Consider this paradox: without the Soviet Union (U.S.-designated nemesis since 1917), the United States would have never succeeded at placing the planet under its unilateral grip—often referred to by U.S. imperialists as the “new world order”. Or, rephrased differently, a world whereby the U.S. wants to rule unchallenged. This how it started: first, forget the Soviet Politburo—Mikhail Gorbachev practically annulled its role as the supreme decision-maker body of the Soviet Communist Party before proceeding to dismantle the Soviet state. In sequence, he, his foreign minister Eduard Shevardnadze, other anti-communists in his inner circle, and the Yeltsin group were the material instruments in the downfall of the USSR thus leading to U.S. success.

By a twist of events, with its unrelenting policy of economic, geopolitical, and military pressure to submit the new Russia to its will, the United States effectively forced it to intervene in Ukraine many years later. After 33 years from the dismantling the Soviet Union (first by Gorbachev’s contraptions of perestroika and glasnost, and then by Yeltsin’s pro-Western free-marketers), Russia is now breaking up the monstrous American order it helped create. Today, it seems that Russia have reprised its founding principles in the world arena—not as an ideologically anti-imperialist Soviet socialist republic, but as an anti-hegemonic capitalistic state.

The process for the U.S. world control worked like this: taking advantage of Gorbachev’s dismantlement of the socialist system in Eastern Europe and his planned breakup of the USSR, the United States followed a multi-pronged strategy to assert itself as the sole judge of world affairs. The starting point was the Iraqi occupation of Kuwait. With the success of its two-stage war to end that occupation (Operations: Desert Shield, 1990, and Operation: Desert Storm, 1991) the United States achieved multiple objectives. Notably, it removed the USSR completely from the world scene even before it was officially dismantled, and it put Iraq and the entire Arab world under its effective control, and it tested its new world order.

Far more important, with a considerably weakened Russia taking the seat of the USSR at the Security Council, the United States finally completed its takeover of the United Nations. Although the hyperpower is known for routinely operating out of the international norms and treaties, and has myriad methods to enforce its influence or control over foreign nations, it is a fact that whoever controls the Security Council can use its resolutions—and their ever-changing interpretations— as authorization for military interventions in the name of so-called collective international legality.

Still, it is incorrect to say that the United States has become the omnipotent controller without considering the other three permanent members of the Security Council:  Britain, France, and China. First, aside from being the two states with a known history of imperialism and colonialism, Britain and France are NATO countries. As such, they pose no threat to U.S. authority. This leaves China. (For now, I shall briefly discuss China’s role vis-à-vis the U.S. taking control of the Security Council after the demise of the USSR, while deferring its relevance to U.S. plans in Ukraine to the upcoming parts)

China has been rising as world power since the early 1990s onward. That being said, China’s world outlook has been consistently based on cooperation and peace among nations. China is neither an imperialist nor expansionist or interventionist state, and its claim on taking back Taiwan is historical, legal, and legitimate. That being said, China’s abstention from voting on serious issues is seriously questionable. Interpretation: China seems primarily focused on building its economic and technological structures instead of antagonizing U.S. policies that could slow its pace due to its [China] growing integration in the global capitalistic system of production. Consider the following two Western viewpoints on China’s voting practices:

• The Australian think tank, Lowy Institute, states, “China used its UN Security Council rotating presidency in August … China did not veto any UN Security Council resolutions between 2000 and 2006.”

Observation: but the period 2000–2006 was the post-9/11 Orwellian environment in which the United States broke all laws of the U.N. and turned the organization into its private fiefdom. Does that mean China had caved in to U.S. pressure and subscribed to its objectives? Based on its history, ideals, stated foreign policy principles, and political makeup, my answer is no. Yet, we do know that China has often been moving alongside U.S. objectives—by remaining silent on them. Examples include the U.S. 13-year blockade of and sanctions on Iraq (starting in 1990 and theoretically ending after the U.S. invasion in 2003), as well post-invasion occupation that is lasting through present by diverse ways and methods.

• Wikipedia (Caveat: never take anything printed on this website seriously unless you verify content rigorously) stated the following on China, “From 1971 to 2011, China used its veto sparingly, preferring to abstain rather than veto resolutions not directly related to Chinese interests. China turned abstention into an “art form”, abstaining on 30% of Security Council Resolutions between 1971 and 1976. Since the outbreak of the Syrian Civil War in 2011, China has joined Russia in many double vetoes. China has not cast a lone veto since 1999.”

Observation: by abstaining, China seems to be playing politics and patently taking sides with Washington on critical issues. Is china conspiring, in some form, with the U.S. for selfish reasons? Are there other reasons?

No science is needed to prove that China is neither fearful of the United States nor subservient to it or uncertain about its own great place in the world. Simply, China favors dialogue over confrontation and patience over nervous impulses. Although such conduct may unnerve some who want to see China stand up to the hyper-imperialist bully, the fact is, China is no hurry to play its cards before the issue of Taiwan is resolved. Still, by its own problematic actions at the Security Council, China is not a dependable obstacle to U.S. plans. Of interest to the anti-imperialist front, however, is that China’s voting record on Iraq, Libya, and Yemen has left dire consequences on those nations.

Russia’s Intervention in Ukraine: Dialectics 

Russia’s intervention in Ukraine was calculated and consequential. It was calculated based on symmetric response to U.S. long-term planning aiming at destabilizing it. The consequentiality factor is significant. Russia’s action did not precede but followed a protracted standoff with Ukraine following U.S.-organized coup in 2014. Not only did that coup topple the legitimate government of Viktor Yanukovych, but also veered Ukraine’s new rulers toward a fanatical confrontation with Russia and ethnic Russians—a sizable minority in Donbass.

Could comparing U.S. and Russian reactions to each other’s interventions shed light on the scope of their respective world policies? How does all this apply to Ukraine? First, Ukraine is not a conflict about territory, democracy, sovereignty, and all that jargon made to distract from the real issues and for the idle consumption of news. Second, to understand the war on Ukraine, we need to place Russia’s intervention in Ukraine in a historical context that —at least since the dismantlement of the USSR.

Premise 

The study of reactions by political states to military interventions and wars is an empirical science. By knowing who is intervening, who is approving, and who is opposing, and by observing and cataloging their conduct vis-à-vis a conflict, we can definitely identify pretexts, motives, and objectives. For example, when Iraq invaded Iran in 1980, the reaction of the United States, key European countries, Israel, Arab Gulf states, Egypt, and Jordan were unanimously approving—and supporting with instigation, money, weapons, and logistics. The Soviet Union on the other hand, called for dialogue, negotiation, and other ways to end the conflict.

In the Iraq-Iran War, the U.S., Europe, and Israel wanted the war to continue so both would perish by it. Henry Kissinger the top priest of U.S. Zionism simplified the U.S. objective with these words, “The ultimate American interest in the war (is) that both should lose”. Consequently, Western weapons sales to both contenders skyrocketed—war is business. The Arab Gulf states, for example, financed and wanted Iraq to defeat Iran—its revolutionary model threatened their feudal family systems of government. They also looked for surgical ways to weaken Iraq thus stopping its calls for the unification of Arab states.

It turned out, when the war ended after eight years without losers and winners, that U.S. and Israel’s objective evolved to defeat Iraq that had become, in the meanwhile, a regional power. The opportunity came up when Iraq, falling in the U.S. trap (April Glaspie’s deception; also read, “Wikileaks, April Glaspie, and Saddam Hussein”) invaded Kuwait consequent to oil disputes and debts from its Gulf-U.S.-instigated war with Iran. As for Iran, it became the subject of harsh American containment and sanction regimes lasting to this very date.

Another example is the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982. While the USSR, China, Arab States, and countless others only condemned but did nothing else as usual, Ronald Reagan, on the other hand, approved and sent his marines to break up the Palestinian Resistance and expel it from Lebanon, which was an Israeli primary objective.

United States: Reaction to the Russian Invasion of Afghanistan

When the USSR intervened in Afghanistan in 1979, that country became an American issue instantly. Cold war paradigms played a paramount role in the U.S. response. Not only did the U.S. (with Saudi Arabia’s money) invent so-called Islamist mujahedeen against the Russian “atheists” (operation Cyclone), but also created ad hoc regional “alliances’—similar to those operating in Ukraine today—to counter the Soviet intervention.

Russia: Reaction to U.S.’s many interventions and invasions 

When Lyndon Johnson invaded the Dominican Republic (1965), when Ronald Reagan mined the Nicaraguan ports (1981-85), and when George H.W. Bush invaded Panama (1989) and moved its president to U.S. prisons, the USSR reacted by invoking the rules of international law—albeit knowing that said law never mattered to the United States. The Kremlin of Mikhail Gorbachev stated that the invasion is “A flagrant violation of the fundamental principles of the United Nations Charter and norms of relations among states”.

But did he do anything to hold the U.S. accountable? Gorbachev knew well that words are cheap, and that from an American perspective such charter and norms are ready for activation only when they serve U.S. imperialist purpose. The U.S., of course, did not give a hoot to Gorbachev’s protestation—and that is the problem with Russian leaders: they avoid principled confrontation with the futile expectation that the United States would refrain from bullying Russia. One can spot this tendency when Russian leaders kept calling U.S. and European politicians “our partners” while fully knowing that the recipients are probably smirking in secret.

Another catastrophic example is Gorbachev’s voting (alongside the United States) for the U.N. Resolution 678 to end Iraq’s occupation of Kuwait by January 15, 1991. According to my research, that was the first time in which a resolution came with a deadline. Meaning, the United States (and Gorbachev) were in a hurry to implement Bush’s plan for world control.

Not only did the Gorbachev regime approve Resolution 678, but also approved all U.S. resolutions pertaining to Iraq since the day it invaded Kuwait on August 2, 1990. The statement is important. It means that Gorbachev’s role was structurally fundamental in allowing the United States to become the de facto “chief executive officer” of world affairs. At the same time, his role was also the material instrument in turning Russia into a U.S. vassal for over two decades since the dissolution of the USSR. [After becoming a former president of a superpower, Gorbachev made a living by taking commissioned speeches at various U.S. universities and think tanks]

From attentively reading Resolution 678, it is very clear that the objective was not about the withdrawal of Iraq from Kuwait. Decisively, it was about the disarming of Iraq for the sake of the Zionist entity in Palestine. In fact, the U.S. bombing of Iraq in 1991 was never meant just to end that occupation by dislodging Iraqi forces from Kuwait. It was enacted to destroy Iraq’s civilian structures and infrastructures, its army, and its nascent military industry including its nuclear capabilities.

The point: Gorbachev as a convert from communism to capitalism closed his eyes to U.S. objectives in Iraq and the world—these were unimportant to his plan since he obviously tied a deeply altered USSR to the wheel of U.S. imperialism while thinking he and his regime still mattered. With that, he doomed future Russia to protracted hardship and the world to suffer at the hands of U.S. violent imperialists and Zionists.

The Example of Libya: Zionist hyper-imperialist Barack Obama bombed Libya in 2011. [For the record, the Jerusalem Post (top publication in the Zionist state) called Obama, “An insider’s view: Eight years watching the first Jewish US president”. (Describing Obama as Jewish is irrelevant. He was a Zionist at the service of Israel via a constructed career powered by opportunism and sycophancy) Obama’s bombing of Libya is testimony to Russia’s betrayal of just causes when that suits its calculations.

Russia of Dmitry Medvedev (and Putin as his prime minister) explicitly accepted the U.S. plan by not vetoing UNSC 1970, and UNSC Resolution 1973 that declared the whole of Libya a No-Fly Zone. Once the resolution was passed, the U.S. (and NATO) transformed it at once into a colossal bombing of that country. (Debating whether Russian’s general conduct toward U.S. tactics was an expression of pragmatism, concession, collusion, or weakness goes beyond the scope of this work. I reported on Lavrov’s statement on the Libyan issue further down in this series.)

As for the United States, a fascist Hillary Clinton disguised as an “intelligent diplomat” epitomized the U.S. role for government change in Libya as follows. Referring to the brutal murder of former Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, Obama’s Secretary of State said, “We came, we saw, he died”. Aside from theatrically debasing Mark Anthony’s famous victory exclamation with her crazed laughter, Clinton’s “WE” confirmed the basics: Odyssey Dawn was a code name, not for a romantic beginning for Libya but for Obama’s imperialist war to conquer its oil and depose its leader.

Two other events are significant for their long-term implications: U.S. invasions of Afghanistan (2001) and Iraq (2003). Regardless of U.S. pretexts, Russia reacted to each invasion differently. In the case of Afghanistan, it sided with the United States in spite of the fact that Afghanistan under the rule of the Taliban had nothing to do with the still very much suspicious attack on the United States on September 11, 2021. It is imperative to recall what Tony Blair said prior to the Anglo-American invasion. Media and public records of the British government can confirm that Blair thundered to the Taliban, “Surrender Bin Laden, or lose power”. The Taliban offered to comply if the U.S. could prove that Bin Laden was behind the attack. The U.S. never responded—it just invaded.

In the case of Iraq, Russia, together with France and Germany, vehemently opposed the planned invasion but only within the realm of the UNSC. The U.S. and Britain invaded nevertheless. Aside from protesting, however, neither Russia nor any other country took any punitive action against the top two imperialist powers. More than that, Russia of the first Putin presidency sent neither weapons nor money to Iraq and Afghanistan to help them fight the invaders. Germany and France did the same. Was that for “solidarity” with invaders or fear from U.S. retribution?

What is worse, Russia and China had even accepted the U.S.‑imposed U.N. resolution 1483 that crowned the United States and Britain as the occupying powers of Iraq. That acceptance is a moral, historical, and legal blunder that the passing of time will never erase. This how it should be interpreted politically: with the passing of that resolution, Russia and China had not only legalized the U.S. imperialist occupation of Iraq, but also lent international legitimacy to the invasion and it is false motives.

A question: why did not the United States and Britain try to declare themselves as the occupying powers of Afghanistan? The answer is prompt: look no farther than the Zionist Israeli project to re-shape and control Iraq and other Arab countries via the United States. Accordingly, Afghanistan is not relevant to this scheme.

To close, I’m not suggesting that interventions by any country are tolerable as long as “A” can do whatever “B” does or vice versa, or, as long as they do not stand in the way of each other. That would void the struggle for a just world system where natural states could enjoy independence and security. Rather, to address persistent questions on the current configuration of the world order, we must tackle first the issue of exclusive entitlement. That is, we like to know according to what rule Russia, China, or any other country should remain mute while the dictatorial, violent hyper-empire continues staking its claim to arrange the world according to its vision? If this rule turns out to be by means of fire, death, and printed money, then we may finally understand the miserable situation of the world today and find all possible means to end it.

It is no small matter, but the “indispensable nation” [Madeleine Albright’s words and Barack Obama] seems to think it deserves this exclusivity. American biblical preachers, hyper-imperialists, multi-term politicians, think tanks, proselytes of all types, military industry, and neophyte politicians seeking promotions within the system, and, before I forget, Zionist neocon empire builders often declare that the U.S. is predestined to rule over others. Biden, a self-declared Zionist has recently re-baptized the notion of U.S. ruling over others when he declared that the U.S. must lead the new world order.

Another Subject: American ideologues of permanent wars persistently talk about what appears to be a fixed target: Ukraine must win and Russia must lose. What hides behind such frivolous theatrics? First off, why Ukraine must win and Russia must lose? Stating so because Russia intervened in Ukraine is non sequitur. The United States, Britain, France, and Israel have been punching the world with invasions for decades without anyone being able to stop them. Ineluctably, therefore, there should be fundamental reasons for wanting to see Russia lose.

To begin, U.S. tactics to frame wars in terms of winning and losing is at the very least childish and makes no sense. Further, whereas waging wars of domination are built on a hypothetical model that ends with “we win they lose”, the resulting indoctrination paradigm is invariably translated into an ideological construct whereby winning is a sign of power and losing is a sign weakness. Again, that makes no sense. One could lose not out of weakness or could win not out of strength. In endless situations, winning or losing in any field is a function of varied dynamic and static forces leading to either outcome by default.

In real context, the fabricated philosophy pivoting around the must-win scenario while discarding potential devastating reactions by a designated adversary is of paramount significance to understand the dangerous mindset of American politicians and war planners. As they prepare pretexts for a war by choice, they completely jump over the possibility that an opposite response could devastate them. How does the process work?

Read Part 1 and 2.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by B.J. Sabri.

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)

[4] See “Peculiar Admission in Award Winning Book” Dissident Voice (21 July 2014)

[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)

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

A comrade recently pointed my attention to a comedy skit by Foil Arms and Hog called “Santa is Captured by the Russians,” where for two minutes Mr. Claus is interrogated by the Soviet police. Below are some excerpts from the conversation:

Santa:  I think there has been some sort of a mistake. You see I have a very busy night tonight.

Soviet Police 1: He was found attempting to hide in a chimney.

Soviet Police 2: Chimney? What were you doing in Russian airspace?

Santa: I’ve already told you…

(Santa gets slapped): Ho, ho, ho… That was naughty.

