporting. Unarmed, ordinary travellers are monitored just as are those whose task it is to transport contraband or deploy to armed propaganda and terror action against targeted populations. The so-called “terrorists”, whether branded as Al Qaeda or ISIS, like their precursors in Phoenix and Gladio are system products and instruments for managing population flows. In some places, like Syria, they are also deployed for the management of resource plundering or demolition of civilian infrastructure, both of which are in turn parts of the cash flow model by which hedge funds operate. In order to understand the elusive meaning of the language around terrorism, a cultural historical concept is needed not merely a trivial political one. The political concept of terrorism is a marketing/ branding idea with no substantive explanatory utility. Just as so much political science is written about politics but not about power, the literature on terrorism describes supposed terrorists and imagined terrorist organizations but does not identify the terrorism system within the financial oligarchical culture that dominates the West in the early 21st century. By expanding the concept of terrorism to include, literally, the full spectrum of domination, the relevance of global psychological and financial warfare campaigns like the Covid-19 war and the Global Climate Change war to a culture of total financial control can be imagined and understood without losing the explanatory power for examining the nature of corporate state violence.

    The post Elusive Language: What Is Terrorism Really? first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Among the subjects of instruction in schools are the local language, spoken and written; the techniques of computation, arithmetic and algebra or geometry; the principles of the physical world, chemistry and physics; and the story of the country in which the school is located—unless it is a colony in which case the story of the country that rules it. That story and its episodes is what is commonly known as history. Sometimes it is taught generally. At some point a distinction may be made between local or national history and the greater odyssey know as world history. In the Anglo-American educational tradition established by Matthew Arnold and John Dewey, the aim of school instruction is to instill in the pupil or student a sense of virtue and national pride capable of sustaining citizenship and duty to the State (euphemistically described as democracy in the US).

    History is first and foremost a moral subject, as opposed to a scientific investigation, something like catechism or homilies at mass. The graduate should have imbibed enough of the national theodicy to continue to judge the affairs of which he learns in a manner consistent with the national ideals. The pupil is carefully shielded from that contentious atmosphere otherwise known as historical scholarship, lest it interfere with indoctrination. If history is written by the victors, the first place they celebrate is in the history books used in formal education.

    When in the wake of 1989, many scholars claimed the “end of history” had arrived, they also meant the end to any necessity of contemplating other ways to explain the events constituting the American Empire. However, in 1865, the victors in the civil war aka as the war between the States and among the vanquished the “war of Northern aggression”, the history books were written to explain and justify the defeat of the southern states, the destruction of their economy, and the military occupation of their territory. In the campaign to expand US power into the western peninsula of Eurasia in 1917, the history books had to be re-written to make all the immigrants from belligerent countries into sanitized Americans who could then be recruited to invade the lands of their forefathers bearing moral superiority. After 1945, the history of the hostilities formally declared on 7 December 1941 was revised to obscure the support for fascism and highlight the perennial battle against communism. When the US continued its efforts to control the Asian mainland after the defeat of Japan, the government found itself compelled to end Jim Crow. The reaction to this intrusion into the social order established to reconcile North and South was the introduction of “sub-national history” in the former Confederacy, reviving the rebuttals of abolitionism and industrial expansionism that had been the formal motives for the attacks on Southern sovereignty. Even after the so-called Civil Rights Era had ended, a South Carolinian was taught quasi-national history more intensively than national or world history combined. Memory of a war that had ended more than a century ago constituted the essence of South Carolinian identity for those who attended school.

    Bruce Cumings, in his works recounting and analysing the war whose beginning in Korea is dated in 1951, has written that “civil wars do not start, they come.” His definitive two-volume study The Origins of the Korean War establishes that the core of the conflict was a civil war in the Korean nation. As such the enduring conflict whose greatest violence exploded between 1951 and 1953, arose in Korean society and with the defeat of Imperial Japan exploded in the vacuum created by that brief cessation of foreign domination. That is the Korean War which continues to this day, the war unknown in the US because US national history does not recognize the sovereignty of other nations, especially those populated by brown, yellow or red peoples. Professor Cumings also wrote that the Korean War has been erroneously called the “forgotten war” when it should be called the “unknown war”.

    Of course the thousands of US soldiers, sailors and airmen who participated in the wholesale slaughter of Koreans and the wanton destruction of at least half of the peninsula did not forget the war, even if they reluctantly discussed it. Nor have the Koreans who survived the heaviest saturation bombing campaign ever conducted (until Vietnam) forget the war.

    Already during the active combat operations, journalist I.F. Stone was able to establish the US government’s policy of concealing the war from the public at large. In his Hidden History of the Korean War (review), Stone relied solely on official pronouncements and the reporting by the mainstream media to show how what was known about the war was consistently kept as unknown as possible. Needless to say once the Chinese Peoples’ Volunteer Army had forced the US war machine, operating behind a UN fig leaf, to accept a stalemate, the hiding continued.

    Not only was the civil war character of the Korean conflict denied—and hence the Korean authority to resolve the internal domestic disputes—the actual role of the US as a party to war against all of Korea was hidden by the claim that US Forces were merely commanding UN troops. Hence the active imperial objectives of the US government (and the interests it represents) were never officially recognized and or negotiated. Neither the Korean state constituted by the US nor that constituted by Koreans in the north were able to dispute the legitimacy of the US as an invader of their country.

    So the Korean War is unknown in two senses. The essentially Korean nature of the civil war is denied and, therefore, untaught. The US invasion of Korea in 1945, as part of its manifest destiny to control China through Japan, Korea, Taiwan and the Philippines, is completely obscured or distorted by an utterly false implied analogy with the occupation of Germany.

    In recent years there have been some attempts to at least show the extent of US barbarism in Korea. In fact everything Americans had come to hear about their war against the Vietnamese had been practiced full throttle in Korea. The virtue of telling a history of the Korean War might be to demonstrate the patterns in US warfare against target countries. It might show that the myths of US wars for freedom have always been just that. That knowledge might lead to a more critical view and consideration of contemporary lies and concealment by government, armed or civilian. Recounting US atrocities can be instructive. However, without adequate context, pupils are left with shock and awe but little to ripen their understanding. Since the task of history instruction remains unchanged, exposures such as the massacres perpetrated by US troops remain anecdotes, even if very brutal ones. In contrast, an examination of the origins of civil war in other countries, like Korea, not only acknowledges that other countries have histories independent of the United States. It also permits consideration of such questions as “what would have happened had the British successfully intervened on the side of the Confederacy in the US Civil War?” That could lead to recognition why Britain was actually considered an enemy of the US until 1917?

    While it may often be impossible to identify the beginning of something, it is therefore crucial to examine the end of it. The Korean War has not ended, either for Koreans still deprived of their 1000-year-old sovereignty, which Americans helped Japan end in the beginning of the last century. It has also not ended for the US which pretends it is not a formal belligerent whose intervention in the peninsula was driven by grand strategic goals in East Asia, goals the pursuit of which it has yet to abandon. In the nearly century of endless wars waged by the US throughout the world, the refusal to acknowledge either starts or finishes is part of the policy of deniability. No one attacked by the US or NATO or some American force wearing “UN Blue” can ever openly claim its rights to self-determination or self-defence under the UN Charter because those attacks are extra-legal, extra-territorial, and extra-vicious. If history instruction is to contain more than national apologetics and catechism, then it might start with viewing the nation among the community of nations. The gaps that need to be filled are those which comprise international law, aka the law of nations, and the international humanitarian law adopted with the UN Charter, as a ratified treaty binding elements of US law. Then one could begin to ask pupils and students to reflect on the conduct of their government in accordance with international standards rather than parochial rules fabricated in foreign policy think tanks or departmental committee rooms. Then the massacres and carpet bombing of Korea would not be mere shock and awe anecdotes but the point of departure for investigating the content of a truly moral and responsible role for the US in the world.

    The post Does the End Matter? first appeared on Dissident Voice.

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  • The summer of discontent is upon us. Whether we will find ourselves witness to direct exchange of fire or targets of another global counter-insurgency sweep is anyone’s guess. This time in 2020 the most massive abrogation of human and civil rights (temporary privileges granted to selective populations at different levels) in recorded history was accelerating on the highway to Hell, paved by the psychopathic oligarchy and the pharmaments industry. In the first half of 2024, distorted, partial, and self-serving disclosures and omissions have animated what remains of critical faculty in the West.

    Predictably, at least for those few who learned no later than 2001 to trust nothing governments and corporations say or do, the schedule of lies—both by commission and omission—has been released for public assessment. Almost without exception, the assertions made by those who opposed both the state of siege and the subsequent mass poisoning of approximately a billion people have been verified in fragmentary form. The arbitrary nature and futility of the measures even for their ostensible purpose have been admitted. The genetic engineering origins of the alleged pathogen have also been licensed for public chatter. A recent report attributed to Establishment mouthpiece, Reuters, claims that covert US military operations included an Internet campaign to discredit China’s Sinovac injections, presumably to protect Pfizer market share. An “anti-vax” attack on the Philippine government was supposedly launched to discourage Filipinos from taking the Chinese prophylaxis. Such an “anti-vax” operation in the former US colony persisted while in the rest of the West those critical of the de facto mandatory injections were actively suppressed. Perhaps one should not rush to attribute so much value to this revelation.

    The concern about the competition in the injection market, also known as vaccines or biologics (a term used to evade certain legacy regulatory conditions that survived the gutting of public institutions for assuring safe food and drugs) belies a confidence in the underlying official myth upon which the so-called COVID-19 pandemic is based. Hence one can see how these disclosures trigger gossip habits among critics, diverting their attention from the core issues.

    Starting with the basic deception at the end of November 2019, there were early analysts like Larry Romanoff in Shanghai (aka Moon of Alabama I believe) who provided a clear breakdown of the alleged spread of whatever pathogen(s) were attributed to the first December days in Wuhan, Hubei province. Numerous other, meanwhile forgotten or ignored observers pointed to the coincidence of the World Military Games and a strangely ill US contingent. The suppression of reports by a medical practitioner in Washington State, early in the run-up to the all out war, has also been forgotten for all intents and purposes. Other observers pointed to the peculiar and not entirely explained role of a US agent, ostensibly on behalf of the paramilitary Centers for Disease Control, who had been seconded to China until shortly after the alleged outbreak when she suddenly returned to the US. Here it should be noted that the general ignorance of the standard literature on covert action became apparent. Aside from a few early commentators, there were hardly any reactions to these reports. All focus turned to pseudo-medical debates about transmissibility of animal viruses to humans and security conditions in biological experimentation laboratories. The obvious signals of covert action were scrupulously ignored or merely overlooked. David Martin remained one of the diligent open source researchers who refused to ignore the accumulated twenty years of overt-covert action. None of the mainstream and much of the conformist alternative media perpetuated the navel contemplation by which every event in the world is measured.

    For example, while attention was focussed on the Japanese cruise ship in quarantine almost no questions were raised as to how a Wuhan “infection” became lethal for several high-ranking Iranian officials. Despite the well-known assassination campaign by the settler-colonial regime in Palestine and its principal patron on the Potomac, virtually no one discussed the possibility of a complex synchronisation of belligerence. The repeated occurrence of extraordinary livestock infections in China have yet to reach common consciousness in the overall story. Meanwhile the role of the Italian NATO Gladio squads in bombing the Bologna railway station (2 August 1980, killing 85 and wounding over 200) is public record. Aside from the fact that the OSS/CIA and Italian organised crime (aka the Mafia) have been running Italian politics since 1944, one needs no imagination to contemplate a scheme by which the Bergamo “covid” deaths in old-age facilities could have been perpetrated. The COVID-19 “pandemic” is entirely consistent with the NATO “strategy of tension” executed by Gladio units throughout Europe in the 1970s and early 1980s.

    In short, before launching a dilettante debate about healthcare policy and pandemic preparedness, the facts on the ground already discredit any such starting point. On the contrary, while there continues to be speculation about “lab leaks” and “blow back”, there is little consistent discussion about the actual events in sequence and their political context.

    What can be called the COVID counter-insurgency is really a sequel to the 2001 Global War on Terror triggered by relatively minor state terrorism using US military grade anthrax and followed by the highly profitable demolition of the World Trade Center towers in New York City. As has been argued elsewhere, we are in the midst of a world war, and it is against us. The euphemism “hybrid warfare” actually designates the systems approach to global counter-insurgency. The so-called “Great Reset” is better named “Phoenix 8.0”—the “infrastructure” to be neutralized is the bulk of humanity itself. While the weblogs surge with daily fear reports and reminders of what our psychopathic 1% “could do” little attention is directed to what they have done and are doing.

    Admittedly there has to be some reason to wake every morning and not reach for some means of self-destruction. Yet in the midst of a crusade, the “infidels” have to know that they are dealing with religion and religious fanaticism and not misguided or mistaken neighbours whose only vice is too much money or power. That said, the ultimately political nature of the present struggle should not be forgotten. A political struggle is always collective even if not uniform. The hybrid quality of the offensive can be seen in the way overt military action, e.g. the war in Ukraine (as well as a hundred others with no exposure) and the mass murder of indigenous inhabitants in the reservations established by European settler-colonialists in Palestine are part of the same action that was launched in 2020—although demonstrably in the active planning and rehearsal phase since 2001!

    Whether or not there was a novel virus and whether or not it leaked (deliberately) or was deployed ought not to be ignored but relegated to the details bin. “The virus” did not do anything—people did. More attention ought to be given to some hundred biological weapons laboratories operated by the US under contract in every country bordering Russia or China where foothold can be obtained. Jeffrey Sachs can be taken at his word when he confirms publicly what the record has long shown– that NIH (and CDC) are the cover for the massive US pharmaments industry, developing weapons against enemies both foreign and domestic. Global health threats are just the next stage in the jargon of hybrid warfare that started in 1913. The purpose of hybrid warfare or counter-insurgency is population control. Territorial control follows naturally. Population control means the exercise of force, physical, psychological, personal and environmental to manipulate the target humans at whatever scale is deemed necessary to achieve strategic objectives, e.g. power over natural resources, space, energy, “elimination of useless eaters”, etc. The crucial innovative success of the past four years has been enhanced scalability. Moreover through years of highly selective hyper-indoctrination, the COVID counter-insurgency could be launched without B-52 bombing strikes. However assassinations were and remain an essential part of mission tactics.

    A series of articles posted in Dissident Voice and Global Research in 2020, 2021 and 2022 describe these operations in conceptual detail. Repeating them here would add only length.

    The principal barrier to political analysis and after-action deliberation lies in the trauma of mass deaths. That is also part of the overall strategy. The oligarchy that waged saturation bombing against Germany, Japan, Korea and Vietnam, just to name the most egregious cases, learned that this does not break civilian morale. Instead they adopted the lesson of concentration camp management, namely that senseless death from disease, malnutrition, and other quasi-natural phenomena, even though induced by an aggressive external force, is far more traumatic. The trauma is compounded by the psychological torture of incarceration itself, especially irrational and arbitrary discipline imposed in prison-type conditions.

    Failure to understand the degree to which the healthcare system has been integrated into the military-industrial (pharmaments) complex over the course of a century, i.e., Rockefeller control over medical education and certification finally established by the end of WW2 (when the WHO was established to internationalise it), prevents many serious critics from distinguishing between healthcare and state-ordered euthanasia. Trust in the Marcus Welby, Ben Casey, or Doctor House versions of in and out patient medicine has sustained a Disneyland view of the hospital and the virtually extinct GP. Here Lars von Trier’s 1994/1997 mini-series The Kingdom would be a far more instructive story.

    Morticians and whistleblowing staff along with less naive medical experts repeatedly pointed to systematic malpractice perpetrated by hospital administrations for pay. Physicians in private practice have long been discouraged from practicing proper diagnosis and preventive care by state and private health insurers who only pay for treatments and expensive technology. The amount of money – bribery – paid throughout the North American and European hospital and outpatient “healthcare” apparatus to sustain the illusion of a pandemic—which was only so defined by a deliberate alteration of the international health regulations to accommodate the scheme—has yet to be measured. Add to this the amounts of bribery paid to obtain exclusive, mandatory deployment of the definite biological weapon: the genetic engineering injection euphemistically called a “covid vaccine”.

    So far what we have is the fundamental collapse of anything resembling a popularly accountable government at any level and its entire appropriation by financial interests (hedge funds, private equity, banks etc.) armed to the teeth with the world’s most powerful propaganda apparatus and legions of brainwashed terrorists.

    This war is far from over. One of the few Germans conspicuous for his attempts to integrate all these levels of hybrid warfare, eschewing distractions but collecting all details that might help explain the incoherent and contradictory aspects of this war, Reiner Füllmich, has been held in German maximum security prison for the past six months after he was kidnapped in Mexico by secret police assets. Having established in open court (Göttingen regional court) that the charges of embezzlement and dereliction of fiduciary duty upon which he has been held were not only fraudulent but baseless on their face, the presiding judge simply amended the charges and insisted that he would be found guilty of something else. Documents disclosed establish that Füllmich was kidnapped, charged and incarcerated by conspiracy of the German secret police. Others have already been silenced, bankrupted or driven into exile. During the active phase of the counter-insurgency fatal “accidents” neutralized several of the more prominent opposition, just in Germany. There has been no tally of the political assassinations in other countries. However, it is reasonable to say that large numbers of those in hospital did not die from a “virus” but from institutional violence, to paraphrase Johan Galtung.

    The most well-trained response to the above is to deny that there is sufficient proof. Denial is also derived from the apparent absence of some “plan” that could have produced this result. Was it all just for money? Could these folks really have planned to cull a billion or so people from the herd? Not everybody was injured or died from the injections. It was an unprecedented emergency, hence mistakes could be expected. Certainly all these well-meaning medical professionals did not go to work to kill the old and infirm isolated in their factories. Some of our best friends are doctors.

    These objections miss the point of counter-insurgency, covert warfare and hybrid operations. The psychological control which is the ultimate aim of hybrid/ counter-insurgency operations derives from what must be called a “conversion”. Conversion is different from conquest. Conquest seizes the land but leaves the people. Conversion seizes the people, the land follows. Conversion is accomplished through trauma, destruction of the knowledge base of the target, and injection of a new structure to replace the knowledge base destroyed. That is the technology of Christendom, Christian mission.

    Moreover the trauma not only destroys the knowledge base it undermines the target’s capacity to distinguish internal and external phenomena. No deception is ever perfect. Therefore it is necessary to create and maintain sufficient doubt and uncertainty in the target so that he or she is unable to stabilise any explanation for events and circumstances to which he or she has been subjected. This is what torture aims to do. Helplessness, although also an illusion, is a powerful means of self-control. Conviction replaces empirical experience and all facts become deniable. William Colby, while Director of Central Intelligence, explained to the US Congress the meaning of plausible deniability. Then he was only referring to the actions of the Agency. Since 2020, Western society has been restructured entirely along those lines. So began the years of living deniably.

    The post Years of Living Deniably first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Those who learned or vaguely remember what they were taught in school in those deliberately boring hours devoted to the subject called “history” may be forgiven for their confusion at the progressive transformation of core myths from the mid-20th century. Among those are the bundle of fabrications that constitute the history of the “good war”. The 20th century can be called the American Century not only because of US aspirations to global dominion after 1945 but because it was the US propaganda ministry — in privatized USA aka known as “Hollywood”—which has successfully written the history of the two world wars and propagated it like the Bible, also in foreign parts. During the recent commemorations of the June 1944 “Normandy landings”, executed by an amphibious force comprising mainly members of the Anglo-American armed forces, the constellation of honoured guests was instructive in ways that no textbook could be.

    Decades of make-believe have persuaded those susceptible to Western mass media that the Second World War, a designation these hostilities acquired after the capitulations of 1945, was fought by the Anglo-American Empire, the Allies, for democracy and freedom against fascism in Germany and Italy (and as an afterthought in Japan). It has also persuaded millions that this war, in which the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei – NSDAP regime in Germany and the older government of British agent Benito Mussolini’s Partido Nazionale Fascista (the origin of the generic term) were subdued, was ultimately won by the heroic efforts of the largest amphibious assault action in history, the so-called Normandy landings. Never mind for the moment that since the 1960s the purpose of the war has been utterly redefined as the defence of some segment of European Jewry.

    To illustrate how this propaganda has expanded with each year further from the events themselves, there were posters hanging in Porto this year advertising an exhibition to commemorate military action in which Portugal was in no way involved. (How the regime of the Bourbon-Anjou pretender, successors to the Caudillo de Espana por la gracio de Dios and usurper of republican government in Madrid, remember 1944 may be worth comment, too. Veterans of the 250th “Azul” division were most unlikely in attendance.) The head of the Portuguese government of that day, Dr Antonio Salazar Oliveira, carefully avoided any overt participation in the international aggression. Instead he exported grain to feed the Wehrmacht instead of his own compatriots and under pressure of his liege lords in London, leased airfields and harbours in the Azores to the Americans. Perhaps Dr Salazar also understood that the Atlantic Charter also protected him from the ultimate enemy, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

    Each year since the demise of the Soviet Union the government of the Russian Federation, for some twenty years led by President Vladimir Putin, has politely requested, then objected that the commemoration reflect the facts of the 1944 and not the political preferences of those in attendance. If the Normandy commemoration serves to recall the efforts of the forces invading France to defeat the German NSDAP regime, then the French government itself could not claim honours there any more than the representatives of Germany who soon became regular guests. After all half of France was willingly occupied by Germany while the other half, governed from Vichy collaborated. In other words, if taken at their word, the celebrants before the altars on Omaha Beach, could insist that Paris be treated just like Russia would have Kiev treated today. If the war was against fascism in Europe, as the propagandists in the West have proclaimed for decades, then Germany and France both constituted fascist states whose leaders at such a mass must – at the least—repeat acts of contrition, if not ritual surrender. That at least would be consistent with the anniversary memorials. It would be consistent with the “living history” model of historical re-enactment so beloved in Anglo-American “Disney-culture”. In fact, in a generous interpretation of the Second World War it was a great battle against truculent fascism. Obsequious fascists like those in Madrid or Lisbon were conspicuously spared. Then in 1949 both were lovingly absorbed into NATO, a precedent that should not be overlooked.

    Instead not only is France celebrated as an Anglo-American ally—which it was not during that great war (assuming for the purposes of argument the official rationale)—but the ostensible main enemy, evil Germany has been elevated to the status of ally as if it had waged war against itself. In fact, that would conform to the perverse logic by which Koreans invaded Korea in 1950 and Vietnamese invaded Vietnam, while Chinese are poised today to invade China. Already the absurdity and patent insincerity of the commemoration becomes evident. With further interpretative generosity, the Normandy exhibition is a demonstration by its producers that the thousands who died there constitute multiple Christ figures whose “sacrifice” vicariously saved the fascists of France and Germany from damnation. Given the fanaticism with which Latin hypocrisy is practiced in the West, both in and out of church, there are no doubt Faithful to adhere to such a construction. After all the Latin Church has innumerable monuments to its “martyrs” who died fighting communism.

    No Red Army units crossed the Manche to wade onto the coast of cows and Calvados. Confining the celebrations to the memory of battles actually fought by those who actually bore arms there (and their descendants) could legitimately be limited to British and American imperial forces and perhaps the few exile French allowed along for the ride. However the Normandy prostrations, especially after 1989, became a stage for historical revisionism. The Russian Federation rightly objects to this deliberate distortion of the war record and its mass medial – hysterical propagation.

    This year the Russian government complained that after years of ignoring the primary role of the Soviet Union and Red Army in defeating the NSDAP regime, the western allies added insult to injury by receiving the tee shirt-clad Führer in Kiev, whose party and regime openly celebrate Nazi paramilitary and regular armed forces as national heroes. The harbinger of this affront was the ovation given to a Ukrainian Waffen SS veteran in the Canadian House of Commons last year. He was honoured in the House as a courageous legacy fighter against Russia.

    Joseph Stalin insisted that the French (de Gaulle’s French and by implication the French Communists who constituted the bulk of the Résistance) share in acceptance of the capitulation in Karlshorst (Berlin) in May 1945. (Only enormous diplomatic pressure prevented Dwight Eisenhower’s anti-communist armies from accepting a separate surrender by the German High Command a few months earlier.) Then the Soviet Union sincerely or pragmatically lent its Western allies the benefit of a doubt, presuming perhaps that there was still enough of a Left in the West to keep Britain and the US within civilized boundaries.  Since 1989, despite the havoc wreaked upon the dissolving Soviet Union by Western powers, the Russian government has diplomatically avoided stating the obvious in the real revision. Politely speaking the Western “allies” could be accused of foreign policy narcissism as rabid as the narcissism of their popular culture. Having fed on decades of their own mythology they suffer political obesity and hence are incapable of seeing that their story of the Second World War is sociopathic vanity. Hollywood has so permeated their consciousness that they genuinely believe they won the war. The late Ronald Reagan, B-grade film actor that he was, once actually claimed in an interview to have been among US troops that liberated concentration camps in Poland. Aside from the fact that he had never served in combat, the arch anti-communist neither knew nor cared that the Red Army and not the US Army liberated the camps in Poland. His errors (like those of his successors) were dismissed like so many other senile remarks from American gerontocrats, without a wall on which to stand.

    Far more plausible and consistent is another explanation. It is also far more obvious and less tortuous to recognize. Namely after 80 years, the Anglo-American Empire has openly repudiated its own mythology. Finally after nearly a century, the West is admitting that the Second World War was the war of the London-New York- Rome – Tokyo – Paris Axis against the Soviet Union and the Chinese Communist Party. The true allies were the Soviet Union and the nascent People’s Republic. At Normandy this year the successors to Berlin-Rome-Tokyo Axis—properly the Anti-Comintern Pact powers—and the children of the collaborators in industrial-strength mass murder from the Rhine to the Dnieper join those high commissioners of banks and hedge funds who have sponsored them since 1917 in the comprehensive war against communism and any other form of national and popular development at odds with the British, American and French Empires—and the caste who own them all.

    As they celebrated on the beaches their invasion of France—a last ditch effort to stop the Red Army from reaching the Rhine—they prepare for the next great war against Russia and China, against humanity itself.

    The post Unbecoming American: Judgement at Normandy first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • One strike, two strikes and they are out…

    Meanwhile there are even respectable, Establishment scholars who appear to have overcome their indoctrination or institutional discipline to express views on the current campaign in the eternal war of the Anglo-American Empire although at variance—if not deviance—from the positions they have been known to hold in the past or those that continue to prevail among the ruling class, its prelates, acolytes and fanatical hordes.

    Tucker Carlson has continued to sail full speed ahead in the same manner with which he confronted the Establishment’s re-enactment of the Reichstag fire (1933) in 2021 and exhibited the strongest circumstantial evidence that the farce staged on 6 January was quite obviously anything but what the Establishment has insisted it was to this day. Then he exposed millions of traditionally ignorant US Americans to the intelligence and immanent sanity of the Russian federal president, Vladimir Putin. Just last week he released an extensive interview with Professor Jeffrey Sachs of Columbia University. Although Sachs is probably still invited to parties and other events of the New York and Washington season, this prior preacher of shock therapy in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union—of whose legal dissolution he was personally informed by US stooge Boris Yeltsin—has arrived, on his own it seems, at an independence he could scarcely have been accused of exhibiting for much of his career. That said, just because he has said things with which critical historically conscious people can even violently disagree does not mean that his basic intellectual integrity is fraudulent.

    On the contrary, in the cult of individual personality that drives Western society there is also a compulsion to see every human as isomorphic with the verbal behaviour in which he or she engages. However since there is no immanent meaning in language—words—but only judged responses to verbal activity—it takes considerable energy and force to preserve dogmatic personalities of the kind with which we are routinely presented in mass media and wherever substantial power is exerted without corresponding challenge. What I mean is the judgement that anyone is inconsistent (as a liar or an idiot) relies on a more or less static and hence stereotypical or cliché-formed notion of the person whose behaviour is being judged. Hegel made this point more than two-hundred years ago in his journalistic essay “Who thinks abstractly?” (Wer denkt abstrakt?) It is not necessary to take vows of holy matrimony in order to have intimate and confidential relations—although as I child I did believe that children were mysteriously generated by the legal act.

    The education of Jeffrey Sachs, although far from complete, induced him to repudiate his role in the destruction of the Soviet economy while sitting on a New York Times panel discussing China. He was heavily criticized for that as well as his unwillingness to categorically condemn the Chinese State—especially by Western standards. However the economist is still ready to believe that the UN Sustainability Goals are benevolent policies driven by the sincere pursuit of human welfare. It appears that he does not advertise his destructive role in post-Soviet Eurasia. In speaking to Tucker Carlson he retained the positive version of his political-economic engagement. However he recounted an element of his epiphany when the very policy recommendations deemed a success in Poland (for reasons that are too extensive to explain here) were categorically rejected when it came to restoring Russia to the Western political-economic fold. The refusal of his masters to approve recommendations he had successfully implemented in the CIA-infested Catholic republic east of the Oder was by his own admission a stage of his Kairos. Apparently oblivious to actual Polish politics he assumed—not unlike the worshippers of Ludwig Erhard in Germany—that wonders come from liberal economics in lieu of canonized saints or the deity itself. This failure does not invalidate the lesson he learned, namely that the masters’ were not about to let their servant treat the hereditary enemy of Anglo-American Empire (I find hegemony an insufferable euphemism) in any other manner than destructive. Perhaps it should be said here that the very intelligence which elevated Jeffrey Sachs to the professorship and fellowship of Harvard University at such an early age was complemented by the spiritual-intellectual dependency sought in the loyal cadre. Repeatedly during the interview Professor Sachs refers to himself as naive or perhaps naive. That naïveté is cultivated among the bright, once talent-spotters have recruited them for the Establishment. He called the “neo-cons” “true believers”—a term popularized by Erich Fromm—but seems unable to recognise that he too was a true believer, spoiled with rewards that confirmed his own merit but ultimately had little to do with his undeniable intellectual capacity.

    Jeffrey Sachs, as a meanwhile marginalized if not banned regime critic, is important for two reasons. In the first place the credibility he enjoys because of his decades of devotion to the ruling cult lends some authority to the criticisms raised by those with little or no access to the apparatus of power. In the second place, Professor Sachs provides evidence of the permeability of a certain—albeit small—segment of the Establishment. His statements are evidence of the mendacity of his masters and ours. Although, unlike Tucker Carlson, Jeffrey Sachs is not willing to call his masters evil, he has at least reached the point of calling them insane. If we need proof that the evil 1% ought to be neutralized (to adopt a term favoured in those heights) there is at least testimony that the insanity requires us to act in our own defence.

