Broadly speaking three kinds of reactions to the recent Tucker Carlson-Vladimir Putin interviews can be detected. Aside from the official condemnations that find their echo wherever dementia and other intellectual impediments prevail, there is ecstasy, skepticism, and loyalty.
The ecstatic present this interview as something akin to the visions of Fatima. The skeptics point out that Fatima is a fraud. The loyal include those who have held Tucker Carlson for a hero or at least a very worthy member of their national conservative side in the ongoing US political wars. Nonetheless all these groups of viewers, commentators (pod or web) and officials high and low agree that there is something extraordinary about the event, the interview or conversation recorded in Moscow on or about 9 February 2024. Is it a sign of information liberation? Has Carlson together with those who have offered him platforms to distribute the interview without charge broken the sound bite barrier in the US (NATO) war against Russia and its own middle class and working class? Has this event revealed mysteries hitherto concealed except from those whom divine powers have deigned to speak? Is this yet another psychological operation where the son of the former director of Voice of America has launched the campaign that will end so-called “alternative media”?
The disturbing aspect of all these possibilities is that they are rooted in the fundamentally religious culture of the United States (and to the extent its missionaries have succeeded, in the various vassal states, e.g. the EU). In the first place the interview was a performance, if not a spectacle. This is not an issue of culpability. Rather it is an affirmation that the Carlson interview in Moscow by its very nature and cultural context is a show. That is just the way American culture works. If it had not been staged as a show — to the extent that Carlson and President Putin agreed on the format — it would have been incomprehensible to an American or American indoctrinated public. It is meanwhile tiresome to analyze all the speculation about “narratives” — that gratuitous contribution of literary scholarship to the lingual franca of the mass media through whatever channel. The corollary to Coolidge’s dictum is that the business of America is also show business. Religion is the ultimate show as the plethora of radio, TV and auditoria evangelists easily testifies.
Of course Tucker Carlson, like his father, has been a part of the public-private partnership that constitutes the American propaganda system. Anyone who works at an establishment media outlet is — wittingly or unwittingly. That is how American journalism was founded by Pulitzer and Hearst at the end of the 19th century. It is superfluous to criticize Carlson for doing what every professional journalist has been trained to do, whether at one of the corporate sponsored journalism faculties, or as a well-connected freelancer. That cannot be the starting point for understanding the Moscow interview (as opposed to Oliver Stone‘s 2017 interview— which was also framed in cinematic terms rather than journalistic).
The starting point ought to be with the facts. What did Carlson say? What questions did he ask? What answers did he receive? And what has happened since, to him and to those who watched the interview? Carlson spoke in a rather poor interview format in Dubai this week. It was apparent from his statements that whatever he may have expected from his interview, the confrontation with Russia and President Putin induced him to make statements he has not previously made. Those statements about the character of the US regime, his values as an American patriot, his confusion as he attempts to integrate the experience into his personal and professional personae, ought to be taken for what they are statements of fact — about in the first instance Tucker Carlson, American.
Some skeptics have speculated that Carlson is the thin edge of a crowbar that will undermine through infiltration and acquisition the so-called alternative media. They point to his curriculum vitae and his career as a corporate propagandist. All that is a matter of public record. However it is necessary to recall that since the founding of the CIA (and before that the FBI) there have been innumerable people whose careers were in the “opposition” and only very late — if not posthumously— were identified as government agents or assets. Just as the public curriculum vitae creates a presumption to be rebutted. It is extremely difficult to know who among those with “spotless” opposition credentials are merely working under deep cover.
The long-time followers are probably the least disappointed or skeptical. For this audience Tucker Carlson already enjoys a certain star status. If they are anti-Russian then their star has shown courage in the face of battle. He did not let himself be intimidated by what the Germans call the “Ivan”. They may have wondered that Carlson was unable to carry an American spy back to the homeland with him. However, they would have had no problem explaining that. Carlson sat in the Kremlin in front of the cameras and showed American strength and character. His personal meeting with the Russian president was evidence that American values can be defended even in Moscow — while the Democrats and the bizarre “Left” try to destroy their country.
There is another way to assess the interview and Tucker Carlson‘s subsequent statements. This is where the role of the appraiser ought to be more carefully considered than that performed by the performance appraised. Carlson performed the role of an American journalist on a stage partly structured like those stages upon which American audiences are accustomed to see such performances. Although the interview was extraordinary in a limited sense, it was overdetermined as performance. Anyone who had listened to President Putin’s speeches over the past ten years would not have found anything very new in what he said. However, that is the key point. The audiences before which Carlson sought to perform had never seen this stage or this show. It was a premiere in a very real sense, even if not held at the Bolshoi or on Broadway.
Much of the analysis and appreciation of this performance by the generous and sympathetic critics misses the point. In Dubai Carlson found himself unable to answer all the stock questions his poor, corpulent, interlocutor posed. He also was very clear about that incapacity. Anyone his age — 54 — or older ought to be able to recall the kinds of albeit naive basic principles and optimism with which his generation was still educated at home if not at school. The under-40, who have by and large been indoctrinated with the ostensible absence of positive doctrine or history, do not even understand the problem of recognizing that one‘s personal history and one‘s national history cannot explain the current conditions of the country in which one lives. They have been trained in the history of the brand, where the past is merely a “retro” design of the present. Tucker Carlson is a child of the Establishment, at least once removed. Yet there are far more people who share the history in which he was raised than our current youth fetishism recognizes.
The question that still bears serious consideration is that of what Tucker Carlson the performer means in the overall context of political warfare? This is a fair question, but until now I have only noticed feeble expressions of this issue. If instead of applying rigid forensic dissection of Carlson’s role, like those found in those atrocities of film criticism, one distinguishes between Tucker the journalist and Tucker the man, then one can also say that Tucker the journalist is susceptible to every subterfuge and political warfare tactic to which the entire profession is open. Then one must look at the way the journalist role is played now and in future — not only by Carlson. At the same time, a humanist appreciation must distinguish between the man, Tucker Carlson and what he does and says in that role. Serious intellectual effort, cultural-historical method, is needed to detach oneself from the constant role of “show perceiver” and learn to master the role of perceiving ordinary humans as they act in their daily lives. That applies to Tucker Carlson, his wife and four children, even if he lives in a wealthy neighborhood of La Jolla, California, where smoking Cannabis at breakfast is not allowed.
Broadly speaking three kinds of reactions to the recent Tucker Carlson-Vladimir Putin interviews can be detected. Aside from the official condemnations that find their echo wherever dementia and other intellectual impediments prevail, there is ecstasy, skepticism, and loyalty.
The ecstatic present this interview as something akin to the visions of Fatima. The skeptics point out that Fatima is a fraud. The loyal include those who have held Tucker Carlson for a hero or at least a very worthy member of their national conservative side in the ongoing US political wars. Nonetheless all these groups of viewers, commentators (pod or web) and officials high and low agree that there is something extraordinary about the event, the interview or conversation recorded in Moscow on or about 9 February 2024. Is it a sign of information liberation? Has Carlson together with those who have offered him platforms to distribute the interview without charge broken the sound bite barrier in the US (NATO) war against Russia and its own middle class and working class? Has this event revealed mysteries hitherto concealed except from those whom divine powers have deigned to speak? Is this yet another psychological operation where the son of the former director of Voice of America has launched the campaign that will end so-called “alternative media”?
The disturbing aspect of all these possibilities is that they are rooted in the fundamentally religious culture of the United States (and to the extent its missionaries have succeeded, in the various vassal states, e.g. the EU). In the first place the interview was a performance, if not a spectacle. This is not an issue of culpability. Rather it is an affirmation that the Carlson interview in Moscow by its very nature and cultural context is a show. That is just the way American culture works. If it had not been staged as a show — to the extent that Carlson and President Putin agreed on the format — it would have been incomprehensible to an American or American indoctrinated public. It is meanwhile tiresome to analyze all the speculation about “narratives” — that gratuitous contribution of literary scholarship to the lingual franca of the mass media through whatever channel. The corollary to Coolidge’s dictum is that the business of America is also show business. Religion is the ultimate show as the plethora of radio, TV and auditoria evangelists easily testifies.
Of course Tucker Carlson, like his father, has been a part of the public-private partnership that constitutes the American propaganda system. Anyone who works at an establishment media outlet is — wittingly or unwittingly. That is how American journalism was founded by Pulitzer and Hearst at the end of the 19th century. It is superfluous to criticize Carlson for doing what every professional journalist has been trained to do, whether at one of the corporate sponsored journalism faculties, or as a well-connected freelancer. That cannot be the starting point for understanding the Moscow interview (as opposed to Oliver Stone‘s 2017 interview— which was also framed in cinematic terms rather than journalistic).
The starting point ought to be with the facts. What did Carlson say? What questions did he ask? What answers did he receive? And what has happened since, to him and to those who watched the interview? Carlson spoke in a rather poor interview format in Dubai this week. It was apparent from his statements that whatever he may have expected from his interview, the confrontation with Russia and President Putin induced him to make statements he has not previously made. Those statements about the character of the US regime, his values as an American patriot, his confusion as he attempts to integrate the experience into his personal and professional personae, ought to be taken for what they are statements of fact — about in the first instance Tucker Carlson, American.
Some skeptics have speculated that Carlson is the thin edge of a crowbar that will undermine through infiltration and acquisition the so-called alternative media. They point to his curriculum vitae and his career as a corporate propagandist. All that is a matter of public record. However it is necessary to recall that since the founding of the CIA (and before that the FBI) there have been innumerable people whose careers were in the “opposition” and only very late — if not posthumously— were identified as government agents or assets. Just as the public curriculum vitae creates a presumption to be rebutted. It is extremely difficult to know who among those with “spotless” opposition credentials are merely working under deep cover.
The long-time followers are probably the least disappointed or skeptical. For this audience Tucker Carlson already enjoys a certain star status. If they are anti-Russian then their star has shown courage in the face of battle. He did not let himself be intimidated by what the Germans call the “Ivan”. They may have wondered that Carlson was unable to carry an American spy back to the homeland with him. However, they would have had no problem explaining that. Carlson sat in the Kremlin in front of the cameras and showed American strength and character. His personal meeting with the Russian president was evidence that American values can be defended even in Moscow — while the Democrats and the bizarre “Left” try to destroy their country.
There is another way to assess the interview and Tucker Carlson‘s subsequent statements. This is where the role of the appraiser ought to be more carefully considered than that performed by the performance appraised. Carlson performed the role of an American journalist on a stage partly structured like those stages upon which American audiences are accustomed to see such performances. Although the interview was extraordinary in a limited sense, it was overdetermined as performance. Anyone who had listened to President Putin’s speeches over the past ten years would not have found anything very new in what he said. However, that is the key point. The audiences before which Carlson sought to perform had never seen this stage or this show. It was a premiere in a very real sense, even if not held at the Bolshoi or on Broadway.
Much of the analysis and appreciation of this performance by the generous and sympathetic critics misses the point. In Dubai Carlson found himself unable to answer all the stock questions his poor, corpulent, interlocutor posed. He also was very clear about that incapacity. Anyone his age — 54 — or older ought to be able to recall the kinds of albeit naive basic principles and optimism with which his generation was still educated at home if not at school. The under-40, who have by and large been indoctrinated with the ostensible absence of positive doctrine or history, do not even understand the problem of recognizing that one‘s personal history and one‘s national history cannot explain the current conditions of the country in which one lives. They have been trained in the history of the brand, where the past is merely a “retro” design of the present. Tucker Carlson is a child of the Establishment, at least once removed. Yet there are far more people who share the history in which he was raised than our current youth fetishism recognizes.
The question that still bears serious consideration is that of what Tucker Carlson the performer means in the overall context of political warfare? This is a fair question, but until now I have only noticed feeble expressions of this issue. If instead of applying rigid forensic dissection of Carlson’s role, like those found in those atrocities of film criticism, one distinguishes between Tucker the journalist and Tucker the man, then one can also say that Tucker the journalist is susceptible to every subterfuge and political warfare tactic to which the entire profession is open. Then one must look at the way the journalist role is played now and in future — not only by Carlson. At the same time, a humanist appreciation must distinguish between the man, Tucker Carlson and what he does and says in that role. Serious intellectual effort, cultural-historical method, is needed to detach oneself from the constant role of “show perceiver” and learn to master the role of perceiving ordinary humans as they act in their daily lives. That applies to Tucker Carlson, his wife and four children, even if he lives in a wealthy neighborhood of La Jolla, California, where smoking Cannabis at breakfast is not allowed.
In his Moscow interview, Tucker Carlson also asked the president of the Russian Federation to release a young American citizen convicted of espionage in Russia from imprisonment. Vladimir Putin replied that the man was arrested, tried and convicted by a Russian court of a crime under Russian law, espionage, by secretly receiving classified documents from someone in Russia.
Carlson’s plea was based not on respect for Russian law — or understanding of the crime of espionage — but on a widely held prejudice in the West. Namely there is a presumption that Westerners, in particular Americans, if arrested in countries listed as enemies of the West or the US, are never incarcerated for their acts but taken as hostages. Thus Carlson’s appeal was phrased in terms of a plea for mercy to an outlaw. President Putin rejected that implication and explained both the specifics of the crime committed and the customary practice for reciprocal release of agents caught by opposing special (secret) services. While not ruling a release out, the Russian president made clear that this was not a case for executive clemency.
Why, one might ask, did Carlson not grasp that fact? The obvious and superficial reason is that the request was gratuitous and theatrical. The “hostage release” mission is a typical form of quasi-diplomatic grandstanding. However there is a deeper level at which this segment can and ought to be understood. There is an ancient tradition — prior to 7 October — of states at war taking leaders of the opposing side as hostages to induce and guarantee negotiations to end hostilities or to enforce the conditions to which belligerents subsequently agreed. Medieval warfare is full of such incidents. Also other cultures have availed themselves of these in personam guarantees for treaties between warring parties. These guarantees have continued in the rituals of prisoner exchanges during truces.
The late 20th century was accompanied by proliferation in the West of a new kind of hostage taking. Whereas the ancient mode usually involved the capture or surrender of belligerents (soldiers and officers) or high officials and dignitaries, modern Western warfare focussed on holding civilians, especially non-combatants, as hostage. This became a central tactic of counter-insurgency warfare. This was condemned in the treaties after World War 2 as a form of collective punishment and prohibited under the Geneva Conventions (or protocols to the Hague Convention on the Laws of Land Warfare).
The practice of the French in Algeria was one of the most notorious post-war examples. Although almost universally condemned (at least beyond the West) it found its way into the annals of counter-insurgency doctrine through Roger Trinquier. His book Modern Warfare formed the core of CIA-US military strategy in Vietnam. The conduct of war Trinquier proposed based on his service in Indochina and Algeria was fundamentally opposed to the spirit of the Geneva Conventions. By arguing that there was no more distinction between combatants and civilians he provided the example and the theory upon which all modern wars are waged by the West. World War 2 was the first modern war in which non-combatant casualties and death exceeded those of the armed forces. That was the reason for the Geneva protocols. Triquier circumvented this essentially by claiming that the organized self-defense and armed struggle against colonial occupation was not protected by the laws of land warfare since they protected states and their regular armed forces, while colonies were not states and could therefore not field armies in terms of international law.
While it is true that Trinquier insisted that treatment of civilians should distinguish between criminals to be tried and sentenced by the regular courts and “terrorists”, this distinction was no more than academic in the CI context. The CIA’s Phoenix Program extended to forcing the RVN legislature to criminalize political opinions and activities so that they could be punished as “civilian” crimes. As then CIA station chief William Colby explained, the Phoenix directorate in Saigon also insisted that political crimes be handled by the special branch of the national police so as to keep the military “clean” for regular warfare. However in Algeria, as in Vietnam, there was almost no contact between the regular forces of the two sides until the CI was virtually at an end. Moreover the personnel overlap between military and police in the colonies made the distinction more a question of clothes than substance.
The use of hostages in counter-insurgency expanded throughout the era of wars against national independence movements regardless of the prohibitions under international law. There was also a major innovation in 1972.
The conventional story is that a group of activists desiring to call attention to the ongoing occupation of Palestine by European settler-colonialists plotted to take the Olympic competition squad sent by the State of Israel to Munich hostage. Presumably this surprising move would compel the international community (as the US calls itself) to listen to the pleas of the Palestinian Liberation Organization, pleas for just treatment to resolve the conflict in compliance with international law.
The immediate result was dramatic and has been repeatedly dramatized. A special paramilitary squad from the German national police, GSG 9, stormed the rooms where the hostages were held and killed everyone, hostages and alleged hostage-takers. After that international air travel to and from Palestine was subjected to security measures that would then be standardized for all air travel in 2001. The immediate result was not the opening of international venues to the Palestinian cause but the opposite. The PLO became a certified “terrorist organization” and its members were declared outlaws. One should recall here what the term “outlaw” actually means. The naive understanding is misleading. Since the days of the Medieval Inquisition there has been a clear legal distinction between criminal and outlaw. A criminal is someone accused and convicted of violating the law. Nonetheless he is also governed by the law and enjoys its protection. Only the authorities have the right to seize and punish a criminal. An outlaw however is deemed literally beyond the law, enjoying neither rights nor protection. Hence an act of violence, even killing, against an outlaw is no offense. Anyone is free to treat an outlaw as he likes. An outlaw has no claims whatsoever.
One of the principles by which counter-insurgency is waged is by creating outlaws and removing them from the sight or oversight of the regular government and social infrastructure. This has also been done through what is now called “disappearing”. However hostage taking by the counter-insurgency agencies and their operatives has the perfidious effect of creating outlaws in the public perception by staging hostage incidents that appear to be perpetrated by the so-called “terrorists”. Thus the mythic propaganda of the deed is turned against those engaged in struggle — whether or not armed — to elicit the revulsion among the target population commensurate with this violation of the Geneva protocols.
Leaving aside the plethora of staged hijackings in the 1970s, there are two high jacking-hostage incidents that bear consideration. Indeed they too relate to Palestine. The first is the Entebbe incident in which Israeli military force was applied to near universal acclaim to the recovery of a passenger liner taken there by “terrorists”.
In June 1976, an Air France flight to Tel Aviv carrying some 248 passengers was diverted to Uganda’s capital. (Ironically Uganda had been one of Britain’s proposed sites for a future Zionist state.) Israel special forces attacked the airport and liberated the aircraft, killing some Ugandan soldiers and apparently violating Ugandan sovereignty to perform the raid. The ruler of Uganda, Idi Amin, apparently supported seizure of the airliner. In the course of the action practically all non-Israelis were released. The Israeli forces shot their way in and recovered all those passengers except for some collateral damage. Amin had been receiving and continued to receive exceptionally bad press. The review of his years in Uganda is only relevant to show that whatever domestic political struggles were underway in Britain’s former colony, Amin was one of several African leaders punished for supporting the citizens of Palestine in their armed struggle.
The second incident involved a TWA flight from Athens to San Diego that was diverted to Beirut in June 1986. In the course of this action a US Navy diver was killed. While this death is treated as a civilian casualty, since it was not a military flight, the reported actions of a man trained in what is essentially a special forces MOS may have led to his death as combat-induced. Nonetheless the remarkable aspect of this hostage incident was not only the negotiated exchange of 19 hostages unharmed in return for fuel. Eventually all the hostages were released. In this case the Israeli government released prisoners it held while denying that the incident had forced them to do so.
One of the hostages released was a Texas original, a businessman from that archconservative oil and ranching state. He was actually interviewed on network television just after he reached the tarmac. (The man disappeared from public view shortly thereafter.) He told assembled reporters that he was not only treated well but that they had made a case for their political objectives that he found very reasonable. He practically asked the governments concerned to listen and take his captors seriously. That was the last time he spoke in public- at least where cameras could record it.
The case of TWA flight 847 ended with the released passengers being flown by USAF transporter to Frankfurt am Main, the center of US intelligence services in Germany, for “debriefing” before a quasi-heroic reception in the US. That Texas businessman who had spoken soberly to journalists asking why no one was listening to the people in Palestine, was declared to have incurred “Stockholm syndrome”.
Stockholm syndrome is a pseudo-medical term invented in the early 1970s as a faux psychiatric disorder whereby captives allegedly become bonded with their captors and sympathetic to them. It has become a term of trade for discrediting anyone who by virtue of a politically motivated hostage-taking exhibits a sympathetic response to the political issue at hand, no matter how rational that sympathy may be articulated. To confuse matters the “syndrome” is sometimes compared with the established “attractions” in abusive relationships, e.g. wife-beating, child-beating, rape, etc. While there are plausible explanations for the persistence of abusive relationships the elements of time and social/ familial status are very different from those of temporary hostage situations.
The purpose of Stockholm syndrome is to pathologize the responses of people caught in political conflict who begin to consider rationally or even humanely the terms of those conflicts in officially prohibited ways. The origin of the term “brainwashing” was similar. When US POWs were released after the Armistice in Korea, many were forced to retract statements made in captivity about war crimes they had been ordered to commit. To explain these retractions and conceal the threats made to extract them, the returning prisoners were alleged to have been victims of Korean brainwashing. This also served as convenient cover for what is now known as MKUltra, the CIA psychological warfare program which included the mass marketing of LSD.
Throughout the so-called Cold War the Soviet Union was accused of conducting all the psychological and pharmament operations against its dissidents that the CIA was performing in the US, Canada and other countries under its control. The battlefield “mind” predates the Internet- in fact it has been the main battlespace since 1913.
The history of modern hostage taking for political purposes could bear far more examination than this space permits. However to return to the Carlson-Putin interview and Carlson’s plea for a “hostage release” we should ask from what position Carlson’s request is actually addressed?
That is most simply revealed in his opening questions.
On February 22, 2022, you addressed your country in your nationwide address when the conflict in Ukraine started and you said that you were acting because you had come to the conclusion that the United States through NATO might initiate a quote, “surprise attack on our country”. And to American ears that sounds paranoid. Tell us why you believe the United States might strike Russia out of the blue. How did you conclude that?
Tucker Carlson, consciously or not, was speaking with the voice of the real “hostage-taker”. The US, in NATO extended, began to take the world hostage no later than August 1945. It held for a brief period the absolute atomic monopoly, until the Soviet Union followed by China acquired a deterrent. Then until 1990 the US claimed to be the hostage of a country half its population and subjected to more than twenty years of US-supported war mainly against its civilian population. In addition it held the world hostage while it carpet-bombed Korea and Vietnam (plus Laos and Cambodia), murdering over six million people from the air. At the same time it held as much of Africa, Latin America and the Pacific archipelagos hostage through military dictatorships, with or without civilian faces. Then through brain drain and strategic immigration policy it created an international hostage pool paying ransom in return for a chance to send money to impoverished families at home. Ultimately the psychological and economic warfare to which all inhabitants of the US are subjected is calculated to create a strong emotional bond with their captors, the real but unnamed hostage-takers who rule the Anglo-American Empire.
Vladimir Putin responded to Tucker Carlson’s plea in the manner appropriate to a traditional statesman, schooled in statecraft from an age before the US was even conceived as a place, let alone as a nation. Also that point eluded the American journalist. President Putin’s repeated injunction that Tucker Carlson should ask the actors themselves (in the US) why they act as they do? was also a polite indication that for all his curiosity, sincerity and goodwill, Carlson was himself a captive, a hostage. He remains a captive of a hostage nation.
This week former Fox News commentator, now self-employed audio-visual journalist, Tucker Carlson interviewed the president of the Russian Federation, Vladimir Putin. According to his own account, it was a mission opposed—secretly by the agencies of the “Vatican on the Potomac” and with it the hierarchy of the American Church. A summary of the sermons and homilies published by its national and international propaganda organs indicates concerted efforts to spin this encounter in ways that profess the faith and confirm the purported apostasy of the successor to that patriarch of the beloved if short-lived Russian-American Church, Boris Yeltsin.
Carlson has acquired a wide and varied following not only because of the topics he began to cover but by some things conspicuously absent from the broadcasting and cable genre in which he made his career—a robust sense of humor and allowing the people to whom he talks to speak without rude interruptions. Throughout the illegal and unconstitutional mass incarcerations starting in 2020 he insisted without reservation that Americans have rights that are being violated. George Carlin would have said their temporary privileges had been suspended or revoked. As a personally wealthy individual from an establishment background, Carlson is essentially a believer in the status quo or at least the status quo of the era in which he grew up. As a media professional he is sensitive to the way the business works and the role people like him play in it. He does not pretend to identify with everyone he meets. Despite his clearly conservative position he has acquired a reputation for sincerity throughout what is called “alternative journalism”. There was an age, long forgotten by many, when a journalist of reputation or representing a major media outlet did not have to explain publicly why he chose to report on something or talk to somebody. The fact that Tucker Carlson felt compelled to give several introductory explanations for speaking to the elected leader of a major nation with whom his country has been at war (unofficially since 1917) reflects the dismal state of affairs even in a profession subject to corruption since its institutionalization by magnates like Pulitzer, Hearst, Rothermere and Beaverbrook.
By his own admission, Carlson was surprised at among other things the history lesson he was given in the first third of the interview. One might ask if in the course of his preparation he had viewed Oliver Stone’s extensive interviews with the Russian president in 2017? Anyone who watched them would not have been surprised by Vladimir Putin’s style or substance. Stone, who had much more time, asked many of the same questions Carlson asked. In those interviews President Putin was very detailed in his answers with frequent historical explanations given as context. Perhaps that is what most surprised Carlson since the absence of context is the primary characteristic of what passes for journalism in the West. However Tucker Carlson, began no later than the 22 February 2022 Russian intervention, to add context and history to his own reporting. What is more logic acquired a greater role than dogma. So what role was Tucker Carlson performing?
Perhaps his questions were formulated to simulate the kind of bar, living room and dinner table discussions his viewers are likely to have when the subjects of Putin or Russia are raised. If one wants to inform a notoriously isolated and ignorant population one has to start with their knowledge base and the things they are likely to ask. President Putin asked Carlson after the first question, was this a talk show or a serious conversation? By surrendering to a serious conversation he was breaching the unstated barrier of all domestic political gossip and chatter. Yet it was too late to change either his style or his pattern of questions. Without diminishing the value of the interview as a whole, it is worth considering the role model upon which Carlson explicitly drew. He has mentioned Barbara Walters. Those who can still recall her career in American television will remember how she became the first woman to co-anchor that TV slot for the nightly news. She replaced Chet Huntley after he died to share the NBC show with David Brinkley. Then she went on to conduct “star” interviews with world leaders. Those performances raised the TV presenter to a certain mutual celebrity in the penumbra of the personality interviewed. It also created a new platform for selected leaders to be displayed to a mass television audience, not unlike the 1969 broadcast of the putative moon landings. Political leaders obtained a new kind of pulpit with this precursor to the ubiquitous talk show. Performers from the news theater genre were able to enhance their credibility as conduits for official views presented in living room conversation format. David Frost was the master of this format- although even his famous Nixon interviews were just a bit too English for an average US audience (unless sedated by Masterpiece Theater episodes). Barbara Walters in contrast was the Maria Callas of the grand interview. At least Maria Callas knew she was only a performer and used her own voice. Tucker Carlson can be forgiven for avoiding the David Frost style. However had he learned something from Oliver Stone he might have transcended the living room TV style and focussed on things Americans and Westerners really need to understand.
Repeated questions to Vladimir Putin were couched in phrases like “why do you think America does something?” From the Stone interviews he would have learned that the Russian president does not try to guess why other people act as they do. He merely describes the actions as he sees them and what he thinks they mean for Russia. Carlson’s approach indirectly reflects the absence (or impossibility) of any serious questioning by Americans as to why their government acts as it does? Vladimir Putin pointed both Stone and Carlson toward home saying essentially- Ask the people who act for their reasons. I can only tell you why we act as we do. The critical viewer will immediately recognize that Western policy is never honestly explained. Hence while the whole world (except the citizens of NATO countries) can know why the Russian Federation acts, no one has an honest answer from those in the West who drive US actions.
Another curious aspect of the interview is Carlson’s questions about diplomacy and the implied question about the “special services”. Tucker Carlson’s father was a journalist working with the American “special services” or other government agencies. The level of passive and active cooperation between the corporate media and the CIA (or FBI) is a matter of record. Originally discrete, they even operate overtly today. As a former intelligence officer (like George H W Bush), the Russian president respects the rules by which those services operate. In contrast to the legions of CIA assets in the US and the West as a whole, Vladimir Putin neither denies this stage in his career nor does he trivialize the functions these services perform. Yet he comes just short of suggesting that the lead Western services drive policy. In contrast one hears little to indicate that the Russian president is run by his country’s covert action branch. Does Carlson appreciate this difference? Vladimir Putin answers Carlson with the rhetorical question, who is Boris Johnson? To which Carlson seemed to have no answer. Again a critical viewer could understand the insinuation. Boris Johnson, who was no longer British prime minister was in Kiev on someone’s behalf. Johnson himself, unlike a member of the Biden family, had no obvious personal interest in Ukraine. Yet his words were apparently enough to destroy the Istanbul format where Russia and Ukraine had initialed accords that according to President Putin would have ended the war. So on whose behalf was the backbencher sent? What did he offer or threaten to persuade Kiev to renounce what they had already accepted? Even if Tucker Carlson did not know the answer the question was hard to overlook.
Already before FOX sacked him Tucker Carlson had begun to question the appearances of government in the US. However little attention has been paid to the “secret team”, the term Prouty used to describe the permanent government, and how it rules and disseminates propaganda. So little critical attention is given to covert government because it also transcends the political and social categories in which the mass and sacraments of the American Church are celebrated. Carlson ended his interview with questions couched in the language of Christian catechism. He asked the Russian president, as a Christian, if he would not act in accordance with a platitude of that same Sunday school version of Christianity characteristic of the West: “why don’t you turn the other cheek?” Sensibly Vladimir Putin responded as a head of state and not a pupil summoned to the principal’s office for fighting on the playground. He said with calm neutrality that the West was more “pragmatic” than Russia. Without demeaning the West, Vladimir Putin answered in a way deeply consistent with the Orthodox Christianity overthrown by Rome in the Fourth Crusade. His conviction was that Russians had a life and soul that were indivisible. The implication was that the West in its pragmatism could dispense with one or the other.
Certainly the enormous viewer numbers Tucker Carlson reaches will uniquely benefit if they really listen to the conversation. Nonetheless the legacy of Walters will be hard to transcend. Carlson as the celebrity interviewer risks not just being unheard. There is still the opportunity for a new news entertainment brand to emerge by which the medium remains the message. Tucker Carlson then would join the pantheon of celebrity with surprising but increasingly superficial product. The Church has always known how to absorb divergence into entertainment (if it could not be suppressed) and its grand corporate successors, who Putin correctly identified as directly or indirectly controlling almost all the world‘s mass media, have refined those methods using both natural and artificial intelligence.
Some people are still complaining –rightly — about the penetration of women’s competitive sports (along with prisons and school lavatories). There is a strong temptation to see this merely as some bizarre fashion against which too many officials lack the courage to resist. In fact I do not believe this is cowardice. There are cowards up front but they don’t make policy. Look what happened at Penn and Harvard. Normally immune CEOs at these elite kindergartens were sacked for failure to behave like “trannies” toward students who dared to protest the mass murder in Palestine. The mass murder and population displacement in the entire Middle East and Ukraine (by Kiev not Russia) has induced far less outrage. This is despite (or perhaps because of) the subsequent enrichment of serial murderers like George Soros who back the causes they have learned to blindly support. It is particularly egregious since these students go into debt to in the hope of joining the ruling cadre and are essentially customers of these hedge funds.
For the purposes of argument let us say that the same tiny sadist elite holds the purse for all major ideological institutions. Competitive sports is one of them, a central tool for mass indoctrination.
Social engineering is based on multiple layers of indoctrination and structural organisation, whether labor process or reproduction. The outrage over transgender terror cannot be suppressed by neutralizing of women and healthy heterosexual men, meanwhile labeled with bizarre terms like “cis”. As yet there are no reliable replacements. Sports sell products and they sell weapons. NASCAR races are traditional promotion for the military. They also support the creation of masses of “losers” who engage in vicarious triumph through the selected heroes in each discipline.
Hence it is imperative to disrupt and undermine all forms of natural life. That is being done through compulsory use of pharmaments and restructuring of the indoctrination organs, to which sports belong. Before injections were introduced to control the potential for illness from the “dangerous” (now called “deplorable”) class, sports were industrialized as mass spectator operations, first for patriotism and then for consumption. Private-public partnerships have already brought the conventional military to an advanced stage.
Anyone who doubts that sports are instrumental in managing consumption only has to examine contemporary footwear. It is also a branch of the identity industry. Identity politics is nothing less than the marketing of recombinant genetic engineering. Dependent on corporate managed consumption, identity can be created and erased like software updates. After all software is the digital extraction of human intellectual labor — no less exploitative than using children to crack coal or other extractive operations. Despite many apparent service advantages (except for its employees) Amazon is essentially the template for a digital synthetic culture. The 2020-21 lockdowns from which it profited enormously were the test field for “digital enclosures”.
It may take a while until the entire competitive sports sector has been reorganized around anti-human values but the campaign is very aggressive. On the fringe are disciplines like robot football. Robot soldier prototypes are in advanced stages too.
Hollywood has been selling this vision for decades now. When real humans die off through wars and pharmaments combined with poisoned foods, the social structures will be complete to subordinate the remaining humans to planned obsolescence.
There is a certain tragedy in the 19th century struggle to assert the value of labor. The result has been that it is valued above all those who actually perform it. The sincere effort to eliminate oppression of women and children has resulted in the destruction of the social bonds that sustained human life — as opposed to abstract surplus value. “Freeing” peasants from the land and women from child bearing has not benefited either as a group. Even today we can see that the benefits promised by such relief have been hoarded by the ruling class. This was accomplished by isolating nominal freedoms and promoting them to destroy the social fabric in which those freedoms might actually mean something. Another public-private partnership under the umbrella of the intergovernmental public-private partnership cartel, aka United Nations, the International Organisation for Migration promotes politically and materially the vision that labor is just an internationally distributed natural resource to be moved wherever it can be most efficiently profitably exploited. War is just another means of resource allocation the UN promotes.
The once helpful analytical tool by which systems of domination and exploitation were shown not to be natural, but the product of ruling class violence has now been appropriated so that ordinary human activity is defined as an artificial social construct. The difference between the critical theory and the current ideology lies in the definition of human life as artificial while its management by the ruling oligarchs is elevated as natural. The pretenders to divinity in their mountain retreats have turned critique into a strategy for destroying human society as living environment. Margaret Thatcher was not exaggerating when she said there is no “society”.[1] Her ostensibly libertarian assertion belied the fact that corporations under her long reign certainly constituted a “society” from which she and her family personally benefited- unlike Yorkshire miners. The aim of her handlers was to destroy it. It is the organisational complement to genetics and recombinant biological manipulation. That is also why it is not too harsh to properly apply Daniel Goldberg‘s banal and mendacious term “willing executioners” but to the “Wokie Dokies” rather than some fictional Germans under NSDAP rule.[2] It has been the “woke” who were most easily persuaded to collude in the extermination of the old and infirm since the outbreak of the Covid War.
The “third way”, a chimera propagated by Tony Blair, Bill Clinton and cohorts of “young global leaders” and still churned by Soros’ alma mater the LSE, triumphed as the cult of the new trans-human millennium. Its principal pathology is exhibited in the myopia that induces innumerable people-not just acolytes- to support the depopulation of Ukraine and the Middle East- that is the function for which the same people created Israel and the Zelensky regime. Bound by the malignant narcissism and nihilism of their masters they may be embarrassed by the crudity of the current campaign in Palestine but they support albeit unwittingly their own redundancy and obliteration. First they will cheer the carnage as purification. By the time they are led to the slaughterhouse it will be too late.
ENDNOTES
[1] “They are casting their problems at society. And, you know, there’s no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families. And no government can do anything except through people, and people must look after themselves first. It is our duty to look after ourselves and then, also, to look after our neighbours.” – in an interview in Women’s Own (31 October 1987)
[2] Daniel Goldhagen, Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (1996). Goldhagens initially scandalous book was eventually discredited as scholarship but not before its slanderous impact as “holocaust porn”.
Ninety years ago (1934), the Austrian writer Stefan Zweig began writing the book published posthumously in 1942 as Die Welt von Gestern. In 1932, Joseph Roth published Radetzkymarsch. Both authors died in exile essentially by what in German is so prosaically called “Freitod” or suicide. Their principal subject was the end of Austria-Hungary. However for both men these were stories of the end of the world as they knew it.
Since the end of the Napoleonic Wars the multi-ethnic empire of the Habsburg double monarchy had become a silent financial dependency of the British Empire, alternatively a continental resource for British industry and a brake on Prussian and French expansion. Vienna‘s urbane society was a fusion of Francophilia and Anglophilia with sophisticated music and literature accompanied by conservative political culture. Sigmund Freud, whose work was ultimately distorted beyond recognition by his daughter Anna and nephew Edward Bernays, had devoted his study to explaining the peculiar combination of Enlightenment and repression the legacy of which would be world war and neo-liberalism (Austrian economics).
Unlike Britain, whose insular pirate culture had seized the Habsburg‘s sun, the world from which Zweig and Roth had been thrusted, the abyss into which they fell, had been genuinely cosmopolitan, if highly contradictory. On one hand there was the harsh order by which seven or more language communities were held together- by Germanic administration and Magyar military prowess. On the other there was the blend of cultures that nourished arts and intellect.
The collapse of Austria-Hungary left a vacuum in Europe. That collapse is treated in the school history books as the product of an unfortunate military alliance with the ascendant German Empire. Supposedly forced into war by Germanic militarism, the roots of the Great War can be found in the covert diplomacy of the British Empire. Britain had been secretly supporting every conceivable separatist movement that could fuel the centripetal dissolution of the central European state. This culminated in the assassination of the heir to the throne, Archduke Franz-Ferdinand and his wife in Sarajevo.
It is no accident that the true dissolution of civilization- such as it is- in the European peninsula of Eurasia should properly be dated with the Anglo-American (aka NATO) destruction of Yugoslavia. The European Union (successor to the Anglo-American prototype Western European Union- WEU) has been falsely marketed as the model of a new Europe. In fact it was created to prevent the emergence of a post-war Europe beyond the control of the Anglo-American Empire.