Soviet Police: We found a list of names.

Santa: Ah my list.

Soviet Police: These are American spies?

Santa: No, no…

Soviet Police: There was also a second list.

Santa: Oh you don’t want to be on that list.

Soviet Police: You plan to kill these people.

Santa: No, no, they just get a bad present… It used to be a bag of coal… but the whole climate change thing…

Soviet Police: We intercepted a communication from one of his assets.

“Dear Santa, I have been a good girl. I would like a Silvanian Family Cosy Cottage Starter Home.”

Soviet Police: This is clearly code.

Santa: No it’s not code.

Soviet Police: Then who is Santa?

Santa: That’s me.

Soviet Police: You said your name was Father Christmas.

Santa: Yes, I’m known by very many names.

Soviet Police: So you are spy?… How do you know my children’s names?… What are you doing in Russia?

Santa: Presents, I deliver presents.

Soviet Police: Presents? For who?

Santa: Well, to all the children in the world.

Soviet Police: All the children in the world? In return for what?

Santa: Well, nothing.

Soviet Police: Nothing? So…You are communist?

Santa: Da (Yes)… Why do you think I wear red comrade?

Soviet Police: Signals to officer outside “Comrade, two vodka, one cookies and milk.”

This captures wonderfully the gap between reality and the values and narratives enunciated by the liberal capitalist world. Father Christmas is said to be this selfless gift-bringer, someone who enjoys seeing the smile on kids’ faces as they receive – assuming they weren’t naughty – their new toys. Santa Claus gives, in the traditional narrative, to all kids, irrespective of class (but especially the poor), race, nationality, and sex. He gives these gifts, most importantly, for free. He does not give in exchange for money. His purpose, telos, is not profit. He gives gifts to meet the playful needs of children. His goal is social good, not capital accumulation. He gives so that kids can play, so that they may fulfill what it means to be a kid. He does not give so that parents’ pockets are hollowed, and his North Pole bank account inflated.

Santa Claus’s logic is completely antithetical to the capitalist system. A system premised on producing for the sake of capital accumulation and not social and common good is in contradiction with Father Christmas’s telos. Both the real St. Nicholas (270 – 342 AD) and the Santa Claus we consume in popular culture gift-give without any attempt at obtaining recognition. Unlike the charities in the capitalist West, Santa’s giving does not afford him major tax deductions, and neither does it boost his ‘humanitarian philanthropist profile’ through large, broadcasted events. Saint Nicholas’s giving was not some big spectacle, quite the opposite. He climbs in through the chimney when everyone is sleeping to leave gifts and go. He stands on the side of the poor and does his part in attempting to bring about social justice.

While this is the dominant narrative we operate with, the reality of our commodified Christmas, and of Santa Claus as the personified agent of such commodification, is directly opposed to the narrative itself. As Valerie Panne notes, modern capitalist Christmas has turned Santa Claus into a “decorative marketing tool…for hysterical shopping.” Santa’s commodified image – first used by Coca-Cola in the 1930s – has become instrumental in helping the capitalists realize profit. He has become an instrument used to, as Marx notes in volumes two and three of Capital, “cut the turn over time of capital… The shorter the period of turnover, the smaller this idle portion of capital as compared with the whole, and the larger, therefore, the appropriated surplus-value, provided other conditions remain the same.”

Here we see a clear gap in the enunciated values and the reality of capitalist society. At the ideological level, that is, at the level of how we collectively think about the story and figure of Santa Claus, we find heartwarming values of empathy, selfless giving, and community. However, this ideological level is rooted in the reality of a Santa Claus used to promote conspicuous consumption (as Thorstein Veblen notes), the commodification of family time, traditions, and relations, and the accumulation of capital in the hands of the few.

The ideological reflection of the real world provides an upside-down, topsy-turvy image of itself. This is the essence of bourgeois ideology qua false consciousness. It is a social order that necessitates the general acceptance of an inverted understanding of itself. We come to erroneously understand the “capitalist” Santa through the narratives of the “communist” Santa. Reality is turned on its head. But this is not, as Vanessa Wills notes, a problem of “epistemic hygiene”. The root of the ‘error’ is not in our minds, that is, in our reflection of the objective phenomena at hand. As I’ve argued previously, “it is much deeper than this; the inversion or ‘mistake’ is in the world itself… This world reflects itself through an upside-down appearance, and it must necessarily do so to continuously reproduce itself.” As Marx and Engels noted long ago,

If in all ideology men and their relations appear upside-down as in a camera obscura, this phenomenon arises just as much from their historical life-process as the inversion of objects on the retina does from their physical life-process.

To understand the gap between how Santa Claus (or Christmas) is understood and how it actually functions in modern capitalist society it is insufficient to see the problem simply as one of subjective ‘misunderstandings’ held by individuals, classes, or whole peoples. One must investigate the political economy which grounds, that is, which reflects that erroneous image of itself. The gap between the actual “capitalist” Santa and the ideological “communist” Santa is objective, it is required by the existing material relations of social production and reproduction. Capitalist ideology must disguise the cut-throat values of bourgeois individualism with the universalist values of Santa’s socialistic humanism.

But this is nothing new. Santa Claus is just another particular instant of a universal bourgeois phenomenon. The capitalist class has never been able to fully realize, to make actual, the values it enunciates with its appearance in the arena of universal history as a dominant force. Its universal appeals to liberty, equality, fraternity, etc. have always been limited within the confines of their class. As Marx had already noted in 1843, “the practical application of the right of liberty is the right of private property;” “the necessary condition for whose existence,” he and Engels write in 1848, “is the non-existence of any property for the immense majority of society.” The phrasing of ‘all men’ used to formulate rights under capitalism is always with the understanding, as Marx notes, of “man as a bourgeois,” it is “the rights of the egotistic man, separated from his fellow men and from the community.” Its values, and their reflection in their judicature, always present their narrow class interests embellished by abstract language used to appeal to the masses and obtain their consenting approval for a form of social life which they’re in an objectively antagonistic relation with.

The ideologues of the bourgeoisie always provide the masses with a “bad check,” as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. would say. But eventually, as King notes, the masses will come in to cash that check somehow. They’ll notice that within the confines of the existing order, the prosperity that checked promised is unrealizable. Capitalism has never, and will never, fulfill the universal values it pronounces as it breaks out of the bonds of feudal absolutism. Only socialism can.

The values embedded in the narrative surrounding Santa Claus, Father Christmas, Saint Nicholas, or whatever else you want to call him, will never be actual within capitalist society. Only socialism can universalize the form of selfless relationality we have come to associate with Santa.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Carlos L. Garrido.

Furthermore: the U.S. Government began in 1948 its many dozens of coups (starting with Thailand in that year) to overthrow the leaders of its targeted-for-takeover countries, and its replacement of those by U.S.-chosen dictators. Ever since 25 July 1945, the U.S. Government has been aiming to take control over the entire world — to create the world’s first-ever all-encompassing global empire.

Cold War Two is the years when Russia had ended its side of the Cold War in 1991 while the U.S. secretly has continued its side of the Cold War. This deceit by America was done during the start of Russia’s Yeltsin years, when the G.H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton Administrations sent the Harvard economics department into Russia to teach Yeltsin’s people how to become capitalists by partnering U.S. billionaires with whomever Russia would privatize its assets to, and so created an incredibly corrupt economy there, which would be dependent upon decisions by America’s billionaires — Russia was then in the process of becoming the U.S. Government’s biggest colony or ‘ally’ after it would be trapped fully in the thrall of America’s billionaires, which was the U.S. regime’s objective. Then, while getting its claws into Russia’s Government that way, Clinton lowered the boom against Russia, by blatantly violating the promises that Bush’s team had made (but which violation by Bush’s successors had been planned by Bush — Bush secretly told his stooges (Kohl, Mitterand, etc.) that the promises he had told them to make to Gorbachev, that NATO wouldn’t expand toward Russia, were to be lies) to Gorbachev, and that NATO actually would expand toward Russia and would exclude Russia from ever being considered as a possible NATO member-nation (i.e., Russia wasn’t to be another vassal nation, but instead a conquered nation, to be exploited by the entire U.S. empire). The expansion of America’s NATO toward Russia was begun by Clinton — on 12 March 1999 near the end of his Presidency — bringing Czechia, Hungary, and Poland, into NATO, blatantly in violation of what Bush’s team had promised to Gorbachev’s team.

Russia’s top leadership now knew that America’s top leadership intended to conquer Russia, not merely for Russia to become yet another vassal-nation in the U.S. empire; and, so, Yeltsin resigned as President on 31 December 1999, and passed the nation’s leadership (and Russia’s then seemingly insuperable problems from it) to Russia’s Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, who promptly began to clean house and to inform Russia’s billionaires that either they would do what he asks them to do, or else he would make sure that Russia would pursue whatever legal means were then available in order to get them into compliance with Russia’s tax-laws and other laws, so as for them not to continue to rip-off the Russian nation (as they had been doing). Even the post-2012 solidly neoconservative British newspaper Guardian headlined on 6 March 2022 “How London became the place to be for Putin’s oligarchs” and touched upon the surface of the escape of “Russian oligarchs” to London (and elsewhere in America’s EU-NATO portion of the U.S. empire), but their article didn’t mention the worst cases, such as Mikhail Khordorkovsky, Boris Berezovsky, and Vladimir Gusinsky. Each of these were individuals who had absconded with billions in Russia’s wealth. (I previously posted to the Web my “Private Investigations Find America’s Magnitsky Act to Be Based on Frauds”, presenting in-depth the case of the American-in-Russia financial operator Bill Browder’s theft of $232 million from Russia, and documenting Browder’s lies on the basis of which President Obama got passed in the U.S. Congress the Magnitsky Act protecting Browder and sanctioning Russia on fake charges that were cooked up by Browder and by the billionaire George Soros’s ’non-profits’. Not all of the American skimmers from Russia were billionaires; some, such as Browder, weren’t that big. But their shared target was to win control over Russia; and this was the U.S. Government’s objective, too.)

The U.S. regime also changed its entire strategy for expanding its empire (its list of colonies or ‘allies’ — vassal-nations) after 1991, in a number of significant ways, such as by creating front-organizations, an example being Transparency International, to downgrade creditworthiness of the U.S. regime’s targeted countries (so as to force up their borrowing-costs, and thus weaken the targeted nation’s Government), and there were also a wide range of other ‘non-profits’, some of which took over (privatized) much of the preparatory work for the U.S. regime’s “regime-change” operations (coups) that formerly had been done by the by-now-infamous CIA.

One of these ‘non-profits’, for example, is CANVAS, Centre for Applied Nonviolent Action and Strategies, which “was founded in 2004 by Srđa Popović, and the CEO of Orion Telecom, Slobodan Đinović.” Just about all that is online about Đinović is this, this, this, this and this. It’s not much, for allegedly the 50% donor to CANVAS. Actually, that organization’s major funding is entirely secret, and is almost certainly from the U.S. Government or conduits therefrom (including U.S. billionaires such as Soros), since CANVAS is always aiding the overthrow of Governments that the U.S. regime aims to overthrow.

Both Popović and Đinović had earlier, since 1998, been among the leading members of another U.S. astroturf ‘revolution for democracy’ organization, Otpor! (“Resistance!”), which had helped to overthrow Milosevic and break up Yugoslavia. Otpor! ended successfully in 2004, at which time Popović and Đinović founded their own CANVAS, which they designed to institutionalize and spread to Ukraine and other countries the techniques that Otpor! had used and which had been taught to Otpor! by the U.S. regime under Bill Clinton. These were techniques which had been formalized by the American political scientist Gene Sharp.

Even well before Popovic and Dinovic had joined in 1998 (during the U.S-NATO’s prior overthrow-Milosevic campaign to break up the former Yugoslavia) the Otpor student movement to overthrow Yugoslavia’s President Slobodan Milošević, the American Gene Sharp had created the detailed program to do this. Sharp’s Albert Einstein Institute published and promoted Sharp’s books advocating pacifism as the best way to force a ‘dictatorship’ (i.e., any Government that the U.S. regime wants to overthrow) to be overthrown. Sharp presented himself as being an advocate of ’non-violent resistance’ as practiced by Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, and other actual anti-imperialists, but Sharp himself was no anti-imperialist (quite the contrary!); he was instead purely a pacifist, and not at all anti-imperialist. Einstein, like Gandhi, had been no pacifist, but didn’t know that Sharp, whom Einstein never met, accepted imperialism, which Sharp’s claimed hero, Gandhi, detested. So, Einstein unfortunately accepted the cunning Sharp’s request to write a Foreword for Sharp’s first book praising Gandhi, Gandhi Wields the Weapon of Moral Power, and Sharp then used that Foreword as ‘proof’ that Sharp was a follower of Einstein (even naming his Institute after the by-then deceased physicist) — which was as false as Sharp’s claimed advocacy of Gandhi’s philosophy was. Sharp was a master self-publicist and deceiver. Einstein’s 321-word, 1.3-page-long, Foreword praised the work and its young author, but he might just have cursorily skimmed the manuscript. He probably would have have been appalled at what followed from Sharp.

Sharp, thus, carefully avoided clarifying that, for example, he would have been a pacifist if he had been in America during the U.S. Revolutionary War, or even perhaps if he had been a northerner during the Civil War, or else been an anti-Nazi partisan during WW II (a pacifist ‘anti-Nazi’). Sharp’s recommendations are useful for the U.S. regime’s coups, because Sharp’s recommendations provide a way to make as difficult as possible for a head-of-state that the U.S. regime has targeted for removal, to remain in office. Sharp’s recommendations are for such a head-of-state to need to employ so much — and ever-increasing — violence against so many of his domestic opponents (fooled non-violent resistors — ‘martyrs’), as to become forced to resign, simply in order not to become himself a casualty of the resultant soaring backlash against himself as being viewed by his own public as simply a ruthless tyrannical dictator, for imprisoning or even killing those ‘democracy protesters’ who had been fooled by agents of the U.S. empire. So: Sharp’s methods are ideal to use so as to increase the public’s support for what is actually a U.S. coup. And that’s their real purpose: to facilitate coups, instead of to create any actual revolution. (As the commentator at the opening there noted, “Missing from Gene Sharp’s list are ‘Constructive actions’ – actions you take to build the alternative society you hope to create.” Sharp’s entire system is for destroying a Government — nothing to create a new one except that it should be ‘democratic’ — whatever that supposedly meant to his fools.) And, then, the coup itself is carried out, by the U.S. professionals at that, once the targeted head-of-state has become hated by a majority of his population. That’s the Sharp method, for coups.

This is an alternative to what had been the U.S. regime’s method during 1945-1991, which was simply CIA-run coups, which relied mainly upon bribing local officials and oligarchs, and hiring rent-a-mobs so as to show photographic ‘mass-support’ for overthrowing a ruler, in order to replace the local ruler with one that the U.S. regime has selected (like this).

On 12 November 2012, the pacifist John Horgan headlined at Scientific American, “Should Scientists and Engineers Resist Taking Military Money?,” and he wrote:

Defense-funded research has led to advances in civilian health care, transportation, communication and other industries that have improved our lives. My favorite example of well-spent Pentagon money was a 1968 Darpa grant to the political scientist Gene Sharp. That money helped Sharp research and write the first of a series of books on how nonviolent activism can bring about political change.

Sharp’s writings have reportedly inspired nonviolent opposition movements around the world, including ones that toppled corrupt regimes in Serbia, Ukraine [he was referring here to the 2004 ‘Orange Revolution’, but Sharp’s methods were also used in the 2014 ‘Maidan Revolution’], Georgia–and, more recently, Tunisia and Egypt [the ‘Arab Spring’]. Sharp, who has not received any federal support since 1968, has defended his acceptance of Darpa funds. In the preface of his classic 1972 work The Politics of Nonviolent Action, he argued that “governments and defense departments — as well as other groups — should finance and conduct research into alternatives to violence in politics.” I couldn’t agree more.

So: Sharp’s pacifists are the opposite of anti-imperialists; they are neocons: agents to expand the U.S. empire, by means of (i.e., now preferring) coups instead of military invasions.

On 11 December 2000, the Washington Post headlined “U.S. Advice Guided Milosevic Opposition,” and reported:

The lead role was taken by the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development, the government’s foreign assistance agency, which channeled the funds through commercial contractors and nonprofit groups such as NDI and its Republican counterpart, the International Republican Institute (IRI).

While NDI worked closely with Serbian opposition parties, IRI focused its attention on Otpor, which served as the revolution’s ideological and organizational backbone. In March, IRI paid for two dozen Otpor leaders to attend a seminar on nonviolent resistance at the Hilton Hotel in Budapest, a few hundreds yards along the Danube from the NDI-favored Marriott.

During the seminar, the Serbian students received training in such matters as how to organize a strike, how to communicate with symbols, how to overcome fear and how to undermine the authority of a dictatorial regime. The principal lecturer was retired U.S. Army Col. Robert Helvey, who has made a study of nonviolent resistance methods around the world, including those used in modern-day Burma and the civil rights struggle in the American South.

