As per usual in my ongoing failure to “speak to the day” as a journalist should, this piece will come out after the “most important election of our lifetimes”-midterms. Part of the delay was having to deal with friends who were worried that I would say the sorts of things I say here—because, you know, as a philosopher and retired professor the influence I have is enormous! I’ll return to the all-important midterms at the end, now that they are (safely?) behind us.
I imagine the “lifetimes” in question are those of the well-trained liberals, progressives, and “leftists” who are now in their twenties, thirties, and forties; “educated people.” For anyone older, I find it hard to understand how they think the stakes of things within the existing social system are so different than in any other election. Even for those in their forties, we have lived as adults in a time when the Supreme Court stopped an election and installed a president and vice-president in what looked like a right-wing coup. This unfolded into real elements of fascism, such as the abrogation of the U.S. constitution by the Patriot Act, the starting of wars on the basis of outright lies (lies that were easily seen through, but that were supported by Democrats in Congress such as Hillary Clinton); these wars continue today. But my liberal friends say, “never mind that, because … Trump.”
For liberals, there is nothing Trump has done that is anything but bad or even horrible. Everything Trump is and does is horrible for them.
George W. Bush is the name we associate with these never-ending wars, wars that the Democrats supported. Trump took down Bush and his terrible family with a single line that needed to be said—and yet no Democrat said it; that was a great service to both America and the rest of the world. But the Democrats are incapable of recognizing this. In fact, now they love W. and feel nostalgia for his presidency.
On day one of his administration, as promised, Donald Trump cancelled the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement, which had the very dangerous and wrong aim of isolating China internationally. That by itself is worth the price of admission.
In the 2016 election, every element of the ruling class and the State (and the Deep State, the crucial element of which is the CIA, at least as I understand it) supported Hillary Clinton. Leading figures in the Republican Party did everything they could to undermine Trump. The following passage from Tucker Carlson’s new book, Ship of Fools, is worth not only reading, but repeated study; the passage describes Bill Kristol’s trajectory in 2015 to 2016 regarding Trump’s candidacy and election:
“I remain not pro-Trump, but I’m once again drifting into the anti-anti-Trump camp,” Kristol wrote in August 2015. “Much of the criticism of Trump has the feel of falling (fairly or unfairly) into the hobgoblin-of-small-minds category.”
Then came the South Carolina primary debate. Trump criticized the Iraq War and its promoters. Kristol erupted. He was as angry as he had been in public about anything. Kristol denounced not just Trump, but anyone who didn’t join him in denouncing Trump.
“Once upon a time we had leaders who would have expressed their outrage at such a slander,” he wrote in the Weekly Standard. “They would have explained to the American people how extraordinarily irresponsible his slander was, and would have done their best to discredit a man who could behave so irresponsibly. They would have pronounced him to be unfit to be president of the United States, and they would have mobilized their friends, supporters and admirers to ensure so appalling an eventuality didn’t come to pass.”
Suddenly Kristol found himself aligned with the cocktail partiers at Davos he once mocked. Global elites might oppose the interests of American voters, but at least they didn’t accuse Bill Kristol of lying about Iraq. Kristol lapsed into a kind of public nervous breakdown, once coming close to tears on television, as he tried to stop Trump.
He failed. Trump won the nomination, but Kristol barely took a breath. He began searching for a warm body willing to mount a third-party challenge that would guarantee Hillary Clinton’s victory in the general election. (pp.116-117; Ship of Fools, Free Press, 2018)
This fascinating tale of Kristol’s attempt to undermine Trump goes on, including the attempt to convince Mitt Romney to be the aforementioned “warm body,” i.e., patsy. It is very interesting to me, as someone who does work in Mormon Studies (especially communitarian political theory and the heterodox elements of LDS theology), that Kristol settled on Evan McMullin, a Mormon who had worked for the CIA. Unlike Romney, McMullin has actual Utah roots, and he did receive more votes there than anywhere else (where the LDS Church had denounced Trump, spurred by the famous “pussy grabber” tape). Still McMullin did not become president of Utah, either, coming in third there, behind Hillary Clinton.
Given that Trump managed to triumph even against the CIA and every other element of the State/Deep State/ruling class, I propose we call this period of the Trump candidacy and presidency an “experiment.” Liberals, and others who turn out to be no more than liberals, call it “fascism.” Some call it “right-wing populism.” Perhaps there are elements of the latter, but it is hard for me to see how terms such as “left” and “right” have much meaning anymore. Now more than ever almost everyone who uses the term “left” to describe themselves as supposedly something to the left of the Democratic Party (even if, as with Democratic Socialists of America, representing the left within the Democratic Party) has folded themselves into this wretched, ridiculous “party”—at least for “now,” when “the stakes are so high,” indeed higher than they’ve ever been, in “our lifetimes,” etc., etc., ad nauseum.
What is condemned now as “right-wing populism” is simply the populism of the working class, it is the popular discontent of working people who have continually been sold down the river by the globalist-imperialist ruling class. The Democratic Party leadership have positioned themselves to be the best servants of this class, and they’ve done a very good job with that. This is especially true in the ideological sphere, whereby anyone who disagrees with them is a racist, misogynist, homophobe, transphobe, and hater of refugees from the Third World. On this last, and the approaching “caravan,” it makes sense to me now why, as Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton would have supported a coup in Honduras—to drive more desperate people northward to further replace and undermine working people in the U.S. That is the sort of game the globalists play on the global chess board; more to come on this subject.
People who believe the Democratic Party ideology, or who at least believe that, at this apparently “singular moment,” “NOW” (as a close friend of mine put it), we have to set aside “ideological purity” and support the Democrats are just wrong about what is going on in the world. Like the recent class-driven/Identity Politics constituencies who pass themselves off as “feminism,” the voices of this supposed desperation about Trump are largely coming from the academic and otherwise “professional” middle-class, who identify their interests with globalism. On the one hand, from this group, I’ve seen some saying the “ideologically-pure” on the “left” supposedly “look down their noses” at those who recognize the necessity to vote for Democrats “NOW.” On the other hand, I’ve also seen the hilarious ploy of posting videos of Barack Obama asking people, “whether left or right,” to “get involved,” and vote. Let me put it this way: people who promote the latter ploy know full well that they are full of it, except perhaps it simply does not enter their minds, such are their ideological blinders and deep-seated class interests, that not everyone is going to vote the way these “involved”-types want them to. For my part, yes, if you hold a gun to my head and force me to vote, I will vote, but I am not going to vote for the party of militarism and war and spitting on working people (all the while expecting them to silently get back to work, while there is work to get back to—and otherwise bugger off), and doing no more for those whose real grievances are diverted into the Identity Politics agenda than instrumentalizing them for the power of globalist finance capital.
As for anyone who is “looking down their nose,” it is these same Democrats who have become masters of nasal ocularism*, calling the working people “stupid” and “uneducated.” Never was it more true what Marx said in the third thesis on Feuerbach, “The educator must be educated.” [*“nasal ocularism”—from the Latin, “nasi deorsum quaeritis,” op. cit. Seneca, De Brevitate Vita, c.49 CE]
In other words, I hope the Trump experiment is allowed to unfold quite a bit more.
It’s not the revolution, obviously, and it’s not the world that humanity needs, in the longer term, but it’s qualitatively better than what the Democrats have on offer.
The most straightforward version of this reasoning has to do with the recent discussion of the term “nationalism.” There is much more to be said on this question (and I will return to it elsewhere), but the point here is that Trump avowed the label in opposition to “globalism.” It seems to me that Trump meant the term in the simple sense of “take care of your own people,” and, yes, we can raise many questions about that—though, significantly, none that the Democrats have provided any good answer to (e.g., with the border issue, all they have is opposition to actually having borders, but no actual immigration policy to propose). In a somewhat more complicated vein, I think Trump means something like “protectionism” in a libertarian, non-interventionist vein. Obviously, it is completely bizarre that actual “socialist” and “communist” organizations (I’ll turn to one in a moment) could complain about trade wars and other trade policies that “threaten to destabilize world markets.” In other words, let’s defend the World Trade Organization!—after all, we’re already going down the path of defending the CIA, FBI, etc., with the Democrats. So crazy.
I recall that Alexander Cockburn once said (and perhaps the source of this can be found) that, given the choice between a libertarian anti-interventionist and a Democrat, he would take the former every time. Belief in the mythology of the mythical “free market” is not necessary to make this claim. Furthermore, though, while no one can say what will come from the Trump disruption, we have to let go of the idea that there is some connection between the internationalism that humanity needs and the globalism that the Democrats support, and the attendant view that what is “truly left” is somehow “left of the Democrats” and finding itself in what is “left in the Democratic Party.” That’s just bad reasoning that doesn’t understand the world as it is configured today.
***
Of the various things for which we can be thankful to our forty-fifth president, perhaps the most important is what we can call “the Trump Clarification.”
In actuality, this Clarification is spread out over numerous, qualitatively-different issues. I wrote about one form this Clarification takes in a previous article on the Christine Blasey Ford stunt. Trump “causes problems for the postmodern capitalism anti-politics set-up, and shakes things up. He is especially good at taking things that have needed to be addressed for years, and pushing them another step (at least rhetorically) toward crisis—and what the existing structure is showing is that, whether Democrat or Republican, the system has no solution to these things, at least not without a major shake-up and (what’s more important) without loss of power by those who are entrenched in power.”
Another form of clarification is that those to the “left” of ordinary Democratic Party liberals have had to decide where they stand. Unfortunately, they have gone full-bore into the liberalism, or neo-liberalism if you want to call it that, of the Democratic Party. In other words, so-called “progressives” and “leftists” and even “socialists” and “Marxists,” and the far-greater part of those who call themselves “feminists,” or activists concerned with “issues of race,” or Trans-activists, etc., have now folded themselves into a “politics” where the horizons are “anti-Trump,” or “because Trump,” and where, whatever they think they are intending to advance, all they will achieve, at most, is support for the Democratic Party as some kind of “alternative”—really, the only alternative. Undoubtedly, many think they are doing something else; at the same time, bedazzled by the term “fascism,” and excited by the prospect of being part of “the Resistance,” they seem to have lost all critical capacity for understanding society in a systemic and systematic way.
Whatever they think they are, these “leftists” have now shown their true colors and are simply liberals. Perhaps to capture this acquiescence of leftism into Democratic Party liberalism I can coin the term “LOL,” for the liberalism of ostensible leftists.
But I’m not laughing out loud, or in fact laughing at all. On a personal level, this has been a painful thing for me, as I have seen many comrades and friends go in this direction.
[… digression… ]
There are many indications of how unhinged and upside-down liberals and LOLs have become, but I would especially like to point to a roughly one-month period when Donald Trump met with Kim Jong Un in Singapore and Vladimir Putin in Helsinki.
The evening of the Helsinki meeting, I posted the following on my Facebook page:
Results of the past week:
Trump disrupts alliance with Europe.
Trump disrupts NATO.
Trump blasts U.S. “intelligence community.”
Trump has conversation with Putin without his many minders present.
Both establishment “parties” (“steering media for money and power,” as Habermas put it) are angry at Trump.
What’s not to like? (Just to be clear, I’m not being sarcastic.)
Predictably, many of my friends—real or Facebook-only, or somewhere in-between—jumped on this for a very simple reason: I had said positive things about Trump. Well, that can’t be allowed!