The defeat of the Soviet Union in 1990 and the subsequent dissolution of that great multi-ethnic polity was complemented by the destruction of Yugoslavia based on the same principles by which Britain had ruled India and ts cousins had ruled the western hemisphere. Thus a pattern which ought to be recognized today was cut for preaching independence in order to weaken the capacity of cultures and peoples to retain their autonomy.
That autonomy protected by conservative traditions is the greatest obstacle to the cancerous growth of finance capitalism- a euphemism for state-sponsored piracy. Heralded as a new order of peace, the proliferation of economically neutered polities, led by what today would be called identity fetishists, guaranteed the expansion of financial debtor states no longer able to pursue rational trade or industrial policy. When the financial and monetary engineers let loose their wrecking balls in 1929, they also used the ruins of continental Europe to excite antagonisms at every turn. Those whose hands were on the levers of finance were far from the wreckage they caused. Local attempts to restore sanity to the post-war world were sabotaged by every means available in London or New York.
Karl Marx wrote in The Communist Manifesto that “all that is solid melts into air”. Of course he was predicting the cannibalism of the bourgeoisie while expressing optimism that it could be overcome. The world of yesterday should not be idealized. However Marx and his socialist and communist contemporaries were humanists. For them humanism was based on the principle that value comes from labor- even if it is stolen.
The world of yesterday was filled with people. It was decorated by artisans. Musicians animated daily life. Literature was not just intellectual property to be hoarded. Machines were made by people to increase the quality and distribution of useful goods for human needs. The aim was not to eliminate work but to preserve the value of those who performed it.
The destruction of that world was not replaced by peaceful work for the good of real human beings. It has been replaced by the peace of the grave. The largest industries extant today are devoted to using ever fewer humans to annihilate those that remain. The blasphemy of artificial intelligence is propagated to further that annihilation by denaturing the human heart-mind and reducing life to computation.
While the neutered offspring of the survivors contemplate their atomic identities all the attributes of historical personality and daily life are erased so that those few allowed to breathe (but not exhale) can masturbate to death. Freedom is reduced to the freedom from anything not produced through binary notation. The masturbating class rages against biological difference into obsessively binary cellphones.
Anyone anywhere who insists on a life like those of their grandparents or ancestors is targeted with calumny and outright violence. Digital fanatics scream pledges against the “binary” with slogans of Diversity, Inclusion and Equity (DIE) oblivious to the emptiness they signify. Russophobia is more than an attack on the Slavs, although it is that too. It is a pattern for absorbing the nihilism that is the true technological product of the 20th century. Lacking even the will to know- let alone understand- the history of the world of yesterday, they have already become lab-made growths from the petri dishes due to replace the wombs from which humans throughout history have emerged to work, play and contribute to their communities. They willingly watched their grandparents executed in hospitals converted to death chambers. They renounce the age of procreation in favor of celibate and even sodomistic fornication.
Should it be any wonder then that their ideal has become a world without gardens and forests, without pastures and grazing, without communities with traditions, where there is no labor, no value, but only the realm of the dead?
Without the world of yesterday, there can be no world of tomorrow.
A recent X post from Tucker Carlson featured biologist and podcaster Bret Weinstein (DarkHorse) to talk about the US immigration crisis after a visit to the Darién Gap. The gap is a jungle in the Panamanian isthmus where the Pan American Highway is interrupted on its way to South America. There, at the incitement of weblogger and US Special Forces officer Michael Yon, Weinstein went to see the immigration camps and learn how people from all over the world are trekking to the Rio Bravo border to enter the US.
His detailed description was rational and cautious, yet it raised a specter which was clearly alarming. Weinstein described the conditions and the character of two camps that he saw. One fit the description of a classic refugee camp. It was visibly managed by a number of NGOs as well as US government agencies. The other appeared to be full of Chinese. He was able to talk to numerous migrants in the first camp but was unable to enter the one which appeared to be Chinese.
The “Chinese” camp seemed to be full of military age young men who when addressed outside the camp were reluctant to talk.
After discussing the discrepancies, Carlson asked if he had any explanation. Weinstein was exceptionally cautious and only uttered hypotheses. However, the direction implied the possibility that China was sending men to the US behind the migrant screen.
Then Weinstein shifted to the possible relation between a Chinese contingent and Covid with the mRNA injections that the US government (along with nearly all Western governments) forced on much of the population. Although Weinstein was very explicit that his hypotheses were not facts and that he did not know if there was any relationship to verify, the discussion proceeded to cover possible motives and objectives of both policies supported by the US regime.
The speculation is provocative and not to be easily dismissed. Nonetheless, it also revealed how little many people seem to understand about how covert operations can work. Michael Yon can be recognized as a special operations professional. While popular imagination continues to portray these men as mere super soldiers, the reality is that Special Forces are the armed cadres of the CIA and other covert action (state terrorism) agencies. A quick look at Yon’s website shows him as a super-soldier or soldier of fortune who has been a dedicated operator in all the CIA managed wars of the past three decades. That alone ought to raise suspicions about his coverage and why he was so interested to show a biologist and popular podcaster the frontier of what are undoubtedly covert operations. Weinstein was taken into Yon’s confidence much like the journalist character in John Wayne’s notorious The Green Berets film, promoting the war against Vietnam.
Allowing that Weinstein reported what he honestly saw, the question remains whether he saw what he was supposed to see. That returns us to the question “why Chinese?” The ensuing discussion raised legitimate questions about connections between US immigration policy and the Covid War. However before considering them it is necessary to return to the first camp. Weinstein named several organisations supporting the migrant camp. He identified USG agencies and the UN agency IOM. What he either did not know or did not recognise is that the International Organization for Migration is run by the US national security bureaucrat Amy Pope.1There is general confusion about how the UN and its specialized agencies are run. The WHO is essentially an arm of the Gates Foundation and the international pharmaceuticals (pharmaments) cartel. It would not be unreasonable to suppose Ms Pope assures that the IOM complies with the policies set by those who rule the US. Weinstein’s conclusion is that such policies as those articulated by the Biden administration reflect corruption on a global scale. However that does not answer the question who benefits from those policies and how?
To return to the compulsory mass injection, especially of the military and other health and safety services, Weinstein and Carlson both expressed their bewilderment and shock that the compulsion was so rigorous in what might be called the public services sector. Then more speculation returned to COVID and mRNA injections and what these were doing to people in the US. Consensus prevailed that this was biological weaponry deployed. While there is no reason to doubt that assertion, the next step was to repeat the half truth that China was the source of the raw material both for the pathogen and for the injections since the latter were based on the former. Neither Weinstein nor Carlson could recall that the actual origin was Eco-Health Alliance, a cutout for US bioweapons development and Ralph Baric at UNC-Chapel Hill, the principal investigator commissioned for the DoD gain of function (weapons) development. Weinstein is probably not savvy enough to understand how cut-outs work or the details of false flag operations. Carlson probably does know but rarely if ever discusses such details. The accuracy of the media depictions of COVID in China were accepted as debunked. Yet the sources of that “information” were not examined. Thus, Chinese authorship was implied.
While discussing the implications of the migration crisis + “Chinese”, the hypothesis was aired that both the managed “uncontrolled” migration and the covid/mRNA weapons aimed to weaken the US from within. This might serve the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) by mass infiltration of potentially militarized immigrants who would then create the conditions most favorable to alleged Chinese expansionism. This it was suggested might be due to China having essentially bought the US government. This hypothesis has been peppered by regular reports of bribes paid to inter alia the Biden family by Chinese interests.
Striking in the discussion is the absence of two considerations: a) the complex of US anti-China war propaganda which naturally compromises any reporting about China in the West as a whole and b) the interests of the Western oligarchy in redesigning the West as a neo-feudal regime. Leave that eyesore, the CIA-founded WEF, aside for a moment. There are purely national phenomena which provide a far more efficient explanation.
As a matter of record Mr Gates is now the largest private owner of farm land in the US. There is no indication that he has stopped buying. Since the 2008 mortgage crisis, the hedge funds like Black Rock have become the largest owners of rental property (residential and commercial). This feat was accomplished by the massive derivatives fraud that forced millions of mortgagees to forfeit their real property. The economic devastation continued this process. Sane economists, of which Michael Hudson is one of the few, have charted this conversion of home ownership to rental tenancy and its acceleration. The Anglo-American finance oligarchy is aggressively pursuing through the banking, tax and monetary system an unparalleled expropriation of rank and file Americans.
During the mass incarceration, I wrote several times that COVID was political-economic warfare using biological agents and financial terror. My argument, then and now, was that this is atomic grade social engineering. In the worst case — for the oligarchy — this neutralization of the country’s majority was a clearing of the decks for open world war. Masses who might, under pressure of extermination — especially in the military and armed citizenry — actually rebel and mutiny leading to an October scenario. However, there is another scenario compatible with the history of North American conquest. In the 19th century, the tiny oligarchy was incapable of fulfilling its manifest destiny by stealing the whole continent. So bonded labor and massive immigration were used to take and hold everything between the Allegheny and the Pacific. Poor immigrants were granted the freedom to fight and die in battle against the indigenous population. Afterwards the land won was handed to railroads, finance, miners and ranchers. Successive economic crises bankrupted smallholders regularly. They abandoned their homes and moved westward. “Indians” and Chinese-bonded labor kept those settlers busy while the usual suspects seized all the land and loot, selling it back to successive suckers. Forced displacement was fundamental to the business model that “won the West”. Even to this day, the oligarchy represented in Washington understates the use of biological agents to eradicate the indigenous peoples. Few 19th century immigrants admit how they were used to enrich East Coast elites. Perhaps that is the policy followed today, the one at home which bears examination. The immigrants are driven by plane and on foot from the South. Meanwhile, mRNA injections provided the same comfort as smallpox-treated blankets.
ENDNOTE
It is after all just a hypothesis, but with tradition.
1 IOM mission statement Harnessing the Power of Migration
Comprehensive solutions to the world’s biggest challenges – from poverty and inequality to climate change, and conflict – are all inextricably linked to migration. IOM knows that migration has the power to transform the lives of individuals, their families, their communities and societies for the better. It is clear that the Sustainable Development Goals cannot be reached without safe, orderly and regular migration. For this reason, our vision is: to deliver on the promise of migration, while supporting the world’s most vulnerable.
When I was a child my grandfather, whom I knew as a man who had driven cars for the rich and conversed with the famous in his youth, once told me “making money is easy — if that is all you want to do”. As an eight-year-old that sounded very profound although at the time it made little sense to me. Personally I must confess, money has really meant very little to me. I worked as a youth to earn pocket money so I could go to restaurants or buy books. However I never had that sense of thrift that fills the Puritan with such pride or disdain for others. Money was largely absent from my youth so that its presence or absence made no discernible impact on my daily life. Thus my grandfather‘s words remained obscure until my middle age.
It was then that I had sufficient experience to reflect on the conduct of my fellow humans. One of the questions which arose in my studies did not pertain directly to money. I saw first that the jobs I thought I wanted were all badly paid and yet the applications were very competitive. This too seemed a kernel of wisdom that escaped me. One of my academic sojourns took me through the canon of pre-1990s women’s studies. For those who are too young or amnesiac to recall, this was still the debate about the social-political-economic construction of gender roles in the humanist tradition of which Simone de Beauvoir was a part (see The Second Sex). One of the key observations about these roles was the extent to which the social organisation of labour (not erotic stimulation) placed women in labour-intensive roles within the family and society that freed men of property (what once was called the ruling class) to concentrate almost entirely (aside from bowel movements that could not be delegated) on the exercise of power. Illustrative was the fact that anyone who has to feed and nurture children, cook, clean, launder etc. has very little time to control much beyond the threshold of the home. In other words the labour process and division of labour were critical not only for the control of the family but for those thus freed of menial tasks to spend every waking minute dominating the rest of the world. It was then that I found a model for interpreting what my grandfather told me.
As I have said, my organizational experience has been varied. I have been able to observe at close quarters the behaviour of people from the shop floor and street pavement to the bridge or boardroom. There even a casual observer can see and hear – with due attention – that there are different types in every organisation but every organisation has the same types.
There are those who work at the tasks assigned. There are those who organise and supply those who work. Then there are those who do very little other than “be” in the organisation. Finally there are those whose only true interest is the exercise of power in whatever form available. The latter are the same character type as those my grandfather denoted for whom making money is easy.
What unites theses two is benevolently described as single-mindedness. Within very limited circumstances the sheer determination of these people can be harnessed. However those circumstances may be compared to those of the mythical “peaceful atom”. Atomic power for electricity generation was conceived as a cover for the permanent bomb economy. Praised as a triumph of technology, it is demonstrably the most expensive means of boiling water yet invented. Aside from the toxicity and waste disposal issues, the fact remains that the turbine or other engineering needed to use all the plant’s steam generating capacity has not been developed and never will be. The only net benefits the atomic fission reactors have ever delivered are to those for whom making money or exercising power is thus made easy: unregulated private utilities (one could look back to Bonneville Power bankruptcies in Washington State) and the armed forces (propulsion and annihilation).
An honest study of power would deal with the material conditions of its accumulation, including the division of labour. This is where rational analysis would show quickly how irrational those who belong to the power or money seeking cults are. However “rational” in the established study of politics and international relations means something quite different. Instead the rationalist – wherever affiliated – ought to be called an apologist, except that he does not apologize. Instead he is proud that he knows no shame.
The obsession with accumulation of money or power is simplification of the highest degree. Since nothing else counts no other factors are actually relevant. No results can be contemplated beyond accumulation or dissipation. Such personalities are in need of guidance since the world is not naturally a source of profit or power.
We may have read that in societies preceding those in which we live or imagine based on documents attributed to an inaccessible past, that the leaders sought oracles before or after action. They offered sacrifices – frequently burnt – to obtain the translation of the real world into their unidimensional perspectives. That is what the academic – especially the realist – scholar or consultant does. Within the division of labour the establishment scholar has a sacerdotal role to play. His scholarship is realistic only in the sense that it translates data about the world in which the rulers imagine they live into language of obsessive-compulsive behaviour.
The astute priest knows the beliefs and dogmas he must profess and teach. He knows that if the king will eat meat on a day it is forbidden then a duck must become a species of fish. If the realist scholar is to serve his faith and his psychopathic patrons then he must translate the potentate’s violence and avarice into virtues. When the War Department in the US was renamed this was partly justified by the consolidation of the cabinet departments. (War was the Army alone.) However the act of Congress was designed to create the bureaucratic conditions for perpetual and covert war. The same legislation created the CIA. The Defense Department became the central instrument of US domestic and foreign policy. As not only George Kennan and Thomas Friedman acknowledged, the US economy and hence the machine for only making money and only exercising power could not run without translating everything into “war” or “profit”. As the DuPonts could easily testify after the Great War there was nothing, absolutely nothing, more profitable than war. (see my review of Behind the Nylon Curtain)
The realist, unlike Machiavelli whose language was clear, thrives by selling his oracles in the forum or as a hawker in the remotest (now electronic) venues. The development of the atomic bomb to annihilate the Soviet Union, after failure of the West’s intervention to stop the revolution and the failure of their man Adolph to do the job later, was decorated in unrealistic stories. Actually outright lies were constructed. While the realists preached the Soviet threat in public they knew that the West’s Hitler-led devastation would require at least twenty years for the USSR to repair. The realists know that the official US strategy from the end of the Second World War was “first strike” and the renamed War Departments had to arm for two strikes against the Soviet Union. If the Tsar Bomba did nothing else it made some of the less obsessive among the psychopathic elite doubt the advantages of nuclear attack. This was the real meaning of deterrence: the US was deterred from following the nihilistic atomic strategy for which the Manhattan Project – staffed with some of the most reactionary anti-communists available – was founded. When New China developed its own weapons, the deterrent value increased. Mao was supposed to have said that even if the US unleashed an atomic war every fifth survivor would be Chinese. That had at least some deterrent effect at Groton or on Eton’s playing fields.
Today, when some wonder (and others appear to praise) about the treatyless “rules based” order their uncertainty or discontent is generally directed at all those who do not comply with that order. Others moan that the United Nations is so ineffective. Altogether the wailing avoids the historical reality of the imperial regime initiated in 1913. That reality was the “great class war” aka the Great War or WWI after its continuation had ended in 1945. Eric Blair (George Orwell) was not prophetic. He was a true realist. He described the really existing empire that was established and unfolding. He knew nothing about the Soviet Union. The religion was Engsoc – British fascism or Anglo-national socialism. Orwell’s Party was the distillation of Anglo-Puritan moralism and its crusading fanaticism, to be intensified in all the white dominions. Behind those crusaders or in their hearts was the nihilistic obsession with power and submission for their own sake. He could not name them because the very fusion of state and corporate power which the Anglo-American Empire perfected became an exoskeleton sustaining power as if without the personality of the potentate. In order to distract from this reality a body of scholars was actively recruited and promoted whose descriptions of so-called totalitarianism or authoritarianism erased the essence of the new form which thirty years of war had perfected. In doing so, these often cited writers and speakers squeezed political theory out of toothpaste tubes and polished the smiles of those who triggered, waged and prolonged the slaughter, plunder and pillage into anonymity. Were these merely academic debates in modern monasteries we could regard them as arcane. However those critical years began a continuing deception about the true sources of the power that ended humanism and turned the short 20th century into the start of a millennium of perpetual war.
How would the realist scholar explain this? What rational basis could such a society have? This is no speculative question. Such a society already prevails but not for the priests of academy. They cannot find the society in which the vast majority of us live. Their brethren have no idea about the economy they pretend to study either. The economist sees monopoly and piracy as “imperfect competition” just as Samuelson told us all. The political scientist sees only imperfect democracy where voting and public assets are entirely owned and controlled by cartels immune even from modest citizen scrutiny. The biologist revels in the destruction of humanity through genetic engineering just like his brothers who created the atomic bomb at the same time. These realists all at the cutting edge of their fields stand ready and willing to push humanity into the precipice their nihilism has created.
It is all so easy to destroy human life, if that’s all you want to do.
An old friend with years in the purchasing department of a leading consumer products conglomerate once told me that the active ingredient in washing powder is actually a minuscule component in those huge boxes of famous brand soap powders from which US daytime television dramas derived their sobriquet. The rest, he said mockingly, is just to make suds (foam). His point was that the consumer pays for the suds.
I retorted that although the deception did not surprise me, he underestimated the importance of foam. Although I am no chemist, unlike my friend I have been washing my own clothes for years. I explained that one had to understand some basic physics, too. Suds, I added, are needed for dispersion, i.e., to carry the chemical solution to the bundle of clothes in the machine. This was done by hand in the days of washboards.
My first attempt at scholarly writing was at the age of 16. The US withdrawal of uniformed services from Vietnam was still fresh and the professionals in the field I thought I would study on the way to a career at the bar were already telling the ostensibly defeated men of the Ivy League why they had lost the war. Years later I would write a series of articles criticising that body of scholarship. At 16 I only had the fragments of the public record in the county library and my readings of Liddell-Hart, Clausewitz and Mao at my disposal. Then my conclusion was that the stated objectives of US war against the Vietnamese people were incompatible with the actions taken to wage the war. That seemed to me to be a simple and logical conclusion. The US did not distinguish between a hammer and a screwdriver.
When I began to study that subject called political science I thought I was going to learn more about how such decisions or distinctions were made. I was soon disappointed. This led me to retain the major — because the required course load was so small — and spend the remaining two years studying every other subject (mainly arts and literatures) to grasp what it might mean to be educated in our society.
Although I had abandoned the academic discipline — and was not called to the bar — I did not cease asking the questions I believed were the subject of study for that field. I can say, to cut the biographical at a decent interval, that I have been an active participant in a representative cross-section of organized activities that has permitted me to see how people in organizations of very different types articulate themselves and behave, both internally and externally. Very few of the theories or concepts to which I had been introduced in academia were in any way adequate to explain or predict (two functions of classical science) what I experienced and observed. In fact the only useful theories I found came from my study of arts and literatures. Furthermore it was these theories which offered some insight into what political scientists actually do in those places they are employed.
In 2014, I submitted the argument that the West was preparing for some kind of world war. I based this on specific observations and the bald assertion that the Anglo-American Establishment (to use Quigley’s term) was a captive of the public school/preparatory school indoctrination of more than two hundred years of empire. In other words, world war a century later was an expression of what the Americans call “school spirit.” “Let’s celebrate Sarajevo with another bout of mass slaughter and destruction.”
I am reasonably sure that the majority of readers dismissed this “unscientific” proposal. Surely no one in office would want to repeat the Great War or World War 2, much less for the sentimental reasons I mentioned. And yet the near universal praise for the deceased realist Heinz K offers an excellent support for my case as do the assessments of another “offensive” realist still with us and rather lionized by all masters and mistresses of insight into today‘s global bellicosity. Heinz K. consistently justified his intrigues based on his reading of Metternich, the continental cutout for British policy after the French Revolution and Napoleon were defeated. Balance of power (terror against the population) and deterrence are quintessential British concepts. With the merger of the British and American Empires through the Great War these doctrines became the central dogma of the piratical cult that Rhodes and Rothschild conceived in the Round Table. It is important to know that while for most people the Round Table is a cult of nobility and order (or something from Camelot or The Holy Grail films), Thomas Malory made quite clear that it was a system of vicious treachery dominated by a sinister and jealous monarch and his deceitful and ruthless champion Lancelot. It is the real Round Table that should concern investigators, not the fantasy.
Far from being a paragon of virtue and loyalty, Lancelot is an adulterer and a cheat who stoops to any trick needed to win the tournaments Arthur has instituted to maintain control over the chivalry and, needless to say, the deplorables (the rest of the population). Anglo-American imperial policy is not similar to the Round Table as Rhodes, Rothschild, Milner et al. envisioned. It is identical with it. One need only look at how NATO and the COVID regime perform. It is a matter of record that the most draconian policies were applied throughout the Anglo-American Empire: the US, Britain and the white dominions. A realist, if that term means anything in the vernacular, would have to ask how such uniform tyranny could have been exercised in all those nominally independent countries? The answer is not hard to find.
Political science as practiced in the academy and those tank manufacturer-funded institutions who collude in the articulation of public policy cannot call attention to the obvious. This is especially true of the so-called “realists.” What makes them so offensive is their obfuscation combined with moralizing verbosity. Yet the “realist” scholar or school is admired by all young and old (we have not yet heard of “trans-aged”).
Consider the pre-mortem and in vivo critiques of the Ukraine and Palestine theaters. The steadfast refusal to analyse these as elements of one world war is generally tolerated because of the episodic objections raised to Anglo-American imperial warfare (my words, since for the realist the AAE and the one war world do not exist). Furthermore, the belligerence or in the case of Heinz K, duplicitous action toward China is never seriously criticised. It defies imagination to consider that the academic, “punditric” and weblog/podcasting spheres have never studied Manifest Destiny (a laudable exception is Bruce Cumings — no political scientist).
“Political science” and its sister “international relations” literally concern the study of politics/policy and trans-border engagements. However what they do not concern is the exercise of real power. Neither the sources of power nor its composition are seriously observed or described. While classic geopolitical writing — often cited as boilerplate — like Mackinder or Mahon at least admits power for its own sake and attempts to describe its exercise, these books, even like the maligned Liddell-Hart are treated as superficially as dinner conversation at the club (whichever type one may imagine). That is no accident. Conversation is not supposed to offer offense to anyone, especially those whom it is dangerous to offend). In the jousting that goes by the name scholarship the best cheat wins.
Like in the automatic washing machine, the power lies in the minuscule cult that rules the empire. Political science and her siblings produce the suds, the foam.
An old friend with years in the purchasing department of a leading consumer products conglomerate once told me that the active ingredient in washing powder is actually a minuscule component in those huge boxes of famous brand soap powders from which US daytime television dramas derived their sobriquet. The rest, he said mockingly, is just to make suds (foam). His point was that the consumer pays for the suds.
I retorted that although the deception did not surprise me, he underestimated the importance of foam. Although I am no chemist, unlike my friend I have been washing my own clothes for years. I explained that one had to understand some basic physics, too. Suds, I added, are needed for dispersion, i.e., to carry the chemical solution to the bundle of clothes in the machine. This was done by hand in the days of washboards.
My first attempt at scholarly writing was at the age of 16. The US withdrawal of uniformed services from Vietnam was still fresh and the professionals in the field I thought I would study on the way to a career at the bar were already telling the ostensibly defeated men of the Ivy League why they had lost the war. Years later I would write a series of articles criticising that body of scholarship. At 16 I only had the fragments of the public record in the county library and my readings of Liddell-Hart, Clausewitz and Mao at my disposal. Then my conclusion was that the stated objectives of US war against the Vietnamese people were incompatible with the actions taken to wage the war. That seemed to me to be a simple and logical conclusion. The US did not distinguish between a hammer and a screwdriver.
When I began to study that subject called political science I thought I was going to learn more about how such decisions or distinctions were made. I was soon disappointed. This led me to retain the major — because the required course load was so small — and spend the remaining two years studying every other subject (mainly arts and literatures) to grasp what it might mean to be educated in our society.
Although I had abandoned the academic discipline — and was not called to the bar — I did not cease asking the questions I believed were the subject of study for that field. I can say, to cut the biographical at a decent interval, that I have been an active participant in a representative cross-section of organized activities that has permitted me to see how people in organizations of very different types articulate themselves and behave, both internally and externally. Very few of the theories or concepts to which I had been introduced in academia were in any way adequate to explain or predict (two functions of classical science) what I experienced and observed. In fact the only useful theories I found came from my study of arts and literatures. Furthermore it was these theories which offered some insight into what political scientists actually do in those places they are employed.
In 2014, I submitted the argument that the West was preparing for some kind of world war. I based this on specific observations and the bald assertion that the Anglo-American Establishment (to use Quigley’s term) was a captive of the public school/preparatory school indoctrination of more than two hundred years of empire. In other words, world war a century later was an expression of what the Americans call “school spirit.” “Let’s celebrate Sarajevo with another bout of mass slaughter and destruction.”
I am reasonably sure that the majority of readers dismissed this “unscientific” proposal. Surely no one in office would want to repeat the Great War or World War 2, much less for the sentimental reasons I mentioned. And yet the near universal praise for the deceased realist Heinz K offers an excellent support for my case as do the assessments of another “offensive” realist still with us and rather lionized by all masters and mistresses of insight into today‘s global bellicosity. Heinz K. consistently justified his intrigues based on his reading of Metternich, the continental cutout for British policy after the French Revolution and Napoleon were defeated. Balance of power (terror against the population) and deterrence are quintessential British concepts. With the merger of the British and American Empires through the Great War these doctrines became the central dogma of the piratical cult that Rhodes and Rothschild conceived in the Round Table. It is important to know that while for most people the Round Table is a cult of nobility and order (or something from Camelot or The Holy Grail films), Thomas Malory made quite clear that it was a system of vicious treachery dominated by a sinister and jealous monarch and his deceitful and ruthless champion Lancelot. It is the real Round Table that should concern investigators, not the fantasy.
Far from being a paragon of virtue and loyalty, Lancelot is an adulterer and a cheat who stoops to any trick needed to win the tournaments Arthur has instituted to maintain control over the chivalry and, needless to say, the deplorables (the rest of the population). Anglo-American imperial policy is not similar to the Round Table as Rhodes, Rothschild, Milner et al. envisioned. It is identical with it. One need only look at how NATO and the COVID regime perform. It is a matter of record that the most draconian policies were applied throughout the Anglo-American Empire: the US, Britain and the white dominions. A realist, if that term means anything in the vernacular, would have to ask how such uniform tyranny could have been exercised in all those nominally independent countries? The answer is not hard to find.
Political science as practiced in the academy and those tank manufacturer-funded institutions who collude in the articulation of public policy cannot call attention to the obvious. This is especially true of the so-called “realists.” What makes them so offensive is their obfuscation combined with moralizing verbosity. Yet the “realist” scholar or school is admired by all young and old (we have not yet heard of “trans-aged”).
Consider the pre-mortem and in vivo critiques of the Ukraine and Palestine theaters. The steadfast refusal to analyse these as elements of one world war is generally tolerated because of the episodic objections raised to Anglo-American imperial warfare (my words, since for the realist the AAE and the one war world do not exist). Furthermore, the belligerence or in the case of Heinz K, duplicitous action toward China is never seriously criticised. It defies imagination to consider that the academic, “punditric” and weblog/podcasting spheres have never studied Manifest Destiny (a laudable exception is Bruce Cumings — no political scientist).
“Political science” and its sister “international relations” literally concern the study of politics/policy and trans-border engagements. However what they do not concern is the exercise of real power. Neither the sources of power nor its composition are seriously observed or described. While classic geopolitical writing — often cited as boilerplate — like Mackinder or Mahon at least admits power for its own sake and attempts to describe its exercise, these books, even like the maligned Liddell-Hart are treated as superficially as dinner conversation at the club (whichever type one may imagine). That is no accident. Conversation is not supposed to offer offense to anyone, especially those whom it is dangerous to offend). In the jousting that goes by the name scholarship the best cheat wins.
Like in the automatic washing machine, the power lies in the minuscule cult that rules the empire. Political science and her siblings produce the suds, the foam.
Economic history has its overt and covert sides. Now the State has been almost completely privatized, i.e., conveyed to the so-called hedge funds. It may be safe to say that the West has been converted into one huge financial derivative system.
To understand this without drowning in jargon it is easiest to describe the structure as global extortion or blackmail. As Whitney Webb has shown the murder of Jeffrey Epstein was probably a blunt attempt to eliminate one of the visible faces of the extortion hub for managing public officials. There is another level of extortion that is applied to the public purse. In foreign parts this is the manipulation of the money market through public debt. However there is also an area which has yet to be adequately mapped. For simplicity we can call this “lawfare.”
Lawfare is the application of civil and criminal judicial process to bankrupt targeted opposition by initiating litigation against regime opponents before captured venues where punitive civil damages deplete or eliminate the personal assets of individuals using ideologically constructed complaints which while not criminal are capable of mustering mass moral condemnation even without substantiation. Here the old Inquisition procedures apply where a presumption of guilt and the reversal of the burden of proof are imposed.
A second more insidious strategy is pursued which is less obvious. Analogous to classical foreign debt extortion, the State uses the threat of physical or economic penalties to conceal the use of extorted funds intended for covert action. Traditionally drug and gun dealing have been used to generate funds whose political origins have to be concealed. One reason the CIA and SIS have a vested interested in these illegal markets is that they provide money off the books for operations that — were they funded through official appropriations — would create less deniable paper trails. The deniability of an operation at arm’s length relies on hiding cash flow. This is one of the conclusions from Douglas Valentine’s work on the Bureau of Narcotics and DEA where he explained why and how these agencies became subordinated to covert action arms of the State. Thomas Röper in recent preliminary investigations found another tool by which lawfare can benefit the secret services.
Röper started by asking who and what Doctors Without Borders are and why the Russian government was accusing the group of espionage? He reported how difficult it was to find any published reports explaining where this group’s millions originate. However a crowd query produced something remarkable. At least in Germany he received multiple reports from people summoned before German courts who were told that they would receive consideration (such as in plea bargaining) if they donated money to its German franchise Ärzte ohne Grenzen. The frequency with which this was reported more than suggested a pattern or even a policy.
An extrapolation of the number of civil or criminal settlements of this sort easily pointed to double-digit millions. Now if one considers — as I have argued in the past- that the Antifa and BLM groups in the US are actually armed propaganda groups analogous to those formed in Vietnam in the CIA Phoenix Program, then the enormous million-dollar settlements in US civil actions awarded to these groups or rioters and arsonists make more sense. Namely the city governments sued have been compelled to deplete their budgets with transfers of tax money (actually public debt) to covert operatives. Thus these political warfare actions are funded openly by court judgements. The NGO, whether duly constituted or merely implied, receives public money, tax exempt and with no personal attribution or paper trail linking the flow of funds to the sponsoring entity.
How do the hedge funds benefit? Aside from arbitrage these funds have direct influence over insurance rates and other financial levers that can be applied selectively or collectively to the targeted jurisdiction or entity. Failure to empty the coffers means that the risk ratings that establish the cost of any entity’s future financing must deteriorate. In other words a punitive extortion cycle is anchored in the model.
The result is the perpetual hostage status of the target and full deniability that any planned operation underlies the action. That adds more depth to the term Webb used to title her book: One Nation Under Blackmail.
At regular intervals the high representatives of the Allied Powers (West) congregate to commemorate the “kick-off” that led we are told to victory in Europe ending part of the hostilities in the Second World War. They meet on the often-cold beaches of Normandy, the western coastal region of France from which William the Conqueror led his hordes to decimate what became Great Britain and establish the monarchy and aristocracy, which until the end of 1947 comprised rulers of the most extended imperial state in history. There, the successors to the temporary autocrats of the US, Britain and France, engage in ritual self-congratulation and insincere piety. The D-Day amphibious landing of some 150,000 troops of the combined British and American Empires on those windy shores provides their alibi. Since the end of the war against the Soviet Union in 1989, the former adversaries are no longer the targets of self-righteous rebuke. The total forces of on-going occupation have wholly reconstructed Germany and Italy in the image of the victors. Moreover, the Eastern ally, if not shunned, has been repeatedly insulted on these occasions—at least since Vladimir Putin became head of the Russian Federation.
On or about 6 June 2024 will be the 80th anniversary of what Western schoolbooks and Hollywood propaganda films tell us was the decisive blow against the NSDAP regime in the German Reich. The continuing war through Ukraine is beyond irony. Meanwhile, the expected continuation of slaughter in Palestine will surely enhance the cynicism on those hallowed beaches.
However, the purpose of D-Day, the better late than never concession to the Soviet Union of a “second front” against Germany, has always been presented as evidence of the West’s magnificent contributions to defeating Germany for the second time in the 20th century. Subsequent Anglo-American occupation of first the rump Federal Republic and then the annexed Democratic Republic have assured that the Anglo-American history of the Second World War prevails in the culture of the vanquished. Even today to challenge that history in any public fashion can bring dire consequences.
Critical historians have repeatedly called attention to discrepancies in the official history as well as the on-going revisionism with its denials.[1] While even the suggestion that this official history may be inaccurate or incomplete can incriminate the critic as a so-called “holocaust denier”, attempts by the Russian Federation to punish the glorification of the fascist era have been opposed with scorn by those who ostensibly fought on the same side. The revisionary process reiterates or elaborates the view that the Soviet Union and the NS regime in Germany were essentially the same. The implication is that the Red Army defence of what was still the Soviet Union against German invasion was a crime while the collaboration of ultra-right wing Western Ukrainians with the German invasion—including formation of dedicated Waffen SS divisions like the Galizia—were heroic acts of national self-defence.[2] No later than 2014 this implication has been adopted as canonical history in the West, at least at governmental level. The bureaucratic authoritarian bodies of the European Union have fostered this process with attempts to equate the Soviet Union with the NS regime or at least to attribute the war to the acts or omissions of the Soviet leadership under Joseph Stalin.
However if blatant distortions directed at the defunct Soviet Union and its successor, the Russian Federation, are relatively well known and openly controversial, there are numerous matters regarding the Second World War which still deserve some scrutiny. Such scrutiny is not merely of academic relevance. The Second World War—along with its precursor the Great War—is the great sacramental myth upon which the Anglo-American Empire relies for its legitimacy, even among those who are either reluctant or embarrassed to accept it. Then as now a central issue is the concept of “war guilt”. It may be argued that this moral or religious concept derives from that most formative of eras in Western history—the Crusades. The Latin papacy, both for political and financial reasons, established the Christian doctrine of war for salvation of souls. The political reasons were obvious. Expanding the Latin empire required more than mendicant preachers it needed “boots on the ground”. Rome’s coup against Constantinople could only be sustained by military means. Moreover the control over the trade routes that passed through Asia Minor required armed occupation. Hence, the relatively under-populated peasant provinces had to be reaped for able bodies. Preaching the Crusades—recruiting foot soldiers and raising money—was complementary to the papal derivatives market aka the trade in relics and indulgences. For all the cant about Islam and its holy wars, the Latin papacy established salvation through organized mass murder as a firm institution in Western culture, a curse with us even today. A salvation model needs sin and guilt from which one is to be saved in the first place. Hence it was probably a natural development that empires built on the exploitation of the salvation model of militarism would need a moral template by which to judge their victories and defeats. If the Great War was the culmination of Western imperial competition then it is hardly surprising that morality would reach a critical mass, leading to the infamous “war guilt” provisions of the Versailles treaties.
Wherein could the “war guilt” actually be found? The diplomatic record, some of which has actually made its way into history books, shows that the French acted covertly to undermine German efforts to negotiate with the members of what became the Entente. The Wilhelmstrasse had successfully persuaded the Russian Empire to withdraw its general mobilization order and negotiate differences with Germany.[3] Thus, the Schlieffen Plan for the invasion of France via neutral Belgium became an imperative for the German high command. The French government would have been forced to negotiate to avoid a war with an industrially and militarily superior German Reich. Even if this French subterfuge is conceded, German militarism is claimed as unimpeachable evidence for German war guilt. A disingenuous Australian historian reasserted the naïve claim that the war was no one’s fault but the result of “sleepwalking” in Europe’s foreign offices. This attempt to sidestep the “war guilt” issue is self-serving. Rather than openly confronting the chain of culpability and the exculpatory evidence in favour of the German Reich, the “sleepwalkers” thesis removes the culpability issue from the table under the pretext of dismissing the “war guilt” question entirely.[4] This question of war guilt cannot be properly addressed without first considering the fundamental change that occurred between the “long 19th century” and the “short 2oth century”.
Political economist Michael Hudson summarized the “long 19th century” in a very different way than its most noted proponent, British historian Eric Hobsbawm. While Professor Hobsbawm describes the “long 19th century” as the evolution of liberal-enlightenment (somewhat democratic) values, Professor Hudson also following Marx describes it as the evolution of industrial capitalism toward socialism.[5] By that Professor Hudson described the direction of classical economics (also identified with the Enlightenment) as the struggle to eliminate the rentier or landlord class and its parasitic role in society.[6] Industrial adventurers would take capital and organize it in new ways together with labour to modernize society and provide goods and services appropriate to that modernization. Part of the surplus value would accrue to entrepreneurs but those resources which were natural, like land, water, air, minerals etc. would be developed as state monopolies so that the forces of production would drive society rather than the forces of extraction. This socialisation was in fact occurring despite the most vicious resistance by the landlord class and its ally the Church. According to Hudson, 1914 did not end liberal democracy but the drive toward socialism necessary for any kind of democracy, whether liberal or mass-based.