“What was most amazing to us was to discover that what we were trying to do spontaneously in Serbia was supported by a whole nonviolent system that we knew nothing about,” said Srdja Popovic, a former biology student. “This was the first time we thought about this in a systematic, scientific way. We said to ourselves, ‘We will go back and apply this.’ ”

Helvey, who served two tours in Vietnam, introduced the Otpor activists to the ideas of American theoretician Gene Sharpe, whom he describes as “the Clausewitz of the nonviolence movement,” referring to the renowned Prussian military strategist. Six months later, Popovic can recite Helvey’s lectures almost word for word, beginning with the dictum, “Removing the authority of the ruler is the most important element in nonviolent struggle.”

“Those Serbs really impressed me,” Helvey said in an interview from his West Virginia home. “They were very bright, very committed.”

Back in Serbia, Otpor activists set about undermining Milosevic’s authority by all means available. Rather than simply daubing slogans on walls, they used a wide range of sophisticated public relations techniques, including polling, leafleting and paid advertising. “The poll results were very important,” recalled Ivo Andric, a marketing student at Belgrade University. “At every moment, we knew what to say to the people.”

The poll results pointed to a paradox that went to the heart of Milosevic’s grip on power. On one hand, the Yugoslav president was detested by 70 percent of the electorate. On the other, a majority of Serbs believed he would continue to remain in power, even after an election. To topple Milosevic, opposition leaders first had to convince their fellow Serbs that he could be overthrown.

At a brainstorming session last July, Otpor activist Srdjan Milivojevic murmured the words “Gotov je,” or “He’s finished.”

“We realized immediately that it summed up our entire campaign,” said Dejan Randjic, who ran the Otpor marketing operation. “It was very simple, very powerful. It focused on Milosevic, but did not even mention him by name.”

Over the next three months, millions of “Gotov je” stickers were printed on 80 tons of imported adhesive paper–paid for by USAID and delivered by the Washington-based Ronco Consulting Corp.–and plastered all over Serbia on walls, inside elevators and across Milosevic’s campaign posters. Printed in black and white and accompanied by Otpor’s clenched-fist emblem, they became the symbol of the revolution.

However, a WikiLeaked email from Jake Sullivan to Hillary Clinton on 26 July 2011, about the Subject “Gene Sharp,” discussed Egypt’s “April 6 movement,” which had overthrown Egypt’s President Hosni Mubarak. Sullivan told her that “In order to assess … the role of Gene Sharp’s ideas in the January 25 revolution, several members of the Policy Planning Staff (S/P) looked into the issue during a recent fact-finding trip to Egypt. They met with representatives of a wide range of protest groups — including the April 6 movement — major civil society organizations, and political parties.” And Sullivan concluded that “ the earlier reporting on these purported ties to Gene Sharp now seems somewhat overblown. …  Most other analysts … credit this to the leadership of the Muslim Brotherhood.” Sullivan wrote from ignorance. On 3 March 2018, Israel’s Haaretz newspaper headlined “The Resistance Guide That Inspired Jewish Settlers and Muslim Brothers Alike: Opponents of Israel’s 2005 Gaza withdrawal, Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood and anti-government protesters in Iran have adopted the civil disobedience principles of the late Prof. Gene Sharp,” and recounted that, “Participants in the Arab Spring uprisings of 2011 also owe many of their achievements to Sharp’s ideas. In Egypt it’s known that at least four groups of activists were influenced by them. Even the Muslim Brotherhood [the group that Sullivan said was NOT influenced by Sharp’s ideas], whose tradition of violence struck fear into the hearts of many, viewed Sharp’s book as a manual and posted it in Arabic translation on its website.” And, for example, even Wikipedia, in its article on the “April 6 Youth Movement,” says: “The April 6 movement is using the same raised fist symbol as the Otpor! movement from Serbia, that helped bring down the regime of Slobodan Milošević and whose nonviolent tactics were later used in Ukraine and Georgia. Mohammed Adel, a leader in the April 6 movement, studied at the Centre for Applied Nonviolent Action and Strategies, an organization founded by former Otpor! members.”

Jake Sullivan was stunningly ignorant — not merely arrogant. The U.S. intelligence community has intimately cooperated with Otpor, CANVAS, and other such astroturf ‘revolution’-generators for American billionaires. For example, Ruaridh Arrow, the writer and director of a eulogistic biopic on Gene Sharp, “How to Start a Revolution,” headlined “Did Gene Sharp work for the CIA? Correcting the Conspiracies.” He wrote: “Funds were provided by the NED and IRI to activists for Albert Einstein Institution projects, for example in Burma, but the Institution was never able to fund groups in its own right.” (And what is that “but”-clause supposed to mean?) However, Arrow also wrote there: “Gene Sharp never worked for the CIA, in fact he was highly critical of them and advised activists not to take money from intelligence services. He argued that reliance on outsiders could weaken their movement and make them reliant on a foreign state which could suddenly cut off money and support, causing serious damage to their cause. It’s one thing to deny involvement with the CIA, it’s quite another to go around the world giving convincing arguments NOT to take money from them. … See below for a video of Gene Sharp telling people NOT to take money from the CIA.”

Sharp’s operation, and that of the other ’non-profits’ such as CANVAS that adhere to it, don’t need money from the CIA, because they can get plenty of money from the billionaires who benefit from America’s coups. On 26 January 2001, David Holley in the Los Angeles Times headlined “The Seed Money for Democracy: Financier George Soros has put out $2.8 billion since 1990 to promote a global open society. His efforts include funding the student movement that helped oust Milosevic in Yugoslavia.” He wrote:

Yugoslavia was a case where everything democrats had worried about–extreme nationalism, ethnic conflict, corruption, media controls and bickering among opposition political parties–were at their worst. Yet, just as Soros had calculated, it was a grass-roots surge by strong citizen organizations that won the battle for democracy.

Soros’ branch in Belgrade, the Yugoslav and Serbian capital, was among the earliest backers of Otpor, which grew under young and decentralized leadership to strengthen the fractured opposition to Milosevic. “We gave them their first grant back in 1998, when they appeared as a student organization,” said Ivan Vejvoda, executive director of the Fund for an Open Society-Yugoslavia, the network’s branch here.

Foreign financial support helped Otpor surreptitiously print about 60 tons of posters and leaflets in the months before the Sept. 24 election that led to Milosevic’s ouster, said Miljana Jovanovic, a student who is one of the movement’s leaders. …

The vast majority of groups funded by Soros are not nearly as powerful as Otpor, nor do they play for such huge stakes.

More typical are efforts such as “horse-riding therapy” for disabled children, funded by the network’s Polish branch, the Stefan Batory Foundation.

I found that article only recently. On 18 April 2022, I had headlined “History of the Ukrainian War” and here was a passage in it that included the Stafan Battory Foundation, but I didn’t know, at the time, that this organization was actually Soros’s Open Society Foundation in Poland. Here is the relevant portion from that history of the Ukrainian war:

*****

On 1 March 2013 inside America’s Embassy to Ukraine in Kiev, a series of “Tech Camps” started to be held, in order to train those Ukrainian nazis for their leadership of Ukraine’s ‘anti-corruption’ organizing. Simultaneously, under Polish Government authorization, the CIA was training in Poland the military Right Sector leaders how to lead the coming U.S. coup in neighboring Ukraine. As the independent Polish investigative journalist Marek Miszczuk headlined for the Polish magazine NIE (“meaning “NO”) (the original article being in Polish): “Maidan secret state secret: Polish training camp for Ukrainians.” The article was published 14 April 2014. Excerpts:

An informant who introduced himself as Wowa called the “NIE” editorial office with the information that the Maidan rebels in Wrocław are neo-fascists … [with] tattooed swastikas, swords, eagles and crosses with unambiguous meaning. … Wowa pleadingly announced that photos of members of the Right Sector must not appear in the press. … 86 fighters from the then prepared Euromaidan flew over the Vistula River in September 2013 at the invitation of the Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The pretext was to start cooperation between the Warsaw University of Technology and the National University of Technology in Kiev. But they were in Poland to receive special training to overthrow Ukraine’s government. … Day 3 and 4 – theoretical classes: crowd management, target selection, tactics and leadership. Day 5 – training in behavior in stressful situations. Day 6 – free without leaving the center. Day 7 – pre-medical help. Day 8 – protection against irritating gases. Day 9 – building barricades. And so on and on for almost 25 days. The program includes … classes at the shooting range (including three times with sniper rifles!), tactical and practical training in the assault on buildings. …

Excited by the importance of the information that was presented to me, I started to verify it.

The Office of the Press Spokesman of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs refused to answer the questions about the student exchange without giving any reason. It did not want to disclose whether it had actually invited dozens of neo-fascists to Poland to teach them how to overthrow the legal Ukrainian authorities. …

Let us summarize: in September 2013, according to the information presented to me, several dozen Ukrainian students of the Polytechnic University will come to Poland, at the invitation of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. In fact, they are members of the Right Sector, an extreme right-wing and nationalist Ukrainian group led by Dmytro Jarosz – he declined to comment on his visit to Legionowo.

Poland’s ‘fact-checking’ organization is (appropriately) titled demagog dot org (Demagog Association), and it is funded by the Stefan Batory Foundation. Demagog’s article about that NIE news-report rated it “NIEWERYFIKOWALNE” or “ NOT VERIFIABLE”. The sole reason given was: “The Ministry [of Foreign Affairs] strongly opposes such news, emphasizing that the weekly (magazine) has violated not only the principles of good taste, but also raison d’etat (reasons of state).” No facts that were alleged in Miszczuk’s article were even mentioned, much less disproven. How can his article be “unverifiable” if the evidence that it refers to isn’t so much as even being checked?

Miszczuk’s article’s mention of “the Right Sector, an extreme right-wing and nationalist Ukrainian group led by Dmytro Jarosz” referred to the key person (Dmitriy Yarosh) and the key group (his Right Sector paramilitary organization and political party) that has actually been running Ukraine behind the scenes ever since the coup, and they also were the key people who had led the snipers who were firing down from tall buildings upon the Ukrainian Government’s police and upon the anti-Government demonstrators at Kiev’s Maidan Square — the violence simultaneously against both sides — that the newly installed post-coup government immediately blamed against the just-ousted democratically elected President, so that the new top officials were all blaming the ones that they had replaced.

*****

On 4 October 2017, the historian F. William Engdahl, who unfortunately leaves many of his allegations not linked to his alleged sources, wrote:

Goldman Sachs and Stratfor

Even more interesting details recently came to light on the intimate links between the US “intelligence consultancy”, Stratfor — known as the ”Shadow CIA” for its corporate clients which include Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon and U.S. government agencies including the Department of Homeland Security and the Defense Intelligence Agency.

It was revealed in a huge release of internal memos from Stratfor in 2012, some five million emails provided them by the hacker community Anonymous, that Popović, after creating CANVAS also cultivated very close relations with Stratfor. According to the Stratfor internal emails, Popović worked for Stratfor to spy on opposition groups. So intimate was the relationship between Popović and Stratfor that he got his wife a job with the company and invited several Stratfor people to his Belgrade wedding.

Revealed in the same Stratfor emails by Wikileaks was the intriguing information that one of the “golden geese” funders of the mysterious CANVAS was a Wall Street bank named Goldman Sachs. Satter Muneer, a Goldman Sachs partner, is cited by Stratfor’s then-Eurasia Analyst Marko Papic. Papic, asked by a Stratfor colleague whether Muneer was the “golden goose” money behind CANVAS, writes back, “They have several golden gooses I believe. He is for sure one of them.”

Now the very remarkable Mr Popović brings his dishonest career to Hungary where, not a dictator, but a very popular true democrat who offers his voters choices, is the target for Popović’ peculiar brand of US State Department fake democracy. This will not at all be as easy as toppling Milošević, even if he has the help of student activists being trained at Soros’ Central European University in Budapest.

If he had linked to those WikiLeaks documents, then copies of his article that were made before the U.S. regime removed some WikiLeaks files from the Web would have archived those files, but that didn’t happen; and, so, today, a Web-search for the 3-word string

Stratfor Popović wikileaks

produces finds such as

https://wikileaks.org/gifiles/docs/17/1773778_meeting-canvas-stratfor-.html

https://wikileaks.org/gifiles/docs/17/1792423_information-on-canvas-.html

of which no copies were saved at any of the Web archives.

However, a prior article, by Carl Gibson and Steve Horn of Occuy.com, on 2 December 2013, was headlined “Exposed: Globally Renowned Activist Collaborated with Intelligence Firm Stratfor,” and it has links to the WikiLeaks documents. From all of this, it’s clear that the obscure Srđa Popović and Slobodan Đinović, are each well-connected to wealth, if not themselves quite wealthy, from their business, of fomenting coups for the U.S. regime, in the names of ‘peace’ and of ‘democracy’.

Apparently, CANVAS remains quite active today:

On 6 October 2023, Kit Klarenberg, at The Grayzone, headlined “A Maidan 2.0 color revolution looms in Georgia,” and reported that:

The arrest of US regime change operatives in Tbilisi suggests a coup against Georgia’s government could be in the works. As Ukraine’s counteroffensive fails, the West appears eager to open a new front in its proxy war.

On September 29, in a disclosure ignored by the entire Western media, the US government-run Radio Free Europe’s Russian-language portal Slobodna Evropa revealed that three foreign operatives had been summoned for questioning by the Georgian Security Service, for allegedly assisting opposition elements prepare a Maidan-style regime change scenario in Tbilisi.

The operatives were staffers of the Center for Applied Nonviolent Actions and Strategies. …

The ruling Georgian dream [NO — it’s the Georgian Dream Party] has been portrayed in the west as a pro-Kremlin government. In reality, it’s simply reverted to a longstanding policy of balancing between East and West. For the neoconservative establishment, its true sin is being insufficiently supportive of the Ukraine proxy war. Thus Ukrainian elements are set to be involved in a possible color revolution. If such an operation succeeds, it would open a second front in that war on Russia’s Western flank.

The development seemingly confirms warnings from local security officials earlier this September. They cautioned “a coup a la Euromaidan is being prepared in Georgia,” referring to the 2014 US-backed color revolution which toppled Ukraine’s elected president and ushered in a pro-NATO government. The purported lead plotters are ethnic Georgians working for the Ukrainian government: Giorgi Lortkipanidze, Kiev’s deputy military intelligence chief; Mikhail Baturin, the bodyguard of former President Mikheil Saakashvili; and Mamuka Mamulashvili, commander of the notorious Georgian Legion.

A September 6 investigation by The Grayzone revealed that Georgian Legion chief Mamulashvili is centrally implicated in a false flag massacre of Maidan protesters, which was pivotal in unseating elected President Viktor Yanukovych. He apparently brought the shooters to Maidan Square to “sow some chaos” by opening fire on crowds, and provided sniper rifles for the purpose.

Georgian officials say that now they’ve uncovered evidence that young anti-government activists are undergoing training near Ukraine’s border with Poland to enact a similar scheme, which would feature a deadly bombing during planned riots meant to take place in Tbilisi between October and December, when the European Commission is expected to rule on whether Georgia can formally become an EU candidate country.

The Wikipedia article “Centre for Applied Nonviolent Action and Strategies” says:

CANVAS’ training and methodology has been successfully applied by groups in Georgia (2003), Ukraine (2004), Lebanon (2005), The Maldives (2008)?, Egypt (2011)?, Syria (2011)? and Ukraine (2014). It works only in response to requests for assistance.

However: anyone who participates in such ‘Revolutions’ is placing oneself at severe personal risk, in order to facilitate a coup by the U.S. Government and its controlling owners, who are billionaires. People such as Sharp, Popović, and Đinović, are merely well-paid and maintained servants to America’s billionaires.

Here’s how they market their operation, to peaceniks:

https://web.archive.org/web/20230521063855/https://www.nonviolent-conflict.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/CANVAS-Core-Curriculum_EN4.pdf

https://canvasopedia.org/2023/01/05/examining-non-state-stakeholders-role-in-modern-nonviolent-conflict-2/

https://web.archive.org/web/20231025015004/https://fsi-live.s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/s3fs-public/canvas_presentation.pdf

They open by paying homage to Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King. This is mocking them — aping their influence, not spreading it.

And here is how the neoconservative Tina Rosenberg, in the neoconservative Donald Graham’s Foreign Policy magazine, promotes CANVAS, as being “Revolution U“:

As nonviolent revolutions have swept long-ruling regimes from power in Tunisia and Egypt and threaten the rulers of nearby Algeria, Bahrain, and Yemen, the world’s attention has been drawn to the causes — generations of repressive rule — and tools — social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter — animating the wave of revolt. But as the members of the April 6 movement learned, these elements alone do not a revolution make. What does? In the past, the discontented availed themselves of the sweeping forces of geopolitics: the fall of regimes in Latin America and the former Soviet bloc was largely a product of the withdrawal of superpower support for dictatorships and the consolidation of liberal democracy as a global ideal. But the global clash of ideologies is over, and plenty of dictators remain — so what do we do?