The New York Times reported, with many others following, that “Trump sheds all notions of how a president should conduct himself abroad.” When Trump expressed doubts about the U.S. “intelligence community” and its indications that there was Russian interference in the 2016 election, “his words prompted rebukes from Democratic and Republican lawmakers.” One has to love this headline from the NYT: “TV anchors agape after the Trump-Putin appearance.” There were headlines regarding “universal condemnation,” and the real kicker, the president was called a “traitor.”
The latter was because, as some of my Facebook friends wrote on their pages, the president had sold out the United States to Putin and Russia. How that would actually happen is something they didn’t really consider, and neither did they reconsider their comments in the weeks after July 16 when Russian flags didn’t go up all over the country.
All of this sounded pretty good to me.
On the way to Helsinki, Trump stopped by London to see Queen Elizabeth. The news that day, June 14, was all about how Trump had supposedly committed a faux pas by stepping in front of the queen. Later it was seen clearly that the queen had told the president to walk ahead of her, but even so the reaction was how terrible it was that Trump broke royal protocol. Horrors, truly. That the president would offend the queen of England or the British Commonwealth or whatever it is at the moment, while on his way to suck up to the president of Russia, it’s just too much.
A month before, president Trump flew to Singapore to meet with the Korean leader Kim Jong Un. As every reader here knows, this was the first time a U.S. president has met with a leader of the DPRK. In the wake of the meeting, the DPRK returned to the U.S. some remains of U.S. soldiers who had died in the Korean War, and it was clear these remains had been taken care of very carefully. It was an extraordinary gesture, given the horrible war that the United States had unleashed on the people of Korea.
How anyone could see this summit meeting as anything but a good thing, I find hard to imagine. Again, as with a few other major actions by Donald Trump, I think this one is worth the price of admission.
Of course, liberals (and other LOLs) not only do not see things this way, but more, what is very important, they cannot let themselves see things this way. So, my liberal and ostensibly leftist friends say things on the order of, “Well, we don’t know how this is really going to work out.” Hmm … that’s so strange … after all, we do know how most everything else is going to work out, but, on this one thing, we can’t be too sure.
Rachel Maddow commented on the “spectacle” and the “weirdness” of the summit, saying that “we” shouldn’t “sugar coat” Trump’s having reached out to “the most repressive dictatorship on earth.” “There’s a reason why no U.S. president has agreed to give the North Korean dictatorship what they have wanted for so long.” The only “accomplishment” Maddow sees here is that Trump has bestowed “legitimacy” on the North Korean regime. (MSNBC, July 12, 2018)
That’s some really brilliant bullshit, from the Democratic Party’s paradigm of an “educated woman.”
Actually, I want to say a couple things about this “educated woman” theme from the Democratic Party leadership. This is clearly a signal to those in the professional middle-class or those who aspire to this class, but there is also something more here with this reference to “educated.”
First, “educated” here is a reference to those young people who are presently in some part of the college/university system, or who have been through this system in the last ten years or so. In other words, it’s more praise for the always-needing-of-praise middle-class Millennial generation. (And isn’t it the case when people talk about Millennials, they mean middle class, or perhaps a few scholarship students from the working class, perhaps minority students, who are taken—rightly or wrongly—to aspire to the middle class?) What, however, is the relationship between having a university degree and being “educated” these days? To put it succinctly, and I’m sorry that this is not very nice, most people receiving college degrees are not what one ought to call “educated.” The “hard” sciences, or some of them, and the humanities (or some of them), may be a little different, but, for the most part students have come out of colleges and universities for years now not having been and not having become good readers. In fact, the “trick” that so many students in recent years are trying to achieve is to get through college without reading a single book, and many of them are able to “achieve” this. Clearly this includes a great deal of today’s “educated” liberals, who, if they “know” anything, it is simply how to put certain terms in play in order to defeat the white cis-male or whatever. I’m sure those who support that model of “education” will not rest until every college is made over into the Title IX/SJW paradise that is Palo Alto University, where Christine Blasey Ford teaches.
My other comment goes more directly to the liberal talking heads such as Maddow, and public opinion they seek to generate among liberals regarding the Trump-Kim summit. Whether these talking heads are so “educated” that they cannot understand this, I do not know, but anything to do with North Korea is very significantly more to do with China. Indeed, the Korean War itself had a great deal to do with China, as did the Vietnam War and the larger war that the United States unleashed in Southeast Asia. Even for those who ever knew this in the first place, which is probably not so many these days, there is a tendency to forget that, from the moment Mao and the Communist Party of China took nationwide power in 1949, the U.S. went into overdrive to create havoc on the borders and in border regions.
So, here is president Trump attempting to consistently pursue something he said throughout his campaign, that a world in which the U.S. gets along with Russia and China is a better world, and Democrats and LOLs have put themselves in a position where they can only criticize Trump for these efforts. This is where the Democrats and other anti-Trump movement people have been since the 2016 election, but in the period from June 12 to July 16 of this past summer they really sealed themselves into this box, and it is very hard to see how they can get out of it. At the very least, they are going to need the help of people who are not so “educated.”
***
The anti-Trumpers, on the one side, and those who are at least open to the idea that there is a Trump experiment that ought to unfold a bit more, on the other, seem to live in two very different worlds. This is literally true, in some ways; here I will conclude by speaking to the outcome of the mid-term elections in terms of the divide between “rural” and “urban.”
Democrats at the presidential level have been elected or supported in recent years by mostly urban majorities in a handful of mostly northern states (with the exception of California). (Having grown up in Miami, I can also say that the urban centers of central and south Florida are also “northern” in the relevant aspects.) What this means is that, looking at things in terms of the “red” and “blue” states, presidents can be elected by a relative handful of cities. Considering a map of red and blue counties, one will see a United States that is overwhelmingly red, while the blue parts are the counties that encompass New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, etc.
When it comes to the U.S. Congress as a whole, things work differently, as there isn’t the winner-takes-all aspect (whereby, for example, Chicago/Cook County can mostly overwhelm the rest of Illinois) and there is no Electoral College. There are still questions about how majorities (or majorities of those who vote) express themselves in the outcomes of elections, but they are different questions. Here the blue states tend to express themselves better in the House of Representatives, while the red states are better represented in the Senate. Some complain about this set-up, as the Senate is not apportioned in terms of the populations of each state, and therefore seems to be not a body reflecting majority rule.
However, let us interrupt this little Civics class for a moment to remind ourselves that there is nothing in the U.S. system, at least at the national level, that is really representative of “the people” in any substantive sense. We can simply cite president Jimmy Carter, Nobel Prize winner, committed Christian, greatest Democrat alive (according to Democrats, I mean), and almost certainly one of only two or three U.S. presidents who is not/was not a pussy grabber (along with Abraham Lincoln, probably the greatest president, who was gay), and who, as the head of an effort to certify elections in various countries as “free, fair, and open,” has spoken to the oligarchic nature of the U.S. system. Someone praised by Lincoln, namely Karl Marx, proclaimed that every class society is a “dictatorship” in the following way: a capitalist society is a society ruled by capital. This means that, albeit in complicated, often messy ways, capital decides—unless some countervailing force forces things in another direction. There is ample historical experience to show that electoral “politics” is not a real countervailing force. In a way, it is the number one task of the Democratic Party to convince people otherwise, despite the fact that no so-called “democracy” (or “democratic republic”) has been bought and paid for to the extent that the United States has been—and that is not even to get into the basis (in slavery, indentured servitude, genocide of the existing indigenous population, and general dispossession of the great majority) for what was called a “revolution” in 1776. (Despite this, I do not agree, or at least not entirely, with most European Marxists, e.g. some of my favorites such as Sartre, Adorno, and Badiou, that there was nothing at all good in the American Revolution.) So that’s the Civics class none of us got back in the day, and of course there is a great deal of complexity left out here.
What is Donald Trump in all this? I’ve proposed three terms: experiment, clarification, and disruption. In the aforementioned “all this,” I think the third of these terms is most important. Trump disrupted the Republican Party in very significant ways on his way to the nomination. That disruption did not necessarily have to be a good thing, in any larger terms—but, in fact, it was a good thing. Because it is a delicious passage that ought to make any person with good will toward humanity happy, I will quote again from Tucker Carlson’s Ship of Fools:
It is possible to isolate the precise moment that Trump permanently alienated the Republican establishment in Washington: February 13, 2016. There was a GOP primary debate that night in Greenville, South Carolina, so every Republican in Washington was watching. Seemingly out of nowhere, Trump articulated something that no party leader had ever said out loud. “We should never have been in Iraq,” Trump announced, his voice rising. “We have destabilized the Middle East.”
Many in the crowd booed, but Trump kept going: “They lied. They said there were weapons of mass destruction. There were none. And they knew there were none.”
This was the moment when Jeb Bush and the whole Bush family was done for, and how can anyone in the liberal/left camp not be happy about that? And Jeb helped nicely with his whining, “I’m tired of people attacking my brother and my family.” Yes, wonderful crime family there! –or, crime plus CIA, which is pretty much how the latter always works. Just like that, too, Jeb’s 100+ million dollars spent on the campaign went down the toilet. But let’s stay with Carlson a bit more:
Pandemonium seemed to erupt in the hall, and on television. Shocked political analysts [were they agape?] declared the Trump presidential effort had just euthanized itself. Republican voters, they said with certainty, would never accept attacks on policies their party had espoused and carried out. …
Rival Republicans denounced Trump as an apostate. Voters considered him brave.
Trump won the South Carolina primary, and shortly after that, the Republican nomination.
Republicans in Washington never recovered. When Trump attacked the Iraq War and questioned the integrity of the people who planned and promoted it, he was attacking them. [This is where the Bill Kristol narrative picks up.] They hated him for that. (My emphasis; pp.108-109.)
As I said in “The Christine Blasey Ford episode,” you know it’s a different, topsy-turvy world when Tucker Carlson is making far more sense than the “left.” But then, I suppose it’s a topsy-turvy world when the First Lady is from the same country as Slavoj Zizek!
And consider again the fact that the LOLs had been saying for years that they were “frustrated” that Democratic politicians, including Hillary Clinton, did not go after G.W. Bush on the Iraq War and what led up to it. HRC is of course a hawk, she is all about war and militarism; but even if she wasn’t so hawkish, she is also all about the game of “politics” as it is supposed to be played. When Trump showed very bad etiquette in that debate, he really broke with the entire political establishment, and made them all look like the craven, lying power-players they are.
Couldn’t a good argument be made, on the basis of Trump’s apostasy, and on the basis of my Marx 101 Civics-class presentation, and on the basis of the reactionary etiquette of all acceptable establishment politicians of either establishment party (in the complete bullshit “two-party system,” that we all learned about in Civics class), that Trump’s election was the closest thing to a triumph for democracy that could possibly happen in the United States?
Obviously, Trump is not the international proletariat, but is he in some way representing something of the working class? Ironically, the LOLs themselves think this—except that what Trump represents is the “stupid, fascist, racist, white, male workers” of the “rural” parts of the U.S. Of course the “male” part is definitely not true, part of why HRC lost is that the majority of white women, and many other women, did not vote for her.