The Great War was not accidentally a war against Germany. It was a war launched against an increasingly efficient social-economic model that was out-producing the leading manufacturing country of the day and moreover delivering a higher quality of life to its citizens. This war started however before 1914 through economic and cultural war against both the German Empire and Austria-Hungary. German militarism was fed by the successful efforts by those who controlled British and French finance to obstruct the Berlin-Baghdad Railway. Not unlike measures presently taken to impede the Belt and Road Initiative, every effort was taken to block a land route from Central Europe to East Asia that would bypass the British merchant marine and Anglo-French ownership of Suez—with all that control implied for international trade.[7] In 1914, like in 2024, free trade and freedom of navigation were reserved to the Anglo-American Empire and no one else. Absent realistic commercial or diplomatic channels to establish Germany’s access to the world economy, the intensification of military preparation could have been no surprise. However objectionable armed force is, Germany’s application of it was neither unique nor without justification. Guilt, termed liability in civil law, not only presumes intent but also the capacity to act otherwise. The doctrine of force majeure or acts of God rebuts liability for acts performed under conditions the actor could neither foresee nor prevent. Hence official historians, as dedicated attorneys for the Establishment, must conceal or obscure evidence that an adversary was compelled to act or was denied any alternative to the act condemned.
The Second World War was a continuation of the British Empire—meanwhile all but formally amalgamated with the American Empire—to assure British domination of world trade and Britain’s exceptional status among nations. Rightly those summoned to Versailles to submit to further economic and social strangulation were to suffer the wrath of nationalists at home. Then as now, nationalists are evil if they are not one’s own. In the aftermath of this until then greatest known gratuitous mass slaughter of youth and manhood, the efforts to restrain competition and obstruct economic development led to the overthrow of the Romanov dynasty in the impoverished peasant empire of Russia. The Communist Party under Vladimir Lenin began a massive socio-economic transformation. This revolution was necessarily built upon the wholly inadequate and failed tsarist infrastructure and bureaucracy; a fact Lenin admitted would be a major obstacle to the country’s modernization. However this revolution threatened the permanent debtor status, which the Romanov’s century-long pawning of Russia’s wealth and economic capacity had created. Thus there was every incentive for the same bankers and cartels to support the counter-revolution with the help of the US, Great Britain, the Czech Legion and Japan. The withdrawal from the Great War had aggravated the Anglo-French front. To prevent the default on the battlefield and in debt service, the international community (the banking community that is) induced the US to intervene on the side of the British and French just enough to save impending bad debts and to prevent a negotiated peace among equals.
Economic warfare against Germany continued under the various extortion treaties designed for the public imagination to “punish Germany” for its war guilt. Thus an attempt to overthrow the servile Weimar regime was defeated by Allied support to the German military and the assassination of critical leaders. Not only were Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg murdered by forces friendly to the Allies. Officially, Walter Rathenau, son of the family that ran Germany’s AEG electricity group, was assassinated by a right-wing anti-Semite. Most probably he was murdered for his negotiation of the Rapallo agreement between Germany and the Soviet Union by which the former would supply industrial equipment in return for raw materials.[8] Even the circumstances of Rathenau’s murder bear an uncanny resemblance to another conspiracy, the assassination of the Austrian Archduke Franz-Ferdinand in Sarajevo.[9] The more one examines story of economic warfare, assassination and ethno-nationalist conspiracy, the more obvious it becomes that the Open Society Foundations, NED and Otpor merely modernized established British covert foreign policy toolbox. Historians, or those who pretend to this function, as well as journalists have long been key performers in the mass deception that perpetuates “good war” mythology and its dramatic climax, war guilt.
However prior to the Great War, “war guilt” was not an essential part of the law of nations. In fact, one of the consequences of the treaties signed in Westphalia ending the first Thirty Years’ War was to de-moralize it. By recognizing the authority of rulers to define the religious regime of their respective states, a significant step was taken away from the salvation model of warfare. By the 19th century this could be captured in the dictum attributed to Carl von Clauswitz that “war is the continuation of policy with other means”. The realpolitik expounded in his classic Vom Kriege (1832) was a general’s assessment of the professional soldier’s role in his country’s public life. While it is understandable that a professional army officer would write about the relevance of armed combat in statecraft, this is not the same as preferring it to diplomacy or negotiated problem-solving. By withdrawing the religious or moralizing component war itself, von Clausewitz did not legitimate war as an amoral endeavour. Instead he placed the responsibility for morals and ethics on those who make state policy and hence decide whether it is to be pursued by force of arms. Thus the soldier is a servant of a moral or political order and not the one to define it. Any question of guilt or innocence has to be answered in the policy and those who make it not in the army per se.
On 27 August 1928, in Paris, the representatives of the high contracting parties, including the United States of America, the United Kingdom (and its dominions), France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Belgium and Ireland, signed the General Treaty for Renunciation of War as an Instrument of National Policy, aka the Kellogg-Briand Pact. This much-ridiculed treaty, still an element of international law in force, ratified by the US and hence integrated into its national law, was remarkably simple.
Its main text comprised only two articles.
“Article I
The high contracting parties solemnly declare in the names of their respective peoples that they condemn recourse to war for the solution of international controversies and renounce it as an instrument of national policy in their relations with one another.
Article II
The high contracting parties agree that the settlement or solution of all disputes or conflicts of whatever nature or of whatever origin they may be, which may arise among them, shall never be sought except by pacific means.”
This treaty was signed, adopted, and ratified independent of other inter-governmental institutions such as the then extant League of Nations. Hence it became international law independent of any inter-governmental or supranational body. Its provisions were absorbed by the United Nations Charter but not superseded by it. By 1929 all the countries that were later to constitute the belligerents during the Second World War had ratified the treaty.
The Kellogg-Briand Pact transcended the realpolitik with which von Clausewitz and a century of militarism had been associated. Von Clausewitz removed the morality from the profession of arms and submitted it to the authority of the State rather than the generals. The 1928 treaty renounced that particular continuation of policy and created an obligation to negotiate and apply peaceful measures. It is unnecessary to demonstrate the ineffectiveness of the treaty in preventing war. Even when the treaty was signed and ratified contemporaries saw it is empty idealism. There were neither enforcement nor penalty provisions. However such objections lead to the absurdities of the current UN system by which the dominant founding member arrogates the sole right to punish “breaches of the peace” by waging war against those accused. It did not take long for this to occur. The US abused not only its veto power but also every other diplomatic and economic measure to obtain Security Council approval of its 1951 invasion of the Korean peninsula.
However, before such blatant bullying and deceit were applied to protect the US coup d’etat in Seoul and plans for “rollback” in China, there was an even more insidious deceit. The “good war” has meanwhile been shown to be far less good than Hollywood or schoolbooks have told us for the past eighty years. The unambiguous battle by the “good” against the “evil”, while necessary to preserve the crusading spirit of the Anglo-American Empire, is full of inconsistencies beginning with the funding of the NSDAP paramilitary forces needed to suppress political opposition before the elections in which Hitler’s party established a minority government with the help of the Latin pontiff. The formal abolition of the Zentrum ordered by Pope Pius XI eliminated the largest party in the German Reichstag and the only formal obstacle to Hitler’s appointment as chancellor. This detail is often omitted to support the erroneous assertion that the Germans elected Hitler. Once the government had been formed and the Enabling Act adopted to eliminate constitutional limitations on the government’s power, there was no shortage of support from American and British cartels. Well before the orders for Operation Barbarossa were given, Hitler’s government and rearmed military was being used as a cut-out for Britain’s war against the Spanish Republic. The minutes of Hitler’s meeting with Franco in Hendaye indicate that Franco appreciated Britain’s role in his victory while Hitler did not.
Carroll Quigley credibly argued that there was no “appeasement” on the part of Neville Chamberlain in Munich. Quite the contrary, Chamberlain in his capacity as a member of the so-called Round Table group, was intent on delaying any confrontation with the German Empire that would direct its attentions to the West. Moreover the strategic negotiations that led to the absorption of the Sudetenland, the occupation of Czechoslovakia and the annexation of Austria were generally accepted as legitimate remedies to the wholesale territorial seizures resulting from Germany’s defeat in 1918. There can be no doubt that negotiating the amalgamation of German-speaking territories from the defunct Austro-Hungarian Empire was entirely consistent with the stated policy of the famous Wilsonian “Fourteen Points”. These principles had until Munich never been applied to Germany or Germans. The subsequent portrayal of the Munich accords as surrender to an insatiable German dictator obscures Britain’s constant duplicity. At the same time it was conceding the legitimacy of German demands it was secretly encouraging the Czechs and Poles to oppose them, promising diplomatic and military support which never came. These features along the road to world war, while perhaps unfamiliar, are sufficiently incriminating to debunk British claims to innocence. Nonetheless claims to Germany’s “evil” role persist.
After years of suppression, testimony is emerging that supports the accusations that Franklin Roosevelt at least could have known that the Empire of Japan had planned and was undertaking an attack on America’s Hawaiian colony. Although Roosevelt was accused of deceit at the time of the attack, the story of the surprise and unprovoked Japanese aggression has remained the cornerstone of US history, not only of the Second World War but also for all its subsequent wars. Pearl Harbor itself became a metonym for fiendish surprise by which any adversary of the US is denounced as evil—and popularly accepted as such. Despite the suspicions harboured for decades, official history has maintained the ex post facto argument that even if the POTUS had known about the pending attack on the Pearl Harbor naval station, the evil of the Anti-Comintern Pact regimes, usually known as the Axis, is self-evident.[10] Feigning surprise was “a good lie” for “a good war”. However that is doubly dishonest. First of all, the horrors of the Second World War were only acknowledged in their magnitude after the Axis had been defeated. Defenders of the “so what” thesis must attribute clairvoyance to the POTUS not merely good intentions.
The “good lie” for the “good war” defence relies on two assumptions: one, the Anglo-American Empire was innocent of the cause of the war and two, it was genuinely surprised by the attacks that led to its participation in the hostilities. If the Anglo-American Empire was culpable in the start of the war, the element of surprise attack is deemed mitigating. In other words, the culpability accepted only extends to the part in real conflicts and controversies, not to the aggressive acts committed by Germany and Japan.
There is a technical issue, in itself minor, but if given due weight may also rebut the claims to innocence in causing the war. Here the much-maligned Kellogg-Briand Pact is quite relevant. The terms of the General Treaty oblige the parties to resolve problems by peaceful means and to renounce war. By alleging that one or more of the Axis powers committed surprise attacks the argument is made that it was the Germany or Japan which had breached its obligations under the treaty by failing to pursue negotiations in lieu of using armed force.
Here the actions of the Soviet Union take an entirely different colour than the one in which they are commonly depicted. The Treaty of Non-Aggression between Germany and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, has been denounced by the official histories and by many who considered themselves members of the Left, or even a communist party. This treaty has been almost universally condemned in the West. The Establishment points to it as proof for its “Hitler equals Stalin” equation. The Left beyond the orthodox Communist Party followers of the time, saw it as Stalin willing to appease Hitler at the expense of the international workers’ struggle against fascism—however defined. Yet US Ambassador Joseph Davies (from 1936-1938) was quite clear when he said that the Soviet government pursued negotiations with Germany while France and Britain were essentially arming Hitler to attack the Soviet Union.[11] Davies, who had no reason to defend either Stalin or the CPSU, was assessing the diplomatic cesspool of British and French foreign policy.
Meanwhile in the Pacific, where the US had expanded its empire in 1901 to include practically every island that was neither French nor British between San Francisco and Manila, the US consistently supported Japanese expansion into the Asian mainland. For his contributions to this feat Theodore Roosevelt was even awarded a Nobel Peace Prize—proof that the award had been debased long before it was given to Henry Kissinger. Later US Secretary of State Dean Acheson would even admit that one of his principal assignments in Foggy Bottom prior to 7 December 1941 was to direct economic warfare against Japan. The US within the context of its established geopolitical doctrine of Manifest Destiny, under the pretext of the Open Door, was determined to succeed all European powers as the dominant imperial force in East Asia.[12] The United States was pursuing a covert policy, which could have no other effect than to provoke hostilities with Japan. The US supported the transfer of German settlements in China to the Japanese Empire at the end of the Great War. This further eased Japanese conquest of Manchuria, a logical move after the US had brokered Japanese annexation of Korea.
The second phase of the Chinese Revolution had pitted the right wing of the Kuomintang (KMT) against its enforced partners the Chinese Communist Party. Chiang Kai-shek clearly understood that he had the backing of the US against the Communist Party in the same way that the British backed Franco. Japanese invasion was barely opposed because Chiang saw the Japanese not unlike Hitler’s Legion Condor. Superior Japanese military force would help him to crush the Communists and reach an agreement with Japan for the benefit of his own party. Both Mao and Chiang were aware of this role that the US and Japan were playing in China’s internal revolution. US foreign policy and even war plans throughout the 19th century anticipated the possibility of war with the British Empire, its only natural enemy. Nonetheless, British tradition and education has long been the source of American foreign policy, diplomacy and duplicity. The New England elite, whether from Business or the Ivy League colleges, barely concealed their admiration for the British model of indirect rule and duplicitous, espionage-laden diplomacy. Using Japan as a wedge with which to dominate China risked the emergence of Japan’s own capabilities and interests. The Second World War would determine which country’s power would define the Asia-Pacific half of the world, for a while at least.
Already on the eve of the attack on Pearl Harbor there was at least one general officer on MacArthur’s staff who attempted to raise the alarm of a coming Japanese attack only to find that this was no surprise. Moreover, he apparently concluded that there was foreknowledge of which he was not privy. After the war, including three years in a Japanese POW camp, Edward P. King, Jr. wrote a memoir no one would publish in which he related his experience leading up to the attack. In Day of Deceit[13], Robert Stinnet documents what others have claimed but been unable to make heard.
The circumstances before, during and after the attack were so irregular they even deviated from the routines of peacetime naval duty. Leaving aside the suspicious circumstantial evidence that no efforts were made to prepare or execute adequate defence of the naval station, the key to the surprise myth relies on a technical issue which when discussed is minimized or obscured. The British and Hollywood have paraded the story of their cryptographic coup against the German Reich so that everyone has probably heard of Turing and ENIGMA. Less trumpeted is the fact that US Navy signals intelligence and the ONI had successfully broken Japanese ciphers and thus the US was able to monitor most of the imperial fleet’s cable traffic. Even today we only know a fraction of the capacity of signals intelligence work since “national security” would be jeopardized were the extent of surveillance actually known. One need only ask Mr Snowden or consider the fate of Mr Assange to recognize how little we actually know about the cryptographic work of the Anglo-American Empire and its government agencies and privatized surveillance system.
However, it is worth considering that both Germany and Japan were heavily exposed in what they apparently believed were coded communications. Since as has already been shown the Anglo-American Empire had targeted Germany and Japan long before the outbreak of hostilities they had worked very hard to incite, it is not far-fetched to imagine that the deciphering of Japanese and German communications was an on-going operation before 1939 or 1941. If the Anglo-American Empire was in full possession of meaningful, decrypted communications of its two primary adversaries, then it was also in a position to face those potential belligerents with diplomatic arguments for resolving the disputes at hand. Germany and Japan were both led by governments well aware of their relative weaknesses and material deficiencies in the event of war. They also knew that protracted war would exhaust their resources while their adversaries could rely on sources of supply practically immune from attack. There is no reason to believe that confronted with the exposure of their intentions and preparations they would not have launched attacks that could not be surprises.
This leads to the question that remains relevant today. If the Anglo-American Empire was not surprised by attacks but merely feigned surprise then they knowingly provoked a massive world war that not only could have been averted by negotiation but which they were obliged by international law to avert. By inciting Germany and Japan to wage war against them and concealing the knowledge that would have forced all parties to aver armed conflict, they actively inhibited negotiations before the outbreak of hostilities. Unlike the Soviet Union which demonstrably negotiated to the very end, not only with the regime in Berlin but with Berlin’s sponsors and promoters in the Anglo-American Empire, the Anglo-American Empire was in grave breach of its treaty obligations. As more honest historians and journalists have come to argue, the International Military Tribunal—only convened because the Soviet Union insisted on trials—should have included the British Empire and the United States of America in the dock, unindicted co-conspirators, for the breach of the peace and crimes against humanity they wilfully incited, in addition to those they perpetrated on their own account. Instead the crimes of “breach of the peace” derived from the Kellogg-Briand Pact were perverted, one might even say “encrypted” such that they continue to disguise the violations of the substance and the spirit of that noble act of modern diplomacy.
ENDNOTES:
[1] Among others Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States (1990), Jacques Pauwels, The Myth of the Good War and The Great Class War, reviewed by this author “’Romanticism and War’: Contextualizing a Theory of Interpretation”, Dissident Voice (15 September 2015). Although Zinn debunks much of the official World War 2 history in the US he completely omits – like many others- the Yalta agreements and the background they set for the Soviet Union in the post-war order. This is no doubt in part because Harry Truman repudiated the Yalta accords at the Potsdam Conference, a time when most people had no idea what had been agreed.
[2] Such was the “heroism” that the remainder of the Galizia division was packed from Italian POW camps and sent to Britain en masse at the end of the war from whence they spread throughout the Empire it seems.
[3] Metonyms for the various governments and foreign ministries: Wilhelmstrasse (Berlin), Quai d’Orsay (Paris), Foggy Bottom (Washington), Whitehall (London)
[5] Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes: The Short 20th Century 1914-1991 (1994)
[6] For articles, interviews, and bibliography of Professor Hudson’s political economic analyses see www.michael-hudson.com
[7] Summarized in F. William Engdahl, A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order (2012)
[8] This story is told in Time Forward!, (Vremya, vperyod!), Valentin Kataev (1932) in English (1995)
[9] Markus Osterriede, Welt im Umbruch: Nationalitätenfrage, Ordnungspläne und Rudolf Steiners Haltung im Ersten Weltkrieg (2014)
[10] The term “axis” for the Anti-Comintern Pact, initially concluded between Germany and Italy and later including Japan, actually conceals the purpose of the Axis, one in which the Allies with the exception of the Soviet Union were entirely agreed. The Axis powers were explicitly agreed to combat the supposed expansion of the Soviet Union by means of the Communist International (Comintern).
[11] An important element of the treaty was the restoration of territory to each country that the Entente had allocated to the new Polish republic. Claims that this was conquest ignore the way in which the Entente imposed border and territorial realignments on Germany and the Russia (which was in the midst of civil war during most of the negotiations).
[12] For a thorough discussion of US imperial policy in the Asia-Pacific region see Bruce Cumings, Dominion from Sea to Sea: Pacific Ascendancy and American Power (2010)
[13] Robert B. Stinnet, Day of Deceit The Truth About FDR and Pearl Harbor (2001)
There have been recent elections in numerous principalities. The constellations by which governments — the outward and visible signs of obscured and conspiratorial power — have been formed since 2020 are not in themselves unique but have occurred with an intensity — I like here the German term Verdichtung, i.e. thickening or coagulation — perhaps unlike anything since the financial coup d‘etat that inaugurated the Great Depression (as it was called in the US).
In fact, one could date this phenomenon to the unpredicted victory of Mr Donald Trump in 2016 over the repulsive partner of presidential philanderer William J. Clinton. As I wrote at the time, no later than the inauguration of Donald Trump, it should have been apparent that the last pretenses of a diverse media had evaporated. The catastrophe of 2020 ought not to have surprised anyone.
Amidst the verbal streams, I hesitate to call them a debate, as to the significance of the current janitor in the US executive mansion, aka White House, we can observe the same impoverished thought that characterizes the choice of athletic footwear, meanwhile the universal equivalent to denim trousers for all but the princely functions. Certainly there are criticisms that point to the superficiality of the bourgeois electoral systems, whether in the US or its vassal states. They are valid as far as they go. Then there is the criticism which I certainly share that voters — real or virtual — are far too influenced by corrupt mass media. Although I am actually tired of repeating it, I will again iterate that the Press and the journalistic “profession” was created for commercial propaganda and not for education of the population. It is to paraphrase George Carlin, “a cute idea” that journalism has duty to inform, but that is all it is. If journalists inform the public it is despite journalism and not because of it. One only needs to examine the history of this profession to recognize that it was conceived as prostitution and most of its practitioners have wittingly or unwittingly followed the strip.
Underlying all these distractions is a legitimate complexity of ancient quality. That is the difficulty of distinguishing between the person, the personality and the organization. In conventional circumstances, e.g. intimate human contact, the terms are person, character and relationship. So a marriage is seen as a relationship conditioned by the persons with their families and histories perhaps and the characters of those persons in the conditions under which the marriage’s inception and experience. In the greater format of the world of which many people are only conscious through electronic media, this complexity is even harder to describe than that of marriage (which anyone who has been involved in matrimonial affairs can admit is complex enough).
The model for understanding this problem, in the West at least, is Latin Christendom. To illustrate the problem in the simplest manner I can imagine I have to draw on an anecdote. Many years ago, as a young man educated in a Latin household — although not strictly — I had a “revelation” that I should apply myself to the priesthood. As a youth I did not believe in God or the saints. However I did not have to believe in the Church. It was there. I could see it and all those who constituted it with their clothes, rituals, buildings and special language. In fact, one would have to be an idiot not to believe in the Church at the empirical frontier of Western life (I almost wrote civilization but by Gandhi corrected).
So one fine day I entered the reception of the Latin seminary in a German city where I lived at the time. The priest who interviewed me upon my request to be accepted for study to join the clergy asked me first: would I tell him about my personal relationship to Jesus Christ? I was quite shocked by the question. Trying to hide my surprise, I replied that when I was raised as a member of the Latin Catholic Church such a question was never raised. One did not have a personal relationship to the lord and king. There was the Church and its ruler and we were subjects. This answer did not satisfy my interlocutor. He was quite perfunctory and told me to come back when I had a better answer to the question.
At the time I thought, this was a question any evangelical Protestant might ask but surely not a Latin priest. With time I began to see the problem in another light. The Latin Church, the DNA of Western life (although this cliché is also suspect like Francis Crick’s whole essentialist model of human genetics), created the person of Jesus to attract the individual with the idea that the deity was recognizable in human life — incarnate. However Christ the King was the dominant form in which this personality was propagated. So personal subjugation became internalized through an image of the human who was nonetheless a character in the organizational language and explanation of the Church hierarchy.
When people feel compelled to talk about how and who a particular courtier is elected or appointed to high office, e.g. POTUS, they are caught in the sleight of hand that presents a persona as a person. The individual Jesus is not the founder of the Church. The persona of Jesus (or any other individual in another religious constellation) is not the same as a historical individual. He, she or it is a mere manifestation of an organization/explanation which expresses power through the representation of personae as if they were real, flesh and blood human beings.
It is not easy to distinguish people from the personae they adopt — or by which they are created — in the organizations they serve. However it is necessary to understand the scope of organizations in human life in order to even begin to recognize the discrepancy between our needs at the empirical frontier and the actions of organizations fundamentally antagonistic to them.
Although I have never been anything but a professional dilettante, I have spent some time in a number of professions. One of these was political correspondent at the United Nations headquarters from 1985 until 1987. Another was as professor of English in Berlin after the GDR was annexed in 1989. In the accidents of my amateur activity, I have managed to meet or at least hear in person a few personalities of public life (in German: Personen öffentliches Leben). These include artists as well as politicians and other notorious people.
One September day, my spouse at that time and I went from our Westend home to one of Berlin’s many private theaters, the Renaissance Theater in Charlottenburg. The occasion was an event sponsored by the Bertelsmann Stiftung (a powerful Westphalian media conglomerate with the expected orientations). The Berliner Lektionen (Berlin Readings— or lessons) was lecture series with an eclectic choice of people from all aspects of public life. The program was directed by Ulrich Eckart, then director of the Berlin Festival.
My particular excitement, not shared by my far less politically interested wife, was the meeting on the stage of the then grand old man of foreign policy in US-occupied Germany and the semi-retired Rockefeller courtier, Heinz Kissinger, aka known as Henry. Well aware that Heinz Kissinger was born in Germany and recalling that he always spoke English with an atrocious accent, I was curious to hear the man in person in the once capital of the country in which he was born and — like Leo Strauss — abandoned for Columbia before the Great War against the Soviet Union began.
After a duly laudatory introduction by his junior, Hans-Dietrich Genscher, Heinz Kissinger began his introduction in the language he learned at birth. My wife and I listened with incredulity as he told the audience he could not speak German. After this attempt at humility by a man notorious for his lack thereof, he began his lecture in English. My wife, although a native of the region north of the Rhine, was fluent in English. She looked at me with consternation. She could barely understand a word he spoke once he switched to English. As a teacher far more accustomed to the bandwidth in which English is spoken by non-native speakers, I was merely insulted by the rudeness of a man who lacked the courtesy to speak to his former countrymen in their own tongue.
Heinz Kissinger spoke his entire life to those for whom obsequiousness was a paramount virtue. It is difficult to say whether he was honored by so many because of the diplomatic readiness for self-deception or the vanity of power itself. It could not have been the talent for language or communication. For decades, Heinz Kissinger has been praised as a sober representative of balance of power politics. His entire career was based ostensibly on the lessons of the Congress of Vienna. However, the Metternich order was just the first step of reaction against the Peace of Westphalia and the attempt to democratize it in the French Revolution. His famous opening to China was nothing more than calumny to aggravate the divisions between the Soviet Union. And most recently the Establishment press propagated the same “mystique du Kissinger” when he travelled to Beijing. His recent homilies about Ukraine and Russia are the pathetic wheezing of a man who maybe felt in his last breaths that one or two sane words might save him from the Gates.
As I was considering my reaction to the demise of this grand courtier of capitalism, I searched for the date when I had the dubious honor of an audience. It was 11 September 1994.
At least as one response to the perceived failures of the French Revolution, some of what became the Romantic movements in the 19th century turned away from social interaction, especially collective activity, and toward individual isolation. Such a reaction was not peculiar to this period. In fact, withdrawal from social contact was an established niche strategy throughout Latin Christendom. There were two broad views in the Church as to how sin was to be encountered. One was collective labour. The other was solitary penitence.
Solitude for the Romantic movements emerged as a process of disengagement. By withdrawing from the noise of society artistic (creative) potential could be enhanced. Contemplation was often focused on nature or introspection. The work produced in the process, whether in literature or visual arts, created an iconography for human isolation and alienation. At the same time, nature served as a source of potential redemption from all those sources of alienation found in society. Nature in various forms also became a repository of the divine. The paintings of Caspar David Friedrich are well-known examples for this process in the visual arts. The Prelude, by William Wordsworth, is certainly exemplary in the literary arts.
Wordsworth began The Prelude in 1799 and finished it in 1805, although he made several revisions in the course of his life. The poem can be understood as a literary investigation into the forces and events that shaped the personality of the author and his poetical labour. In Book Four he wrote:
When from our better selves we have too long
Been parted by the hurrying world, and droop,
Sick of its business, of its pleasures tired,
How gracious, how benign, is Solitude-
How potent a mere image of her sway!
Most potent when impressed upon the mind
With an appropriate human centre: hermit,
Deep in the bosom of the wilderness;
Votary (in vast cathedral, where no foot
Is treading, where no other face is seen)
Kneeling at prayers; or watchman on the top
Of lighthouse, beaten by Atlantic waves;
Or as the soul of that great Power is met
Sometimes embodied on a public road,
When, for the night deserted, it assumes
A character of quiet more profound
Than pathless wastes.[1]
Wordsworth began as a great supporter of the French Revolution and ended greatly disappointed by it. The poem examines the path that transformed him into a revolutionary and led him away from revolution in the end. The revolution had promised to reorganise society along principles of equality as articulated in the Declaration of the Rights of Man. Wordsworth and others felt it had failed. The dictatorship and imperial ambition of Napoleon Bonaparte were proof that it was impossible to create a society based on New Testament equality by removing the divinely ordained monarchy.
It is important to add here that these judgements were based on reports scarcely more circumspect than found in today’s mass media. Wordsworth would not have been able to see the results of the Jacobin societies in the provinces or to measure the violence with which the changes introduced were opposed by the counter-revolution with its foreign supporters. The rejection of the French Revolution by much of the English intellectual caste and England’s emergent cultural power in the 19th century constitute a bias which still overshadows the appreciation of the 1789 revolution beyond the English-speaking world. Even today very little attention is given to the counter-revolution and foreign intervention. Almost all school and university texts focus on the Jacobins and the so-called Terror, although the “White Terror” killed substantially more people.
At the same time the foundation of what we once recognized as modern science, evolving as it did from the same cultural context, emerged as the product of solitary investigation. In fact by the end of the 19th century the image of the scientist and the artist merged as solitary investigators, discoverers and innovators were ranked among the upper strata of Western society and the artistic creator/ scientific genius became clichés.
The solitude, whether in science or the arts, was in many ways a recovery of the penitentiary tradition in the Latin Church. In order to discover god and attain grace it was necessary to exercise as close to purity as possible. If artistic or scientific truth approached that of the divine or substituted for it, then it was also to be obtained by the investigator isolated from sources of corruption thus able to perceive pure data. The scientist sought this isolation in research performed in private laboratories that were sometimes associated with university faculties. The concept of academic freedom—a secularization of monastic privileges—was interpreted to assure the necessary solitude for unbiased research and pursuit of truth. Thus although scientific research is inevitably a collective activity, the fiction of solitary research was created by formally isolating the university from daily political and commercial interests.
The artist sought places in the countryside or abandoned his native land for a self-imposed exile or quest. George Gordon Byron’s death in the Greek war of independence in 1824 is only the most notorious.
By the end of the 19th century the literary-artistic and scientific-scholarly caste was endowed with its own ethic and processes for transforming the pure into the true. This ideal was based on a critique of society’s corruption and the striving to transcend it. The bearer of this ideal was to become the autonomous self, solitude incarnate.
Following the defeat of Napoleon the Congress of Vienna not only restored the monarchical system, if somewhat “embourgeoised”, it reinstalled the deification of truth and knowledge as something otherworldly in origin. As Nietzsche observed at the end of the century, god was restored in all but name, while the name of “god” became an empty category, a mere symbol for the will to power.
The emergence of the autonomous Self, whose access to identity and truth derived from exercises in solitude, derived from two traditions. One, already mentioned, was the penitentiary. The individual withdraws from society as a source of sin and by contemplation, absorption and submission to God attains a higher degree of grace and eventually redemption from the sins with which society has soiled him.
The other tradition is that of natural divinity. The individual withdraws in order to contemplate and then engage the creative forces of nature. By comprehending them the artist becomes an agent of creation. Like nature he becomes capable of producing exemplifications of truth. The truth-value of these exemplifications is claimed by virtue of the method applied to create them. This is sometimes called “scientific method” or “artistic creativity”. Until recently it has been assumed that integrity of the respective methods was essential to the value of the product.
The Romantics found that solitude created the conditions by which they could contemplate the problems with which they had been confronted in society. The psychic isolation of the countryside or a foreign environment permitted them to focus on what remained in them when they were no longer influenced by daily social interaction. The longer the isolation continued the more they were exposed to themselves. In some cases this resulted in a “stripping” of their personalities down to the basics, e.g. the interaction of the human with nature unmitigated by social instructions. At some point the artist or scholar would arrive at an essence from which his personality could be redesigned, primarily through the creative or investigative work. The principle can be illustrated simply enough. If anyone has been left alone with a problem long enough, especially one which is highly conventionalized but for which there is no external solution available, there is at least a tendency for the person to use whatever means are at his disposal to solve the problem—even if they are unconventional. If a person is left in a group with the same problem and attempts to use that unconventional method, he will likely feel enormous pressure to abandon it in favour of the approach used by everyone else in the group.
One of the additional products of this solitude, voluntary psychic isolation, is to develop the strength of persona necessary to reproduce the solution created even under social pressure. Thus solitude is not only a strategy for stripping but for clothing the Self. There is certainly enough anecdotal evidence to justify statements like “he is too headstrong because he has been working alone too long.” One of the Romantic contributions to cultural transformation has been the adaptation of solitude to the modern scientific construction of the Self.
The Self as envisioned by the Romantics was a liberated personality, freed from the oppressive social structures and thus able to act as an agent of social transformation. However another Self was developed in response to the revolutionary impulses.
In 2002, British filmmaker Adam Curtis produced a television documentary, roughly based on a book by Stuart Ewen, called The Century of the Self. [2] Curtis’ central thesis is that the nephew of Sigmund Freud, Edward Bernays, initiated and for a while led a movement that would turn the concept of the Self into the central instrument of social control in the West. In his study of public relations, the euphemism for propaganda Bernays introduced after World War I, Ewen explains how the culture of the Self was appropriated and exploited by corporate and political communications actors (Business and Government) to produce a society of individuals who believe themselves to be autonomous but are in fact manipulated in their every thought and move. Bernays drew on his uncle’s theories of the unconscious to show that control could be exercised over people by speaking to what they “really” thought and felt as opposed to what they actually said.
Instead of individuals—as the Romantics imagined—creating an authentic Self and entering society to act on the basis of this authenticity, Bernays and his successors devised methods they believed would suggest to the masses of isolated individuals ways they could reconstruct themselves in the interests of those who rule society. This presumed that one could create individuals in isolation that could be sufficiently alienated to engage in searching strategies. The aim was to exploit industrial and especially post-war psychic distress among masses of people whose lives had been irreversibly affected by the world war. These people would be encouraged in their sense of alienation. That alienation would be labelled individualism. The emotional duress would be sustained by graduated fear. This fear was sublimated in the reconstitution of groups of alienated individuals.
Curtis’s 4-episode film continues with a focus on commercial activity. Edward Bernays argued if he was able to produce advertising that would persuade people to go to war and fight he ought to be able to do this to sell products. After World War I ended the US was faced with massive overproduction. There were just too many goods that had been produced just to be wasted in war and now the plant lay idle and the goods collected dust in warehouses. Modern advertising was initiated to move those goods and restore the enormous profitability of wartime industrial manufacturing. He shows that creating desires and fears were complementary aims. On one hand the individual has to be freed from inhibitions like thrift, morality, social responsibility, or just a realistic assessment of his financial condition. The objective impositions of society are to be stripped from him so that he can feel his true nature as a desiring subject. Then he is intensively exposed to the prefabricated objects he ought to desire. This process is stimulated by fear, either the inability to satisfy those desires or the injection of ever more desires for which he has not yet the means of satisfaction. Dissatisfaction and fear are the constant state in which the individual is to be confined. Society does not offer him comfort, whether as routine or sustenance. Instead it exposes him to continuous competition for the satisfaction of the desires cultivated in him during his enforced isolation. Society becomes a machine for enforcing the private desires and the cycles of satisfaction – dissatisfaction, safety – fear that are translated into spending and consumption.
This process of alienation could not have become industrialized without political force. At the same time as individualism was being encouraged, Business and the State were waging vicious war against any genuinely autonomous collectivities like labour unions and popular movements, especially communism in the industrialized world and anti-colonialism/ nationalism among the peoples subjugated by colonial and imperial rule. Although Business was certainly enamoured with Bernays’ approach to mass marketing of products and services, there was also great demand for technologies of the “Self” by state actors.
The State’s interest in the Self, as opposed to the citizen, has not ceased. Curtis shows how the CIA and other covert agencies of the State promoted large-scale experimentation with the technology for creating or modifying the “Self”. One of the most notorious was the work of Dr Ewen Cameron at the Allan Memorial Institute in Montreal during the 1950s and 1960s. There experiments were performed on people who were subjected to pharmaceutical treatment in combination with electro-shocks and various degrees of sensory deprivation. The principle driving this work was that humans could have their consciousness erased and be “reprogrammed” on demand.
Although the Allan Memorial was eventually closed and Dr Cameron’s work denounced, there is no evidence that this kind of involuntary psychic isolation for political and social engineering goals has discontinued. The rudimentary descriptions available of programs run by the CIA and US military at the Guantanamo Detention Center, US Naval Base Guantanamo Cuba since the beginning of the century bear similarities to those run by Dr Cameron so great that they ought to be equally disturbing. Yet despite numerous pledges this center remains in operation with some 700 persons incarcerated at last count.[3]
The mass incarceration, appropriately denoted with prison jargon as “lockdowns”, organized and enforced to varying degrees from March 2020 to the end of 2021 has been excused by medical grounds discredited almost as soon as the public health authorities proposed them. Studies are only beginning to emerge that raise the question: what were the real reasons for these forced isolations, in innumerable cases, solitude and involuntary psychic isolation.
One of Dr Cameron’s experiments was to use covert media, e.g. hidden audio recordings, to introduce thoughts and verbalization to the brain of his presumably erased subject. The recordings would be played during the sleep sessions.
When the first reports and complaints about torture in Guantanamo Detention Center became public there was frequent mention of forced exposure to loud music and audio-visual material the prisoner would presumably find offensive. Sensory deprivation was combined with saturation exposure to foreign stimuli.
During the so-called “lockdowns” I was particularly struck by the closures and domestic incarceration in Portugal. In 2005, I was in Fatima for the first time. My friend and I were amazed at the people assembling there. Cripples of all sorts, people visibly disfigured or disabled by every conceivable illness made their way to the sanctuary. They were on their way to ask for the blessing and healing power of the Holy Virgin, Mother of God. Who knows if any of them had infectious illnesses? The power of the Almighty was present and able to heal. Yet during the mass incarceration the Shrine of Fatima was closed. Had I still been a practicing member of the Latin Church I would have been in uproar. How could the State presume to be more powerful than Our Lord and the Mother of God? How could anyone presume to keep me from the omnipotent divine?
To end, again with Wordsworth:
Oh, yet a few short years of useful life,
And all will be complete, thy race be run,
Thy monument of glory will be raised!