The answer, for democratic activists in an ever-growing list of countries, is to turn to CANVAS. Better than other democracy groups, CANVAS has built a durable blueprint for  nonviolent revolution: what to do to grow from a vanload of people into a mass movement and then use those masses to topple a dictator. CANVAS has figured out how to turn a cynical, passive, and fearful public into activists. It stresses unity, discipline, and planning — tactics that are basic to any military campaign, but are usually ignored by nonviolent revolutionaries. There will be many moments during a dictatorship that galvanize public anger: a hike in the price of oil, the assassination of an opposition leader, corrupt indifference to a natural disaster, or simply the confiscation by the police of a produce cart. In most cases, anger is not enough — it simply flares out. Only a prepared opponent will be able to use such moments to bring down a government.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Eric Zuesse.

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 A Century 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.

• Read related articles: “Missionary Strategy for Social Engineering,” “Poverty and Grace,” and “Policing and Policy.”

Endnotes

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

A central figure in this drama remains Stepan Bandera, whose influence during the Second World War have etched him into the annals of Ukrainian history.  His appearance in the Russian rationale for invading Ukraine has given his spirit a historical exit clause, something akin to rehabilitation. This has been helped by the scant coverage, and knowledge of the man outside the feverish nationalist imaginings that continue to sustain him.

Since his 1959 assassination, the subject of Bandera as one of the foremost Ukrainian nationalists has lacked any lengthy treatment.  Then came Grzegorz Rossoliński-Liebe’s door stop of a work in 2014, which charted the links between Bandera’s nationalist thought, various racially-minded sources such as Mykola Mikhnovs’kyi, who dreamed of a Ukraine cleansed of Russians, Poles, Magyars, Romanians and Jews, and the role of the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), which was founded in Vienna in 1929 by Yevhen Konovalets and Andriy Melnyk.

Notwithstanding the cosmopolitan, multi-ethnic composition of the territories that would become modern Ukraine, the OUN specialised in the babble of homogenous identity and purity.  A hatred of Jews was more than casual: it was integral.  They were, to quote the waspish words of Yuri Lylianych in Rozbudova Natsii (Rebuilding the Nation), the official OUN journal, “an alien and many of them even a hostile element of the Ukrainian national organism.”

For his part, Bandera, son of a nationalist Greek Catholic priest, was a zealot, self-tormentor and flagellator.  As head of the Ukrainian Nationalists, Bandera got busy, blooding himself with such terrorist attacks as the 1934 assassination of the Polish Minister of the Interior Bronisław Pieracki.  He was fortunate that his death sentence was commuted to life imprisonment, not that it stopped him from bellowing “Slava Ukrayiny!”

Followers of Bandera came to be known as the Banderowzi.  During the second week after the invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, the Benderowzi, flushed with confidence, declared a Ukrainian state in Lemberg.  The occasion was celebrated a few days with a pogrom against Jews in the city.  It remains unclear, however, where the orders came from.  With the Germans finding Bandera’s followers a nuisance and ill-fitting to their program, they were reduced in importance to the level of police units and sent to Belarus.  On being transferred to Volhynia in Ukraine, many melted into the forests to form the future UPA (Ukrainian Insurgent Army).

For its part, the OUN, aided by the good services of the Ukrainian citizenry, assisted the Third Reich slaughter 800,000 Jews in western Ukraine.  The UPA, as historian Jaroslav Hryzak writes, proceeded to fight all and sundry, be they units of the German Army, red partisans, the Polish underground army, and other Ukrainian nationalists.  Volhynia and Galicia were sites of frightful slaughter by the UPA, with the number of murdered Poles running upwards of 100,000.  One target remained enduring – at least for five years.  From 1944 to 1949, remnants of the UPA and OUN were fixated with the Soviets while continuing a campaign of terror against eastern Ukrainians transferred to Volhynia and Galicia as administrators or teachers, along with alleged informers and collaborators.

Oddly enough, Bandera as a historically active figure played less of a direct role in the war as is sometimes thought, leaving the Banderowzi to work their violence in the shadow of his myth and influence.  From the Polish prison he was kept in, he escaped after the German invasion of Poland in September 1939.  In the summer of 1941, he anticipated a more direct role in the conflict as future Prowidnyk (leader) but was arrested by the Germans following the Lviv proclamation of a Ukrainian state On June 30, 1941.

Prior to his arrest, however, he had drafted, with the aid of such deputies as Stepan Shukhevych, Stepan Lenkavs’kyi and Iaroslva Stes’ko, an internal party document ominously entitled, “The Struggle and Activities of the OUN in Wartime.”  In it, purification is cherished, one that will scrub Ukrainian territory of “Muscovites, Poles, and Jews” with a special focus on those protecting the Soviet regime.

Following his arrest, Bandera spent time in Berlin.  From there, he had a stint as a political prisoner of the Reich Main Security Office (RSHA) in Sachsenhausen concentration camp.  His time in detention did little to quell the zeal of his followers, who went along their merry way butchering in the name of their cult leader.  After the war, he settled in Munich with his family, but was eventually identified by a KGB agent and murdered in 1959.

Bandera offers a slice of historical loathing and reverence for a good number of parties: as a figure of the Holocaust, an opportunistic collaborator, a freedom fighter.  Even within Ukraine, the split between the reverential West and the loathing East remained.  In January 2010, Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko declare Bandera a Hero of Ukraine.

In 2020, Poland and Israel jointly rebuked the city government of Kyiv via its ambassadors for sporting banners connected with the nationalist figure.  Bandera’s portrait made an appearance on a municipal building at the conclusion of a January 1 march honouring the man’s 111th birthday, with hundreds of individuals in attendance.

In their letter to the city state administration, ambassadors Bartosz Cichocki and Joel Lion of Poland and Israel respectively expressed their “great concern and sorrow… that Ukraine’s authorities of different levels: Lviv Oblast Council and the Kyiv City State Administration continue to cherish people and historical events, which has to be once and forever condemned.”

The ambassadors also expressed concern to the Lviv Oblast for tolerating its celebration of a number of other figures: Andriy Melnyk, another Third Reich collaborator whose blood lust was less keen than that of Bandera’s followers; Ivan Lypa, “the Anti-Semite, Antipole and xenophobe writer,” along with his son, Yurii Lypa, “who wrote the racist theory of the Ukrainian Race.”

The stubborn Bandera itch can manifest at any given moment.  In July 2022, the Ukrainian ambassador to Germany, as it so happens another Andriy Melnyk, misjudged the mood by airing his views about Bandera.  He insisted that the nationalist figure had been needlessly libelled; he “was not a mass murderer of Jews and Poles” and nor was there evidence to suggest otherwise.   The same Melnyk had also accused the German Chancellor Olaf Scholz of being a “beleidigte Leberwurst” (offended liver sausage), a delightful term reserved for the thin-skinned.

As ambassadors are usually expected to be vessels of government opinion, such conduct should have been revealing enough, though Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s decision to remove Melnyk from his Berlin post was put down to “a normal part of diplomatic practice.”  A likelier explanation lies in the furore the pro-Bandera remarks caused in the Israeli Embassy (“a distortion of the historical facts,” raged the official channel, not to mention belittling “the Holocaust and is an insult to those who were murdered by Bandera and his people) and Poland (“such an opinion and such words are absolutely unacceptable,” snapped the country’s Deputy Foreign Minister Marcin Przydacz).

Despite his removal from the post, messages of regret and condolences flowed from a number of his German hosts, suggesting that the butcher-adoration-complex should be no barrier to respect in times of conflict.  “The fact that he did not always strike the diplomatic tone here is more than understandable in view of the incomprehensible war crimes and the suffering of the Ukrainian people,” reasoned the foreign policy spokesman of the Christian Democratic Union/Christian Social Union (CDU/CSU) parliamentary group, Roderich Kiesewetter.  Bandera would surely have approved the sentiment.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Binoy Kampmark.

Cosmopolitan — ‘world politics’, ‘world citizen’ — people of many races under a world empire. The word became a meme in the 1890s as British empire blossomed, supposedly the world now united around principles of the free market. Sounds cool. The market is the proven way to run economies. It is neutral, no favorites, harsh but just, making us work hard, the state ensuring people don’t cheat and undermine the sacred system. For if belief in all this wavers, the loss of faith in the market would spell doom for all, equally. We are equal before the law, and we can vote. That’s what democracy and freedom are all about, right?

But is the apparent real?

Statistics suggest there’s much more to all this. Income distribution has never been more skewed, clearly the result of four decades of neoliberalism. We’ve never been closer to world war (except in 1914 and 1939). Weren’t countries merrily trading in ‘free markets’ supposed to be peaceful? Reason and logic fail us.

Peter Myers’ Cosmopolis is a collection of essays, available free at his website, which can be read independently, packed with quotes, reflecting on past conspiracies, critiquing the neoliberal plot for world hegemony today, its origins and its relation to Jewish, Freemason, Nazi, Bolshevik, capitalist ones. The main actors — Trotsky vs Stalin, HG Wells and Orwell, the pandemic, and the return of fascism/ Nazism as the conspirators push for their TINA moment in the Great Reset, culminating in the war in Ukraine.

The star is HG Wells, who proposed a World State which he also called ‘Cosmopolis’. His ‘Open Conspiracy’, the world movement for the supercession or enlargement or fusion of existing political, economic, and social institutions … a movement aiming at the establishment of a world directorate” (Wells, Open Conspiracy, 1933, p. 32-3.)

There are two main themes. The first centres around the role of Jews in the Russian revolution, how Stalin ‘stole’ ‘their’ evolution (Myers calls it ‘one of the great Denials of our time’¹), and how that resulted in Israel and feminism-gay liberation as the new, post-Marx ‘revolution’. He shows that the new Cold War is between the atheistic, LGBT, ‘Trotskyoid’, ‘Cosmopolitan’ West, on the one hand, and a coalition of Christian Russia and Confucian China, both a hybrid socialist-capitalist authoritarian on the other.

Myers’ other main theme is linking all suspicious recent events — assassinations of JFK, RFK, and MLK, 9/11 + the anthrax letters, MH370, the World Economic Forum and the Great Reset — to deep state elite plans. The WEF ‘penetrates the cabinets’, ‘but for an unelected body to do so is undemocratic and subversive. It implies Oligarchic rule—for the greater good, of course, because most people are Deplorables. The Globalists are attempting to implement the World State advocated by HG Wells.’

Myers draws from dozens of sources, many of which he unearthed himself and with the help of his strategically located readers, from the New York Public Library to the grave site of Stalin’s mother in Georgia. Part of the fun in reading this very readable work is following his sleuthing.

His appendices including the smoking gun revelations of Morrow and Hunt on JFK are welcome reminders of how truly bizarre US politics is. They make the case of assassination as the CIA modus operandi for JFK, MLK, and RFK. Truman’s 1963 Oped to the New York Times calling for the CIA to be brought under control disappeared the moment it appeared. (Eisenhower made sure his message got out and stayed out by springing it on a nationally broadcast farewell speech in 1960.) RFK was killed for calling for an independent investigation of his brother’s death. Which brings us to the ultimate cloak and dagger, the blowing up of North stream. The CIA is alive and well and still out of control.

Promised lands

Myers, like Solzhenitsyn, is not afraid to analyze the role of Russian Jews in the Russian revolution from start to finish, with a short bumpy patch under Stalin. The details are fascinating. It’s finally time to access Soviet history through different lenses, and Myers is a good source for this. One tidbit: ‘Both Trotsky (Kronstadt, collectivization) and Stalin (gulags) lived by the sword and died by the sword.’ i.e. they were both assassinated.²

It struck me that Israel is actually a slicker version of the Russian revolution from Lenin to Putin: a cosmopolitan ideological state, originally socialistic but quickly devolved into authoritarian capitalism, governed by a European elite as a police state oppressing non-Jews. BUT with a ‘heppi end’ for the Jews both in Russia and Israel. All but one of the Russian oligarchs are Jewish.

Just stating this truth is heresy. The centrality of the Jewish tribe must be rigorously denied, a feat which we watch as laws are pushed even in the United Nations (and unwritten laws for media stamped in journalists’ minds), asserting that any criticism of the Jewish state is racism, despite clear practice that shows Israel is the font of racism. Orwell’s 1984 doublethink and newsspeak have a new playing field, where INGSOC (Orwell’s Britain) has devolved into the most loyal supporter of the new Oceania (US), and no one notices that the Grand Inquisitor is a Goldstein.

In the days of the British empire, before the state of Israel, it was easier for the goy empire of the day (Britain) to manoeuvre, as the elite Jews at the centre of that conspiracy had to behave. The Shaftsbury/ MacKinder idea of a Jewish colony in the Middle East was there by the mid-19th century, but when it materialized in 1948, it had a new mother country and quickly started to play its own political games. Jews are nobody’s puppets. So the US-Israel empire is unwieldy and is wearing thin as Israel celebrates 75 years, its diamond jubilee. And moves to unite Sunni and Shia in a newly invigorated united front against Israel, with the US out of the picture, suggest that all the plandemics and wars might not be enough to put Humpty Dumpty together again.

Illuminati/ Freemason

Myers deals with the origins of today’s conspiracy, giving a central role to the Illuminati and Freemasons. I’m not convinced that there is more than an just an element of nostalgia in those who identify with these secretive groups. The Tempest, Midsummer Night’s Dream, Winter’s Tale are based on Masonic legends. Mozart’s Magic Flute has clear Illuminist influence. Goethe was a member of the Illuminati. Myers traces Freemason imagery, poses and beliefs as continuous through the post-enlightenment period. The hand-hiding pose traces back to classical times – Aeschines, founder of a rhetoric school, suggested that speaking with an arm outside one’s chiton was bad manners. The pose was used in 18th-century British portraiture as a sign that the sitter was from the upper class.

But there are definitely two versions of today’s conspiracy. Myers sees the Illuminati as more globalist (rule by the United Nations, UN Committees and International courts) as opposed to a more hegemonic nationalist rule by the UK/US/Israel. Jews, the most internationalist/cosmopolitan and yet ‘the most nationalist (chauvinist, self-absorbed) of peoples, are riven by the oscillation between Akhenaten’s Universal God and Jehovah the Tribal God.’

Elite Jews are behind the conspiracies today, though a small minority of ‘good’ Jews reject this secular Judaism-Zionism and work with non-Jews to unite as opponents to this corporate globalization, either nice Wellsian or chauvinist. Such as Jeffrey Sachs, who condemns US imperial policy today, having participated in the post-collapse Russian reforms which almost cemented post-Soviet Russia into the US-led conspiracy. Sachs and Putin ended up on much the same page three decades later, both essentially fighting the post-pandemic push by the globalists.

Marx was not a Freemason nor were Lenin, Trotsky, etc. Stalin, Hitler, Franco banned it as do all dictators. The most authoritative text, Manly Hall, Lost Keys of Freemasonry, 1923, is anodyne, admirable, no hint of anything nefarious, just another ‘path to enlightenment’. Freemasony operate(d) as a secret society but never very secret (unless outlawed) as it became fashionable in the 18th century. It was openly behind both the American and French revolutions (though not the Russian). Now it is more or less completely open. It has evolved over time as capitalism developed and made use of the Freemasons as a governing force of educated bourgeois.

Freemasonry serves imperialism though it is either unaware of this or accepts imperialism as the way to a universal society, the ancient dream, the Tower of Babel in reverse, as sincere striving rather than hubris. Hall’s thought stops with bourgeois society, though he explains the pomp of mystic self-striving which ‘true’ Masons pursue as part of their 33-level initiation.

Myers chides RFK Jr for not pointing to Masonic handshakes by Fauci and others, but are they just colourful flourishes, hiding the real deep state? Most Masons are just nice science-oriented, educated middle class men and women. Though Freemasonry might have sparked the French revolution, it didn’t come to power as a disciplined elite, and it was not a factor in the conspiratorial organization that brought the Bolsheviks to power. Freemasonry did not re-emerge in the former Soviet Union until after the breakup of Soviet dominance in Eastern Europe.

Vladimir Antyufeyev, deputy prime minister of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic blamed the ongoing conflict on US and European Masons. If in fact all European leaders are Freemasons and the US has Freemasonry built into its revolution, then Antyufeyev is right. Putin also attacked ‘Masonic’ competitors (at 15 minute spot) and warned that Russia has always ‘caught up with them in strategic weapons’.

An appeal online by Andrey Bogdanov, Great Master Of The Grand Lodge Of Russia, addressing the war in Ukraine, suggests the role of Freemasonry is not a serious lethal conspiracy: ‘For a real Freemason, no matter how complex the outside world is, a sense of inner harmony, fraternal communication and continuity of the chain of communication of Masonic knowledge are the prevailing aspects of its existence. Everything passes and only brotherhood seems eternal to us.’

New morality: anything goes

It is interesting that both ‘Marx and Engels saw the bourgeois family as a farce, oppressing women and predicted communal child-rearing but traditional forms of living, as did HG Wells. ‘ Yet all had traditional families. Rousseau, author of Emile, on free child-rearing, place all five of his children in an orphanage at birth.’ My takeaway: Intellectuals make poor rulers, always theorizing, conflicting and/or totalitarian.