    This interview was not unlike the Putin interview in one respect. Both Vladimir Putin and Jeffrey Sachs live in the world of diplomacy, civilized behaviour even among antagonists. Although of very different rank and station, Putin and Sachs demonstrate that there are limits to what one may say in public. The conversation Tucker Carlson conducted permitted him to interpolate or extrapolate from the statements made by his interlocutor. Hence we cannot know how critical Professor Sachs really is or how much he really understands beyond the framework his precocious academic career constructed.

    This is no where more evident than in the synthesis by which Professor Sachs asserts that none of the current crisis arose from spontaneous errors or miscalculations. On the contrary he argues very clearly that today’s brinkmanship derives at least from the policies (and culture) of Old Harrovian Henry Temple, 3d Viscount Palmerston and the Crimean War. The Old Etonian, David Cameron, who bowled Britain’s first innings against Russia until 2016 has continued that tradition in his assault as foreign secretary—recently on record as calling for direct assaults on Russia with British (and NATO) weaponry. In a discussion of his conclusions as chair of a committee appointed to investigate the origins of the so-called COVID-19 pandemic, Sachs traced the story back at least to 2008 and the ambiguity of US regime claims to research “biodefense”. He also asserted that the 1963 assassination of POTUS John F. Kennedy could no longer be explained credibly by the fantastic story recorded and certified by the late Chief Justice Earl Warren et al. Moreover he concurred with a view meanwhile widely held that the assassination was a coup d’etat at least organized by the US national security apparatus (e.g. CIA). In all these Candide-like remarks—with Pangloss implied—Jeffrey Sachs demonstrated that even the most well-rewarded prodigies can under certain circumstances be induced to question many if not all of the fundamental assumptions by which they were recruited.

    Another admission—certainly rare among those of his rank and station—is that he actually values the lives of his family beyond the balance sheets and capital accounts with which political economy is obsessed. The idea that atomic war should be avoided because it kills the innocent (not necessarily the warriors) is foreign to any living Western politician or Establishment intellectual. As in the case of the settler-colonial regime in Palestine, the ideological standard is that mass killing of women and children “is worth it” (as the finally late Madeleine Albright proudly proclaimed for half a million dead Iraqi children). Sadism is an implicit prerequisite for high office and senior civil or military service. Corporations have departments dedicated to it. For Jeffrey Sachs the annihilation of his children and all the children like his was reason enough to oppose the insanity of the ruling oligarchy.

    Nonetheless as thoroughly confessional and sincere as Professor Sachs was in his conversation with Tucker Carlson, there were numerous loose ends. Perhaps the loosest of those is the de-contextualization of George Kennan’s anti-Sovietism. While it is true that in later years Kennan criticized much of the Establishment policy toward the Soviet Union he never went so far as to violate the sanctity of Chatham House, so to speak. Candidly this true believer accurately asserted that without military force the US would not be able to retain control over some 60% of the world’s consumption with 4% of its population. He also predicted that the damage the West had done to the Soviet Union would require at least 20 years to repair. In other words those who had ultimately backed the Hitler Wehrmacht as a means of destroying the Soviet Union had succeeded in creating the living conditions claimed to be the fruits of socialism. When despite that devastation the Soviet Union recovered ahead of schedule, the war intensified.

    By missing the essence of Kennan’s policy papers, Jeffrey Sachs fails to understand that the atomic weapons developed by the Manhattan Project— the largest single government research project at the time—were always intended for use against the Soviet Union, not against the German Reich or Japanese empire. Perhaps he never saw the de-classified Sandia oral history of US strategic policy. Yet Curtis LeMay was really no exception among the centurions. It was the Soviet Union that preserved what we in the West experienced to varying degrees as peace and prosperity, not the US. Even the story of the arms race taught in the West conceals this fact so as to blame the USSR for what was always unilateral, not mutually, assured destruction.

    What was the fundamental change in 1989? Professor Sachs says it was the “neo-con” ascendency. However Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld were already embedded in the Nixon administration. Richard Holbrooke and his slightly older roommate began their careers as Phoenix counter-insurgency managers in the Mekong Delta (VietnamI)—that is junior mass murderers for the CIA before the official “neo-con” tracts were published. The dramatis personae of American empire has been incestuously linked to Britannia’s (in fact the City of London) destiny ever since Cecil Rhodes and Lord Rothschild founded what would become the Royal Institute of International Affairs franchise and the Council on Foreign Relations. A century of continuous class war, for convenience launched in 1913 with such paragons of legislation as the Federal Reserve Act and the South African Native Lands Act, has been waged by the “banking” class, guided by its dogma of world population reduction. In 1989, the triumph of the 1.0% meant that the horrific labour (human) intensive industrialization process could finally be transcended. The merger of eugenics and ecology, exemplified in the Club of Rome, prepared the ideological foundation for elimination of 20-40% of the world’s population, instead of merely 20% of selected target populations (China, Soviet Union, Central America, African states). The United Nations organisation—mainly the plethora of “specialized agencies” and the Anglo-American dominated Security Council and Secretariat—provided deniability for genocide in Korea, Indochina, Indonesia and the Congo or Haiti and of course Palestine. What seems unmentionable is the global enclosures program being implemented behind the facade of UN Sustainable Development Goals. The WHO—originally founded as a shell organization for the Rockefeller petrochemical pharmaceuticals cartel—has openly taken the point for biochemical herd culling/ eradication. The pejoratively denoted “Woke” ideology has emerged very much like Huxley and Orwell described—under the pretext of a vacuous and hypocritical morality, human kind are to be replaced by NCEs, i.e. numerically controlled entities. The abolition of biological sex, both in microsocial and macrosocial senses, accompanies the total commodification of “identity”. It only takes a cogent sense of consistency to see that when there are no essentially human qualities, then there can be no human rights.

    Fictive wealth can be indefinitely maintained by the minuscule tribe of monsters with the elimination of sufficient numbers of human beings (20-40% or more). Injecting genetically-engineered toxins into a billion people at a time is entirely consistent with pushing Russia into what could be politely called an atomic exchange.

    To the extent Russia and China oppose this nihilism it is because, unlike the West, they have actually been on the receiving end of previous culling campaigns (millions murdered by Western warrior-terrorists). However even there one can hear the grunts of members in the “big club”. Resistance to evil and insanity is far from uniform, especially among those committed to AI and contract pharmaceuticals manufacture.

    Nikki Haley is meanwhile standing in for that character played by Slim Pickens in Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove. As can be seen on the banks of the Hudson, Thames, Seine and Spree, between the River Jordan and the sea, the entire Western political class is compromised and or complicit in this accelerating democide.

    The post Unbecoming American: One strike, Two strikes, and You’re out first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • The Democratic-Republicans at prayer

    Those who may recall, if only vaguely, the early chapters of their secondary school history books, may recognize- if not remember- that the original name of the “party of Jefferson” was the Democratic-Republicans. In the first years of the American Empire, the government was in the hands of the Federalist Party, led by the Boston Adams dynasty and the New York mercantile-adventurers for whom Alexander Hamilton had become spokesman. The Federalists became extinct in the term of Thomas Jefferson, the Democratic-Republican POTUS from Virginia. The party base was essentially the Southern landowning oligarchy which opposed its creditors in New York and Boston. The westward extermination of the indigenous and expansion of the empire gave rise to the Whig party. Imperial politics and finance was fought until 1860 by the mercantile – colonizers of what was then the Northwest Territories (a region now considered part of the “mid-West”, basically extending from the River Ohio to the Mississippi and the Great Lakes).

    The determination of the mercantile oligarchy from Boston to Chicago to extract from the Southern oligarchy the costs of the 1857 economic crash intensified the divisions within the settler republic. Those textbooks to which reference is made above also erroneously simplify the conflicts that led to the only serious war ever fought on US territory– the civil war from 1860 to 1865. School pupils are taught that this fraternal war was fought for the liberation of African slaves or for the preservation of constitutionally enshrined “states’ rights”– depending on which side of the Mason-Dixon line one went to school. I recall terms like “the war of Northern Aggression” and “the war between the States” prevailing in the American South while Northern schools taught the “Civil War” and the fight to abolish slavery. The past decade of attacks on memorials to the Confederate States of America and thus the distractive erasure of a complex period in US history by the congenitally ignorant (aka the awakened “Woke”) has been aggravated by other systemic language perversion. It is beyond the scope of such modest essays as this to remedy the institutionalized dementia which passes for social justice activism in the US. However just like sewage treatment is an ongoing process, responsible users of public language ought to regularly skim at least the upper layers of mendacious slime from the reservoirs that supply potable thought.

    In this sense it might be helpful to restore some clarity of definition to the political topography.

    What I have called elsewhere the Fourth Awakening (“Awakenings” are the Protestant equivalent of the Latin Crusades– both of which are directed toward the extermination of dissidents and “brown people”) has become the moral equivalent of the Hitlerjugend (Hitler Youth). The Establishment, constituted in the Democratic Party (with its Republican component- hence Democratic-Republicans), has created, since the early 1980s, a domestic armed propaganda movement, drawing conceptually on elements of the NSDAP Sturmabteilung (SA) and the counter-insurgency organization created by the CIA in what would be called the Phoenix Program. Since ideological consistency is not essential in a society controlled entirely by daily marketing and advertising campaigns, the combination of anti-racist and egalitarian rhetoric with support of the most violently imperialist and anti-humanist government policies should not surprise. An accurate understanding of the German NSDAP would include the fact that “national socialism” absorbed strong anti-capitalist and petty bourgeois democratic tendencies in the service of cartel capitalism (and surreptitiously the Anglo-American Empire). The original fascist party, was created by the faux socialist Benito Mussolini while on the payroll of British secret intelligence services. Just like it was never necessary for everyone in the Manhattan Project or the NASA Space Program to know what the real objectives of their work was, there is no need to impugn the motives of thousands of young people who have been recruited directly or indirectly into today’s “Children’s Crusade”.

    While it is helpful to examine and understand the underlying ideology, that is insufficient. All ideologies are inherently incoherent by themselves. It is really impossible to enforce, short of death, uniform responses to ideological instructions even among those who consider themselves true and loyal believers. Hence it is essential, while giving weight to ideological analysis, to examine the organizational mechanisms by which ideology is transformed into action and action is absorbed within ideology. Although the claims by the wokie-dokies to be latent or active social justice warriors cannot be taken at face value, the behavioral consequences of such explanations must be taken seriously. In fact it is possible to believe in racial equality and act in ways that exacerbate inequality. Does one judge the attribute of belief or the results of the act? Hypocrisy is a natural condition of language in part because it is impossible to act in a way which is utterly and absolutely consistent with any verbal explanation of the act in question. There is always a statement which can be uttered that qua statement is consistent with other statements of the same type and yet inconsistent with the nonverbal actions attributed to it. We judge statements to be appropriate or not as statements (verbal acts) and as instructions for how to respond to other statements or non-verbal acts. Philosophy and ethics are largely concerned with the generation of statements that ought to be used as explanations for assessing other statements or nonverbal behavior.

    The question can be restated. Based on assumptions and values as to what behavior is appropriate for maintaining social relations governed by “democracy”, “equality”, or even the DIE criteria or “diversity, inclusion and equity”, is it the language or the results that count? The answer to that question requires that one include language as action and results of actions at the empirical frontier as distinct categories. Moreover language in its passive sense, contemplation and scholarship, ought to be considered in relation to the actions generated rather that as some quasi-mathematical equation on the blackboard.

    So let us return to the party terminology with which we began. The Democratic Party is the lineal descendant of the Democratic-Republican Party. It was historically the party of the North American slavocracy and landed oligarchy. After the “war of Northern Aggression” it became the party of resistance to the Republican Party (aka GOP or the party of Lincoln) which replaced the Whigs and for strategic reasons absorbed the third awakening (abolitionism) in an alliance with Northern creditor interests. Whatever one may have thought of chattel slavery in the 19th century, the Republican Party was not the anti-slavery party but the party of the slave merchants and usurers whose abolition of the slave system and much of the agricultural asset base of the latifundistas would render the South the poorest part of the United States to this day. African-Americans– Negroes in the 19th century– were admitted to political power during the so-called Reconstruction period as Republicans, not as Democrats. These Reconstruction governments created the first wide-ranging free public primary and secondary education for the poor agricultural workforce, whites as well as freed slaves. In other words Black Reconstruction was an attempt to remedy the class inequalities inherited from the Anglo-American antebellum regime. It was ultimately torpedoed by the reconciliation of creditor and debtor, whereby the Southern elite agreed to industrialize in the textile industry for example in return for power-sharing again. This reconstitution of the Anglo-American elite in 1865 also gave birth to the industrial and financial trusts associated with the so-called Robber Barons (Carnegie, Rockefeller, Morgan, et al.) and the prison-industrial complex, whereby freed slaves and poor whites were sent to prison to perform “involuntary servitude” pursuant to the loophole in the 13th Amendment to the US Constitution. Unlike Britain that used Australia and other colonies for labor discipline, the Americans had space to incarcerate bonded labor at home.

    The Fourth Awakening/ Crusade is identified by its opponents as a Democratic Party project. Per corollary the Democratic Party is condemned for its “leftist” or “socialist” policies based on the largely unchallenged assumptions that the ideology and the actions are consistent and that both have some vague root in “socialism” or even “communism”. Absurdly the more reasonable assessment is that they are a product of covert Zionist psychological warfare strategy, one which is only being admitted as police bludgeon students on elite universities for protesting the mass murder perpetrated by the settler-colonial state occupying Palestine. The absurdity is that adherents to a traditional oligarchy identified as “white” and “nativist” attack or defend themselves from crusaders they claim to be foreign in every sense of the word. However the Democratic Party has always been tightly controlled by an anti-communist/ anti-socialist elite. Even its “immigrant” party machines were ultimately “nativist”. However the Democratic Party in the North managed the immigrant labor just like its brethren in the South managed the former slaves and sharecroppers. The paragon of “left” Democratic politics, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, would have been unelectable without the Southern vote. The moral degenerate who dropped the first atomic bombs, Harry S. Truman, and his 1993 Arkansas successor, were products of Southern Democratic machine politics.

    The bipolarity produced by American politics leads opponents of the Democratic Party machine, actually the result of a merger between the Bush Republicans and the Clinton Democrats, brokered by the principals of the national security state, to huddle behind the mast and sails of the Goodship Ronald Wilson Reagan, slinging insults like broadsides of grapeshot– whereby the shot is only made of grapes rather than something more deadly. Thus the wholly transitional hordes of Wokism and the Democratic faithful are incited to ever escalating violations of what formal democratic practices and procedures survived the hundred-year corporatist onslaught– marketed as “public-private partnerships”. The most recent travesty are the quasi-autistic orgasms and Vitus dances performed by solipsistic Trump haters after his bureaucratic lynching before a New York Superior Court. (What would Joseph E. Davies have said about that, one can only imagine?) Clearly it is impossible for those engaged in the destruction of the United States of America, as an inhabited nation rather than a special purpose entity of its finance capitalist oligarchy, to articulate themselves in terms both empirically verifiable and linguistically/ ideologically coherent. The party of Lincoln, the party of Kennedy, the party of peace, the party of the New Deal, the anti-slavery party, the party of civil rights (was there ever such a party?), the party of Reagan, the party of Clintons, chose your epigraph. Since 2020 it is even impossible to say that these are the parties of electoral representative democracy. For better or worse, if a woman’s beauty pageant can be won by a man dressed in woman’s clothes, then why not an election decided in favor of someone who is not even alive? Voting dead has a long tradition in US electoral politics.

    Were these all merely anecdotes from Tierra del Fuego or Fiji, it would be comic. However these are the conditions prevailing in the most belligerent and homicidal state on the planet. A minority consensus is emerging in the United States and among its vassals that the West is managed by the insane. Intuitively the vast majority of ordinary people throughout the world have known this for decades. That majority of ordinary humans, who have been kept in senseless poverty since the US helped crush the revolution in Haiti with financial warfare in 1803, understand that the only way to escape the US was under its shadow by immigrating there. The American Dream was to escape the Anglo-American nightmare. Yet the armed propaganda units of the Fourth Awakening (the latest corporatist crusade) are simply too ignorant to grasp these details. That is also what makes them unwitting instruments of Democratic Party– in reality Democratic-Republican– terror. After the real socialists and revolutionaries were exiled or killed (by the end of the 1970s) and replaced by academic androids, who produced a similarly chimeric ideology– combining e.g. postmodernism, transgenderism and CRT, there were no alternatives for the justifiably dissatisfied. This has been an established strategy for recruiting terrorists, whether in Vietnam to neutralize the NLF or in Iraq– destroy real opposition and then recruit the unwitting into synthetics run by opportunists.

    The language of US American politics is powerful. It has been crafted by the best psychological warfare (propaganda) experts corporate money can buy. Edward Bernays was merely the most self-important of the lot. There are also squadrons of academics like the late Dr Heinz Kissinger and his Democratic counterpart, Zbigniew Brezinski. Then there is the Hollywood regiment of congenital propagandists who expand their operations beyond the silver screen to share the stage of misanthro-capitalism e.g. by promoting covert operations throughout Africa for “humanitarian” reasons. Underlying it all is the religion of Business by which the population is constantly told that some clown in the Executive Mansion makes decisions– while all his bills are paid by his corporate donors, a euphemism for masters. Because Business is the measure of all virtue, anything the State does which benefits Business is good. Moreover Business virtue is enhanced by the degree to which government serves it. Since corporations (and offshore trusts in secrecy jurisdictions) are “persons” in terms of the law and upper class persons too, they deserve the full protection and promotion of the State. Therefore neither a Republican partisan nor a Democrat– especially a bought-and-paid-for wokie dokie— will dispute the right and dignity of oligarchs who buy state, national and intergovernmental legislatures and executives for their “personal” benefit. They will all agree that if the business plan, like they learned to produce at Wharton, Harvard or LSE, is realistic and the income projections are plausible, then killing a billion or two with genetic engineering or atomic weapons, is just an unavoidable expense on the liabilities side of the balance sheet.

    While those who are doing their best to find solutions to this insanity and evil try to sort the language and the behavior, there are confronting even greater forces whose conviction is beyond rational argument. These legions are armed not only by the State with its democidal mission. These legions are also irradiated with the toxins of nearly 80 years. They believe that the atomic bomb was created for liberation. They are the crusaders for death as freedom. When in they go marching, with their saints, then the number to which we are to belong is nil. When the Democratic-Republican saints go marching in, oh when those saints go marching in– it will be over the billions of corpses without number– oh when those saints go marching in.

The post Unbecoming American: The Nihilists at Prayer first appeared on Dissident Voice.

This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • The idea that the Anglo-American Empire wages war by mistake is not new. Nor are the kinds of mistake novel. There appears to be an entire school of historical literature based on the premise that when the paragons of benevolence among the English-speaking peoples go forth to war then it is almost entirely unintentional. Apologist from down under, Christopher Clark, made a great impression with his slightly Germanophilic addition to the literature ten years ago. Belligerence is conceded occasionally, like when some functionary pronounces that the mainly brown people on the planet need to be regularly instructed in obedience. However, all the really messy wars are attributed to miscalculation. In other words, failing in subterfuge, the regime(s) are compelled to slaughter millions to adjust for their errors of judgement.

    I was a high school student when an Anglophone South African, on whose daughter I had a crush at the time, recommended to me The Guns of August, a historical novel by Barbara Tuchman. Subsequently I read her The Zimmermann Telegram too. Tuchman was a good writer, in the sense that it was a pleasure to read her books. Probably she was also a good historian in the sense of propagandist for national stories. A daughter of the Wertheim and Morgenthau banking dynasty, one need not cast aspersions to contemplate a particular bias in recounting an epoch of immense importance to family fortunes.  In any event, both accounts present the Great War (WWI) in the style of British pageantry, a blood-drenched coronation for the world to come. It is not enough that the history of the twentieth century is told by the victors, a careful genealogy indicates that it is also narrated with the greatest literary skill by the merchant-adventurers (aka bankers) that have funded or plundered along the way.

    Summer approaches. This August 110 years will have lapsed since the general mobilization with which four years of murderous class war commenced. The Great War was not the end of an era of peace. It was the regurgitation of the blood splashed by the Maxim and Hotchkiss guns throughout Asia, Africa and Latin America. This August 79 years ago, the US Empire incinerated two Japanese cities with atomic bombs— other cities, including Tokyo, had already been burned to the ground with conventional incendiaries. In February of 1945, more than 3,900 tons of HE and incendiary were dropped on civilians in the city of Dresden before the one-bomb solution had been perfected. Summer approaches with rumours of F-16 V “Fighting Falcons”, atomic bomb platforms, to be delivered to the Ukraine theatre of the Empire’s barely undeclared war against the Russian Federation. The triggers are already being shrink-wrapped in the polystyrene of official apology. With the forward deployment of Pfizer, Moderna, and the regiments of the medical-pharmament in 2020, the decks have been cleared. If “the big one” comes, nearly a billion people will not be able to tell whether they are dying from genetic-engineering injections or radioactive force projection.

    In 2016, a good friend of mine joined me for a nine-hour performance of The Last Days of Humanity (Die letzten Tage der Menschheit) by Karl Kraus, on the stage of Teatro Nacional de São João in Porto. Kraus called it a “Mars play”. Written between 1915 and 1922, this play is some five-hundred pages long. It dramatizes all the insidious and infuriating aspects of the war — including especially the mendacity and perversion of language — that began in August 1914 (also the title of a 1971 Solzhenitsyn novel). When we left the theatre, I said to my friend essentially, “they know not what they do”. Of course I meant the theatre company that had prepared and performed this marathon drama. Last year, I met the theatre director in the rua Santa Catarina and repeated to him those very words. He smiled and acknowledged my appreciation of the grand performance. However it was clear he did not understand my reference to prophesy.

    We wait irradiated by the mirages of the “phony war” in our partially personal digital devices for the moment when violent fantasies are no longer virtual. Satiated by malignant narcissism and stimulated by transhuman lust, the switches and circuits inflame as we anticipate August infame.

    The post Unbecoming American: Bombs of August first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.


  • The Son of God Goes Forth to War

    In 1812, need I say more, Reginald Heber composed the hymn of the Church Militant, the text of which bears citation in full:

    The Son of God goes forth to war, a kingly crown to gain; his blood red banner streams afar: who follows in his train? Who best can drink his cup of woe, triumphant over pain, who patient bears his cross below, he follows in his train.

    That martyr first, whose eagle eye could pierce beyond the grave; who saw his Master in the sky, and called on him to save. Like him, with pardon on his tongue, in midst of mortal pain, he prayed for them that did the wrong: who follows in his train?

    A glorious band, the chosen few, on whom the Spirit came, twelve valiant saints, their hope they knew, and mocked the cross and flame. They met the tyrant’s brandished steel, the lion’s gory mane; they bowed their heads the death to feel: who follows in their train?

    O noble army, men and boys, the matron and the maid, around the Savior’s thrown rejoice, in robes of light arrayed. They climbed the steep ascent of heaven, through peril, toil and pain; O God, to us may grace be given, to follow in their train.

    According to the astute analyst Mr Mike Whitney, Mr Richard Haass (I wonder whether the name originally meant hate i.e. Hass or hare i.e. Haase), a reverend brother of the Rhodes-Rothschild congregation for the propagation of the faith, has arrived at the same conclusions of his brethren in uniform that the battlefield triumph of the legacy SS battalions and reconstituted Ukrainian military product (Kiever Velveeta) is beyond achievement. As Mr Whitney points out, not only outliers like Scott Ritter, Douglas MacGregor or Larry Wilkerson have stopped singing hymns of immanent victory over the reincarnation of Ivan and Stalin, but members of the general staff have changed their tunes.

    Whereas the professionals cautiously suggest, if not request, disengagement, the real government for whom Richard Haass is a representative “influencer” complacently advises that the West in NATO assembled must and will now shift gears. If an M1 Abrams cannot manage a 15 degree incline in snow or mud, then it is just a matter of firing more rocketry. That is to the extent that overt military support is relevant.

    Clearly Mr Haass also has the strategy of Brzezinski in Afghanistan in mind. Recall the latter’s offensive pronouncement that creating the pseudo-Islamic terrorist forces in Afghanistan (actually the beginning of “America’s own Ghurka regiments”) was justified as a means of destroying the Soviet Union.

    Instead of faux-Muslims, Ukraine is run by crypto-Zionist terrorists who operate Ukraine just like Hamid Karzai ran Afghanistan.

    Depopulating Ukraine also benefits the criminal cashflow underlying the plunder of the territory still known by that name.

    As we have both argued to different degrees, this was war against Russia from the beginning.

    Paul Craig Roberts has insisted from the beginning that Putin failed to see the obvious, thus prolonging the campaign to the brink. I disagree. In real politics it makes a difference what you say too. The tacit avoidance of the obvious (and here Stalin was compelled to act the same) has been necessary to prepare and force the other side to escalate in language first.

    Of course this is not 1938 and Putin is not leading a state out of civil war. Germany’s role has been muted because the “Nazis” are already in the Ukraine. From current reports they are engaged in clearing the corridor for a vain but violent missile cruise to Moscow and Sevastapol. Moreover a great deal of Western war preparation was accomplished by the COVID-19 campaign, whose effects on the Western mass psychology and economy are far from dissipated (as they too are entering a new only vaguely perceivable phase).

    Yet one can see that the Istanbul format was an attempt to reach something equivalent to the German-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact. That failed – showing that the West learned from its mistake in the last war against Russia.

    Why is there such an obvious discrepancy between official US military assessments and those of the Establishment? Let us recall that the notorious Pentagon Papers reported the warrior’s pessimistic appraisal of US efforts in Indochina. The late Daniel Ellsberg adroitly “neglected” to include the crucial CIA chapters in his conscientious exposure. Vietnam was a CIA (corporate) war with military cover. The same applies to the Ukraine. Vladimir Putin surely knows that. However there are also rules in covert warfare. One of them is that the general public must remain confused or ignorant of the underlying business driving the visible and tangible hostilities. Mr Putin has repeated that all wars end with negotiation. Hence his refusal to table demands or assertions that could render the malicious incapable of concessions demonstrates a profound belief in diplomacy foreign not only to perfidious Albion but to its genotypes in the Anglo-American Empire.

    Therefore, the professional soldiers (as opposed to paramilitary party cadres in cabinet of general staff) can honestly say what they have been educated to see while the political commissariat repeats the substance of their daily briefings.

    For the US, WW2 became desperate only once it was clear that the Wehrmacht was on the retreat. The panic of 1944 that precipitated Normandy and the formal abandonment of fascist (Vichy) and occupied France was triggered by a similar adjustment. 1945 delivered Germany and Japan to US occupation where they have remained ever since. [Except for the interregnum of an East Germany state from 1949 to 1990 — DV ed] It also initiated the kind of war that international financial functionary Bernard Baruch was credited with calling “cold”.

    The physical space has not changed. The strategic objectives remain more or less the same as in the Fourth Crusade (including the sack of major Near Eastern population centers). However, there has been an enormous compression of time and lethality.

    The inhabitants of Western Eurasia aka Europe are supposed to be simultaneously impoverished and enlisted as Crusaders, think of the 1212 “Children‘s Crusade”. The masses of psychologically maimed since 2020 are to find their salvation in vicarious battle with the “Ivan”. The rabinnical-papal absolutism on the Tiber has long been a patron of perdition. However, there is some irony in the regnal name blessing the slaughter on the Bosporus and elsewhere East. Innocent III was anything but. However innocence and purity, like hygiene and solidarity have become the highest virtues among the quick and the dead of the dissolving Western Empire.

    Salvation is just over the rainbow, as the popularity of those banners demonstrates.

    In Hoc Signo

    The post In Hoc Signo Vinces first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Hell: the creditor of last resort

    Note: While I was writing this I thought about many things I experienced and read. Then as I was posting this the title of a book I read many years ago came to mind. Bernard Fall’s Hell in a Very Small Place. Fall was and remained a sympathizer with the imperial powers that exploited Indochina, both French and American. His account of the defeat of the French at Dien Bien Phu was a combination of despair and appeal for a more sensible counter-insurgency strategy that would waste fewer (French) lives. While Gaza and Dien Bien Phu are by no means politically or historically comparable. The ambiguities in the assessment of this military operation do bear some similarity to the contradictions among opponents of the annihilation of Palestinians in Gaza. Thus the reference to Fall’s title is not intended as analogy or allegory but as cognitive provocation.

    Between BlackRock and a hard place

    According to published sources, whatever one may think of Wikipedia’s notoriously selective entries, the university named after the Puritan merchant-adventurer of Massachusetts Bay Colony, John Harvard, constitutes a corporation with the largest academic endowment in the world, valued at some USD 50 billion as of 2022. This had led to at least one wag designating “Harvard” as a hedge fund with a university in its portfolio. Hedge funds are unregulated entities that permit people with real money to move it from one source of extraction to another with various benefits such as offshore opacity, tax avoidance, and sundry immunities obtained through the efforts of correspondingly empowered managers to influence investment conditions and outcomes. The hedge fund is a modern version of the Latin Church’s vast traffic in salvation, otherwise known as the indulgence business and Crusades.

    Salvation is the intangible product promised by the Latin Church in the context of its risk management business. Financial risk management is the modern product for which the hedge fund was developed. The rabbinical-papal financial services industry — concentrated in the Vatican by Innocent III —  is composed of the congregations that preach damnation, those that preach salvation, and the orders and offices that deliver the risk management products, i.e. various types of sacraments, indulgences, dispensations and preferment. Parallel to but in fact a logical extension of the Latin Church’s financial system, the hedge fund has superseded the bank as the core instrument for trading life in return for death.

    The university corporations upon which the US Ivy League were based are found in the renowned collegiate universities located in Cambridge and Oxford. Unlike most universities today, the collegiate university was created on the basis of ecclesiastical endowments — hedge funds by which the founders secured dispensation and protected their wealth from those they had robbed in their lifetime. When the Latin Church was nationalized under the Tudors, the English Church succeeded in title but the business continued otherwise unabated. The history of exclusion from the Oxford and Cambridge colleges has been presented as a history of arbitrary prejudice and discrimination, all of which was successively remedied by the post-1945 order. This is a crass avoidance of the real issue. The Oxford or Cambridge college was foremost a financial institution. One must recall that both universities were entitled to send members to the House of Commons. That was not because of their learned activity but because they were property and asset holders and as such satisfied the requirements for the franchise whereas municipalities with ordinary tenants did not.