Then, though (too weak to tread the ways of truth)
This age fall back to old idolatry,
Though men return to servitude as fast
As the tide ebbs, to ignominy and shame
By nations sink together, we shall still
Find solace—knowing what we have learnt to know,
Rich in true happiness if allowed to be
Faithful alike in forwarding a day
Of firmer trust, joint labourers in the work
(Should Providence such grace to us vouchsafe)
Of their deliverance, surely yet to come.
Prophets of Nature, we to them speak
A lasting inspiration, sanctified
By reason, blessed by faith: what we have loved,
Others will love, and we will teach them how;
Instruct them how the mind of man becomes
A thousand times more beautiful than the earth
On which he dwells, above this frame of things
(Which, mid all revolution in the hopes
And fears of men, doth still remain unchanged)
In beauty exalted, as it is itself
Of quality and fabric more divine.
(“The Prelude,” Book fourteen, 430-454)
ENDNOTES
[1] William Wordsworth, “The Prelude” cited from The Prelude and other Poems, Alma Classics (2019)
[2] Stuart Ewen, PR! A Social History of Spin, New York, 1996; Adam Curtis, The Century of the Self, originally released on BBC Two in 2002. Available on YouTube.
[3] From the time the US Government announced its program of “extraordinary renditions” and incarceration of “terrorists” at its illegally occupied south-eastern Cuba naval station, Guantanamo Bay aka as GITMO, there have been estimates and official claims ranging between 1,500 and 20 over the past two decades. Thus far there is no way to be certain exactly how many prisoners were or are held at this high security naval base. Therefore 700 is considered a conservative number, even if it may exceed current official claims.
I grew up taking people at their word. Even as a child I listened carefully to adults and gave thought to their interests and motives- but especially their actions. In the course of time one can see- at least I do- that those who hold any kind of power know they must be willing to do or say anything if they are to maintain and expand it. There are numerous manifestations of this phenomenon.
I am dismissive – to be charitable – of the climate, hygiene, gender and other legions of hysterics who, with open or indirect (undisclosed) foundation/ NGO support, “flood the zone” preaching moral crusades as “scientific truth”. The dean of Anglo-American power policy stated the strategic doctrine for which almost without exception these campaigns – from anti-communism to anti-climate, to anti-covid, anti-woman and ultimately anti-human- have been launched:
We have about 50% of the world’s wealth, but only 6.3% of its population. This disparity is particularly great as between ourselves and the peoples of Asia. In this situation, we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships, which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity without positive detriment to our national security. To do so, we will have to dispense with all sentimentality and daydreaming; and our attention will have to be concentrated everywhere on our immediate national objectives. We should cease to talk about vague and unreal objectives such as human rights, the raising of living standards, and democratization. The day is not far off when we are going to have to deal in straight power concepts. The less we are then hampered by idealistic slogans, the better.
— George Kennan, Director of Policy Planning, US State Department, 1948
These useful idiots, being charitable again, enjoy the fetishes of idealistic slogans invented in the marketing departments of the corporate state.
Unlike some who are genuinely critical of the two centuries of unrestrained plunder, pillage and pollution brought by industrialisation (or Western colonial/ imperial rule), these storm troopers and crusaders consistently blame the 92% of the robbed population for the spoilage of the 6.3%. (Whereby Kennan is including the owners and their immediate household servants, overstating the actual percentage of beneficiaries.) Nor did Kennan rule out increases in that ratio above 50%. The solutions offered, even demanded, amount to sharing some of that loot on the condition that the raw numbers and the share of consumption comprising the 92% be reduced to a level that will render the present ratio conscionable for the courtiers and household servants (Malcolm X called them “house negroes”.) upon whom that 6% (actually less than 1%) rely for protection.
There is a phenomenon, hardly new, that persists in politics, which I would call for want of a better term “rhetorical burglary”. Years ago there were debates- some were even recorded on film/ video- where for example a group of black students discussed their living conditions while a minority of white students in the group insisted on a balanced debate or an account of their feelings and conditions. Somewhat less frequently there were such debates between women and men in women’s circles.
The fact that these whites or men were in the minority within these groups caused a cognitive conflict between the debate among the majority (a social minority) and the minority (members of a social majority). So some whites became “dissidents” in black groups and men became “dissidents” in women’s groups. This constructive reversal of the role of Establishment and dissident created a moral dilemma- at least for the liberal-minded. How could an oppressed minority maintain its integrity when it also repressed a minority among its number?
One attempt to resolve this far from original problem was to assert the majority right to establish its identity, sometimes called consciousness. A black students group had constituted itself foremost as a group of blacks who happened to be students. The participation of whites who happened to be students too was of right subordinated to the essential interest and criterion of being black. Hence whatever these white students might say as students was peripheral when the issues focused on being black—which they were not. Moreover the status of being white or male in a group formed for blacks or women (the main groups involved in this ancient history) did not constitute dissidence but interference or even infiltration by the Establishment in what was then per se dissident organisation.
One reply to this claim was that a white or male was not an Establishment agent simply by virtue of biology. While this was clearly true, unlike in Georg Lukac’s “standpoint of the proletariat” theory, until the 21st century “black” or “female” were not considered pure states of consciousness. However “black” the white UCLA student might feel in a BPP meeting, when he was faced with an LAPD officer he remained white while his brethren remained black. As Mao was fond of saying, truth flows from facts.
Anglo-American liberalism, even its left-wing version, is founded on the concepts of possessive individualism like that of such village philosophers as Locke and monarchist apologists like Hobbes. People were chattel like cows or bushels of grain. There was the owner class that had rights in property and this was a tiny minority for whom Anglo-American political theory was composed. The collectivism of Mill or Bentham did not abolish this distinction. It only added a morality of scale, an adaptation from slave-driven plantations to worker-driven factories. Class formation was reserved to the owners who maintain a system of indoctrination venues for this purpose (also known as schools and universities etc.)
Hence dissidence within that class had its established routines. When the workingmen’s movement began to reach critical organizational mass it also attracted defectors and Establishment attention. Contemporary labour parties, dominated by lawyers and other middle-class leadership did not appear overnight. They are the result of processes that were controversial and strife-ridden in the 19th century just like conflicts within black and women’s groups in the late 20th century. The liberal approach that prevailed in the labour movement – except in revolutionary Russia and China – was to suppress opposition and class conflict by individualizing all disputes. This took two forms: career betterment/ uplifting and litigation. These options were the “dissident” program promoted by liberal whites and men. The dissidence comprised opposing class formations and collective consciousness by shaping every issue as one resolved at the level of the subjective “owner”, the possessive individual who instead of attaining owner status would be liberated by consumption. If blacks and women could aspire to consume like white men then they would be free (and the Establishment even more profitable).
This campaign succeeded with the labour movement until it was destroyed. It has decimated attempts to end the Afro-American gulag magnified by the Bush-Clinton-Obama reign (the bizarre criminal justice scheme introduced under Biden not withstanding). The campaign continued to destroy the women’s movement, turning the demands for equal pay and support for families into the perverse claim that children can be borne by males and 1950s gender stereotypes constitute genetically defined qualities to be chemically imposed by hormones, surgery and paedophilia. It has laid waste to the independent development of formerly “non-self governing peoples” (the UN euphemism for conquered imperial subjects) by first bankrupting them with the phony oil crisis of the 1970s and now robbing every bit of meat and vegetable matter to enforce zero carbon, for the benefit of that Establishment.
These are the facts. Not even the intergovernmental organisations created to perpetrate these crimes deny them — if one reads past the slogans and jargon.
All the foregoing has been promoted as “dissidence”. It has rendered that term suspicious if not meaningless because it is used completely out of context. The ruling oligarchy, along with their court and retainers, can be considered “dissenters” if a fictive majority is erected from whom they require the protection of liberal freedoms. A slave overseer can be viewed as a dissident with respect to the slaves whose labour he compels. They are not his slaves. The field is not his either. In the woke view of the world, he need only imagine that he is a slave and voilà, he is one. He can imagine he is a woman or has a doctorate in climate justice and he knows the virtue of masking and untested gene therapy injections for all those he now “counsels” in the field. Yes, he is also a dissident, too. He cannot share the view of the labourers beneath him that his consciousness is sufficient to make their world just and good. He has to dissent to their demands for firewood at night and more than hominy grits to eat. Like his forefathers his dissent can be enforced with the stocks, branding or even burning.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote in his critique of the regime that murdered him that it was impossible to defeat stupidity with rational argument and facts. Such an approach can only trigger or enhance the stupid person’s aggression. It is no accident therefore that the most vociferous “poster girls” and boys for these crusades exhibit rabid disregard for arguments based on facts (even about those the interpretation of which might be legitimately disputed). For example, Kary Mullis was deemed unqualified to pronounce on the limits and purposes for which his invention was conceived. The necessity of CO2 for photosynthesis and plant life and hence also animal life – and humans are animals, too – (while corporate deforestation continues e.g. for wind and solar farms) is utterly irrelevant for the members of the Zero Carbon cult.
The authors of these cult tracts are never obliged to defend their absurdities in public because these are the slogans of power whose banners they carry into battle against heretics and infidels. This power, which can and does suppress almost all public challenge to corporate state doctrine and dogma, invades alternative media with the same aggressive assurance: only real dissidents must defend themselves. The appearance of these agents of power in alternative media is intended to spray them with the scent of dissidence while they excrete the Establishment’s propaganda.
Rigorous debate requires disclosure of the power one brings to the encounter. Thirty years ago journalistic agents for corporate state interests were at least subject to critical suspicion. Today the thinnest foundation or NGO condom suffices to prevent scepticism. The illusion of scientific virility is preferred to intellectual decency. (Indeed the Church had good reason to punish even with death anyone found in possession of a bible without ecclesiastical license—look at the digital bible known as the Web if in doubt.) The pernicious sermons spread by these modern mendicants corrupt the serious debate by reducing it to dogmatic disputation, with inquisitorial etiquette masking as serious inquiry. It is either cynical or stupid- or both.
The protection of secrecy jurisdictions1should not be permitted. Propaganda also includes “idea laundering”, presenting ideas through an agent which would be treated very differently, i.e. with scepticism or even suspicion, were they presented by the principal.
That is also why Kennan’s words were not spoken to the general public in 1948 and why the agents of the class he represented do not speak those words today. They are not obsolete. They just remain too honest.
When considering the recent performances at the General Assembly of the United Nations this year, the echoes of “peace” resound through the plenary hall. Why should anyone want peace in the Ukraine more than any other place the Empire is waging war? My suspicion is that many of these calls are really for Russia to withdraw to its pre-2014 borders. They believe that would make the US regime happy and be a great relief to the minor and little league oligarchs who long for return to business as usual. Calm and intelligent people could be forgiven for doubting the sincerity of many peace petitioners.
After all, don’t the continuing wars in Africa, the still pending “United Nations” war against the DPRK (where there is only a 70-year-old armistice since 1953), and the innumerable economic wars being waged in places and ways we do not even know, deserve to end too?
Like the war in the Ukraine, one will hear how complicated these wars are. They cannot be simply ended. Yet they are all simple in one material way: without the US and its NATO cut-outs—often the principal aggressor in violation of the Kellogg-Briand Treaty—many of these wars would never have started or would have long ago been resolved. So why not demand that the US stop waging wars and why not apply sanctions to the US for its belligerence and violations of the law of nations? How can the United Nations end wars when it cannot even end the one it started in 1951? Could it be that too many of the parties among those who convene to call for peace, really need and want just a piece of the action?
The two military veterans probably best known for criticising US policy in Ukraine, Colonel Douglas MacGregor USA and Major Scott Ritter USMC, have said loud and clear that at least from a military standpoint the Ukrainian armed forces have lost the war against Russia. There have been numerous voices calling for an end to the conflict, not least because the more than USD 46 billion and counting in military aid alone, has yet to produce any of the results announced as aims of what has finally been admitted is a war against Russia.i If Mr Zelenskyy, the president of Ukraine’s government in Kiev, is to be taken at face value, then the hostilities can only end when Crimea and the Donbas regions are fully under Kiev’s control and Vladimir Putin has been removed from office as president of the Russian Federation. To date no commentator has adequately explained how those war aims are to be attained. This applies especially after the conservatively estimated 400,000 deaths and uncounted casualties in the ranks of Kiev’s forces since the beginning of the Russian special military operation in February 2022.
Before considering the political and economic issues it is important to reiterate a few military facts, especially for those armchair soldiers who derive their military acumen from TV and Hollywood films. As MacGregor and Ritter, both of whom have intimate practical knowledge of warfare, have said: Armies on the ground need supplies, i.e. food, weapons, ammunition, medical care for wounded, etc. These supplies have to be delivered from somewhere. In ancient times, armies could live off the land. Essentially this was through looting and plunder—stealing their food from the local population as they marched. To prevent the local population from becoming the enemy in the rear and avoid early exhaustion of local supply, generals started paying for what was requisitioned. Defending forces would often withdraw the civilian population and destroy what could not be taken to avoid supplying their enemies. In fact, this kind of rough warfare against civilians still occurs although it has been forbidden under the Law of Land Warfare.ii Naturally the soldier in the field can no longer make weaponry. Even less can they be plundered from the local inhabitants—unless one comes across some tribe the US has armed with Stingers. All the weapons the Ukrainian armed forces deploy have to be imported from countries with manufacturing capacity. As the two retired officers, among others, have said, such capacity is unavailable to the Ukraine. Obviously it would also be unavailable to NATO forces were they to deploy in Ukraine in any numbers. It is illusory to believe that a NATO army can do what the Wehrmacht could not some eighty years ago with three million men under arms and the most modern army of its day. This was so obvious from the beginning that one has to wonder why this war ever started. Is it possible that wars are started without any intention of winning them? If winning the war is not the objective, then what is?
Forgery and force: Explicit and implicit or latent and expressed foreign policy
Historical documents are essential elements in any attempt to understand the past and the present. However, this is not because they are necessarily true or accurate. Forgeries and outright lies are also important parts of the historical record. Perhaps the most notorious forgery in Western history is the so-called Donation of Constantine. This document was used to legitimate papal supremacy and the primacy of the Latin over the Greek Church. Although it did not take long for the forgery to be discovered, the objective was accomplished. Even today most people in the West have learned that the part of the Christian Church called Orthodoxy is schismatic when the reverse is true, namely the Latin Church arose from a coup d’état against Constantinople.
There is now no shortage of evidence that the British Empire forced the German Empire into the Great War and with US help justified the slaughter of some four million men, ostensibly to expel German forces from Belgium. There is systematically suppressed testimony by commanders in the field and others in a position to know that the Japanese attack on the US colonial base at Pearl Harbor was not only no surprise but a carefully crafted event exploited to justify US designs on Japan and China. Yet to this day the myth of surprise attack against a neutral country prevails over the historical facts. Even though there is almost popular acceptance that the US invasion of Iraq was based on entirely fabricated evidence and innuendo, the destruction of the country was not stopped and continues as of this writing.
What does that tell us about historical record and official statements of policy? Former POTUS and CIA director, George H.W. Bush expressed the principle that government lies did not matter because the lie appears on page one and the retraction or correction on page 28. In short, it is the front page that matters. That is what catches and keeps the public’s attention. Truth and accuracy are immaterial.
Let us consider for a moment one of the most durable wonders of published state policy—the Balfour Declaration. This brief letter signed by one Arthur Balfour on 2 November 1917 was addressed to the Lord Rothschild, in his capacity as some kind of conduit for the Zionist Federation. Carroll Quigley in his The Anglo-American Establishment strongly suggests that Lord Rothschild, also in his capacity as a sponsor of the Milner Round Table group, presented the letter for Mr Balfour to sign. As Quigley also convincingly argues the academic and media network created by the Round Table has successfully dominated the writing of British imperial history making it as suspicious as the Vatican’s history of the Latin Church.
This “private” letter to the British representative of the West’s leading banking dynasty is then adopted as the working principle for the League of Nations’ Mandate for Palestine awarded to the British Empire. From this private letter an international law mandate was created, continued under the UN Charter, to convert a part of the conquered Ottoman Empire into a state entity for people organized in Europe who imagined that some thousand(s) of years ago some ancestors once inhabited the area.iii The incongruence of this act ought to have been obvious—and in fact it was. The explicit policy with which the British Empire had sought to undermine Germany and Austria-Hungary was that of ethnic/linguistic self-determination of peoples. So by right—even if the fiction of a population in diaspora were accepted—this could not pre-empt the right of ethnic/linguistic self-determination in Palestine where Arabic was the dominant language and even those who adhered to the Jewish religion were not Europeans.
As argued elsewhere there has been a century of propaganda and brute force applied to render the dubious origins and the legitimation for the settler conquest that was declared the State of Israel in 1948 acceptable no matter how implausible. Like the Donation of Constantine, the Balfour Declaration served its purpose. No amount of rebuttal can reverse the events that followed.
Motors and motives
However, the question remains what is then the policy driving such acts? What is the motive for such seemingly senseless aggression against ordinary people? Why does an institution supposedly based on national self-determination deny it so effectively to majorities everywhere whose only fault appears to be living on land others covet? By the time the Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples was finally adopted in 1960, there was no question of reversing the de facto colonisation practiced by the mandatory powers under the League. Moreover the Declaration was only an act of the UN General Assembly, a body wholly dominated by the three permanent imperial members of the Security Council, each with their veto powers.
To understand that and perhaps to better illuminate the principal subject—Ukraine—it is helpful to recall that of the five permanent members of the Security Council, the two most powerful are not nation-states at all. The United Kingdom is a colonial confederation as is the United States.
Russia, France, and China are all states derived from historical ethnic-linguistic determination. Beyond doubt they were formed into such unitary states through wars and revolutions. As de Gaulle famously said, “France was made with the sword”. However, there is no question that these three countries are based explicitly on ethnic-linguistic and cultural congruity within continental boundaries, in the sense articulated by the explicit text of the Covenant and the Charter. On the contrary, Great Britain and the United States are commercial enterprises organised on the basis of piracy and colonial conquest. There is not a square centimetre of the United States that was not seized by the most brutal force of arms from its indigenous inhabitants. “Ethnic-linguistic” among the English-speaking peoples is a commodity characteristic. It is a way to define a market segment.
Great Britain gave the world “free trade” and liberalism and the US added to that the “open door”. Nothing could be more inimical to the self-determination of peoples than either policy.iv How can a people be independent and self-determined when they are denied the right to say “no”? The Great War and its sequel, the war against the Soviet Union and Communism, aka World War 2, were first and foremost wars to establish markets dominated by the Anglo-American free trade – open door doctrine. One will not find this explicitly stated in any of the history books or the celebratory speeches on Remembrance Day (Memorial Day in the US) or the anniversary of D-Day, to which properly the Soviet Union and Russia ought not to be invited. After all D-Day was the beginning of the official war by Anglo-America against the Soviet Union after Hitler failed. More of Italian, French and German industrial and domestic infrastructure was destroyed by aerial bombardment from the West than by anything the Wehrmacht did—since its job was to destroy Soviet industry. This will not be reported in schoolbooks and very few official papers will verify this open secret. That is because like the Donation much of what counts as history was simply “written to the file”. The facts, however, speak for themselves. When the German High Command signed the terms of unconditional surrender in Berlin-Karlshorst, the domestic industry of the West, except the US, had been virtually destroyed leaving it a practical monopoly not only in finance but manufacturing that would last well into the late 1960s.v Only the excess demand of the war against Korea accelerated German industrial recovery. No one can say for sure how much of German, French, Italian, Belgian, or Netherlands capital was absorbed by Anglo-American holding companies. Hence those that wonder today about the self-destruction of the German economy have to ask who owns Germany in fact. To do that one will have to hunt through the minefield of secrecy jurisdictions behind which beneficial ownership of much of the West is concealed.
It is necessary to return to the conditions at the beginning of the Great War to understand what is happening now in Ukraine. One has to scratch the paint off the house called “interests” and recall some geography. F. William Engdahl performed this task well in his ACentury of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order (2011). It would do well to summarise a few of his points before going further.
Geography and aggrandizement
Continental nation-states need secure land routes. Pirate states need secure sea-lanes. Britain succeeded in seizing control ruling the waves after defeating the Spanish and Portuguese fleets. It reached a commercial entente with the Netherlands, which helped until the Royal Navy was paramount. The control of the seas meant that Britain could dominate shipping as well as maritime insurance needed to cover the risk of sea transport. So it was no accident that Lloyds of London came to control the financing of maritime traffic. Geography dictated that the alternative for continental nation-states was the railroad. Germany was building a railroad from Berlin to Baghdad which would not only have delivered oil to its industry but allowed it to bypass the Anglo-French Suez Canal and the British controlled Cape route. Centuries before the predecessors to the City of London financed crusades to control the trade routes through the Middle East, propagandistically labelled the Holy Land, whereby this was wholly for commercial reasons. The Anglo-American led NATO captured Kosovo not out of any special loyalty to Albanians but because of geography. Camp Bondsteel lies at the end of the easiest route to build pipelines between Central Asia and the Mediterranean. In short there is not a single war for “self-determination” waged by the Anglo-American special relationship that was not driven by piratical motives, for which ethnic-linguistic commodities are expendable.
In 1917, the “interests”, for whom Lord Rothschild spoke and no doubt provided financial support, coincided with the pre-emptive control over real estate that had been desired by the banking-commercial cult at least since the establishment of the Latin Church. It is no accident that serious investigations have established that the state created from the British Mandate in Palestine was a commercial venture like all other British undertakings. Moreover it has been able to use its most insidious cover story to veil itself in victimhood and thus immunity for those criminal enterprises, both private and state, that use it as a conduit: money laundering, drug and arms trafficking, training of repressive forces for other countries on contract, etc. all documented and protected by atomic weapons. Moreover this enterprise has been the greatest per capita recipient of US foreign aid for decades. Its citizens are able to use dual citizenship to hold high office in the sovereign state that funds it, too. Any attempt to criticize or oppose this relationship or its moral justification by a public official or personality with anything to lose can lead to the gravest of consequences. Its official lobby in the US, AIPAC, is only one instrument by which any act that could interfere with the smooth flow of cash or influence between Washington and Tel Aviv can be prevented or punished. It draws on an international organisation that does not even have to be organised. The status of ultimate victimhood combined with mass media at all levels committed to protecting “victims” can summon crowds just as Gene Sharp predicted in his works.vi
A business too innocent to fail
Now we come to the issues with which this essay began. What is the aim of the war in Ukraine? Will it end when the military operations have failed?
In April 2022, i.e. just over a month after the Russian intervention, Volodymyr Zelenskyy described “the future for his country”. He used the terms “a big Israel”. In Haaretz it was reported that Zelenskyy wanted Ukraine to become “a big Israel, with its own face”. Writing for the NATO lobby, the Atlantic Council, Daniel Shapiro elaborated what Zelenskyy might mean: the main points are security first, the whole population plays a role, self-defence is the only way, but maintain active defence partnerships, intelligence dominance, technology as key, build an innovation ecosystem, maintain democratic institutions.vii The stories depict this stance for better or worse as the creation of a state under permanent military control, always giving priority to existential threats—presumably from the East.
But is that really what Zelenskyy meant? Or perhaps that is what he was just supposed to say. What about those who have directed nearly all of NATO armament and so many billions through the hands of the Kiev regime—one notorious even before 2022 as the most corrupt in Europe, if not anywhere? Maybe another construction is to be applied. Perhaps Zelenskyy is talking, like some latter day Balfour, on behalf of his sponsors whose Holocaust piety never prevented them from subjecting nearly entire populations to forced medical experiments starting in 2020. Perhaps he is talking about the extensive participation in all sorts of international trafficking, either as agent or protection for the principals. Perhaps he is talking about the permanent and undebatable foreign aid contributions from the US and the extortion from other countries, e.g. as Norman Finkelstein documented.viii There is no doubt that Ukraine has become a major hub for human trafficking, arms smuggling, and biological-chemical testing. They have atomic reactors and have asked for warheads.ix
Add to this the potential of a large and potentially self-righteous diaspora spread throughout the West, heavily subsidised and already equipped with influence in high places. A “Ukraine Lobby” was already in preparation in 1947 when the British shipped some eight thousand POWs of the SS Galizia Division (a Ukrainian force) from Italy to Britain without a single war crimes investigation.x From there they were able to spread throughout the Empire as Canada amply indicates.
Much of the debate about the Ukraine war remains confused because of the successful obfuscation around the term “Nazi”. Essentially a Hollywood story has been substituted for analysis of the historic development of the ideology and government that prevailed in Germany between 1933 and 1945.xi Nazism is treated as sui generis based on criteria that are not unique at all. For example, great attention is given to uniforms and insignia. In fact, after the Great War all the major political factions and parties, e.g. the SPD and DKP, had uniformed paramilitary organisations formed mainly of front veterans. When the NSDAP was able to ban all opponents those uniforms also disappeared. Contemporary fascism also uses current fashion and language. Only the nostalgic retain antiquated uniform and language styles. However repulsive the ideology may be these so-called neo-Nazis are equivalent to the historical re-enactment units found throughout the US for example.
After WW2 much of Europe was a wasteland, especially the East. Refugees understandably fled as far west as they could because getting to North or South America meant living in territories unscathed by war. The British and US secret services deliberately exploited these refugee waves to cover the removal into safety of the residue of their fascist allies. There they were to prepare for the continuation of war against the Soviet Union by other means. These formations often hid behind ethnic front groups, as the fascists did in occupied West Germany. Hence when an embarrassing discovery was made—usually some low or middle grade Nazi veteran—then he could be disgraced, tried or deported while leaving the bulk of the clandestine organisation in tact. These Nazis were obviously the result of careless immigration oversight but by no means a reflection of state policy.
Together, historical re-enactment Nazism and “exposed” single Nazi veterans distracted from the large scale programs supporting and expanding anti-communist forces both domestically and for expeditionary deployment. Much more seriously, these two “shows” and the deliberate suppression of meaningful debate about fascist policies and practices—always reduced to anti-Jewish attitudes and actions alone—have successfully prevented any coherent analysis and debate about the relationship between Anglo-American monopoly capital and the cartels that backed the NSDAP regime or the relationship between US/ NATO policy and its consistent support of fascist regimes in Spain, Portugal and throughout the world. It has prevented coherent debate about the long forgotten but documented participation of reconstructed Nazis in the government of the Federal Republic of Germany and their active participation in the Ukrainian war against the Soviet Union after 1945.
Zelenskyy and his fellow travellers cannot be blamed for their self-confident fascism. It is not an anomaly but a historical product of decades of Anglo-American/ NATO business plans—including the distraction of “Nazi” from the substance of those plans. Given how successful Lord Rothschild’s model for Israel has been, one can scarcely blame a patriot like Volodymyr Zelenskyy for seizing the opportunity to apply it to his own country. The model has been so successful that no one in public dare oppose it. Why not establish another such parasitic machine? Russians just like Arabs provide the permanent enemies with which to sell the permanent victim status at the expense of millions of displaced Ukrainians.
In other words, there is a very successful business model to be implemented wholly consistent with free trade and the open door and all those other slogans, which have anointed plunder and pillage by the occasionally alpine commercial cult in their campaign to assure that all of us own nothing and they will be happy.
i Jonathan Masters and Will Merrow, “How Much as the US Sent to Ukraine Here are Six Charts”, Council on Foreign Relations (10 July 2023). Among those declaring this was Foreign Minister of the German Federal Republic, Annalena Baerbock. Angela Merkel, the former chancellor of the Federal Republic is on record having said that the so-called Minsk Accords were intended to stall the Russian reaction in Donbas until Ukraine could be sufficiently armed to fight against the Russian Federation.
ii Principally the Hague (1907) Conventions and subsequent Geneva Conventions
iii More likely the Eastern Europeans in question were descendent from the Khazar kingdom located far closer to what today is Ukraine. The ruling elite was to have converted to Rabbinic Judaism in the 8th century. The Khazar Khaganate was disbursed by the end of the first millennium CE. This would better explain the hostility toward Russia and myth of a national homeland, displaced in 1917 to Palestine based on contemporary political realities.
iv Historian Gerald Horne ascribes “free trade” to the so-called Glorious Revolution, which also abolished the Royal Africa Company, opening “free trade in slaves”; see The Counter-Revolution of 1776 (2014).
v Bombing of German factories conspicuously omitted Ford plant in Cologne and GM’s Opel factory in Russelsheim, although both Ford and GM claimed and received reparations for damage done by Allied bombers.
vi Gene Sharp, From Dictatorship to Democracy (1994)
vii Daniel B. Shapiro, “Zelenskyy wants Ukraine to be ‘a big Israel’. Here’s a road map”, New Atlanticist (6 April 2022) “By adapting their country’s mind-set to mirror aspects of Israel’s approach to security challenges, Ukrainian officials can tackle national security challenges with confidence and build a similarly resilient state”.
viii Norman Finkelstein, The Holocaust Industry (2000)
ix This notorious request by Zelenskyy at the Munich Security Conference in 2022 for atomic weapons was another reason President Vladimir Putin gave for a military response to Kiev’s attacks on the Russian-speaking eastern Ukraine that Russia had been forced to recognise as two independent republics and grant protection.
x A documentary produced by Julian Hendy (The SS in Britain) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kjj__aya4BA contains interviews, e.g. with civil servants who were told by US authorities that no pre-immigration investigations were to be conducted. This film about the 14thWaffenSS Division Galizia division has been almost scrubbed from the Web. The film, originally to be broadcast by Yorkshire Television (UK) was never shown. Geoffrey Goodman described details after a private viewing in a Guardian article (12 June 2000).
xi A useful source for the historical context and actual description of the NSDAP regime can be found in Behemoth: The Structure and Practice of National Socialism, 1933-1944, a detailed study written originally in English by Franz Neumann. This book comprises two parts: the NS state and the economic system. Very little attention is paid to the section on the economic system although the regime cannot be understood without its legacy economic policies and the bureaucracy responsible for implementing them.
To start with an anecdote of my personal intellectual history, I have to recall reading The Gulag Archipelago as a youth. There were two things that impressed me about this work although I later came to view much of the author’s assertions to be questionable and distorted. However, if one reads the entirety of Solzhenitsyn as literature there are still remarkable insights to be gleaned, even if the excessive attacks on the Soviet Union should be taken cum grano sale. The first point was formal— the use of footnotes in a literary text to comment on what had been written in the main narrative. The second observation, anticipating Foucault et al., was the function of ordinary criminals in a population of political prisoners.
Footnotes can have the formal function of lending an otherwise weak or absent authority to a text full of unsubstantiated or anecdotal assertions. They can also permit the shift of reader attention from a story to the underlying or derivative aspects of that story. They can also instigate a dialogue with the text by showing the reader how to expose the covert reading of the shadow text.
The role of ordinary crime in disciplining political prisoners was described in some detail in the hundreds of pages Solzhenitsyn devoted to his topic, what he called the archipelago of incarceration throughout the Soviet Union to which political prisoners under Soviet Union law could be sent. The form he chose was the literary version of the “docudrama“. Meanwhile less partisan authors and scholars have disputed the number of prisons and the actual number of prisoners suggested or claimed in Solzhenitsyn’s book. However, this does not invalidate one of his central observations, namely, the function of organized crime in the operation of an oppressive regime. To be clear about this, no matter what system creates and maintains prisons, prisons are instruments of oppression. Any discussion about theories of penitentiary organisation, correctional practice, punishment cannot erase this fundamental fact. Moreover any society that lacks oppressive/ repressive capacity cannot maintain stable commerce and social interaction. Therefore the question is not whether a society has oppressive or repressive instruments but what does any given society value and therefore support or repress in order to maintain such values?
No later than what I have claimed in an earlier essay is the shift from surplus appropriation to scarcity management in economic theory, modern political economy has been taught through mass education as a new religion— a secular form of the grace and sin regime established by the Latin and Reformed clerical elite in the reorganisation of sparsely settled sedentary populations in the Western peninsula of Eurasia into fodder for nomadic barbarians who would extend their empire over two-thirds of the Earth’s surface. Until the political-economic apologists were faced with the abolition of slavery and the ascendency of an industrial proletariat, theory focused on how to allocate stolen wealth among the elite estates. With the abolition of slavery (around 1886), the principal occupation of political-economists and the school known now as Social Darwinism was to explain how to prevent the newly freed and the proletariat from claiming their share of the wealth their labour had generated over half a millennia. The explanation they developed was the theory of marginal utility and the redirection of economic management to administering newly discovered “scarcity.”
Introduction of scarcity as the underlying condition of political economy — perversely at times when capitalist crises of overproduction were recurrent — was a sleight of hand. Fast forward to the end of the War against the Soviet Union and Communism: in the US a Canadian Stanford (amazingly) economist named Lorie Tarshis published a textbook, TheElements of Economics (1947) An Introduction to the Theory of Price and Employment, that was recognized as the first textbook in the US based on the theories of Maynard Keynes. This book was quickly banned after a vicious letter-writing campaign led in part by archconservative and reputed CIA asset, William F. Buckley. When I say “banned”, I mean banned. In more than twenty years it has been impossible for me to find even second-hand editions of this book. It is available only in a very difficult to use e-book version in Internet Archive. That is the condition more than fifty years after it was first published. In its place was the Economics: An Introductory Analysis (1948) by Paul Samuelson. It is to the best of my knowledge the only introductory economics textbook in use in the English-speaking world.
Why is that important? What has that to do with Solzhenitsyn and organized crime in prisons, one might ask? Tarshis was far from being a communist as was insinuated at the time. Maynard Keynes was a liberal eugenics adherent and no friend of the working class or poor. However, Tarshis following Keynes included a very important chapter: on administered pricing and monopoly/ oligopoly. Samuelson’s contract as theoretical “hit man” was to expunge this critical element of political economy from the study and teaching of economics. He was also— thanks to the enormous academic-criminal enterprise of which many in his family have been a part, e.g. Lawrence Summers— able to reap accolades long before that ostensible bête noir of liberals, Milton Friedman, earned his fame as economic terrorist (especially as leading theorist of Chile’s economic destruction after 1973).
What is administered pricing? According to the fairy tale still propagated by the Samuelson catechism, all prices are derived from scarcity equations settled in the market by a tendency of supply and demand to reach equilibrium. The deceit— not unlike that propagated by climate hysteriacs- is that there is such a thing as “equilibrium,” never mind economic equilibrium. Tarshis distinguished quite clearly between real economies of scarcity or surplus and oligarchic/ monopolistic economies. For Samuelson et al. oligarchy and monopoly are merely “imperfect competition”. This is akin to calling something ugly, less beautiful.
According to the so-called “neo-classical synthesis”, only the horrible socialists try to set prices and make economic decisions according to plans. In the “free market” these decisions are the result of mathematical divination derived from the laws of economic nature. However, administered pricing, like administered energy policy, constitutes planning by invisible, publicly unaccountable actors in the private sector using such key performance indicators as return on investment (ROI) or simply how much profit can be obtained at any given price. Since vertically integrated cartels can manipulate input/ factor prices, also with the help of rigged taxation and accounting rules, the question is not at what price will a certain demand level be satisfied but at what price a certain rate of profit can be obtained. This is why such strategies as cross-subsidization or transfer pricing mechanisms can be used to obtain profits despite obvious price inflexibility at the end of the chain— the consumer. To the extent that this is discussed at all in Samuelson and his derivatives it is a pure aberration or distortion. Political power exercised to benefit these actors is concealed by the euphemism “externalities.”
How can a sane person say “distortion” when describing the impact of beneficial ownership of a media market where only five enterprises dominate the industry worldwide? When five oligarchical entities operate under such a regime that were there real, enforceable anti-trust law would be forbidden. Only ignorance or mendacity can call it an exception. It must be treated as the rule. That is point. Assuming that every single graduate that has passed through the Samuelson indoctrination continues either in academic or commercial economics, then we are talking about millions of people whose fundamental education ignores a central fact and operating principle of economics since the beginning of the 20th century. The anecdotal evidence of global ignorance/ mendacity ought to be sufficient to convince any sober thinking person that what we are told about the economy and the society it constitutes is at least twenty per cent nonsense. (I am being generous here.) The damage is actually much worse since the discipline is thus so detached from reality and bound by pseudo-scientific mathematical models that we cannot even begin to imagine another way of organizing resources. (Economist Michael Hudson has worked very hard to do this by returning to the original critical forms of political economic theory: Professor Hudson, who learned economics working in Business and not the Academy, also makes very clear that all modern economies are “planned,” Gosplan was responsible for the Soviet economy, while Wall Street—a closely held private financial cartel—plans the Western economy. See among others Hudson’s Superimperialism)
What does all this have to do with policing?
Since the declaration of the COVID-19 war in 2020 numerous business districts throughout the United States and other Western metropolises have experienced bizarre mass attacks mainly on the retail sector. These attacks often followed or were contemporaneous with mass demonstrations apparently organized and/ or supported by offshore NGOs like Black Lives Matter and Antifascist Action or groups demonstrably trained by the successor to OTPOR. The attacks included looting, vandalism, arson, and assault and battery. Millions of US dollars in property damage were recorded. Many businesses closed their doors or were forced to create expensive security barriers to customers. During this period policing was conspicuous by its absence.
Before continuing the term “offshore” should be explained. The construction of astro-turf organizations requires funding. Organizations are needed to obtain and pay for facilities used whenever masses of people are brought together for any purpose. A daylong event of any sort, especially in countries like the US with a low density of public conveniences, needs provision for basic things like toilets and drinking water. These are key logistical elements of any sustained mass activity and they cost money. A friend of mine from Leipzig who grew up there during the GDR era remarked often about the Monday demonstrations there: who paid for all the toilet facilities during those demonstrations? There was a US TV sitcom, All in the Family (a variant of the 1965-75 British satire Till Death Us Do Part) that was initially quite scandalous not only because of fluid bigoted language but also because the protagonist explicitly talked about and went to the toilet in prime time television. Perhaps American culture is so sanitized that no one can even imagine the necessity of a toilet in public life. Offshore NGOs are these conduits for cash and organizational resources whose actual beneficial owners are screened from public view. The National Endowment for Democracy directs funds for such entities beyond US borders. Other government agencies facilitate these cash and resource flows in the West.