Myers shows how important the Stalin-Trotsky war-within-the-revolution is to understanding our current cultural wars. ‘Trotskyists did not learn from the Soviet Union’s experience, because they deemed Stalinism a ‘betrayal’ of True Communism. Instead, they are bringing the Culture War — begun by Old Bolshevism — to the West; but, as David Horowitz noted, in the West it is called ‘Feminism’ rather than ‘Marxism’. … Whereas Hitler’s supporters are in jail for Holocaust Denial, and most of Stalin’s supporters in the West disappeared after 1991, Trotsky’s heirs and supporters are entrenched in Academia, university campuses, Foundations, the Media, the Public Service, and the Judiciary. They have dominated university campuses for decades. They regularly march in city centres—marches organised by Socialist Alliance, Socialist Alternative, or other Trotskyist sects. Green Left Weekly is a mainly Trotskyist newspaper.’

You must read the details yourself. The ‘revolution’ snuck in the back door.

And now we arrive at the Globalists, the ‘collective West’ elites, the new Oceania, having rewritten 20th c history as a benevolent empire that crushed fascism and communism (i.e., Stalinism), with no mention of the role of Judaism, though it was behind both, as Svengali for the Nazis and as shapers of communism in the latter.

‘The anti-Stalin ‘Trotskyoid’ Left, which Stalin defeated in Russia, has consolidated in the West and largely overthrown the Christian order via the so-called Culture War,’ which is already creating a centre of opposition that brings left and right together. ‘Putin, meanwhile, has re-established Christianity in Russia. The new Cold War is between the atheistic, LGBT, ‘Trotskyoid’, ‘Cosmopolitan’ West, on the one hand, and a coalition of Christian-socialist Russia and Confucian-Stalinist China on the other.’ Which is now attracting the evangelical right in the US, creating fissures in any conspiratorial attempt at a ‘Great Reset’.

Where is the East in all this? Myers points out that ‘Knowledge and ideas spread both ways across the Silk Road, from around 2000BC. Heraclitus’ philosophy is similar to Taoism, and he too took to the hills.’ Eastern thinking culminated in Plato. Marx dismissed ‘oriental despotism’ but Schopenhauer built his philosophy around Buddhism and despised socialist notions of elevating the working class as a historical actor. He quips in The World as Will and Representation that he would prefer to be ruled by a lion than one of his fellow rats. So were the nonentities that followed Stalin rats? They certainly weren’t lions. And the workers’ state collapsed in an awful hurry, with rats fleeing the sinking ship in droves when the hatch opened.

As for totalitarianism, Plato was the first to promote it, though he insisted his republic would only work for a community of 5,000. We shouldn’t blame Plato. ‘When Russian emigrants went to Palestine and established the state of Israel there, they brought with them both socialism (the kibbutzes being a benign kind) and the totalitarianism disclosed by Israel Shahak.³ Their treatment of the Palestinians and of their neighbours bears comparison with Soviet precedents. As for the ‘Open Society’, could there be anything more ‘Closed’ than the Jewish Bible’s mindset in its depiction of Goyim/the Nations?’

It is important to have reliable sources when dealing with Jewish issues. This work by Myers and his online library are essential tools to recognize the Jewish origins of today’s world.

Prescriptions

‘There IS a need for Environmental Limits, but the One Worlders are using this as an excuse to push World Government. The Trotskyist/HG Wells version of Communism is alive and well. ‘Open-border immigration, casual relationships treated as equivalent to marriage, We did not recognise it as Communist simply because we identified Stalin’s modifications as Communism. The Marxist Cultural Revolution, begun in the West in the late 1960s, has taken the West down the path pioneered by the early USSR. … To treat “relationships” as the equivalent of marriage is, in effect, to abolish marriage.’

‘As social breakdown proceeds, desperation will force us back to the essentials of life. We’ll be looking for ways to re-establish family ties, and the bonds between men and women.’ Myers takes many blinkers off leftists’ eyes (including mine). Even John Lennon’s Imagine: ‘no borders and no religion too.’ Many of us were smitten by the promise of 1917, which somehow morphed into a backdoor revolution of sex and drugs.

Myers has his finger in the dyke to stem the flood of book burning and newspeak today: History had already been rewritten, but fragments of the literature of the past survived here and there, imperfectly censored, and so long as one retained one’s knowledge of Oldspeak it was possible to read them. … A great deal of the literature of the past was, indeed, already being transformed. (1984 p. 250) As Myers points out it is the Trotskyoids of today that are the Thought Police for this brainwashing.

Is there any hope for ‘a less-severe Managerial State one day, not burdened by this Jewish bitterness or, equally, by a ‘white separatist’ prejudice’? China’s long tradition of state bureaucracy without full-blown slavery suggests itself as a tradition worth building on today, though contemporary China’s 996 policy⁴, and the plight of Tibetans, Uighurs and no doubt others, suggest capitalism erases even the most honoured traditions. Egypt and Babylon were successful state bureaucratic formations which were admired by Herodotus. It’s only biblical lore that paints a (self-serving) narrative dissing those civilizations.

Myers’ chapter on the covid plandemic documents how the Trotskyists in Australia sided with the conspiracy, denouncing anti-vaxxers as fascists. He could add the remnant of the communist parties too, which have all gone down the trans/gay road and meekly promoted the pro-vax plan. Even Cuba. The future opposition to the Wellsian world government is taking shape now, centred on Russia and China and their growing trade bloc with the third world (85% of the world population).

Wells is still the inspiration behind the one-worlders today, complete with his recommendation of an end to war and instead to deindustrialize in the interests of preserving the planet. ‘Wells presents a strong case for World Government, and it is a matter we should be discussing openly and (I believe) agonizing over, because we are in a Catch-22 situation. The threats are real, but the outcome could be Tyranny and the End of Civilization.’

‘Was George Orwell wrong when he depicted the coming tyranny as a Left-wing one?’ Left and right have lost their meaning. Genuine conservatives and genuine Marxist socialists have much common ground in opposing the liberal, now neoliberal Great Reset behind the plandemic and the cementing of a Wellsian globalism but under US-Israel.

*****

Afterthought:

The world had its moment of a global civilization. It started in 1917 and embraced the world by 1945 but collapsed when the US launched the Cold War. It was a proto-socialism, which the ‘collective West’ tolerated long enough to let the Communists beat Hitler. In the 1930s, it was implanted in the minds of anyone who took the time to consider it. Even the western media seemed to be on board as the fascist rivals prepared to destroy (the idea of) Communism.

Communism was the 19th century answer to industrial society, but Stalin made it a nonstarter for the ‘collective West’. Reading all this and the complicity of western media in giving Stalin’s regime lots of slack during the 1930s (Ukraine famine, mass arrests, slave labour), I’m reminded of my own ‘sov-symp’ Soviet sympathies, even today, with all the filth and horror exposed. It was never just a ‘managerial’ bureaucratic society. It was and will remain a stirring symbol of defiance of capitalism, banker-capitalist control, war as a plaything for weapons producers and cynical imperialist governments.

And it is Stalinism that retains the stamp of authenticity. The 1920s NEP mixed market was only a way station, and Khrushchev’s Thaw was really just living off the fruits of Stalinism; but without the ideological backbone, it slowly, then quickly collapsed. That spark/ flame  in history is now the stuff of legend, still inspiring Africa and Asia for help in liberating themselves in the 1960s. When Russia needed them, they held out their hands.

Yes, Cuba and a few others survive, fiercely attacked by imperialism, but none of them would have existed without the Soviet Union, and none have found a magic key to leave its legacy – good and bad — behind. It still looms as the conscience of the world cosmopolis. It included villains but many more heroes and many happy, if exasperated campers. And inspired the best music of the century (Shostakovich, Prokofiev), the best athletes (hockey, figure skating legends). They proved socialism could work, even under excruciating conditions. Russians are right to mourn its demise. I will die a sovsymp.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Eric Walberg.

In his World Peace speech President Kennedy states,

I am talking about genuine peace, the kind of peace that makes life on earth worth living, the kind that enables men and nations to grow and to hope and to build a better life for their children–not merely peace for Americans but peace for all men and women–not merely peace in our time but peace for all time.

Some say that it is useless to speak of world peace or world law or world disarmament–and that it will be useless until the leaders of the Soviet Union adopt a more enlightened attitude. I hope they do. I believe we can help them do it. But I also believe that we must reexamine our own attitude–as individuals and as a Nation–for our attitude is as essential as theirs. And every graduate of this school, every thoughtful citizen who despairs of war and wishes to bring peace, should begin by looking inward–by examining his own attitude toward the possibilities of peace, toward the Soviet Union, toward the course of the cold war and toward freedom and peace here at home.

World peace, like community peace, does not require that each man love his neighbor–it requires only that they live together in mutual tolerance, submitting their disputes to a just and peaceful settlement.

We [the US and Soviet Union] are both devoting massive sums of money to weapons that could be better devoted to combating ignorance, poverty, and disease. We are both caught up in a vicious and dangerous cycle in which suspicion on one side breeds suspicion on the other, and new weapons beget counterweapons.

So far so good. But then he adds:

To secure these ends, America’s weapons are nonprovocative, carefully controlled, designed to deter, and capable of selective use. Our military forces are committed to peace and disciplined in self-restraint.

And again:

The Communist drive to impose their political and economic system on others is the primary cause of world tension today.

In other words, the US that stands for peace, the Communist bloc instigates conflict. Not exactly putting into action his words, “every thoughtful citizen who despairs of war and wishes to bring peace, should begin by looking inward.” This has similarity to President Eisenhower’s farewell address warning us of the military-industrial complex after he spent eight years building it up.

Coming to his final words, Kennedy says, just six months after almost precipitating a nuclear war with the Soviet Union, “The United States, as the world knows, will never start a war. We do not want a war.”

This World Peace speech is heralded by many progressive and libertarian people.

However, if “America’s weapons are nonprovocative…  designed to deter”; if “Our military forces are committed to peace”; if “The United States, as the world knows, will never start a war,” then Kennedy is saying US has been for peace and he is continuing that policy. His speech did not proclaim major policy change, but signaled a preservation of the present one.

We are told this speech, like the claim he planned to pull the troops out of Vietnam, posed a threat to the Pentagon chiefs. And we are told after the defeat at the Bay of Pigs in Cuba (April 1961), JFK vowed, “I will splinter the CIA up into a thousand pieces and scatter them into the wind.” This statement, said in private (contradicted by later Kennedy statements), is said to have made the CIA, like the Pentagon, seek revenge. This supposedly led, less than six months after his June 10 speech, to his murder on November 22.

Kennedy’s November 22, 1963 Speeches

His speeches he was to give that evening show the actual “peace” policy he was carrying out was really one of military escalation. From the first speech he was to give in Dallas:

In the past 3 years we have increased our defense budget by over 20 percent; increased the program for acquisition of Polaris submarines from 24 to 41; increased our Minuteman missile purchase program by more than 75 percent; doubled the number of strategic bombers and missiles on alert; doubled the number of nuclear weapons available in the strategic alert forces; increased the tactical nuclear forces deployed in Western Europe by 60 percent; added 5 combat ready divisions and 5 tactical fighter wings to our Armed Forces; increased our strategic airlift capabilities by 75 percent; and increased our special counter-insurgency forces by 600 percent.

From his second speech on November 22:

We have radically improved the readiness of our conventional forces – increased by 45 percent the number of combat ready Army divisions, increased by 100 percent the procurement of modern Army weapons and equipment, increased by 100 percent our ship construction, conversion, and modernization program, increased by 100 percent our procurement of tactical aircraft, increased by 30 percent the number of tactical air squadrons, and increased the strength of the Marines. As last month’s “Operation Big Lift” – which originated here in Texas – showed so clearly, this Nation is prepared as never before to move substantial numbers of men in surprisingly little time to advanced positions anywhere in the world. We have increased by 175 percent the procurement of airlift aircraft, and we have already achieved a 75 percent increase in our existing strategic airlift capability. Finally, moving beyond the traditional roles of our military forces, we have achieved an increase of nearly 600 percent in our special forces – those forces that are prepared to work with our allies and friends against the guerrillas, saboteurs, insurgents and assassins who threaten freedom in a less direct but equally dangerous manner.

Do these actions by JFK show the Soviet leaders his desire for “not merely peace for Americans but peace for all men and women–not merely peace in our time but peace for all time”?

With good reason few believe the government’s story that Kennedy was killed by a lone gunman, Lee Harvey Oswald. Since thousands of documents the government still conceals from us, we are left with unanswered questions. Maybe it was the CIA and FBI and Mafia and anti-Castro Cubans, or a sub-grouping in them.

The National Security State Campaign to Remove Trump

But we do have evidence the CIA, FBI, NSA, and DIA and other secret national police agencies have targeted a president – in the unsubstantiated stories of Russian election interference and Trump collusion with Russian President Putin. This national security police state hoax is reminiscent of the Weapons of Mass Destruction lie they fed us to start a war on Iraq. They conjured up this Russia collusion story to sway a US presidential election and continued it during Trump’s presidency. And in 2020, they suppressed the Hunter Biden laptop case to sway a second election. They now attempt to imprison him for treason.

Regardless your opinion of Trump, this is a documented case of the US national security state seeking to neutralize a president. Those who assert a US police state operation against Kennedy do not attempt to bolster this with the proven operation against Trump. It would make sense for them to argue that while evidence of the CIA plot to kill Kennedy remains a state secret, in Trump’s case their plots are now out in the open.

Moreover, Trump, though a racist and sexist bully, did advocate for the issues that are said to make JFK a target: to bring US troops home, have peaceful relations with Russia, and reign in national security state agencies.

For instance, Trump said at a press conference (October 21, 2019):

I got elected on bringing our soldiers back home.  Now, it’s not very popular within the Beltway, because, you know, Lockheed doesn’t like it, and these great military companies don’t like it. It’s not very popular.

As we defend American lives, we are working to end American wars in the Middle East …. It is also not our function to serve other nations as law enforcement agencies. (February 28, 2019).

I want to bring our troops back from the endless war. They’ve been going on for 19 years in the area. But I’m going to bring them home from Syria. (Watch How Progressives Respond When Trump Isn’t Wrong) There is more here.

Concerning the security state police agencies, Trump condemned the collusion of the Democratic National Committee, Hillary Clinton, and FBI when asked if he would publicly criticize President Putin for Russia’s interference when they met. In response former CIA head John Brennan declared, “Donald Trump’s press conference performance [with President Putin] in Helsinki rises to and exceeds the threshold of ‘high crimes & misdemeanors. It was nothing short of treasonous.” This sounds the same as the CIA’s alleged attitude towards JFK.

President Trump wrote (Mar 15, 2019):

New evidence that the Obama era team of the FBI, DOJ & CIA were working together to spy on (and take out) President Trump, all the way back in 2015.

Unelected deep state operatives who defy the voters to push their own secret agendas are truly a threat to democracy itself. (September 6, 2018).

This does not mean Trump was any more serious about “draining the swamp” than JFK in carrying out his World Peace speech – and in the end, the president is not in control of the national security state, but the reverse.

While President Trump did advocate US ruling class interests around the world and prioritized business interests above our welfare, the national security state did not forgive him for repudiating its endless war agenda. He wanted to withdraw US troops from Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria.

He befriended DPRK leader Kim Jong Un, an anathema to Washington, later explaining, “We have a good relationship with North Korea, we’re not in a war. Having a good relationship with leaders of other countries is a good thing.” (October 22, 2020).

Even worse, he said, “Some people hate the fact that I got along well with President Putin of Russia. They would rather go to war than see this” (July 18, 2018). He was gotten out of office, and then they instigated a war.

Of course, liberals would never uphold Trump, like they did Kennedy, Obama (in 2007-2008), Bernie, Jesse Jackson (1984), among others, as a leader who could move the US towards the dream of being a model for the world and make the US government actually represent the people.

Kennedy embodied progressives’ hope that a genuinely progressive democrat could become president and redeem the country, fulfill the promise of its ennobling principles and supposed exceptional nature. To MAGA people, Trump personifies the conservative realization of this same chauvinist dream.

Trump brought about a redirection in the US no more than Kennedy.  But the popularity of both presidents in different sectors of the population does signify the common yearning of US people across the board for curtailing the immense power of the national security state. Now this national security state is using lawfare to intervene in the 2024 election process to disqualify and imprison Biden’s main challenger. That issue should be determined by the voters.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Stansfield Smith.

Amidst this week’s strange attempt to instigate a military coup from the head of Russia’s Wagner Group, President Putin took a loud stand calling out the operation as a foreign directed insurgency with parallels drawn from the chaotic revolution of 1917.