    In other words to become a member of a college in either university made one a shareholder in the corporation and at least a limited beneficiary of the wealth extraction instruments inherent in these entities. From the standpoint of the university corporations, it was clearly inconceivable that persons otherwise not entitled to property or the franchise be admitted to these universities. The fact that Oxford and Cambridge graduates enjoyed privileged access to government, after the precedence of aristocracy and the great public schools, was not based on academic merit but on class membership and in some cases meritorious service to the ruling class. The US elite universities were founded with the same principles and the same structures, albeit without the loyal toast at high table. Later foundations, the post-colonial colleges and universities were controlled by a similar business model. Then the 1862 (and 1890) Morrill Acts, created the basis for the so-called Land Grant universities. Federal land, generously transferred from the indigenous population to the US government, was allocated to the states for the purpose of establishing universities, mainly of the agricultural and technical type. These were a departure from the collegiate structure and more closely resembled the German technical college. Toward the end of the 19th century the US would largely abandon the English model in favour of the German Hochschule. On one hand this was because the Anglo-American elite needed engineers and technicians to develop the country and lacked (rejected) the occupational dual-education system common on the Continent. On the other hand it was implicitly desired to replace hereditary aristocracy with quasi-hereditary “meritocracy”. The Ivy League was to continue to indoctrinate the senior civil service and managerial class as well as issue credentials to the runs of the plutocratic litter so as to preserve the latent class structure in America’s “classless society.” The Anglo-American elite, in contrast to the latifundista of the “Blessed Isle”, recognized the need for merchants and engineers or mechanics to convert a stolen and progressively vacated continent into fungible assets. The settler-colonial elite in North America did not have the benefit or obstacle of the millions with which first the East India Company and then HM Viceroy was confronted.

    As a result of this distinct historical development most of the US higher (tertiary) education system is in fact state established and funded by the public purse. After the Second World War, the US elite — in panic after failure to destroy the Soviet Union or even inhibit its technological and social development — adopted legislation to inject massive amounts of public funds into education, a policy deeply antithetical to Anglo-American elite culture, Thomas Arnold and John Dewey notwithstanding. Harvard and Yale graduates were forced to recognize that even their theological seminaries (the new business schools) were not enough to train the masses of indoctrinated technicians needed to confront the Ivan who had not only taken Berlin but launched the first artificial satellite into orbit. Places like Michigan State specialized in counter-insurgency to help the regime terrorize Vietnamese. However even here the bulk of the money went to private universities. This was not only because of the personal union of grantors and grantees but because funnelling public funds for research at MIT or Columbia promoted the money-laundering schemes by which these foundations retained their exclusivity.

    Behind the mask of merit, the endowment (and the gravy train to public research funding) permit the university to operate profitably without regard for tuition fees. Essentially the “research grants” subsidize these tax dodges (universities are generally tax-exempt and can accept donations for tax exemption) and constitute a covert subsidy to those corporations or wealthy individuals who endow them. What is in a name? A library by any other name would smell as mouldy.

    There is another less obvious but intellectually insidious aspect of this business model. Elite universities become repositories of rare and valuable cultural, intellectual and scientific resources. They are able to hoard them and restrict access accordingly. Thus a poor or mediocre scholar can establish himself as an authority by virtue of using the sources held by such endowments to which others have only restricted access, if any. In a system where canonical texts are used to exemplify dominant ideology, limiting access to such materials gives authority to the loyal servants while diminishing that of scholars forced to rely on secondary or even tertiary sources. It should be recalled that until the Reformation even possession of a Bible by anyone without ecclesiastical license could be punished by death. When our loquacious regurgitators of doctrine and dogma preach against conspiracy they are protected by the locks and keys of the Hoover Institution and the US Holocaust Museum as well as the soft files that saturate the corporate, espionage and secret police bureaucracies.

    Which leads us to the business at hand: what is actually happening at the renowned universities of the Great North American republic? The charming claims that academic freedom is being violated are really nothing more than charming. As George Carlin said about “rights”, they are a cute idea. There has never been anything called “academic freedom”, unless one means by that “free enterprise” applied to universities as businesses. As I have already argued elsewhere, science was wholly replaced by Science after the Manhattan Project and the less known biological warfare unit run by Merck during the great war against communism (aka WW2). Where scholarship has been genuinely free it has been despite the university not because of it. The same applies even more rigorously to teaching. There is a reason why teacher colleges (once the only venues to accept women) were called “normal schools”. John Dewey, celebrated for his assertions that education was essential for democracy, never vocally challenged the plutocracy that obstructed it. His education for democracy was ultimately distilled into indoctrination of an emergent multi-ethnic society such that they possessed no identity capable of coherent interest articulation. Unlike the Soviet Union, defunct successor to a historically multi-ethnic state, the US was not only founded on the extermination of the indigenous but on the acidic brain dissolution of the immigrant. Genetic engineering is in fact a deep technological application of the ideology by which humans can be infinitely reconfigured beyond Donald Cameron’s reprogramming at the Allan Memorial between 1957 and 1964.

    Barely buried, the FBI asset and GE lackey appointed governor of California and later POTUS, Ronald Wilson Reagan, was canonized for his propaganda (to use the term Edward Bernays did his best to replace) contributions to the complete privatization of what little public and potentially democratic space had emerged in the US despite the victory of finance capital in 1913. Under so-called New Deal policies, the historic mercenary forces of corporate industrial and financial capital managed by so-called White Shoe law firms in cooperation with the US Marine Corps (don’t take my word for it, USMC General Smedley Butler knew what he was he was being ordered to do), was temporarily nationalized. As the war drew to an end there were some who wanted to dissolve these state agencies like the OSS and return liability for piracy to the private sector. However the prescient, mainly Ivy League, elite recognized that the propaganda they had embedded in the UN Charter made a return to open corporate criminality bad for the US image in the competition with the unfortunately surviving system competitor. Thus the National Security Act of 1947 preserved the state protection of the US plutocracy that prevails to this day. Saint Ronald is worshipped like Our Lady of Fatima, by the witting for his PR success and the unwitting because of their blind faith.

    Meanwhile there have been numerous challenges to the brutality perpetrated by the militarized police forces of cities where even elite universities reside. They have not prevented the police repression. However some have at least insinuated—as in the case of Columbia — that the actions are not entirely based on local law enforcement perceptions. The relationship between a certain Ms Weiner, as head of NYPD intelligence and counter-terrorism (let’s call it NYC’s Phoenix Program) embedded in the university faculty like what the NSDAP called a “Führungsoffizier” (a party leadership officer responsible for assuring ideological compliance under the Hitler regime) and NYPD liaison to the state terrorist apparatus in Tel Aviv has been illuminated without innuendo. The investigators recognize that the conclusions one can draw are hopelessly obvious. This archetypical infiltration of a primary academic and research institution has been rightfully criticized. However it is not a new phenomenon. The FBI and through cut-outs the CIA have always had agents in the educational institutions deemed critical for the system. These agents served as “talent scouts” and police informers. What appears quite unique to this period of campus protest is on one hand the willingness of students to make demands on the “official permanent and privileged victim state” aka as the State of Israel in Palestine and the violence with which the agents and assets of that State without constitutional or moral boundaries are prepared to perpetrate in their largest host country. As Ron Unz et al. have said with justifiable vehemence, the masks have fallen. The State of Israel is demonstrably capable not only of buying the entire federal legislature and considerable assets at state level, it is able and willing to dictate individual police actions at municipal and university level.

    The debate has begun — albeit only among already sensitized critics — about how the precedent set by Lyndon Johnson in suppressing the investigation and condemnation of the State of Israel for its murderous attack on the USS Liberty in 1967 created the immunity of that settler-colonial regime’s officials from any liability under any recognized law. The blatant interventions have followed pronouncements by the reigning head of government with such rapidity that only an idiot could imagine that diplomatic channels were even necessary. This atrocious and obvious capacity to intervene in the minutia of US domestic politics (whereby these are surely not purely domestic matters) may, even if only at the pace of snails or winter maple syrup, produce a partial revulsion against the gut feeling of many sharing that primitive spirit of national sovereignty residual from the 19th century.

    Yet beyond the mathematical equation by which the thermodynamics of dog and tail are integrated, there is a more elemental quality that bears consideration. Morse Peckham once wrote and frequently said that “man does not live by bread alone, but mostly by platitudes”. Thomas Friedman wrote that McDonald’s was inseparable from McDonnell Douglas (all now Boeing, I believe). And Harvard is a hedge fund with a university in its portfolio.

    Take these platitudes seriously for a moment, in their combination. It helps to be specific. A McDonald’s in Saigon needed an F-4 Phantom. And hedge funds need collection agents, too. Before 1947 these were usually the USMC. Ajax and PBSuccess were the style of the 1950s. FUBELT was the name given to the CIA’s operation on behalf of ITT et al. University students were a disproportionate target of the first wave since they formed the potential cadre in support of the Allende government. In fact, at least two academic economists from North America were successfully marginalized for the rest of their careers just because they supported the new government and not the Rockefeller economics of the University of Chicago. Not only is there no academic freedom under capitalism there is unlimited vindictiveness toward those who violate the free market. We do not know what the cryptonyms for the current counter-insurgency operations are. However, it is important to see their true origins.

    While there is no doubt as to the smell of cordite and the hands upon which the powder stains can be found, a more fundamental force is at work, that of the hedge fund. The world’s leading hedge fund and the paramount of this criminal tribe is BlackRock, known also through the peculiar person of one Mr Laurence Douglas Fink, where students of his alma mater have recently been attacked by SA-like gangs for protesting against the mass murder perpetrated by the armed forces of the state occupying Palestine, is reported to have more than USD 10 trillion (billion in continental terms) of “assets under management”. There are diagrams that illustrate the degree to which just this hedge fund has penetrated the world economy, both private and private-public. There is no reason to doubt that the hubris of this graduate of the First Boston school of financial engineering (aka as legalized securities fraud) reflects the asset class to which he belongs.

    It may help to diverge for a moment to explain a few basics of the formal corporate and municipal debt business. Gustavus Meyer’ History of the Great American Fortunes (written before he, like Ida Turbell in the matter of Standard Oil, was persuaded to write with more sympathy) explains in lay vocabulary how the bond and stock market actually function. Corporate finance is taught at business schools like typing is taught at vocational schools. However once one has obtained a proper degree in finance or business from one of the gateway institutions—or through viciousness has worked his or her way up after graduation from a less prestigious school — the process begins by which one learns the work of hard selling, usury, stock watering, legislative influence, tax and accounting fraud and deployment of ratings agencies. In short, an investment banking apprenticeship is a course in how — in Adam Smith’s terms — one meets to collude, fix prices and manipulate markets. Cigars only available to those who can evade the general embargo beyond the Strait of Florida or the narcotics beyond the substance control by the CIA/DEA lubricate the Rolex and Patek Philippe adorned wrists.

    These cardinals and bishops, prelates of finance capital, sell financial salvation to unwitting penitents and their pastors. They must protect the faith in their product, the belief in the sin for which these sacraments, indulgences and penance are sold. They must retain the value of the derivative instruments for which universities (and other tax dodges) have been established. At the height of the Middle Ages, the Holy Roman and Universal Inquisition together with whatever massed mercenary forces and police power the rabbinical papacy could command, from Brazil to Wittenberg, from Rome to Lima, from Milan to Manila, perpetrated every conceivable and heinous violence against ordinary humans to preserve the credit rating, to secure the value of discounted cash flows.

    And so it is today. What we witness at US universities, especially those financed for the benefit of tax dodging hedge fund operators, is command performance. These are not merely the punishment ordered by some barbarian of Polish descent leading a settler-colonial regime in Palestine. These are the acts of the apostles. Acts of the apostles of the holy hedge funds who have succeeded the Latin Church — although consensually — to deliver truly catholic salvation. Salvation that is wealth for the quick and the grave for the dead.

    The post Hell in a Very Small Place first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Hell: the creditor of last resort

    Note: While I was writing this I thought about many things I experienced and read. Then as I was posting this the title of a book I read many years ago came to mind. Bernard Fall’s Hell in a Very Small Place. Fall was and remained a sympathizer with the imperial powers that exploited Indochina, both French and American. His account of the defeat of the French at Dien Bien Phu was a combination of despair and appeal for a more sensible counter-insurgency strategy that would waste fewer (French) lives. While Gaza and Dien Bien Phu are by no means politically or historically comparable. The ambiguities in the assessment of this military operation do bear some similarity to the contradictions among opponents of the annihilation of Palestinians in Gaza. Thus the reference to Fall’s title is not intended as analogy or allegory but as cognitive provocation.

    Between BlackRock and a hard place

    According to published sources, whatever one may think of Wikipedia’s notoriously selective entries, the university named after the Puritan merchant-adventurer of Massachusetts Bay Colony, John Harvard, constitutes a corporation with the largest academic endowment in the world, valued at some USD 50 billion as of 2022. This had led to at least one wag designating “Harvard” as a hedge fund with a university in its portfolio. Hedge funds are unregulated entities that permit people with real money to move it from one source of extraction to another with various benefits such as offshore opacity, tax avoidance, and sundry immunities obtained through the efforts of correspondingly empowered managers to influence investment conditions and outcomes. The hedge fund is a modern version of the Latin Church’s vast traffic in salvation, otherwise known as the indulgence business and Crusades.

    Salvation is the intangible product promised by the Latin Church in the context of its risk management business. Financial risk management is the modern product for which the hedge fund was developed. The rabbinical-papal financial services industry — concentrated in the Vatican by Innocent III —  is composed of the congregations that preach damnation, those that preach salvation, and the orders and offices that deliver the risk management products, i.e. various types of sacraments, indulgences, dispensations and preferment. Parallel to but in fact a logical extension of the Latin Church’s financial system, the hedge fund has superseded the bank as the core instrument for trading life in return for death.

    The university corporations upon which the US Ivy League were based are found in the renowned collegiate universities located in Cambridge and Oxford. Unlike most universities today, the collegiate university was created on the basis of ecclesiastical endowments — hedge funds by which the founders secured dispensation and protected their wealth from those they had robbed in their lifetime. When the Latin Church was nationalized under the Tudors, the English Church succeeded in title but the business continued otherwise unabated. The history of exclusion from the Oxford and Cambridge colleges has been presented as a history of arbitrary prejudice and discrimination, all of which was successively remedied by the post-1945 order. This is a crass avoidance of the real issue. The Oxford or Cambridge college was foremost a financial institution. One must recall that both universities were entitled to send members to the House of Commons. That was not because of their learned activity but because they were property and asset holders and as such satisfied the requirements for the franchise whereas municipalities with ordinary tenants did not.

    In other words to become a member of a college in either university made one a shareholder in the corporation and at least a limited beneficiary of the wealth extraction instruments inherent in these entities. From the standpoint of the university corporations, it was clearly inconceivable that persons otherwise not entitled to property or the franchise be admitted to these universities. The fact that Oxford and Cambridge graduates enjoyed privileged access to government, after the precedence of aristocracy and the great public schools, was not based on academic merit but on class membership and in some cases meritorious service to the ruling class. The US elite universities were founded with the same principles and the same structures, albeit without the loyal toast at high table. Later foundations, the post-colonial colleges and universities were controlled by a similar business model. Then the 1862 (and 1890) Morrill Acts, created the basis for the so-called Land Grant universities. Federal land, generously transferred from the indigenous population to the US government, was allocated to the states for the purpose of establishing universities, mainly of the agricultural and technical type. These were a departure from the collegiate structure and more closely resembled the German technical college. Toward the end of the 19th century the US would largely abandon the English model in favour of the German Hochschule. On one hand this was because the Anglo-American elite needed engineers and technicians to develop the country and lacked (rejected) the occupational dual-education system common on the Continent. On the other hand it was implicitly desired to replace hereditary aristocracy with quasi-hereditary “meritocracy”. The Ivy League was to continue to indoctrinate the senior civil service and managerial class as well as issue credentials to the runs of the plutocratic litter so as to preserve the latent class structure in America’s “classless society.” The Anglo-American elite, in contrast to the latifundista of the “Blessed Isle”, recognized the need for merchants and engineers or mechanics to convert a stolen and progressively vacated continent into fungible assets. The settler-colonial elite in North America did not have the benefit or obstacle of the millions with which first the East India Company and then HM Viceroy was confronted.

    As a result of this distinct historical development most of the US higher (tertiary) education system is in fact state established and funded by the public purse. After the Second World War, the US elite — in panic after failure to destroy the Soviet Union or even inhibit its technological and social development — adopted legislation to inject massive amounts of public funds into education, a policy deeply antithetical to Anglo-American elite culture, Thomas Arnold and John Dewey notwithstanding. Harvard and Yale graduates were forced to recognize that even their theological seminaries (the new business schools) were not enough to train the masses of indoctrinated technicians needed to confront the Ivan who had not only taken Berlin but launched the first artificial satellite into orbit. Places like Michigan State specialized in counter-insurgency to help the regime terrorize Vietnamese. However even here the bulk of the money went to private universities. This was not only because of the personal union of grantors and grantees but because funnelling public funds for research at MIT or Columbia promoted the money-laundering schemes by which these foundations retained their exclusivity.

    Behind the mask of merit, the endowment (and the gravy train to public research funding) permit the university to operate profitably without regard for tuition fees. Essentially the “research grants” subsidize these tax dodges (universities are generally tax-exempt and can accept donations for tax exemption) and constitute a covert subsidy to those corporations or wealthy individuals who endow them. What is in a name? A library by any other name would smell as mouldy.

    There is another less obvious but intellectually insidious aspect of this business model. Elite universities become repositories of rare and valuable cultural, intellectual and scientific resources. They are able to hoard them and restrict access accordingly. Thus a poor or mediocre scholar can establish himself as an authority by virtue of using the sources held by such endowments to which others have only restricted access, if any. In a system where canonical texts are used to exemplify dominant ideology, limiting access to such materials gives authority to the loyal servants while diminishing that of scholars forced to rely on secondary or even tertiary sources. It should be recalled that until the Reformation even possession of a Bible by anyone without ecclesiastical license could be punished by death. When our loquacious regurgitators of doctrine and dogma preach against conspiracy they are protected by the locks and keys of the Hoover Institution and the US Holocaust Museum as well as the soft files that saturate the corporate, espionage and secret police bureaucracies.

    Which leads us to the business at hand: what is actually happening at the renowned universities of the Great North American republic? The charming claims that academic freedom is being violated are really nothing more than charming. As George Carlin said about “rights”, they are a cute idea. There has never been anything called “academic freedom”, unless one means by that “free enterprise” applied to universities as businesses. As I have already argued elsewhere, science was wholly replaced by Science after the Manhattan Project and the less known biological warfare unit run by Merck during the great war against communism (aka WW2). Where scholarship has been genuinely free it has been despite the university not because of it. The same applies even more rigorously to teaching. There is a reason why teacher colleges (once the only venues to accept women) were called “normal schools”. John Dewey, celebrated for his assertions that education was essential for democracy, never vocally challenged the plutocracy that obstructed it. His education for democracy was ultimately distilled into indoctrination of an emergent multi-ethnic society such that they possessed no identity capable of coherent interest articulation. Unlike the Soviet Union, defunct successor to a historically multi-ethnic state, the US was not only founded on the extermination of the indigenous but on the acidic brain dissolution of the immigrant. Genetic engineering is in fact a deep technological application of the ideology by which humans can be infinitely reconfigured beyond Donald Cameron’s reprogramming at the Allan Memorial between 1957 and 1964.

    Barely buried, the FBI asset and GE lackey appointed governor of California and later POTUS, Ronald Wilson Reagan, was canonized for his propaganda (to use the term Edward Bernays did his best to replace) contributions to the complete privatization of what little public and potentially democratic space had emerged in the US despite the victory of finance capital in 1913. Under so-called New Deal policies, the historic mercenary forces of corporate industrial and financial capital managed by so-called White Shoe law firms in cooperation with the US Marine Corps (don’t take my word for it, USMC General Smedley Butler knew what he was he was being ordered to do), was temporarily nationalized. As the war drew to an end there were some who wanted to dissolve these state agencies like the OSS and return liability for piracy to the private sector. However the prescient, mainly Ivy League, elite recognized that the propaganda they had embedded in the UN Charter made a return to open corporate criminality bad for the US image in the competition with the unfortunately surviving system competitor. Thus the National Security Act of 1947 preserved the state protection of the US plutocracy that prevails to this day. Saint Ronald is worshipped like Our Lady of Fatima, by the witting for his PR success and the unwitting because of their blind faith.

    Meanwhile there have been numerous challenges to the brutality perpetrated by the militarized police forces of cities where even elite universities reside. They have not prevented the police repression. However some have at least insinuated—as in the case of Columbia — that the actions are not entirely based on local law enforcement perceptions. The relationship between a certain Ms Weiner, as head of NYPD intelligence and counter-terrorism (let’s call it NYC’s Phoenix Program) embedded in the university faculty like what the NSDAP called a “Führungsoffizier” (a party leadership officer responsible for assuring ideological compliance under the Hitler regime) and NYPD liaison to the state terrorist apparatus in Tel Aviv has been illuminated without innuendo. The investigators recognize that the conclusions one can draw are hopelessly obvious. This archetypical infiltration of a primary academic and research institution has been rightfully criticized. However it is not a new phenomenon. The FBI and through cut-outs the CIA have always had agents in the educational institutions deemed critical for the system. These agents served as “talent scouts” and police informers. What appears quite unique to this period of campus protest is on one hand the willingness of students to make demands on the “official permanent and privileged victim state” aka as the State of Israel in Palestine and the violence with which the agents and assets of that State without constitutional or moral boundaries are prepared to perpetrate in their largest host country. As Ron Unz et al. have said with justifiable vehemence, the masks have fallen. The State of Israel is demonstrably capable not only of buying the entire federal legislature and considerable assets at state level, it is able and willing to dictate individual police actions at municipal and university level.

    The debate has begun — albeit only among already sensitized critics — about how the precedent set by Lyndon Johnson in suppressing the investigation and condemnation of the State of Israel for its murderous attack on the USS Liberty in 1967 created the immunity of that settler-colonial regime’s officials from any liability under any recognized law. The blatant interventions have followed pronouncements by the reigning head of government with such rapidity that only an idiot could imagine that diplomatic channels were even necessary. This atrocious and obvious capacity to intervene in the minutia of US domestic politics (whereby these are surely not purely domestic matters) may, even if only at the pace of snails or winter maple syrup, produce a partial revulsion against the gut feeling of many sharing that primitive spirit of national sovereignty residual from the 19th century.

    Yet beyond the mathematical equation by which the thermodynamics of dog and tail are integrated, there is a more elemental quality that bears consideration. Morse Peckham once wrote and frequently said that “man does not live by bread alone, but mostly by platitudes”. Thomas Friedman wrote that McDonald’s was inseparable from McDonnell Douglas (all now Boeing, I believe). And Harvard is a hedge fund with a university in its portfolio.

    Take these platitudes seriously for a moment, in their combination. It helps to be specific. A McDonald’s in Saigon needed an F-4 Phantom. And hedge funds need collection agents, too. Before 1947 these were usually the USMC. Ajax and PBSuccess were the style of the 1950s. FUBELT was the name given to the CIA’s operation on behalf of ITT et al. University students were a disproportionate target of the first wave since they formed the potential cadre in support of the Allende government. In fact, at least two academic economists from North America were successfully marginalized for the rest of their careers just because they supported the new government and not the Rockefeller economics of the University of Chicago. Not only is there no academic freedom under capitalism there is unlimited vindictiveness toward those who violate the free market. We do not know what the cryptonyms for the current counter-insurgency operations are. However, it is important to see their true origins.

    While there is no doubt as to the smell of cordite and the hands upon which the powder stains can be found, a more fundamental force is at work, that of the hedge fund. The world’s leading hedge fund and the paramount of this criminal tribe is BlackRock, known also through the peculiar person of one Mr Laurence Douglas Fink, where students of his alma mater have recently been attacked by SA-like gangs for protesting against the mass murder perpetrated by the armed forces of the state occupying Palestine, is reported to have more than USD 10 trillion (billion in continental terms) of “assets under management”. There are diagrams that illustrate the degree to which just this hedge fund has penetrated the world economy, both private and private-public. There is no reason to doubt that the hubris of this graduate of the First Boston school of financial engineering (aka as legalized securities fraud) reflects the asset class to which he belongs.

    It may help to diverge for a moment to explain a few basics of the formal corporate and municipal debt business. Gustavus Meyer’ History of the Great American Fortunes (written before he, like Ida Turbell in the matter of Standard Oil, was persuaded to write with more sympathy) explains in lay vocabulary how the bond and stock market actually function. Corporate finance is taught at business schools like typing is taught at vocational schools. However once one has obtained a proper degree in finance or business from one of the gateway institutions—or through viciousness has worked his or her way up after graduation from a less prestigious school — the process begins by which one learns the work of hard selling, usury, stock watering, legislative influence, tax and accounting fraud and deployment of ratings agencies. In short, an investment banking apprenticeship is a course in how — in Adam Smith’s terms — one meets to collude, fix prices and manipulate markets. Cigars only available to those who can evade the general embargo beyond the Strait of Florida or the narcotics beyond the substance control by the CIA/DEA lubricate the Rolex and Patek Philippe adorned wrists.

    These cardinals and bishops, prelates of finance capital, sell financial salvation to unwitting penitents and their pastors. They must protect the faith in their product, the belief in the sin for which these sacraments, indulgences and penance are sold. They must retain the value of the derivative instruments for which universities (and other tax dodges) have been established. At the height of the Middle Ages, the Holy Roman and Universal Inquisition together with whatever massed mercenary forces and police power the rabbinical papacy could command, from Brazil to Wittenberg, from Rome to Lima, from Milan to Manila, perpetrated every conceivable and heinous violence against ordinary humans to preserve the credit rating, to secure the value of discounted cash flows.

    And so it is today. What we witness at US universities, especially those financed for the benefit of tax dodging hedge fund operators, is command performance. These are not merely the punishment ordered by some barbarian of Polish descent leading a settler-colonial regime in Palestine. These are the acts of the apostles. Acts of the apostles of the holy hedge funds who have succeeded the Latin Church — although consensually — to deliver truly catholic salvation. Salvation that is wealth for the quick and the grave for the dead.

    The post Hell in a Very Small Place first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • I could not have been a pacifist, if by that one means waiver of the use of physical force in disputes. The reason is simple. In my childhood I had to actually hit someone who threatened me or positioned himself as if he would in order to end at least two years of harassment, including destruction and theft of my personal property while travelling to and from school. The actual punch that like a miracle sent some invisible wave throughout the scholastic environment was a panic reaction, a thrust to the face of the boy who once had been a playmate and for some only years later explicable reason had converted to lead tormenter.

    Although I grew up in a semi-military household, everyone on my father’s side had served in the armed forces, while no one on my mother’s side had, the military as regular and pernicious institutional violence was not present in my youth. We did not play “cowboys and Indians” in the fifth grade. Instead we imagined World War 2 battlefields. As I recall our sandpits resembled most the campaign waged in Italy after Anzio. My classmates had plastic rifles or machine guns with the advantage that they could make noise. I was armed with a wooden training rifle in the shape of the bolt action Springfield issued to US soldiers in the Great War. On one hand I was sorry that the only noise it made was a click when the bolt was drawn or the trigger pulled. Yet, it had been used to drill ordinary soldiers, and hence it was more realistic than all the other guns in our war games. In retrospect, I find minor consolation that I did not wholly absorb the domestic enemy images in Western films. Nor did I ever acquire the fondness for violence which makes armed service so natural for many. These were games and not real life.

    Throughout my life, I have known soldiers and others engaged in warfare, mainly those serving either in the Forces of the United States or Her Britannic Majesty. Yet, I have been spared the personal participation in war. Unlike many of my classmates whose military interest was technological—they liked guns—my interest the military as an organization. I began very early to read military history and the classics of military science. Strategy, tactics, and logistics are above all organizational matters. Even if there were not a single rifle or warship employed, the military organisation remains distinctive, a particular way of getting work done.

    On 9 May the Russian Federation, as the successor to the Russian Soviet Socialist Republic, the largest and core constituent entity in the defunct Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, celebrated the defeat of the Western fascist invasion spearheaded by the German Wehrmacht under the codename Unternehmen (Operation) Barbarossa. The Second World War is called in the former Soviet Union the Great Patriotic War (Velikya Otechestvennaya voyna). I can recall the years when condescending aspersions were cast on occasion of the military parades in Moscow on 1 and 9 May. These parades were always presented as evidence of Soviet aggressive intent.

    Trooping of the Colour and the armaments and martial display in Paris on Bastille Day (14 July) were never subjected to such derision, despite the continued foreign wars in which both Britain and France were (and are engaged). National holidays in countries that fought for their independence or safety might be forgiven for celebrating the forces with which those goals were attained. However, 4 July commemorates the UDI and not the battles to be fought. Trooping the Colour is celebration of the British monarch’s birthday by means of a loyal display of close order massed formation of the regiments responsible for defending the monarchy, not Britain, from invasion. The Guards uniforms and massed bands add to the pageantry at Horse Guards Parade, Whitehall. However the archaic drill formations are not decorative. They are a living example of 18th and early 19th century infantry tactics for producing massed firepower from single shot muskets and rifles. Anyone with some knowledge of French history would find the parade down the Champs Elysées on 14 July incongruent with the storming of the prison by which the start of the French Revolution is remembered. After ignominy in the Great War and the surrender to fascism in June 1940, the ruling class, represented by a banker of 172 cm (while the emperor of the French was only 157 cm tall), can lay no serious claims to heroism in defence of the nation. Presidential celebration of the Jour de Bastille is essentially a commercial display for the French armaments industry, in tough competition with its Western allies.

    Pacifism is a personal choice, like so many ethical decisions made by individuals, to be respected. Perhaps there is a potential message for millions that conflict resolution or interest imposition must not necessarily require force of arms. However, like vegetarianism and veganism, pacifism relies on simplifications of the world that are just as problematic as those simplifications that dictate force of arms as the pure means of resolving conflicts. If the purpose of conflict resolution is to prove one side to be right and the other wrong, then war is inevitable. There is no way to prove the ideas of someone else absolutely wrong unless one is prepared to exterminate all those who hold those ideas. Conflict resolution cannot be based on proving who is right and who is wrong—even if in our hearts we believe we know this. Instead of proof of right or wrong—although wartime slogans are usually stated in platitudes and absolutes—conflict, even armed conflict aims to produce terms which both combatants can agree are sufficient to end hostilities.

    The primitive propaganda of the NATO members, jointly and severally, has consistently argued that there is an absolute solution to end the war and that is to comply with the dictates of the West in NATO assembled. Pursuant to this unilateralism the Russian Federation, portrayed as the aggressor and hence in the wrong, is alleged to have the same absolute aims that the West in NATO assembled proclaims. Merely asserting this does not make it so—except in the minds of the other enemy NATO has pursued since 2001. This war in Ukraine, designated a special military operation by the Russian Federation and as a war for Ukrainian liberation from Russia in the West, is simultaneously a war against the ordinary inhabitants of the West, with a focus on the frontline sacrifice along the point of contact, stretches of the former NATO-Warsaw Pact border.