Nevertheless it did not take long to find that massive amounts of money were funnelled to bank accounts of these AstroTurf agents, announced for use as bail bond, etc. At the same time banks on both sides of the great northern border were seizing donations for Canadian truckers protesting government policies. The spokespersons for these demonstrations claimed that they were being held to protest against police brutality and racism, ostensibly in official conduct and economic behaviour. These demonstrations received vast mass media and social media coverage. They were praised by public authorities at state and federal level and in rare instances also by local government officials. During these summers of discontent, much of the population was subject to house arrest; curfews and public assembly restrictions ordered in violation of all principles of due process under US law. In fact, demonstrations attempted to protest the violations of constitutional rights to free speech, due process and freedom of assembly were strictly suppressed by police at all levels while these peculiar demonstrations against police brutality and racism were unobstructed. It became clear that many demonstrators at these events had been bussed in from other locations around the country. Hence local residents were an insignificant part of the action.
As argued in an earlier article, there is an ideology and a strategy at work here. The religious component is a missionary strategy based on and organized through a “purity” cult. However, the social transformation or re-engineering which is the long-term plan has a serious economic component, too. That economic component is rooted in the theories of eugenics and marginal utility or marginalism. Both of these theories arise with a fundamental ideological change that matured in the Manhattan Project.
Prior to 1942, the prevailing – by that I mean also in popular culture—model of humans and nature was mechanical. Nature was a machine and humans, including their cerebral –corporeal interfaces, were mechanical. The culmination of this human model can be found in Frederick Taylor’s time-motion studies, explained in his Principles of Scientific Management (1911). There was a critique of this model among the Romantics but this minority was itself marginalized in favour of the apparently modern “systems” theories. Romantic criticism of the emerging industrial society was complex and contradictory since, unlike the Enlightenment, Romanticism was not a concept of social coherence but an attempt to deal with the inherent incoherence of society and human personality. In any event by 1942, the Romantic approaches to humanism were thoroughly marginalized (to use this metaphor again) in favour of systems theory together with an analogue and then digital-calculation model human nature. When the first artificial intelligence (AI) claims were being asserted at US research universities, one of the leading developers of the underlying programming, Joseph Weizenbaum, denounced the cause in Computer Power and Human Reason (1976). In a talk he gave in the late-1990s in his native Germany, he reiterated that the so-called Information Society was fraudulent. Compulsive computation, as he called it, not only erroneously equated data with information. It also substituted calculation for judgment.
Thus it also followed that the mathematical, compulsive model of the world prevented the judgment that would have condemned the Manhattan Project as the quest for the world’s most nihilistic weapons. Today the computer model of man, the “hackable animal”, whose every act is described and defined on the basis of mathematical modelling, includes the negation of judgment (and of values). Instead this mathematical model of man, merely an aerobic program medium with disposable parts, forms the basis for re-engineering of a society that will be “sustainable and robust”. However, there is a grand deception in this language developed through the appropriation of opposition language in the 1970s and its propagation as reconstituted liberation product—political-economic Velveeta. If the economy is driven by calculation of utility and economic man is governed by this rule, then he—yes, he—must by nature be a calculator and governed by the “laws” of mathematics. From this follows the anti-humanism of Norbert Weiner (Cybernetics, 1948) and Yuval Noah Harari. It is crucial to recall that atomic weaponry and genetic engineering were developed contemporaneously and have continued parallel to this day as elements of a unified weapons suite.
The so-called UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) ought to be judged first of all by their source. The source of all international policy from the United Nations and its agencies was and remains the executive suite of the world’s largest multinational corporations and the governments they own. The flowery language aside—and one must see it for what it is, marketing (propaganda)—this is the agenda of institutions that have all been sworn to the worldview for which the Manhattan Project stands—atomic domination or annihilation of humanity. From this standpoint the human computer and the digital economy are a continuous fabric with the ARPA Net, now called the Internet, which was designed as sustainable communications in the wake of the two atomic strikes the then US Strategic Air Command had planned to destroy the USSR. That is the immoral foundation of this still proprietary technology that billions have been persuaded is the public sphere and governed by liberal freedoms like speech and assembly.
While there have been legal and commercial challenges to create some kind of public sphere out of this technological space—something akin to squatting and the doctrine of adverse possession—we have seen that the real owners of the Internet regularly assert their ownership, either through state agencies or corporate entities. We have yet to establish a doctrine that the electrical and communications grids upon which the theory of Internet liberty is premised can actually be articulated, let alone aggressively defended. Instead we are debating as to why private owners and their state agents do not respect archaic and naïve ideas about human liberty. Is this the fallacy of misplaced concreteness?
There is no enforceable legal regime because there is also no comprehensive economic regime that includes the human as someone more than a computer or machine with legs. There is no biological or moral regime because the argument has been accepted that humans are not animals like the rest of life on the planet and hence no more enemies of Nature than rabbits, fish, birds or fruit trees. Instead the psychopaths of compulsive calculation swoop around the planet to gather, catalogue, patent, digitalize and synthesize everything that could enable their sustainability. Those who fanatically argue for population reduction never appear on the assisted-suicide rosters. Could it be that they don’t mean a reduction of all the population?
Seemingly parallel—but actually at deniable arm’s length—the CIA sponsored World Economic Forum has not only taken the mantle sewn with SDGs, it has also turned them into the loincloth for the not yet unsustainable to wear called “Diversity – Inclusion – Equity”—DIE, for short. (Their marketing departments certainly advised a different order of wording to avoid the obvious connotation.) The principal sponsors of this exclusive club and cutout for the “sustainable class” coincides with those whose wealth derives from the exact opposite of those terms, if one understands them naively. In fact, the WEF and the wholly owned United Nations apparatus are all beneficiaries of the atomic extortion system created by the Manhattan Project. What D-I-E means is literally what Stanley Kubrick so effectively depicted in Doctor Strangelove. It is the world depicted in Soylent Green. It includes the Invasion of the Body Snatchers and Outbreak. This Hollywood propaganda product has been called “predictive”. It is part of creating the psychological conditions for re-engineering.
So amid the Woke Crusade, the legally protected vandalism of vast majorities by “pure” fanatics, two phenomena have emerged to coincide with the worldwide counter-insurgency by force of arms (aka the War on Terror and now the war against Russia). These have been a) mass migration from the countries that the Anglo-American Empire and its vassals have been plundering and pillaging since 1975 almost without meaningful opposition at home or abroad and b) abject failure of even the most rudimentary public safety and policing mechanisms to function.
The rampages since 2020 mainly in the US and the mass illegal migration, in the US and EU but also in countries unfortunate enough to border the imperial plunder and pillage operations everywhere except perhaps Russia and China, are destroying the economic order in which the vast majority of people live their lives. Officially this disruption is a struggle for social justice. However, justice is not a natural condition but one created within definable social contexts. Precisely these contexts, until now, defined by nation-state legal and moral regimes, are under universal attack. The assailants are not secret. The attack on definable social contexts in which local communities can establish and maintain social justice is being organized and conducted at the strategic level by those who own the United Nations and compose the World Economic Forum. The sustainable development goals they pursue are those which clearly permit them to sustain their position and power amidst the destruction of every other social structure that could in any way deviate from the digital-computational vision of life (let us not call it humanity) they have been raised to promote and impose.
It is clear testimony to the effectiveness of the psychological weapons used that while so much has been scrubbed from the Internet (or blocked by available search engines), one can still find a notorious 60-Minutes interview in which George Schwartz (Soros) unabashedly admits that since the age of 14 (!) he has unrepentantly participated in the deportation of people (also to slavery or death) in order to profit from confiscation of their goods and property. This man has been able to promote himself as a philanthropist while enriching himself for some 79 years by the same methods. His Open Society foundations, in addition to acting as conduits for other government agencies, have served as cadre schools and organizational support to thousands whose business model is the destruction of the citizen framework that has historically guaranteed social justice or any kind of organized cultural and economic life—for power and profit. He is demonstrably one of the major funders of the AstroTurf NGOs that wage the war for “purity” (DIE) throughout the world. Mr Soros is just the most prominent and unabashed of the atomic war elite. The dissolution of the legal and social context for communities, historical nations or states, is being pursued to create a world of statelessness in which no institutions are available to protect human beings, especially from those who are like Soros.
The removal of policing, whether of borders or city streets, is elemental to this policy. The destruction of the SME sector, one of the COVID-19 objectives, was accelerated by the armed propaganda tactics of the offshore AstroTurf NGOs. There is a complex of weaponry deployed and the US itself has finally become the target of the strategy its owners have pursued for decades in every corner of the empire. Mass migration will flood the labour market in a country already deindustrialised. It will replace furloughed and mRNA poisoned workers and their families with raw muscle from abroad. At the same time the US will be subjected to unique tactics.
While the EU comprises populations long accustomed to national registration, social management and lack of lethal force among the citizens, the US is a society with a notoriously well-armed population. Moreover its most traditional elements include police, fire brigades, and military veterans indoctrinated with even more patriotism than the average person outside the US can imagine. This poses a threat—mirrored in the regime’s fanatical attempts to prevent Donald Trump from standing in the next POTUS election. The ruling oligarchy has surely been asking itself, especially after growing barracks unrest following the forced mRNA injections, whether its uniformed security forces are sufficiently loyal. Therefore it is very likely that among these “military-aged” illegal immigrant males there are cohorts of trained paramilitary infiltrated into the country, like in Libya or Syria. All this can lead to a major reorganization of the economy based on new forms of forced labour and political repression. Without the SME sector the US population becomes even more dependent upon the oligarchs that own corporations like Amazon. At the same time the barriers between licit and illicit economy are being dissolved/ demolished. When ordinary business has to pay protection only armies will be able to do business.
The digital war, launched against humans and nature in 1945 with the obliteration of two Japanese cities, opened a new era, the era of global nihilism whose lingua franca is mathematics and whose form of reality is the mathematical model in which humans are mere computational factors. There are cultures on this planet still that resist this compulsive computation and its practice of natural and human degradation. They cannot be reduced to digits or some factor or marginal utility. They are not enemies of Nature but integral elements of Nature. It is necessary to remember that. Those who bombard us with lies about sustainability are only the descendants of the Strangeloves, the Tellers, von Neumanns, Oppenheimers and the psychopathic misanthropes who paid them for creating the means by which they may sustain themselves (they believe) at the expense of annihilating the rest of us. The Sustainable Development Goals and DIE are the immoral basis by which sustainable atomic, biological and chemical war can be waged against Nature and its human members.
More than twenty years ago I published a study in which I argued that South Africa’s apartheid system was created by mission and land appropriation.1 This obviously implicated the Christian churches, including those that had claimed to be opposed to the British policy enshrined in the National Party programme when it came to power in 1947. This study received one review which confirmed the experience I had defending it as a dissertation—namely that my thesis was not understood. The problem was not the clarity or evidence. That was clear from the review and the committee’s reactions. Rather it was a fundamental and paradigmatic issue. Neither the Church nor the land question was taken seriously as central to the policy of apartheid.
In the years following the demise of South Africa’s National Party regime, I watched and waited to see what would happen to the social and economic order that the Anglo-Afrikaner elite had created since the end of the 19th century. As I predicted none of the grand land reform measures, not even those stated in the new constitution or the ANC’s Reconstruction and Development Plan were implemented in more than token ways. One of the reasons for this was the victory of neo-liberalism in 1989 over every other form of economic programme. Another was, and remains, the absence of any social-political-economic praxis aimed at social transformation to counter the neo-liberal paradigm. Finally the nature of the NP’s withdrawal was to surrender form without surrendering power.
Actually my interest in these problems goes back to 1986, when by accident I was on a study trip to Brazil. It was the year after the formal end of the military dictatorship instigated by the US in 1962 and executed in 1964. During that trip I was able to interview numerous people involved in the drafting of a new civilian constitution to replace the Atos Institucionais that had formed the basis of military rule for two decades. It was by coincidence that I found myself in a similar position in 1991 when I arrived in Johannesburg.
All that said: I have been studying social engineering for more than thirty years. In the West—to apply a thoroughly worn and yet useful cliché—the DNA of social engineering is the Latin Church, also known as the Roman Catholic Church. Since the 18th century but even more in the 20th century there has been a largely successful effort to conceal the extent to which the Latin Church remains the model for effective conquest. Wishful thinking, mendacity, and propaganda have obscured the mechanisms by which the West’s oldest transnational corporation shaped what is today often called the “globalized world”—a euphemism for the planet’s susceptibility to the central ecclesiastical technology—missionary conquest.
In The Art of War (5 BCE), Chinese general, Sun Tzu, explained, “to fight and conquer in all your battles is not supreme excellence; supreme excellence consists in breaking the enemy’s resistance without fighting.” The method of mission is to break the enemy’s resistance.
Colonialism and imperialism over the past four centuries were not merely the extension of high lethality belligerence and larceny by Western barbarians. Numerically the population of the Western peninsula, aka Europe, was always far too small to fight and conquer the world that came to embody the British and now Anglo-American Empire. In fact, this inability of Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, English, French and later Belgian forces to conquer and fully occupy all the territories they claimed is often used to explain the failures of imperialism and the ultimate victory ascribed to independence movements after 1945. In today’s comparison between empires supposed to have waned or atrophied, like the British or French, and the imperial quality ascribed to the Russian Federation and the People’s Republic of China, invidious and fallacious distinctions are made. The persistence of the multi-ethnic quality of both great continental states is treated as evidence that they are imperial in nature—for which they are regularly condemned in popular and scholarly venues. These states whose alleged empires comprise immediately contiguous territory in which culture and populations have integrated over centuries are compared with the occupation of India, Africa, Indonesia and the Americas by small tribal kingdoms, like Spain, Portugal, France or the Netherlands, Belgium or Great Britain. These kingdoms and republics have supposedly withdrawn to their core principalities and liberated once subjugated peoples. Thus these states, which now constitute the EU, the Commonwealth and the USA, have attained the moral status entitling them to condemn other states for sins they committed and meanwhile allege to have confessed.
This is the general political context in which the empire of the West constitutes itself as the “international community” and the promulgator of “rules”. Those who are not part of this “community” are obliged to follow. Certainly there is a tiny, barely audible voice in that community that tries to assert the primacy of international law or the Law of Nations, as it was once known. Both the Russian Federation and the People’s Republic of China make every effort to remind the world that the Law of Nations, as opposed to the “rules-based” order is the genuine foundation of human civilization and commerce between states.
There are several clear reasons why these efforts have failed to date. First, the historic balance of political-economic forces, including military, had remained for the better part of the 20th century and into the 21st century in the hands of the barbarian West. (For readers who may wonder why I consistently use the term “barbarian”, let me say that it has been these countries, the collective West, that have constituted the most warlike and destructive forces on the planet for the past five hundred years, including the only state to have deployed atomic weapons.) Second, the control of nearly two thirds of the world’s land mass and the inhabitants of those areas has magnified the impact of the barbarian tribes reinforced by naval and air power developed to dominate those territories. This has had the effect of isolating the two huge Asian nations of Russia and China. Third, and probably most importantly, the West developed the most powerful psychic technology for conquest of hearts and minds throughout the planet. This technology is cultural, proprietary and, above all, religious.
It is on this last aspect of Western barbarism that I will focus.
The Latin Church bequeathed to its semi-secular partners in conquest the technology of mission. Previously religion was based either on geography or ethnicity. There were no universal gods and monotheism was a rarity at best. Sigmund Freud offered an explanation for the latter in a late and brief essay called Moses and Monotheism (1939). However, it is not his thesis that concerns me here. In the course of recorded history, to the extent we can rely on it, deities were confined to places and peoples. Travellers, even armies, brought their religions with them while paying due respect even homage to the deities they met on their travels and campaigns. Of course, what this meant was that the sacred places of others were generally treated respectfully even if they did not coincide with one’s own religious worship. When people moved they either brought their own deities or adopted the ones they found in their new homes.
The establishment of cults based on a universal deity was the product of global imperial expansion. However, it first only supported the imperial conquerors by granting that the local god now was free to accompany the soldiers of a marauding army far from its own cultural and ethnic community. The next stage of development was for the universal deity to be adopted by soldiers recruited from territories that had been invaded and conquered. This left the peoples dominated by military conquest possessed of their local and ethnic deities while integrating the foreign troops into an ideologically (religiously) uniform command structure.
When the Latin Church was founded by what was essentially a coup against Hellenistic Christianity based in the Balkans, Black Sea basin and Asia Minor, monotheism acquired a virulence inconsistent with what we know about original Christian praxis and aggressiveness which arguably triggered the militancy of Islam, too. That virulence and aggressiveness was disproportionate to the numbers actually following the Latin deviation. Yet within less than a thousand years this Christian deviation led to the global dominance of the business corporation and the missionary propaganda technology as means of psychological conquest independent of territorial occupation.
How does mission really work?
If one reads any of the standard histories describing the expansion of Christianity in the Western peninsula of Eurasia, the Americas or Africa, great attention is given to the preachers of the Gospel. In some narratives they travelled alone preaching; i.e., orally transmitting—from Scripture and working miracles; i.e., performing acts deemed supernatural or divinely supported. Then there were the preachers accompanying invading armies who not only preached to the soldiers but also construed the results of battle either as divine victories or punishing defeats. Hagiography, the stories of saints, is replete with accounts of wonders that led to conversion of princes and nations to the Holy Church. The precise mechanics of these conversions is generally omitted because it is expected that the readers already accept the divine attributes of the Church and the will of god to increase his flock.
However, the core of the technology of conversion is already recognisable in the myth of Christ, itself. In fact, the true intent of this myth has been marvellously characterised by Jose Saramago in his scandalous novel The Gospel according to Jesus Christ (1991). In a dialogue between the god in question and Jesus of Nazareth, Saramago recounts how this god, aware of all the other competing gods and determined to be the top god, needs people to fight for him against the other gods. He explains to Jesus that people would not fight just for a god—but they would fight for him. Jesus is furious at this revelation and refuses to participate in the god’s plan for domination. The god replies that Jesus is powerless to resist. He can refuse to perform miracles but he will be unable to prove that he did not perform the miracles god stages.
Saramago uses this fable or interpretation of the Gospel to explain the dynamics of “victimhood”. The god sets up Jesus as an ordinary man who suddenly can perform miracles, which draw a following. Then he creates the conditions by which Jesus is persecuted and killed by the State. This galvanizes the cult around Jesus the miracle-worker. The cult angered by the murder of its divine leader seeks revenge. This it can only do by the threat of, or use of, armed force. To exact revenge it must align with those who have the necessary force and win them over to the cult. As members of the vengeful cult they are now in a position to exact revenge or alternatively conversion to the cult. It is this basic materialistic contradiction that fuels the cult’s expansion.
As a rule, and this can be found throughout the missionary activity of Western churches (the Latin Church and its reformed derivatives), local cults and their deities are not easily abandoned. First of all, under the conditions of ethnic or geographic religion there is no reason for an established ethnic group or the traditional inhabitants of a region to “change gods.” Sedentary peoples who remain together as tribes or occupy agricultural and pastoral regions for centuries do not “evolve” their religious beliefs into monotheism. This notion of monotheism as an evolutionary product is part of the 19th century myth of progress many associate with Charles Darwin and sociological followers of his historical interpretations.
As said before military expansion or nomadic barbarism are the social formations from which monotheism emerges as soon as territorial and population conquest require.
The expanding Latin Church overcame this inertia by the refinement of the “victimhood” and its transformation into a method of psychological warfare. The invading Church, let us call it the Church militant, sought and isolated minorities in the targets of conquest. These minorities had little or no power in the communities to which they were attached. Thus they were amenable to preaching—if for no other reason than the allied power to which they were then joined. The adoption of the cult by these minorities endowed them with “purity” compared to the complex majority communities with their geographic and ethnic deities, now viewed as corrupted and sullied by mundane practices. The pure status insinuated virtues proclaimed to be absent among the majority. Naturally in any established community there are various sources of discontent. No system functions perfectly. The longer any system has been in place the more incoherence is certain to have appeared. Hence the first tactic of the new “pure” is to find and recruit the discontented among the majority. It is not necessary that these discontents join the cult of the pure. In fact, it may be detrimental to the overall strategy if they do.
What is important is the capacity of the discontents to be sacrificed for purity. They must be sufficiently dissatisfied that they will act in concert with the pure, wittingly or unwittingly. Here a number of options are possible but to keep it simple we will stick to the “Jesus model”. The potential “Jesus” has to be perceived as a member of the community as a whole. Then he has to articulate grievances that all but the most hard-core defenders of the status quo will admit—even if this admission has no immediate consequences. Then this “Jesus” has to be sacrificed. That means the “Jesus” has to conspicuously suffer and perhaps even die at the hands of the supporters of the status quo. This does not by itself trigger a revolt or overthrow of the prevailing system. In fact, that is not the aim of this strategy. Instead it creates a breach in the perceived legitimization of the extant religion. That breach arises from the fear that the insignificant “Jesus” becomes more than exemplary of the threat to everyone else who harbours the doubts or critiques for which this “Jesus” was persecuted. A latent choice is introduced into an inertial system: align with the pure or risk punishment.
It is important to say that this only works when the pure already enjoy a preponderance of force, even if that force has not yet been applied. Therein lies the difference between missionary conversion and revolutionary mobilisation. For example, it is also the fundamental difference between Maoism and “Sharpism”.
The Christianisation of the western hemisphere and Africa relied on this model. Sometimes this was simplified by the mass extermination of Western barbarian conquest, like in the Americas. Another argument used to explain the effect of missionary conquest is that the defeat of the besieged population on the battlefield discredited the extant religion and deities, leaving the survivors to convert to the “winning god”. However, this argument is insufficient to explain conversion where no such massive battlefield annihilation occurred. Nor does it explain the continued success of the “Jesus” model without explicit armed force.
In this brief essay I would like to apply the “victimhood” or “Jesus” model and by implication its 20th century adaptation in the wake of the “second thirty years war” that was interrupted in 1945.2 For more than 30 years—to keep it simple starting in 1989—the world has been subject to an accelerated conversion or social engineering process, euphemistically called “globalisation”. The acceleration or metastasis was made possible by the defeat of the Soviet Union. Every history book one can find today will recount that the Soviet Union failed due to what might be called the errors of its underlying religion; i.e., Marxism-Leninism. Those with less antagonism toward that body of theory will argue that the Soviet Union was bankrupted into collapse. Then ridiculously sentimental will say that “communism failed because even communists realised it was wrong”.
An objective examination of the economic conditions of the two superpowers in 1989 would demonstrate that the Soviet Union did not collapse because it was bankrupt and its economy no longer able to function. The Soviet Union and its antagonist the United States were both in demonstrably ruinous economic condition. In fact, the economic condition of the US never improved after 1989—only the FIRE sector did.3 Moreover there was no military defeat of the Soviet Union. The war started under President Jimmy Carter in Afghanistan was far shorter (for the Russians) than the thirty some years that the US waged war throughout Indochina. The Soviet Union had none of the debt the US accumulated carpet-bombing and murdering millions in Korea between 1950-53.
Three factors led to the collapse of the Soviet Union. The first was the accumulated damage done by a century of economic and armed war against the country. US “experts” like George Kennan wrote accurately that it would take the Soviet Union at least twenty years to recover the lost population and economic capacity destroyed by the West’s German-led war against it.4 That was with all things being equal—which they were not. Despite the non-stop war against the Soviet Union the country was able to reach nearly its full pre-war capacity by the mid-1960s. Scarcely a common source in the West explains that the occupation of Europe east of the rivers Elbe and Danube was conceded by the West to the Soviet Union in Yalta as an alternative to reparations from Germany. To the extent this is mentioned at all the excuse given was to prevent a situation arising like the one when the West drained Germany like a vampire after the 1918 armistice. The conditions at the end of World War 2 were quite different. Namely, the Western “allies”, mainly the Americans, had encouraged the destruction or theft of every useful capital asset in what became the Soviet zone of occupation and the transfer of anything of future economic value to the West.
The subsequent, at first secret, re-arming of Germany under command of American and Nazi general officers and continued brain drain led to the erection of the fortified border between the Soviet zone and the rest of the Western peninsula. Thus the Soviet Union had to fortify and subsidize the countries ruined by the Wehrmacht campaigns while trying to reconstruct its own economy and restore the 20 million plus killed during World War 2. While the Soviet Union was working to recover a relatively weak status quo ante, the United States was able to expand its markets and power over the rest of the globe. Thus from 1945 until 1989 the United States economy was fuelled by the elimination of every other meaningful competitor whether it was for sales or purchases. It is worth noting—given the recent release of an atomic bomb hagiography called Oppenheimer—that this weapon was devised under the leadership of rabid anti-communists/anti-Soviets for use in wiping the Soviet Union off the face of the Earth after it was clear that the Wehrmacht had failed. At no time during World War 2 was Anglo-American aerial bombardment directed to support the Soviet Union’s self-defence. It was explicitly waged to destroy economic competitors to the British and American Empires.
The third factor was the missionary strategy. I have always found it bitterly amusing when Americans or the natives of the Western peninsula complain about Soviet (or Chinese) propaganda. The first thing I ask them is how much Russian or Chinese they have learned? Then I ask if they can name a Russian or Chinese pop musician or film star or what Chinese or Russian clothing items they most prefer? The only food and drink they can associate with Russia are vodka and caviar. How effective could their propaganda be?
Coca Cola and Pepsi (thanks to negotiations by Richard Nixon on behalf of his friends) are known throughout the world and were imported or bottled in the Soviet Union. Denim trousers (Levis) were coveted goods from Magdeburg to Vladivostok. Despite technical countermeasures there was little that could be done to suppress the vast global propaganda machine combining films, music, and consumer goods of every kind. This all served to amplify the ideology of consumerism as a pure form of economic and social well being. This pure form—available only to the “middle class” countries on any scale—was presented and seen everywhere as the virtue which a struggling economy and political system was expected to produce for young people. There was no question of converting the heroes of the Soviet Union, the survivors of the civil war and non-stop foreign invasions since 1918.
However, the young, the desperately needed replacements to rebuild the Soviet Union, could not simply be inculcated in the moral sacrifices of their parents and grandparents. There had to be space and a future for these people. The capacity to compete for the hearts and minds of the generations that by 1989 had no immediate recollection of the Great Patriotic War was not only challenged within the Soviet Union but throughout the countries it had occupied since 1945. These countries, especially the GDR, Hungary and Poland, were able to benefit from overt and covert support from the West. Moreover there had been an intensive and to date still largely unacknowledged level of penetration and sabotage under the guise of technology transfer agreements that in the final years weakened the system considerably. Defective control technology for industrial infrastructure led to serious destruction of pipelines.5 It takes no fantasy to imagine that intentionally defective control components—merely improperly calibrated meters would have done the trick—led to the Chernobyl meltdown.
The Helsinki Accords (1975), still considered naively as an important step toward peace, were a major propaganda victory for the West. Despite the creation of NGOs in the West, the only governments consistently subjected to its conditions were those in the “Soviet bloc”. By treating the conflict between the US and the USSR as competition when, in fact, it was covert aggression by the United States, every international treaty presented the US as the generous human rights and peace defender and the Soviet Union as conceding its power both domestically and abroad. To this day there is no general admission in the West that no later than 1945, it was the US that waged non-stop war against the Soviet Union, making all these treaties essentially acts of extortion against the country and its people all of whom were aware of the US first strike and second strike atomic warfare strategy and what it would mean for any reconstruction and development.
By the time a wholly compromised Mikhail Gorbachev gave his country to the US raiders under Yeltsin, the moral legitimacy of the Soviet Union had been so seriously undermined that no party or military effort could rescue it from the locust swarms that devastated the country after 1990. With the borders open, the government in disgrace, and the youth able to join what they thought would be the saving purity of the cult held back for seventy years, the potential for converts was enormous. The cost was immeasurable. Only with the election of Vladimir Putin did the bleeding stop.
The conversion of the Soviet Union into the neo-liberal Russian Federation was made possible not by some catastrophic failure of Marxism – Leninism or even the inadequacy of the CPSU government. It was accomplished by 44 continuous years of covert war against a country struggling to recover from the previous decades of war waged against it. It may be added that Russia has always had a conflict between its Russian (Slavic Orthodox) and its Francophile/ Anglophile partisans.6 The October Revolution did not overcome this contradiction. Before 1917 there were also factions that believed that the Russian economy should rely on Germany, France and Britain for its industrial products and export its raw materials (like any third world country). Lenin’s vision for the October Revolution was to transform Russia into a self-sufficient industrialised nation capable of using its own resources for development. As a result the conflicts in revolutionary Russia were very much like those that persisted in the so-called Third World where leaders like Nkrumah wanted national electrification to make the country capable of producing and exporting aluminium for hard cash instead of just cheap bauxite for peanuts. The Generalplan Ost was not just an expression of Hitler’s attitude toward the Soviet Union but also the West’s plans that had been frustrated by Stalin’s “socialism in one country”, so poorly understood by ultraorthodox Marxists in the West. Altogether then the constant war, covert, diplomatic and economic waged against the Soviet Union, directly and through the Comecon states, combined with the global propaganda campaign directed at the vulnerable youth to undermine the last pillars of an independent Soviet Union. And for the Russian Federation the war is far from over.
The Woke and the Dead
Just as the war against Russia did not end with the destruction of the Soviet Union, the war against humanism, whether liberal or Marxist, has continued. No one doubts that the end of the Soviet Union also meant that the independence struggles that began in earnest and seemed promising until 1975 were going to be reversed wherever possible. Absent the military or diplomatic challenge from Moscow or Beijing, every liberation movement that was not subdued was forced to reach a neo-liberal compromise to avoid being neutralised. While the US economy was just as much in tatters as that of the Soviet Union, the US could use the IMF, World Bank, and UN (also NATO) to transfer the costs to Rest of World. That was an option always unavailable to Moscow.
However, the unimaginable concentration of wealth that has continued since 1989 would have to consume what was left of the US economy too. The Chinese strategy for accelerated industrialisation using what was essentially a modified treaty port system permitted the Anglo-American financial oligarchy to relocate all its meaningful industrial capacity—whatever had not already been moved to Indonesia or some other client state—to China.7 This deindustrialisation—following the British model—left the US with only one industry of any size: weapons systems.8 The steady impoverishment of the US since the 1970s has always been concealed behind a wall of credit cards and second mortgages. Thus the illusory American standard of living is maintained by charging the difference between 1973 salaries and 2023 prices. Already by the time the Bush-Clinton dynasty obtained control over the presidency and the electoral machinery to deliver congressional majorities, popular resistance was growing. Initially deceived by the Reagan-Thatcher shell games, the inability to continue debt payments and the rising cost of everything, aggravated by massive privatization in a system already dominated by business corporations, were pushing increasing numbers of conservative, church-going, Americans into opposition to what they identified as the status quo.
This presented a serious problem for the country’s ruling oligarchy. It was the Christian, moral majority that had put Ronald Reagan in the White House. Despite wars initiated by both Bush presidents and Clinton to stir that majority’s patriotic fervour, both the wars’ failures and the fallout in terms of major wealth transfers and obvious corruption were threatening to alienate that core upon which the nation’s owners depend for consent. A revolt in the Republican rank and file, also known as the Tea Party, not only articulated some of this resentment but also led to upsets in the previously comfortable GOP election machinery. Attempts were made to stigmatise the Tea Party as a fanatical right-wing minority. In fact, it looked for a while like some self-appointed Tea Party leaders in the Establishment would perform some rhetorical moves and vent the steam that threatened to dislodge the mainline Republican Party.
This appeared to work until out of the “red,” the New York City real estate mogul, Donald Trump won the Republican nomination for the 2016 general elections.9 Worst of all, Donald Trump won the election, soundly defeating the anointed successor from the Bush-Clinton gang. It should be remembered this implosion was delayed by the CIA’s invention of Barack Obama as a candidate to defuse all the opposition to George W Bush. Obama had dutifully served/ saved the financial oligarchy when its massive financial derivatives scam collapsed in 2008. Together with Hillary Clinton, Obama kept the US at war for eight years so that the patriotic majority had to swallow its antipathy to the polyester POTUS.
The panic that ensued among the Establishment was clearly not really aimed at Trump, since his personality and ignorance of the bureaucratic system he was entering posed no immediate threat. Rather it was the conservative, populist core that his election empowered which the Establishment had to check. For the better part of a century this majority of the population could be relied upon to support the Establishment in the cause of anti-communism. However, after 1989 this cry was inconsistent with the proclamation that the West had won and communism along with the evil Soviet Union had been destroyed. A new strategy was needed.
Until the Six Day War (1967) not much attention had been paid to Israel and certainly nothing significant to the forced labour, slave labour and mass murder perpetuated in Germany and those territories it had occupied during the Second World War.10 Obvious reasons included the need to avoid shining the light on perpetrators the US had installed in West Germany or in cushy jobs stateside; the need to focus attention on the evils of the Soviet Union, and more subtly because the massive death toll of the Soviet Union alone would have tarnished the on-going campaigns to destroy it. With the Israel attack of Egypt, a relatively benign public opinion was at risk of turning into outright hostility toward the Euro-Zionist colony under British administration in Palestine that had declared itself the State of Israel in 1948. Israel not only launched surprise attacks but also occupied territory in every direction more than doubling the area under its control.
In the wake of this public relations disaster, a campaign, which became massive in scope and continues to this day, resurrected the stories and history of the Second World War and retold it as the war by Germany to exterminate world Jewry and the centre of this war, “the holocaust” was the mass murder of an estimated six million Jews in concentration camps run by the German Nazi regime. Since the Second World War had been fought to defend Jews from extermination, Israel could not be blamed even for pre-emptive measures since these all served to prevent another “holocaust”. The fact that even were one certain of the numbers of deaths and could be convinced by data, the figure of six million pales in comparison to the twenty plus million killed in the Soviet Union alone and another twenty million that died in China during the war. So without diminishing any deaths whether due to slave labour or mass murder, the re-writing of the history of World War 2 as the prologue to the foundation of Israel required heavy-duty propaganda and convincing political force. All of this was brought to bear. The scope of distortion and outright mendacity needed to establish the state of Israel as the “Victim” par excellence and its Jewish citizens, living and dead, as the ultimate victims, have been treated extensively elsewhere. The point here is that this is probably the greatest example of the “victim” strategy for social engineering since the “Jesus” strategy as deployed by the Latin Church.
The structural analogy I propose is as follows: It is not sufficient that there is a victim. This victim must be chosen; must be the ultimate victim. This victimhood also means that the victim is the embodiment of purity in comparison to which all other victims are imperfect or not victims at all. A veritable hierarchy of victims follows with the chosen victim at the top. This victim is entitled to reverence, even adoration, and the victim’s purity must be defended absolutely. The cult of this victim endows the true believers with the charisma of purity—even if they are not, in fact, pure in any meaningful sense. The cult then reaches into the majority of the impure from which it recruits or implicates those either aspirant to purity or touched by the guilt of the “impure”. Together these two elements when combined with material force, whether political, economic, military or combinations thereof, create a minority of the pure positioned to defend purity and the victimhood even from imputed threats by the majority who are by definition impure or victims of lower status. The aim of this strategy is to subjugate an indigenous majority by creation of a morally pure and hence powerful minority. This minority cannot show the physical force upon which its attack relies without creating a majority reaction that could repel it. The moral-psychological power is expressed through the implication of guilt or sympathy among unorganised members of the majority who in dispersion seek confirmation of their moral position. Thus latent outliers may work to strengthen the minority assault or undermine any emerging consensus to defend the indigenous culture.
This is essentially pre-emptive counter-insurgency. That is why Gene Sharp was so interested in dissecting national liberation movements. He wanted to know how to re-engineer them to oppose mass movements. Before he published his infamous From Dictatorship to Democracy he published a study for the US Department of Defense on how to create popular forces that would effectively combat national liberation struggles by imitating them.11
By 1975 the national liberation movements in all of the countries in the Western Empire had been either subdued or compromised. Their radical leaders, including those in the US, were murdered or driven underground. In their place came the civilian defence organisations Sharp had conceived now in the form of NGOs.12 These became the seeds for so-called astro-turf grassroots movements, collectively called “civil society”. Civil society replaced the mass movements with qualified experts able to promote agendas in the system. What that meant, in fact, was that mass politics and struggle were replaced by political management conducted by cadres modelled on Sharp’s understanding of the political commissar. Key positions were filled with the members of movements who could be rewarded after their unfortunate leaders had been eliminated. With time civil society became a career path for academically trained managers in social engineering. The financial support of the oligarchy either directly or through various conduits compounded with access to all the Establishment media outlets, not least of which are the educational institutions, would raise civil society to the supreme force for articulating purity and victimhood. Civil society became the cover for the merger of missionary technology and brute economic, political and military force in a world where the ecclesiastical model had become a vehicle for the popular movements; e.g., in the 80s liberation theology and in the 90s Christian revivalism. The papacy had succeeded in crushing the mass movements’ efforts to use the Church for the liberation struggle.13 However, there was no such central force capable of subduing the Protestant denominations. Although Pentecostalism had been very effective in Latin America for neutralising the popular church, the US was a far more complicated terrain than the Catholic countries. 14 Scandals had decimated the most reliable agents in the Fundamentalist movement already in the late 1980s. 15
This was the challenge that gave rise to the Fourth Awakening—or Woke, a tasteless appropriation of an expression from Black American dialect meaning “aware”. The term awakening is more appropriate because Woke is really another crusade. Awakenings were the Protestant equivalents of the Catholic Crusades, usually in some way also just as fanatical and bloody as well as profitable for the promoters. 16 Following the model applied after the Six Day War and working from the basis of Gene Sharp’s NGO-based counter-insurgency strategy, the Establishment through its extensive control over all mass media and educational institutions, accelerated the moral campaign to create a movement of purity and victimhood to be directed against the core working class population of the United States and other middle class countries in the empire. By appropriating the academically modified liberation jargon developed in the university and NGO labs, armed propaganda units like BLM and Antifa could be deployed in ways that thirty years ago would have been prosecuted as communist terrorism. This use of reconstituted liberation jargon was calculated to antagonise the majority as well as trigger reactions which moderately critical or liberal members of the majority would find difficult to defend.