Just as in 1917, the nation was at war with an enemy on the verge of defeat, and just as 1917, foreign manipulations using fifth columnists resulted in sucking the nation into Civil War. Putin stated:

Exactly this strike was dealt in 1917 when the country was in WW1, but its victory was stolen. Intrigues and arguments behind the army’s back turned out to be the greatest catastrophe, destruction of the army and the state, loss of huge territories, resulting in a tragedy and a civil war… Russians were killing Russians, brothers killing brothers. But the beneficiaries were various political chevaliers of fortune and foreign powers who divided the country and tore it into parts. We will not let this happen.

Now I don’t know if the events catalyzed by Prigozhin’s attempted coup are part of a ‘game within a game’ designed to flush out fifth columnists while providing a headfake to western strategists… OR if this was an authentic coup. But what I do know is that there are historical processes at play which too few recognize and which President Putin understands very well.

Some might think Putin’s comparison to the 1917 revolution to be hyperbole, or a disrespect for the glorious Soviet revolution. They would be mistaken.

Aborting a System of Win-Win Cooperation

The sad fact is that neither the Bolsheviks nor Mensheviks which emerged onto the stage of history at the turn of the 20th century were organically arising “peoples’ movements”.

Upon deeper analysis conducted by historians like Anthony Sutton, Kerry Bolton, and Robert Cowley, both organizations which eventually merged into a singular force, enjoyed vast financial patronage of western imperial powerhouses such as Paul Warburg, Jacob Schiff (head of Kuhn, Loeb & co.) and even Lord Alfred Milner — head of the newly formed Round Table Movement.

These characters bankrolled much of the Bolshevik movement as early as 1905 in order to destroy a truly revolutionary process that was spreading across much of the world in the wake of the Civil War.

One of the leading champions of this revolutionary process was Lincoln’s former bodyguard and the first Governor of Colorado, William Gilpin. Governor Gilpin envisioned a world of sovereign nation states united by rail lines stretching through the Bering Strait and bringing all the continents and cultures into harmonious co-existence. In his famous 1890 ‘Cosmopolitan Railway’ Gilpin stated:

The cosmopolitan railway will make the whole world one community. It will reduce the separate nations to families of our great nation… From extended intercommunication will arise a wider intercourse of human ideas and as the result, logical and philosophical reciprocities, which will become the germs for innumerable new developments; for in the track of intercommunication, enterprise and invention invariably follow and whatever facilitates one stimulates every other agency of progress.

Describing the obvious brotherhood of Russia and the USA in spearheading this project, Gilpin wrote:

It is a simple and plain proposition, that Russia and the United States, each having broad, uninhabited areas and limitless undeveloped resources, would by the expenditure of two or three hundred millions apiece for a highway of the nations through their now waste places, add a hundred fold to their wealth and power and influence. Nations which can spend in war their thousands of lives – the lives of the best and bravest of their sons and citizens – can surely afford a little of their surplus wealth and energy for such a work as this [p. 35].

The American System Goes Global

Gilpin was not alone in this vision.  In fact, he represented a network of statesmen spread all across the globe who recognized that the only way to break out of the endless cycle of wars, usury, and corruption, which the Hobbesian structures of the British Empire maintained globally, was through the adoption of an anti-Free Trade system known as “The American System of Political Economy”. This was a very different concept of “America” than the Pax Americana which has run roughshod over the world since WWII.

In Russia, this process found its champion in the figure of Sergei Witte (Finance Minister and Minister of Transportation from 1892-1903) who led a faction of the Russian intelligentsia in a struggle for progress and cooperation both internally and with allied nations against powerful forces committed to feudalism both within the Russian oligarchy and externally. The regressive forces which Witte had to contend with included powerful reactionary traditionalist forces who yearned for the good old days before Czar Alexander II freed the serfs and on the other extreme, the emergence of vast clusters of anarchist movements threatening to burn down the state in a replication of the Jacobin frenzy of the French revolution.

As Martin Sieff has demonstrated through his many writings on Prince Kropotkin, many of these anarchist networks enjoyed the patronage of powerful forces that cared little for the plight of the working class.

The international spread of the American System between 1876-1905 took the form of large-scale industrialization and railroads. The funding mechanism was located in a practice that has fallen out of favor in the West (although has made a powerful comeback in China in recent years) called ‘dirigisme’ — the emission of productive credit from state banks.

It was Witte who had spearheaded the Trans Siberian Railway’s construction between 1890-1905 with plans to extend rail lines to China and beyond utilizing state directed capital and a blend of private enterprise. A fuller exposition of Witte’s fight will be unveiled in the next installment.

The British Empire, which always relied on keeping nations divided, underdeveloped and dependent on the use of maritime shipping, was not amused.

By controlling the international maritime choke points, the tiny island was able to exert its influence across the globe. Through the vigorous enforcement of laissez-faire doctrines of free trade, nations were blocked from protecting themselves from the financial warfare launched by the city of London against victim states (speculative volatility, usury, cheap dumping, cash cropping, and drug running). Anyone wishing to engage in long term planning in the building up of the land-based transport corridors via rail, roads, and industry would be easily sabotaged if the British System were shaping their world.

The international movement to break this system of evil was the only real revolutionary process animating the world during this time.

The Bolshevik Counter-Revolution: An Anglo-American Fraud

In 1905, Wall Street financier Jacob Schiff had given $200 million to the Japanese to assist their victory against the Russians during the 1904-05 Russo Japanese war. This generosity ultimately earned the banker the Medal of the Rising Sun in the Meiji Palace in 1907.

After crippling the Russian state and military (its navy was wiped out during the war), Schiff turned his attention to financing revolutionary activities within Russia itself. How money was spent by Schiff was difficult to say until 1949, when Schiff’s grandson John Schiff bragged to the New York Journal that his grandfather had given $20 million “for the triumph of communism in Russia.”

American journalist, and Schiff asset George Kennan, played an instrumental role as perception manager of the revolution and bragged that he had converted 52,000 Russian soldiers imprisoned in Japan into Bolshevik revolutionaries. A March 24, 1917 interview recorded in The New York Times celebrating the revolution read:

Mr. Kennan told of the work of the Friends of Russian Freedom in the revolution. He said that during the Russian-Japanese war he was in Tokyo, and that he was permitted to make visits among the 12,000 Russian prisoners in Japanese hands at the end of the first year of the war. He had conceived the idea of putting revolutionary propaganda into the hands of the Russian army.

The Japanese authorities favoured it and gave him permission. After which he sent to America for all the Russian revolutionary literature to be had…

“The movement was financed by a New York banker you all know and love,’ he said, referring to Mr Schiff, ‘and soon we received a ton and a half of Russian revolutionary propaganda. At the end of the war 50,000 Russian officers and men went back to their country ardent revolutionists. The Friends of Russian Freedom had sowed 50,000 seeds of liberty in 100 Russian regiments. I do not know how many of these officers and men were in the Petrograd fortress last week, but we do know what part the army took in the revolution.”

Schiff himself jubilantly stated to the New York Times, March 18, 1917:

May I through your columns give expression to my joy that the Russian nation, a great and good people, have at last effected their deliverance from centuries of autocratic oppression and through an almost bloodless revolution have now come into their own. Praised be God on high!

Historian Kerry Bolton wrote of New York Federal Reserve director William Boyce Thompson who had been installed as head of the American Red Cross during the 1917 revolution and was largely recognized as the true U.S. ambassador to the government, saying:

Thompson set himself up in royal manner in Petrograd reporting directly to Pres. Wilson and bypassing U.S. Ambassador Francis. Thompson provided funds from his own money, first to the Social Revolutionaries, to whom he gave one million rubles, and shortly after $1,000,000 to the Bolsheviks to spread their propaganda to Germany and Austria.

Writing in 1962, historian Arsene de Goulevitch, who experienced the events of 1917, firsthand wrote:

In private interviews, I have been told that over 21 million rubles were spent by Lord Alfred Milner in financing the Russian Revolution… The financier just mentioned was by no means alone among the British to support the Russian revolution with large financial donations.  [1]

According to his own accounts, during the four months Leon Trotsky spent in New York in 1917, much of it was spent hobnobbing with the upper crust of Wall Street and being driven around in limousines. [2]

It is also noteworthy that after Trotsky was arrested by Canadian authorities while en route back to Russia with tens of thousands of dollars of Wall Street money, it was none other than Claude Dansey (Cecil Rhodes disciple, deputy chief of the new MI6 and founder of US military intelligence in 1917!!) that directly intervened to liberate Trotsky and company.

Leon Trotsky’s Immortal Treachery

Leon Trotsky, who Lord Milner, Schiff, Paul Warburg etc., always intended to be the leader of the movement that would take control over the dead bodies of the Romanovs, was fortunately ousted by the saner forces around Joseph Stalin in 1927.

As historian Grover Furr masterfully documents using recently declassified material, testimonies, and other evidence from archives in the USA and Russia, Leon Trotsky made several attempts to return to power in Russia after his expulsion. He didn’t do this alone, however, but largely with the help of fascist forces in Britain, Japan, Ukraine, and Germany all the way until the moment he met his untimely end in 1940. This will be the subject of a future review of Grover Furr’s work. [3] One of the best and more recent among Furr’s pioneering writing on this topic can be found in his New Evidence of Trotsky’s Conspiracy, Erythos Press, 2020. Furr’s website is also an invaluable resource.

For all of Lenin’s many problems, he differed from Trotsky on two interconnected points of 1) a general belief in voluntarism and 2) a rejection of the theory of permanent revolution.

Where Lenin believed that productive labor could be channeled towards the improvement of productive forces of society, Trotsky believed that any such effort at peaceful productive improvement would lead only to decadence. Permanent revolution was thus needed to keep workers from falling into sloth amidst the eternal striving for global class struggle. In 1914, a frustrated Lenin spoke of Trotsky’s fetish, saying:

he [Trotsky] deserted the Mensheviks and occupied a vacillating position, now co-operating with Martynov (the economist), now proclaiming his absurdly Left ‘permanent revolution’ theory.

Another point of conflict between Lenin on the one side and Trotsky on the other centered on whether or not Russia should continue to participate in WWI.

Where Lenin wanted to bring Russia out of the insane conflict in the first moments of their coup in 1917, Trotsky and his close ally Bukharin demanded that Russia stay in the war with the aim of converting it into a total pan European (and ultimately global) revolution. Trotsky’s commitment to global socialist revolution vs Stalin’s commitment to “socialism in one country” was at the heart of an unbridgeable divide between the two revolutionaries throughout the years.Upon taking charge of the Russian economy, Trotsky and Lenin unleashed a destructive wave of economic reforms titled ‘The New Economic Policy’ (NEP) that saw vast liberalization of the entire state with western corporate powers sweeping in to buy up former national utilities for pennies on the dollar. The most powerful figure of the western magnates to be granted full access to buy up Russia under this new policy was Occidental Petroleum’s Armand Hammer (1898-1990) who was only forced to leave Russia the moment Trotsky was kicked out (and returning to dominance in the weeks after Stalin’s 1953 death).

Later on in life, Hammer described how Lenin told him: ”We do not need doctors, we need businessmen… communism is not working and we must change to a New Economic Policy.”

Working closely with Lenin and especially Trotsky, Hammer became the principal moderator of nearly every business deal made between the Soviet government and western corporations during the 1920s which saw Russia sink into brutal economic enslavement to foreign powers at a pace which would not be seen again for over 60 years.

The vast liberalization of the Russian economy during the dark 1920s paralleled closely the Perestroika program of free trade/privatization of the 1990s and it is no coincidence that George Bush Sr dubbed this program of Balkanized looting of Russia ‘Operation Hammer’.

If one saw a proto-George Soros in the figure of Armand Hammer, they would not be far off.

Parvus and the Pan-European Union

Trotsky’s close association with Alexander Israel Helphand (aka: Parvus) throughout the revolution of 1905 and beyond is also suspicious and should be considered in the context of a much broader imperial geopolitical strategy.

Parvus’ association with the Pan-European Union founded by Count Richard von Coudenhove-Kalergi in 1923 is another relevant anomaly that takes us into the deeper power structures lurking below the surface waves of history.  [4] Parvus’s association with the Pan European Union and broader fascist operations across Turkey and the Middle East is laid out in Jeffrey Steinberg’s 2005 report “Cheney Revives Parvus’ Permanent War .madness”

Other members of Coudenhove-Kalergi’s institution included likes of Benito Mussolini, Walter Lippman, Nazi finance minister Hjalmar Schacht and Nazi geopolitician Karl Haushofer, while financiers Max Warburg and Louis de Rothschild openly bankrolled the organization.

In 1932, Kalergi delivered a speech celebrating the great restoration of order that would emerge in the unified pan-European effort to put down Bolshevik anarchism saying:

This eternal war can end only with the constitution of a world republic…. The only way left to save the peace seems to be a politic of peaceful strength, on the model of the Roman Empire, that succeeded in having the longest period of peace in the west thanks to the supremacy of his legions.

This group played a much greater role in history than many realize and set the stage for the European Union. Parvus’ (and Trotsky’s) close association with Vladimir Jabotinsky set the stage for the most fascist elements of Zionism to emerge in the wake of WWII, and Parvus’ work as propagandist and arms dealer for the leadership of the Young Turk movement (deployed to set a weakened Ottoman Empire on fire and provoke what became the Balkan Wars of 1912-13) can still be felt across the Turkish world to this day.

It is also noteworthy that none other than Otto von Hapsburg himself had run this organization for over 30 years and also created a sister organization called Dignitae Humanae Institute to “united the right of the world” under a gnostic Catholic veneer with a Clash of Civilizations rebranding for the alt right. As the ultra-liberalized dissolution of society proceeds expectedly apace under the moral mush of LBGTXYZ gobbledygook, pagan Gaia worship, and critical race theory, it is obvious that a knee jerk leap into radical conservativism will accelerate. Hence, a net has been cast to catch conservative fish.

Located in an 800-year-old monastery in Trisulti, Otto Hapsburg’s organization has found a useful frontman in the form of a Jesuitical fascist right-wing priest of the American alt-right by the name of… Steve Bannon. [5] This fact gives new meaning to Bannon’s self-characterization as a Leninist. In an August 22, 2016 Daily Beast article, journalist Ronald Radosh described a conversation he had with Bannon two years earlier saying “we had a long talk about his approach to politics. He never called himself a “populist” or an “American nationalist,” as so many think of him today. “I’m a Leninist,” Bannon proudly proclaimed. Shocked, I asked him what he meant.
“Lenin,” he answered, “wanted to destroy the state, and that’s my goal too. I want to bring everything crashing down, and destroy all of today’s establishment.”

Trotskyites Mutate into Neocons

I say this here and now just to draw a parallel in the reader’s mind to the strange transmogrification which leading Trotskyists took in the USA once their leader’s life was snuffed out in 1940. Trotsky’s body wasn’t even cold before such devotees as James Burnham, Sidney Hook, Max Schachtman, Albert Wohlsetter, and Irving Kristol abandoned Trotskyite socialism and adopted a new rabidly right-wing paradigm, which came to be known as ‘neo-conservativism’.

This poisonous movement grew quickly throughout the Cold War and took over the USA over the dead bodies of JFK and his brother while unleashing a new global dis-order ‘clash of civilizations’ each-against-all logic onto the globe under the watch of the Trilateral Commission of Kissinger, Brzezinski, and David Rockefeller.

I think we can intimate what Trotsky ultimately saw as the final destination for his aims of a global revolution of the masses, and willingness to collaborate with Nazis to achieve his ends by considering the writings of former Trotskyite James Burnham.

As Cynthia Chung pointed out in her recent article on the topic, Burnham, (Trotsky’s former personal assistant and a man known to many as the father of the neocons), saw the resolution to the Manichean problem of class struggle and Cold War in a one world fascist government. Right before Trotsky’s 1940 death, Burnham wrote an essay renouncing Dialectic Materialism in favor of the superior philosophy of Bertrand Russell as outlined in the 1913 Principia Scientifica, and hence his rebirth as a neocon was ensured. [6] In his Feb 1940 ‘Science and Style’, Burnham wrote: “Do you wish me to prepare a reading list, Comrade Trotsky? It would be long, ranging from the work of the brilliant mathematicians and logicians of the middle of the last century to one climax in the monumental Principia Mathematica of Russell and Whitehead (the historic turning point in modern logic), and then spreading out in many directions – one of the most fruitful represented by the scientists, mathematicians and logicians now cooperating in the new Encyclopedia of Unified Science.”

Bertrand Russell and Alfred Whitehead’s three volume Principia Mathematica published between 1910-1913 set the stage for the latter development of cybernetics and information theory by Russell’s pupil Norbert Wiener

The question now sits before us: Was Burnham’s conversion to Russell’s worldview inconsistent with the actual goals and mission of Leon Trotsky?

It is too often forgotten that Leon Trotsky, acting as chairman of the technical and scientific board of industry, quite literally controlled all science policy of Russia from 1924-25. During this time, he wrote a 1924 pamphlet outlining his pro-eugenics vision of the future global order that would be brought into existence through the forces of Darwinian natural selection saying:

The human species will once more enter into a state of radical transformation, and in his own hands, will become an object of the most complicated methods of artificial selection and mass psycho-physical training. This is entirely in accord with evolution… man will make his purpose to master his own feelings, to raise his instincts to a higher consciousness… to create a higher social biological type, or if you please, a superman.