What exactly are the “rural” parts of the United States? As I suggest above, referring to the blue/red map of counties rather than states, “rural America” is now everything that is outside of a handful of large and relatively large cities. (Having lived in Shanghai and Mexico City in recent years, my perception of what is a relatively large city has been altered a good deal. But what I’m really talking about is the famous New Yorker cartoon on the New Yorker’s view of the United States.) In some sense there are very few parts of the United States that are “rural” anymore. There are cars, roads, highways, electricity, and television; even more, now, there is the internet. The latter is working well as a force of globalist homogenization.
Two things that larger cities bring is more “diversity” and more “culture.” The second of these is not at all available to everyone, and certainly not equally, but still, it seems like a good thing.
“Diversity” is universally praised as good, but I think it’s a little more complicated than that, and one way to see this is in the class structures of cities. Of course all my liberal, academic friends “love the diversity” of New York, Chicago, San Francisco, etc. For them it is like a smorgasbord of experiences that they can have, and then they go home to relative comfort. Of course they are “around” ethnic Mexicans quite a lot, boys and girls and men and women who work in restaurants (not just Mexican restaurants), generally in the back, and sometimes as caregivers. In universities there are non-white students who either come from better-off families or who have been provided with financial aid in the hope that they can join the middle class in a very assimilated, middle-class way. Some of these students succeed, while many quietly slip away. How much longer even this experiment will go on is uncertain, as even for middle-class whites the “college experience” is becoming untenable. The term that cannot be brought into the “diversity” parade is indeed class, because urban diversity on the whole depends on a great deal of class inequality, and situations where, on the whole, after one has one’s exciting “diversity”-interactions for the day, one can retreat to a different kind of space. Obviously this is an extreme example, but consider the meme that went around recently, featuring mega-pop star Katy Perry. As part of the “resistance” to Trump on the border question, she preaches, “The greatest thing we can do is unite and just love on each other. No barriers, no borders, we all just need to coexist.” And yet Perry “lives in a very-large, nineteen-million dollar mansion, hidden at the end of a private drive in a gated community surrounded by security.” Many of the leading Democratic politicians have similar set-ups.
One of the things that happens in the “rural” part of American, which includes medium-sized cities and towns in states as diverse as Ohio and Iowa and Kansas and Wyoming and—well, really, most of the states (and much of Canada!) is that “diversity” is not just the fun mixing of cultures and colors that liberal academics celebrate. Instead it is the supplanting of a longstanding culture by a new population of non-union workers who have been brought in by what are more or less legal “human traffickers”—except these traffickers don’t work for some penny-ante operation (though, at the ground level, they may live like prison guards, not so much better-off than prisoners), they ultimately work for globalized finance capital. This is not a fun scene, for anyone, really—but all the LOLs can do is complain that the “rural, white” people don’t want or like “diversity.”
There is a good deal more to say about this question, but once again I’ll put in a plug for Ship of Fools; see Ch. 5, “The diversity diversion.” There’s more to say than what Carlson says, too, but in any case, much of what he says is on a topic that has been ruled out of order by academic liberals and, what is so vastly crazy I would find it hard to wrap my head around it if I hadn’t come through that scene myself, academic leftists and Marxists—namely, the topic of class.
But I’m sure all these good folks would want to talk about class if only the workers (or the “white workers”) weren’t so stupid, racist, misogynist (even the women, obviously), and fascist. You see, they’ve ruled themselves out of consideration. We are back with the crude dismissal of the working class by Bertrand Russell and other aristocratic, Fabian socialists. Russell, in his sweeping, generalized characterization of Marxism, claimed that Marx and Marxists thought that the working class should rule society because they are some sort of morally-superior class. Perhaps Russell was unconsciously reflecting on his own superior attitudes (Russell was not so “open” as to accept his gay son, for example, and the poor young man fell into insanity), but, in any case, despite the fact that very few working-class people could even begin to get up to the debaucheries perpetrated by the ruling class (no one can afford these things, if nothing else), Marx’s argument is something quite different, it has to do with the social structure.
As I said above, that even Maoists and so many others who have called themselves “Marxists” down through the decades could now buy into this nonsense, if from the “other side” (working people, or the “white working class,” is morally-inferior), as it were, is a disaster of epic proportions, right up there with LOLs loving the CIA, FBI, Mueller, George W. Bush, John McCain, etc.
There’s a good side to this, though. It shouldn’t be so hard to break with all of this horrible crap, and in fact most “ordinary people,” especially “ordinary working people,” aren’t having such a hard time breaking with it. And whether or not Trump truly represents these people, he does seem to be an alternative to the horrible crap that the Democratic Party proudly represents.
And you know what they’re going to say: something about the rural, white, working class being fascist, etc. And something about me being a fascist or fascist sympathizer, etc.
In my CounterPunch.org articles, I’ve tried to say some structural things about capitalism, imperialism, globalism, and postmodern capitalism, and the specifically-American context for why I not only don’t think Trump is a fascist, but also why I don’t think real fascism will work in America. One very major reason is that a fascist society is a highly-militarized and politicized (in a particular ideological way) society, and, for all kinds of reasons such a society is not in the offing here. These reasons range from consumerism (don’t stop going to the mall just because of 9/11 and the Patriot Act) and the warped view of what freedom is in a consumerist society, to the recent announcement of the “Space Force.” The “Space Force” is something that was coming for some time now, and it will be coming regardless of who is president—and one reason for this is that the U.S. cannot hope to mobilize the numbers of people it would take to actually “win” a long-term war in, say, Iran—it cannot even do this in Iraq or Afghanistan. (See chapters 9 and 10 of George Friedman, The Next Hundred Years [2010], for a very plausible scenario on the Space Force; most likely this will grow out of what most people do not realize is the “other space program,” namely the U.S. Air Force.) On the other hand, this mechanization-robotization-cyberization of space is mixed up with a gaggle of other issues, including immigration (let people in to become cannon fodder) and a military system that is, in effect, just as much a welfare system as anything else.
Certainly there are “Orwellian,” or “Vonnegut-ian” aspects to all this (see the latter’s Player Piano on the “Reeks and Wrecks”), but these don’t add up to fascism, and indeed these sorts of things work better in a system of global “markets,” especially where the working people are treated like excremental beings who are the worst kind of people, who need to shut up and check their privilege, curb their racist and misogynist anger, and get back to work, if they have work, and otherwise bugger off.
That’s the message our LOLs have for working people, who they think they can carve into sections by race, etc.—and capitalism especially in its eighteenth to twentieth-century forms, and in new forms employing Identity Politics today, has done an exemplary job with this carving. Let’s go back for a moment to Max Horkeimer’s famous line that, “If you’re not going to talk about capitalism, shut up about fascism.” Somehow it has escaped today’s LOLs, most significantly the avowedly-leftist (and even “Marxist”) side of this bunch that they go on about Trump being a capitalist (and he is, but let’s also think structurally about some of the divisions among the capitalists), but they have put themselves in a position where all they can do is affirm the gigantic forces of capitalism in the United States and the world, with its leading edge of finance capital.
Obviously this is very complicated stuff. The point here, though, is that in pursuing this “fascism” thesis (though to call it a “thesis” is to give too much credit to it), these LOLs have suckered themselves into supporting the main workings of capital in the world today—and, from this, nothing good will come, and much that is bad.
So, what would actually be good is to stop blaming working people for having figured this out—even if not in the heavily “theorized” way that some academics might prefer.
The irony here is that, in this age where the left is wrapped-up in Identity Politics, there’s not a lot of good “theoretical” work going around, things have mostly been reduced to a jargon that is good for little more than name-calling and call-out culture.
It is hard to expect that things will go in a better way for the existing Left. They’ve dumbed themselves down too far. (In terms of philosophy and what came to be called “theory”—based in literary theory and giving rise to “cultural studies”—I do blame some of this dumbing down on the more recent outcomes of phenomenology and hermeneutics, with not enough structuralism.) They’ve attached themselves too thoroughly to power as the be-all of everything. (It has to be recognized that some of this comes out of utilitarian and Hobbesian aspects of Marx, and the Machiavellian aspects of Lenin—and the failure to grapple with the ways in which Mao and others provided a corrective to this.) Their self-conception (and this goes for liberals in general) as so bloody smart is bound up with the idea that most ordinary people are stupid.
It is hard to imagine that this LOL/LARP “resistance” can go much further, or that it could have gone as far as it has, for that matter, without some major, if hidden, backing.
All this went around a major bend with the Month I discussed. Another bend was traversed with the Christine Blasey Ford and Elizabeth Warren stunts, though at that point the LOLs were moving at breakneck speed toward the mid-terms, only taking time out to blame Trump for the (fake) pipe bombs and the murder of eleven Jews at a Pittsburgh synagogue. The pipe-bomb suspect looks very suspicious, not like someone who could have pulled off what he is charged with doing; the person charged with the synagogue murders was angry that Trump is not an anti-Semite. Trump made strong statements in both cases, but of course all of that just became fodder for the Democrats on the way to the mid-terms.
Now we have some results.
I will say, and perhaps this will make my liberal friends a little happy, that I’m not sorry that certain Republicans lost their elections. In my home state of Kansas, I’m not sorry that the Republican lost the race for governor. It’s good that people here have had enough of Brownback-ism, and more or less any Republican candidate for governor in Kansas is going to be in the pocket of the Koch brothers. Similarly, it’s of course good that Scott Walker has been booted out in Wisconsin. There are a few more examples like that around the country where I’m not only not sorry the Republican lost, but that the Democrat won.
In terms of the Trump experiment, I can see some possibility for something good coming out of the Democratic retake of the House. One would think that the Democrats will now have to actually make concrete proposals on immigration rather than just blather ideological baloney that amounts in reality to there not being any borders. (Again, here, there are all kinds of complexities to questions of immigration and borders that the supposedly-benign view of immigration espoused by LOLs papers over.) They might actually have to take responsibility for something, for a change. As I’ve said before, there is almost a “situationist” (in the sense of Guy Debord) aspect to the way that Trump pushes “maximal” solutions in order to at least thematize the need for some solution. Perhaps here, too, we see that what is especially disruptive about Trump is that, while he is “of” the world of capitalism and the capitalist economic and “political” system, he is not entirely “in” it.
Now, compare this with what is entirely “in” this latter world, and who would not have things any other way … in other words, the Democratic Party, and all who would give aid and comfort to it.
And so, are the Democrats actually gearing up to propose solutions to these problems that have been thematized (sometimes in a forced and perhaps “extreme” way) by president Trump? No, of course not. For one thing, immediately after the midterms (even with ballots still being counted and contested in some states), the Democrats have a new hero: Jeff Sessions! They are holding new demonstrations: Protect the Mueller investigation!
Let’s note that the Democrats themselves do not officially use the term “fascism” when talking about Trump—that is instead the ostensible Marxists, including my former comrades of the formerly Maoist RCP. The latter cite the definition of fascism formulated in 1935 by the Comintern leader, Georgi Dimitrov. Dimitrov based himself on Lenin and argued that fascism is the open dictatorship of the most reactionary elements of finance capital. This describes the Democrats nicely, especially insomuch as they wrap this dictatorship up in SJW and Identity Politics rhetoric.