This counter-insurgency campaign is being waged by the civil society cadre organisations and the kind of armed propaganda units conceived in the CIA’s Phoenix Program for Southeast Asia during the wars against Vietnam and subsequent wars in Central America. 17 The difference is that since the target is the conservative, patriotic majority, the language has to be that of the movements they had been indoctrinated to oppose since 1945. Combined with the very real corporate power behind this “moral minority” or pure (vicarious) victims and the effective use of legislation and police power (or its absence), the Woke Crusade aims to divide the majority of the American population, not only whites since conservative Christianity is foundational among Blacks and Latinos too. The Woke crusade is a carefully synthesised missionary project to completely re-engineer the conditions under which the vast majority of American citizens live in the mistaken (and insincere) belief that this serves social justice. This war against popular majorities is not limited to the United States. It is being waged throughout what was once called Christendom. In fact, that is why it is so effective thus far—it is derived from the modus operandi of the institution upon which all Christendom was based.
If the people be led by laws, and uniformity sought to be given them by punishments, they will try to avoid the punishment, but have no sense of shame.
If they be led by virtue, and uniformity to be given them by the rules of propriety, they will have the sense of shame, and moreover will become good.
— Analects, 1:3:1,2
This morning it occurred to me again that what we have seen in the past forty-fifty years was not the failure of the Left but its extermination behind façades maintained solely for the illusion that there was one still. I kept saying this is Fabianism.
However, most often Fabianism is understood as the gradual penetration of the Establishment by the Left. In fact, it has always meant the opposite: the Establishment’s penetration and absorption of the Left. That was certainly evident in the US version, Pwogism (Progressivism).
The result became clear no later than in 2016 where Left was recognised as the hallmark of unadulterated fascism.
Perhaps the first historical version of this was Mussolini himself. He began his political career as a “left wing” politician (and British agent) before emerging as the titular head of Italian fascism.
The neo-conservatives were the Fabian equivalent in the “right” wing. New York City, rather than the South or Midwest, became the fountainhead of reaction in the 1980s.
In both cases we are talking about intellectual thugs and gangsters who, through terror and conspiracy, seized control of education and research, now more aptly called indoctrination and repression.
At the top they converge again in virtually pure nihilism after having rendered much if not all of the political spectrum vacuous and useless as channels for political expression.
The recent cant claiming a fundamental conflict between “democracy” and “authoritarianism” ought not to be dismissed so quickly. It is not a mere replacement for Samuel Huntington’s slogan, “clash of civilizations?”
“Democracy” is the defining condition of Fabianism. Like certain animal parasites it needs a specific host. Fabianism, as a conspiratorial manipulation of liberal democratic institutions, relies on mass politics for its nutritional base.
Fabian opposition to “authoritarianism” is best understood as an attack on any effective barrier to parasitic infestation by those whose power is exercised through malignant “mass democracy“.
Fabianism needs the ideology of the “self” and “narcissism” to drive mass organisations in ways that serve the Establishment. A sales campaign is a component of the whole crusade mechanism. The individual selfish soul or gene is sanctified in the personalized illusions to be satisfied by purchase of products or performance of compliant acts. This “democracy” in consumption supports the belief that democracy is an inner belief and not a material process with external results. One knows one is a “democrat“ by what one has ingested, not by the world in which one lives. If in doubt there are “hormonal therapies“ to stabilize the consumer’s identity.
The similarity to principles and practices of Christian dogma is not accidental. Elections are sacramental not material. The true election reveals the Christ through dispensation of grace. An election is only manifest when consecrated — the function and act of the clergy (prelacy in collegiate and secret congregation).
All this is utterly opposed to what Hegel called “Sittlichkeit” — ethical forms which define the permissible and proper behaviour of everyone — not just parasitic “victims” — in a social formation. Public ethics and morals (also found in Confucian thinking) constrain the powerful and the weak. They can also be publicly modified. However, this modification comes through overt social consensus and not private evasion, elevated by sacrament.
Thus the range of tolerance is also public, as when Putin told Oliver Stone that his duty to Russia meant protecting families as the means of continuing the population of Russia. This did not mean forbidding private homosexuality. However, it forbade treating it as equal to the right of procreating families.
In a Western “democracy” it is forbidden to protect human reproduction and family structures because these are “exodermic,” hard shells. They constrain the psychological manipulation upon which Christian crusades rely. The Christian traditionalist in the West, also known as fundamentalist, is faced with this doctrinal contradiction, namely the antagonism of the Latin church to every kind of natural family. That doctrine has been preserved despite the Reformation.
The cult structure in “democracy” protects the ruling oligarchy and its wealth (like sacerdotal celibacy — a rule of the Latin rite): the charitable foundation has replaced the dynastic family for this purpose. Hence inherited wealth is less obvious. All these notorious “giving pacts” are just transubstantiation monetized. The democratic prelate (billionaire) acquires the “grace” of the fictive citizen by a gesture of “poverty” surrendering his wealth to an ecclesiastical institution whose clergy take vows to pray for his soul in tax exempt manner for eternity. Natural children can sin, constituting a financial risk to immortality. The foundation can and must fire anyone who violates his sacred vows to protect and multiply the endowment.
Thus the charitable foundation, successor to the endowed monastery, promotes the democratic faith and is fully protected from the masses and material democratic claims. Its wealth is devoted to spiritual democracy and prayer for the salvation of the founder.
Here it should be noted that successive revolutions dissolved monasteries. This act has always been attacked in history textbooks as a renunciation of charitable and good works. Unfortunately in the “democracies” the dissolution and secularisation of the monasteries was incomplete: the wealth was merely transferred to new owners. Even worse the treasury (meaning the ordinary taxpayer) was forced to compensate this loss by the Church while a secular form of monastic economy was established.
Today it is very difficult to attack dynastic structures because their formal powers have, in fact, been radically curtailed. No amount of genealogical analysis will convince anyone that a few intermarried families rule the West as they did under pre-1789 monarchies. In that sense there has been a democratisation of the West and it appears irreversible — especially since natural procreation, marriage and other instruments are now abhorrent to the ruling oligarchy.
However, with the new piety of the visibly wealthy and the ancient piety of the secretly rich, the monastic system has been redesigned to protect more than mere wealth. The charitable foundation as a perpetual entity, endowed by their founders with inalienable wealth, is governed by the spirit that amassed such wealth in the first place. Like the monastic orders of the past, the abbots rule absolutely. As they are obliged to protect and expand the endowment they and the monks they hire must continue the founder‘s rapacious and parasitic spirit in their daily devotion. Ora et labora.
Together with the great international “funds” they continue the tradition of one holy church through which only salvation may be attained. It makes no difference whether the prelate is named Bill, George, Larry, Jacob, Nathaniel, Francis, or Carlos. The power these men exercise derives from the corporations they command but is perpetuated and protected through their monastic misanthropy.
Any new revolution will have to complete the dissolution repeatedly attempted in the past. It will have to transcend the illusions of merely spiritual democracy and struggle with the perpetual labour of material democracy — where there is no salvation beyond mortal life itself.
Clarity Press recently published Joan Roelofs’ latest contribution to the movements for peace in the United States, The Trillion Dollar Silencer (TDS). She has been a peace activist all her life and a scholar who always worked to bridge the gap between activism and academia that despite that effort seems to have widened rather than narrowed, at least since the 1990s. Part of the reason for this can be found in the activity of pseudo-academic institutions in the private sector, foundations and their appendages, think tanks. Naomi Klein may not have been the first to so describe them but her characterization cannot be disputed: places where people are paid to think by those who make tanks. After reading Joan Roelofs’ new book, it seemed more useful to talk to her about it rather than simply review it.
Dr T P Wilkinson: Some years ago you published a book called Foundations and Public Policy. In it you give a substantial overview of the tax-exempt foundation landscape in the US and how these institutions have not only shaped but also created public policy in the US. As I understood the work your concern was not necessarily to condemn these efforts but to call attention to this exercise of political power by unelected institutions largely beyond public oversight and unknown to most citizens. Of course you also show that some policies that may be very controversial in fact originated in the foundation sector and owe their adoption and implementation to it. One suspects a sympathy with C. Wright Mills but as a political scientist you concentrate on the perspective from your own discipline.1 Now in this new book you start from the question “why is there no anti-war movement?” and proceed to show how much influence the “war movement” has on the potential for “anti-war movement”. This seems an extension of your argument in the earlier book: namely that many important policies are made beyond the scope of open political discourse and action — essentially hidden from the constitutional processes available to citizens. Does this book simply cover another sector or is it also an indictment of a general erosion of those constitutional processes and public control over the State?
Joan Roelofs: Foundations try to fix up our political and economic system without threatening capitalism and US world dominance. However, radical change is needed, for the sake of justice, protecting the environment, lessening the threat of war, and ensuring the basics of the good life for all. Foundations divert these goals, replacing them with reformist measures that often are only stopgaps. In the process, they removed incentives for radical activism, especially by creating a world of nonprofit organizations with decent staff income, doing obviously good things. They, along with government agencies, acted as soft cops in the Cold War, aiming to dispel the attraction of socialism throughout the world.
Democracy today, i.e., a truly representative system without corruption and bought representatives, would not necessarily produce justice, equality, peace, and environmental regeneration. It would reflect the self-interests of the majority, who are not poor. In earlier times the majority was poor, so democracy might have worked to produce major changes in wealth distribution. I’m not so sure that it could produce a rational economic system or anti-war fervor. In my old age I have more sympathy with Plato, especially because the semi-democracy of Athens voted for war.
TPW: Do I understand correctly, the majority is not poor today? Certainly the majority is not poor like those who live in Indonesian shantytowns or in Guinea Bissau. But with wages that have stagnated and declined for nearly 40 years now and a recognizable expansion of the gap between income and assets held by the majority and the minuscule segment of super-rich, surely there is growing poverty. Do you mean poverty as a fact or poverty as self-perception? How do you define poverty? Economist Michael Hudson has said that since the last major housing crash the last bastion of working middle class assets—home ownership – is rapidly deteriorating. This is equivalent to massive expropriation, turning homeowners into quasi-feudal tenants. Are you saying there is no democracy to counter that trend? People like Hudson and Jeffrey Sachs practically say that what makes China a democracy is that its system of government really responds to the needs of the vast majority of the people. Is the problem perhaps with the definition of democracy in the US?
JR: The official poverty rate in the US is 11.6%. Of course it is a disgrace, and especially the homeless, even in Keene. Many of these people do not vote. Many of the poor are tied into the social service system, government and NGO with housing, food, etc. Not in the mood for protesting. I live in a very mixed neighborhood and see how various poor people cope. Some own their homes (with their property taxes forgiven or unpaid), however run down; other in Section 8. The odd thing is that some of these decrepit houses have slate roofs, and even the landlords can’t afford or find people to repair them. My house was built in the 1850s, like much of the neighborhood.
TPW: Mao Zedong said during the Chinese Revolution “political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.” He was arguing that not only the revolution but also any accomplishments, such as land reform, that the Chinese people (particularly the peasantry) were able to accomplish could not survive without the armed force to defend it against enemies. In the 1930s that meant not only the reactionary forces gathered around the KMT and European colonial powers but also the Japanese. He specifically said that China — unlike Europe or the US — had no constitutional structures capable of protecting the peasantry or workers and their achievements.
Nonetheless when I finished reading your book I could not help thinking that it coincides with Mao’s dictum. The political power in the US grows out of the barrel of guns made by the enormous military-industrial-complex. At the end of your book you propose steps to take to oppose this power over American life and society. Allowing that one should use every tool available to oppose militarism in the US (or anywhere else) the impression one gets is that the power of the military is so pervasive that very few constitutional means are available. On the other hand the sheer mass of US military force seems more irresistible in the US than abroad. Does this mean that the US is really a military regime? If it is aren’t Americans faced with the same problem that countries ruled by warlords elsewhere in the world face? Are there examples from other countries that might strengthen attempts to reduce the power of the gun in US politics and society?
JR: I didn’t say there was no anti-war movement—but that it is very small. I listed a number that are doing good work. What is remarkable is that the progressives, academics, minorities, immigrants, religious institutions, et al have so little participation in anti-war causes and are mostly silent about ongoing overseas exploits. At election time foreign and military policy are barely mentioned by candidates or the press. Support or silence, not covert politics, maintains militarism.
TPW: So there is an anti-war movement that is very small. That means it is a niche issue. The difference must be that it has no “lobby” since the US Congress is no stranger to niche issues. One cannot help observing—especially from outside the US—that given the extent of US engagement, whether political, military or business, even people working beyond the US borders exhibit what might be called “geographical impairment”. We have even seen political leaders who apparently do not know where on the map to find the places they want to invade or sanction. Is it possible that the size of the anti-war movement is also a factor of the general ignorance in the population about the world beyond US borders? The instruments for maintaining this ignorance are the schools and mass media but also the latent feeling of superiority in the best of all possible worlds—in other words, complacency. What does it matter what happens to people or countries I cannot even find? To put the point positively: how much influence or potential does the anti-war movement have for raising the level of basic education about the world in which the US Empire exerts its power?
JR: One thing the antiwar movement can do is raise the awareness of what is going on, which is the aim of my book. There are planned marches in DC and Times Square. A demonstration was held in a Harvard class. The divestment movements inform workers and NGO patrons about the MIC. It is important to inform people on a local level, difficult but I have been trying. For many decades there has been a weekly vigil in Keene, as in other places.
There is a heritage of violence and its glorification in the US, perpetrated by propaganda, the educational system, and the adoration of family members who have been in the military. In addition, there are other reasons for supporting the military, including fear (of being considered unpatriotic, etc.), distractions, and interests. My book is mainly about the interests and the military connections pervading our social, educational, cultural, and economic institutions. Rust belt communities must be saved from destitution, and military contractors prop up ballet and classical music.
TPW: Does the Constitution have any practical bearing on contemporary US politics? In particular regulating the activities of the war departments? What about the militarization of the police and other institutions, after Vietnam and after 2001? Doesn’t this kind of militarism fall through the cracks?
JR: The Constitution doesn’t prevent demilitarization. The UN Charter makes war illegal, so “declaring war” needs to be amended. However, Article I states that no appropriation of money for armies shall be for longer than two years, and requires Congress to define and punish offences against the law of nations.
Courts have generally refused to question foreign policy or war activities, whether they are said to be in violation of laws or the Constitution.
This despite the provision that treaties are the law of the land.
TPW: Some years ago I argued that there was such a thing as military culture. This culture emerged in the late 19th century when, especially influenced by Positivism, militaries in Europe and Latin America saw themselves as the modernizing forces in society. They were at the vanguard of science and technology and management structures. As such they offered a vision of a rational, efficient society that abandoned the superstition of the past and the irrationality of populism or mass politics. In fact the National Defense University and its constituent colleges have had a very significant role in propagating this image of civil-military affairs and governance. Since 2020 there has been another push for “rational” governance, supposedly managed according to science (or medicine). National security ideology has been expanded to a global system of public health ostensibly embodying the same benevolent principles of good governance.
Shouldn’t we welcome the capacity of the military-industrial complex to propagate such a rational model for political and social management? If not, what is the alternative.
JR: Some aspects of the military favor rationality, science, and meritocracy—not the ideal system but better than nepotism, corruption, etc. for achieving both competence and justice. The irrational part is war, especially where nukes are involved. Victor Considerant (see my translation of his Principles of Socialism)2 was a graduate of the École Polytechnique in Paris, joined the military engineering corps. He and many of his fellow students were socialists, (St. Simonian at first), and their goals were projects such as creating a national railway system. In the TDS, I recognize the positive side of military organization.
Science has been distorted for destructive ends. It should be concerned above all with how to provide the good life for all without destroying the planet.
Fletcher Prouty, in The Secret Team, explains how the military establishment was invaded by CIA Cold War covert action people.3 There is also a revolving door between the Department of Defense and military contractor personnel.
One reason for the massive military budget is that a “free market” economy is not sustainable. The invisible hand was always a myth, and now, because of automation, outsourcing, agribusiness, consumer satiation, and extensive poverty and disability, the economy requires massive government intervention even to go along in its irrational way. The Cold War prompted US de-industrialization policies in order to build up capitalist industrial powers in Southeast Asia.
TPW: I heard and also read Tony Benn say he found it incredible that when he was drafted to fight in World War 2, the government gave him everything he needed for the job of just going out and killing Germans, but was unwilling to guarantee these things for me to do productive work.4 It has been said enough, I suppose, that the reason corporations prefer their own health and pension plans to socialized health care and pensions is for the simple purpose of labour discipline. Now much of that old corporate “welfare” has been turned over to the big five funds or derivative speculation. Those who dare to demand what soldiers and sailors get as hired killers, just for paying taxes and being good citizens, enjoy very little support. Does this mean that killing is just seen as a greater economic good than anything else workers could produce in the US?
JR: Funding the DoD is much easier for Congress than civilian intervention (there is some), which is considered socialistic.
Now rural and small towns are desperate for any government contracts, and Congress is fine with giving the military trillions to play with.5
TPW: You mention that one of the effects of all this soft intervention by the military is to promote single-issue activity or movements. For some the anti-war movement, like pacifist movements, are all single-issue movements too. In a 1967 interview German student leader Rudi Dutschke was asked, not long before he was shot in April 1968, if he would engage in guerrilla warfare in Germany to change the conditions there.6
Gunter Gaus referred to priests participating in liberation struggles in Latin America. Dutschke responded that were he in Latin America he would fight with a rifle— but he is in the Bundesrepublik and therefore has to fight with other means. Is there anything in the massive US military apparatus that offers an opportunity for those inside to oppose the destruction of the country they are constitutionally sworn to defend? Or is this a closed culture that must continue to feed itself?
JR: There are some people in the military, at all levels, who question the fateful path of US policy and operations, and also fine organizations such as Veterans for Peace. However, today’s troops are pressured and wooed with benefits. Psychology is certainly utilized, as Merrill (see part 2) describes in your previous interview.
TPW: How do you see the impact of US military culture in rest of world? There was a time in the 80s still when people in Germany actually demanded that the US military leave— and certainly not install medium-ranged atomic missiles. However those days seem to be long gone. Does the “silencer” also silence abroad? Is there any relationship between the way US military-industrial power is exercised in the US and the way it is exercised among its “allies”? Do you see potential for cross-border action or is the differences embedded in US military culture too great to allow people to see the relationships to the rest of the empire?
JR: I mention some of these factors in Europe in TDS. There is a military industrial complex in Europe and much civilian manufacture is outsourced. NATO has many connections with civilian society, ministries of defense and foreign policy, and EU institutions. Bases are of economic importance, often situated in depressed areas. One important work on the topic is The Globalization of NATO by Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya, another Clarity Press book.
I wish others would extend my research on the military at the ground level, in the US and elsewhere. There is so much more, and visibility might help to activate people, perhaps to figure out how to change the system of wars and the ever-present threat of nuclear winter.
In another 50 years China will be stronger, and by that time the Chinese Communist Party will be a hundred years old. The United States will surely be envious and ill-intentioned, but it doesn’t dare attack China, not even with a single bullet. It will research germ contamination. That is immoral. After it finishes with this unconscionable deed, imperialism will self-destruct.
— Mao Zedong, 毛主席50年前的预言 (Chairman Mao’s 50 Years Ago Prophecy), 1 July 1971, p 520
In Britain, 26 December is Boxing Day. However far more importantly it is the birthday of Mao Zedong, who would have been 129 years old. Mao was a brilliant leader, a poet, a military talent (although trained as a teacher not a soldier), and a keen observer and analyst of world affairs although he practically never left China. Comrade Mao’s selected works comprise a mere five volumes (much of his writing was lost during more than thirty years of war in China. However, there is much to amaze when one considers the almost universal defamation to which he has been subjected in the West. Reading Mao’s writing1 is particularly instructive because this work is also an astute lesson in how to read politics. That is a skill rarely exhibited in the Anglo-American Empire. Regardless of rank or station ignorance, mendacity and insincerity prevail on the plantation.
On one hand the field still seems at the mercy of those “house negroes” described in part 3. On the other the city never sleeps. New disappointments and embarrassments (putting it mildly) are reported by the hour (or however often the news cycle repeats these days).
So are we surprised that the P*OTUS (there are other words besides president that come to mind) declines to declassify records pertaining to the murder of John F Kennedy? What basis was there for great expectations to the contrary? At some point, maybe not in my lifetime, expectations might be replaced by unconditional demands.
As I suggested in numerous articles previously, any progress in the effort to obtain something like full disclosure would require adoption of a critical patriotism that recognises the nearly three centuries of bad faith that have driven the American Empire and takes responsibility for ending it. Until today only foreigners have spent their lives for America. Hardly any Americans have. Is that cynicism, ignorance or cowardice? The civil rights movement was only possible because the regime could not fight independence movements abroad without the complacency at home.
Now when the US is potentially at its most vulnerable — when pushing back against the oligarchy might actually achieve something the 4th Great Awakening (aka Wokism)2 has the nominally educated attacking the last scraps of liberty that made the US more than just another rich white man’s country. Ignorantly and cynically they claim to oppose white supremacy (or global warming) while defending the most stridently racist politicians and oligarchs the US has ever spawned.
I had to read the Scarlet Letter in school. Our teachers had no clue how to read (and today they still don’t). However Hawthorne captured the essence of American political culture, infused with the religious fanaticism that fueled the Thirty Years War. Pupils are taught to admire Mark Twain but not to read him, let alone understand what he wrote.
Mr Biden, a DuPont lackey3 and petty gangster, obviously did not decide anything with what little is left between his ears. (Give me Nixon any day!) Agnew had to quit for what amounted to parking tickets in comparison. It is frankly disgusting that anyone should even admit having actually cast a vote for this pedophile. He cannot even claim he is just a priest.
The Kennedy file (what there is of it) will only be declassified when the regime that controls those archives is no more.
Another burner which is still being used to torch the traces of pluralism still floating where the wreckage of ancient immigrant optimism sank in 1947 is the blow torch of parochialism that passes for political philosophy.
While it is attractive to draw on the literature analysing the NS-era. It is rare that someone in the English-speaking world is sufficiently versed in history or political-economy to adequately place the NS regime (a militarised form of Fabianism4) in the proper historical context not merely in the terms of poorly understood Marxism.
I say that because the chimeric Left — the pwogs young and old — perpetuate this practice often with copious citations from real and unreal Marxists. This is possible because unlike Europe before 1947, the US neutralised all its popular Marxist intellectuals and popular organisations where ordinary people actually learned to read Marx and others.
The easiest place to begin is with the absurd discussions about Antifa. One author recently called this US gang a military response to fascism.
If the writers in the Alt-Media were better informed they would know the roots of Antifa. This armed propaganda element is modelled on a group formed in Germany during the 80s, most likely with the same funding as that provided to the so-called Neo-Nazis they pretended to fight. The German neo-Nazi groups were found to be composed almost entirely of off-duty political police whose job it was to agitate with the unwitting help of mainly unemployed youth and workers. Like various Gladio5 actions these Neo-Nazi/ Antifa shows served to promote de-politicisation and to bait both nationalists opposed to US occupation and leftists opposed to the real Nazis that the US installed and maintained behind Konrad Adenauer’s reactionary screen (and whose progeny form the cadre of the Green, SPD and CDU parties today).6
In other words “antifa” is not nor was it ever “antifascist”, despite its name. Just as so many American “Maoists” and “Trots” were never even communists but pseudo-sectarians whose activities were coordinated by intellectual gangsters like Irving Kristol.7 These pseudo-extremists divided the Left and discredited serious political activity. This was one of the main criticisms raised by Malcolm as well as the BPP — this style of extremist infiltration by academically trained intelligence (red squad) assets.
The current Antifa (they did not even bother to change the German brand name) is an armed propaganda element based on the counter-terror program in the CIA’s Phoenix system.8 It is an asset of the fascist intelligence organisation that constitutes the core of the US executive branch (executive in the literal sense).
So many writers suffer from a failure to appreciate the differences while grasping too readily at apparent similarities. These comparisons with the NS era are not unwarranted but they only make sense when one places the NSDAP in the context of British and American anti-communism, British antagonism toward Russia (and Germany) in any form, and the determination of the Allies to use the Anti-Comintern Pact9 to crush nationalism and socialism in Russia and China, as they had in Spain.10
They are misguided or insincere. If they were sincere they might recognise that by attacking the patriotic working class- many of whom are veterans- they are pulling the only teeth the American people have with which to bite their exploiters.
One can only conclude that they want to attack the American working class using paramilitary propaganda like Antifa (really Klan style) and psychological warfare to “wham”11 the very people whose contradictory patriotism and piety is probably the last bastion of the good that Jefferson intended when he wrote the 1776 declaration.
Mao Zedong, Selected Works (1926-1957), Vols. 1-5, Foreign Languages Press/People’s Publishing House (1965).
In Anglo-American Protestantism the equivalent of the Roman Catholic Crusades was the series of so-called Awakenings. These are usually presented as mere religious revivals without any political context. However each of these Awakenings gave rise to politico-religious movements of varying degrees of fanaticism. The current use of the term “woke” is a mendacious abuse of what was called in the 1970s “non-standard black English”, e.g. “I be woke” instead of “I am awake.” Like a lot of other slogans, the pattern follows that outlined in Gene Sharp’s original proposal for co-opting popular protest and revolutionary language to create astro-turf movements, aka known as colour revolutions. See National Security through Civilian-based Defence (1970). This is virtually Mao’s On Guerrilla Warfare reverse engineered for counter-insurgency.
Joseph Biden, represented Delaware prior to his elevation first tot he Vice Presidency and then somnambulously into the White House. It is hardly a secret that Delaware is the Duchy of DuPont.
The Fabian Society founded in England in 1884 is an elite organisation, which became strongly associated with the university-educated and upper-middle class faction of the British Labour Party pursued an infiltration strategy. Its aim was to prevent revolution by the lower classes by imposing social policies from the top down which would ostensibly benefit them but in fact pacify them to preserve the Empire. Many of the Fabians were convinced eugenicists and supporters of policies that were comparable to continental fascism but naturally British.
Gladio can probably be seen in hindsight as the predecessor of Phoenix. While presented officially (after it was exposed) as part of a so-called “stay behind network” to organise resistance in the event of an imagined Soviet invasion, it was in fact a terror organisation aimed at the “infrastructure” of the European Left, whether in or out of government. Although it is impossible to say for sure, the eponymous BBC Timeline documentary interviews an operative in Belgium who names a CIA case officer as his contact. Coincidentally the name is the same as an officer who had primary responsibility for Phoenix in Vietnam.
Here it would be useful to read the work of Bernt Engelmann, e.g. Grosses Bundesverdienstkreuz (1974) and Schwarzbuch: Strauss, Kohl und Co. (1976). Engelmann documented not only the Nazi patrons of Helmut Kohl and others in the FRG; he exposed Franz Josef Strauss for the Nazi he had been and how the US occupation forces concealed all this in order to restore the NS without Hitler or Himmler as weapons against the European Left and the Soviet Union. At first Engelmann was sued for libel but when discovery proved far too embarrassing for the plaintiff’s the suit was withdrawn to avoid more publicity. Whoever wants to know this in a more entertaining way should look for the GDR TV series Das Unsichtbare Revier in which almost all the CIA operations in West Germany were presented in GDR prime time while those in the West were told nothing or the opposite.
At first sight it seems peculiar that many people later identified as “neo-conservatives” claim to have been Trotskyists in their “youth”. The point missed by casual or inattentive observers is that claiming to be a Trotskyist was a way of suggesting that one was a communist who had become disillusioned by the Bolsheviki (Lenin and Stalin). The popular presentation of the so-called “show trials” in which Trotsky was the unindicted co-conspirator having fled the country obscures the overall political war waged against the Soviet Union at the time by focussing on factionalism. Trotskyist—and after the Sino-Soviet split, Maoist—became convenient labels for groups of no particular ideological commitment in the service of anti-communism. The supposed “conversions” of Trots was particularly insidious in the purging of the Left from academia.
For a detailed discussion of armed propaganda operations in Vietnam within the Phoenix program see Douglas Valentine, The Phoenix Program (1990) (2014 as e-book).
Commonly known as the “Axis” because the original signatories were Italy and Germany, Japan joined subsequently.
The official representation of the Spanish Civil War is that Hitler was the driving force to support Franco against the Popular Front government in Madrid. This is inaccurate. Since the Peninsular Wars against Napoleon Britain had established itself as the dominant investor in Spain. The non-intervention policy Britain pursued was intended to prevent undue damage to that investment. Britain provided the transport and cover for the sealift of Franco’s forces from Morocco to Spain. Its non-intervention policy was intended to block any meaningful aid from France or other sympathetic countries (the Soviet Union was blocked by the Italian Navy) and to leave space for Hitler’s Legion Condor to do Britain’s dirty work by attacking the republic as a proxy. That Franco knew this was at least one major reason why he refused to support Hitler’s attack against Britain when the two met in Hendaye.
“WHAM” is an acronym fort he political warfare objective known as “winning hearts and minds”, the objective of civic action and civil affairs teams in the various armed services both in and out of uniform.
Another bureaucratic war criminal, Robert MacNamara, said in Fog of War that he made it a rule “not to answer the question asked but to answer the question I wished they had asked”. He added that it was a good rule.
It is a good rule of psychological warfare never to acknowledge the obvious messages and questions and to confine one’s own responses to euphemism and circumlocution while always exaggerating — even with expletives — the positions of one’s targets/victims. MacNamara was not only a master of deception but to judge by Errol Morris’ film also a master of self-deception.1
Naively many readers and viewers — in part due to their own exercises in self-deception — expect that an interview or testimonial will prove the character of the person interviewed and somehow reveal “truth”. Yet the serial presentation of statements presumes that the listener/reader will thus attach objectivity to the interpretation triggered by the astute liar. Details can confuse more than clarify. A certain volume of detail seemingly random (and, therefore, presumably sincere) overwhelms the listener and coagulates to form a cognitive clot, crossing the brain barrier and causing what might be called an intellectual stroke. James Michener performed this kind of exercise in an interview given not long before he died.2 After explaining that he was potentially exempt from the draft in WWII because he was a member of the Society of Friends (the Quakers), he then said he volunteered for the US Navy (implying he was among other ranks, when he in fact was an officer) just as his draft board summons was received. A few other contradictory details leave one entirely unsure how he actually became an intelligence officer in the Pacific. Anyone who saw Robert de Niro’s CIA film, The Good Shepherd, could with patience decipher Michener’s obfuscation.3 He was most probably recruited to the OSS while in college, just like the fictional “Edward”, and told where to go to start his assignment under military cover. The theater commander for the US Army, Douglas MacArthur, was adamant that no OSS officers be allowed in the Pacific. Hence Michener was assigned to the Navy. The interviewer did not attempt to clarify his incoherent recital. The fact that Michener went on to explain how much quasi-official assistance he received in writing his historical novels and the implied intimacy with the CIA did not trigger any questions either. But Michener clearly understood “McNamara’s rule” as much as William Colby did when testifying to the Church Committee. Unfortunately Colby’s bureaucratic enemies, like Richard Helms, did not appreciate such virtuoso obfuscation. They preferred condescending sarcasm and demonstrative silence.
But I wanted to talk about overpopulation here. First however it is important to remind the reader that while well-versed in euphemism I have always preferred explicit language, not to be confused with expletive.
I am old enough to remember when the Limits to Growth was published.4 The general milieu into which this pseudo-scientific study was inserted also produced NSSM 200, Kissinger’s manifesto for population reduction in Africa and Asia.5 It is frequently ignored that the arch-philanthro-capitalist Rockefeller tax dodges aka known as foundations, funded Kissinger’s NSSM, the Club of Rome and its descendants. There are in fact innumerable writers, lecturers and managerial bureaucrats (elected or appointed) who have pecuniary or social incentives to perform for fashion (fascism). They receive grants, work for NGOs (whose sponsors are taken for granted) and as scriveners are contractually (or implicitly) bound to write nothing that would jeopardize that cash flow.
My mentor, a distinguished professor of literature long deceased, used to say that he had no true objection to selling his soul but that no one had yet offered him a sufficient price. I have always kept a strict separation between writing what I learn and think and producing or editing text for a living. Therefore I believe I can say sincerely that I am neither a propagandist nor a prostitute. (Perhaps that is a deficiency but I have had to live with it.) My objection lies not in that people write for money but that they also preach for money without disclosing their church.
When I attended school, I can recall how much and often “white” people talked about “teen pregnancies” and “welfare moms”. These were ways of expressing the underlying ideology that university professors and cabinet ministers mean when they say the world is suffering from overpopulation. The wealthy — and the spokespersons for the extremely wealthy aka the piratical/parasitic class — have always complained about threats to their comfort, i.e. threats to the unobstructed pleasure of robbing some 90% of the population. Those who are employed by them — Malcolm X called them “house negroes” — feel those threats even more than the masters themselves. They rush to extinguish the flames at the Big House — because that is the only home they have — while the master can just move to another house and buy other help.
This concern for population — for an excess of “field negroes” — is deeply rooted in the obsequious subservience that comprises the central characteristic of the successful bureaucrat, whether he or she is in the civil, military, clerical or academic division of the social order. As George Carlin poignantly explained: the rich take all the money, the middle class does all the work and pays all the taxes, and the poor are there to scare the shit out of the middle class. We have to understand this psychology if we are to grasp the willingness with which writers — even in these pages — threaten their readers with impending doom. These writers are as insensitive to criticism as McNamara. They have a burning mansion to save. They have to assure those gates that protect their physical and intellectual ghettoes are closed, except when they need to fetch something from the fields.
It is no accident that most of the writers at the “Big House” are among the “English-speaking peoples”, Cecil Rhodes’ kind of folks, from all those white dominions now euphemistically called “Commonwealth” and of course among the cohorts of the fourth Awakening in the United States.6 These descendants of the last surviving “piratical race” share the same insecurities as their masters. Every night they imagine their rooms in the “Big House” aflame. “Massa” saddles up. His womenfolk aboard the brougham and the family treasure in a wagon following. Meanwhile these academics, journalists, NGO fetishists and servants of corporate misanthropy, grovel begging to be taken with the lord of the manor. Instead he says calmly, “Hunny or Binny or Jane, you just keep those field folk from getting to the house. We’ll be sendin’ some militia round to give you a hand. After all they’re your people too. Get them to listen. Promise them medical attention if they help you put out the fire. We left some medicine for you to use.” Then with a crack of the driver‘s whip the wagons pull out and the master on his great steed salutes the heroic servants he leaves behind.
You think I exaggerate. That was the substance of the environmental, socio-economic and political deluge that has inundated us for the past nearly three years. The master took all the wood too. So no arks can be built — unless of course the big house is saved and the wood stripped. But the problem arises then, the shipwrights are in the field! The passengers in the house — and ne’er the twain shall meet.
In 1972, Dr Henry Kissinger, and other courtiers of the unnamed aristocrats that dominate the Anglo-American Empire, were well aware that the Big House was endangered. It was time again to put the “house negroes” to work building a firewall. It is easy to focus on Henry Kissinger because he obviously enjoyed — more than his patron — becoming a celebrity. However he is just one of many in the grand court of Anglo-American Empire. Harvard University (MIT and Yale of course) — which some wag fondly called “a hedge fund with a university as tax dodge” — has always been a logical place to find cult members to cast the necessary spells. Dennis Meadows was just one of those warlocks who could be so engaged.
Goethe’s “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice” — rendered in cartoon by Disney with Mickey Mouse — cast a spell to make his work easier but failing to learn the whole lesson unleashed a monster. Meadows and his like were no Mickey Mouse academics. They cast spells using technology that had been conceived already in order to annihilate civilians with incendiaries or atomic bombs. Yet being “house negroes”, they were accustomed to the euphemism of the court and salon. So when they discussed how to prevent or extinguish the fire threatening the Big House they preferred the polite, indirect language to the forthright and explicit terms, which everyone in the field would understand.
Kissinger, Schwab, Harari or Meadows, they are all interchangeable, liveried servants. They have all been indoctrinated more or less in the same way. Kissinger is certainly the most eclectic (not particularly intelligent but extraordinarily vain and obsequious). Klaus Schwab got his indoctrination through the NSDAP, Harari through the Middle Eastern branch of the same movement, Meadows from the Round Table (the so-called Chatham House clubs, e.g. RIIA, CFR et al.) — wittingly or unwittingly. However these are only the notorious courtiers, the servants to the servants of greed. They occupy places close to the top of the household. Below the rank of chamberlain there are dozens and dozens of footmen, chambermaids, polishers of silver and pressers of linen. The court is enormous. It feeds innumerable scribes and minstrels, too.
Yet in all the interviews and articles read or lectures and talks heard or seen, the really important questions are missing, the obvious questions — once one gets beyond, “and who pays you?” or “what do you get out of this?” These questions may be seen as an invitation to breach some promise of confidentiality to a third party.
No, when I read articles or hear speeches about how we have to save the planet (whereby I agree with Carlin, “the planet is not going anywhere — we are”), how COP is failing to reach the needed agreements (on how to defraud the world’s population with ESG-based financial derivatives etc.), or how some policy developed by the parasitic class is not been truly embraced by the masses, or how “disinformation” or “misinformation” can be prevented? I could go on. When I read or hear all this stuff from the servile “house negroes” funded by the Big House NGOs and tax dodges, I want to ask just two questions:
When are you going to be sterilized — along with the rest of your family?
When and how are you going to do your part for reducing population by relieving the planet of y o u r life?
Nobody seemed to think that this question was important to ask Dennis Meadows. Or maybe he just followed McNamara’s Rule.
Errol Morris, The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara (2003).
Robert De Niro, The Good Shepherd (2006). Edward is a Yale student and Skull and Bones member who is recruited from college into the newly founded OSS before US entry into WWII. His recruitment is under US Army cover. He later becomes a senior CIA officer.
The Limits to Growth was written by Donella H. Meadows, Dennis L. Meadows (who appears in the video), Jorgen Randers, and William W. Behrens III, published by the Club of Rome in 1972. Like the work done in East Anglia (climate change) or at Imperial College (Neil Ferguson, pandemics), the forecasting upon which Meadows et al. based their claims were computer models and not real data. The assumptions upon which the underlying programs were based are highly contentious to say the least.
See Carroll Quigley, The Anglo-American Establishment (1981). Quigley’s posthumous book sympathetically describes the origins of the so-called Chatham House institutions and other efforts to transfer the fulcrum of the British Empire to the US, while arresting the centrifugal forces in the white dominions (South Africa, Australia, New Zealand and Canada) to keep the empire together.