Whether we consider Trotsky’s relentless efforts to integrate Darwinism with Marxist Dialectic Materialism or the Neoconservative commitment to a Darwinian survival of the fittest ethic merged with a gnostic Christian end times doctrine, the effects are largely identical: Global chaos with a supposed point of rapture/synthesis to resolve the chaos of the material world. Getting to this destination, whereby a new order and new Nietzschean human being were to emerge, simply required a cleansing experience.

In this sense, Trotsky could be compared to a Russian version of his contemporary Jesuit Pierre Teilhard de Chardin.

Where Chardin was tasked with merging Darwin’s theory of natural selection into Christianity, Trotsky was tasked with merging Darwin’s theory into the state religion of Marxist dialectic materialism in Russia. The end result in either case was identical.

Wohlstetter and RAND Corporation

Albert Wohlstetter is another devout Trotskyist who became a leading neo-conservative and controlling hand behind RAND Corporation. It was under Wohlstetter’s influence that RAND Corp became the principal conduit for the intellectual takeover of all branches of US policy on military, economic, and cultural levels.

How did this occur? Through a process known as Cybernetics.

Created by Norbert Wiener as the “practical application” of Lord Bertrand Russell’s “theoretical” Principia Mathematica of 1910-1913, Cybernetics was essentially a ‘science of control’ which became the conduit used to re-brand eugenics into new clothes after World War II.

As I outlined in my recent essay ‘The Revenge of the Malthusians and the Science of Limits’ the language of Cybernetics was called ‘systems analysis’ and presumed that all systems could be described as closed units susceptible to pure mathematical description and most importantly… manipulation from a scientific elite.

Author Alex Abella described RAND’s systems analysis repackaging of Dialectic Materialism in the following terms in his Soldiers of Reason:

RAND’s systems analysis…refused to be constrained by existing reality…Systems analysis was the freedom to dream and to dream big, to turn away from the idea that reality is a limited set of choices, to strive to bend the world to one’s will…the crux of systems analysis lies in a careful examination of the assumptions that gird the so-called right question, for the moment of greatest danger in a project is when unexamined criteria define the answers we want to extract. Sadly, most RAND analysts failed to perceive this inherent flaw in their wondrous construct. Not only that, the methodology of systems analysis required that all the aspects of a particular problem be broken down into quantities…Those things that could not be eased into a mathematical formula…were left out of the analysis… By extension, if a subject could not be measured, ranged, and classified, it was of little consequence in systems analysis, for it was not rational. Numbers were all – the human factor was a mere adjunct to the empirical.

The key that gives both Dialectic Materialism the same power of evil as the upgraded tool of Bertrand Russell’s Principia Scientifica extolled by Burnham or Norbert Wiener’s cybernetics/systems analysis is found in the following axiom:  “Quantity must always govern quality”.

Under the influence of Wohlsetter’s RAND Corporation, the USA was driven into full scale insanity with a military outlook driven by computer models that presumed nuclear war was a winnable endeavor bringing the world closer to full scale nuclear holocaust. The merging of Darwinism with social science created “eugenics” which presumed that quantitative properties like genetic codes and DNA gave rise to qualitative attributes like “morality”, “wisdom” or “fitness to rule or live”.

In order for society to be brought into acceptance of this new soul-less paradigm of existence, with an invisible master class governing depopulated slaves from above, a vast shock therapy would be called for.

The Frankfurt School Global Revolution

That cleansing experience would take the form of ritualistic climax of purgative violence which would usher in a state of total despair and thus a new scientific priesthood managing the slaves of the other under a renewed form of technocratic feudalism. But how would society be brought to such a state of despair such that the masses would clamor for a new age to be imposed upon them in the form of a one world technocratic government?

When Christianity, nationalism, and respect for family values still governed society, such a state of nihilistic despair requisite to achieve this breaking point was more than a little difficult to achieve.

Here the role of Trotsky’s associates Georg Lukacs, and Willi Munzenberg play an important role.

Both men were not only radical Bolsheviks but also founders of a new organization founded in 1923 known as the Institute for Social Research founded in Frankfurt Germany, otherwise known as “The Frankfurt School”.

The Frankfurt School would lay out a comprehensive intellectual framework for a new global aesthetical and scientific revolution premised on the worship of decay, ugliness, and death within a Weberian-Freudian-Marxist synthesis. The system developed by these misanthropic leading priests of the new cult of death would justify the CIA’s funding of abstract art, post-modernist literature, a-tonal music, and other most modernist garbage throughout the Cold War. The launching of this project in full force took the form of a CIA-MI6 funded operation in 1949 dubbed ‘The Congress for Cultural Freedom’. Leading organizers of this congress included Lord Bertrand Russell and two former Trotskyists: Sidney Hook and James Burnham.

This group and their role in steering mass education and culture over the ensuing century will be the topic of a future report.

Post-Script: A Final Word from Putin

To this author’s knowledge, the first time Vladimir Putin laid out a full attack on the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution as a foreign directed color revolution was during his 2021 Valdai Club meeting. At his keynote address, the Russian leader called out the social engineers masquerading as revolutionaries and social reformers today driving a parallel to the destructive ideology of the Bolsheviks of 1917:

The advocates of so-called ‘social progress’ believe they are introducing humanity to some kind of a new and better consciousness. Godspeed, hoist the flags as we say, go right ahead. The only thing that I want to say now is that their prescriptions are not new at all. It may come as a surprise to some people, but Russia has been there already. After the 1917 revolution, the Bolsheviks, relying on the dogmas of Marx and Engels, also said that they would change existing ways and customs and not just political and economic ones, but the very notion of human morality and the foundations of a healthy society. The destruction of age-old values, religion and relations between people, up to and including the total rejection of family (we had that, too), encouragement to inform on loved ones – all this was proclaimed progress and, by the way, was widely supported around the world back then and was quite fashionable, same as today. By the way, the Bolsheviks were absolutely intolerant of opinions other than theirs.

Notes

1.  Czarism and Revolution, published by Omni Publications in Hawthorne, 1962 French edition, pp. 224, 230.

2. Leon Trotsky: My Life, New York publisher: Scribner’s, 1930, p. 277.

3. One of the best and more recent among Furr’s pioneering writing on this topic can be found in his New Evidence of Trotsky’s Conspiracy, Erythos Press, 2020. Furr’s website is also an invaluable resource.

4. Parvus’s association with the Pan European Union and broader fascist operations across Turkey and the Middle East is laid out in Jeffrey Steinberg’s 2005 report “Cheney Revives Parvus’ Permanent War Madness”

5. This fact gives new meaning to Bannon’s self-characterization as a Leninist. In an August 22, 2016 Daily Beast article, journalist Ronald Radosh described a conversation he had with Bannon two years earlier saying “we had a long talk about his approach to politics. He never called himself a “populist” or an “American nationalist,” as so many think of him today. “I’m a Leninist,” Bannon proudly proclaimed. Shocked, I asked him what he meant.  “Lenin,” he answered, “wanted to destroy the state, and that’s my goal too. I want to bring everything crashing down, and destroy all of today’s establishment.”

6. In his February 1940 ‘Science and Style’, Burnham wrote: “Do you wish me to prepare a reading list, Comrade Trotsky? It would be long, ranging from the work of the brilliant mathematicians and logicians of the middle of the last century to one climax in the monumental Principia Mathematica of Russell and Whitehead (the historic turning point in modern logic), and then spreading out in many directions – one of the most fruitful represented by the scientists, mathematicians and logicians now cooperating in the new Encyclopedia of Unified Science.”

• Originally published in the The Last American Vagabond

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Matthew J.L. Ehret.

June 6, 2023 marks 79 years since the fabled Allied invasion known as “D-Day.”

Lost amid the annual self-congratulatory orgy is the minor detail that by the time of the D-Day invasion, the Soviets were engaging 80 percent of the German Army on the Eastern Front.

Author Alexander Cockburn explained that WWII had already been won “by the Russians at Stalingrad and then, a year before D-Day, at the Kursk Salient, where 100 German divisions were mangled. Compared with those epic struggles, D-Day was a skirmish. Hitler’s generals knew the war was lost, and the task was to keep the meeting point between the invading Russians and Western armies as far east as possible.”

Even the National World War II Museum admits:

Let’s be blunt: the German army lost World War II on the Eastern Front. For most of the war, 75-80 percent of the Wehrmacht had to be deployed in the East, a preponderance dictated by the sheer size of the front, and 80 percent of German war dead perished there: about four million of the five million German soldiers killed in World War II.

Of course, this doesn’t fit the “good war” myth, so it’s down the memory hole.

The next time someone you know speaks of WWII in hallowed tones, remind them that:

• The U.S. fought that war against racism with a segregated army.
• It fought that war to end atrocities by participating in the shooting of surrendering soldiers, the starvation of POWs, the deliberate bombing of civilians, wiping out hospitals, strafing lifeboats, and in the Pacific boiling flesh off enemy skulls to make table ornaments for sweethearts.
• FDR, the leader of this anti-racist, anti-atrocity force, signed Executive Order 9066, interning over 100,000 Japanese-Americans without due process…thus, in the name of taking on the architects of German prison camps became the architect of American prison camps.
• Before, during, and after the Good War, the American business class traded with the enemy. Among the US corporations that invested in the Nazis were Ford, GE, Standard Oil, Texaco, ITT, IBM, and GM (top man William Knudsen called Nazi Germany “the miracle of the 20th century”).
• While the U.S. regularly turned away Jewish refugees to face certain death in Europe, another group of refugees was welcomed with open arms after the war: fleeing Nazi war criminals who were used to help create the CIA and NASA while advancing America’s nuclear program.

The enduring Good War fable goes well beyond Memorial Day barbecues and flickering black-and-white movies on late-night TV. WWII is America’s most popular war. According to accepted history, it was an inevitable war forced upon peaceful people thanks to a surprise attack by a sneaky enemy.

This war, then and now, has been carefully and consciously sold to us as a life-and-death battle against pure evil. For most Americans, WWII was nothing less than good and bad going toe-to-toe in khaki fatigues.

Reality: American lives weren’t sacrificed in a holy war to avenge Pearl Harbor or to end the Nazi Holocaust. WWII was about territory, power, control, money, and imperialism.

What we’re taught about the years leading up to the Good War involves the alleged appeasement of the Third Reich. If only the Allies were stronger in their resolve, the fascists could have been stopped. Having made that mistake once, the mantra goes, we can’t make it again.

Comparing modern-day tyrants like Vladimir Putin to Adolf Hitler activates the following historical façade:

After whipping the original axis of evil in a noble and popular war, the US and its allies can now wave the banner of humanitarianism and intervene with impunity across the globe without their motivations being severely questioned — especially when every enemy is likened to der Fuehrer.

But it wasn’t appeasement that took place prior to WWII. It was, at best, indifference; at worst it was collaboration… based on economic greed and more than a little shared ideology.

U.S. investment in Germany accelerated by more than 48 percent between 1929 and 1940, while declining sharply everywhere else in Europe. For many US companies, operations in Germany continued during the war (even if it meant the use of concentration-camp slave labor) with overt US government support.

For example, American pilots were given instructions not to hit factories in Germany that were owned by US firms. As a result, German civilians began using the Ford plant in Cologne as an air raid shelter.

The pursuit of profit long ago transcended national borders and loyalty. Doing business with Hitler’s Germany or Mussolini’s Italy proved no more unsavory to the captains of industry than, say, running sweatshops in China does today. What’s a little repression when there’s money to be made?

Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels said, “It is not enough to reconcile people more or less to our regime, to move them towards a position of neutrality towards us, we want rather to work on people until they are addicted to us.”

Little has changed in the way criminality is aggressively packaged and sold to a wary public today… except for the technology by which the lies are disseminated.

Thus, it is our moral obligation to see through our own propaganda and kick the addictive habit of lazy thinking. We must address the many uncomfortable truths — not just about WWII but about virtually everything.

The lies and deception did not begin in March 2020, folks. Ending this evil cycle begins with each of us deciding we will refrain from knee-jerk, emotional reactions and never again buy what the parasites are selling.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Mickey Z..

With the world of the plundering Colonial Powers deep in the chaos of the Great Depression, a disastrous failure of rule by the banks of the capitalist countries and the United States internally threatened by local organizations of socialists and communists, US capital flowed into weaponizing Nazis.

The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics Was Seen as a Model for Revolutionaries Everywhere

Except for the socialist Soviet Union, the suffering engendered by the Great Depression  was world-wide. Between 1929 and 1932, worldwide gross domestic product (GDP) fell by an estimated 15%. Meanwhile, the prospering revolutionary Soviet Union had become an inspiration and model for revolutionary organizing against capitalism and colonialism across the world. By 1928, the Soviet Union had made an amazingly rapid recovery from the ravages of the First World War and from a horrible war on the domestic front promoted by invasions of twelve capitalist nations. However, its agricultural production had not recovered from war’s devastation and there were still terrible famines throughout the 1930s.

There is an awesome amount of documented history about Hitler’s prostate and weak Nazi Germany having been rearmed by US Corporations for War on Russia. 

America’s Wealthy Put Their Money Where Hitler’s Mouth Was

By their intense investing and joint venturing to arm Germany to the teeth,  America’s wealthy were, albeit mostly silently, showing a positive attitude regarding Hitler’s announced hatred of what he believed to be the world’s two evils, communism and Judaism.

So why had Soviet leaders and writers — even during the onslaught of much vile, unfair and unfounded anti-Soviet propaganda during the Cold War after the Second World War — never managed to hold the Western colonizing powers, the United States in particular, responsible for the Second World War in having rearmed Germany, intending (as Hitler had threatened) the destruction of the USSR? This has remained a mystery to this archival research peoples historian, all efforts contacting various well known historians in the field of recent Russian history in the US, and some in Russia notwithstanding. All the investments and joint venturing of US (and European) corporations building up Hitler’s Wehrmacht to the world’s number one military in only six years are documented in both business and tax records of US, Germany and other nations, and are in great part documented on the Internet with quite comprehensive statistics, a modest but indicting amount of which are presented in this article.

Below are excepts from British American scholar Anthony B. Sutton’s Wall Street and the Rise of Hitler, Chapter One – “Wall Street Paves the Way for Hitler.” (Anthony Sutton was a research fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution from 1968 to 1973.) and an economics professor at California State University, Los Angeles.)

The contribution made by American capitalism to German war preparations before 1940 can only be described as phenomenal. It was certainly crucial to German military capabilities. For instance, in 1934 Germany produced domestically only 300,000 tons of natural petroleum products and less than 800,000 tons of synthetic gasoline. Yet, ten years later in World War II, after transfer of the Standard Oil of New Jersey hydrogenation patents and technology to I.G. Farben, Germany produced about 6 1/2 million tons of oil — of which 85 percent was synthetic oil using the Standard Oil hydrogenation process.

Germans were brought to Detroit to learn the techniques of specialized production of components, and of straight-line assembly. The techniques learned in Detroit were eventually used to construct the dive-bombing Stukas. I.G. Farben representatives in this country enabled a stream of German engineers to visit not only plane plants but others of military importance. Contemporary American business press confirm that business journals and newspapers were fully aware of the Nazi threat and its nature.

The evidence presented suggests that not only was an influential sector of American business aware of the nature of Naziism, but for its own purposes aided Naziism wherever possible (and profitable) — with full awareness that the probable outcome would be war involving Europe and the United States.

Synthetic gasoline and explosives (two of the very basic elements of modern warfare), the control of German World War II output was in the hands of two German combines created by Wall Street loans under the Dawes Plan.

The two largest tank producers in Hitler’s Germany were Opel, a wholly owned subsidiary of General Motors (controlled by the J.P. Morgan firm), and the Ford A.G. subsidiary of the Ford Motor Company of Detroit. The Nazis granted tax-exempt status to Opel in 1936, to enable General Motors to expand its production facilities. Alcoa and Dow Chemical worked closely with Nazi industry.

General Motors supplied Siemens & Halske A.G. in Germany with data on automatic pilots and aircraft instruments. As late as 1940, Bendix Aviation supplied complete technical data to Robert Bosch for aircraft and diesel engine starters and received royalty payments in return.

In brief, American companies associated with the Morgan-Rockefeller international investment bankers were intimately related to the growth of Nazi industry. It is important to note ” that General Motors, Ford, General Electric, DuPont and the handful of U.S. companies intimately involved with the development of Nazi Germany were — except for the Ford Motor Company — controlled by the Wall Street elite — the J.P. Morgan firm, the Rockefeller Chase Bank and to a lesser extent the Warburg Manhattan Bank.

FDR Was Fully Aware His Cronies Were Investing in Hitler’s Military

President Roosevelt had to have been aware that many of his cronies and most of his peers among the wealthy owners of America’s corporations were investing and joint venturing head over heels in and with Nazi Germany.