What leading Democrats have said in the wake of the midterms (only a few days ago, now) is that their concentration will be on more investigations of Trump, support for the Mueller investigation (including what no special prosecutor has had or is supposed to have, complete carte blanche to look into anything and everything—other than, one supposes, things like the installation of a fascist regime in the Ukraine by Obama’s and Clinton’s State Department), and attempts to impeach Trump. But hey, there are good reasons for this: 1) the Democrats know they have no alternative on the immigration/border situation, and neither do they want one, because their main aim is to undermine the working people of the U.S. for the benefit of globalist finance capital; 2) especially these newer, younger Democrats, these “fresh faces” that my liberal friends are so excited about, have never gotten down to any kind of real work other than SJW activism, and this latter kind of “work” mainly consists in name-calling to bring people down. On this latter point, let’s not forget that Identity Politics inevitably divides against itself; it would not be surprising if we are about to see a sectarianism that makes previous left sectarianisms look like a hippie drum circle.
***
Remember the very simple message that Trump had for potential African-American voters in 2016? “What do you have to lose?” Understood as a constituency, and an “identity,” things were a little more complicated than that. But perhaps the eight-percent of African-Americans who voted for Trump understood well enough that it was worth taking a chance, when the Democrats treated them as chumps. (Significantly, that eight-percent consisted in four-percent women, thirteen-percent men.) Whether African-American unemployment is down as much as Trump says, or as little as the Democrats say, it seems clear that at least it is down.
When it comes to the thematization of the “rural” and of working people—which more or less comes to the same thing, and neither is it some racially monolithic group, either (as Trump has continually thematized in speeches that brilliant liberals can only hear as something from the Nuremburg rallies)—Trump is at least bringing forward issues that do not exist in any positive or constructive way for the LOLs. This deserves credit, because, whether or not Trump is really for the working people, at least he is not the sworn enemy of working people, at least he does not openly express contempt for working people.
But I frankly think the Trump experiment, disruption, and clarification opens up much more than that for the ordinary working people, of all colors, genders, and sexualities of the United States, and one can at least hope that opportunities are opened up for ordinary people of other countries if the United States can get out of their business. (I will say more about this in a subsequent article, which at the moment I hope to title something like, “From Maoist to Trumpist? Encountering today’s “left.”)
So, to my many liberal or effectively-liberal friends who say that “revolution is not in the offing” and there is some sort of qualitative difference between normally-functioning bourgeois democracy and what Trump is and represents, and so I have to choose, my response is:
Laissez l’experience rouler!
Bill Martinis professor of philosophy emeritus from DePaul University. He is aiming to go from retired professor to renewed philosopher, and also to devote a good deal of time to making music. After twenty-eight years in Chicago, he now lives full-time in Salina, Kansas. His most recent book isEthical Marxism: The Categorical Imperative of Liberation. He has now released four albums of experimental music in his “Avant-Bass” series, most recently Raga Chaturanga (Avant-Bass 3) and Emptiness, Garden: String Quartets (Avant-Bass 4).
In 2017, hundreds of academics in Canada and Australia called for a pre-emptive ban on the development and use of lethal autonomous robotics, a move that became part of the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots.
The development of “killer robot” drones has actively been funded by the British government, which is making public statements that it has no plans to create such unmanned aerial vehicles, according to a leaked report by a UK anti-drone campaign group.
The group, called Drone Wars, published a survey called ‘Off the Leash: The Development of Autonomous Military Drones in the UK’. It specifically claims that Britain’s Defence and Security Accelerator (DASA) is specifically injecting money into the creation of the Taranis drone, as well as dozens of other similar research programmes.
Developed by BAE Systems and the UK Ministry of Defence (MoD), Taranis is capable of autonomously flying, plotting routes and locating targets. The project has cost more than 200 million GBP (259 million USD) so far, according to the Drone Wars report.
Peter Burt, author of the report, referred to “tangible evidence” that the UK MoD is actively engaged in development of “the underpinning technology with the aim of using it in military applications.”
In this vein, Burt cited Taranis as an example of a drone with “advanced autonomous capabilities”, arguing that the development of a “truly autonomous lethal drone” in the foreseeable future was now a “real possibility”.
“The government should be supporting international initiatives to prevent the development and use of fully autonomous weapons, and should be investigating the enormous potential of artificial intelligence to identify potential conflict areas and prevent wars before they start,” Brunt underscored.
The Independentcited an unnamed MoD spokesperson as rejecting reports about the UK government’s plans to create any weapons systems which would operate without input from humans.
The spokesperson pointed out that the MoD’s weapons will “always be under human control as an absolute guarantee of oversight, authority and accountability.”
Last week, The Times reported that during its Saif Sareea-3 military exercise, which wrapped up on November 3, the UK military for the first time engaged in wargames where it practiced fighting countries with more powerful armed forces, including Russia, using unmanned flying drones.Speaking at the Web Summit in Lisbon in 2017, prominent UK physicist Stephen Hawking specifically cited the advent of powerful autonomous weapons, warning that if it is not used properly, artificial intelligence “could be the worst event in the history of our civilization”.
THE SANTA SUSANA FIELD LABORATORY (ROCKETDYNE) BURNED IN THE WOOLSEY FIRE, THREATENING TOXIC EXPOSURES FROM CONTAMINATED DUST, SMOKE, ASH AND SOIL. THE DEPARTMENT OF TOXIC SUBSTANCES CONTROL DENIES RISK THAT IT CREATED BY DELAYING THE LONG PROMISED CLEANUP.
Last night, the Woolsey fire burned the contaminated Santa Susana Field Laboratory (SSFL), a former nuclear and rocket engine testing site. Footage from local television showed flames surrounding rocket test stands, and the fire’s progress through to Oak Park indicates that much of the toxic site burned.
A statement released by the California Dept. of Toxic Substances Control (DTSC) said that its staff, “do not believe the fire has caused any releases of hazardous materials that would pose a risk to people exposed to the smoke.” The statement failed to assuage community concerns given DTSC’s longtime pattern of misinformation about SSFL’s contamination and its repeated broken promises to clean it up.
“We can’t trust anything that DTSC says,” said West Hills resident Melissa Bumstead, whose young daughter has twice survived leukemia that she blames on SSFL and who has mapped 50 other cases of rare pediatric cancers near the site. Bumstead organized a group called “Parents vs. SSFL” and launched a Change.org petition demanding full cleanup of SSFL that has been signed by over 410,000 people. “DTSC repeatedly minimizes risk from SSFL and has broken every promise it ever made about the SSFL cleanup. Communities throughout the state have also been failed by DTSC. The public has no confidence in this troubled agency,” said Bumstead.
Nuclear reactor accidents, including a famous partial meltdown, tens of thousands of rocket engine tests, and sloppy environmental practices have left SSFL polluted with widespread radioactive and chemical contamination. Government-funded studies indicate increased cancers for offsite populations associated with proximity to the site, and that contamination migrates offsite over EPA levels of concern. In 2010, DTSC signed agreements with the Department of Energy and NASA that committed them to clean up all detectable contamination in their operational areas by 2017. DTSC also in 2010 committed to require Boeing, which owns most of the site, to cleanup to comparable standards. But the cleanup has not yet begun, and DTSC is currently considering proposals that will leave much, if not all, of SSFL’s contamination on site permanently.
Dr. Robert Dodge, President of Physicians for Social Responsibility-Los Angeles, shares the community’s concerns. “We know what substances are on the site and how hazardous they are. We’re talking about incredibly dangerous radionuclides and toxic chemicals such a trichloroethylene, perchlorate, dioxins and heavy metals. These toxic materials are in SSFL’s soil and vegetation, and when it burns and becomes airborne in smoke and ash, there is real possibility of heightened exposure for area residents.”
Dodge said protective measures recommended during any fire, such as staying indoors and wearing protective face masks, are even more important given the risks associated with SSFL’s contamination. Community members are organizing a campaign on social media to demand that DTSC release a public statement revealing the potential risks of exposure to SSFL contamination related to the fire.
But for residents such as Bumstead, worries will remain until SSFL is fully cleaned up. “When I look at that fire, all I see is other parents’ future heartache,” said Bumstead, “And what I feel is anger that if the DTSC had kept its word, we wouldn’t have these concerns, because the site would be cleaned up by now.”
# # #
Physicians for Social Responsibility-Los Angeles (PSR-LA) is the largest chapter of the national organization Physicians for Social Responsibility and has worked for the full cleanup of SSFL for over 30 years.. PSR-LA advocates for policies and practices that protect public health from nuclear and environmental threats and eliminate health disparities.
Parents vs. SSFL is a grassroots group of concerned parents and residents who demand compliance with cleanup agreements signed in 2010 that require a full cleanup of all radioactive and chemical contamination at the Santa Susana Field Laboratory.
Contact: Denise Duffield, 310-339-9676 or dduffield@psr-la.org, Melissa Bumstead 818-298-3192* or melissabumstead@sbcglobal.net,
An article in Sunday’s New York Times entitled “Remembering the Forgotten War” demonstrates perfectly the moral bankruptcy of the philosophy of foreign interventionism. Calling for the Korean War to become more highly remembered, the author, Hampton Sides, extols some of the popular justifications for subjecting U.S. troops to death, injury, and maiming in the Korean War.
Hampton tells the story of a veteran named Franklin Chapman, who is still alive. Hampton was sent to fight in Korea, was shot several times, and also hit by shrapnel. He was taken captive by the enemy and was held as a POW for three years. Today, the 85-year -old suffers from the aftereffects of frostbite, experiences aches and pains from his wounds, and suffers severe memory loss, sometimes unable to recognize his daughter.
Sides implies that while all this is regrettable, it’s all justifiable because Korean War veterans “stopped a naked act of Communist aggression and opposed three malevolent dictators — Stalin, Mao and Kim – while helping South Korea take wing as a democracy.”
What is fascinating about Sides’s article is that it is completely bereft of any moral outrage whatsoever against the U.S. government and, specifically, the U.S. national-security establishment. Sides seems to forget something important: The reason that Chapman was there in Korea waging war was because the president of the United States and the Pentagon ordered him to be there.
I was curious about Chapman and so I looked him up. It turns out that he has written a biography that is posted online, where he tells the reason he joined the military. No, it wasn’t to stop communist aggression in Korea or to oppose three malevolent communist dictators. Chapman explains that he joined the military for one reason alone: He needed a job.
My hunch is that like many people who join the military, he believed that his job would be to defend the United States from invasion or attack. My hunch is that the last thing he ever expected was to be sent to wage a land war in Asia. But that is precisely what the U.S. government did to him. It ordered him to report to Korea to kill or be killed.
That doesn’t seem to concern Hampton Sides, any more than it concerns any interventionist. Equally important, it obviously doesn’t concern Sides that the order to send Chapman to fight in the Korean War was illegal under our form of government. The U.S. Constitution, which governs the actions of federal officials, including those in the Pentagon, prohibits the president from waging war against a foreign nation without first securing a declaration of war from Congress. It is undisputed that President Truman, who ordered U.S. soldiers into Korea, did not secure a congressional declaration of war. That means that he had no legal authority to order Chapman or any other U.S. soldier to kill or die in Korea.
In claiming that Chapman was fighting to oppose communist aggression, Sides ignores the fact that the Korean War was actually a civil war, not a war between two independent and sovereign nations. The country had been artificially divided into two halves by Soviet communist leader Joseph Stalin, who, ironically, was a partner and ally of the U.S. government during World War II. (The irony lies in the fact that Sides extols Chapman for opposing the man who had been a partner and ally of the U.S. government just a few years before.) In any event, every Korean understood that the dividing line between North and South Korea was just an artificial construct based on international politics. Even today, if you ask a person of Korean descent here in the United States where they are from, they always, without exception, say “Korea” rather than “South Korea.”