    Watching the military parades in Russia and China it is tempting to see them as large scale militarist exhibitions. The serried ranks parading past the review stand in Moscow or Beijing cannot help but impress in terms of drilled precision. The strong presence of women, wearing skirts not trousers, conveys the image of an entire population under arms—if only because of the numbers in China. Casual Western observers and insincere critics alike are inclined to see such massive marching formations as incompatible with peace. I can even hear the sceptical remarks that such enormous displays prove that the Russians and Chinese are at least as belligerent as the armed forces in NATO. It is easy to wish that Russia or China, if they really wanted peace, would not so flagrantly display their military resources. Regular presence of US Armed Forces in all manner of sporting events with mass audience appeal is treated as routine with no ideological significance for countries beyond its borders.

    Parades and all forms of pageantry are political events—even if promoted as entertainment. It is childish, ignorant or mendacious to attribute political motives to the parades of another country, one’s enemy, while pretending that one’s own country has no political motives for marching on holidays. It is necessary to ask what the motives of an event are and to consider them in historical context. Simply asserting that the bigger the military parade the more militaristic the parading is insufficient.

    Long ago the so-called Western allies, Britain and the United States (for most of the war France was occupied by Germany or governed by an explicitly fascist regime in Vichy), were barely engaged in war against the Hitler regime in Germany. Despite claims to the contrary, the facts show that the Anglo-American alliance (essentially a Rhodes-Round Table compact made without the populations of either country) were on the side of anyone who would wage war against the Soviet Union. US ambassador to Moscow, Joseph Davies, was convinced that France and Britain were on the side of Hitler in preparing war against the USSR. So this conclusion as it applied until 1944 was no historical revision. It was in plain sight. The US was neutral until 1941 and Britain had nothing to say in the matter except to make money and avoid outright losses in its imperial corridors.

    Although Vladimir Putin essentially repudiated the Soviet Union he was very clear in his speech this year that the military assembled were the descendants of the heroic men and women who defeated Nazism and the West’s second major invasion of the Russian heartland. Their parents and grandparents sacrificed more than their lives to stop German militarism and its allies from destroying what the citizens of the Soviet Union had produced. They can claim the legacy of great armies of liberation in the hell poured over them since the October Revolution.

    The People’s Liberation Army, the descendants of the Eight Route Army and other Chinese revolutionary formations, not only defeated the Japanese and united a country torn by foreign invasion, exploitation and civil war. The PLA formed the basis for China’s mobilisation to become the modern industrialised country it is now. When huge divisions parade before the reviewing stand in Beijing, they are celebrating the accomplishments of the fastest and largest poverty reduction in human history for which the PLA’s organisational skills, bureaucratic structures and accumulated industrial know-how was essential.

    Unlike the parades in Paris or London, trade shows for the parasitic weapons industry of revanchist France and monarchist Britain, the uniformed and armed or unarmed servants of the Russian and Chinese states can justly claim to honor the peoples their recent forefathers and mothers fought and died to defend and develop. One need only look at the percentages of the war budgets of Russia and China and compare them to what prevails in NATO to see that military is not automatically militarism.

    The post Victory Days: Military without Militarism? first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Risk and fraudulent mutuality

    Thirty years ago, having just successfully completed a international congress on environmental consciousness and mass media which I had organized on behalf of the Deutsche Hygiene-Museum, Dresden, a legacy of an early German pharmaceutical magnate, the inventor of the mouthwash Odol; I was asked to prepare the framework for a subsequent congress on risk and health for the same institution. Although the actual event was then assigned to a new employee and my contract not extended, I had already engaged in considerable research on the topic of risk and the underlying issue of the planned congress and its management. I no longer hesitate to say that the very factors which led to a successful and well-attended first event were conspicuously absent from the far more modest result of the second, namely conceptual breadth and theoretical foundation. One of the virtues of studied superficiality can be the readiness to see relationships or connections of even the most trivial kind. We live in a necessarily incoherent world but nonetheless in a unified field. By that I mean that there is no place outside of culture which we can assume in order to examine or intervene in human behaviour. As a result, the question is not if any particular aspect of our culture is imposed on human conduct but how the phenomenon we attempt to explain can be related to any of the thousand layers of culture in which humans have waded since birth.

    Rather than attempting here to provide a comprehensive understanding of risk, I will explain the way I began to design the congress. This design was not accepted either because the principal—the museum—did not understand it or did not approve it or perhaps me. In any event the serving director died not long ago and can no longer be asked for an opinion. Another reason why my proposal was not accepted—I say that because there was no explicit rejection, my contract was simply not renewed—is the compulsion in any institution to reproduce all questions and solution ranges in terms defined by the institution itself. In fact “institution” can be understood as a set of problem-solution pairs (or ranges) which control/limit the behaviour of those people organized by it. This is the kind of truism that scholars like the late German sociologist Niklas Luhmann pronounced with great profundity—yet without drawing many useful conclusions. An academic event has to have certain conventional forms and rituals in order for it to be treated seriously or at least recognized as such. A museum—even one as peculiar as the German Hygiene Museum—has to present exhibitions of artefacts or collections. These two institutional habits are far more restrictive than a layperson may imagine.

    Before discussing my preparation and plan it may help to explain the Deutsche Hygiene Museum. Founded in 1911 in connection with the International Hygiene Exhibition, organized and funded by August Lingner—the Odol magnate—the museum became a repository for the remainder of that event. Today a huge restored building in 1930s quasi-Bauhaus style stands at the head of Dresden’s great park, the site of the 1911 exhibition. The idea of a “hygiene” museum strikes most visitors to Saxony’s capital as strange, to say the least. Yet it must be seen in the context of the founding era. The turn of the 19th into the 20th century—as perhaps all transformative periods—was viewed both optimistically and pessimistically by contemporaries. The pessimists began to see what would come in 1914. The optimists saw the accumulation of human progress. Roughly at the same time three museums were created in Germany, each devoted to some element of human progress. The science and technology museum was inaugurated in Munich. Another museum was founded in the Ruhr region dedicated to industry and commerce. August Lingner’s hygiene museum was dedicated to the achievements in human health and physical well-being. (It was a museum dedicated to care for the body and healthy living conditions and not vaccinations.) The Ruhr museum was destroyed during the Second World War. The Munich museum survived. The Dresden museum, which had focussed on “race hygiene” during the NSDAP era, was burned out by the Anglo-American fire bombing of the city but the concrete shell remained. During the GDR era, the museum became an agency of the national health ministry and served as a health education centre and manufacture for teaching materials to serve the healthcare and medical profession. Its most famous product was the “glass man”, a statue-like figure by which all the vital elements of the human body were displayed in a glass or plexi-glass shell. The glass man (gläserne Mensch) was exported worldwide for use in medical and human biology education. Similar models of other living things were produced to meet the demand for teaching materials in schools and universities.

    After the annexation of the German Democratic Republic the museum was reassigned to the Saxony health ministry. Like in much of the former GDR, well-paid managers and technicians were seconded or hired by state governments in the hands of the BRD politicians, in Saxony’s case the legacy CDU functionary and former premier of Baden-Württemburg, Kurt Biedenkopf. The reorganization of the DH-M from a state agency into a public foundation (following the neo-liberal public-private partnership model) was in the planning. This required “Western” management and operational models. Hence the new management was intent on following the Anglo-American museum business approach, enhanced entertainment and commercial opportunities. It was in the context of this transition that I was accidentally engaged to create the first congress on environmental consciousness and mass media in the early 1990s. I had been organizing academic conferences since the early 80s as well as working in the foundation of a new museum in New York City, I already had experience in the various processes for museum and event management in the PPP framework, a largely Anglo-American concept. The virtue of this concept is not at issue here.

    With this experience my strategy was two-pronged. First, I wanted to establish a fundamental discussion of risk that would be broad enough to include both theory and praxis. Second, the event was to be shaped to permit as much “action” as possible, so that the discussion could extend beyond academic debate.

    The idea of risk in the healthcare and medical context that had shaped the DH-M as an institution was quite simple and narrow. Human health was at risk because of environmental exposure and human ignorance or negligence. In other words people get sick because of some external toxicity, i.e. physical, chemical or biological, or because of some unhealthy behaviour, e.g. addictions, bad diet, inadequate exercise, etc. The risk of exposure to externalities can be controlled or limited by regulations and prohibitions. For instance, industrial toxins can be regulated by safety measures or forbidden entirely. Unhealthy behaviour can be treated by education and sanctions. However the decision as to what constitutes a risk to human health and what measures are appropriate to handle such risks can be viewed from very different and conflicting perspectives.

    Hence the focus of risk debate is not on identifying and eliminating risks. Instead, principal attention is given to risk perception. The world is seen as full of risks, another way of saying that it is full of uncertainty and only relatively predictable. Relative predictability means that anticipating consequences is imperfect and therefore the relationship between any phenomenon and its risks to humans is incomplete—in fact tenuous. The branches of mathematics devoted to probability offer a variety of models for controlling the decisions about risk by turning measured factors into numbers that can be manipulated according to those mathematical rules. The subsequent probabilities are then used to define risks in terms of incident prediction statistics that in turn are monetized for those who decide based on such numbers what costs or benefits are reasonable. That is essentially what actuaries do, the professional number-crunchers of the insurance industry. There are also similar professionals employed to advise gambling casinos, brokerage houses, banks, and the military-industrial-pharmaceuticals cartel.

    For the healthcare industry and its partners in crime, the insurance industry, the question of risk is ultimately just as monetary as for the gambling casinos. The premium flow upstream must continue to exceed the treatment or compensation flow downstream. Risk is therefore not an issue of substantive danger to human health and safety but the tolerance of injury in proportion to compensation claim. Since the healthcare industry is funded by the insurance industry—whether exclusively state-owned, corporate or mixed—there is a confluence of interest. While there are some conflicts such as the healthcare industry’s need for sick and injured as opposed to the insurance industry’s need for minimum payouts, the common risk culture which the health insurance model has produced—reinforced by a sympathetically adjusted legal system—permits a fairly balanced relationship. This is especially true for those market participants owned by the same beneficiaries. In fact with the absorption of nearly all industries by the financial sector there is scarcely a single economic activity that is not governed by the risk model underlying the insurance industry.

    This realization led me to conceive the risk congress not as an academic forum for scholars to debate their scientific research about the nature of risk and its measurement. I was also less interested in those who studied the dangers of technology or industrial manufacturing processes and products. I had read work of the leading experts on risk at the time. Those I invited to talk at the congress generally refused. The most frequent reason given was that they had finished the work and talked about it until they had nothing new to add. I spent some considerable time and effort in conversation with representatives of the world’s largest reinsurers. Then I decided to look at the history of insurance itself. This led me to the oldest established insurance market, Lloyd’s of London.

    Great Britain, in particular London and even more particularly the “Square Mile”—as the City of London is also known—became the centre of the world’s largest extant empire since the end of the Second World War known as the Commonweath of Nations. The success of this empire, which triumphed over Portugal, Spain, France and the Netherlands while squelching Germany, is remarkable given the small size of its population and their relative poverty. Although other monarchies expanded beyond the western Eurasian peninsula before Britain, the British Empire adopted and refined tools developed by its predecessors and concentrated their control in a small body of institutions, one of these was the Stock Exchange, another the East India Company, the precursor to today’s multinational public-private partnership corporation and then there was the Lloyd’s insurance market.

    Lloyd’s started when coffee was still a luxury beverage. It was a coffee house located in the City. Instead of merchant-adventurers meeting to quaff martini cocktails, qualm with Cuban cigars and thousand dollar champagnes, they met in Lloyd’s for hot beverages, gossip and gambling. England emerged as a maritime power based on the ruthlessness of its pirate (privateer) fleet with commanders like Francis Drake. With time the pirate fleet would be divided into the merchant fleet and the Royal Navy. Shipping and seaborne piracy were subject to two principal risks, weather and war. Hence the merchant-adventurers, in Lloyd’s language “names”, began to gamble with the value of cargo, vessels and maritime value-added chain. This was not science or even Science. Instead it was a house full of gossipers and gamblers negotiating wagers based on reports about weather and world events. Insurance was a bet on whether losses would occur and if and how to cover them. In the course of establishment, booths became desks occupied by specialists in the wide range of commerce and the risks of loss specific to business involved. Although property (e.g. fire) risk and other terrestrial hazards also found cover, at Lloyd’s insurers retained their lead as the world’s largest maritime insurance market. Its members were thus capable of collectively harnessing the wealth of the British Empire to cover risks to shipping around the globe. This was not only possible because of the enormous financial resources the Lloyd’s brokers could muster. It was also because of the enormous state subsidy in the form of the Royal Navy. The nationalized British pirate fleet of Sir Francis and his successors was a guarantor for the safety and profitability of shipping flagged with the Union Jack. Lloyd’s had the implicit backing of the Royal Navy and the British State which also allowed the market to underbid any other maritime insurers and indirectly impair the competitiveness of other nations’ merchant fleets.

    The ability to define risk and monetize that definition through legal, political, and military means made Lloyd’s and its insurance business model very lucrative for investors, also drawing foreign capital into the City and away from other assets.

    The mercantile insurers consciously applied all these advantages and the capacity to manipulate insurers (names) and insured by means of information differentials or asymmetries. Consumer insurers developed a parallel yet distinct approach. In the scholarship this is called “risk perception”. Health insurers and property insurers work to raise the perception of loss probability to induce constantly intimidated consumers to pay premiums for policies to cover every conceivable fear. At the same time they support their shareholders by minimizing or otherwise modifying the perception of industrial or commercial hazards that could result in claims. For example, numerous studies promoted by the insurance industry argued that the chances of a critical accident with toxic or other destructive effects by heavy industry (including atomic power) and the consumer goods sector (including automobiles) are far lower than those to which humans voluntarily expose themselves. Hence fears of industrial accidents causing environmental or bodily harm or product negligence are deemed exaggerated by the public. While those of driving fast, so-called extreme sports, and ordinary diet are presented as risks to be borne entirely by those who engage in them. In other words, the risk that a legally mandated industrial injection could cause grievous bodily harm is exaggerated by the public since it could only affect individuals and therefore need not be treated as a serious threat. At the same time, health damage caused by voluntary consumption of a product (the entire contents of which are partially concealed by intellectual or industrial property rights) is considered a major unacceptable risk for the insurer. Another argument frequently presented states that the real risk, i.e. the probability of an incident, consistently deviates from the perceived risk. The conclusion drawn by the insurance industry and the underlying finance capital culture governing it is that risk is entirely a question of successful manipulation of risk perception and not an issue of sharing costs. Moreover by purchasing the legislation needed to exclude financially ruinous risks from cover (e.g. atomic power stations) or grossly negligent profit seeking (biological weapons dressed as experimental vaccines), the insurer and his class can exclude whole categories of intentional and negligent harm from any kind of liability whatsoever.

    The official ideology of insurance describes the wager as a means of distributing the costs of large risks, by any definition, among the largest conceivable number of parties so that the cost of an incident need not be borne entirely by any one member. The social value implied is mutuality. This mutuality is exemplified in the early fire insurance companies. The mission of the mutual company was logical. In a densely populated city one ought to extinguish a burning house not just to save the owner but to prevent the fire from spreading to other owners, burning down entire neighbourhoods or towns. To this end premiums supported fire extinguishing brigades. Competition between these proved to be hazardous. Hence the fire brigades become public sector functions, like with the Royal Navy, the State became a guarantor for the fire insurers too. The principle of mutuality meant shared payments and shared risks. However there was little profit in mutuality alone.

    The insurance industry, like the stock exchange and the multinational corporation, promotes the myth of mutuality because it is far more attractive than the underlying piracy and gambling scheme upon which it is based. This propaganda comprises two elements. First there is the appeal to selfishness. The insured wants to minimize the losses from any risk incidents and contribute as little to those costs as possible. At the same time the insurer wants to avoid liability for any incident and sacrifice as little income (invested premium payments) as possible. Then there is the appeal to mutuality, the insurance model is presented as benevolent implementation of “solidarity”. The insurer (and those who pay premiums) collect money (and invest it for a return) so that the community as a whole shares the risks and thus makes them more manageable for all. So when the industry opposes mandatory coverage (unless it also increases premium income) of some risk it will reply that is unreasonable to burden the community (its investors) with the cost of losses for which it is not responsible. When it wants to increase premiums or reduce cover it will present the risks as so substantial that they require more reserves to satisfy claims. Both propaganda strategies rely on confusing the citizenry as to who is the community and who is the actual rather that supposed beneficiary of mutuality. Finance capitalism relies on the illusion that every person contributing to (upward) cash flow is at least potentially an equal beneficiary of that income extraction. Insurance operates like all the other parasitic elements of finance capital. Like all parasites it must persuade the host to feed it. The chimeric character of finance capital (and the cult that controls it) leads the host—the ordinary population—to identify the strong and unobstructed upward flow of cash from individuals into the coffers of insurers or other financial institutions as not only a sign of economic strength but of social vitality. The power of those who chair the world’s largest hedge funds and their brethren is treated as scientifically inevitable. They are the “risk bearers”, the demigods of mutuality who assure that our human society is protected. Their skills in understanding human and natural risks and managing them endears a Fink and a Soros and others of their kind, permitting them the pedigree of “philanthropists”.

    However, the insurance industry is not really based on some extraordinary oracular talents combined with professional accounting skills. The insurance industry is the “suit and tie” version of a business model much older, although today it is consigned to the parallel economy. The insurance protection business derives not from mutuality with which it decorates itself but from extortion. In fact, even the earliest incidents of fire brigade insurance included partnership with arsonists. Paying a premium would keep certain arsonists away or grant protection if competing arsonists added to accidental fires (although there were certainly enough urban fire risks too.) The collectivization of the private fire brigades was also an attempt to limit the extortion model and protect the inhabitants and property owners from natural and criminally-induced losses. When Bismarck introduced the first national pension scheme in Prussia the insurance model adopted was based on the entirely reasonable expectation that a substantial amount of the mandatory employee contributions would never have to be paid as retirement benefit. Workers would die before they became eligible. As lifespans increased so did the amounts deducted from wage packets. Civil servants pensions were funded, like their salaries, from taxation. However, the rest of the workforce had to pay wage taxes, matched in part by employer contributions (disproportionately levied on the SME sector to reduce its competitiveness with emerging cartels). At least for the ordinary worker the pension and health insurance system was a pyramid scheme, a state-sponsored scheme but a ponzi scheme nonetheless. What made it attractive to ordinary workers was its appearance of mutuality. That appearance was crucial to the anti-socialist legislation of which it was a part. It was attractive to Germany’s merchant-adventurer and industrial class because it constituted forced savings and hence cheap capital to be used by the State to fund infrastructure for which private enterprise could not or would not pay.

    Needless to say, this model was a propaganda success. Even today Germans swear by their system, despite its near destruction through the neo-liberal “health reform” initiated under Chancellor Helmut Kohl. Compared to the US, the German system is nearly divine (although since 2020 the alliance between god above and devil below has become clearer than ever). The gradual dismantling of the German public health insurance/healthcare system was promoted by attacking mutuality. The individual premium-paying insured was bombarded with messages that he should see himself as the bearer of other people’s unreasonable risks or outright fraud. He was to see the reduction in cover and increase in fees as measures to protect his personal interest in avoiding anyone’s risk but his own. He was told that the price of compensating incidents, whether in terms of healthcare interventions or monetary restitution, was hurting him as the insured. At no time was he ever advised who sets the prices for those interventions, e.g., pharmaceuticals or hospital fees. Nor was he ever informed of the particular sources and causes of those injuries which the system was allegedly not designed. Finally, he was deceived about the resulting contraction of the contribution base with the result that the very risk spread and diversification that a large pool of insured offers disappeared leaving that selfish insured with higher premiums and less cover each year. In the mid-1990s, the mouthpieces for the Establishment in Germany blamed these burdens on an aging population, without admitting that this was Bismarck’s legacy. On one talkshow amidst repetition of this boilerplate, a former advisor to late Chancellor Willy Brandt intervened to say that actuarial errors were utterly irrelevant. He said loud and clear that the aging statistics were consistent with continued pension system funding. However, the funding model was based on the Federal Republic of Germany prior to annexation of the GDR and absorption of 16 million citizens whose pension and healthcare were funded under a completely different model and for whom the FRG pension/healthcare schemes had made no allowance whatsoever. The logic of this expertise was so compelling that the man was ignored for the remainder of the broadcast. No one dared to contradict it so burying it in silence was the only option.

    This essay began explaining how I came to research the discussion about risk and insurance although my remit was merely to deal with risk and health. Not only did I drift into the history of insurance, especially Lloyd’s of London, my eclectic reading led me into another field, financial derivatives. At the time the market leader in the financial derivatives sector was the defunct Bankers Trust company in Boston (USA). I had read a lot in journals like The Economist about derivatives as risk management tools. These products were offered as universal instruments for dealing with all manner of risks and “hedging” against the potential financial losses. I attempted to find someone from Bankers Trust or a similar company to attend the planned congress and talk about risk and derivative financial instruments. At the time the scope and nature of the new generation of financial derivatives was far from being common knowledge. Traditional hedging is familiar to most people. It takes the form of buying supplies when they are cheap to avoid high prices due to scarcity or sudden demand increases. Even ordinary travellers following exchange rates know the value of changing money when one’s home currency is stronger than the currency one plans to visit. This simple logic made the idea of derivative risk management appear as merely a scale-up of conventional hedging. However, even the 2008 collapse in derivative markets with its international economic consequences has had little pedagogical value.

    Despite warnings from a wide variety of analysts and critics about the enormous dangers latent in the global derivatives market, efforts to breach the propaganda wall that protects parasitic finance capital, with the narcotic of pseudo-mutuality from human hosts, continue to be modest and on the whole ineffectual. For example, when the so-called “subprime mortgage” derivative market (so-called mortgage-backed securities or collateralized debt obligations) failed, this was seen as irresponsible or reckless investment in low-quality debtors (home-buyers with little or no income stability in relation to the payment rates due on the mortgage bonds). This was encouraged by deceitful intermediaries who packaged non-performing debts together with positive cashflow to create the illusion of an overall performing debt instrument. The injured parties were the investors who had bought these overpriced or diluted securities. These so-called “toxic” investment products were heavily marketed to the largely corrupt asset managers for public sector and labor union trust and investment funds. Thus, when they collapsed not only were the homeowners defrauded but the quasi-private and state employee pension funds whose portfolios were loaded like lead with these securities. The fault was ultimately settled on the undeserving home buyers who were not entitled to reasonable financing for home purchases (due to externalities, of course). The homes were seized based on foreclosures for default and the properties bunkered to protect the real estate market from a flood of compulsory auctions. The infamous bailout organized by the leading derivatives house at the time, Goldman Sachs, was engineered in personal union of former partner-managers holding offices of trust in the US Government and the private central bank known as the US Federal Reserve System. The bailout served to insulate the perpetrators from losses that would have forced them to write-down those assets both tangible and intangible to seriously low market values. By absorbing the “bad debt/ risks”, those who created the risk were able to profit from the collapse of their “insurance cover”. Today’s “risk” from the volume of outstanding financial derivative contracts worldwide is acknowledge to well exceed any recognized total value of global GDP. Yet there is no public substantive debate which explains what this risk really is and how it is measured or covered. That is largely due to the reasons elaborated above.

    Risk is presented as a measurable and thus manageable phenomenon, something that has been scientifically isolated and is amenable to treatment by qualified experts. The definition of risk, its scope and substance, including exposure, is governed by those whose business it is to profit from its inception. Although at the level of ordinary individuals any sense of real threat or danger is trivialized or treated as superstition, the threat to the class of wealth extractors is a matter of greatest severity that can only be appraised and managed by the experts appointed by the extractive (parasitic) class. Risk is defined and measured by them. The means to reduce or transfer the consequences or exposure to such risk are part of the laws they pass, the contracts they write and the deployment of media and martial violence they order. Like in the original Lloyd’s coffee house, these are gaming adventurers competing in any way available to privatize gains and socialize losses. Like in the old booths where coffee-drinking, pipe-smoking men exchanged rumours, lies, and calculated wagers—mainly with other people’s money—the manipulation of data, the dissemination of stories, the exploitation of ignorance and emotion or simply relative wealth—were essential for the “market” to work. Yet, it could never perform without the recourse to a State capable of selectively protecting insurer or insured, whether with the army, the navy or debtor’s prison.

    For the past eighty some-odd years we have all been forced to accept insurance policies at extortionate prices because insurance is essentially a product of the extortion business. The atomic bomb could be seen as the ultimate, underlying derivative financial instrument. It has been complemented by the genetic engineering that produces the growing arsenal of “biologics” and pharmaments. Mutuality was consciously turned into Mutually Assured Destruction, although only the US (the Anglo-American Empire) actually demonstrated the will (and the secret planning) for destroying everyone else to preserve its oligarchy—aka the Samson option). The years of mass injection and incarceration exercises and planning that culminated in the Covid-19 War—an escalation of the 2001 Global War on Terror—have been marketed behind the same mask of “mutuality”. The more mutual risks become the more concentrated the profit for those who induce the losses and cause the risks. One can see the cancellation of civil rights in 2001 and of human rights in 2020 as the corporate state’s unilateral abrogation of coverage clauses in the social contract most ordinary people learned was the basis of the society in which they live.

    In the midst of atomic war since 1945, we have been told that the USA has protected the world through deterrence when if fact we have been terrorized by the marketing fraud of forbearance. Every day all the media one can hope to find is full of “risk” campaigns; fear sells. Desperately ordinary people ask who and how will they be insured or better yet protected from the constant escalation of terror in every aspect of daily life. There are no universal insurers. The privately-owned armed bureaucracies, which we still call “governments” because of the archaic beauty pageants by which their public faces appear to be chosen, have renounced all pretence to mutual protection of anyone except the insurers, finance capital as a class. Salvation cannot be bought from the State in its current form any more than it could be bought be the inventor of today’s financial derivative insurance market—the Latin Church. It cannot be acquired “by faith alone” either. Instead it requires genuine mutuality and the hard work that is necessary to constitute a community and communities of interest in and among real human beings (as opposed to legal fictions, juridical entities or virtual humans as promoted by the finance capital class in its transhumanism). That means also—at the very least—that the risks created by the insurers for their parasitical profits must finally be borne by the creators of those risks themselves. We should harbour no illusions. That small class of parasites has centuries of experience successfully deceiving the hosts. Parasites by their nature only die when the host destroys them or dies for failure to do so. An insurer of last resort cannot tell the difference.

    The post Unbecoming American: Risky Business first appeared on Dissident Voice.

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  • Words don’t mean anything, people do.

    Much of the conflict we experience, observe or imagine arises from the problem every human and arguably most other mammals confront from the moment they become distinct beings—animals. While I never studied classical languages, I believe the very term “animal” designates a being, an entity, endowed with a soul. The literalists among the species Homo sapiens may in fact justify their attitudes toward each other and toward other animals by their underlying response to the soul at the core of animal being. Depending on the degree of self-value or self-effacement the humans adopt, a wide range of behaviours, i.e. responses to the world in which they live, may be elicited. Centuries of recorded Western thought have yet to establish any uniform pattern of response to the confrontation with life forms, whether animated or not—more precisely whether or not deemed animated—since there is no evidence of universal agreement as to what constitutes even the basis of such an assertion or category of response.

    If after millennia there have only been contested responses, it may be assumed that such universal consensus will continue to elude us. That leaves us with the permanent interim solutions and the daily work of controlling behaviour, our own and that of others, in what for purposes of simplicity, we can call life itself. The fact that I am even writing this essay can be understood as an example of the many ways humans can attempt to respond to the world and ourselves in some manner judged appropriate. If the category of deity means anything, then perhaps it is best defined as the status in which all these responses are perfectly controlled – always appropriate and never incoherent or inadequate. Of course the stories we can find in all religions, whether Buddhism or Western monotheism, if we read the texts attributed to the divine command as authoritative, are full of conflicts and incoherencies. The gods or the one true god is also incapable of establishing stability of response and meaning (appropriate response). Creation is simply ungovernable. There is also no extant example of divine perfection — unless by that we mean unlimited indifference, sometimes called “fate” or “destiny”.

    This uncertainty may arise ultimately from an error of scale. Humans are but one group of the living on this planet we call Earth. Despite the ambitions of our scientific clergy, explicitly religious or merely implicitly devoted, to imagine a universal scale of life and action, we are unable to demonstrate a view of the world which does not assume we are the middle of it. What Pluto or Jupiter might teach us about the significance of human life remains bound by the fact of our own animal existence.

    In the past decade, there has been an increasing and perverse obsession with transhumanism and the creation of social and material organisations benignly anointed as “smart”. While very little of this rhetoric is actually new, the attention generated and the style of propaganda devoted to concepts like the Fourth Industrial Revolution, since 2020 the “great reset”, and many other subroutines best captured by the slogan “you will own nothing and be happy” have together enhanced the general insecurity fostered by those ecumenical fascists who constitute the World Economic Forum. As I have argued elsewhere, repeatedly, the most recent manifestations in Davos are based on the institutional environment that emerged one thousand years ago in the rabbinical-Latin absolutism of Pope Innocent III. Feudalism as conceived by the Latin Church was an order in which no one owned anything except by papal license.

    The religious foundation of Latin Christendom — we can leave aside any discussion of Jesus of Nazareth or teaching attributed to this person as irrelevant — was and remains the salvation of the soul through ecclesiastically ordered and secularly performed torture and execution. The wealthy were entitled to live and the poor required to work and die. They did not even own their lives, but in heaven they would be happy.

    When Marx argued that capitalism was automatic, i.e., it did not rely on the individual capitalist, he was identifying at the same time the spirit of Judeo-Christendom. Max Weber’s misguided attempt to justify capitalism by faith alone only confused the genealogical analysis, obscuring the continuity between the Reformation and the financial derivative system at the core of Latin political-economy. The West is still essentially — one hesitates to use the word “civilization” — a mass of people ruled by primitive superstition and piratical-barbarian violence exercised by a robust death cult. It makes no difference whether that superstition is reified at Lourdes, Fatima or Wall Street. The automatic violence of capitalism is maintained by constant revolution in the technology of production. Thus it should be no surprise that its current doctrinal manifestation, neo-liberalism/conservatism, is championed by members of the death cult who claim to have been Trotskyists. Since the Portuguese dismembered and disfigured the merchants and artisans whose trade relations they wished to dominate in the Indian Ocean basin and the British East India Company raped, pillaged and plundered India, every significant Western technological advancement has been directed to eliminating labourers and enhancing lethality.