The Nazi Counsel for the Defense at the Standard Oil Spoke an Embarrassing Truth

The deception fostered in Wall Street war investors owned press and TV that the white people of the American, English, French and other racist European colonial empires were good guy heroes during the Second World War has been pervasive and universal. Even the outcry of the German Counsel for the Defense in his summation at the major Nuremberg trial, heard by the audience of millions that saw the block buster American documentary movie Judgement at Nuremberg, (with Burt Lancaster, Spencer Tracy and Marlena Dietrich) seems to have made little impression. Actor Maximilian Schell, in defense of the Nazis on trial, shouts:

Your Honor? What about the rest of the world? Did it not know the intentions of the Third Reich? Did it not hear the words of Hitler’s broadcast all over the world? Did it not read his intentions in Mein Kampf, published in every corner of the world?

Where is the responsibility of those American industrialists, who helped Hitler to rebuild his armaments and profited by that rebuilding?!! Are we not to find the American industrialists guilty?

How many moviegoers are shocked when they hear: “American industrialists, who helped Hitler to rebuild his armaments and profited by that rebuilding?!! Are we not to find the American industrialists guilty?”

Amazingly, in this American made movie, the German Counsel for the Defense is seen making the case that seventy to eighty-five million men, women and children didn’t die because of Adolph Hitler. They perished because the wealthy in the US and Western Europe empowered Hitler to make war.

The only plausible answer as to why Russians haven’t openly and logically held the United States responsible for the Second World War and the genocidal Nazi invasion of their country is their shame for the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact of mutual assistance between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany signed only days before the Second World War began.

However, given the obviousness of the colonial powers heavily arming Nazi Germany under such a pathetic and oft repeated excuse as to make Nazi Germany a ‘bulwark against the communist Soviet Union,’ and then refusing all entreaties of the Soviets to form a protective alliance in the face of Hitler’s ever increasing power and belligerence, Stalin’s surprise signing a non-aggression pact with Hitler’s Nazi Germany seems to have been a last resort defense of Russia.

Were the Soviets to wait for Hitler’s attack, prepared by US, UK and France’s rearming of Germany in open violation of the prohibitions in the Versailles Treaty, after allowing Hitler’s illegal warplanes to bomb Spain?

Stalin Had Warned World War Was Already Ongoing in Europe and Asia

Four days before the signing of the Molotov-Ribbenthrop pact Stalin warned that World War was already ongoing in Europe and Asia. In his speech at 18th Convention of the Soviet Communist Party in Moscow, Stalin not only cruelly analyzed and exposed the policy of “non-intervention” and encouraging aggressors for what it was, but warned the world that

a new imperialist war was already in progress since 1935, and had already involved over 500 million people in Ethiopia, Spain, China, Austria and Czechoslovakia. The war has created a new situation with regard to the relations between countries. It has enveloped them in an atmosphere of alarm and uncertainty. By undermining the basis of the postwar peace regime and overriding the elementary principles of international law, it has cast doubt on the value of international treaties and obligations. Pacifism and disarmament schemes are dead and buried. Feverish arming has taken their place. Everybody is arming, small States and big States, including primarily those which practice the policy of non-intervention. Nobody believes any longer in the unctuous speeches which claim that the Munich concessions to the aggressors and the Munich agreement opened a new era of ‘appeasement’. They are dis-believed even by the signatories to the Munich agreement, Britain and France, who are increasing their armaments no less than other countries.

The US Ambassador to the USSR Witnessed Russian Awakening to the Ultimate Goal of the Colonial Powers in Arming and Promoting Nazi Germany 

In his book Mission to Moscow, the US ambassador to Russia from 1936 to 1938, Joseph Davies, chronicles the desperation of the Russians in 1937, unable to get a defensive alliance with England and France and fully aware of the rearming of Germany in violation of the Versailles Treaty was directed at the Soviet Union and most obviously not meant to be only a ‘bulwark.’

A US pro-Soviet film, Mission to Moscow, staring Walter Huston was made by Warner Bros. in 1943 in response to a request by President Roosevelt, and made specifically to improve Soviet-American relations. Because of the surprise non-aggression pact with Nazi Germany, Stalin is credited with having foreseen the danger Hitler was capable of, though not that Stalin had derailed, for the moment, the West’s plan to have Hitler invade the USSR. A New York Times movie critic wrote,

With a boldness unique in film ventures …, it comes out sharply and frankly for an understanding of Russia’s point of view. It says with a confident finality that Russia’s leaders saw, when the leaders of other nations dawdled, that the Nazis were a menace to the world. (Mission to Moscow, starring Walter Huston, Ann Harding in Hollywood. Bosley Crowther, New York Times, April 30, 1943.)

All the War Crimes Committed During WWII Were Made Possible by the Rearming of Germany

All the inhuman, monstrous beyond description Nazi-German crimes, the crimes that have been attributed to Stalin and those committed by the US and Britain in fire bombing civilians in German and Japanese cities, happened during the world war that was made possible by the enthusiastic rearming of Nazi Germany. This was done to protect and continue invested capital rule over most of humanity by the unjustly wealthy in the Western colonial empires which were then threatened by the Great Depression that had been created by their own financial malfeasance. The true source of the Second World War was American industrial might that empowered Hitler and his Nazi thugs in what had been a disarmed Germany. Hitler’s strident call for Germany to expand into the Soviet Union was silently or tacitly approved as was much of Hitler’s rabid condemnation of Jews by Americans investing and joint venturing in Nazi Germany. This economic facilitation of a Second World War equally would come to mean an economic facilitation of a multi-nation Holocaust.

When we recall films and photos of skies filled with warplanes, of seas filled with warships and of thousands of tanks engaged in deadly conflict on land bringing death, destruction and misery to millions of innocent men, women and children, we ought to best remember, as well, that a lot of upper-class people in business suits were elatedly counting their enormous blood-soaked profits from investments in the manufacture of weapons, munitions, uniforms, and coffins while the Wall Street-owned USA, became the world’s single superpower and the cities of its designated enemy, the USSR, lay half in ruins, 27 million of its citizens dead.

May 9th or Victory Day is a holiday in Russia that commemorates the Soviet victory over Nazi Germany in 1945. It was first inaugurated in the 16 republics of the Soviet Union, following the signing of the German Instrument of Surrender late in the evening on 8 May 1945.

The Red Army Had Shattered the Nazi Wehrmacht at Great Human Cost but Western Media Has Continued to Falsify History that the USA Defeated Nazi Germany During the Second World War 

As early as June 1942 the Soviet Union had urged its American and British allies to open a second front in Western Europe. It would take the US and UK another two years to finally launch the invasion of France. Meanwhile, the Red Army took the brunt of German military might and millions died in the genocidal race war waged by the Nazis on the Eastern Front.[207]

The German defeat at Stalingrad was the turning point of the war on the Eastern Front, in the war against Nazi Germany overall, and of the entire Second World War. German and Axis casualties were enormous: 68 German, 19 Romanian, 10 Hungarian and 10 Italian divisions were mauled or destroyed. That represented 43% of Axis forces in the east. After Stalingrad, the Red Army had the initiative, and the Wehrmacht was in retreat. Germany’s Sixth Army had ceased to exist, and the armed forces of Germany’s European allies, except Finland, had been shattered. In a speech on 9 November 1944, Hitler himself blamed Stalingrad for Germany’s impending doom. The destruction of an entire army, the largest killed, captured, wounded figures for Axis soldiers, during the war, and the foiling of Germany’s grand strategy gave the battle at Stalingrad global significance.

Meanwhile British and US Had Been Engaged in Peripheral Fighting with the Enemy.

While at Kursk in Russia 6,000 tanks and more than 2,000,000 men battled, on July 9, 1943, an American seaborne assault by the U.S. 7th Army  involving 150,000 troops, 3,000 ships and 4,000 aircraft landed on the southern coast of Sicily.

A Very Belated D-Day Operation Overlord at Normandy June 6, 1944!

A fleet of some 6,900 vessels landed the assault forces of slightly more than 156,000 men, Americans, British and Canadians on five beaches, About 24.000 airborne troops were deployed By the time the Allies did open this Western front in Normandy in June of 1944, the eventual defeat of Nazi Germany had already been established by the Red Army victories at Stalingrad (August 1942-February 1943) and Kursk (July-August 1943) the year before. At Stalingrad Germany had lost its Sixth Army and four allied armies of over 400,000 men. Meanwhile, at Kursk Germany  had lost thirty divisions (over 500,000 men) including seven Panzer divisions equipped with the new Panther and Tiger tanks, 1,500 tanks, 3,000 guns and 3,500 warplanes.Thus, while the war was being won and whole German armies destroyed at great human cost to the Soviet Red Army during the month of July at Kursk, the Americans, British and Canadians in the same month had been invading a weakly defended Sicily.

In actual fact the Normandy invasion was not a significant contributor to Germany’s defeat.  A small US/British/Canadian/French force of about 150,000 soldiers of which about 73,000 were American faced a few German divisions at half strength and short of fuel and ammo.  The real war was on the Eastern front where millions of soldiers had been fighting for several years.

The Red Army won World War II.  The cost to the Soviets was between 9 million and 11 million military deaths.  Adding in the Russian civilian deaths, the Soviet Union won the war at the cost of between 22 million and 27 million Soviet lives. In contrast the US had 405,000 soldiers killed during WW II of which 111,600 died fighting the Japanese in the Pacific. (“D-Day Normandy Invasion after 75 Years. The Falsification of History,” Paul Craig Roberts, Global Research, 6/7/ 2019)

Throughout most of World War II, the U.S. and the British faced 10 German divisions combined. The Soviets were facing more than 200 German divisions. The Germans lost approximately 1 million men on the Western front. They lost 6 million on the Eastern front. There is reason why Churchill said the Red Army tore the guts out of the German war machine. However, that’s not what Americans learn. (Peter Kuznick, “Mythology of America as Liberator,” The Real News Network, 6/9/2019)

The success of the Allies after Normandy was largely due to the Germans having been already weakened badly because of the pummeling they had taken from the Russian Army, and were at the time of the D Day landing, in retreat across Europe ahead of the vast Red Army, which was then liberating the concentration camps. Majdanek on July 22–23, later that summer the Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka killing centers.

By the time Allied troops came ashore on June 6, 1944 the Russians had already fought three years of devastating war on the Eastern Front, taking and inflicting appalling casualties. The enormous and pivotal battles of Stalingrad and Kursk had been fought and won.

Operation Bagration – the Soviet destruction of German Army Group Centre – was, arguably, the single most successful military action of the entire war. This vital Soviet offensive was launched just after Allied troops had landed in Normandy, and it is symptomatic of the lack of public knowledge about the war in the East that whilst almost everyone has heard of D-Day, few people other than specialist historians know much about the Soviet Operation Bagration. Yet the sheer size of Bagration dwarfs that of D-Day.  Despite the recent Allied landing at Normandy, the German army retained over 235 divisions in the East, in comparison with roughly 85 in the West. On January 27, Soviet troops liberated Auschwitz.

On every June 6 since 1944, leaders of the US, UK and France join in public observance of the D Day Normandy invasion in taking credit for the defeat of Hitler’s Nazi Germany. This is the Colonial Powers, or ‘Free World’ or ‘Community of Nations’ version of history. According to this Western media popularized version of history, the Red Army merely helped Americans and British win the war

The CIA overseen corporate media conglomerates of the Western World Powers [230C] have not only falsified a USA-UK victory over Nazi Germany, but have given the world a false picture of an initially powerless criminally bankrupt Adolph Hitler.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Jay Janson.

Russian President Vladimir Putin, French President Emmanuel Macron, Britain’s Prince Charles, Vice President Mike Pence and the presidents of Germany, Italy and Austria were among the more than 40 dignitaries attending the World Holocaust Forum, which coincides with the 75th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz death camp.

The three-hour-long ceremony at Jerusalem’s Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial — called “Remembering the Holocaust: Fighting Antisemitism” — looks to project a united front in commemorating the genocide of European Jewry amid a global spike in anti-Jewish violence.

But the unresolved remnants of World War II’s politics have permeated the solemn assembly over the differing historical narratives of various players. Poland’s president, who’s been criticized for his own wartime revisionism, has boycotted the gathering since he wasn’t invited to speak. Putin was granted a central role even as he leads a campaign to play down the Soviet Union’s pre-war pact with the Nazis and shift responsibility for the war’s outbreak on Poland, which was invaded in 1939 to start the fighting.

On the eve of the gathering, Israeli President Reuven Rivlin implored visiting dignitaries to “leave history for the historians.”

“The role of political leaders, of all of us, is to shape the future,” he said.

But Putin quickly ventured into the sensitive terrain shortly after his arrival Thursday, claiming that 40% of Jewish Holocaust victims were Soviet.

Of the 6 million Jews killed by the Nazis, historians say about 1 million were Soviet. Putin’s controversial figure appears to include an additional 1.5 million Jewish victims from eastern European areas occupied by the Soviets under their pact with the Nazis.

“When it comes to the tragedy of the Holocaust, 40% of tortured and killed Jews were Soviet Union Jews. So this is our common tragedy in the fullest sense of the word,” he said during a meeting with Rivlin.

Arkadi Zeltser, a Yad Vashem historian, said the accuracy of the statement depended on rival “definitions” of when the war began. Yad Vashem, along with all other reputable institutions, considers the war to have been sparked on Sept. 1, 1939 with the invasion of Poland. The Soviets generally consider their “Great Patriotic War” to have started two years later, when Germany invaded the Soviet Union.

It was the latest chapter in a bitter dispute over Soviet actions in World War II. Putin has been leading a campaign to downplay the Soviet Union’s pre-war pact with the Nazis and focus instead on its role in defeating them.

Israel has appeared eager to oblige, giving Putin a fawning welcome and hosting him for the dedication of an imposing monument honoring the nearly 900-day Nazi siege of Leningrad. The city, now known as St. Petersburg, is Putin’s hometown.

“We mustn’t for even one second blur the sacrifice and the contribution of the former Soviet Union” in defeating “the Nazi monster,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said at the ceremony.

The forum at Yad Vashem marks one of the largest political gatherings in Israeli history, as a cascade of delegations including European presidents, prime ministers and royals, as well as American, Canadian and Australian representatives, arrived at Ben-Gurion Airport. More than 10,000 police officers were deployed in Jerusalem and major highways leading to it. Large parts of the city were shut down ahead of the event.

For Netanyahu it offered another opportunity to solidify Israel’s diplomatic standing and boost his profile as he seeks re-election on March 2. He was hoping to use his meetings with world leaders to bolster his tough line toward Iran and rally opposition to a looming war crimes case against Israel in the International Criminal Court.

“I am concerned that we have yet to see a unified and resolute stance against the most anti-Semitic regime on the planet, a regime that openly seeks to develop nuclear weapons and annihilate the one and only Jewish state,” he said of Iran. “For the Jewish people, Auschwitz is more than the ultimate symbol of evil. It is also the ultimate symbol of Jewish powerlessness. … Today we have a voice, we have a land, and we have a shield.”

For historians, though, the main message is one of education amid growing signs of ignorance and indifference to the Holocaust. A comprehensive survey released this week by the Claims Conference, a Jewish organization responsible for negotiating compensation for victims of Nazi persecution, found that most people in France did not know that 6 million Jews were killed during World War II. Among millennials, 45% said they were unaware of French collaboration with the Nazi regime and 25% said they weren’t even sure they had heard of the Holocaust.

The World Holocaust Forum is the brainchild of Moshe Kantor, the president of the European Jewish Congress, an umbrella group representing Jewish communities across Europe. The group recently reported that 80% of European Jews feel unsafe in the continent.

Kantor established the World Holocaust Forum Foundation in 2005 and it has held forums before in Auschwitz, the killing fields of Babi Yar in Ukraine and at the former concentration camp Terezin. Thursday’s event is the first time it is convening in Israel. The official commemoration marking the 75th anniversary of Auschwitz’s liberation will be held next week at the site itself in southern Poland.

Organizers of the Jerusalem event have come under criticism for not including enough Holocaust survivors and instead focusing on the panoply of visiting dignitaries and the festival-like atmosphere surrounding it. In response, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy tweeted on Thursday that his delegation was giving up its seats to allow more survivors to attend.

Yad Vashem called the decision “odd” since about 100 survivors were expected to be among the 780 attendees and it was too late to make any adjustments in any case.

“It’s a shame he took such a step,” the memorial said in a statement.

The gathering comes amid an uptick in anti-Semitic violence. Tel Aviv University researchers reported last year that violent attacks against Jews grew significantly in 2018, with the largest reported number of Jews killed in anti-Semitic acts in decades. They recorded 400 cases, with the spike most dramatic in western Europe. In Germany, for instance, there was a 70% increase in anti-Semitic violence. In addition to the shooting attacks, assaults and vandalism, the research also noted increased anti-Semitic vitriol online and in newspapers, as extremist political parties grew in power in several countries, raising shock and concern among aging survivors.

“Anti-Semitism does not stop with the Jews,” Rivlin said in the opening speech. “Anti-Semitism and racism are a malignant disease that destroyed and takes apart societies from within and no democracy is immune.”