We can concede that the northern half of the country was ruled by a brutal communist regime, one that attempted to unify the country by force. But why does a nation’s civil war justify U.S. intervention? Why should U.S. soldiers be sacrificed to help out one side or another in a civil war? That’s not what most U.S. soldiers were signing up to do after World War II. They were signing up to defend the United States, not help out one side or another in another nation’s civil war. (By the way, the same principle applies to the Vietnam War, another favorite foreign war of the interventionists.)
Another aspect of the Korean War that Sides fails to mention is conscription. The U.S. military didn’t have enough men to intervene against the North Korean regime, and not enough American men were volunteering for “service.” So, Truman and the military resorted to conscription. That means that they were forcing American men, against their will, to go to Korea and kill or be killed. An interventionist would say that it was necessary to destroy the freedom of Americans to protect the “freedom” and “democracy” of South Koreans.
Sides’ expression “helping South Korea take wing as a democracy” is an interesting one. It’s interesting because South Korea’s first elected president, Syngman Rhee, was one of the most brutal dictators in the world. Immediately after taking office, he curtailed political dissent and authorized his goons to engage in indefinite detention, torture, assassination, death squads, and massacres.
On the suspension of hostilities in 1953, it was clear that the National Assembly, which elected the president, was going to boot Rhee out of office. In order to avoid that, he ordered a mass arrest of opposition politicians and then unilaterally changed the Constitution to enable him to be elected directly by the citizenry. He remained in power until 1960, when he was forced to resign after his police shot demonstrators who were protesting his regime.
This is what Sides and other interventionists call “democracy taking wing.” It brings to mind the U.S.-inspired coup in Chile in 1973, which ousted the democratically elected socialist president of the country, Salvador Allende, and installed a brutal right-wing military dictator in his stead, army Gen. Augusto Pinochet. To this day, interventionists say that the Chilean coup demonstrated that “democracy was taking wing” in Chile with the coup that nullified the presidential election, followed by a 16-year-long brutal military dictatorship entailing round-ups of some 50,000 people, torturing most of them, raping and committing gruesome sexual acts against women, and killing and disappearing around 3,000 people.
Sides and other interventionists are dead wrong about the Korean War and other foreign interventions. No U.S. soldier deserves to be ordered to faraway lands to kill or be killed or maimed, as Franklin Chapman was. If Sides or other interventionists want to go overseas and help out one side or another in some faraway civil war, they are free to do so. Just leave U.S. soldiers out of it. The job of a U.S. soldier is to defend the United States from invasion or attack, not be sent to participate in some bogus fight for “freedom” or “democracy” in a foreign country.
The previous government ordered some 90 of the fifth-generation jets for its military, but the Five Star and Lega parties, which won the last election, have been trying to either scrap the deal or reduce spending on it.
The Italian government is planning to reduce the number of F-35 jets it will buy over the next five years from 10 to six or seven aircraft, Defence News reported citing an anonymous source. According to the media outlet, Rome will not reduce the total amount of ordered jets, but instead will leave the final decision on their fate to the next government.
The move will allow Italy to avoid or reduce contract penalties and free up some resources for the government’s commitments, Defence Minister Elisabetta Trenta told the media earlier.
“What I would like to do is lighten the load, since we have other spending commitments in Europe. We will try to stretch out deliveries instead of cutting the order, which would reduce offsets and mean penalties,” she said.
The outlet’s source added that the money saved by postponing the delivery of three or four of the F-35 jets will help Rome fund its social programs and tax cuts.
Earlier, a member of the now-ruling Five Star party in the Italian parliament, Tatiana Basilio, vowed in 2017 that the country will scrap the contract for the delivery of F-35 warplanes. Italy intends to buy a total of 90 of the fifth-generation jets. Eight jets have already been delivered to Amendola air base, and three others are being used to train pilots in the US.
This Remembrance Day will doubtless see strenuous efforts by some to justify the fruitless bloodbath that was the First World War. Revisionist commentators have long attempted to rehabilitate the conflict as necessary and just, but the arguments do not stand up. It does no service to the memory of the dead to allow any illusions in the justice or necessity of war, particularly so when the precedents will be used to argue for the next ‘necessary’ conflict. From the causes of the war, to its prosecution and its results, here are the counter-arguments to ten common pro-war ploys.
1 The war was fought in defence of democracy.
This is contradicted by the basic facts. Germany had universal manhood suffrage while in Britain, including Ireland, some 40% of men still did not qualify for the vote. In Germany also, there were attempts to justify the war on the grounds that it was being fought to defend civilised values against a repressive, militaristic state, in the form of Russian autocracy.
2 Britain went to war due to a treaty obligation to defend the neutrality of Belgium.
There was no clear and accepted obligation on Britain to do this, and, in fact, before the Belgian issue appeared, the war party in the cabinet was already pushing for British intervention on the entirely different ground that there were naval obligations to France. These obligations had been developed in secret arrangements between the military of both countries, and were never subject to any kind of democratic accountability. The Germans even offered guarantees over Belgian integrity, which the British government refused to consider at all.
3 German aggression was the driving force for war.
However aggressive the German leadership may have been in 1914, the British establishment was at least as determined to take the opportunity to go to war with its imperial rival. At one point the Foreign Office even seized on imaginary German incursions into France to justify a British declaration of war on Germany. The declaration letter had to be retrieved from the German ambassador and rewritten when it was discovered that the stories were false. The enthusiasm of the British ruling class for war undermines any justification for it based on German aggression.
4 Germany had started a naval arms race with Britain.
Imperialist competition between the two states over markets and resources preceded the arms race in the fifteen years before the war. Britain’s naval power was the vital element in its ability to restrict German access to markets and resources across the world. Unless Britain was willing to allow Germany to expand economically, the logic of capitalist competition meant that Germany was bound to challenge British naval supremacy. The latent violence of the leading imperial nation is always the context for aggressive challenges to the status quo on the part of rising powers.
5 German imperialism was uniquely vicious and had to be challenged.
The atrocities committed against the Herrero people in Namibia were indeed terrible crimes, but were hardly unique compared to the horrors committed by all those involved in the rubber industry in the Belgian Congo, to take but one example. Also, European opinion had only a few years before 1914 been horrified by the brutality of another colonial power when it was engaged in ruthlessly expanding its dominance over independent states in Africa. This was Britain in its wars of aggression against the Boer states in South Africa, during which concentration camps were first used in order to control a civilian population.
6 Public opinion was united in favour of the war, as shown by images of cheering crowds in 1914.
It is now usually admitted that the degree of enthusiasm for the war was strictly limited, and the evidence is that the crowds who gathered at the outbreak of war were by no means united in martial enthusiasm. In fact sizeable and widespread anti-war demonstrations occurred in both Britain and Germany. Had the leaderships of Labour and Socialist parties across Europe not caved into demands to support their national ruling classes in going to war, it is quite possible that the conflict could have been stopped in its tracks.
7 The morale of British troops fighting on the Western Front remained intact to the end of the war.
While Britain may not have suffered quite the same scale of mutinies as in the German and French armies, at times there were whole stretches of the front where troops became so unreliable that generals did not dare order them into combat. The evidence for widespread cynicism about war strategies, contempt for the military leadership, and grave doubts about the purpose of the war, cannot be wished away by the revisionists. In so far as soldiers carried on willingly fighting the war, the explanation needs to be sought in the habituation to obedience, as well as the threat of court-martial executions. There is no need to invoke either fervid nationalism or any kind of deep psychological blood-lust as explanations.
8 The military leadership, notably General Haig, was not a bunch of incompetent ‘donkeys’.
Attempts to rehabilitate the likes of General Haig founder on some of the basic facts about the tactics he relentlessly employed. Repeated infantry attacks on opposing trenches consistently failed to gain any clear advantage, while causing colossal casualties. On the first day of the battle of the Somme, 1st July 1916, 57,000 troops out of 120,000 were killed or wounded. Despite continuing carnage on an incredible scale, Haig carried on ordering further attacks. When any hope of a breakthrough against the German lines was clearly lost, the purpose of the battle was shifted to attrition pure and simple. The plan now was to kill more German troops than the British lost. Since there was no way of reliably measuring the casualties on the other side, Haig relied on estimating it through the losses of his own side. On this basis he began to be angered when the army suffered too few losses, as when he complained that one division in September had lost under a thousand men. There can be no defence for this kind of disregard of human life.
9 The end of the war saw the triumph of liberal capitalism, against collapsing autocratic Empires.
In fact all states involved in the war were deeply destabilised. Even the United States, whose involvement was the most limited, experienced the ‘Red Summer’ of 1919, with unprecedented labour revolts, such as the Seattle general strike, alongside savage repression of socialists and black Americans. Britain saw the beginning of the Irish war of independence, and increasing unrest in India, which marks, in effect, the point at which the Empire began to unravel. Domestically, there was also a wave of radical working-class unrest, particularly in the ‘Red Clydeside’, which culminated in troops being sent into Glasgow to impose martial law.
10 The war achieved anything worthwhile whatsoever.
The war opened up a period of endemic economic dislocation, and outright crisis. In Britain there was a decade of industrial decline and high unemployment even before the Great Depression. In effect, it was only the Second World War which brought the major capitalist powers out of the slump. The First World War saw the point at which capitalism became addicted to war and to a permanent arms economy. The war demonstrated the capacity of capitalism to create industrialised waste, carnage and destruction on a colossal scale. The remembrance of the war is appropriately a time for mourning the horror, the loss and the waste of it all, but it should also provoke a determination to resist our rulers’ insistence on promoting war to further their interests. War can achieve nothing other than to create the conditions for further wars.
Popular opinion has, ever since its ending, remembered the First World War as a time of horrendous and futile misery and slaughter, as epitomising political and military leaders’ incompetence and callous disregard for human life. That popular judgement, which has helped turn common opinion against war in general, was correct, and we must not let the war mongers dismiss this instance of the wisdom of ordinary people.
The specifics for General Haig’s murderous rage can be found in Adam Hochschild, To End All Wars (Pan 2013), p.209 – reviewed on this site by Lindsey German.
Those in the war industry and the business of commemorating the dead have little time for peace, even as they supposedly celebrate it. For them, peace is the enemy as much as armed opposing combatants, if not more so. Dr Brendan Nelson of the Australian War Memorial is every bit the propagandist in this regard, encased in armour of permanent reminder: Do not forget the sacrifice; do not forget the slaughter. The issue is how war, not peace, is commemorated.
That theme was repeated, for the most part, in Paris on November 11. US President Donald Trump spoke of “our sacred obligation to memorialise our fallen heroes.” French President Emmanuel Macron marked the 100th anniversary of the Great War by having a dig at nationalism, calling it a “betrayal of patriotism” (is there a difference?). The nationalists, he warned, were getting busy, these “old demons coming back to wreak chaos and death”. The intellectuals (and here, he alluded to Julien Benda’s 1927 classic, La trahison des clercs) were at risk of capitulating.
But Macron, rather slyly, was hoping that the French obsession with universal values would somehow render his message less parochial: to be French was to be an internationalist, not a tunnel-visioned, rabid nationalist. The soldiers who perished in the Great War did so in the defence of France’s “universal values” in order to repudiate the “selfishness of nationals only looking after their own interests.” Much room for disagreement on that score, and Marine Le Pen would have been a suitable corrective.