Perhaps one of the most amazing phenomena of the 20th and now 21st century is not Anglo-American empire, understood as military and economic power. Far more remarkable is the fact that in the scope of some two hundred years the English-speaking world; i.e., the British Empire and the American Empire, have produced a cultural and propaganda machine which has completely overwhelmed and occluded two of the oldest extant cultures in the world that of Russia and China. Andre Gunder Frank argued in ReOrient that, in fact, until the middle of the 19th century the de facto centre of the world economy was still East Asia, that is to say China. While historians have offered a variety of explanations for how the Western peninsula dominated by Great Britain overtook China in economic terms, today’s revitalised and powerful Chinese economy verified Gunder Frank’s prediction that the shift back to the East was underway. Yet the power of Anglo-American language and culture throughout the world show no signs of dissipating.
Meanwhile the Anglo-American Empire and its suzerains are undergoing yet another “cultural revolution” in which the imperial language and culture appear even more aggressive than they were in the age of anti-communism from 1917 until 1989.
Robert Merrill taught humanities and intellectual history for the better part of his career at Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore.
T.P.Wilkinson: You began as a literary scholar with a dissertation on Thomas Malory’s Morte d’Artur, essentially a subject for Medievalists. When you arrived at the Maryland Institute, essentially an art school, you developed their humanities program and courses in intellectual history. At the same time you have always been politically active, working with a variety of groups to support criticism of the regime in Washington but also publishing the work of people engaged in active opposition. Clearly your interest in language is not merely academic. Could you talk about how you got from Malory to Maryland and Medievalism to contemporary intellectual history?
Robert Merrill: I was propelled to write about the phenomenon of Arthurian Romance in the 14th and 15th centuries after reading Johan Huizinga’s book, The Waning of the Middle Ages. He noted certain characteristics in collapsing of forms in a culture going through the final stages of one historical epoch and before anything new emerged to replace it. This was always my insight about the romances of Arthur. They were never much about the rise of a constellation of cultural dominants but rather about their incoherence and eventual ripping apart. Studying the 14th and 15th centuries was about as good a grounding for the study of the 20th century as one could get, since in a strong way the 20th century was the “waning of the modern age.”
Some of the post-modernists were very good but much of the movement was pretty much vapid. But that’s how the 15th century was, as well. We are living through the end of the Enlightenment and the concept of the rational human being as well as all the social and political implications of that core belief. This is therefore also the end of science, as was so clearly and buffoonishly shown in the Covid pandemic by the authorized “scientists” at the NIH, CDC, WHO and other agencies. This is also the end of the age of democracy and nation states founded on the human rights and inherent powers of people.
The arts at the highest level are always the struggle over forms. I was asked to teach a class at the Maryland Institute College of Art because a faculty member left abruptly, and I was intrigued by the opportunity. What I found there just amazed me. This was an art college which made it clear that art was about ideas, ways of seeing, and ways of thinking rather than about materials, techniques, and forms. Artists are intellectuals and knowledge creators/disseminators. I could see immediately that I could contribute. I was soon selected to head a new Division of Humanities, which I built on the model of intellectual history, a way of studying the humanities which asserts that knowledge is unavoidably historical and grows out of the real experiences of the people who create that knowledge. There are no universals or permanent truths. But there is the relationship between formal systems of thought or representation and the worlds those systems emerge from. Intellectual history attempts to study the structure and dynamics of intellect communities and the evolution of the methods, techniques and hermeneutical practices used by scientists, philosophers, men and women of letters, and artists.
After many years, I developed the Office of Research in order to align art production with the research in the sciences and humanities. On a more practical level, it was also a move to help with grant funding. There was very little money for “the arts,” but lots of grant money for “research.” The National Science Foundation at the time even added a provision that a team of investigators would be considered improved if it included an artist.
TPW: Much of what has happened in American culture seems like it appears spontaneously. The US is a business centre for fashion in film, music, clothing, and all sorts of consumption. It also seems to be the best country in the world at producing and marketing its culture—even to people who have every reason to oppose the US in every other way. What do you believe is the source of the power of the American culture industry? Why does it seem irresistible? How does this relate to the power of the English language in the world?
RM: Really, there isn’t anything about the US that is much different from preceding empires. The US has a culture industry, which it sells to every nation on earth as a way to promote the empire and create a class of people who will be quite open to ever greater penetration by the US of their economy and society. Here’s a typical example. My wife grew up in China in the 1950s and 60s. As a kid she watched classic Hollywood movies and listened to US music about as much as any American. She loved them and they created in her a fascination for the culture which could create such dreamy productions. Later as an adult she moved to America.
The same thing was done by the European empires with the Great Britain and France leading the way. Colonial subjects were taught in school French or British history, geography, literature and it was always asserted that these were superior to the indigenous counterparts. There’s a lot that has been written about this by “post-colonial” authors; those who were educated under the colonial system but are now living in independent nations with the watershed of formal colonialism. They seem to have a leg in two different cultures.
The US, however, does have a signal advantage and that is it created the science of modern public relations, propaganda, and scientific brainwashing. It is no longer just assigning kids in Ghana the works of Tennyson or Shakespeare; now it is applying science to re-make human consciousness by means of structuring a person’s experiences. In this it was heavily influenced by the work of B. F. Skinner and his concept of “operant conditioning.” The techniques of conditioning behaviour and consciousness is applied by agencies of the US government but more importantly by US corporations both domestically and internationally. The “consciousness industry” emerged early in the 20th century as a necessity following the development of mass production and mass consumption. This is where the US really excelled in creating a culture of consumption of goods. A good and useful history of this is Stuart Ewen’s Captains of Consciousness: Advertising and the Social Roots of Consumer Culture. It traces the ways in which marketing transformed consumption from a “need” based action to a “desire” based avocation. Consumer culture is about creating one’s identity by means of the products or brands one buys (or consumes) in order to externalize an identity. A person can be what he or she desires to be by consuming products with the right image. Image is everything, and so it is paramount to always present the products and accessories that comprise the “true you.”
Your question asks about the source of the global power of the culture industry. I would say the power resides in the combination of corporate money and depth psychology. Edward Bernays, Sigmund Freud’s nephew, was the founder of this practice of scientific marketing. But the real quantum development came in the 1950s and 60s when the CIA hired legions of psychologists and medical doctors to apply the experimental method to the construction of consciousness and thought control. Skinner was among these psychologists. His book, Beyond Freedom and Dignity presents a total rejection of the Enlightenment assumption of the rationality of human beings and therefore of the political conditions which such rational people would create, such as freedom and the quest for dignity in one’s life. Instead of those, Skinner proposes cultural and social engineering. Cognition or thought is not some mysterious and inherently individual process but rather is conditioned, as it is learned from conditioned behaviours in specifically engineered environments.
This is where we are today with engineered environments like the Covid pandemic, the climate catastrophe environment, and the global shortages of food, energy, and other things.
TPW: The US was considered a model of Enlightenment revolution after 1776. The French 1789 revolution was certainly inspired by it as have been many subsequent struggles. Yet those who are old enough to remember Ronald Reagan may recall that he called the CIA-sponsored terrorists attacking Nicaragua “the moral equivalent of the founding fathers”. Repeatedly what is called at the same time “regime change” is defended with the canonical language of the American independence war. Today we find people in the West like Gerald Horne saying the independence war was an act to preserve slavery and others saying that everything in US history (or British history) can be reduced to “white supremacy”. At the same time there has also been a strong criticism of the revolutions in the 19th century—the Romantic revolutions, including those of the 20th century—as betrayals of Enlightenment ideals. You also spent many years studying Romanticism as a Euro-American cultural phenomenon. Can you suggest a coherent way of understanding the legacy of 1776 and the so-called Romantic revolutions? Are the 20th century revolutions; e.g., in Russia, China, and Cuba, “betrayals” of Enlightenment ideals? Can these terms Enlightenment and Romanticism be used to explain anything about the development of political culture in the West?
RM: The Age of Revolutions or the Age of Democracy is long over. It ended with the Chinese victory over the western supported Kuomintang in 1948. The Age of Revolutions did not end because there was no more need for revolution but rather because the forces for reaction mobilized and ended democratic revolutions once and for all. If you think of the revolutions that have occurred after 1948, the successful ones are still frozen in time in a permanent reactionary war of EuroAmerica against them. Think of North Korea, Cuba, Iran, all of the Nations of Latin America, and most of the nations of Africa.
I think most presidents have called their terrorist bands something like the equivalent of the Founding Fathers. Reagan also said this about the Mujahedeen who changed into al-Qaeda. In truth, they were always a reactionary proxy militia fighting against the true revolutionaries in Afghanistan. People have totally forgotten that the socialist party negotiated a deal with the current king in Afghanistan for a new constitution and a democratic government beginning in 1964.
The important point is that revolution, enlightenment, humanism, and democracy are all components of the same way of conceiving of a society in which political powers are derived from the inherent powers and rights of people. The purpose of politics is the happiness of all people and the successfulness of their lives. This is the essence of Marx’s work just as it is of the Romantic poets like Shelley, Schiller, Goethe, and many philosophers such as Jean Jacques Rousseau.
Political structures are quite susceptible to corruption because they are vested with more than ordinary powers and public moneys needed to carry out public projects. That means they also will probably need to be overthrown from time to time in order to restore true power to people. Jefferson, who had read carefully Rousseau’s Social Contract, wrote in the opening paragraphs of the Declaration of Independence:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, –That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.
You could not write this or attempt to put these words in action today. If you did, the FBI would have your marked as a domestic terrorist. Jefferson said on several occasions that the check people have on the abuses of power by government is revolution.
Today, theories of government have returned to theories of monarchy; that is, the powers and rights of governments are inherent or given by God or some supernatural force and may never be overthrown. Individual leaders come and go but the State is permanent and operates in its own rights and powers – not those give to it by people. This is the political philosophy of monarchy but our more current terms are fascism and Nazism.
This is where we are today. The future does not look good. Orwell’s glimpse into the future at the end of 1984 is dramatic and scary, but it is not far from the truth: “If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face – for ever.” How many lives have been stamped out in the Bush/Cheney campaign to bring “freedom” to every human on earth (otherwise knows as the Global War on Terror). The best guess would be somewhere near 20 million. And it has not nearly stopped. The Obama/Clinton/Biden “Pivot to Asia” is now promising to bring “freedom” to Russia and China. This form of this will be World War III and that may just mean the end of the human race as we have known it.
TPW: During the US war against Vietnam there was often talk about “the American inside every Vietnamese” trying to get out. In fact, this idea seems to be the strongest one shared by Americans everywhere. A country barely two centuries old believes fervently that everyone else wants explicitly or implicitly to be just like them. This implies either gross ignorance or wanton disregard for the languages and cultures of the vast majority of the world’s population. Yet if one travels to China, South America, Africa, Western Europe, Russia, you see American stuff everywhere. In fact, in many places I know people consider their own culture and products inferior to anything from the US. That makes what is now called “Woke” seem even more absurd—virtue signalling by formally rejecting American cultural product while consuming it at the same time. Is this mass schizophrenia?
RM: The US has a rather simplistic conception of human nature. It was the theory of the 18th and 19th century philosophers like Jeremy Bentham, James Mill, Jean Baptiste Say, and others who defined “rational man” in a mechanistic or numerical way. Sometimes this was called “Utilitarianism” or “enlightened self-interest.” It holds that human beings always behave rationally and that means they always choose to maximize their self-interest or advantage over competitors.
This has always been only the theory of “economic man.” The economic man simply proposes that buying/selling and self-interest (greed) are at the root of everything any human ever does. Freedom is also just economics or the desire to pursue self-interest with little or no restrictions. This is exactly what G. W. Bush meant when after 9-11 in proclaiming the Global War on Terror he said that freedom was god’s gift to all people and the US would bring freedom to all people of the earth. He really only meant economic freedom.
So the Vietnamese with an American inside trying to get out is just the economic man who wants to be able to buy and display American commodities and thereby fulfill his nature. But this is such a shallow and ethno-centric way of looking at people. Of course, everyone has some greed, but in most people it is not very important.
I think not enough recognition is made of the fact that in WW II, pretty much all of the world was utterly destroyed. Russia lost 29 million people and 80% of the buildings in the European side of Russia were destroyed. China lost 25 million people and though it was not industrialized at the time of WW II, its agricultural production was destroyed. Only the US was untouched by the devastation of WW II. So in the years between 1945 and 1980, the US was the manufacturer of the world. US products dominated because they were often the only products available. People worldwide looked to the US for what modernization meant and they wanted to be like the US. Many revolutionary leaders such as Ho Chi Minh greatly admired the US until its war against Viet Nam taught him better.
It was World War II that made the US the centre of the world. But that phase is now over and we are fully now in a multi-polar world. It is interesting that in the recent proxy war between the US and Russia, President Putin has made it clear that Russia no longer wants to belong to a world order dominated by the US. The US response to the independence of Russia and also China and India is to impose sanctions. That means Russian products cannot be sold in the West and Western products can’t be sold in Russia. This only enhances the separation of East and West, as Russia now has to become self-sufficient in everything from food to technology to consumer goods. Russia also has to develop economic relations with Asia, instead of the West. This is how the post-WW II American hegemony is dying.
TPW: Since 2020 there has been – perhaps for the first time—a general recognition that censorship and propaganda are explicit practices of the US regime, not only by the government but also by Business. Throughout the anti-communist era censorship and propaganda were supposedly only practiced by “communist dictatorships”. Strangely at the same time that this censorship and propaganda by the US – openly contradicting a supposed fundamental virtue—is actually supported by enormous numbers of people. This can be seen on the street but even in academia. How did this develop and what is its significance in education and in the use of language overall?
RM: I don’t think the deep hypocrisy in the US proclaimed values of free speech, openness, freedom of thought and conscience as opposed to the reality of propaganda, secrecy, and rigid conformity in thought and consciousness has yet been realized in any significant way. The hypocrisy is celebrated as the value. Take, for example, George Soros’ Open Society Foundation. It is based on the principles of Soros’ teacher, Karl Popper, whose book The Open Society and its Enemies gave Soros both the name and the concept. Popper contrasted open societies of the West (US, UK) against the “closed societies” of Russian communism, Nazi Germany, and totalitarianism in general. It may have been possible in the 1940s and 50s to see some truth in Popper’s claims but now that we have the predatory philanthropy of Soros and the false agenda of social democracy promoted by not just the US empire but also by billionaire oligarchs of the World Economic Forum, we can see clearly that “opening societies” is just a tactic for looting them of all their wealth. It has always been that way. The West sent missionaries to Africa and the entire “new world” in order to “open them up” to Western exploitation, genocide, and theft.
It is often said that the censorship practiced in the Soviet Union was well known by all Soviet citizens. Official government pronouncements were always received with a certain amount of scepticism. This was actually a hold over from Czarist Russia where the ruling class and the Czars were just as distrusted as the Bolsheviks. Because of this, Russian society as a whole developed a healthy critical consciousness about what they were being told. Part of this resulted in an underground information system or Samizdat. This was not a new feature in communist Russia but existed under the Czars back as far as the 17th century, when private ownership of printing presses was outlawed. Back then, Russians just published their underground work in Western Europe and brought it back into Russia.
In contrast, in the West (EuroAmerica) there is almost no critical consciousness with regard to public information. People are as vulnerable to government lying and manipulation as a herd of sheep. In the US, democrats believe with absolute fidelity the spokespersons for Democratic Party. And republican do the same for their spokespersons. No democrat would accept for a minute my comment about Soros’ predatory philanthropy or about Gates’ philanthrocapitalism. But they would be happy to hear the same comment if it were said about the Koch Brothers.
There really is in the West almost no desire to understand their own information systems. News organizations like the New York Times or the Washington Post can have open relations with the CIA and very few people seem to care about it. They just believe what the “paper of record” tells them, even when this “paper of record” is proven wrong over and over again. The CIA’s Operation Mockingbird was virtually run out of the offices of the Washington Post by ex-CIA Post owner, Philip Graham, and his long time OSS colleague Frank Wisner. It managed to gain control by cash payments, blackmail, or simple association of most prominent journalists in the US. The operation was exposed and supposedly shut down in the 1970s, but its effectiveness continues to this day. Objectively, there is no free and independent press in the US, but most Americans still believe that there is. They believe there is because they are told by their media and politicians every day that the US has the best free and independent media in the world.
At the current moment, the major tactic of propaganda is for powerful people to “establish the official narrative” for any event in the world. Let’s take the war in Ukraine for example. The “official narrative” is that Russia invaded Ukraine in order to restore the Russian empire. When Ukraine falls, Russia will move on to Lithuania, Estonia, and Latvia. After that, all of Europe will be in the Russian cross-hairs. This is the old narrative of Soviet Communism which was hell-bent to conquer the world. The truth is that Russia has always been very reluctant to go to war in Ukraine. The 2014 US installed Nazi government in Kiev has carried out genocide against ethnic Russians in the eastern provinces of Ukraine since 2014. Russia was instrumental in developing the Minsk Agreements which would keep the Donbass provinces in Ukraine in exchange for some cultural autonomy and security. While Kiev and Washington signed the agreements, they never honoured or implemented them. They kept shelling the cities of the Donbass. Finally Russia invaded in order to stop the killing of ethnic Russians.
The nature and role of violent Nazi groups in the Ukrainian government and military has been entirely written out of the official narrative. This leaves open the reason why Russia invaded Ukraine.
The hegemony of false narratives is accompanied by “cancel culture.” If you say anything outside of the official narrative, you will be banned from the most popular websites, you may lose your job or profession, and you might also be labelled by the Merrick Garland Department of Justice as a “domestic terrorist.” Garland has been promulgating the theory that “disinformation” is the seedbed for domestic terrorism since violent acts originate in false information. Garland has declared a war on disinformation. The Biden administration through the Department of Homeland Security created something they called “The Disinformation Board of Governors” – a parallel to the Broadcasting Board of Governors which runs external propaganda for the State Department. The “Disinformation Governors” would regulate all information in the US in order to keep the nation secure from the dreaded “disinformation.”
When one considers the Covid pandemic in the light of disinformation, the whole situation becomes absurd in the worst ways. It was the government and its official scientists at the NIH, CDC, FDA who were promoting disinformation in their easily-proven-wrong in their narratives about zoonotic origin for the virus, the death rate, and treatments. Social distancing and masks did no good at all, and yet they were an essential part of the narrative. Really good doctors who offered truthful information about the virus were banned, fired from their jobs, and had their medical licenses cancelled.
We are now at the moment of outright and violent suppression of thought and speech in the US. If you think or say something against the government narratives and you publish your thoughts in a way that alerts enough people, you will be crushed by the force of the Department of Justice, Homeland Security, or their adjuncts in the media owners.
In response to Jeff J. Brown’s article “The Myth of Chinese Capitalism,” Ron Leighton wrote an article published at Dissident Voice, Counterpunch, and elsewhere. Dr. T. P. Wilkinson has interviewed Jeff J. Brown about his article and much more.
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The debate about what system actually governs the People’s Republic of China has continued since the death of Mao Zedong in 1976. The significance of this controversy increased after 1989 when the Soviet Union was destroyed along with the governments that had prevailed in the Comecon1 region.
After the NATO-led demolition of Yugoslavia, the prevailing opinion in the West was that communism or even socialism had failed. This left the Republic of Cuba, the People’s Democratic Republic of Korea and the People’s Republic of China as the only states ruled by and through communist parties. The claim that China—at least since Deng—is capitalist and not communist or socialist is not so much an issue in China as one for those adamant on proving that the system attributed to the US or the “West”, generally called “capitalism” is not merely the superior system but the only system on the planet no matter who governs.
This interview is not only a response to an article by Ron Leighton criticizing Jeff J Brown. It is the first in a series of articles on the Transformation of Political Language. Since 1989 there has been an obvious crisis in popular-based politics following the global purging of radical popular movements from the 1950 to the 1980. While the thirty years following the end of World War II were dominated by violent counter-insurgency and assassinations, the period following the end of the Soviet Union has been an era where the very language of popular political action has collapsed. This series aims to explain this and perhaps point toward possibilities for a reconstituted political speech capable of collating the subjective and objective conditions of political struggle.
T.P. Wilkinson: As someone whose life in China went through different phases, in fact, changed through personal experience, it might be useful to start by describing when and how you came to China and briefly describe those transformations.
Jeff J. Brown: I really need to go back in time to fully answer your question. My travel lust began over a decade before starting my career in China, 1990-1997. With my agricultural upbringing, in 1978, I learned fluent Portuguese at graduate school, with the express goal of going to Brazil to become a corn and soybean baron. Luckily, I could not get the financing. Otherwise, I would have probably become a greedy landowner, shooting at locals and Natives, to protect my property.
Instead, I joined the Peace Corps, 1980-1982 in Tunisia, learning Arabic fluently, to help local farmers with their imported Holstein dairy cows. This launched me into eight more years across Africa and the Middle East, first in marketing frozen bull semen for artificial insemination and then in grain trade, also learning French fluently.
Having gotten married in 1988 and becoming a naturalized French citizen, I was ready for a change of culture. We got transferred to China in 1990, with four more years in grain trade and then for three years, overseeing the installation and management of McDonald’s first bun bakery on the Mainland.
I mention all this, because I am ashamed of my attitude and behavior during my first seven years in China. In spite of all my previous cosmopolitan, globetrotting, linguistic experiences in tens of countries on four continents, I was thoroughly brainwashed with the hubris and cultural superiority of all things USA. Yes, I learned to read, write and speak Mandarin fluently, soaked up the culture, traveling all over China and in the region, yet sadly, I swaggered around like the proverbial ugly American.2
Looking back, I cringe at myself.
It wasn’t until we returned 2010-2019, that my arc of awareness became meaningful and personally transformative. First was the metamorphosis of the country, after only 13 years. I was stunned by the breathtaking development and improvement in quality-of-life factors. Even more importantly was the amazing, positive revolution in the people, their attitudes, behavior and lifestyles. I was truly impressed with everything I saw. However, we were in Beijing and at first, we only did limited travel in the area. I had to prove to myself that what I was seeing was the real deal in other parts of the country. I thus spent 44 days traveling by foot, local trains and buses, in six of the poorest provinces/regions of the country, including the Tibetan Plateau.
What started out as a simple blog developed into my first book, 44 Days Backpacking in China. Nonetheless, having finished it, I knew something was very wrong about my lingering Western superiority attitude, which I fully shed in writing my second book, China Rising. I then really rounded out the Chinese people’s incredible story of their 5,000-year civilization in writing BIG Red Book on China. Through it all, I learned to talk and write about the Chinese people from their point of view, in their voice.
As a result of my long journey to truth and understanding, I am very patient with Westerners, who are just like I was in the 1990s. I can fully empathize.
TPW: Lots of slogans are used in the mass media to describe people and the governments they lead, as well as those countries. We hear a lot about democracies, dictatorships, oligarchies, etc. However, we rarely hear anyone using those terms give an intelligible definition or explain why the same terms are so inconsistently used. Could you explain based on your own experience in China what democracy means in China, and how that definition might be applied elsewhere to judge if a place or system is democratic?
JJB: It took me writing China Rising to fully purge my system of a lifetime of “The West is the Best” brainwashing. I was having tremendous cognitive dissonance after experiencing 44 Days, and suspected that some of the comments I wrote about the Mao Era and China’s governance were wrong. I intuitively understood that to extend my arc of awareness into a more accurate understanding, I had to learn the truth about the West. As it turns out, it was not a pretty picture, and still isn’t. Nonetheless, it gave me the path I needed to really analyze the Chinese people in their voice, not from Uncle Sam’s condescending, from-above perspective.
This allowed me to realize that “Western liberal democracy” has always been a propagandized myth, going back to Ancient Greece and Rome, 3,000 years ago. Both prospered on what I call the Six E’s of Western Racism, Expansionism, Expropriation, Extraction, Extermination, Enslavement, Evangelism (since New World colonialism, we can add a seventh, epidemics).
With few, isolated exceptions (Louis IX, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Charles De Gaulle, John F. Kennedy), Western leaders and governments have always been autocratic, elitist, aristocratic, dictatorial, totalitarian, as well as corrupt, criminal and cruel.
After the fall of Rome, we suffered a thousand years of the tyrannical Catholic Church, then for the last 500, tyrannical monarchy’s imperialism and colonialism. Through it all, humanity has suffered the extermination of many billions of innocent souls, with the rape and plundering of the survivors’ human and natural resources. For a brief time under Napoleon Bonaparte’s leadership, 1799-1815 (he was a democratic socialist), the French and much of the rest of the European 99% on the continent being served before the aristocratic, monarchial 1%. After he was deposed, putting lipstick on what devolved into “Western Liberal Democracy” and its god-awful imperialist-capitalist pig, no longer works for me. (See Ramin Mazaheri discusses Part 1 of his fabulous book, France’s Yellow Vests: Western Repression of the West’s Best Values).
Instead in China, I know that for thousands of years, even during its limited, elite-class use of slavery (as opposed to Greece/Rome’s economies only able to function with massive, continual importations of slaves) and its longer period of feudalism, citizens were free to seek redress with local authorities if they felt there was an injustice. If that decision was unacceptable to the complainant, they could take it up to the provincial level and even to the emperor. It is still used today, called Letters and Complaints (信访) or Higher Appeal (上访). I’ve personally seen Chinese delivering letters to the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, where the National People’s Congress convenes. We have seen increasingly that when Westerners do that they are likely to be punished, permanently injured, imprisoned or killed. Black lists, assassinations, and wrongful imprisonment have been common in the US at least since the infamous Palmer Raids. Just ask protesters being run over, mace-sprayed, beaten and shot in the West, especially in the USA and France. (See Ramin Mazaheri discusses Part 2 of his fabulous book, France’s Yellow Vests: Western Repression of the West’s Best Values).
At the same time, emperors and governors routinely sent out high level confidants incognito all over the country, disguised as traveling salesmen or tinkers, to chat up the locals, to understand their zeitgeist at the common level. What’s working? What are the people’s problems? What are their hopes and dreams?
This bottom-up style democracy continues today, with Mao Zedong’s mass line, which is simply massive polling and surveys of what the 99% want and need: to take the line of the masses. To this day, Baba Beijing3 is the world’s most active pollster and surveyor of public opinion. Living in Beijing and Shenzhen, there were notices every week on our apartment buildings’ main doors, asking people to come to the local government office to tell them about everything, from the availability of pap smears and breast exams, to garbage collection, possible sources of pollution, corruption, recycling, bus and metro services, public safety, the speed of the internet, and on and on.
Nowadays, citizens can do the same thing online, and do so vociferously. Artificial Intelligence and Big Data give Baba Beijing the power to zero in on potential problems and find fast solutions. Portals are available to confidentially report corruption, malfeasance, criminal business practices and other irregularities, which feeds into the Social Credit System (SCS-see below). I personally used it to report a couple of problems in my neighborhood and within a couple of three weeks, they were resolved.
Every three years, elections in 900,000 localities take place to vote for their village/neighborhood committees. More than half of those elected are not members of the CPC, just caring and concerned citizens. From there, these local reps vote for the bigger city government, and these in turn vote for provincial level leaders, and these latter vote for China’s 2,500-member National People’s Congress (NPC), which includes eight opposing political parties other than the CPC, something very few Western countries can claim. This body votes for the 300-member Central Committee (like a state council), which in turn elects the 25-member Standing Committee and top-level seven-member Politburo Standing Committee. All these representatives are highly experienced and well-educated. No movie actors and sports stars allowed (Democracy).
These foundations were laid millennia ago and since communist-socialist liberation in 1949, China has the world’s most consultative, consensual, bottom-up people’s democracy on Earth. Mao called it the mass line, President Xi Jinping calls it whole-process democracy. They both mean one thing: SERVE THE PEOPLE! (the 99%). Post-Napoleonic Western liberal democracy is a three-ring, barking dog circus performance to make the 1% super wealthy, keep them in power, while keeping the 99% down, poorer and in their lowly place.
There is simply no comparison.
TPW: Economist Michael Hudson, whose book Superimperialism was written for people in the US government to explain how the “dollar empire” works, has lectured a lot in China. Although he does not know the language, there is no one who can doubt his credentials as a serious political-economist. He also says that China is a socialist country from an economic point of view. He bases that observation on Chinese economic policy and his perception of who makes it. Since you do understand the language and have lived and worked in China many years, could you describe how Chinese talk about their system on a day-to-day basis?
JJB: It was Deng Xiaoping who came up with the moniker Socialism with Chinese Characteristics and it has stuck in the minds of the Chinese people, which they and the media use. Among those adhering to Mao Thought, (of which there are many magnitudes more than Western pundits want to admit) there is much criticism of Deng’s economic liberalization and opening up to the outside world, meaning global capitalism.4 This, while the same-said global capitalists loved what they perceived as a laissez-faire free-for-all, viz, a chance to plunder China’s resources.
What cannot be questioned is Deng’s belief that post-liberated China never had the chance to go through bourgeois capitalist industrialization, and according to Marxism, this is a prerequisite for transition to communism thereafter. Thus, this is what I lived through 1990-1997: Fast-Freddy, make-a-quick-buck, street level, jungle capitalism. The economy was mostly liberalized for high volume, low margin consumer/manufactured goods and retail services, such as restaurants, tourism, hotels, shopping malls, etc. Much less noticed by foreigners was that Baba Beijing kept, and is still keeping to this day, firm control of what they call the 100 Great Industries; i.e., directing and planning the country’s critical means of production.
Global capitalists only saw the prior and wore blinders for the latter, by hypnotizing themselves with their “Dengist” palliative, which avoided the don’t-go-there communism boogeyman. For the West’s mainstream media, this gave China a self-congratulating “capitalist road” sheen of inevitability. The Big Lie Propaganda Machine (BLPM)5 was gloating that China was rapidly joining the global capitalism’s “rules-based order”, meaning becoming a supine vassal, to be raped and plundered by the West trillionaire dictators. Self-conceited Western capitalists saw all that 1980s-1990s retail chaos as a sure sign they would soon be buying up banks, factories and public infrastructure for pennies on the dollar/euro, as they had across the postwar developing world. As it stands, Deng, who was a committed communist to his last dying breath (just read his works) and the Chinese people are having the last laugh to continual development and ever-increasing 99%-prosperity.
Fast forward to 2013. Xi Jinping added Chinese Dream to Deng’s hashtag, which is now used interchangeably by the people and in the media.
The Chinese people’s meteoric rise since 1949 is proof that they know what they are talking about: nonstop and broad-based economic opportunity, growing prosperity, sociopolitical harmony, public safety, and bottom-up, consensual people’s democracy. When the Chinese government announced it has raised some 300 million people out of absolute poverty, one needs to get a sense of proportion. The US population in 2022 is about 333 million. How many Americans are living in absolute poverty in what is supposedly the richest country in the world? Of course, Western anti-communists and Sinophobes refuse to see why, in top international polls, year after year (Gallup, Pew, etc.), the Chinese report great satisfaction with their government, media and the direction in which the country is heading, usually the world’s top-ranked country in each category.
At the same time, most Chinese are mortified by the West’s cruelty and criminality, both at home and abroad. Your average waitress or taxi driver knows much more about Eurangloland’s reality than vice-versa.
Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry Truman and Walter Lipmann’s China Lobby could not bring themselves to admit it, using the euphemism “So-Called Communist China”, fully expecting one day for the country to be covered with big white churches, full of little yellow, Americanized Christians. Today, global capitalists continue to deny that China is communist, in spite of the fact that,
The means of production in the 100 great industries are still controlled by Baba Beijing.
Infrastructure, public transportation, telecommunications and the internet are people-owned.
The financial sector is people-owned, with the world’s four biggest banks being wholly controlled by the State.
The People’s Bank of China (central bank) issues the country’s currency, not like privately owned, Western central banks, which make trillions off performing the same function.
The insurance sector is people-owned.
The aforementioned is all owned and managed by very successful and profitable state-owned enterprises (SOEs).
No dirt/green land can be bought in China. All land can only be leased for up to 70 years, this applies to locals and foreigners.
China has a vanguard political party, the CPC, which oversees the military.
The media is mostly government-owned and tightly state-managed, with an official censor explaining to the people why certain information is withheld (official censors in China have existed for thousands of years).
Marxism-Leninism is official social, political and economic policy, employed at all levels of governance and business.
Stalinist state planning is the order of the day, with benchmarked national five-year rolling plans laying out social, economic and political goals across the country. The private sector is expected to join forces with the state in achieving these targets.
The above official policymaking is reinforced by Mao Thought and Xi Thought, and it all anchors both China’s national and CPC constitutions.
The CPC, PLA and the Chinese people are considered to be one unifying, cohesive force for the betterment of all, to serve the people.
Heavy redistribution of wealth from the top to the bottom, with progressive taxation to make sure it happens.
Heavy legislation, regulations and judicial oversight to keep China’s private sector technology, fintech, social media, education, medicine and other potential “usurpers” on a tight leash. No Chinese Mark Zuckerberg’s, Elon Musk’s, Jeff Bezos’s and Big Pharma allowed.
Broad-based social services, such as generous maternity/nursing leave, universal health care, retirement income, old age homes and freebies for the elderly. Not to mention there are massive programs to eliminate rural poverty, ongoing.
Bottom-up, consensual, consultative people’s democracy, with Mao’s mass line, never-ending polls and surveys among the people, which are essentially eternal public referenda, via direct voting.
These are not just policies on paper, but the big picture that drives daily practice. Yet – and yet – neoliberal, neocon and libertarian pundits still call it “So-Called Communist China”! There are only two other countries that can tick off most to all of these boxes: DPRK/North Korea and Cuba. So, for all these reality deniers, are these countries not communist either?
Ron Leighton, who wrote that dreadfully-argued article, “The Religiosity of ‘The Myth of Chinese Capitalism” appears6, like so many others, to be brainwashed. One might even doubt the article’s actual authorship since Mr Leighton’s website identifies him as a fiction writer, specializing in fantasy, but provides no biographical or other information to show his qualifications for writing about China. Philip Agee7 and more recently Udo Ulfkotte have explained how stories are planted using writers and journalists willing to publish CIA articles as their own. His article and the website he cites heavily take glib, elitist, tones even using Trotskyite “permanent revolution” jargon. Moreover that website provides no clear indication of who actually maintains or funds it.
TPW: It is no secret that while Western governments formally recognise national sovereignty, the corporations that own those governments have always seen national sovereignty as an obstacle to business — an obstacle to be overcome by whatever means necessary. Chinese people can be found almost anywhere in the world, but not the Chinese government. In fact, much of the overseas Chinese population is really the legacy of Western forced labour. Yet there is no doubt about strong historical and contemporary contact between overseas Chinese and New China (not just Taiwan). I imagine you have known people in China who are linked to this diaspora. How would you characterise the relationship between Chinese in China and those Chinese living outside China, whether or not they are Chinese citizens?
I ask this question for two reasons. One is the awareness that Chinese all around the world have been subjected to racialist policies in the countries they inhabit. The other is the question raised, in fact, by Putin, with respect to the Russian diaspora created by the dissolution of the Soviet Union. New countries like the US or, in fact, most of the Western peninsula can only claim a nationality since the 1789 Revolution in France — before that there were monarchies, but no Westphalian nations. China in contrast has had a national identity for thousands years. Somehow, it seems to me that this ancient national identity must have special relevance for the Chinese view of their economic and political system.
JJB: Good question. In fact, we have to go back, way back. The Chinese people cum civilization have had a national identity going back 7,700 years. How? That is when the first remnants of the written language were preserved (on bone, tortoise shell and stone) and incredibly, its grammatical structure has changed very little since then. While today called Mandarin, for thousands of years and between thousands of spoken dialects, the lingua franca has always been the written language.
Even to this day, I have seen older Chinese, who only speak their local dialect, communicate using written messages, when meeting another person from elsewhere, in the same oral situation. They have been using the same characters for millennia, but pronounce them differently. The classic examples are Cantonese and Hakka, which have six tones and Mandarin, which has four (five, including the “non-tone”). We experienced this through all our travels across China. Even exploring small villages just outside Beijing, ground zero for all things Mandarin, we often had to use Chinese maps and writing with the villagers to find our way around, because for us, they were speaking dialectical gibberish; this long before GPS and mobile phones.
I bring this up to point out that postwar Mandarin has become political. The Mainland uses Mao-Era simplified characters, as does Singapore. However, it is associated with communism, Taiwan and most Western Chinese enclaves insist on using the traditional form. Nevertheless, Taiwanese and Singaporeans speak Mainland Mandarin. Thus, this national/linguistic identity applies to the 50 million Chinese living outside the Mainland and Taiwan. San Francisco, Hakka-dominated Penang Island and Paris’ 13th Arrondissement all consider themselves Chinese, many of them feeling this first and foremost, then they see themselves as American, Malaysian and French, respectfully.
To keep the civilizational umbilical cord connected, overseas Chinese are called Huaqiao (华侨), meaning Chinese Bridge. When they come back to the motherland, like after studying and working overseas, they are called Sea-Returnees (海归). The second character (gui = return) has the same pronunciation and tone for turtle. Thus, they are also called Sea Turtles (海龟), which always find their way home!
In sum, politics aside, for the diaspora and Mainlanders, there is only one Chinese Nation/Civilization on Planet Earth.
TPW: We hear and read that China — especially since 2020 — is the evil social system of the future for the rest of the world. I find it hard to believe that Chinese can either want or are able to impose their own social order on the rest of the planet. Americans talk and act as if everyone in the earth wanted nothing better than to become an American. Do Chinese think of the world becoming Chinese?
JJB: Absolutely not. Unlike 3,000 years of Western cultural, spiritual and economic evangelism, Mainland Chinese don’t have a proselytizing bone in their bodies. With the introduction of Buddhism in the first century AD, their spiritual palette has melded into a cosmic Confucism-Daoism-Buddhism (the prior two from sixth century BC), yet have no interest in “selling” it to others. Nonetheless, because of the ancient Asian notion of saving and losing face, they do care what others think about them and are sensitive to outside criticism.
Yes, they are rightfully proud of humanity’s longest enduring civilization and love it when they see foreigners learn Mandarin, enjoy the culture and can express empathy with their communist-socialist way of life. Be that as it may, if an outsider criticizes their sociopolitical system, they are just as likely to ignore them and say sotto voce, tamade (他妈的), which means fuck off!