    The same underlying religious confusion has also shaped the opposition to all the consequences of this system’s automatism. The terms of condemnation include the deadly sins and some vulgar accusations of racism, sexism, or basically unfair conduct. On one hand there are plenty who want sin punished and prevented if possible. On the other there are those who imagine there is some unique great revolution or technological rationality that will neutralize the impact of individual bad conduct or evil. With regard to Marxism, the dominant form of socialist ideology by the end of the 19th century, pseudo-debates continue as to what Marx did or did not anticipate or adequately theorize. Such debates are structurally no different from those that persist in the Latin Church as to what Jesus really meant and what the Church – he never founded — ought to do.

    Now that there appears to be a critical mass of articulate people who assert that they have transcended the primitive superstitions with which Western mass culture is fuelled, the debates are focussed on the capacity of humans to grasp and act in accordance with something called Science. That Science subsumes a vast industrial complex. Perversely — say I — but naturally if viewed as proposed here — we find in this mass of the articulate those who argue that the Science shows (Simon says) that the political-economy upon which the past five hundred years of Western history has been based is suddenly a hindrance to the continuation of the Planet (by which they mean themselves as inhabitants of same) and that the same Science dictates all sorts of measures which will save the Planet (by which they mean them). They are struck by the epiphany that Western culture is a system of enhanced lethality. However they turn to those who have had their hands on the trigger for five centuries as the not so “lone rangers” (together with their “Sloane Rangers” in the City or Wall Street) to save them.

    The other order of mendicants imagine that once the arsenal has been liberated from the “old and greedy” and programmed with the “right” rules and computational procedures, we will be able to march to the Holy Land where life is free of the unreliable and messy humans who previously managed all that mischief. Their defence is that the technology is not defective — the people are. Change the people or liberate the technology from their cold, dead hands and salvation will dawn.

    This is nothing more or less than the argument raised by the Great Reformer before he pled for the slaughter of rebellious peasants and their leader Thomas Müntzer at Bad Frankenhausen in 1525. The Church, once freed from papal autocracy, was still the door through which faith would lead man to salvation, even if reading Scripture was to be allowed. My point is not that overthrowing the Papacy in some form was not a good idea. It has been convincingly argued that Martin Luther did what was possible at the time. He could not have rejected the entire world in which he had been raised, could he? The clergy continued to serve as a source of oppression and instrument of imperial expansion — after all that is what mission is. He could not abandon the value of salvation either. Instead he tried to change or expand the terms upon which it could be attained.

    If we return to the question with which this essay began — the problem of human souls and the souls of other animals — then we ought to ask ourselves seriously: when we seek salvation of our souls, do we actually consider the souls of other animals? Do we take soul seriously or is it just another manifestation of the malignant narcissism in which the West luxuriously bathes? The animal rights fanatics — and I consider this a kind of cult fanaticism—would have us wear petrochemical products instead of leather but have no serious response to the bipeds killed for oil needed to cloth them. The vegetarian and even worse the “veganese” — when they are not addressing the problem of industrial slaughterhouses and poisoned foodstuffs — seem quite silent about the nutritional sources of other animals. (I have a neighbour whose pedigree dog is actually allergic to meat.)

    Many of the incoherencies I could list have been mentioned elsewhere. I have also elaborated on the legal and socio-political consequences of the inversion of “rights” doctrines to eliminate the very distinguishing characteristics of humans upon which human rights are based. However, here I am concerned with fundamental question, one which I would call moral for want of a better term. What is the difference between empathy and anthropomorphism?

    If we are so bold to admit that Homo sapiens is a distinct mammalian species of animal then the soul/psyche we attribute to the members of this species joins us to other animals, other inhabitants of this miniscule planet. It is something we share. It is something a wolf and a rabbit share as do a whale or dolphin. We might ask ourselves if sharks or spiders have a soul. There are certainly religious attitudes which affirm this. However I have just as often asked myself if we are too deaf to hear the scream of a grain of wheat? If we are so bold to admit that other beings are endowed with attributes so unfathomable as the soul we attribute to ourselves and other mammals (in descending order), then we should also be sensible not only to what we presume to know but also to the vast universe of ignorance in which we wallow. Anthropomorphism is another manifestation of anthropocentrism. If we turn everything into a mirror of us we deny not only our own unique qualities—both positive and negative — but also the very existence and potential value of the world we inhabit. The jargon of sustainability or the religious fervour with which Science fanatics preach our salvation through technology are both symptoms of the Western religious pathology embedded in our modern mass culture and capitalism itself. Marx has been read as a latent technocrat. He was a political activist as well as a scholar. Obviously he could only make politics under the conditions of the world in which he lived — fighting the fights as the fronts were formed during his animal lifetime. Yet his explanation of where value is added is essentially humanist. It is a model analysis of empathy not automatism—which he explicitly criticized. He refused the formulation that prevails despite his argument that labour creates value and not things in themselves. Hence it was constantly necessary to ask what humans were actually doing? The machine, no matter how sophisticated, was not the creative force.

    Anthropomorphism and anthropocentrism — both essential drivers of the current crusades and wars — turn the entire world into the human and thus abolish the very conditions for human qualities. When the pontificate and ecumenical fascists whether in Davos, Rome, Washington, New York or the City of London assemble they do what their patron saint, Adam Smith, wrote that they always do — meet to fix prices and restrain trade. That is the least harmful of their malevolence. For the last decade, with the benefit of nearly a century of mass destruction weaponry, e.g. atomic weapons, genetic engineering and virtual monopoly of mass media and medicine, they have committed themselves to our salvation. They have recruited from the generations of indoctrinated and alienated youth. Like the court who joined the pope behind the walls in Avignon this ecclesiastical oligarchy would drive those outside to their joyful deaths. Like the papacy that preached the Fourth Crusade, they would drive those outside with the promise that death and mortification, after killing the infidels and heretics, will save the Planet and leave a society of the saints managed by the benevolent computers and other EDP devices they have created for the survivors.

    Empathy is not identification. It does not mean usurping the other. Rather it includes the limits of cognition soothed by the capacity to love — even someone or something one does not even know. Empathy is not wanton or gratuitous. Nor is it based on gluttony or lust. At the same time, it does not demand that a wolf eat bread or a sheep ground cattle bones. We eat and with time we too are eaten. If we had true empathy we would be concerned about enhancing the nutritional value of our lives for all those around us. We would nurture our spirit and not just our egos.

    The post Empathy or Anthropomorphism first appeared on Dissident Voice.

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  • Where must we start? Every day, we start today

    A disagreement or a criticism, before it turns into a fight, or a fight which might be reduced to a mere disagreement or criticism: Where we start or end is the frontier between phrases and fists. It really is that simple. The only way to prove any idea to be false is to kill everyone who holds it. At least that is certainly one of the more popular ways to resolve incoherence between verbal and non-verbal behaviour. My temperament at the end of the 18th calendar week was shaped considerably by the recognition that the disputes which dominate the public debate, gaols and battlefields, not to mention the queues of suffering, have been quite successfully reduced to exchanges between those armed with fighter-bombers, assault rifles, judges and police and those whose principal responses are restricted to hide and/or die.

    Perhaps one of the greatest accomplishments of government-sponsored universal literacy in the West as been to render large portions of the nominally educated incapable of reading and unwilling as well. By reading, I do not mean merely the consumption of print or screen text on whatever mass media is chosen. I mean reading as an auseinandersetzen, a deliberate almost surgical attention to the body of language in use. Instead I find even media claiming to be critical, obsequiously advising potential viewers, listeners, or readers of “potentially upsetting” content. I have heard that these are known as “trigger warnings”. Apparently in the world, with which I am only tangentially involved, has a series, perhaps malleable and innumerable, of words, images, and viewpoints that may not be publicly uttered. At the top end of the spectrum are the utterances deemed harmful because they could be “incitement”. Below that are those which suggest that the beliefs held by people real or imaginary, present or absent, are entitled to absolute protection regardless of content. An ambiguous class of “victims” has been created to satisfy the legal doctrines imposed by those in power– power they intend to preserve.

    If I recall my school days with any veracity, then I cannot remember anyone who could object to criticism because it made the person “feel unsafe”. In fact, the whole basis of any critique, whether it was of personal conduct or academic performance, presumed that critique would make the person criticised feel “unsafe” with her or his conduct or performance. The very notion of being “wrong” implies discomfort or at least a desire to improve or correct the behaviour criticised, which logically could not be more comfortable once one has been criticised. The insincerity is obvious. Since unpleasantness cannot be tolerated, except when suppressed by pharmaments, the only ones allowed to raise objections to anything are those who are themselves anaesthetised.

    Conspicuously, in the accumulating display of dissent among young people, mainly residing at universities, the students’ criticism is held to be a risk or violence against those who celebrate mass murder. This is a well established attitude with attendant repression. Almost all histories of the French Revolution of which I am aware treat the Bourbon monarch, his spouse and the estates that ruled France as victims of the Revolution. This is not an accident. Any ruling class prior to 1989 which had been deprived of its absolute power was held to be a victim, not a redundant, let alone, criminal perpetrator whose overthrow was an act of justice. After 1989 any government which could not be deposed by subterfuge and therefore was destroyed by force– either from air, land, or sea– was treated as justly punished once forces had accumulated sufficient to overthrow it. The citizens of the annexed GDR cannot claim to be victims of economic and political warfare, including bribery, election fraud, extortion, and other acts by the annexing agents which would ordinarily be subject to criminal prosecution. The citizens of Libya, since the savage murder and sodomising of their nation’s leader, are not victims of the forces who soiled the shores of Tripoli with bombs and blood.

    This is not only a question of worthy vs. unworthy victims. It is a question far more serious: what is a victim in fact?

    There was a time in the philosophical consideration of women’s rights when certain writers insisted that women were not victims. To call them victims was to deny their agency and far more importantly to deny the presence of institutional violence to which women (and other oppressed groups) were subjected. In essence a victim– this was the argument– was someone without power upon whom violence was exercised. Victimhood implied that the person was a mere object and suffered as if by act of god or nature. Instead by refusing to be treated or identified as a victim, real conflict was identified and the material exercise of excessive and unequal violence was made the focus of dispute.

    Sadism and masochism rely on roles which are necessarily unequal with regard to the exercise of violence but not of force. The masochist plays the role of victim. The sadist plays the role of perpetrator. These two roles are dramatic complements. (It really is necessary to read de Sade’s Philosophy in the Bedroom- La philosophie dans le boudoir -1795 – to understand how important sado-masochism is for contemporary politic-economy.) The performance of either sadist or masochist fails without the illusion of the victim. Christianity itself is a cult of victimhood. Its historical complement is a cult of perpetration. Thus the Sado-Masochism at the core of Western culture is prefigured in the term “Judeo-Christian”.

    The legal regime created and enforced since 1945 and continuously reiterated is one which privileges victimhood but not human equality. However the victim is not the tortured, the expropriated, the displaced, or murdered. The victim is the performer of the role of “victim” who controls the stage upon which millions are abused, robbed and slaughtered while being labelled “terrorists”. These “terrorists” are the men, women, and children who refuse to perform in the theatre run for the titillation of the death cult that claims mastery over the world. Naturally they are not terrorists nor are they victims. However it is their refusal to play their appointed role in this malicious theatre that leaves the perpetrators no other choice but to feign the function of the helpless in the face of the merciless and evil.

    Tearing away the mask of victimhood and confronting the face of evil power are necessary steps to restoring a playing field upon which Old Etonians and their like can be put in their proper place.

    The post Don’t Get Me Started first appeared on Dissident Voice.

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  • Technology fetishism and dogmatic irresponsibility

    Without the use of digital devices, instead mainly that analog apparatus known as the pen, I have managed to retain meaningful recollections and engage in analytical reflection for the better part of sixty two years. The manner in which I have worked since the earliest moments I can remember has engendered the habit of collecting, sorting, observing and evaluating life as I lived it or perceived it by others. It was about 1976 that I was introduced to Russell Ackoff, a professor at the Wharton School in the University of Pennsylvania. He was introducing some basic tenets of systems theory, also outlined in his short book Redesigning the Future. My attendance was accidental since it was my high school physics teacher who took me to this meeting of a regional planning commission where Professor Ackoff had been invited to speak. He was quite droll and said several witting things. However, the most important statement he made was that the purpose of planning was not to produce a plan. Rather planning was a purpose in its own right. What he clearly meant – and that was reiterated in the book I subsequently read – was that planning was an attitude toward the future or toward life and not an industrial process for producing planning documents. The logical consequence of Ackoff’s argument was that the attitude of planning was more important than the creation of machines for churning out plans which would be obsolete before they could be implemented.

    Although I only learned about the book ten years later, Joseph Weizenbaum, a professor of computer science at various universities and one of the early researchers in what became the field of artificial intelligence (AI), published Computer Power and Human Reason in the same year. 1976 was one year after the ignominious withdrawal of US Forces from Vietnam, ending more than 30 years of their organized terror in that part of Southeast Asia. The US war against Vietnam was the first testing ground for both systems theory and artificial intelligence. These concepts and the technology developed to apply them were dedicated to surveillance, planning, target acquisition and destruction of the so-called Vietcong infrastructure, i.e. the civilian government that operated in lieu of the criminal state established by the French and US Americans first in Hanoi and then in Saigon after the partition of the country in Geneva. The government agency primarily responsible for planning and implementing the destruction of the popular government of Vietnam was the US Central Intelligence Agency. ICEX was the first name given to what became known as the Phoenix Program. One of the CIA officers interviewed after the war called it “computerized mass murder”. He was referring to the kill lists generated by the PHIS, the Phoenix Information System by which all the data about Vietnamese citizens was collated and evaluated to guide the deployment of the various hunter-killer teams. These teams were composed of local hires, mercenaries, RVN and US military personnel like the infamous Lt. Caley, and other contractors working on behalf of the Agency. Recently there has been mild consternation because of the PHIS legacy product used by the IDF to perform the same kinds of tasks. Lavender is called an AI solution. It is just a later version of the same computer-driven murder planning machine deployed half a century ago.

    No one should wonder about this since the Israel Defense Force and the other government agencies in occupied Palestine were actively informed and involved in every stage of these system developments. The systems-driven assassination program was a major component of the US counter-insurgency operations throughout Latin America. Death squads and data processing are natural partners going back to IBM’s computer support to the NSDAP. Artificial intelligence is fundamentally an intelligence operation and part of the systems theory of mechanized murder. It has no other serious application.

    Permit me to return to Joseph Weizenbaum. In 1976, many AI fetishists will argue, the technology was simply not very sophisticated. ELIZA and other experimental platforms were primitive and lacked the support of today’s super-computers. I met Weizenbaum shortly before he died. He had returned to Berlin, the city of his birth from which his family had emigrated in the 1930s. He had been invited to talk at the Einstein Forum in Potsdam. Having read the book in the 1980s I was anxious to meet the man who had so politely trashed the AI project. He was introduced by an obnoxious and obsequious American whose other qualities or qualifications left no impression on me. The young man tried to impress the audience by telling us that Joseph Weizenbaum was working at Case Western University when the university decided they needed a computer– and Weizenbaum built it. Normally such calculated flattery would be met with a demurred nod of appreciation. Professor Weizenbaum retorted that Case Western did not need a computer. Moreover no one needed one! That was the last we heard of the young man from Einstein Forum.

    Nearly 30 years after his book was published Weizenbaum was just as adamant. Not the Internet (which most people clearly forget is an adjunct to the US atomic warfare system) or the so-called super-computers, whether in the US or China, have altered the premises upon which his argument is based. As recently as today I read some conversation strings about AI in which one author argues:

    The result of having this ability is not to contest who is right or wrong, but to learn to be right most of the time so that the AI can successfully maintain a peaceful, harmonious human society. At the end of the day, humans are seriously flawed and cannot be trusted to run this society. Therefore, human management will be phased out.

    The author and those who follow his reasoning clearly believe that the strip mining of the Congo and other parts of the world to obtain the rare (and toxic) minerals essential for super-computing capacity along with the impoverishment of all other components of human culture in favour of electrical engineering and computer sciences is the price to be borne by humanity so that computation can fully displace human judgement (and humanity itself). The naive yet thin veneer of modernism and claims to sophistication in the interest of peace and harmony are deeply anti-human, not only in their objectives but at every link in the chain these AI proponents would forge from cradle to grave.

    Weizenbaum’s argument was not based on the state of the art in 1976. In fact he was quite clear that faster processors and larger memory storage would no doubt expand the computational capacity of the emerging technology. Instead Weizenbaum insisted that judgement was not computation. In Berlin he reiterated data is not information. Computation is nothing more than the arrangement of data according to rules defining the circulation of electrical power through increasingly complex circuits. Judgement is the result of human activity not electrical circuits. Data is the numerically codification of signals from whatever source. Information is the product of assessing data and responding to it– i.e. giving it meaning. Computers ought not to give meaning– control human responses to the world. Humans ought to control their own responses, even if they use tools like computers to generate and store data for evaluation.

    Screenshot

    Those who, like the author cited above, imagine that machine intelligence is superior to human intelligence are, to put it mildly, confused about what intelligence is. Claiming– either naively or cynically– that machine intelligence is at least potentially far more suited for regulating human society than humans themselves, these technology fetishists betray their primitive superstitions. Artificial intelligence, which until now has never advanced beyond its intention as a weapon for mass murder and surveillance, is simply the electronic manifestation of the omnipotent deity whose every will must be fulfilled. The desire to see human management rendered obsolete or impossible is the same denial that humans have any personality beyond that defined by the absolute deity of the kind we have known from the 11th century. The dream of the AI cultist is the same dream of the absolutist papacy and the regime that survives in the modern business corporation from which this nightmare arises.

    Weizenbaum did not address the whole production chain in which AI needs to be seen. His humanist position stands on its own, especially when the lines are drawn between humanism and its antitheses transhumanism and anti-humanism. Much is made of the enormous progress– far beyond what the carcinogenic West has accomplished– in Chinese AI. Suffice it here to enumerate some of the absurd claims that dominate in the media and among the cult’s prosyletizers.

    Computer power rests ultimately upon the power to extract highly toxic minerals from the Earth, until now based on quasi-slave labor in Congo, i.e. central Africa. For the past half-century computer power has cost more than six million lives and the independent development of a country whose territory is roughly the size of the European Union. To this must be added the wars and other violent and corrupt interventions to obtain these resources elsewhere on the planet. Then of course we have the highly dubious benefit of employment redundancies as so-called AI systems replace human labor in the industries and service sectors previously maintained by homo sapiens. Marxists praise AI contributions to the end of alienated labor. However the implementation of AI not only aims to kill people for the IDF or other counter-insurgency agencies but to kill the conditions for economic activity for huge numbers of people at all levels of educational and occupational qualification. The subsequent radical concentration of wealth will hardly be an inducement to enhance living conditions– which after all cannot be rationally calculated except as cost minimizing. (We need not ignore the eugenicism underlying the AI cult too.)

    As to the claims that these machines will be infinitely more rational and therefore better managers of human society than humans themselves, the obscenity should be obvious. Any management of humans by agents other than humans can only be accomplished by subjugation of humanity to machines. This is the dream of those whose puerile malice leads them to identify peace with the absence of other people and order with absence of responsibility for their own actions. The nightmare of AI is the dream of what was once called the Dark Ages. Don’t forget, before you leave, to turn out the lights.

    The post Returning to the 11th Century first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.


  • Stories, Histories, Fantasies and Desire

    Essentially there are three standard scripts for the history of the United States of America. They partly overlap, exposing or concealing contradictions. They are taught or staged in schools, in homes, at work, on the playground and in the workplace. They are taught all over the world, too.

    The USA originates as part of British North America, especially after the French were all but driven out of the continent with British ascendency and the capture of Quebec. A UDI followed by an insurgency, aided by the vindictive French, leaves 13 colonies to themselves while Upper and Lower Canada remain British. Some of the departed French are replaced by loyalist who flee the victorious settler-colonialists south of the St. Lawrence. These colonies become America about the same time the taunting French allies are busy overthrowing the Bourbon monarchy. France‘s new regime eventually cedes its claim to a third of the North American continental massif central- Louisiana and the Mississippi valley. America doubles in size. The Anglo-Americans fail to absorb or conquer Canada but reach the Pacific Ocean by colonizing Nueuva España/ Mexico and in turn seizing the northern provinces from its southern rulers. America becomes the dominion from “sea to shining sea“.

    Of course that story would be incomplete without the script that tells of all the heroism and adventure as the coastal merchants and latifundistas pushed their servants West to occupy lands inhabited and exploited by “Injuns”. America became bountiful as its settlers collected bounties for removal of “useless eaters”. Subsequently, albeit barely mentioned, was the Asian bonded labor (aka known as “contract labor”) abused to connect the coastal regimes in San Francisco and New York. They were barred from becoming American until after the lands of their birth and descent had been ravaged in the Second World War.

    Then there is the script known and best loved. This is the story of all those “huddled masses yearning to be free”. In the fine print, freedom included to be free of history, language, love and loyalty as part of “becoming American”. Traditionally “becoming American” has been a process analogous to accepting all the Latin sacraments, from infant baptism to extreme unction. There could be no greater blessing on Earth. Even vicarious consumption could bring the willing to conversion. Becoming American was possible with clothes, food, cinema, music, and political-cultural habits. The world could and should become American even if the iron and razor wire gates to that North American heaven were opened only very selectively. Any indifference or independence of life was simply unbecoming.

    While a private soldier, seaman or airman from the other ranks is punished like a criminal for misconduct and possibly less than honorably discharged from the service, the commissioned ranks are treated differently. Article 133 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice – UCMJ provides for serious violations of military discipline by those holding a warrant or commission to be punished by dismissal “for conduct unbecoming an officer (and a gentleman) ”. Ordinary crime is expected among the enlisted. The commissioned class is subject to different standards, even if the UCMJ applies to all members of the US Forces. An officer expelled from his class is also disgraced.

    There is a fourth script that is rarely if ever staged and in many ways remains unfinished. Individuals have been punished and disgraced for charges of disloyalty to the US. In fact even entire populations have been subjected to the terrible swift sword wielded by the Grand Republic. Conduct unbecoming an American is easily a capital offense. However in a world in which America, i.e. the United States of America, is one out of many rather than “the one from many” (e pluribus unum) only Americans should owe loyalty to Columbia. It should be natural that those citizens of other nations live and love in their own homes and not those portrayed in Hollywood films and TV series. But to do so, without betrayal, it must be possible to unbecome American, to escape the abusive parentalism of those who churn on the great Wurlitzer or the other machines of Oz.

    By turning most of the world into cultural captives (also huddled masses) the US has advertised itself with propaganda, both unarmed and armed, as the only source of freedom, the one true church outside of which salvation is impossible. Unfortunately the Protestant Reformation did not end papal and clerical power. It forced its reorganization. The ostensible decline of Rome on the Potomac will not end the power of its corporate clerical caste. More fundamental change is necessary. We must dare unbecoming in conduct and faith. Give to god what is god’s and give to caesar what is caesar’s. Give America to the Americans and keep one’s own country for oneself.

    Unbecoming American: A War Memoir is a compilation of articles, many of which were first published in Global Research, Dissident Voice, The Greanville Post, and in some cases were presented as papers at scholarly conferences. The essays are the product of some forty years reflection on what makes the US Empire so irresistable even as it demonstrates its incapacity to win on the battlefield or in the marketplace. The author, who emigrated from the US more than 40 years ago also renouncing his citizenship, has dedicated years of observation during travels to South America, Africa, East Asia and throughout the western peninsula of Eurasia trying to understand why nearly everyone he met was becoming American – and no one could understand that he had surrendered his locker room keys. As a witness to interruptions in Brazil (1986), Germany (1989), South Africa (1991) and numerous less visible caesures at the fin de siecle, the discrepancy between the apparent opportunities and the vivid realities could not be ignored. These essays are the product of those experiences and reflection on them.

    The post Unbecoming American: The Fourth Dimension first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.


  • Coming soon: Unbecoming American, A War Memoir, available at amazon.com

    Fifty years ago the Portuguese became the first and only populace to overthrow its national fascist regime.

    Although I was in Brazil in 1986 when the 1964 Atos Institutionais that defined the American incited and inspired military dictatorship were replaced by a new civilian constitution and in Berlin when the annexation of the GDR began and ultimately witnessed the first months when Anglo-American and other international owners of South Africa’s natural resource extraction system imposed an end to Afrikaaner domination, I missed the so-called “—”. In 1974 my father lay three years moulding in the grave and I was in the midst of adapting to “Jim Crow light” in the American South. The US regime was in the process of withdrawing the CIA’s official cover which former officer Frank Snepp would later call—perhaps ironically—“A Decent Interval” (1977). Another former CIA officer, John Stockwell, in his book In Search of Enemies (1978) would report that upon his return from Vietnam, the Portugal desk was the busiest in the Agency. The US media was full of the threat of Angola falling to the “Reds” no sooner had the Saigon embassy annex been evacuated by dramatic UH-1 roof manoeuvres. As Stockwell added, despite the work of the 40 Committee and Kissinger’s chronic belligerence, every bureaucratic attempt was made to conceal the fact that the Agency “goes rolling along.”

    Stockwell, given his residual loyalty as a senior officer at the time and the compartmentalization of information endemic to covert operations (and public propaganda), was unable to say what the CIA—through the late Ambassador and Carlyle Group partner, Frank Carlucci—was doing in Lisbon. A film produced by some young Americans, still available in the Web, Scenes of the Class Struggle in Portugal (Cena da Luta de Classes em Portugal) is about the clearest depiction of the events I know. Among Portugal’s conservatives and reactionaries are those who believe that 25 April 1974 was staged by the Soviet Union and supported by the US as a means of hiving off the African colonies. The US with its older brother the UK would share Angolan and Mozambican loot while the Soviet Union got to play with the residue of the Salazar/ Marcelo nationalists. The implication of this formula—ignoring the popular struggles and ruthlessness with which they had been suppressed—was that the relatively weak communists would do the job of removing those in the Estado Novo regime who were genuinely patriotic and like in Germany wanted to preserve Portuguese sovereignty even at the expense of the colonial populations. The overoptimistic Left served, well by the organizational skills of the otherwise rather bourgeois Portuguese Communist Party, was rightly opposed to colonialism but ill-equipped to deal with a NATO fleet off its coast or the machinations of the world’s most vicious covert action agency. The social revolution was ended by systematic economic and political violence accompanied by the injection of the genetically engineered pseudo-socialist Mario Soares. This spore of international corruption had been cultivated in Switzerland and nurtured to ripeness with funds laundered through the German SPD foundation, the Friedrich Ebert Stiftung, to create a baseless Partido Socialista for parachuting into Lisbon armed covertly by the US and overtly with patronage to buy whomever threats could not suppress. Of course that did not all happen overnight. (It is worth noting that on the eve of the 50th anniversary, the reigning PS prime minister, Antonio Costa, was impelled to resign and yield to what appear to be at least marginally woke election results. The PS served its purpose even through the first campaigns of the continuing COVID war and its complement the “fifth crusade” in the East.)

    It is hard to say whether the designation “Carnation Revolution” was a product of the same OTPOR-type marketing that has caused so much bloodshed since 1989. Given that Gene Sharp’s doctrines were reverse engineering of the Vietnamese NLF practices, it is safer to say that the same Einstein Institution types saw the 25 April military-civilian overthrow of Gaetano Marcelo’s modified Salazarism as a model to study. That means that just as Gene Sharp helped turn Mao’s theories of people’s war into counter-revolutionary tactics he and his acolytes recognized the potential for conversion of the symbolic and political success of the MFA in Portugal into a patent recipe for tactical regime change. As far as I know there has been no investigation of this possibility.

    After more than 30 years living in the Federal Republic of Germany and intensive travel throughout the territories of Euro-American fascism, I can still say that there is a special atmosphere in this tiny semi-mountainous corner of the Iberian peninsula, Lusitania. My compatriots are remarkably apolitical in their sociability, preferring football to factional disputes in the Republican Assembly. Yet the air is somehow much easier to breath than in those countries “liberated” by foreign armies. Portuguese have gained a reputation for docility—although their ancient aggression led Westerners into the Indian Ocean and South China Sea with brutality that shocked the great empires at the world’s fulcrum. That was the beginning of the 500-year global war of terror whose most recent campaign was announced by the US in 2001 and has yet to end.

    For more than half a millennium the civilized world has waited for the barbarians to join the human race. Periodically events occur which raise hope that humanity did not cease to breath west of the Urals or east of the Marianas Trench. The 25th of April 1974 was one of those choice moments when ordinary people not only complained about the incurable viciousness of their pathological rulers, they actually tried to do something about it.

    25 de Abril, sempre!

    The post “25 de Abril, Sempre” first appeared on Dissident Voice.


    This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by T.P. Wilkinson.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.


  • Coming soon: Unbecoming American, A War Memoir, available at amazon.com

    Fifty years ago the Portuguese became the first and only populace to overthrow its national fascist regime.

    Although I was in Brazil in 1986 when the 1964 Atos Institutionais that defined the American incited and inspired military dictatorship were replaced by a new civilian constitution and in Berlin when the annexation of the GDR began and ultimately witnessed the first months when Anglo-American and other international owners of South Africa’s natural resource extraction system imposed an end to Afrikaaner domination, I missed the so-called “—”. In 1974 my father lay three years moulding in the grave and I was in the midst of adapting to “Jim Crow light” in the American South. The US regime was in the process of withdrawing the CIA’s official cover which former officer Frank Snepp would later call—perhaps ironically—“A Decent Interval” (1977). Another former CIA officer, John Stockwell, in his book In Search of Enemies (1978) would report that upon his return from Vietnam, the Portugal desk was the busiest in the Agency. The US media was full of the threat of Angola falling to the “Reds” no sooner had the Saigon embassy annex been evacuated by dramatic UH-1 roof manoeuvres. As Stockwell added, despite the work of the 40 Committee and Kissinger’s chronic belligerence, every bureaucratic attempt was made to conceal the fact that the Agency “goes rolling along.”