The peace activities of the Great War, asphyxiated, smothered and derided in texts and official narratives, are rarely discussed in the mass marketed solemnity of commemorations. The writings of those prophets who warned that any adventurism such as what transpired in 1914 would be met with immeasurable suffering are also conspicuously absent. Jean de Bloc, whose magisterial multi-volume The Future of War appeared in 1898 in Russian, found it “impossible” that Europe’s leaders would embark on a conflict against each other; to do so would “cause humanity a great moral evil… civil order will be threatened by new theories of social revolution”. The end would be catastrophic. “How many flourishing countries will be turned into wilderness and rich cities into ruins! How many tears will be shed, how many will be left in beggary!”
These sceptics were the enlightened ones, scorned for not having the sense of fun that comes with joining battle and being butchered in the name of some vague patriotic sentiment. If human beings are animals at play, then play to the death, if need be – the rational ones were sidelined, persecuted and hounded. They are the party poopers.
Prior to the first shots of the guns of August in 1914, Europe had witnessed a slew of meetings and activities associated with the theme of peace. From 1889, pacifists were busy with Universal Peace Congresses, while the Inter-parliamentary Union made a stab at efforts and ideas to reduce national tensions. The Hague Peace Conferences of 1899 and 1907, with one scheduled to take place in 1915, suggested a certain sensibility, even as the military machinery of Europe was getting ominously more lethal. At the very least, the political classes were playing at peace.
The 1,200 women who gathered at The Hague in 1915 as part of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom feature as sane if forgotten voices before the murderous machine truly got going. Their work involved attendees from 12 countries and the passing of 20 resolutions on war. They worked to convince those engaged in the murderous machine about the folly and were dismissed accordingly as cranks and nuisances.
The peace movement was sundered by the patriotic diseases that engulfed the continent, and such organisations as the International Peace Bureau failed to reach a consensus on how best to quell warring aggressions. In January 1915, its Berne meeting was characterised by division, best exemplified by a resolution denouncing Germany and Australia for egregious breaches of international law. The vote was divided evenly, and unity was destroyed.
While monuments to the war makers and fallen soldiers dot the town squares of the combatant nations, lingering like morbid call cards for failed militarism, there are virtually none in the service of peace. The tenaciously wise and farsighted Austrian noblewoman Bertha von Suttner, the first woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize in 1905 and suspect the motives of governments behind the Hague Peace conferences, hardly figures in commemorative statuary. Nor does Rosa Luxemburg, who began a twelve-month sentence in Berlin’s Barnimstrasse Womens’ Prison on February 18, 1915 for “inciting public disobedience”.
Her crime, committed during the words of her famous Fechenheim address, was to call upon German workers to refuse shooting their French counterparts should war break out. “Victory or defeat?” she would sadly reflect in her anti-war tract, The Junius Pamphlet (1915) written whilst in confinement. “Thus sounds the slogan of the ruling militarism in all the warring countries, and, like an echo, the Social Democratic leaders have taken it up.”
As Adam Hochschild sourly noted in 2014, those who refuse to fight or barrack for war are ignored by the commemorative classes. “America’s politicians still praise Iraq War veterans to the skies, but what senator has a kind word to say about the hundreds of thousands who marched and demonstrated before the invasion was even launched to try to stop our soldiers from risking their lives in the first place?”
Events conspicuously against the spirit of killing and maiming opponents, such as that which took place during the short lived Christmas Truce of 1914, have only been remembered – and tolerated – because of their public relations quality. These events sell chocolates and cakes; they draw people to sites and commodities. The truce signalled no revolution; it did not challenge the war planners. “It’s safe to celebrate,” commented Hochschild, “because it threatened nothing.” The sovereignty of war, the institution of state-sanctioned killing, remained, as it still does, though selling peace can be lucrative when the shells have stopped falling.
The obscenity here is that conflict, most notably that of the First World War, was meant to be cathartic, a brief bit of masculine cleansing that would end by the arbitrarily designated time of Christmas. It was advertised as a picnic, a brief testosterone outing which would see men return intact. Foolishly, such figures as HG Wells saw it as “the war to end war”, so get it over and done with, minimal fuss and all. (To be fair to Wells, he found disgust and despair subsequently, reflecting upon this in The Bulpington of Blup in 1932.)
This was, truly, as the title of Margaret MacMillan’s work goes, the war that ended peace, and we should not forget the political and military classes, instrumental in dashing off soldiers to their death, who engineered it with coldness and ignorance. Foolishness and demagoguery tend to hold hands all too often, distant from that most moving sentiment expressed by the jailed US socialist activist and presidential candidate Eugene V. Debs. “I have no country to fight for; my country is the earth; and I am a citizen of the world.”
Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne and can be reached at: bkampmark@gmail.com.
World leaders gathered in Paris on Sunday under the Arc de Triomphe to mark the centennial anniversary ending World War I. In an absurd way, the Napoleon-era arc was a fitting venue – because the ceremony and the rhetoric from President Emmanuel Macron was a “triumph” of lies and platitudes.
Among the estimated 70 international leaders were US President Trump and Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin, each sitting on either side of Macron and his wife. German Chancellor Angela Merkel was also given pride of place beside the French president.
Macron’s address to the dignitaries was supposed to be a call for international multilateralism. He urged a “brotherhood” for the cause of world peace. He also made a pointed rebuke of “nationalism” as posing a danger to peace – a remark which seemed aimed at Donald Trump who recently boasted of his politics with that very word.
But, ironically, everything about the ceremony and Macron’s speech resonated with jingoistic French nationalism, not his avowed multinationalism. As the politicians sat under the Arc de Triomphe, Macron walked around its circular esplanade in a salute to assembled French military forces bearing assault rifles and bayonets. The French anthem – The Marseillaise – was played twice, once by an army brass band, the second time sung by an army choir. There was also a military plane flyover displaying the blue, red and white tricolor of the French national flag.
In his speech, Macron talked about soldiers coming from all over the world to “die for France” during the 1914-18 Great War. He even said at one point that the war was fought for “the vision of France” and its “universal values”.
This was fluent drivel, French-style. No wonder Russia’s Putin momentarily gave a look of boredom as Macron waxed lyrical.
The speechifying and commemoration was completely detached from current realities of conflict and international tensions.
Among the “brotherhood” whom Macron was appealing to were Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu whose military forces continue to bomb and slaughter Palestinian civilians in illegally occupied territory. Also present was Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko whose armed militias continue to terrorize the people of eastern Ukraine with the blatant objective of instigating a war between the US-led NATO alliance and Russia.
Listening to Macron one would think that World War I erupted mysteriously from no specific cause and that an estimated 10 million soldiers were all killed in heroic battles for noble principles.
There was, of course, no mention by Macron of imperialist warmongering and the barbaric sacrifice of humans as slaves in the service of national capitalist power interests.
Grotesquely, as the world leaders donned solemn faces and mouthed pious platitudes for peace, the whole occasion was a triumph in burying reality and the ongoing causes of wars, as well as whitewashing the very culprits responsible for wars. Among the war criminals wearing a mournful black suit was former French President Nicolas Sarkozy who launched the NATO blitzkrieg on Libya in 2011.
While the empty, self-indulgent rhetoric was ringing out, one couldn’t help but recall some of the most glaring contemporary contradictions that were blocked out with awesome Orwellian efficiency.
Just this week, reports emerged of the horrific civilian death toll from the American air force bombing the Syrian city of Raqqa. The city was razed to the ground by US air strikes last year – supposedly to defeat the ISIS terror group. Some 8,000 bodies of civilians, mainly women and children, have now been recovered by Syrian government forces. And that’s only from clearing away a tiny area of rubble for the whole city.
What the Americans did in Raqqa was a monumental war crime, all the more criminal because US forces, along with their NATO partners Britain and France, are illegally present in and assaulting sovereign Syrian territory.
As Macron was telling world leaders about “the vision of France”, hundreds were being killed in Yemen in a battle to strangle the entire population by taking the port city of Hodeida. The genocidal war on that country – which is putting up to 16 million people at risk from starvation – has been fully backed by France, the US and Britain, from their supply of warplanes and bombs to the Saudi and Emirati aggressive forces.
We could mention other specific conflicts where the culprits are clearly identified. For example, the multi-million-dollar support from Washington for the Azov Battalion and other Neo-Nazi militias in Ukraine, which openly emulate the genocidal conduct of Hitler’s Third Reich to exterminate ethnic Russians.
We could mention how US-led NATO forces continue to expand towards Russian territory with outrageous provocation. The mounting earlier this month of the biggest-ever NATO war drills since the Cold War in the Arctic region adjacent to Russia’s northern border was a brazen threat of rehearsing invasion. The announced tearing up of yet another nuclear arms control treaty unilaterally by Washington is a reckless undermining of global security.
Washington threatens China with naval forces marauding near Beijing’s maritime territory in the South China Sea. Washington blockades Iran with illegal economic warfare and openly agitates for regime change. Washington declares Venezuela, Nicaragua and Cuba a “troika of tyranny” and reserves the right to threaten each of these countries with military invasion at any time.
Meanwhile, this weekend, Russia hosted peace talks in Moscow between the warring parties of Afghanistan. It was seen as a major breakthrough in trying to bring peace to the Central Asia country which has been wracked by 17 years of violence since US forces began their ongoing military occupation – allegedly to defeat terrorism.
Elsewhere, Russia has engaged with Turkey, Germany and France to convene a summit for peaceful reconstruction of Syria. The latest summit held in Ankara at the end of last month follows several other such meetings in Astana and Sochi, largely at the behest of Russian leader Vladimir Putin, to find a political settlement to the nearly eight-year war in Syria – a war that was fomented covertly by Washington and its allies for regime change.
France’s Macron talks about “multilateralism” for world peace, yet the two countries which have arguably supported and implemented multilateralism in practice are Russia and China in their calls and policies for global partnership and economic development.
And yet it is Russia and China that are being harassed with American and European sanctions, and US military provocations.
The unilateral, lawless imperialism that engendered World War I and 20 years later World War II is still alive and dangerously vigorous. We only have to look around the present world to realize that. But when the culprits indulge in a triumph of bullshit then we also know that the world is once again in very grave danger.
What was World War One about? How did it start? Who won? And what did they win? Now, 100 years after those final shots rang out, these questions still puzzle historians and laymen alike. But as we shall see, this confusion is not a happenstance of history, but the wool that has been pulled over our eyes to stop us from seeing what WWI really was. This is the story of WWI that you didn’t read in the history books. This is The WWI Conspiracy.
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TRANSCRIPT
INTRODUCTION
November 11, 1918.
All across the Western front, the clocks that were lucky enough to escape the four years of shelling chimed the eleventh hour. And with that the First World War came to an end.
From 10 o’clock to 11 — the hour for the cessation of hostilities — the opposed batteries simply raised hell. Not even the artillery prelude to our advance into the Argonne had anything on it. To attempt an advance was out of the question. It was not a barrage. It was a deluge.
[…]
Nothing quite so electrical in effect as the sudden stop that came at 11 A. M. has ever occurred to me. It was 10:60 precisely and — the roar stopped like a motor car hitting a wall. The resulting quiet was uncanny in comparison. From somewhere far below ground, Germans began to appear. They clambered to the parapets and began to shout wildly. They threw their rifles, hats, bandoleers, bayonets and trench knives toward us. They began to sing.