As far as Baba Beijing’s paternalistic, authoritarian governance is concerned, this is pure Confucism, which Mao Thought seamlessly integrated into his Serve the People, bottom-up, consultative mass line and consensual people’s democracy. What adherents of Western liberal democracy refuse to accept is that the Chinese people demanded that their Social Credit System be created. Why? Because like me, they were sick and tired of the Fast-Freddy, Rip-Off-Eddy mentality and rampant corruption, from all that street-level, jungle capitalism. I have personally experienced and written much about the SCS and would encourage anyone who wants to understand it from the perspective of Chinese citizens, to read this very informative article.
Western libertarians are quick to point to the World Economic Forum’s (WEF) global Covid Plandemic + Agenda 2030 as a Chinese conspiracy. One actually can hear and read people calling COVID-19 or SARS-CoV-2 the Chinese virus. In this scenario the CCP, like a hissing serpent, spitting and biting, seeks to diabolically impose its SCS and Zero-Covid policy on an unwitting planet. Again, this is laughable, since China has never tried to export its Confucism-Daoism-Buddhism-Communism-Socialism anywhere. It is the West’s trillionaire dictators, going back to their 19th century obsessions with eugenics, totalitarian control of all humanity and their natural and human resources, that is at the heart and soul of the WEF’s techno-fascist totalitarianism. Blaming the CCP for the Covid Plandemic + Agenda 2030 is simply the worst psychological deflection and exonerates the real psychopaths, who own and operate Western global capitalism. It is also deeply rooted in Sinophobia, going back centuries.
Concerning China being a big funder of the World Health Organization (WHO), they have the same idiom as many other cultures, Keep your friends close, but your enemies closer (让你的朋友亲密，让你的敌人更亲密). This is also true for China’s participation in October 2019’s WEF/Gates+Rockefeller+Fauci/Western Big Pharma/Military Event 201 (read “Increasing oppression of the Covid-Great Reset Plandemic proves it is forever and ever in the West“). We can add the Wuhan Institute of Virology accepting payments (also through EcoHealth Alliance) from Anthony Fauci in 2015, to be taught by Ralph Baric at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill how to weaponize SARS-COV-2 (read “We made SARS. And we patented it on 19/4/2002, before there was any alleged outbreak in Asia”: David E. Martin testifies at the German Corona Inquiry Committee July 9th, 2021“). If you know that you are going to be attacked using biological agents, it just might make sense to learn all about the weapon that is being planned to destroy you? Just assume that this was, in fact, “defensive” weapons research. There is a long history of countries not (currently) at war participating officially as observers of each other’s military exercises.
Furthermore, until its collapse, no country can stand up to the West’s global, steamrolling BLPM. Case in point: a good friend of mine worked at the World Bank in New York, which is very near the WHO’s offices. He had a number of friends there and both sides socialized on the weekends. He said it was an open secret that Fauci’s HIV/AIDS was a complete hoax, to suck over two trillion dollars with-a-T into Big Pharma’s medical industrial coffers. Be that as it may, anyone who tried to speak out was assassinated, blackmailed, bribed or extorted into silence.
Want proof? Dr. Luc Montagnier discovered HIV and was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his work. Seeing how it was being exploited by Fauci & Co., he correctly publicly stated that HIV was no more dangerous than seasonal flu. What happened? He and his reputation were utterly destroyed by the corporate-state propaganda machine. One of the greatest microbiologists in history, a true national hero, yet his death this year in France was censored and ignored.
Chinese evangelism? Looking back across the millennia, the simple truth is that China’s Silk Roads reached Ancient Greece/Rome and Medieval/Renaissance Europe. Yet, it was Alexander the Great who was marching towards China, when he died in Afghanistan in 323 BC. It was Europe that globalized its imperial-colonial Six E’s of Racism, including its rape and plunder of Sinoland, 1839-1949. Chinese Admiral Zheng He sailed all over the Indian Ocean basin, two generations before pirate Columbus launched Europe’s New World genocide in 1492. Zheng’s massive flotillas, thousands of times bigger than the Santa Maria, Niña and Pinta conquered no lands, colonized no people. China was centuries ahead of Europe in navigational, military and productive, agricultural/manufacturing technology.9
If the Chinese had the same Six E’s of Racism DNA as the West, we would all be speaking Mandarin and singing songs of praise for Zhonguo (中国), the Middle Kingdom, while likely living much less bellicose and more prosperous and democratic lives.
Imagine that!
Comecon, the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance, was formed in 1949 to coordinate the trade relationships among those countries that had been “acceded“ to the Soviet sphere as a result of the Yalta agreements (1945) and in response to the US-led economic isolation of the region. At Yalta, the US had persuaded the Soviet Union that in lieu of reparations it would be permitted exclusive economic control over the territory it had occupied defeating Nazi Germany. US President Harry Truman repudiated these agreements at the Potsdam Conference.
This expression was popularised by the eponymous 1958 political novel by Eugene Burdick and William Lederer. It was adapted for the screen in 1963, with Marlon Brando.
Baba Beijing, literally “father Beijing” is Jeff Brown’s sobriquet for the central government of the People’s Republic of China. This can be contrasted with the historical expression used prior to the overthrow of the Qing dynasty, when the emperor was called the “Son of Heaven”.
For example, William H. Hinton wrote The Great Reversal: The Privatization of China, 1978-1989 in which he accused Deng of abandoning Mao’s communist programme for China. Hinton also saw the Tiananmen Square event as a protest against Deng’s policies. Hinton published his first book lauding Mao’s land reform, Fanshen, in 1966. He was also a supporter of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, which was widely repudiated after Mao’s death. After Edgar Snow, Hinton is probably the American most well known for his sympathetic reporting of China’s communist revolution.
BLPM, “Big lie propaganda machine“ is a term Jeff Brown uses in most of his weblog posts and his books. The term refers to the notion that “big lies“ are very effective in shaping consciousness. The concentration of Western mass media in some five or six corporations domiciled in the Western hemisphere gives these media their machine quality.
Kim Petersen also responded to Mr Leighton’s article in DV: “China is Not Capitalist and it is Not Yet Communist” (3 October 2022). Here the author of the original piece responds to Mr Leighton and to other questions concerning contemporary China.
Philip Agee explained this in his book Inside the Company:CIA Diary (1975) and in the Allan Francovich film On Company Business (1980).
See inter alia the Report of the International Scientific Commission for the Investigation of the Facts Concerning Bacterial Warfare in Korea and China (1952) also called the “Needham Report” after Dr Joseph Needham who presided over the commission’s work.
See Joseph Needham, Science and Civilisation in China (1954-2008) 27 vols.; also The Shorter Science and Civilisation: an abridgement of Joseph Needham’s original text, (1980-1995) by Colin Ronan, Cambridge University Press.
Unlike many who seem to believe that freedom of movement (since 2020 extinguished in the EU) must mean an end to national borders, I have only felt that borders should be recognised as the product of political will and history.
In the entrance to the museum at the Invalides in Paris there is a quote attributed to Charles de Gaulle, “France was made with the sword.” The idea that anywhere in Europe especially borders are natural or that they are defined by some innate qualities is absurd.1
However, following the principles first proposed in international law (by the British, speaking through their ventriloquist Woodrow Wilson) that nations were to be recognised based on ethnic or language “self-determination”, the only peoples permitted to exercise such political will were granted their “patent” by the British Empire after the Great War. This was consistent with British policy of dismembering all its competitors; e.g., Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire. The October Revolution seemed to offer Britain and its US partner the opportunity to redesign the Russian Empire too.
In order to defeat those forces, a brutal war had to be waged and the system of soviet republics was created both to endow many non-Russian populations with elements of self-determination and to defend the territorial integrity of the Russian Revolution.2 We know that Ukraine emerged as a modern state in this context. War, civil war, and negotiation created a state out of the eastern remnants of Austria-Hungary, Poland and Russia. Such configurations have always benefitted British (today Anglo-American) imperial interests. Precisely those qualities were to promote the use of Ukraine against Russia, in the way Croatia has been used against Serbia but on a far greater scale.
In the entrance to the museum at the Invalides in Paris there is a quote attributed to Charles de Gaulle, “France was made with the sword.”
British objectives have always been to use “cultural” weapons to create or maintain internally fragmented states which can be manipulated through federal structures dependent upon external arms and finance. All of the white dominions of the British Empire were created as federations ruled from above.3 There was clearly legitimate fear among those who supported nationalism in the US that the British would subvert the federal system to their advantage, especially during the Civil War. In fact, they obtained this goal in 1913 and consolidated it by 1918 through the “Bank of England” model of public-private partnership.4 But that is another story.
A major source of confusion in the debate about Ukraine and Russia’s incursion is the question of Ukrainian sovereignty, on which a wide range of people oppose Russia’s actions because it should not attack a sovereign state (naively drawing on the prohibitions of the UN Charter). Moreover, the claim that Russia should not have violated Ukrainian sovereignty is based on the erroneous belief that Ukraine was invaded. This assertion is based on ignorance. Quite aside from the international-law issues posed by the sovereign claims of the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics (DPR and LPR), and hence whether they could exert sovereign rights to conclude treaties and hence invite military aid, there is the long-standing original threat and active aggression of NATO in and through Ukraine’s governments. The recognition of sovereignty does not outweigh the right of self-defense.5 The fact that the Russian Federation has not engaged in military retaliation for multiple violations of its territory does not mean that it has waived or forfeited those territorial rights. 6
That is the ultimate premise upon which most of the critique and attack on Russian military action has been based. There is a principle of English common law by which the convention of traversing private property can create a prescriptive easement – a right of way – which the titular owner of the property can no longer obstruct.7 Title must be actively and conspicuously asserted to remain enforceable. This is augmented by the concept of adverse possession whereby a party may assert title to land occupied for a given period and have that title sustained against the original owner by virtue of that owner’s failure or neglect to challenge the possession. In other words, there is no such thing as absolute title: it must always be effectively asserted.
Common law, while not necessarily enshrined in statutes, can be seen as an expression of the underlying social and psychological conventions prevailing in a regime. Although a nation-state would not appear comparable with a private home or farm, the material beliefs held and practiced in daily life do shape the prejudices of those who debate politics and political concepts. That is what makes this kind of law “common” – as opposed to the details of statutes or treaties.
The Anglo-American view of sovereignty is implemented by people for whom such fluid ideas of property, title and boundaries are conventional. This can be seen throughout the 19th and 20th centuries in every aspect of international-law practice. Even the so-called international judiciary has been formed or deformed by such assumptions, with some contradictory concessions to continental jurisprudence. The extremes to which disputes in Britain and the US lead to litigation are also an indication of the operational instability of legal conventions and norms – and of the level of aggression in everyday violation of whatever norms may be created by statute or courts.
NATO often appears absurd because its continental European bureaucrats utter pronouncements wholly at odds with their own cultural and legal traditions in order to articulate the policies generated by their Anglo-American principals. On the other hand this is part of the Anglo-American sleight of hand: framing their imperial designs in the alien terms of continental European politics. No amount of fealty or obsequy can conceal the fact that neither Stoltenberg nor Von der Leyen are natural “common law” politicians.8 That is one reason their insincerity is so blatant. They both try to present essentially Anglo-American imperial objectives as if they were continental peninsular. Their statements are incredulous and can be dismissed on their face. The real issue — which they are employed to conceal — is the anti-Russian policy of the Anglo-American Empire. To rectify the name of this policy and the actions derived from it would openly deny any pretense of sovereignty in occupied Germany and the vassal monarchies that comprise the core of NATO.9
So to return to the debate about the war that continued with Russia’s military response in the Ukraine, the issues ought to be described in the way the antagonists actually see them and not using the distorted language of professional propagandists.
The world has been at war no later than when behind the pretext of a constructive “emergency of international concern” — an asset of the Anglo-American international organisation cartel — presented the fictive requirements for a global state of martial law.10 Let us call it what it is. Martial law is imposed for a state of war. The enemy in this case was the world’s ordinary population — the 99% some would say. As I wrote two years ago, the WHO exercised implied authority to empower the Anglo-American Empire to commence a global counter-insurgency.11 Like similar counter-insurgency wars fought by that Empire, the focus of operations has been the global drug-weapons-energy cartel. This cartel is managed by the espionage organisations and organised criminal gangs shielded by US-UK forces and those of their closest allies.12
Under these conditions of global counter-insurgency, the Anglo-American Empire has intensified its operations (war) against its historical enemies/competitors Russia and China. The guiding principle by which this war is fought in the saturation propaganda of the biggest psychological operation since the founding of the Roman Catholic Church can be stated simply: Use it or lose it. There are no human rights, civil rights or sovereign rights which the Anglo-American Empire is obliged to respect. The only rights anyone has are those that the person or nation actually exercises. That exercise must be “open and notorious” (the words comes from common law meaning generally known and as such undeniable).
Beginning in March 2020 most of the world’s citizenry was tricked and bullied into surrendering all their natural rights.13 Now, two years later, they are finding just how difficult it is to counter adverse possession of all they surrendered under martial law. At the same time, “astute” observers have failed to take seriously the trespass of NATO and other forces of the Anglo-American Empire’s cartels. They have willfully ignored the conspicuous assertion of sovereign rights and privileges by Russia (and China). They have downplayed or ignored – when not apologising for – the violations committed since 1991 (at least).
The Russian Federation, pursuant to the decisions of its highest legislative and executive bodies, ordered deployment of military force to actively and conspicuously assert its sovereign rights against a government controlling a territory adjacent to it which has collaborated in attacks on its territory and people, violating those sovereign rights. Thus, consistent with the more general (as opposed to Anglo-American) concepts of international law, it is engaged in the right to self-defense. This claim is not diminished or forfeited either by failure to so act earlier or by the refusal of the opposing party to acknowledge violations committed.
The end of the military operations by forces of the Russian Federation in Ukraine can only be considered in the context of a resolution (dare anyone say “end”) of the world war commenced by the Anglo-American Empire in 2020. Threats by agents and assets of that regime to continue guerrilla war against Russia in Ukraine only amplify the necessity of grasping the Russian actions in Ukraine as a response to Anglo-American aggression. Until the subjects of that Empire are capable of grasping that and accepting responsibility for that aggression (not only against Russia) and reasserting those human rights they forfeited to their criminal oligarchs two years ago, (not only) central Europe will remain a very messy place indeed.
The cultural historian Morse Peckham was fond of saying that “man does not live by bread alone, but mainly by platitudes.” Historically Ukraine has been a “bread basket”. Germany has certainly been able to turn much of its arable land into fields of biomass because Western domination of the Ukrainian economy permits importation of cheap grain from Ukrainian fields. Many of the strategic goals of Unternehmen Barbarossa (the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union) lay in Ukraine: grain, oil, access to the Black Sea, etc. historically, the West has only paid lip service to Ukrainian sovereignty.
In his address to the Russian people on 21 February 2022, Vladimir Putin credited Lenin with the creation of the Ukraine as a republic. He argued that this—as part of Lenin’s policy for the nationalities issue—was intended to assure Bolshevik control over Russia. Putin presents himself as an opponent of the Soviet Union, hence he considers such a policy negative and a violation of Russian sovereignty. However, Lenin was not immune to the problems of suppressing foreign intervention in the Russian civil war—of which the US was a part with troops in Russia until 1921. Lenin had to accommodate both the Wilsonian ideology and the threatened disintegration of Russia through foreign invasion. The Soviet Union would not have been the first federal state to factually deny the formal conditions of federation; e.g. the US Civil War.
The “white dominions” were those constituents of the empire covered by the Statute of Westminster (1931): Australia, Canada, Irish Free State, Newfoundland (which was not yet part of Canada), New Zealand, and the Union of South Africa. Conspicuously absent was India. Along with India, the rest of the British Empire was not “self-governing”.
The Federal Reserve Act (1913) was based on the Aldrich Plan conceived secretly at the so-called Jekyll Island conference (1910). The design of the Federal Reserve System was based on many key features of the Bank of England, a privately owned bank with monopoly powers over the country’s money. Coherence with the BoE model was assured by the participation of the Warburg and Morgan interests. Although the Aldrich Plan failed in Congress, a modified version was adopted. The key element was the private control of the nation’s monetary system—as in the UK.
The US circumvented the ostensible intent of the UN Charter to enshrine the prohibition of war (the 1928 ”Kellogg-Briand Pact”, General Treaty for Renunciation of War as an Instrument of National Policy) and establish the UN as the sole venue for international disputes, with the Security Council responsible for the use of force by including provisions that permitted so-called “collective security” arrangements. This sleight of hand was used to justify the creation of NATO outside the UN framework. NATO has commonly been portrayed as a defence against the Soviet-led “Warsaw Pact”. This too is propaganda. NATO was founded before the Warsaw Pact. The Soviet Union only initiated its own collective security agreement after US bombing of the Soviet Union while the US was waging war against Korea and China (1951-53).
In Putin’s address to the Russian nation on 24 February 2022, he detailed the NATO transgressions which Russia had endured since 1991. Many of these went unreported or under-reported at the time. Rick Rozoff (Anti-Bellum) has been posting blow-by-blow reports of NATO actions all along Russia’s border for years using NATO press releases and official publications for operations from Estonia to Kazakhstan.
The inception of a prescriptive easement can be prevented by appropriately defending the ownership rights. A well-known example is the closure of the central court of Rockefeller Plaza in New York City (where the ice rink is) for one day in the year to interrupt the period of otherwise continuous public access that would create such a prescriptive easement.
Jens Stoltenberg is the Norwegian NATO General Secretary. Ursula von der Leyen is the President of the European Commission, the junta that runs the European Union on behalf of its multi-national corporate cartels.
While it is tempting to assume that NATO is comprised of democracies, the fact is that core members are monarchies; e.g., United Kingdom, Belgium, Denmark, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Norway, and Spain. Until 1974, NATO included outright dictatorships like Portugal, Spain, Greece and Turkey. Constitutionalism notwithstanding, monarchy has been an essential part of NATO’s political culture.
The declaration of a “health emergency of international concern“ by the Gates-dominated, Rockefeller-founded World Health Organization in 2020 was only possible by regulatory manipulation and statutory deception perpetrated after the 2009 “Swine Flu pandemic“. The definition of “pandemic” was changed. This bureaucratic fraud has been discussed everywhere except by the general public which is still misled by official deceit.
In November the latest book by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. will be available to readers: The Real Anthony Fauci. In an address to a conference on the Covid-19 crisis held in Budapest, Hungary this past August, Robert Kennedy gave a preview of his research results to the participants. His “Historical and Legal Perspectives of the Pandemic” takes an unusually wide view of the context in which the past 18 months unfolded. As a conservative campaigner for healthcare safety, especially for children, and an environmental activist, Kennedy has concentrated on corporate malfeasance and regulatory capture by the pharmaceutical industry. In this talk he explains the relationship of the health crisis to the State, itself.
It ought to be asked, for instance, “How much grant or budgeted money from the military establishment is needed before scientific research is called military or weapons research?” or “How much objective science is produced by people entirely dependent or whose salaries are determined by the amount of money donors contribute to buy results?” or “How many deceptions and frauds must be perpetrated before those responsible are deemed liars and criminals?” These are, of course, rhetorical questions. Where a significant majority has learned to accept that pay warrants obedience and profit is the highest form of success and virtue, these questions can mean little and their answers mean even less.
Karlheinz Deschner wrote more than 10 volumes of historical research documenting from the records of the Roman Catholic Church, itself, all of its criminal activity since the very fraudulent founding of the Holy See in Rome. Yet none of this will alter the conviction of a true Catholic that he or she is adherent to a criminal organisation more than a thousand years old. Deschner includes all of Christendom, not just the Catholics, since the Reformation did not end the crimes.
Here it might be worth noting that some of the most vicious enforcers of the medical martial law regime, Emmanuel Macron, Justine Trudeau, Gavin Newsom, and, of course, Anthony Fauci were Jesuit educated. The collaborationist pontiff, himself, is a Jesuit. The founder of the Society of Jesus understood his work as a military organisation for the aggressive propagation and defence of the holy church. It is a common place that Cecil Rhodes was inspired by the Jesuits when he created his Round Table movement for British imperial unity. The Jesuits enjoy the reputation within the espionage profession as an elite element of the Church’s notoriously wide-spun and efficient intelligence operation.
So when Robert Kennedy explains the sources of Anthony Fauci’s funding, the integration of the military and intelligence organisations in the ostensibly civilian NIAID (and hence NIH as a whole), he is scraping some of the veneer from a carefully created body of mythology about institutional medical research and major medicine.
The story and context Kennedy presents in this talk will presumably be more detailed in his forthcoming book. However, it is useful to go back in history even further than Eisenhower’s famous farewell speech to which Kennedy refers.
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The following section is adopted from my March 5, 2021 article:
The regimental genealogy of the NIAID can be traced to the War Research Service, the US regime’s secret biological and chemical weapons research office, run by George W. Merck, president of one of the largest pharmaceutical corporations in the world.
In 1948, coincidental with the importation of Japanese and German war criminals with their cases of prison experimentation results, the War Research Service was transformed into the US Microbiological Institute. The War Research Service had been hidden in the Federal Security Agency, a Roosevelt organisation that included a variety of civilian programs deemed to have national security relevance. Federal security meant programs to protect against anything that could destabilise the US regime during the 1929 Great Reset.
After 1945 and the adoption of the UN Charter, repeating the injunction of the Kellogg-Briand Pact and establishing the offense at Nuremberg of “crimes against the peace”, wars did not stop. Instead names were changed. Names make a difference. The Washington Naval Treaty (1922) restricted the tonnage and types of ships that could be built. Hence ship classes were also renamed. At the same time armament and displacement were reallocated among new ship classes so that construction could continue. The US sought not only to buttress its secret first strike strategy against the Soviet Union but also later to circumvent the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaties (starting 1972) by maintaining the same number of missiles and introducing the so-called MIRV, multiple independently targetable re-entry vehicles. In other words, one missile was turned into a delivery system that could deliver the same number of warheads as additional missiles.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), America’s Gestapo, could not have been sold to the states had it been called a police force.
In 1947, the National Security Act was also a response to the need for new language. If war was illegal, then one could not have a “war department”. So the national military establishment was renamed the Department of Defence. After the ceasefire in Korea, the US was also forced to rebrand the programs developing weapons it denied ever having or using—namely, the chemical weapons, already prohibited and the biological weapons it had inherited from the Epidemic Prevention and Water Purification Department of the KwantungArmy and the Japanese war criminals of Unit 731 Douglas MacArthur hid from exposure or trials. The principal war criminals from this secret Japanese military research facility no doubt joined their German colleagues recruited through the good offices of Allen Dulles.
Although military research continued under the auspices of the US Army’s Chemical Corps and biological weapons research was still conducted, mainly at Fort Detrick in Frederick, MD—with other major facilities such as Dugway Proving Ground, Wendover, UT—World War II had also raised the petrochemical industry and its sister pharmaceuticals to a major role in the military – industrial – complex. Atomic weapons had enormously expanded the already firm hold of DuPont on the munitions side. The Army Air Corps and the vastly expanded aeronautical and aerospace industry joined behind the new Air Force. Thus it should be no surprise that petrochemicals and pharmaceuticals needed their State bureaucratic partner for the massive post-war armaments program. It is important to remember here that one of the benefits of US strategic success in the war was the plunder of some of the most lucrative basic research and capture of the most ruthless research personnel available in Germany and Japan. When the leaders of the US regime whine about alleged intellectual property theft by China, they are merely sobbing at the inevitable trickle down from their historical larceny and brain draining.
It simply would have been impossible after the war in Korea to openly foster a biological warfare service in the US war machine. A solution was found. This was supported by trends already well established in the US. Since Frederick Taylor Gates assumed control over the General Education Board (GEB) within the Rockefeller tax dodge, the two largest tax dodges of the time, Carnegie and Rockefeller, had agreed to allocate the theatres of ideological warfare in defence of their fortunes, their class and the system that had come to be called capitalism. Rockefeller money would be devoted to manipulation of the domestic political environment and Carnegie money would be used to buy control of the international side.
At the same time Gates advised Rockefeller to invest his loot in scientific medicine. Although Gates, like Rockefeller, came from a Baptist background, both had come to recognise that medicine is more powerful and intimate even than religion. Scientific medicine, based on the work of professionals operating with “security clearances”, could turn the laboratory into technology for social transformation. Just as John D. Rockefeller had legalised his criminal activities to establish the Standard Oil monopoly, Gates proposed a strategy for establishing an ideological monopoly on medicine and thus a practically invincible defence of the gangster class’ prerogatives to rule.
Today’s complicity of the Johns Hopkins University (Bloomberg) School of Public Health should not be a surprise to anyone who recognises that history did not begin in 2019 or 2020. It was GEB money that founded the JHU School of Public Health (in 2001 named after the financial propaganda magnate, Michael Bloomberg, whose tax dodging has permitted him since 1995 to buy reputation at the nation’s premier population control academy).
Corporate control over scientific medicine, especially through funding of medical schools and medical research laboratories, combined with the integration of the pharmaceutical industry into the military-industrial complex. This process reached its international apex when the Rockefeller tax dodge, which had already made substantial financial donations to the United Nations organisation (notoriously supplying part of its feudal estate in Manhattan to build a kind of international “Vatican City”), managed the foundation of the World Health Organisation (WHO). The chief US delegate to the 1946 International Health Conference was Thomas Parran, the US Surgeon General, who would also be credited with the Tuskegee syphilis experiments on unwitting African-Americans (1932-1972). Rockefeller sent five official observers to the conference. Without a doubt the most powerful delegation at the conference was on the side of corporate medicine and pharmaceutical weaponry.
Recently those few critics of the WHO to be found complain about the amount of money it receives from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. However, it is important to note that WHO was deliberately underfunded when it was started. A proposal that the organisation be funded by the United Nations was defeated in favour of separate contributions by members and a provision for financial gifts (bribes) from other sources.
In 1955, the US Microbiological Institute was again renamed. It became the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. In 1946, the Office of Malaria Control in War Areas, a military operation was renamed the Communicable Disease Center (CDC) and later becomes part of the US Public Health Service—itself a derivative of military/naval hygiene operations. In 1951, the CDC established its cadre program keeping with the ultimately military tradition to which it belongs. The Epidemic Intelligence Service (EIS) was intended to satisfy “the need for an adequate corps of trained epidemiologists who can be deployed immediately for any contingency, including chemical or biological warfare”. The Communicable Disease Center was later renamed the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
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While these institutions have been labelled and marketed as if they were public services and benign operations for the protection and preservation of a social good, namely, human health, they were created, and as Kennedy also shows, have been maintained for the purpose of supporting what is essentially a major arm of the US war establishment, the pharmaceutical industry. The pharmaceutical industry and its soldiers, the lab-coated officers of the medical profession, fight to control the greatest threat to international capitalism of all—free human beings. Since the start of the 20th century what most people call “science” was harnessed to augment, and where necessary, replace religion—not to liberate humans from superstition but to anchor them more firmly in it. Social sciences were promoted because they turned social movements and struggle into managerial problems. Medical sciences replaced the healing arts, first to exclude women who previously would have been burned as witches, and then to exclude any attempts to organise healing within healthy communities—by turning health into disease and the patient into an enemy.
This pandemic of scientism also infected the humanities but for the most part by causing their atrophy. The imposition of science in its present form was forced by the Progressive movement in North America and the Fabians and Positivists in “Old Europe”. Their descendants today have stolen the language of popular struggle in the 19th and 20th century and wear it as a “lab-coat of jargon” with which they sell their 4th Awakening fanaticism to complement the so-called 4th Industrial Revolution.
The old national military establishment that invented the national security ideology in 1947 to subjugate the peoples of the expanding capitalist empire after World War II, realised quickly that they could not “kill ‘em all”. They began quickly to improve on the technology first applied industrially to wage the Great War. The target of that technology was and remains the human mind itself. The body housing it was and is of collateral interest. The mission of the war departments in the Pentagon and elsewhere around the world is to control territory and resources, including populations. The mission of the National Institutes of Health is to conquer the human mind and destroy the will of capitalism’s greatest enemy, humans striving toward liberty.
The latest Corbett Report podcast1 is essentially an update on the developments in genetic engineering, especially in combination with neurological research.
When genetic engineering was first introduced to the public I recall my abhorrence. Unlike many people I do not believe in “neutral” technology. For me a techne is always motivated and developed to transport interests. There are developments by humans that derive from general human needs and those which arise from specific activities. Moreover I believe knowledge and technology are principally derived from organisation and organisation is never neutral.
Genetic engineering — one of the speakers cited compares it albeit favourably with the development of the atomic bomb — is weapons technology and was from the very start.2
It becomes clear among these compulsive technologists that they are interested foremost in any and every kind of control over others. At the same time the entirety of the rhetoric is focused on perceived needs that this weaponry will satisfy.
Social organisation and technology to produce without polluting water, air, or soil is not the objective of these people or their projects. Nor are they interested in supplying safe housing or infrastructure to the masses of the population — all of which require less technology and, of course, less theft.
The best one could say about these people is that they are lazy and want solutions to problems for which they are paid but do not have to work. They spin fantasies of problems solved that only rich or middle class people perceive. The unstated assumption is that more equitable distribution of income and healthy living conditions would impede their own accumulation.
In fact, however, one can see the extent to which all this research has borne fruit in the course of the past two years. The success with which the bulk of the Western population has been induced to wage war on itself — not on the ruling class, of course — is amazing to say the least. The hysteria that launched the Great War was phenomenal; however, nowhere so saturated. Yet it was the Americans who perfected the war propaganda and policing methods essential to perpetuate the war and its profits for DuPont et al.3
There is a scene in Corbett’s presentation where someone tries to show that neural modelling technology can permit people who are completely paralysed to use their brain to perform physical tasks mediated by digital technology and high volume computing capacity. Aside from the hysterical nature of such a show — choosing an extreme medical case to promote the expansion of work for entirely other purposes — one has to ask how, given all the ostensible communication barriers, can anyone actually verify that this person actually is doing anything besides lying as a “dummy” to persuade the observer that she is driving the machine when, in fact, the machine is merely performing on its own.
Then there is another aspect, besides the impossibility of verifying whether the “dummy” is really thinking. The underlying assumption of all these demonstrations is that the “dummy” is thinking and the electromagnetic charges are translation of thoughts. The problem with this assumption is just as in the first case — the stimulus field is limited to peripherals or tools that have specific functions and purposes. Assigning the manipulation of a defined stimulus field as “thought” based on the ability to induce action from electromagnetic pulses just reflects the concept of thought, which these people have. One can reverse the argument and say that the researchers have done nothing but show that certain electromagnetic pulses can be used to drive a machine calibrated to operate on those pulses. Other pulses clearly cannot — or it would be irrelevant where the electrodes are placed.
Hence we return to the point Weizenbaum (Computer Power and Human Reason) made in his study of AI, namely that AI is only the modelling of intelligence based on the needs of operating machines. 4 Any intelligence that might exist but cannot be so used is discounted/discarded. Attention is deliberately focused on humans as beneficiaries but this is a distraction from the machines that are the real centre of activity. This attitude is not new. All warrior/barbarian states have had this focus on humans as mere vehicles for delivering violence. However, that is precisely the point: there is nothing humanistic about AI or genetic engineering. These are technologies rooted in the belief that the mass of humanity has no other purpose than as tools/machines for the benefit of the ruling class.
In short, behind all the flashy lights, song and dance, and pwogish rhetoric, AI and genetic engineering are concepts for reducing humans to the primitive notion of machines that the ruling class applies to valuing the bulk of the species.
Here we see the real damage done by the continuous destruction of the humanities as a component of education. Compulsive technology is fed by people who have been educated to see themselves as more or less efficient machines and not as spiritual beings. The Whitney Webb article5 on Wellcome’s LEAP surveillance program describes the degree to which the machine model of human beings is central to the oligarchy’s control objectives. Children in the thousands are to be monitored electromagnetically in order to generate models of human infant machine behaviour that can then be reverse engineered to produce digital control devices to mechanise children from birth. The reason for this is clear. The more sophisticated AI theorists know that digital control of anything requires very carefully defined parameters. The hyper-volume data is supposed to permit fine modelling to reduce randomness by recognising minuscule “subroutines”– something like photo resolution. There is nonetheless a risk of randomness since the only data that can be processed is that for which there is a device and a measuring parameter. Data, itself, is nothing more than what any given machine makes and as such is meaningless independent of the machine and its user.
Thus the creation of a massive repertoire of human developmental subroutines can only be useful once the new devices — new-born children — are calibrated within the limits of that system. Ideally this would lead to production of children who from birth are controlled by the ruling class ideological priorities and constituted as mere peripherals to the enormous data processing system the elite maintain in lieu of a society. Since they have no way of being certain, however, that this technology will only produce the kind of human machines they program, it will still be necessary to cull those who do not respond according to the user manual.
Only constant purging of the population to remove those who cannot be effectively controlled will assure the stability intended. That is the only purpose of any of this technology. Perhaps there are meanwhile — given the success of the past thirty-odd years of indoctrination — those who feel that their lives would be more fulfilled if they were better machines. Already there are many who believe that their fulfillment comes from having more comprehensive machines rather than a more mature self.
Episode 405 Designing Humans for Fun and Profit (9 July 2021) at Corbettreport.com
George M Church, credited as one of the founders of so-called synthetic biology, as well as his doctoral advisor Walter Gilbert, were entrenched in the transatlantic biological weapons research scene that still operates under cover of health research. Genetic engineering was funded by the State for the same reason basic atomic (weapons) research was supported—the development of weapons of mass destruction and/or control. (See: “The Health which I see is Disease (… if the Hierarchical Church so Defines)“, Dissident Voice, 5 March 2021.) As pertains to the genetic engineering of the SARS and its derivatives. See Dr David Martin, The Fauci/Covid-19 Dossier, available at truthcomestolight.com. Dr Martin shows on the basis of US Patent Office records that all the essentials of the SARS-CoV 2 were patented by November 2019!
Joseph Weizenbaum (1923-2008) Computer Power and Human Reason (1976). This author had the privilege of hearing Weizenbaum speak in Berlin after he had returned to his birthplace in retirement. The moderator introduced him as a computer scientist who while teaching at Case Western Reserve University was told the university needed a computer and so Joseph Weizenbaum built one. Weizenbaum replied scathingly that “Case did not need a computer and in fact nobody needs a computer.” The focus of his talk was simple. Machines process data but they do not produce information—people do. Needless to say his critique of AI has been entirely marginalised and forgotten. This is due mainly to the propaganda of “progress” which leads people to believe that simply because something is young or new it is automatically better or improved. We only need to recall “planned obsolescence” to debunk this cultivated prejudice.
Whitney Webb, A “Leap” toward Humanity’s Destruction, Unlimitedhangout.com. See also her other posts at this site on the military-industrial-financial complex (especially the intelligence sector) role in the events leading to 2020 et seq.
(Legal remedies for fraud and crimes against humanity)
by T.P. Wilkinson / February 20th, 2021
Bremen is a small city-state in the Federal Republic of Germany. It is one of two cities from the medieval Hanseatic League that have retained their political identity and autonomy over several centuries. The other is Hamburg. Such historical autonomy has also produced idiosyncratic personalities and unconventional or non-conformist policies.
For instance, Bremen’s constitution was strongly influenced by the merchant Calvinism. So the city is noted for its lack of ostentation. The head of the church in Bremen is the mayor in his capacity as senator for religious affairs. To distinguish themselves from the surrounding aristocratic principalities and the kingdom of Prussia in the German Empire, Bremen citizens traditionally do not accept or display honors and medals. It is a city that prides itself on civility and citizen government, even if at the hand of patricians.
Hence it is no surprise that the most concentrated civil and legal defense against the German federal government’s constructive pandemic measures have been undertaken by a Bremen law firm, led by Rainer Fuellmich.
As Dr Fuellmich describes in detail in the video linked below, he and colleagues worldwide have filed a class action suit against the “propagator” of the notorious PCR test, Christian Drosten at the Berlin Charité university hospital. Christian Drosten has been the principal marketer of the test originally developed by Dr K Mullis (+2018) as the “gold standard” for identifying the Sars-Cov2 virus in humans. This use of the so-called PCR test, already denounced by Mullis in 2012, has been, and continues to be, the weapon of mass infection upon which the destruction of the SME sector and civil rights are predicated.
Dr Füllmich explains why the evidence to date warrants not only charges of fraud (not negligence) and crimes against humanity.
Even if Covid-19 has become an article of contemporary religious dogma, immune to rational debate, the time for a Reformation is never too late.
Bremen is a small city-state in the Federal Republic of Germany. It is one of two cities from the medieval Hanseatic League that have retained their political identity and autonomy over several centuries. The other is Hamburg. Such historical autonomy has also produced idiosyncratic personalities and unconventional or non-conformist policies.
For instance, Bremen’s constitution was strongly influenced by the merchant Calvinism. So the city is noted for its lack of ostentation. The head of the church in Bremen is the mayor in his capacity as senator for religious affairs. To distinguish themselves from the surrounding aristocratic principalities and the kingdom of Prussia in the German Empire, Bremen citizens traditionally do not accept or display honors and medals. It is a city that prides itself on civility and citizen government, even if at the hand of patricians.
Hence it is no surprise that the most concentrated civil and legal defense against the German federal government’s constructive pandemic measures have been undertaken by a Bremen law firm, led by Rainer Fuellmich.
As Dr Fuellmich describes in detail in the video linked below, he and colleagues worldwide have filed a class action suit against the “propagator” of the notorious PCR test, Christian Drosten at the Berlin Charité university hospital. Christian Drosten has been the principal marketer of the test originally developed by Dr K Mullis (+2018) as the “gold standard” for identifying the Sars-Cov2 virus in humans. This use of the so-called PCR test, already denounced by Mullis in 2012, has been, and continues to be, the weapon of mass infection upon which the destruction of the SME sector and civil rights are predicated.
Dr Füllmich explains why the evidence to date warrants not only charges of fraud (not negligence) and crimes against humanity.
Even if Covid-19 has become an article of contemporary religious dogma, immune to rational debate, the time for a Reformation is never too late.