    Stockwell, given his residual loyalty as a senior officer at the time and the compartmentalization of information endemic to covert operations (and public propaganda), was unable to say what the CIA—through the late Ambassador and Carlyle Group partner, Frank Carlucci—was doing in Lisbon. A film produced by some young Americans, still available in the Web, Scenes of the Class Struggle in Portugal (Cena da Luta de Classes em Portugal) is about the clearest depiction of the events I know. Among Portugal’s conservatives and reactionaries are those who believe that 25 April 1974 was staged by the Soviet Union and supported by the US as a means of hiving off the African colonies. The US with its older brother the UK would share Angolan and Mozambican loot while the Soviet Union got to play with the residue of the Salazar/ Marcelo nationalists. The implication of this formula—ignoring the popular struggles and ruthlessness with which they had been suppressed—was that the relatively weak communists would do the job of removing those in the Estado Novo regime who were genuinely patriotic and like in Germany wanted to preserve Portuguese sovereignty even at the expense of the colonial populations. The overoptimistic Left served, well by the organizational skills of the otherwise rather bourgeois Portuguese Communist Party, was rightly opposed to colonialism but ill-equipped to deal with a NATO fleet off its coast or the machinations of the world’s most vicious covert action agency. The social revolution was ended by systematic economic and political violence accompanied by the injection of the genetically engineered pseudo-socialist Mario Soares. This spore of international corruption had been cultivated in Switzerland and nurtured to ripeness with funds laundered through the German SPD foundation, the Friedrich Ebert Stiftung, to create a baseless Partido Socialista for parachuting into Lisbon armed covertly by the US and overtly with patronage to buy whomever threats could not suppress. Of course that did not all happen overnight. (It is worth noting that on the eve of the 50th anniversary, the reigning PS prime minister, Antonio Costa, was impelled to resign and yield to what appear to be at least marginally woke election results. The PS served its purpose even through the first campaigns of the continuing COVID war and its complement the “fifth crusade” in the East.)

    It is hard to say whether the designation “Carnation Revolution” was a product of the same OTPOR-type marketing that has caused so much bloodshed since 1989. Given that Gene Sharp’s doctrines were reverse engineering of the Vietnamese NLF practices, it is safer to say that the same Einstein Institution types saw the 25 April military-civilian overthrow of Gaetano Marcelo’s modified Salazarism as a model to study. That means that just as Gene Sharp helped turn Mao’s theories of people’s war into counter-revolutionary tactics he and his acolytes recognized the potential for conversion of the symbolic and political success of the MFA in Portugal into a patent recipe for tactical regime change. As far as I know there has been no investigation of this possibility.

    After more than 30 years living in the Federal Republic of Germany and intensive travel throughout the territories of Euro-American fascism, I can still say that there is a special atmosphere in this tiny semi-mountainous corner of the Iberian peninsula, Lusitania. My compatriots are remarkably apolitical in their sociability, preferring football to factional disputes in the Republican Assembly. Yet the air is somehow much easier to breath than in those countries “liberated” by foreign armies. Portuguese have gained a reputation for docility—although their ancient aggression led Westerners into the Indian Ocean and South China Sea with brutality that shocked the great empires at the world’s fulcrum. That was the beginning of the 500-year global war of terror whose most recent campaign was announced by the US in 2001 and has yet to end.

    For more than half a millennium the civilized world has waited for the barbarians to join the human race. Periodically events occur which raise hope that humanity did not cease to breath west of the Urals or east of the Marianas Trench. The 25th of April 1974 was one of those choice moments when ordinary people not only complained about the incurable viciousness of their pathological rulers, they actually tried to do something about it.

    25 de Abril, sempre!

    The post “25 de Abril, Sempre” first appeared on Dissident Voice.


    This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by T.P. Wilkinson.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.


  • I wrote my first book, Church Clothes in 1997. It was finally published in 2004. The essay was written because I had to write it. At the time when I began my work that would culminate in this book there was still a Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and a German Democratic Republic. By the time Maisonneuve Press published Church Clothes both states were extinct. I can only recall one review by a South African historian. He repeated the misunderstanding uttered by some of the doctoral committee that rewarded my work with a degree. Today I do not hesitate to say that that “misunderstanding” and the vanities of academic politics combined to prevent the magnum cum laude grade. The only committee member who opposed that honour was the chair herself. I mention this as a reiteration. My principal lecturer in political science as an undergraduate also told me that even though I was by far his best student he would never give me an “A” because I did not write what he wanted me to write in my assignments and exams. Decades later, I draw attention to these incidents in my academic curriculum vitae because they are exemplary not only for my personal intellectual development but for the sotto voce character of what so many distinguished scholars praise as the “peer review” system.

    Just as I have found my arguments ignored rather than rebutted, I have repeatedly found that the data upon which I have drawn for my research has been similarly ignored or discounted without any attempt to establish its accuracy or soundness. The reasons for this are not unrelated to the central argument of this book. Since the initiation of the Manhattan Project, the secret US program for developing the first atomic bombs, science has been progressively overwhelmed by a new sacerdotal class, enriched by the State and endowed with access to the plenitude of power and violence. This wholesale purchase of the institutions of learning and research and its subsequent devotion to the business of death first destroyed free inquiry in the natural science fields. The best funded and highest paid in the natural sciences—those developing the weapons of mass murder and destruction for the State—became the envy and the measure for aspirant scholars, researchers and students. In imitation and greed for a share of that largesse and access, the social sciences followed, as did the humanities, albeit at a slower pace. The peer review system as well as what Morse Peckham called “publish and perish” was nothing less than the proliferation of little House Un-American Activities Committees (HUAAC) throughout American and then Western academia. In a country whose culture has been notorious for its conformism, subjecting intellectual labour to group consensus was perhaps an inherent national trait. In any event the system has functioned very well. It has rigorously defended the elusiveness of the obvious.

    Thomas Kuhn, in his famous The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, argued that such “revolutions” do not occur gradually or because some prevailing prejudice has suddenly been disproven or discredited. Instead there is a change in the questions being asked usually starting with those about all the data that does not fit in the current theoretical framework. Peckham, who also knew Kuhn from Princeton, said that any human response in the world requires distinguishing something from everything. Inevitably a lot more is left out than included when limiting one’s behaviour, i.e. responding to the environment. What changes is not the data but the interest. Some data previously deemed irrelevant becomes central. The scholar or researcher is no different from anyone else here. Attention must be restricted in order to respond. That is to say an interest must be followed in order to distinguish from all the data to which they judge it is appropriate to respond. Joseph Weizenbaum’s primary argument against the validity of artificial intelligence focuses on the verb to judge. Machines and those humans who prefer to behave like them (or consider humans to be mere machines) cannot distinguish between data and information because they cannot judge. From an ethical point of view Weizenbaum also insists that the function of such machines, digital or analogue, should not be treated as judgment.

    The creation of a vast system of inspection and certification of intellectual product was a logical consequence of organizing the highest levels of scientific activity based on secrecy and loyalty. However it also applies to the laity. In the US it is virtually impossible to utter public criticism of the country or its institutions without first professing “love” for one’s country. (Needless to say, “love” for any other country is impermissible). Whether it was the adoption of the US version of the Ermächtigungsgesetz (Enabling Act) aka The USA Patriot Act in 2001 or the implementation of the mass incarceration and economic shutdown under the pretext of an alleged pandemic in 2020, even the most academically qualified and experienced critics have felt obliged to demonstrate that their scientific assertions have survived “peer review”. While the Soviet Union was extant Western scholars and scientists discounted or denounced all but the most technical work product as “under political control”. However, the semi-anonymous peer review is nothing less than the act of a collective political commissar with no personal responsibility.

    As for the conforming student or scholar and researcher, everything works as if organized intellectual life (the university and its ancillaries) were centres of free inquiry. They are made and kept safe by one’s peers. The potential to become one of those peers depends on decisions taken early in one’s education. Some decisions, like what to write on a term paper or which thesis topic to choose, can make or break one’s career. Without peers there is no one to promote one’s work, whether merely incremental or potentially monumental. The work which never reaches the assent of peers may disappear utterly. The work from which assent has been withdrawn can perish. Lorie Tarshis’s The Elements of Economics is a case in point.

    There is another reason I have decided to reissue Church Clothes. Not only did I argue in 1997 for recognition of the way mission, as a knowledge technology, transforms social formations, I also argued that the “land question” was fundamental for any serious political science and its systematic neglect a discredit to any politics claiming to serve human beings. To simplify the argument of the following pages: mission is the ecclesiastical expression of conquest. Church conquest is essentially the domination of souls (minds) and hence also culture. Since the soul or mind (a metaphor for the body of human responses) develops from the historical experience in the empirical world and reproduces the culture (instructions for performance), control over the material world is essential in order to produce culture. The Church (Christian mission in all its manifestations) engaged in mission to preach a culture it would create by conquering and dominating the space in which that culture was to be imposed. Following Kuhn, destroying the data sets and institutions for stabilizing responses to them was a prerequisite to conversion. The conquered population had to be redirected to other data and data structures—those preferred by the Church and those who own it. Kuhn’s scientific revolutions, at scale, are conversions not proofs. Expropriating the land, whether in North America, Australia or South Africa, to name but the most notorious, was not only a strategy for enrichment but for mass conversion. That mass conversion was essential to sustain what would otherwise have been transitory conquest.

    Since the annexation of the German Democratic Republic, the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the demolition of the Yugoslav Federation, the official Western policy has been that all the pre-1989 borders were violations of the inherent national and ethnic identities of the peoples inhabiting those countries. National and ethnic, following long-standing British political warfare strategy, are assumed to be identical for the purposes of forced conversion. Two seemingly contradictory policies have been pursued vehemently for nearly forty years. On one hand, every ethnic group susceptible of recognition by either the US or EU is entitled to political self-determination. On the other hand, any nation that defends its territorial integrity against foreign intervention (overt or covert) can be denied its sovereignty regardless of ethnic composition. Thus although the dissolution of the Soviet Union was eased by the Union constitution that permitted (in contrast to the US Constitution) republics to secede, the vast distribution of large Russian majorities in those newly separate republics did not legitimate redefinition of the boundaries or guarantees for those who literally overnight had lost their Soviet citizenship, which had made them citizens wherever they lived in the USSR. The historical complexities of the Yugoslav Federation were irrelevant to the forces determined to destroy it and steal its resources, including the geographical advantages for trans-Eurasian rail and pipeline traffic.

    In fact since 1947 only one nation-state has been able to guarantee by any means it deems necessary its territorial and “ethno-religious” homogeneity. The former POTUS Jimmy Carter even called the means by which its system of governance and territorial control—its land regime—are imposed, apartheid, after the original legal regime by that name had been abolished in South Africa. Although the title of my book refers to the “end of apartheid in South Africa” it did not suppose the end of apartheid as a policy per se. In 1948, the ethnic nationalist National Party was elected to govern South Africa. In the same year, the settler regime in Mandatory Palestine announced its independent statehood. South Africa declared itself a republic in 1961 and was practically expelled from the Commonwealth. The NP’s Afrikaner version of ethnic nationalism was offensive to the non-white Commonwealth members upon whom Britain’s material wealth depends. The National Party regime understood itself as a movement of ethnic national self-determination, antagonistic both to the Bantu and the British. It elaborated the Afrikaner identity but would have been incapable of dominating the country without including the British and other European “foreigners”. Thus its original ethnic base was diluted to establish a “white” nationalism while the “Bantu” majority was carefully segregated into language and tribal groups, later assigned by law to their own “national” territories, territories with no real sovereignty. This was the NP’s version of the “two state solution”. By 1991 there was an international consensus imposed upon the South African state. The Republic of South Africa was a unitary state and not a pseudo-confederation of white and black entities. After separation of amenities and other segregation measures were repealed, the acts creating the so-called Bantustans were also purged from the law. Meanwhile the other apartheid regime continues in force.

    The persistence of apartheid and its fanatical violence in the West means the question “what is apartheid?” continues to be of the utmost importance. Furthermore, just as the South African state claimed an essentially Old Testament basis for its legitimacy until 1994, the surviving apartheid system in Palestine retains this rabbinical-scriptural foundation. Yet more importantly, the establishment and maintenance of apartheid today is inseparable from the land in dispute. There can be no doubt that apartheid is ultimately a strategy and justification for expropriation and exclusive control of land by the State, on behalf of those who own it.

    Beyond the most obvious extant apartheid regime there are far greater forces at work. It is tempting to see the current seventy plus year war in Palestine as a local conflict. Even those who worry about world peace because of the failure to reach a peaceful solution to the conflict between the occupying state and the aboriginal population are often blinded by the fanaticism with which the war is waged by the occupying state actor. Their concerns range from humanitarian to pragmatic-economic. It is impossible to deny that the Middle East has been a strategic interface for global trade and communications for millennia. The Latin Church waged centuries of war in order to dominate what it called the Holy Land. Here the Latin Empire battled the forces of Islam before a European sect adopted the territory as a settler-colonial project—just at the moment when Woodrow Wilson’s liberal cant had established the principle of decolonization (if only for the colonies of one’s rivals). His Britannic Majesty’s government, masters of indirect rule and exploitation at arm’s length, needed little prodding to support some kind of settlement proposal for an economically influential cult. It has been credibly argued that the Balfour Declaration was actually a clever bit of subterfuge that was very unpopular among much of Britain’s ruling elite. However the decision-makers, some very powerful members of the Rhodes-Rothschild Round Table and some essentially bribed agents of the same forces were able to impose this new white settler colony even while other white colonies in Africa were collapsing. The terrorism conducted against all opponents to the realignment of Mandate Palestine has been interpreted by many as proof that the policy subsequent to the Balfour Declaration was not only a mistake but injurious to British interests.

    Such arguments rely on an antiquated concept of British interests. It relies on a view of Britain propagated precisely by those historians from the Round Table (RIIA) tradition who continue to dominate the history profession on both sides of the Atlantic, and hence the derivative historical research on the Continent. The principal innovation of the Netherlands and Great Britain in the 18th century was the amalgamation of the State and the joint stock company. Today this is called the “public-private partnership”. When the VOC and BEIC were formed, unlike their weaker counterparts in France and Denmark, they were not only stronger than the existing state apparatus, they had achieved quasi-personal union with the sovereign. The VOC was essentially a republic apparatus while the more advanced BEIC benefited by the patronage of a monarchy that was beholden to its financial class in the City of London. Although the British East India Company eventually went bankrupt and was dissolved as an entity, the piratical machine it has innovated—the precursor to the modern multinational corporation—survived and flourished as an instrument of empire. The geographical centre of that empire is the City of London, the Square Mile. In that enclave of financial adventurism, i.e. piracy or capitalism, the aim of all policy is the control over cash flow and risk throughout the world.

    In other words it is necessary to look for the technology of social transformation in processes found in a variety of institutions. These may operate with different formal ideologies and organizational structures. Those structures provide constraints both as internal and external projections of power. In politics power is exercised by the ability to impose shared meaning. That in turn means the capacity to limit responses in ways that conform to a given culture. We tend to ignore power when politics succeeds in compelling consensus and marginalizing or eliminating dissent. That is as natural as the thoughtlessness by which a fork and knife are used to eat until one finds there is only soup.

    If we recognize that apartheid did not end with the retirement of the NP regime and the adoption of the 1994 constitution, although its legal framework was largely abolished in South Africa, then we have to examine the phenomenon as something that is not specific to the Cape republic. We have to consider the South African experience just one historical example of a social formation and that there are other varieties that may share attributes but also exhibit differences from the system formally in place from 1948 until 1994. In 1997 I based my analysis of South African apartheid precisely on the premise that South Africa was a special case of a more general phenomenon.

    One of the founding myths of the South African epic was the claim that whites and blacks migrated into the Southern tip of Africa more or less at the same time. Hence black tribes had no prior territorial claims with precedence over those of the Dutch settlers at the Cape. This myth also asserted that nations, at least those that had emerged after the Thirty Years War, were politically and socially more mature forms of social organization and culture than anything the black inhabitants could claim. Maturity meant innate superiority. Hence Afrikaner nationalism was hierarchically superior to any other emergent nationalism, although potentially comparable to the nationalism in Britain’s other African colonies. A derivative myth was the foundation of the Group Areas Act. Allowing that each population, racially-ethnically defined, was entitled to its own development in its own space, separate spaces had to be recognized and assigned in which that development could occur. Beyond those boundaries black South Africans had no legal rights or privileges since these were residual to their own areas. In order to reconcile this legal fiction with the facts on the ground, the South African government began the process of forced removal. Cape Town and Cape Province was particularly disrupted because of the population of people called “Coloured” for whom there were no natural areas or “tribal homelands” to which these descendants of white settlers could be assigned.

    In 1989 a global realignment began. While this has been analysed in terms of great power politics, the so-called Cold War, and the various strategic decisions by the Anglo-American Empire, another form of realignment was also initiated that cannot be subsumed by the Cold War model or the proposed Unipolar vs. Multipolar debate. This realignment is multi-layered and multi-faceted. Since the end of the Soviet Union has meant the end of grand theoretical analysis in any of the sciences, there has been enormous fragmentation combined with simplification in the study of the political-social-economic changes. This is due in large part to the absence of credible cultural history. By cultural history I do not mean either the comparative cultural studies associated with anthropology or sociology. Nor do I mean the sophistry and mendacity embedded in such pseudo-disciplines like “critical race theory”.

    Cultural history is an integration of humanistic research methods with other tools aimed at explaining human behaviour, both individually and collectively, in the present using all the artefacts and documents available from the Past. Every explanation implies an organization and every organization can be understood as an explanation. There is no meta-position from which to study culture. We are in it to the end, till death do us part.

    We have been witnessing—at least into the far reaches of the Anglo-American Empire—unprecedented human migration. Millions of people have been driven from their homes by wars, conventional and counter-insurgency (terrorism) and mysteriously transported over oceans no armies could cross, past borders once guarded by men at arms, into countries whose economies are being driven to collapse by the empire’s ruling oligarchy. Very little of the public debate, whether by laity or government functionaries, addresses the scope of this migration in anything resembling a coherent way. These flows in the millions within very short periods of time are not being repelled, like Asians or Southern Europeans were once repelled from US shores. On the contrary all the leading functionaries and officeholders in the West are insisting that these millions be admitted into the country on terms not only more favourable than lawful immigration (for which waiting lists and quotas apply) but also more favourable than for native-born or previously naturalized citizens. There is strong, if ineffective, resistance to this wave. However it is condemned rather than analysed.

    Historical records show that massive waves of human migration are not in themselves new. What is unique about these migrations is that they are entirely man-made. China, central Eurasia, and Africa all experienced waves of migration when famine or other natural disasters accumulated to force people in large regions to move from desolation to new sources of food and shelter. Nowhere was such migration wholly without conflict. Yet what we have seen since 1989 is another kind of enforced migration. In an era where the monopoly of armed force as well as commercial and manufacturing power is in the hand of a small band of pirates calling themselves hedge funds or investment banks, two parallel forms of globalization have been accelerating. Until now the lead form of globalization was the relocation of industrial capacity to low wage countries and continued capture of their natural resources. In this shape there was little difference from the old colonial model, except that local governments run by natives had replaced imperial administrators and governors. The almost complete de-industrialization of the metropolitan countries has steadily reduced their populations to consumers and service workers. Thus the value extracted from those countries is derived from cash flow and the traffic in intangibles (finance and intellectual property). Population declines have been compensated by increase in the cost of consumption in order to maintain high cash extraction rates.

    As a rule there has never been any interest in developing a similar consumer-based extractive economy in the low-wage, resource-rich parts of the world. This has led those who profit from the international flows of cash and resources to speculate by creating a massive international flow of human resources. Hence there has been a systematic series of wars incited and waged throughout the world to make large swathes of the planet uninhabitable. These wars constitute essentially strategic deportation of indigenous populations, whether from Syria, Palestine, Central Africa, Ukraine, or any other place where the land is worth more than the people living on it.

    It is certainly no accident that high representatives of hedge funds, armaments, digital technology and mass media sit annually in ecumenical council in the heights of the Swiss Alps to devise such ideas as The Great Reset or the Fourth Industrial Revolution for a world in which the vast majority of people will “own nothing and be happy”. It should surprise no one that policies to concentrate populations like battery chickens in the urban conurbations of the temperate zone are to be administered by the PPP World Health Organization with its program of regular pandemics and constant inoculation. Much speculation and hysteria has been spent divining the motives, intentions and secret plans at the pinnacle of the sacerdotal and neo-feudal estate in aspiration. Unfortunately much of that has been impaired by fixation on a worldview that sentimentalizes the political ideologies of the English and Scottish Enlightenment at the same time demonizing the ideas of the French.

    Both positions distract from the underlying cultural historical phenomenon upon which the West is built: the Latin Church, the original totalitarian system in the West. It has mutated many times since the Reformation and the Thirty Years’ War, however it remains the single most important explanation and organization in the West. It is the core of what Samuel Huntington meant by “the superiority in applying organized violence.” The Fourth Crusade was an early climax in the “clash of civilizations”, better said the clash of the West with civilization. Philanthro-capitalism, especially that attributed to Bill Gates and George Schwartz Soros, is atomic-strength or a viral form of the mass conversion model propagated by the Latin Church. When the 14-year-old Soros adopted the “deport and confiscate” practice of enrichment, as a willing helper to the occupying forces of Nazi Germany, he was confessing to the business model upon which his entire Open Society and Quantum Fund organizations are based. The International Organization for Migration, a UN specialized agency (PPP), turned the UN relief to workers compelled to migrate as labourers after World War 2 into the service provider to permanently displaced people. The overall objective pursued by the World Economic Forum, as the college of cardinals in the Church of Finance Capitalism (what the medieval Latin Church was in essence), can be seen when these prelates convene to put their seal upon the covenants by which capital, humanity, and natural resources are maintained in continuous flow to be allocated wherever the hierarchy deems desirable or necessary. The land upon which people are born, from which they derive their nutrition and habitation, in which their cultures emerge and the humanity unfolds, is to be seized de facto where people are deported and de jure where they still live or arrive. The hedge funds or carcino-capitalists like Gates, Soros and those whose names we will never hear or read are already buying whatever is vacated by force of arms or destitution, both in the source countries and the new targets.

    Deprived of land and affordable, safe homes in the places they were born and where there families have lived, often for centuries, these human flows will be dehumanized, too. Their material culture no longer either natural or self-produced, it too becomes the discharge of planned obsolescence. A mass conversion is underway in the West. Instead of “group areas” there will be no areas and no groups. The grand apartheid of the future is that separation between those who own nothing and those who own everything. Perhaps that is a good reason to rethink what one thought one knew about the apartheid in South Africa.

    The post Unbecoming American: Did Apartheid Really End in 1991? first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Many years ago, in the previous century, an old controversy in the Latin Church was resuscitated, that of Christian poverty. Anyone who pursues the history of the Latin Church and the papal empire will find periodic disputes over the meaning of such dicta as “the poor shall inherit the Earth” or innumerable other citations attributed to the biblical Jesus of Nazareth. At the apex of its power the Holy Roman and Universal Inquisition included those who insisted that poverty was a fundamental principle of Christian life (meaning for all the clergy, too). Franciscans and others were burned for professing this conviction. With the lapse of centuries, especially after the secularizations imposed by the 1789 revolution in France, the heresy was no longer punished by public combustion. The apparent supremacy of the secular state meant that such debates about opulence and penury were transferred to another sphere. Clergy might debate theological merits. However they had no direct influence on State policy.

    All that changed in the wake of the Second Vatican Council. The accelerating movement toward what was hopefully awaited as the end of colonialism in all its forms also pushed regular and secular clergy as well as laity toward nationalism, the demands for self-determination and national development. The first wave of independence struggles, associated with Simon Bolivar, had been driven by anti-clerical, Enlightenment secularizers. This attitude persisted well into the 20th century. The Mexican Revolution of 1910 was distinctly, even violently anti-clerical. In fact, the seminal independence war in the Western hemisphere, the American War of Independence of 1776, was an exception. The United States was formed with an explicit prohibition of religious establishment. However this prohibition was only a rejection of the British substitution for Latin supremacy by creation of the Church of England to perform the same role, not of clerical status per se. In fact the United States would evolve into a kind of secular church where not only the invocation of the Christian (later also others) deity was standard, the nation itself was transformed into an instrument of divine salvation. Irving Berlin’s God Bless America, made famous by contralto Kate Smith, became one of the great popular expressions of worship in the North American Empire, where religious tolerance actually meant an obsession with religion.

    Despite a strong anti-Latin prejudice among much of the US population (with the exception of numerous Irish and Italian immigrants) including the widely-held belief that a Latin POTUS would inevitably render the US a vassal of the Roman pontificate, this secular church preferred Latin America under church domination to anything Left. Since the Latin Church had retained control over most of the educational system in countries south of the United Mexican States, the class of people who had finished secondary and tertiary schooling were heavily influenced by Church education. Even those who did not become priests or religious shared years of Christian indoctrination with their classmates. Hence it should have been no surprise that the radicalization following Vatican II would shape the attitudes of young, educated clerics as well as those who had pursued other professions. Even today the Second Vatican Council is a highly contentious moment in the history of the Latin Church. Traditionalists continue to fight for reversal of the liturgical and ecclesiastical forms subsequently adopted. Significantly this era provoked the hierarchy with a resuscitation of the Fraticelli heresy reformulated as the “preferential option for the poor”.

    Instead of asserting that the Church and especially the hierarchy abandon its status, the “preferential option for the poor” was derived from the Council’s resolutions and the so-called “social teaching” beginning when Leo XIII promulgated the encyclical Rerum Novarum in 1891. This new generation of priests and laity argued that the Church had a duty to prefer the poor and serve them rather than ministering to the ruling elites. Along with the dogma of papal infallibility promulgated after the First Vatican Council, the Papacy was engaged in a vigorous attempt to counter what economist Michael Hudson identified as the factive march toward socialism throughout the West. It should be understood that the liberal debunking of Marxist determinism is based on ignorance or refusal to comprehend the fundamentals of Marx’s analysis. The Church on the other hand comprehended that it would need a social doctrine to respond to socialism’s emergence in the West.

    The conservatives in this initially broad movement—focussed mainly in Central and South America—agreed the necessity of pacifying the poor with attention. The French Revolution had been inspired by misinterpretation of the UDI struggle in British North America. In turn the 1789 revolution inspired the overthrow of slavery in Saint Dominique, France’s richest colony. That revolution, although infamously compromised by the slaveholder republic to the North, catalyzed the wave of Bolivarian independence wars that drove Spain out of the Western hemisphere — except Cuba until the end of the 19th century. The Church had always been on the side of the colonizers and later the post-colonial elite. Although the conservatives remained loyal to that ruling class, they saw the historical wave and wanted to ride rather than sink beneath it. After 1945, the conservatives warned that the hierarchy had served the cities but utterly neglected the countryside. The radicals complained that the hierarchy was a collaborator and beneficiary in the prevailing oppressive systems. For conservatives, the preferential option meant sending priests to neglected parishes and strengthening religious-patriotic organizations in the rural areas. Radicals wanted the Church to lead fundamental social and economic reform. The most radical felt that Christian teaching obliged them to support armed insurrection if that was necessary to liberate the poor from oppression.

    This return to the traditional concern for the oppressed, i.e. those forced to live in poverty deprived of the most basic needs for human survival and the means to improve their lives beyond bare subsistence, was also a return to the fundamental heresy that the Church must not only serve the poor but renounce enrichment. While the Universal Inquisition had nearly disappeared from political life by the end of the 19th century, the hierarchy had not substantially altered its claims to worldly wealth, honor and power. Under Benito Mussolini the Roman pontiff was recognized as a sovereign over the territory of the Vatican, thus restoring the political authority of the Latin Church. The Weimar Constitution recognized both the Latin Church and the Protestant (Lutheran and Calvinist) Church as quasi-sovereigns on whose behalf church tax was introduced, a levy on the wages of all citizens who did not explicitly renounce confessional membership. Later a concordat, i.e. a treaty between the German Reich and the Papacy, gave formal rights and privileges to the Church and protected its property. The extensive secularization of Church properties in the course of the 19th century were and still are compensated by taxpayers through rates collected at municipal level. In other words, the Latin Church, as arguably one of the largest landowners in the western peninsula of Eurasia, may not have the power to anoint heads of state or ban them and the states over which they preside. However it is a major business actor and property owner and hence part of the corporate cartel that dominates the bourgeois political system, cosmetically called democracy.

    Hence it should not have been surprising to find that the pontiff appointed with the exceptional influence of Anglo-American covert action, John Paul II, should appoint a cardinal-bishop raised under the NSDAP regime to head the Holy Office. Joseph Ratzinger, who later managed to promote himself to the pontificate (like GHW Bush went to the CIA before finally becoming POTUS), joined the forces of the Anglo-American Empire to crush the religious-clerical support for the last wave of independence and anti-colonial struggle in Central and South America. Although there were also activists and promoters of what was now called “liberation theology” on other continents, Africa was only place they had achieved something of a mass base. The Republic of South Africa was dominated by Protestant denominations. Thus radicals like Archbishop Hurley (who like his brother in Christ Dom Helder Camara began as a conservative) were able to benefit from episcopal privileges but remained minority voices. Even the more famous Anglican bishop and Nobel laureate Desmond Tutu was far more marginal in country than his reputation outside South Africa suggested. In the Asia-Pacific region, only the Philippines had a substantial Latin congregation. The peculiarities (better said the perversions) of the US-dominated archipelago prevented a critical mass from developing there. While the Boff brothers (Leonardo, a Franciscan and Clodovis, a Servite) in Brazil and Gutiérrez in Peru (Dominican) became notorious. Another Dominican, Albert Nolan, managed to avoid the persecution. (Perhaps because the Latin Church was relatively weak in South Africa and liberation theology opposed apartheid which the Holy Office could not openly defend.) Gutiérrez and Leonardo Boff as well as the Nicaraguan Ernesto Cardenal were all punished for supposedly politicizing their offices. The archbishop of Recifé and Olinda Dom Helder Camara and the cardinal archbishop of Sao Paulo, Paulo Evaristo Arns, were not deposed but had their jurisdictions diluted to reduce the authority they could exercise. In other words like in the Middle Ages, the hierarchy punished dissident clergy for taking the “option for the poor” too literally.

    The US, both directly through prejudicial policies and covert action and indirectly through foundations and evangelical-pentacostal ministries, had been working to prevent an increasingly radicalized Latin base, organized for example in the CEBs (basic ecclesiastical communities) from developing the capacity to mobilize the countryside. The cooperation of the Ratzinger’s Holy Office was needed to give ideological cover for the assassinations, kidnapping and destruction delivered by US armed propaganda teams and secret units of national armed forces, like those that murdered Bishop Oscar Romero while he was saying mass in Salvador. Evangelical missions not only promoted the US “free enterprise” ideology and its charismatic style, they also competed actively to undermine historically Latin parishes and dioceses. The more extreme of these sects even saw the Latin Church as an evil competing with communism—both of which had to be met with force. Institutional religion has always been a technology for social transformation. The more hierarchically it is structured the more amenable it is to political hierarchies, like those of monarchy and aristocracy. However corporate oligarchies are governed by religious ideologies as well. Thus it should be no surprise that officeholders in one hierarchy can serve in another almost effortlessly. The papacy merged the rabbinical with the Latin imperial forms. Modern business corporations essentially mimic those original power structures, with CEOs elected dictators or temporary princes. Liberation theology and the derived CEBs began to fill a vacuum created by the concentration of clerical and political authority in the urban centers. Basic ecclesiastical communities were established in places that had rarely, if ever, even seen a priest. The theory asserted that the primitive church, before the imposition of the rabbinical-episcopal hierarchy, was self-constituted and thus also endowed with the grace needed to perform the sacraments. In the established Church, the sacraments were a major source of income and part of the vast financial derivative system through which the Papacy drained the Faithful from cradle to grave. Therefore it was not only the potential for political radicalism that Ratzinger and John Paul II feared. They also saw this as a model of the Latin faith which would deprive the global corporation of Christ of rural income extraction. In fact had it proceeded it might have challenged many more financial and ideological institutions with which the Papacy was necessarily aligned.