And just like that, it was over. Four years of the bloodiest carnage the world had ever seen came to a stop as sudden and bewildering as its start. And the world vowed “Never again.”
Each year, we lay the wreath. We hear “The Last Post.” We mouth the words “never again” like an incantation. But what does it mean? To answer this question, we have to understand what WWI was.
WWI was an explosion, a breaking point in history. In the smoldering shell hole of that great cataclysm lay the industrial-era optimism of never-ending progress. Old verities about the glory of war lay strewn around the battlefields of that “Great War” like a fallen soldier left to die in No Man’s Land, and along with it lay all the broken dreams of a world order that had been blown apart. Whether we know it or not, we here in the 21st century are still living in the crater of that explosion, the victims of a First World War that we are only now beginning to understand.
What was World War One about? How did it start? Who won? And what did they win? Now, 100 years after those final shots rang out, these questions still puzzle historians and laymen alike. But as we shall see, this confusion is not a happenstance of history, but the wool that has been pulled over our eyes to stop us from seeing what WWI really was.
This is the story of WWI that you didn’t read in the history books. This is The WWI Conspiracy.
PART ONE – TO START A WAR
June 28, 1914.
The Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, and his wife Sophie are in Sarajevo for a military inspection. In retrospect, it’s a risky provocation, like tossing a match into a powder keg. Serbian nationalism is rising, the Balkans are in a tumult of diplomatic crises and regional wars, and tensions between the kingdom of Serbia and the Austro-Hungarian Empire are set to spill over.
But despite warnings and ill omens, the royal couple’s security is extremely lax. They board an open-top sports car and proceed in a six-car motorcade along a pre-announced route. After an inspection of the military barracks, they head toward the Town Hall for a scheduled reception by the Mayor. The visit is going ahead exactly as planned and precisely on schedule.
And then the bomb goes off.
As we now know, the motorcade was a death trap. Six assassins lined the royal couple’s route that morning, armed with bombs and pistols. The first two failed to act, but the third, Nedeljko Čabrinović, panicked and threw his bomb onto the folded back cover of the Archduke’s convertible. It bounced off onto the street, exploding under the next car in the convoy. Franz Ferdinand and his wife, unscathed, were rushed on to the Town Hall, passing the other assassins along the route too quickly for them to act.
Having narrowly escaped death, the Archduke called off the rest of his scheduled itinerary to visit the wounded from the bombing at the hospital. By a remarkable twist of fate, the driver took the couple down the wrong route, and, when ordered to reverse, stopped the car directly in front of the delicatessen where would-be assassin Gavrilo Princip had gone after having failing in his mission along the motorcade. There, one and a half metres in front of Princip, was the Archduke and his wife. He took two shots, killing both of them.
Yes, even the official history books—the books written and published by the “winners”—record that the First World War started as the result of a conspiracy. After all it was—as all freshman history students are taught—the conspiracy to assassinate the Archduke Franz Ferdinand that led to the outbreak of war.
That story, the official story of the origins of World War I, is familiar enough by now: In 1914, Europe was an interlocking clockwork of alliances and military mobilization plans that, once set in motion, ticked inevitably toward all out warfare. The assassination of the Archduke was merely the excuse to set that clockwork in motion, and the resulting “July crisis” of diplomatic and military escalations led with perfect predictability to continental and, eventually, global war. In this carefully sanitized version of history, World War I starts in Sarajevo on June 28, 1914.
But this official history leaves out so much of the real story about the build up to war that it amounts to a lie. But it does get one thing right: The First World War was the result of a conspiracy.
To understand this conspiracy we must turn not to Sarajevo and the conclave of Serbian nationalists plotting their assassination in the summer of 1914, but to a chilly drawing room in London in the winter of 1891. There, three of the most important men of the age—men whose names are but dimly remembered today—are taking the first concrete steps toward forming a secret society that they have been discussing amongst themselves for years. The group that springs from this meeting will go on to leverage the wealth and power of its members to shape the course of history and, 23 years later, will drive the world into the first truly global war.
Their plan reads like outlandish historical fiction. They will form a secret organization dedicated to the “extension of British rule throughout the world” and “the ultimate recovery of the United States of America as an integral part of a British Empire.” The group is to be structured along the lines of a religious brotherhood (the Jesuit order is repeatedly invoked as a model) divided into two circles: an inner circle, called “The Society of the Elect,” who are to direct the activity of the larger, outer circle, dubbed “The Association of Helpers” who are not to know of the inner circle’s existence.
“British rule” and “inner circles” and “secret societies.” If presented with this plan today, many would say it was the work of an imaginative comic book writer. But the three men who gathered in London that winter afternoon in 1891 were no mere comic book writers; they were among the wealthiest and most influential men in British society, and they had access to the resources and the contacts to make that dream into a reality.
Present at the meeting that day: William T. Stead, famed newspaper editor whose Pall Mall Gazette broke ground as a pioneer of tabloid journalism and whose Review of Reviews was enormously influential throughout the English-speaking world; Reginald Brett, later known as Lord Esher, an historian and politician who became friend, confidant and advisor to Queen Victoria, King Edward VII, and King George V, and who was known as one of the primary powers-behind-the-throne of his era; and Cecil Rhodes, the enormously wealthy diamond magnate whose exploits in South Africa and ambition to transform the African continent would earn him the nickname of “Colossus” by the satirists of the day.
But Rhodes’ ambition was no laughing matter. If anyone in the world had the power and ability to form such a group at the time, it was Cecil Rhodes.
Richard Grove, historical researcher and author, TragedyAndHope.com.
RICHARD GROVE: Cecil Rhodes also was from Britain. He was educated at Oxford, but he only went to Oxford after he went to South Africa. He had an older brother he follows into South Africa. The older brother was working in the diamond mines, and by the time Rhodes gets there he’s got a set up, and his brother says “I’m gonna go off and dig in the gold mines. They just found gold!” And so he leaves Cecil Rhodes, his younger brother—who’s, like, in his 20s—with this whole diamond mining operation. Rhodes then goes to Oxford, comes back down to South Africa with the help of Lord Rothschild, who had funding efforts behind De Beers and taking advantage of that situation. And from there they start to use what—there’s no other term than “slave labor,” which then turns in later to the apartheid policy of South Africa.
GERRY DOCHERTY: Well, Rhodes was particularly important because in many ways, at the end of the 19th century, he seriously epitomized where capitalism was [and] where wealth really lay.
DOCHERTY: Rhodes had the money and he had the contacts. He was a great Rothschild man and his mining wealth was literally uncountable. He wanted to associate himself with Oxford because Oxford gave him the kudos of the university of knowledge, of that kind of power.
And in fact that was centered in a very secretive place called “All Souls College.” Still you’ll find many references to All Souls College and “people behind the curtain” and such phrases—”power behind thrones.” Rhodes was centrally important in actually putting money up in order to begin to gather together like-minded people of great influence.
Rhodes was not shy about his ambitions, and his intention to form such a group were known to many. Throughout his short life, Rhodes discussed his intentions openly with many of his associates, who, unsurprisingly, happened to be among the most influential figures in British society at that time.
More remarkably, this secret society—which was to wield its power behind the throne—was not a secret at all. The New York Times even published an article discussing the founding of the group in the April 9, 1902, edition of the paper, shortly after Rhodes’ death.
The article, headlined “Mr. Rhodes’s Ideal of Anglo-Saxon Greatness” and carrying the remarkable sub-head “He Believed a Wealthy Secret Society Should Work to Secure the World’s Peace and a British-American Federation,” summarized this sensational plan by noting that Rhodes’ “idea for the development of the English-speaking race was the foundation of ‘a society copied, as to organization, from the Jesuits.’” Noting that his vision involved uniting “the United States Assembly and our House of Commons to achieve “the peace of the world,” the article quotes Rhodes as saying: “The only thing feasible to carry out this idea is a secret society gradually absorbing the wealth of the world.”
This idea is laid down in black and white in a series of wills that Rhodes wrote throughout his life, wills that not only laid out his plan to create such a society and provided the funds to do so, but, even more remarkably, were collected in a volume published after his death by co-conspirator William T. Stead.
GROVE: Rhodes also left his his great deal of money—not having any children, not having married, dying at a young age—left it in a very well-known last will and testament, of which there were several different editions naming different benefactors, naming different executors.
So in 1902 Cecil Rhodes dies. There’s a book published that contains his last will and testament. The guy who wrote the book, William T. Stead, was in charge of a British publication called The Review of Reviews. He was part of Rhodes’ Round Table group. He at one time was an executor for the will, and in that will it says that he laments the loss of America from the British Empire and that they should formulate a secret society with the specific aim of bringing America back into the Empire. He talks about this a few different times throughout the will, then he names all the countries that they need to include in this list to have world domination, to have an English-speaking union, to have British race as the enforced culture on all countries around the world.
The will contains the goal. The goal is amended over a series of years and supported and used to gain support. And then by the time he dies in 1902 there’s funding, there’s a plan, there’s an agenda, there’s working groups and it all launches and then takes hold. And then not too long later, you’ve got World War one and then from that you’ve got World War two and then you’ve got a century of control and slavery that really could have been prevented.
When, at the time of Rhodes’ death in 1902, this “secret” society decided to partially reveal itself, it did so under the cloak of peace. It was only because they desired world peace, they insisted, that they had created their group in the first place, and only for the noblest of reasons that they aimed to “gradually absorb the wealth of the world.”
But contrary to this pacific public image, from its very beginnings the group was interested primarily in war. In fact, one of the first steps taken by this “Rhodes Round Table” (as it was known by some) was to maneuver the British Empire into war in South Africa. This “Boer War” of 1899-1902 would serve a dual purpose: it would unite the disparate republics and colonies of South Africa into a single unit under British imperial control, and, not incidentally, it would bring the rich gold deposits of the Transvaal Republic into the orbit of the Rothschild/Rhodes-controlled British South Africa Company.
The war was, by the group’s own admission, entirely its doing. The point man for the operation was Sir Alfred Milner, a close associate of Rhodes and a member of the secret society’s inner circle who was then the governor of the British Cape Colony. Although largely forgotten today, Alfred Milner (later “1st Viscount Milner”) was perhaps the most important single figure in Britain at the dawn of the 20th century. From Rhodes’ death in 1902, he became the unofficial head of the roundtable group and directed its operations, leveraging the vast wealth and influence of the group’s exclusive membership to his own ends.
With Milner, there was no compunction or moral hand-wringing about the methods used to bring about those ends. In a letter to Lord Roberts, Milner casually confessed to having engineered the Boer War: “I precipitated the crisis, which was inevitable, before it was too late. It is not very agreeable, and in many eyes, not a very creditable piece of business to have been largely instrumental in bringing about a war.”
When Rhodes’ co-conspirator and fellow secret society inner circle member William Stead objected to war in South Africa, Rhodes told him: “You will support Milner in any measure that he may take short of war. I make no such limitation. I support Milner absolutely without reserve. If he says peace, I say peace; if he says war, I say war. Whatever happens, I say ditto to Milner.”
The Boer War, involving unimaginable brutality—including the death of 26,000 women and children in the world’s first (British) concentration camps—ended as Rhodes and his associates intended: with the formerly separate pieces of South Africa being united under British control. Perhaps even more importantly from the perspective of the secret society, it left Alfred Milner as High Commission of the new South African Civil Service, a position from which he would cultivate a team of bright, young, largely Oxford-educated men who would go on to serve the group and its ends.