    The persecution of liberation theology and all its practical elements was more than a theological campaign. Just as the universal inquisition had delivered those it convicted of heresy or other crimes to the “secular arm”, the Holy Office legitimated the Anglo-American Empire’s counter-insurgency campaign. Denied the institutional protection of religious freedom, both clergy and laity became outlaws in the medieval sense, where the Inquisition could declare its victims beyond the protection afforded even the lowliest peasant. While the State pursued Communists, real or imagined, the Latin hierarchy and the Pentacostal sects campaigned against primitive Christians. Thus by the end of the 1980s the pincer movement of Church and State had largely neutralized all the Western organizations for base struggle against oppression—creating an ideological wasteland thoroughly contaminated by possessive individualism and malignant narcissism. This ideological wasteland was saturated with “depleted identity product” and the technology of economic cannibalism.

    The Latin hierarchy has always responded to the heresy of Jesus’s “preference for the poor” by insisting that Jesus meant the “spiritually poor” and not the oppressed. By definition every human was “spiritually poor” because of the doctrine of original sin and the principles underlying auricular confession. In the view of the Papacy and episcopate, to prefer the real, materially poor over the “spiritually poor” would itself be sinful. It would violate the diversity, inclusion, and equity principles of the Gospel as taught by the Holy Church. It would distract people from concern for their salvation were they to fight for potable water and safe homes. Instead the Gospel supported the economic and social models which gave the real poor the opportunity for salvation ONLY if they shared in the communion of those who enriched themselves at their expense. Individual salvation was the best thing for which one could pray and pay.

    When the last breaths of the post-war liberation movements were being suffocated by overt and covert armed action by the residue of Euro-American imperialism, the survivors were placed on respirators. If they would only submit to artificial resuscitation as atomized, stateless, faithless (and eventually useless) labor, then their souls would be transubstantiated into consumers of digital, synthetic identities. Virtual nutrition and liberation would render struggle unnecessary—and organized, collective struggle impossible.

    As many observers draw attention to the deterioration in the quality of real life, it has become clear that the resources available to the populations are devoted to virtual life. Whether it be digital communications technology, so-called virtual reality or that obscenity “artificial intelligence”, the lived world is being dissolved and with it the humans we had been accustomed to see in that world. This is a material and spiritual transformation. However it is dissolution not creation. It is both derivative and synthetic, like opioids. Whether one calls it finance capitalism, the New World Order, or by some other advertising slogan and label, we are witnessing not the destruction of the planet—which will be here long after we are extinct—but the annihilation of humanity as the union of heart and mind, soul, intelligence and corporeality. That is surely what the Latin pontiff and his corporate cartel colleagues have always understood as “salvation”—not deliverance of the poor but deliverance from them, from the useless billions for whom heaven was designed: so that the rich actually inherit the Earth.

    The post Unbecoming American: THE Option for the Poor first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.


  • The importance of “peace” in the rhetoric of the West lies not in the sincerity with which it is preached. Rather “peace”, like the DIE dogma emerging from the recent Awakening Crusade (Wokism) is a term of invidious distraction. The intensity and frequency of its use is determined by the underlying concept of domination. As opposed to actual peace, i.e. the absence of hostilities, “peace” is a political and psychological warfare device deployed for what could be called “terminological” or “linguistic” denial.

    Just as the US Forces, operating behind the United Nations banner in Korea, wantonly destroyed civilian infrastructure from 1951-1953 in order to deny Koreans access to their own country, the strategic aim of “peace”, in whatever form it is praised or promoted, is to deny enemies not only the control of the story line (the cliché “narrative” applies here) but also of the vocabulary to express their interests. Saturation bombing, the West’s tactic of choice, applies to language as well as to dropping high explosive as a means to silence the foe.

    Deprived of the use of the terminology of peace, the defendants opposing Western aggression are forced to use the language of war. As a result, pleas to avoid or prevent war can be translated into belligerent intentions. The West has led the world in the development and proliferation of public deliberative bodies, electoral machinery and mass media. The constant praise and attention given to parliaments, congresses and legislative assemblies is not an expression of vital democratic processes or the active translation of popular will into government action. Instead the purpose of these bodies and the mechanisms for filling them with people is to create and maintain what are best understood as public language machines. Qualifications for membership, beyond certain demographic specifications, demonstrate potential capacity to produce and reproduce the systemic language output the surplus of which is deployed to overwhelm or occlude any other forms of expression.

    This overproduction of verbiage and cant is often decried as a malfunction of deliberative assemblies. However that is an error. Just as a jury trial should not be confused with scientific fact-finding and assessment, the written product of deliberative assemblies is not the distillation of popular will.

    The difference between philosophy and science, a relatively recent distinction, is that philosophy comprises exercises in how to respond to explanations (hierarchical verbal behaviour) while science comprises the exercises in verbalizing the non-verbal, sometimes known as facts or the real world, i.e. the empirical frontier. Philosophy was once subsumed by theology and science was nothing more than a more detailed articulation of the statements subsumed by philosophy, in turn subsumed by theology. So human experience at the empirical frontier was subsumed by religious categories and thus governed by those especially privileged and empowered to approve or disapprove the order in which those statements were subsumed. These approvals in turn were subsumed by theocratic explanations the termination of which was “god”.

    For what has turned out to be a brief period, less than two hundred years, science comprised practices and explanations that largely dispensed with theological termini. Toward the end of the 20th century, that changed. Science was reintegrated into religion. Instead of science being the collective and individual activity of investigating the empirical frontier and producing statements and practices that facilitated the useful manipulation of the environment, Science became the system in which Truth was uttered through rituals and sacraments prescribed by largely inaccessible sacred texts. The trigger for this reversal of humanism and return to a sacerdotal system was the Manhattan Project. The largest single scientific research project in modern history, the Manhattan Project captured virtually every scholarly and technical faculty in the US to produce the greatest weapon of mass destruction ever invented. The atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were the ultimate demonstration of Western nihilism. This gratuitous crucifixion of two entire cities not only raised the United States to the primacy of violence. It also demonstrated the culmination of Western imperialism. As Harvard professor Samuel Huntington concisely remarked in his notorious book Clash of Civilizations (1994):

    The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion (to which few members of other civilizations were converted) but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do.

    The organization that produced these weapons and gave the United States the power of international extortion also destroyed what remained of independent science. At the same time the enormous – billions in today’s money—funds that built the fission bombs and later the thermonuclear (hydrogen) bombs also began the rampant manipulation of living matter known as genetic engineering. Together these two technologies of future terror were wrapped in permanent secrecy. A new priesthood was created. Instead of doctors of divine theology ordained by bishops and ruled by an absolutist pope in Rome, this new sacerdotal class was ordained with security clearances, i.e. access to secrets and sacred oaths to keep them. The possession of superhuman destructive power was initially concealed by myths of wartime necessity. Until the 1970s, the pontiffs on the Potomac preached that such a horrible weapon would be sinful to use. They also did whatever was possible to prevent other nations from sharing this weaponry. Then the rhetoric of “peace” was applied once the Soviet Union had detonated its own atomic bombs, culminating with the Tsar Bomba. Disarmament and arms control were pursued by the US Government as a means of concealing the original intent of the weapons and the subsequent technological advances as well as impeding Soviet weapons development. Conveniently ignoring the acquisition of atomic bomb building capacity by the state that occupied Palestine after 1947, the US also successfully concealed the fact that its atomic bomb was built to destroy the Soviet Union (and eventually the People’s Republic of China). Despite the declassification of the Sandia oral history of US strategic policy—in which these objectives had been very clearly articulated—the “peace” screen has hidden the atomic core of US aggressive policy from most of the public, both in the US and abroad.

    This concealment was an intentional product of the restructuring of Science as the cult of national war policy, euphemistically called “defence”. The complement to this restoration of religious control over the pursuit of scientific knowledge was the imposition of the private-public partnership known as the United Nations. Advertised as a “new and improved” version of the League of Nations formed after the Great War, this union of the victors from the Second World War was supposed to guard the world from future ravages of war. It initially comprised five bodies. The administration was vested in the Secretariat. The general powers were awarded to a representative General Assembly comprising all member-states on the principle of one state-one vote. The task of peacekeeping was vested in the Security Council selected by the General Assembly with each of the leading Allied powers (the US, UK, France, the USSR and Republic of China) endowed with a veto over any decision taken by the Security Council (and thus a check on potential majorities that might form in the General Assembly). In addition an Economic and Social Council was charged with social development issues and the Trusteeship Council was erected to deal with what the Charter called “non-self-governing territories”, i.e. countries still subject to League of Nations mandate or colonial rule. Quickly the Economic and Social Council and the Trusteeship Council were relegated to the backwaters of international diplomacy. The General Assembly was reduced to a debating society. In essence the Security Council and the international diplomatic corps employed by the Secretariat became the only functional organs of this great peacekeeping institution.

    It did not take long before even the pretence of peacekeeping became a dead letter. The senior intergovernmental organization of the post-war era is itself party to the longest continuing war in modern history—the US invasion of the Republic of Korea in 1945, the civil war it triggered and the United Nations (US in cognito) forces, less the now defunct Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China, against the people of Korea, since 1951 constituted as the People’s Democratic Republic (North) and the Republic of Korea (South). There has not been a single armed conflict since 1945 in which the United Nations, acting through the Security Council, has successfully prevented war or restored peace. On the contrary, the domination of the Security Council by the United States has assured that the so-called Blue Helmets have become the Trojan horses for the Western powers in every part of the world they were deployed. Their principal mission has been to prevent local populations from deciding their internal affairs in any way that might conflict with the interests of the United States, Great Britain or France.

    How is it that such sacred trust as the world was told it could place in this great peacekeeping institution could be so consistently betrayed no sooner than the ink had dried in San Francisco? Surely the member-states, initially 45 and now 194, would object to such hypocrisy and aggressive exploitation of international organs. Wasn’t everyone agreed that the horrors of war, demonstrated in the carnage from the Oder to the Yalu between 1936 and 1945, were awful enough? After all the Kellogg-Briand Pact adopted in the interwar period as a cornerstone of international law has not been repudiated by any of the permanent members of the Security Council. Why do governments and peoples accept this regime of constant war against peoples and their human rights to peaceful development and self-determination?

    There are major obstacles and they were built into the system, not accidentally but by virtue of the absolute command of destructive power held by the United States and its vassals. First of all there was the secret power of the atomic bomb and the US regime’s demonstrated willingness to use it against civilians en masse. Then there was the veto power bestowed upon three of the empires with the least interest in any change of the status quo. Although not formally part of the United Nations organization, the Bretton Woods accords created, under US control, the weapons of mass economic destruction known as the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. The Second World War had devastated most of the world’s industrial capacity and disrupted international trade. This left the US not only with its tools for financial manipulation. It created a global captive market for the only country whose industrial and agricultural capacity was untouched by the previous thirty years of violent havoc. Finally the destruction of state power in much of the world extended to both political and civil institutions. It gave the United States oligopoly in the market for consumer goods and information, including entertainment.

    Although the Soviet Union had armed itself with powerful atomic weapons this was a purely defensive posture. As US experts knew the USSR would need at least 20 years to recover both in terms of population and economy to pre-war levels. When POTUS Harry Truman repudiated the Yalta agreements concluded by his predecessor, Franklin D. Roosevelt, he aggravated the conditions that would isolate the Soviet Union from the rest of the world. By refusing to recognize the People’s Republic of China, the US enforced the de facto blockade of most of Asia. This would be magnified by carpet-bombing Korea and Vietnam, instigating the murder of some one million Indonesians and the continuing slaughter of Congolese and other inhabitants of Central Africa. Cuba, still subject to a blockade the UN cannot end, is the only country that has been able to resist invasion by US/ UN troops or proxies.

    So what does the United Nations really do, if it does not keep the peace?

    As the pinnacle of international and intergovernmental diplomacy, the United Nations is the highest deliberative body on the planet. And there it is possible to see its true function. The United Nations is an institution created for distraction and denial. Within its chambers, talk of “peace” substitutes for peace. Its specialized agencies are staffed primarily by agents and assets of the US and its vassals, who owe their assignments and extensive diplomatic privileges to the patronage of the US and the corporations for which it stands. Instead of supporting member-states with the putative expertise available, these transnational bureaucrats apply the resources fed to the United Nations to manipulate national and local policies. Even the promise of appointments or the extension of membership privileges to the diplomatic corps of small and medium-sized states provides bribery or extortion at arm’s length for the corporate interests and foreign policies of the Allied permanent members. The absolute veto power prevents any serious initiative from the General Assembly from being carried into action even if adopted by large majorities in that house.

    The “talk” of peace and peacekeeping is not only the inalienable prerogative of the paramount member. By virtue of the control US-based corporations hold over the global mass media, even that talk can erupt at will into a tsunami of “peace” and “reconciliation” or “human rights” or “free enterprise”. The subsequent flood drowns any alternative voices along with arguments and proposals that do not accord with the will of the US oligarchy. As recently as March of this year, a popular conservative journalist-commentator, Tucker Carlson, was told point blank by the President of the Russian Federation, Vladimir Putin, that even his most open, vocal and visible acts of goodwill toward the owners of the US and NATO would not be heard. Just like the Soviet Union, the Russian Federation and the People’s Republic of China have no control over global mass media. There may be fans of genuine Russian vodka and millions may dine regularly on some version of Chinese cuisine. Yet none of this competes with Coca Cola and Levis. India may produce more films than Hollywood. Russian composers and authors may enjoy international fame. Everyone has heard of the Great Wall and has thousands of things stamped somewhere “Made in China”. Yet when peace is spoken in Moscow or Beijing it is still translated in the West as “not war”.

    For decades the vast majority of UN member-states have demanded an end to the atrocities by which the occupation of Palestine is enforced through a settler-colonial state apparatus. Yet the onus for peace is placed not on those who monopolize not only armed force and the language of “peace”. Instead the language of “peace” is applied together with incarceration, torture, murder and mayhem against those who pray for peace itself. Intergovernmental instruments and diplomacy are used aggressively to suppress any peace not commensurate with abject surrender.

    At least twenty million Soviet citizens died as a result of the West’s invasion of the Soviet Union by combined forces of Nazi Germany and occupied Ukraine. However the only deaths counted are the estimated six to seven million from Western Europe. The Western Allies in that massive slaughter regularly commemorate their Normandy invasion, only launched to deny the fruits of its unilateral defeat of the Wehrmacht. Until their viceroy, Boris Yeltsin, was replaced by the current President of the Russian Federation, this contempt and its underlying motives were ceremoniously concealed. Meanwhile the deliberative language machines have turned the invasion of the Soviet Union, known as Operation Barbarossa, into a boxing match between the Western devil and the Eastern devil. The Wehrmacht and the Waffen SS are honored today, e.g. in the Canadian parliament, as early heroes of the continuous battle against Russia. This is not hypocrisy or a mistake. Rather it is the admission of what “peace in our time” was intended to deliver. The some 20 million Chinese that were killed by the Japanese invasion, tolerated by the West in its morbid desire for the extermination of communists, do not count at all. Yet a fraction of the overall war deaths continues to justify the occupation of the Middle East by Euro-Americans. To begin the continuing body count in the Congo—well over ten million since Belgium withdrew (after assassinating its first prime minister)—would be pointless. “Peace” in Africa still means the size of the “piece” of Africa owned or controlled by Western corporations—the same corporations that also profited by the deaths in Eastern Europe from 1939 – 1945.

    The United Nations is not useless as many are tempted to claim. On the contrary it has proven to be a very useful and highly profitable enterprise. By dominating international diplomatic language it diverts attention from the substance of diplomacy. As a cutout for covert military action and subversion, the United Nations diverts attention from the real belligerents in a world long dehydrated by war. Moreover, by its appropriation of the sacerdotal Science instituted since the Manhattan Project, the United Nations and its specialized agencies suppress genuine scientific investigation and the knowledge needed to remedy the illnesses caused by empires that refuse to die—or worse, that will only die by applying diversity, inclusion and equity to the graveyard to which their owners send people every day.

    There is a place for true diplomacy in the world. Conflicts among peoples are just as natural as they are among individuals. Problems solved also expose or create new ones to investigate and solve. That is what science with a small “s” promises humans. In fact that is the essence of humanism. Every explanation implies an organization. Conversely every organization can be understood as an explanation. The United Nations is an organization based on the explanation whose regress is terminated with the atomic bomb. Nearly seventy years cannot alter the fact that an organization borne with the genetic code of atomic annihilation will reproduce death in every generation. If talk of “peace” is to be replaced by peaceful action then clearly a new explanation for international relations is necessary. The language machines created for perpetual war have to be abandoned and real human beings restored to their dignity which includes restoring their language and their voices.

    The post Unbecoming American: Diplomacy and Distraction first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • President Kennedy was furious at the CIA for having misled him. Waiting several months before he compelled CIA Director Allen Dulles to resign, Kennedy told him, “Under a parliamentary system of government it is I who would be leaving. But under our system it is you who must go.”

    Thus John F. Kennedy defended the illusion that the Anglophile dominated US government had transcended its British aristocratic-monarchical roots. Allen Dulles resigned from his office as Director of Central Intelligence to preside over the committee that would disprove Kennedy‘s naive belief in an American system of responsible government in the hands of popularly elected representatives.

    A Conservative friend of the Thatcher regime in Great Britain created a series called “Yes Minister” (with a sequel “Yes Prime Minister”) in which the power of the permanent civil service over elected parliamentary government was lampooned. Yet behind the sarcasm with which Sir Humphrey exhibits his scarcely concealed contempt for the “barbarians” – meaning His Majesty’s ordinary subjects- lies the admission of simplicity in what has been recently called the “Deep State”. Denied by most in the West, the existence of what Prouty called “the secret team” is so obvious to the scriptwriters of the aristocratic- monarchist British Broadcasting Corporation that it could be advertised in prime time. The history of the current regime in the Federal Republic of Germany, ignored by most of occupied Germany’s licensed “free media”, was so obvious that GDR prime time TV broadcast a series in the 1970s which dramatized the US-Nazi cooperation in the remilitarization of Germany (west) to fight the war now actually impending against Russia. Das Unsichtbare Visier told the story of secret rearmament using the core of the SS and reliable Wehrmacht officers and the use of CIA Gladio operations to create pseudo-Left terrorism in the strategy of tension against the nominally legal Left in the NATO-occupied countries.

    The best the US could do was House of Cards, which follows the Dallas template with some cynical steroids. However while the British and the GDR series admit this is a system, the US version is unable to transcend celebrity and the superficiality of daytime soap operas. All three series were devised as entertainment. They therefore have aesthetic attributes, which permit the viewer to suspend belief. However the difference in context is remarkable. While the GDR version fictionalizes history and the British version reeks of the smugness in the senior common room, Americans at their most cynical cannot transcend the Disneyland/ Leave it to Beaver (even if Beaver now would be a trannie) exceptionalism by which only the individual is good or bad. Despite the candid asides and opportunism of the players, the story is always about corruption. The politicians are dishonest and greedy for wealth and power. But so is everyone else. House of Cards conceals the interests of power inherent in the system by making all the participants sinners with varying degrees of indulgence and grace. The clever are the elect (or elected). Calvinism is affirmed.

    While I was searching for Kennedy’s words to Allen Dulles (not knowing who would have recorded the original exchange), I listened to some of Kennedy‘s press conferences. I can recommend them highly. They are remarkable for their studied candour, lacking that vacuous, manipulative staging by the handlers of subsequent POTUS. John F Kennedy campaigned among other things on alleged indicators of US weakness in comparison to the Soviet Union- the so-called missile gap. This persisted in his speeches about the space program. However as POTUS he also implied the Soviet Union or the communist countries were ahead of the US in social welfare. In his 21 April 1961 press conference he replied to a question by saying not that the US was better or more successful than the USSR but that he believed it was “more durable”.

    At this point one could have asked what virtue lies in a durable yet inferior system? Needless to say this question was not asked. Sixty years after his assassination the US system has proven resilient and reactionary. Despite almost quadrennial changes in the executive branch the resilience of the Reaction continues to amaze while innumerable analysts draft obituaries for the expected demise of the great empire. Meanwhile long-term rises in living standards are only found among the enemies (Russia and China).

    To put this in perspective the Soviet Union accomplished the equivalent of two industrialisation phases between 1917 and 1962 (45 years) despite a world war, civil war, foreign invasion and “cold war” that lasted from 1910 until 1989. All that was accomplished based on domestic resources. China accomplished similar development between 1949 and 1989. The US required a century with African and Chinese slave labour, the extermination of a whole continent of indigenous people and some 182 wars fought to dominate the Western hemisphere. Russia and China out produce the US quantitatively and qualitatively despite latter having the highest armaments expenditure in the world. Clearly durability does not translate into human welfare. Kennedy was oblique but somehow aware that the US system would be durably unattractive if something essential did not change in the country whose chief executive he had become.

    The press conferences reveal a man who knew how the formal machinery of Congress worked but seemed oblivious to the operation of government itself. His hesitancy and caution betrayed that novitiate status. One need only compare him to Lyndon Johnson, Dwight Eisenhower or Richard Nixon. His seniors in the business all clearly understood how precarious elected office was. Eisenhower’s farewell may not have been cynical but it suggested that there was actually a choice between elected government and the permanent state. As a career Army officer and high functionary in the permanent bureaucracy he must have known that no later than the machinations that made Truman the new tenant in the White House the POTUS had become a cupid doll for the cultic rituals of entrenched power. The patriotic (loyal) opposition chronically overvalue this speech.

    If one believes the government is only corrupt – although that is bad enough – then it is very tempting to believe that if only the right, honest people get elected then change or even salvation is in sight. However if one begins with the questions what do ordinary people need to live decent lives? And how are those needs satisfied? Then the constant threat that those needs will not be met can be openly addressed. Instead of abstract, negative freedom (Isaiah Berlin) where one is more or less free to sleep under bridges in default of eternal debts, one might judge a government by its willingness to spend maybe half of what it appropriates for killing people to keeping people alive. Then with such a modest proposal one might assess the willingness and ability of one’s government to facilitate well-being for all instead of deliberately preventing it. That could lead to questions about who makes decisions if not the elected representatives (sometimes pretending to be leaders)?

    Until the mid-19th century the US had no permanent civil service like the British had developed. In history books one can read deprecatory discussions of the “spoils system”. Whenever there was a change in elected office, the new officer or his party exercised patronage privilege to hire and fire the civil servants to fit the taste or priorities of the incoming officeholders. Even letter carriers and secretaries owed their posts to the officeholder’s pleasure. In the Reform Era leading into the 20th century the US adopted a competitive civil service system with permanent appointment regardless of party. The only posts that remained discretionary were cabinet-level and those subject to Senate confirmation. This rational improvement and professionalization was intended to give daily government and administration quality and efficiency. However it also created a class of officials whose primary interest was career promotion and not professional implementation of government policy. The very security which was to keep them out of politics created a political subculture insulated from expressions of the popular will. This clerical caste operated like its cultural predecessors in the Latin clergy. The prelates, i.e. cabinet officials and agency directors relied on the senior and ambitious junior civil servants to implement policy but also to defend ministerial/ cabinet secretary turf. While the British filled these ranks from the aristocratic families, new and old, the Americans filled these preferments from the plutocracy. Thus the civil service was socially reproduced like the British service with the US equivalent of titled privilege. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was not the first to call attention to industry “capture” of the regulatory agencies. As serious and justified as that critique is it misses the class component of capture entirely. The “revolving door” which amplifies “capture” is not merely corruption. It is a direct reflection of how the American class system works. There is no better head of NIH or Dr Anthony Fauci’s fief just waiting for an honest selection to confirm his appointment. The DIE dogma is not a solution but a further obfuscation of the problem. There is no “better CIA” or “cleaner FBI” any more than there was a better Inquisition or Gestapo to be had. Philip Agee was clear about that point, as was David Atlee Phillips. Moshe Lewin in his discussion of the eternally maligned Soviet government under Joseph Stalin (The Making of the Soviet System, 1994) pointed out that from the start of the October Revolution the Soviet Union was dependent on the vast majority of Tsarist civil and military servants simply because there were never enough educated Communist cadre to fill all the administrative positions for the vast Russian territory. This Tsarist civil service was even more rigid than those of the “modern” Western states. The only way to change policy was to change personnel. Hence throughout the Stalin era the so-called purges were mainly the punishing or serial replacement of recalcitrant and entrenched bureaucrats with those schooled and tested to enforce the new policies. The bulk of those purged according to Lewin were CPSU cadre and functionaries. Aggravated by war, the Politburo had few direct ways to communicate policy and assure its implementation—using one bureaucracy against the rest. Such periodic “draining of the swamp” is an allusive task, especially in countries like the US, Great Britain and France where the senior civil service is entirely dominated by the ruling class and its aristocratic-corporate cadre.

    The term “deep state”, an expression Peter Dale Scott used to describe the “continuity of government” apparatus that expanded massively under Ronald Reagan, is a meaningful cliché. In increasingly common parlance it directs us to the failure of electoral politics as a means of democratic social management. Electoral politics is in fact a strategy applied by the ruling oligarchy through the permanent state apparatus to manage the population. However it is not something mysterious, secret or transcendental. The term has arisen to poorly substitute for a term and concept still prohibited in serious political action, namely class power. Perhaps the last American to seriously describe this phenomenon both empirically and theoretically was the renegade sociologist C Wright Mills. Mills called it the “power elite”. Today that insight has been distorted beyond recognition by obsession first with the “rich and famous“ and then celebrity. In fact the genre “reality TV” is the paramount vulgarization of the concept. That a former and aspirant POTUS enjoys such celebrity also shows the impact of fantasy on the political unconscious. The term “deep state” is a weak if concerted attempt to reformulate the question: if the people as electors have no power, then who does? Call it a class or the “power elite“ or as George Carlin said the big club – and you ain‘t in it. And it’s also the club they beat you with… till your own deep state is six feet underground.

    The post Who Must Go? first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • 2024 is a year full of elections. For what they are worth they also present a display of the wealth and poverty of language with which active and passive electorates are confined, at least to the extent there is any serious effort to relate the utterances incidental to the process with the lived reality such elections ostensibly reflect. As I have argued elsewhere and repeatedly the limits to rationality in social management have long ago been breached. Although the meaning of political language is no more immanent than any other language, elections may be understood as an exercise in at least temporary stabilization of the response to the terms and concepts used and abused in all the colour bands of the spectrum of organized interest representation.

    In the course of little more than a century the attempts to aggregate popular demands within the channels of conflict resolution have led to the abolition of class-oriented and programmatic political parties. The last of these survived in the colonial/ neo-colonial environments of Central and South America until they were defeated in the last decade of the 20th century. Despite the preservation of conventional labels inherited from the French Revolution, the range of political ideologies available has been reduced to the West’s universal values of neo-liberalism. Liberalism and conservatism also mutated into forms that would be barely recognizable to those whose tracts laid the theoretical basis for these positions. This did not happen overnight. Nor was it a natural phenomenon. Counter-insurgency complemented by the infiltration and manipulation of the standard bearers of nationalism and socialism in Latin America ultimately subdued those few attempts to restore class and programmatic politics after 1945.

    Of course there was also violent counter-insurgency waged (e.g., Gladio) by the covert operators of the State (and its owners) in the US and throughout the territories where Anglo-American power was projected, mainly through NATO and in the western peninsula of Eurasia also through its civil department the European Economic Community or European Union. By the time the official socialist states associated with the Soviet Union were defeated and transformed into Western vassals, the leadership—such as it was—of ostensibly left-leaning political organizations had been decapitated and or replaced by academically credentialed professionals indebted to corporate funding. Before the European Management Forum/ World Economic Forum initiated its cadre program, numerous transatlantic entities such as the German Marshall Fund, Fulbright and Rhodes Scholarships and other lesser-known programs recruited and indoctrinated the predecessors to today’s “global leaders”. Funds channelled through parastatal agencies, NGOs and corporate tax dodges promoted generations of scholars, journalists, teachers and bureaucrats enabling them to march through the institutions with competitive advantage over those with sincere political convictions.

    Anyone paying attention to this process could see that parallel to this transfer of “leadership” academic literature and the publications of the so-called quality press were reshaping the language of post-war mass movements, turning activism into grant-funded research. Beneath the banner of postmodernism in the Anglo-American dominated humanities and social sciences the principles of empirical Marxist analysis were subsumed by a theological form of scholarship even more dogmatic than the much-maligned work of the state institutes for Marxism-Leninism in the so-called Soviet bloc. While the latter were explicitly responsible for regulating the application of core Marxist texts to state ideology, the sacerdotal caste of the postmodernist cult preached the dissolution of explicit state action in social management. Nationalism, racial equality, feminism and socialism itself were relegated to the dustbin of archaic ideologies for social formations that had been dissolved or rendered obsolete by the alleged maturity of identity-based humanism. Possessive individualism, both metaphoric and literal, emerged as the driving force behind the sublimation of citizenship and the exaltation of consumerism as its apogee. Social movements arising from resistance to centuries of Western domination were redefined as mere aggregates of individual ambitions that the new freedom would inevitably manifest. Hence fundamental changes in productive relations and the distribution of political power over whole classes of people were abandoned in favour of enhanced personal opportunities to participate in the pillage by the prevailing system of embedded power. The appointment of a single member of a previously oppressed or subordinated class was interpreted as a sign that the class was no longer the target of the domination against which it had arose in resistance. Class ceased to exist as a meaningful category of human interest. A myriad of excuses were provided to show that there was neither a society nor a power structure in control of it.

    In the 1980s the academy-based political cadre, supported by covertly funded career tracks began redesigning all of the systemic criticism that had characterized liberation struggles in anticipation of the radically individualized mass media that would soon dominate the political and economic space contested by all those who, perhaps naively, expected that the United Nations Charter would guarantee their liberation and an end to “non-self-governing territories”. Then just as industrialization provided the means by which chattel slavery could be abandoned, the onset of digitalization began to render organized industrial workforces redundant, depriving them of their practical tools of asserting control over the means of production and the media for social organization necessary to convert that into social power. By the time formal decolonization had increased the membership in the United Nations from 51 in 1951 to 194 in 2024, the capacity of nation-states to develop and protect their citizens had been thoroughly undermined by the absolute corporate control over the intergovernmental body and its agencies. Instead of local industrialization and internal development augmented by fair trade, the blue flag with its wreath encircled polar projection of Earth not only represented the corporate ideal of its founders. It became the banner of a global public-private partnership for the monopoly in the traffic of labour, money, information and with blue helmets armed force.

    This was enhanced by the redesign of human development. Instead of the liberation of peoples from centuries of exploitation, the vast majority of the world’s population became de-territorialized. Social development was translated into a mere aggregate of individual enrichment or impoverishment, subject to a global “free” market governed by corporate management on behalf of finance capital. Moreover this postmodern political economy was subjected to the neo-Malthusian strategy of competitive advantage by which nations were converted into warehouses for latent resources to be traded or bunkered according to the exigencies of discounted cash flows. The humanist democratic governance principles imperfectly asserted in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and expanded in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights were abandoned. Instead they were proclaimed as absorbed in the corporate governance doctrines formalized and propagated by the Anglo-American capitalist theocracy, housed in the leading Business faculties at mainly American universities and non-governmental organizations. It is perhaps no accident that the technology for surrogate childbirth—once highly controversial—was perfected at the same time as NGOs through “civil society” usurped citizenship for whole classes of disenfranchised persons.

    As I have argued elsewhere, the political economy of surplus allocation associated with classical economics, e.g. Adam Smith, was transformed into the neo-classical analysis of scarcity at the same time that chattel slavery was abolished in the 1880s. Postmodernism expanded this doctrine to denounce human social development at the end of the Second World War. Instead the value of human society and collective development was reclassified in the global accounting regulations as a threat to an abstract planetary welfare. That planetary welfare, currently promoted in various forms such as Climate Change dogma or DIE (diversity, inclusion, equity) doctrine, is merely a euphemism for the ascendency of finance capital and its neo-feudal oligarchy. Applied to the human race, natural reproduction and economic activity in lived human communities are unacceptable costs, which the management of the global private-public partnership must reduce if the rate of profit and the magnification of centralized power are to be sustained. In cost accounting terms, every human being, excepting the caste of oligarchs and their retainers, is a unit cost that had to be eliminated if the capitalist enterprise is to remain sustainable.

    The human development indices cease to reflect increases in the level of nutrition, education, healthy live births and sufficient living conditions in the places real human beings actually inhabit. The preservation of wildlife, whether plant or animal, is only important for sustaining the class of those who claim to own everything. The intergovernmental regime, discretely appropriated and managed by international corporations through their postmodern cadre, measure human development by success in reducing the number of exhaling lungs and depriving those still allowed to breath of the energy resources required to feed, clothe, house and otherwise carry on meaningful lives.

    Not satisfied with crushing national independence and development efforts worldwide, local autonomy is to be subverted by means of a pseudo-healthcare regime that grants carte blanche to pharmaments manufacturers and other branches of the armed forces to incarcerate indefinitely or even to poison the population wherever cyclical mayhem and destruction leaves survivors.

    In order to preserve the veneer of coherence with the ideals espoused in the UN Charter, the social structures of historical communities are aggressively deprived of their material base. Here “civil society” performs a chimeric function facilitating the current manifestation of global parasitism. Just like the keyboard attached to a computer imitates the function of the manual typewriter, the hyper-individualism embedded in the NGO surrogate pronounces social values of the obsolete modernist humanism while driving computational processes created and controlled by the software and ultimately the hardware of the new feudal estate.

    Within this constellation the terms “left”, “right” and “centre” have retained nothing of their original associations. They are entirely inadequate to describe the positions, program, loyalties, or motives of the bureaucratic-sacerdotal class still recruited to perform electoral charades. While those who still go to the polls may try to discern what words are really meant in the storm of gestures and synthetic sound bites, they can be sure that the solution to the riddle their vote has offered is wrong. They may see the hand waving or grimace as an allusion to a tradition they value. They may interpret the high-minded slogan escaping through the lips of some young LSE graduate or a legacy party functionary as a sign that their interest in a decent life and future are supported. They may paint one clown with a red nose and the other with a blue, green or brown one. Yet by the end of the performance, the clowns will remain and they, the audience, will be swept away like so many empty popcorn bags or cold drink cups on the ground. It is a truism that whenever there is some accident or mishap in the midst of a circus performance—they send in the clowns. Unfortunately on the eve of great destruction there are no laughing matters.

    The post Unbecoming American: At Election Time first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Another recent article expressing election year hysteria among the credentialed class began with the assertion:

    While it is very easy, based on documents, to declare Mr. Trump to be a neo-fascist and/ or a criminal, historical events indicate that the Democratic Party failed over the last five decades to protect and support, and then expand the middle class. DP presidents accomplished occasionally some improvements that benefitted workers; however, only token changes were attempted in key areas. Overall, the goals were and are to look good in the public eye without upsetting the elites in the economic and financial sectors.[1]

    Waiting in vain until the end of the article was a disappointment. Although it was “very easy,” the author was unable or unwilling to name or cite any documents to declare the former POTUS a neo-fascist or criminal. To declare him a criminal would require at least one conviction of a bona fide crime for which the author could surely find citation, but for the fact trials are still pending. As for the claim that Mr. Trump is a card-carrying neo-fascist, that would first require a definition, which the author fails to provide.

    Several years ago now, I pointed to the fact that Donald Trump’s unique selling position was the fact that he was the first POTUS in more than a century — if ever — who was not a politician, senior civil servant or military officer prior to his election.[2] In a country whose many worshippers claim anyone can be elected to high office (the Constitution only requires native birth citizenship and 35 years of age), it is remarkable that only in 2016 — 235 years after the national charter entered into force — was it possible for an average millionaire to be elected within the political duopoly that controls the electoral system.

    Whether the ideals of the US polity are sincere or even worthy is a matter for its citizens to decide. However if the electoral system is to be lent any faith it certainly cannot be factional alone. The attacks on the Trump presidency began worldwide in the oligarchically controlled mass media from the day of his election until long after his term expired. It is safe to say that no POTUS has ever been subjected to such sustained vilification. It is even more remarkable that even that “evidence” submitted to disparage or condemn him has proven false witness or forgery. Perhaps that is one reason why the documents by which it is so easy to condemn Mr. Trump are not cited.

    However, there is a far more insidious accusation in the attacks on Donald Trump, who is only a surrogate. Some will admit that in the early 1970s there was a major change in the class war (a term the credentialed class strenuously avoids except in pure theory or when attacking foreign systems). Others date the seismic event to the collapse of the Soviet Union. The tectonic plates beneath the US really shifted in 1913. The privatization of the country’s fiscal policy, based on a model derived from the Bank of England, was the first stage in the consolidation of what would become the world’s largest ever war economy. It was this war economy, protected by two vast oceans, that delivered consumer goods as weapons of consciousness and armaments, including today’s pharmaments, to the world. A nation last attacked, by its cousins, in 1812, built by bonded and indebted labor on the graves of its native inhabitants reached the pinnacle of power in 1945 as the lords of destruction. One of numerous Austro-Hungarians even provided a theory for this. Schumpeter referred to capitalism’s (aka “free enterprise” in the US) creative destruction. Having demonstrated the capacity to destroy competing industrial bases under the pretext of wars against nationalism, communism and only occasionally fascism, it was able to flood the world with whatever manufactures it could produce. The surplus was sold at home on credit to keep the immigrant laborers and their progeny from questioning the virtues ascribed dogmatically to the great destruction machine.

    By the 1970s the circulation was more than sclerotic. The Club of Rome, the European Management Forum (later WEF) and other venues e.g., within the UN, were founded to propagate the message among the ruling class and its credentialed courtiers and bootmakers that even this pseudo-democratic wealth sprinkler was no longer desirable. The word chosen was “sustainable”.

    Nationalism among the newly independent states had been crushed or neutered by counter-insurgency and economic warfare. The only obstacles lay in the persistence of the Soviet Union and the policies of the People’s Republic. By 1990, these obstacles had been overcome, at least from the perspective of the Anglo-American Empire, i.e., its ruling class. The long-standing aim to plunder and pillage Russia was being fulfilled under Boris Yeltsin. Some of that loot trickled into the Western Eurasian economy giving a dose of steroids to its stagnating commerce. The rest went to the “pirates of the Caribbean”, the secrecy jurisdictions. By natural qualification (as the world’s largest national workforce) and development policy, the Anglo-American ruling oligarchy was able to remove almost all its manufacturing to China.

    Thus the economic base of the US “middle class” was removed utterly. It should be noted here that the US is a country whose citizens “self-identify” as middle class. There are material and ideological reasons for this oddity.

    First of all the “free enterprise” doctrine defines workers as “entrepreneurs” endowed with human capital that they invest freely by taking a job. Personnel departments, now called human resources, are like internal fund managers negotiating the rate of return each worker gets on his capital. Hence pensions were also largely privatized using the fund model.

    Second, the real “workers and peasants” in the US economy, excepting migrants from the South, are all the laborers in Central America, Indonesia, the Philippines, Haiti/ Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico — America’s empire and brown vassal states. Thus the surplus permitted to the majority of US citizens is extracted from the empire and distributed in slices to blue collar workers and white-collar supervisors or clerks.

    Thus the contradiction between the real working class and the domestic intermediate working class exists and is maintained to support the imperial division of labor. Until the Clinton-Soros ascendency the parade figures at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue (the address of the official POTUS residence), lip service was still paid to the national labor force. One should bear in mind that the Democratic Party is the historic defender of bonded labor (chattel slavery) and exploitative mass immigration. The Republican Party began in opposition to slavery and with a strong nationalist agenda. The fig leaf of the shallow New Deal is the only policy which can even pretend to demonstrate the Democratic Party as a worker-friendly club. So-called bipartisanism after 1951 purged the New Dealers and other “reds” from both parties. The Clinton-Soros party, as the Democratic Party ought to be called, adopted the policy of its principal benefactor whose business model since the age of 14 has been deportation and confiscation of assets. This model has been translated into the official program of the IOM, a UN public-private partnership for trading in displaced persons worldwide. Consistent with the WEF mantra “own nothing, be happy” all these micro-entrepreneurs are deprived of their birthright and transformed into a continuous flow of denationalized labor – mirroring the hedge funds denationalization of physical assets by conversion into cash streams.

    These are ongoing processes which have radically intensified through multiple wars concentrated in the Middle East, Central Europe, North and Central Africa. They are presented as tragedies when they are deliberate and coordinated crimes against humanity. The enforced cognitive isolation of the planet’s most brainwashed population renders the causal chain opaque to those affected. Thus they see the symptoms and anticipate the effects in nationalistic terms. Americans have no other language since they were long ago deprived of other bases of affinity or loyalty. The accusations of racism and fascism hurled at the remaining mass of ordinary working Americans is smug dishonesty in the condescending language of aspirant courtiers, in short snobbery.

    No later than the second war against Iraq did the recognition of a colossal shell game take hold among the “dangerous” (deplorable) class- the white field hand hated by the domestic staff, just like in Malcolm X parable of the house negro and field negro. The field hands saw that their labor was being stolen to enrich an ever-smaller clique to more and more obscene levels while real jobs evaporated to be rained on foreign soil.

    A society so brainwashed and manipulated as that of the US, where its media and ideological institutions are virtually walled against popular intrusion, cannot easily establish oppositional movements. In fact the US is historically one of the most conformist societies on the planet.[3] Nonetheless opposition to this program of downsizing the US working population emerged, largely leaderless, but not surprisingly, in the Republic Party, the historical anti-slavery and protectionist party.

    Without at least a galleon figure it is impossible to organize mass politics at a national level. Unlike European party systems the US party is an apparatus from promoting personalities and creating celebrities for elected office. That is partly because the permanent government needs distractions to operate discretely. However it is also due to the religious nature of the American polity. As a country chosen by the Divine its ultimate leaders have to perform like high priests on the public altars. Donald Trump is no exception.

    The Clinton-Soros owned Democratic Party (dba the DNC) is a temple of Pharisees. On one hand it is obsessed with purity. The Awakening, sometimes called “wokism”, with its DIE dogma is perceived by a substantial majority of US citizens as a formula for destroying their nation, culturally, politically and economically. The facts are known and they support that contention. There is basis to doubt that the metastasis induced by the ruling oligarchy was accelerated in 2016 and burst through the skin on 6 January 2021.

    Robert F Kennedy Jr has been the only contender for the high office of POTUS to accurately apply the term fascist in the context of the US political system. His description of corporate capture conforms to Mussolini’s definition, where the interests of Capital (corporations) merge with the State. By this classical definition of fascism, Donald Trump hardly qualifies. He is a performer who chose the stage of a nascent mass movement and proceed to market it. That is about as American as one can get.

    The documents that are available to the willing do not support the condemnation of Donald Trump. Rather they support the damnation of the Clinton-Soros fleet flying the Jolly Roger of the Democratic Party. If these evil winds continue to fill the sails of the DIE and deportation/ migration ships, then Mr. Trump will be declared an outlaw like all those who have been rotting in federal dungeons since 6 January 2021. The hostage nation will be subjected politically to the Hannibal directive.

    ENDNOTES

    [1]  Clement Kleinstreuer, “The Enablers of Trump’s Rise to Power”, Dissident Voice (24 February 2024)

    [2] “Reflections on White Elections”, Dissident Voice (8 October 2020) and “To the Halls of Montezuma from the Shores of Tripoli: Donald Trump as ‘Anti-Wilson’” (6 February 2017)

    [3] As testified by pro-American writers as diverse as Alexis de Toqueville, C L R James.

    The post The Clinton-Soros “House Hands” first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Another recent article expressing election year hysteria among the credentialed class began with the assertion:

    While it is very easy, based on documents, to declare Mr. Trump to be a neo-fascist and/ or a criminal, historical events indicate that the Democratic Party failed over the last five decades to protect and support, and then expand the middle class. DP presidents accomplished occasionally some improvements that benefitted workers; however, only token changes were attempted in key areas. Overall, the goals were and are to look good in the public eye without upsetting the elites in the economic and financial sectors.[1]

    Waiting in vain until the end of the article was a disappointment. Although it was “very easy,” the author was unable or unwilling to name or cite any documents to declare the former POTUS a neo-fascist or criminal. To declare him a criminal would require at least one conviction of a bona fide crime for which the author could surely find citation, but for the fact trials are still pending. As for the claim that Mr. Trump is a card-carrying neo-fascist, that would first require a definition, which the author fails to provide.

    Several years ago now, I pointed to the fact that Donald Trump’s unique selling position was the fact that he was the first POTUS in more than a century — if ever — who was not a politician, senior civil servant or military officer prior to his election.[2] In a country whose many worshippers claim anyone can be elected to high office (the Constitution only requires native birth citizenship and 35 years of age), it is remarkable that only in 2016 — 235 years after the national charter entered into force — was it possible for an average millionaire to be elected within the political duopoly that controls the electoral system.

    Whether the ideals of the US polity are sincere or even worthy is a matter for its citizens to decide. However if the electoral system is to be lent any faith it certainly cannot be factional alone. The attacks on the Trump presidency began worldwide in the oligarchically controlled mass media from the day of his election until long after his term expired. It is safe to say that no POTUS has ever been subjected to such sustained vilification. It is even more remarkable that even that “evidence” submitted to disparage or condemn him has proven false witness or forgery. Perhaps that is one reason why the documents by which it is so easy to condemn Mr. Trump are not cited.

    However, there is a far more insidious accusation in the attacks on Donald Trump, who is only a surrogate. Some will admit that in the early 1970s there was a major change in the class war (a term the credentialed class strenuously avoids except in pure theory or when attacking foreign systems). Others date the seismic event to the collapse of the Soviet Union. The tectonic plates beneath the US really shifted in 1913. The privatization of the country’s fiscal policy, based on a model derived from the Bank of England, was the first stage in the consolidation of what would become the world’s largest ever war economy. It was this war economy, protected by two vast oceans, that delivered consumer goods as weapons of consciousness and armaments, including today’s pharmaments, to the world. A nation last attacked, by its cousins, in 1812, built by bonded and indebted labor on the graves of its native inhabitants reached the pinnacle of power in 1945 as the lords of destruction. One of numerous Austro-Hungarians even provided a theory for this. Schumpeter referred to capitalism’s (aka “free enterprise” in the US) creative destruction. Having demonstrated the capacity to destroy competing industrial bases under the pretext of wars against nationalism, communism and only occasionally fascism, it was able to flood the world with whatever manufactures it could produce. The surplus was sold at home on credit to keep the immigrant laborers and their progeny from questioning the virtues ascribed dogmatically to the great destruction machine.

    By the 1970s the circulation was more than sclerotic. The Club of Rome, the European Management Forum (later WEF) and other venues e.g., within the UN, were founded to propagate the message among the ruling class and its credentialed courtiers and bootmakers that even this pseudo-democratic wealth sprinkler was no longer desirable. The word chosen was “sustainable”.

    Nationalism among the newly independent states had been crushed or neutered by counter-insurgency and economic warfare. The only obstacles lay in the persistence of the Soviet Union and the policies of the People’s Republic. By 1990, these obstacles had been overcome, at least from the perspective of the Anglo-American Empire, i.e., its ruling class. The long-standing aim to plunder and pillage Russia was being fulfilled under Boris Yeltsin. Some of that loot trickled into the Western Eurasian economy giving a dose of steroids to its stagnating commerce. The rest went to the “pirates of the Caribbean”, the secrecy jurisdictions. By natural qualification (as the world’s largest national workforce) and development policy, the Anglo-American ruling oligarchy was able to remove almost all its manufacturing to China.

    Thus the economic base of the US “middle class” was removed utterly. It should be noted here that the US is a country whose citizens “self-identify” as middle class. There are material and ideological reasons for this oddity.

    First of all the “free enterprise” doctrine defines workers as “entrepreneurs” endowed with human capital that they invest freely by taking a job. Personnel departments, now called human resources, are like internal fund managers negotiating the rate of return each worker gets on his capital. Hence pensions were also largely privatized using the fund model.

    Second, the real “workers and peasants” in the US economy, excepting migrants from the South, are all the laborers in Central America, Indonesia, the Philippines, Haiti/ Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico — America’s empire and brown vassal states. Thus the surplus permitted to the majority of US citizens is extracted from the empire and distributed in slices to blue collar workers and white-collar supervisors or clerks.

    Thus the contradiction between the real working class and the domestic intermediate working class exists and is maintained to support the imperial division of labor. Until the Clinton-Soros ascendency the parade figures at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue (the address of the official POTUS residence), lip service was still paid to the national labor force. One should bear in mind that the Democratic Party is the historic defender of bonded labor (chattel slavery) and exploitative mass immigration. The Republican Party began in opposition to slavery and with a strong nationalist agenda. The fig leaf of the shallow New Deal is the only policy which can even pretend to demonstrate the Democratic Party as a worker-friendly club. So-called bipartisanism after 1951 purged the New Dealers and other “reds” from both parties. The Clinton-Soros party, as the Democratic Party ought to be called, adopted the policy of its principal benefactor whose business model since the age of 14 has been deportation and confiscation of assets. This model has been translated into the official program of the IOM, a UN public-private partnership for trading in displaced persons worldwide. Consistent with the WEF mantra “own nothing, be happy” all these micro-entrepreneurs are deprived of their birthright and transformed into a continuous flow of denationalized labor – mirroring the hedge funds denationalization of physical assets by conversion into cash streams.

    These are ongoing processes which have radically intensified through multiple wars concentrated in the Middle East, Central Europe, North and Central Africa. They are presented as tragedies when they are deliberate and coordinated crimes against humanity. The enforced cognitive isolation of the planet’s most brainwashed population renders the causal chain opaque to those affected. Thus they see the symptoms and anticipate the effects in nationalistic terms. Americans have no other language since they were long ago deprived of other bases of affinity or loyalty. The accusations of racism and fascism hurled at the remaining mass of ordinary working Americans is smug dishonesty in the condescending language of aspirant courtiers, in short snobbery.

    No later than the second war against Iraq did the recognition of a colossal shell game take hold among the “dangerous” (deplorable) class- the white field hand hated by the domestic staff, just like in Malcolm X parable of the house negro and field negro. The field hands saw that their labor was being stolen to enrich an ever-smaller clique to more and more obscene levels while real jobs evaporated to be rained on foreign soil.

    A society so brainwashed and manipulated as that of the US, where its media and ideological institutions are virtually walled against popular intrusion, cannot easily establish oppositional movements. In fact the US is historically one of the most conformist societies on the planet.[3] Nonetheless opposition to this program of downsizing the US working population emerged, largely leaderless, but not surprisingly, in the Republic Party, the historical anti-slavery and protectionist party.

    Without at least a galleon figure it is impossible to organize mass politics at a national level. Unlike European party systems the US party is an apparatus from promoting personalities and creating celebrities for elected office. That is partly because the permanent government needs distractions to operate discretely. However it is also due to the religious nature of the American polity. As a country chosen by the Divine its ultimate leaders have to perform like high priests on the public altars. Donald Trump is no exception.

    The Clinton-Soros owned Democratic Party (dba the DNC) is a temple of Pharisees. On one hand it is obsessed with purity. The Awakening, sometimes called “wokism”, with its DIE dogma is perceived by a substantial majority of US citizens as a formula for destroying their nation, culturally, politically and economically. The facts are known and they support that contention. There is basis to doubt that the metastasis induced by the ruling oligarchy was accelerated in 2016 and burst through the skin on 6 January 2021.

    Robert F Kennedy Jr has been the only contender for the high office of POTUS to accurately apply the term fascist in the context of the US political system. His description of corporate capture conforms to Mussolini’s definition, where the interests of Capital (corporations) merge with the State. By this classical definition of fascism, Donald Trump hardly qualifies. He is a performer who chose the stage of a nascent mass movement and proceed to market it. That is about as American as one can get.

    The documents that are available to the willing do not support the condemnation of Donald Trump. Rather they support the damnation of the Clinton-Soros fleet flying the Jolly Roger of the Democratic Party. If these evil winds continue to fill the sails of the DIE and deportation/ migration ships, then Mr. Trump will be declared an outlaw like all those who have been rotting in federal dungeons since 6 January 2021. The hostage nation will be subjected politically to the Hannibal directive.

    ENDNOTES

    [1]  Clement Kleinstreuer, “The Enablers of Trump’s Rise to Power”, Dissident Voice (24 February 2024)

    [2] “Reflections on White Elections”, Dissident Voice (8 October 2020) and “To the Halls of Montezuma from the Shores of Tripoli: Donald Trump as ‘Anti-Wilson’” (6 February 2017)

    [3] As testified by pro-American writers as diverse as Alexis de Toqueville, C L R James.

    The post The Clinton-Soros “House Hands” first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • At my relatively old age or state of maturity there are many things about which to dream. As a youth much of this nocturnal secretion necessarily extends beyond conscious experience. Hence we can easily believe that dreams are fantasy, in the sense of words describing what we could not have witnessed or done, at the very least from the bed in which we lay. Since all that is accessible or assessable from what we call dreams are the words — if we have them — to describe, dreams might be called covert verbalization. The only detectable difference is that we attribute this activity to a prior state called sleep. Now I could extend my appreciation to a definition of sleep as a condition and for dreams. However my point here is to focus on the verbal activity, especially supposing a condition of dormancy, whether by day or night.

    Perhaps the dreams I have, that is those about which I can give an account, are extensive because I spend most of my waking hours in verbal activity, e.g. writing and talking (even to myself). It occurred to me that I have been doing both, using a pen and my tongue for nearly sixty years, since shortly after my father bought me my first desk at the age of four.

    Sometimes my dreams comprise conventional activities, doing things in my sleep that I could do awake. However in the past couple of years my sleep reports are debates and lectures I give as if I were still teaching. In fact my formal teaching career was short and frequently interrupted. I had never sought or obtained more than a temporary teaching license. The profession had only annoyed me until an advanced age and unemployment induced me to seek substitute teaching posts to pay my bills. At university it was said of those in the education college, formerly the normal school, that “those who can’t, teach”.

    In the course of my itinerant pedagogical practice I found that this is indeed true. However, like many generalizations, this truism requires qualification. The objection implied was easy enough to find. Many teachers I have met or whom I knew as colleagues would have been interchangeable with any clerk in the lower ranks of the civil or military service. The fact that they spent hours standing before pupils or students was indistinguishable from that of someone who had sat sorting file folders on his desk or marching platoons up and down the square. They were history teachers who knew nothing more than was in the textbooks their pupils had to read. They were science teachers devoid of curiosity or doubt. They were language teachers that neither read nor wrote more than a lesson plan.

    All that was testimony to the regrettable truth of young people addicted to school (especially its work calendar and benefits) but with no interest in learning. At the same time there was another kind of person, albeit rare in my experience. That was the person who through teaching overcame what he can’t do to become someone who can.

    I write this after waking from a dream discussing teaching and the relationship between teacher and taught. On one hand taught designates the substance a teacher is employed to instruct. On the other the term applies to those whose role is to respond to the teacher by learning. This invisible process has always been implicitly compared to the effect of what has only been available in the past three decades, namely local wireless transmission, e.g., WLAN. Naturally other metaphors or metaphysics were applied before humanity’s invasion by compulsive computation and the ludicrous comparison of humans with digital machines.

    My interest, at least as assessment of my nocturnal articulation, was the difference between the teacher who believes in the transmission of the taught to the taught and the teaching situation in which those who can’t become those who can. In the same era in which this question became very important to me any observer could detect the increasing frequency and intensity with which “competency” has dominated the rhetoric of all forms of pedagogy. Competency means the ability to do something properly. It also means the authority necessary to do something. For reasons that can be explained but are usually omitted or concealed, the “competency-based” learning widely propagated only addresses the ability to do something but not the authority. This intentional defect is inherent in the rhetoric of schooling as indoctrination- the main reason schools are run. Competency is a euphemism for the reduction of teaching and learning to mastery of test batteries. It is an insincere slogan for intensifying the brainwashing throughout with high density, depleted data. (The analogy to DU munitions made for atomic waste disposal is intentional.)

    In my dream the teacher was a person able to do many things. At the same time there were many things the teacher could not (yet) do. The controversy in my sleep was about the performance in the classroom. Does the teacher perform as the source from which the taught must drink? Do the taught have preference in defining what they will learn and hence the content and style of the teacher’s performance? I was bothered by this dichotomy especially because both questions really addressed the power of the classroom and not the pedagogical core questions at all.

    As I lay dreaming I argued that the power question must be faced in order to distinguish its exercise. The classroom or analogous space shapes the charges that are detonated within it. Inert materials can be used with explosive effect. However one must ask, should teaching and learning be approached as controlled demolition or the firing of armor-piercing projectiles into captured targets, regardless of the side pulling the trigger?

    As I lay sleeping I wandered between the rows and aisles of this classroom like many in which I had once worked. I remembered the lessons I had begun without knowing their ends. Then there was a class I assigned to memorize a poem by Robert Louis Stevenson- admitting that I was actually rather poor at memorizing. I also recalled being asked how I could teach something that was not in the book. To which I replied, the book tells a story, you can believe or not. But it can tell you no more than you find in print. I can tell you a story and if what I say is not clear or you want to know more than I said, well I am in front of you, you can ask me. Then came the retort. How do we know what you say is true?

    At this point an apparent paradox arises. The learner is confronted with an artifact and a live action. Which is true, that which I read or that which I see and hear with my own eyes? There is no way to resolve this in the classroom. Therefore the determination of truth cannot be the competency to which professional educators so often refer. On the contrary, the practice of being a pupil or student is to become in a sense “incompetent”. That is to learn how to abandon rigidly prescribed dogma or doctrine or ready assessments if sensual experience — if necessary to become capable as a human being endowed with intellectual authority. There is no standardized test to measure that. No certificate can guarantee that either has been achieved.

    Having said that I found myself arguing with a figure indistinct about the necessity of anarchy in education. Although that term was not used in my sleep, the opposition to whom I was speaking was defending the abolition of teacher authority in favor of some higher ethical concepts, like anti-racism, anti-isms of all sorts. My opponent insisted that if nothing else schools or education should assure diversity, inclusion and equity. Knowledge had to be imbued with such moral integrity that pupils and students could have no mistake about the right ways to behave.

    I replied without irony — sleep is a literal condition — that I knew of no time when knowledge was exclusively coincident with prevailing morals and therefore had reason to doubt that such an era lay before us. In that great theatrical prop of Western monotheism the beginning of mankind was when two human beings through divine deceit acquired what has been called the “knowledge of good and evil”. One has to ask what knowledge had they before their tragedy? This notion that knowledge- at least that of “good and evil” — was so crucial (also as in crucifixion) to the exclusion of any other faculty is peculiar. If there was no prior knowledge of this sort then what of importance was known “before the fall”? Perhaps this so-called knowledge was not of something “moral” but of life itself. Certainly the untold centuries or millennia since the alleged event have failed to exhibit much practical knowledge. Instead what one finds is “competency”: the ability to perform tests and the certification of such performance. Perhaps that was the seminal demonstration for the mystification of knowledge that continues in contemporary pedagogy.

    As I woke my discussion continued. I had my breakfast trying to bring it to a useful end. So I began to write that which I now conclude-for the waking moment. The teacher is a necessary role in the creation of real knowledge. The pupil role is just as important. In the classroom both roles are performed separately by people who are or at least try to be awake. The texts and other physical materials used are theatrical properties on this stage. While it is desirable that they be useful, it is not essential that they crystallize truth or morals. The world beyond the classroom is neither pure nor crystalline. The most important quality of the pedagogical performance its integrity derives from the skill and commitment with which both roles are played. For more than a millennia moral purity in the classroom has merely concealed the destructive power of those who would prevent a proper performance. The aggressive attacks on pedagogical stages throughout the West‘s educational institutions purport to purify history, arts and sciences. In fact they are heavily funded campaigns of spiritual terrorism directed at destroying knowledge and the capacity of teaching and learning people to produce it. By destroying the human pedagogical theaters, these fanatics are preparing the replacement of human intellectual and cultural production, that is natural human life itself, for those whose dreams comprise nothing — nothing but the destruction they euphemistically denote as “artificial.” Artificial suggests that it is something made, the product of artifice. However therein lies the term’s deceit. The dream of artificial intelligence is a dream without intelligence or knowledge. It is the dream of death by the killers who never sleep.

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    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.