And from the end of the Boer War onward, those ends increasingly centered around the task of eliminating what Milner and the Round Table perceived as the single greatest threat to the British Empire: Germany.
DOCHERTY: So in the start it was influence—people who could influence politics, people who had the money to influence statesmen—and the dream. The dream of actually crushing Germany. This was a basic mindset of this group as it gathered together.
Germany. In 1871, the formerly separate states of modern-day Germany united into a single empire under the rule of Willhelm I. The consolidation and industrialization of a united Germany had fundamentally changed the balance of power in Europe. By the dawn of the 20th century, the British Empire found itself dealing not with its traditional French enemies or its long-standing Russian rivals for supremacy over Europe, but the upstart German Empire. Economically, technologically, even militarily: if the trends continued, it would not be long before Germany began to rival and even surpass the British Empire.
For Alfred Milner and the group he had formed around him out of the old Rhodes Round Table society, it was obvious what had to be done: to change France and Russia from enemies into friends as a way of isolating, and, eventually, crushing Germany.
PETER HOF: Yes, well from the British perspective, Germany, after their unification in 1871, they became very strong very quickly. And over time this worried the British more and more, and they began to think that Germany represented a challenge to their world hegemony. And slowly but surely they came to the decision that Germany must be confronted just as they had come to the same decision with regard to other countries; Spain and Portugal and especially France and now Germany.
German finished goods were marginally better than those from Britain, they were building ships that were marginally better than those of Britain, and all of this. The British elite very slowly came to the decision that that Germany needed to be confronted while it was still possible to do so. It might not be possible to do so if they waited too long. And so this was how the indecision crystallize.
I think that Britain might possibly have accepted the German ascendance, but they had something that that was was close at hand, and that was the Franco-Russian Alliance. And they thought if they could hook in with that alliance, then they had the possibility of defeating Germany quickly and without too much trouble. And that is basically what they did.
But crafting an alliance with two of Britain’s biggest rivals and turning public opinion against one of its dearest continental friends was no mean feat. To do so would require nothing less than for Milner and his group to seize control of the press, the military and all the diplomatic machinery of the British Empire. And so that’s exactly what they did.
The first major coup occurred in 1899, while Milner was still in South Africa launching the Boer War. That year, the Milner Group ousted Donald Mackenzie Wallace, the director of the foreign department at The Times, and installed their man, Ignatius Valentine Chirol. Chirol, a former employee of the Foreign Office with inside access to officials there, not only helped to ensure that one of the most influential press organs of the Empire would spin all international events for the benefit of the secret society, but he helped to prepare his close personal friend, Charles Hardinge, to take on the crucial post of Ambassador to Russia in 1904, and, in 1906, the even more important post of Permanent Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office.
With Hardinge, Milner’s Group had a foot in the door at the British Foreign Office. But they needed more than just their foot in that door if they were to bring about their war with Germany. In order to finish the coup, they needed to install one of their own as Foreign Secretary. And, with the appointment of Edward Grey as Foreign Secretary in December of 1905, that’s precisely what happened.
Sir Edward Grey was a valuable and trusted ally of the Milner Group. He shared their anti-German sentiment and, in his important position of Foreign Secretary, showed no compunction at all about using secret agreements and unacknowledged alliances to further set the stage for war with Germany.
HOF: He became a foreign secretary in 1905, I believe, and the foreign secretary in in in France was of course Delcassé. And Delcassé was very much an anti-German. He was very passionate about the recovery of Alsace-Lorraine, and so he and the King hit it off very well together. And Edward Grey shared this anti-German feeling with the king—as I explained in my book how he how he came to have that attitude about Germany. But in any case, he had the same attitude with the king. They worked very well together. And Edward Grey very freely acknowledged the heavy role that the King I played in British foreign policy and he said that this was not a problem because he and the King were in agreement on most issues and so they worked with very well together.
The pieces were already beginning to fall into place for Milner and his associates. With Edward Grey as foreign secretary, Hardinge as his unusually influential undersecretary, Rhodes’ co-conspirator Lord Esher installed as deputy Governor of Windsor Castle where he had the ear of the king, and the king himself—whose unusual, hands-on approach to foreign diplomacy and whose wife’s own hatred of the Germans dovetailed perfectly with the group’s aims—the diplomatic stage was set for the formation of the Triple Entente between France, Russia and Great Britain. With France to the west and Russia to the east, England’s secret diplomacy had forged the two pincers of a German-crushing vise.
All that was needed was an event that the group could spin to its advantage to prepare the population for war against their former German allies. Time and again throughout the decade leading up to the “Great War,” the group’s influential agents in the British press tried to turn every international incident into another example of German hostility.
When the Russo-Japanese War broke out, rumours swirled in London that it was in fact the Germans that had stirred up the hostilities. The theory went that Germany, in a bid to ignite conflict between Russia and England, who had recently concluded an alliance with the Japanese, had fanned the flames of war between Russia and Japan. The truth, of course, was almost precisely the opposite. Lord Lansdowne had conducted secret negotiations with Japan before signing a formal treaty in January 1902. Having exhausted their reserves building up their military, Japan turned to Cecil Rhodes’ co-conspirator Lord Nathan Rothschild to finance the war itself. Denying the Russian navy access to the Suez canal and high-quality coal, which they did provide to the Japanese, the British did everything they could to ensure that the Japanese would crush the Russian fleet, effectively removing their main European competitor for the Far East. The Japanese navy was even constructed in Britain, but these facts did not find their way into the Milner-controlled press.
When the Russians “accidentally” fired on British fishing trawlers in the North Sea in 1904, killing three fishermen and wounding several more, the British public was outraged. Rather than whip up the outrage, however, The Times and other mouthpieces of the secret society instead tried to paper over the incident. Meanwhile, the British Foreign Office outrageously tried to blame the incident on the Germans, kicking off a bitter press war between Britain and Germany.
The most dangerous provocations of the period centered around Morocco, when France—emboldened by secret military assurances from the British and backed up by the British press—engaged in a series of provocations, repeatedly breaking assurances to Germany that Morocco would remain free and open to German trade. At each step, Milner’s acolytes, both in government and in the British press, cheered on the French and demonized any and every response from the Germans, real or imagined.
DOCHERTY: Given that we’re living in a world of territorial aggrandizement, there was a concocted incident over Morocco, and the allegation that Germany was secretly trying to take over the British/French influence on Morocco. And that literally was nonsense, but it was blown up into an incident and people were were told “Prepare! You had better prepare yourself for the possibility of war because we will not be dictated to by that Kaiser person over in Berlin!”
One of the incidents —which I would need to make reference to to get the date perfectly right—referred to a threat. Well, it was portrayed as a threat—it was no more of a threat than a fly would be if it came into your room at the present moment—of a gun boat sitting off the coast of Africa. And it was purported that this was a sign that in fact Germany was going to have a deep water port and they were going to use it as a springboard to interrupt British shipping. When we researched it, Jim and I discovered that the size of that so-called gunboat was physically smaller than the king of England’s royal yacht. What? But history has portrayed this as a massive threat to to the British Empire and it’s “masculinity,” if you like—because that’s how they saw themselves.
Ultimately, the Moroccan crises passed without warfare because, despite the best efforts of Milner and his associates, cooler heads prevailed. Likewise the Balkans descended into warfare in the years prior to 1914, but Europe as a whole didn’t descend with them. But, as we well know, the members of the Round Table in the British government, in the press, in the military, in finance, in industry, and in other positions of power and influence eventually got their wish: Franz Ferdinand was assassinated and within a month the trap of diplomatic alliances and secret military compacts that had been so carefully set was sprung. Europe was at war.
In retrospect, the machinations that led to war are a master class in how power really operates in society. The military compacts that committed Britain—and, ultimately, the world—to war had nothing to do with elected parliaments or representative democracy. When Conservative Prime Minister Arthur Balfour resigned in 1905, deft political manipulations ensured that members of the Round Table, including Herbert Henry Asquith, Edward Grey and Richard Haldane—three men who Liberal leader Henry Campbell-Bannerman privately accused of “Milner worship”—seamlessly slid into key posts in the new Liberal government and carried on the strategy of German encirclement without missing a step.
In fact, the details of Britain’s military commitments to Russia and France, and even the negotiations themselves, were deliberately kept hidden from Members of Parliament and even members of the cabinet who were not part of the secret society. It wasn’t until November 1911, a full six years into the negotiations, that the cabinet of Prime Minister Herbert Henry Asquith started to learn the details of these agreements, agreements that had been repeatedly and officially denied in the press and in Parliament.
This is how the cabal functioned: efficiently, quietly and, convinced of the righteousness of their cause, completely uncaring about how they achieved their ends. It is to this clique, not to the doings of any conspiracy in Sarajevo, that we can attribute the real origins of the First World War, with the nine million dead soldiers and seven million dead civilians that lay piled in its wake.
But for this cabal, 1914 was just the start of the story. In keeping with their ultimate vision of a united Anglo-American world order, the jewel in the crown of the Milner Group was to embroil the United States in the war; to unite Britain and America in their conquest of the German foe.
Across the Atlantic, the next chapter in this hidden history was just getting underway…
November 10th is the 242nd birthday of the United State Marine Corps. It is a time of celebration during which current and former Marines acknowledge the storied history and glorious traditions of the branch of the military in which they so proudly served. I, however, am torn. As a former Marine Corps officer with service during the Vietnam War, I still occasionally admit to having been a Marine, perhaps also with a measure of pride, Yet, I have realized that this admission encompasses more than the pomp and pageantry that we celebrate each year on November 10th. I realized what being a Marine actually entails, that as a young man I underwent, perhaps endured is better, a profound life-altering experience, Marine Boot Camp, during which everything I was, embraced, stood for, and held sacred, was brutally and methodically destroyed, with the resultant void filled with the values, “virtues,” and abilities appropriate to the role I was about to assume.
The Marine Corps builds men (and women), it is said, albeit of a specific sort. I have realized that much of this physical, emotional, psychological, and ethical conversion and conditioning process is intended to create effective instruments of death and destruction, killing machines who will do the bidding of our nation’s political and military leadership without hesitation or question. I have realized that Marine training focuses on building an intense fraternity and camaraderie with others who wear the uniform. Anyone who has experienced the insanity of the battlefield understands that when the shit hits the fan, we kill and sacrifice not for god, flag, country, or even for Corps, but for the man or woman at our side.
I have realized that I and many others who claim the title of Marine have had our selflessness, dedication, and patriotism exploited; asked, better compelled, to make sacrifices fighting in wars that were (are) ill-conceived, unnecessary, unjust, and immoral. I have realized that as a Marine I was fighting not for freedom – ours, or in my case, the Vietnamese – a claim we hear so often, and that I was an aggressor, invader, and occupier fighting for corporate profit and national hegemony placed in an untenable survival situation of kill or be killed.
I have realized that by living according to the Marine ethos, I have become a murderer, a realization that has caused me (and many others) profound guilt, shame, and moral distress. For many of us, PTSD and Moral Injury have made recovery from war difficult, if not impossible, and death by one’s own hand, a viable alternative to living in war’s aftermath. I know little of the life of Ian David Long, the latest of this nation’s plethora of mass shooters. What I do know is that he was a product of Marine training, imbued with the behaviors and values of a warrior, reinforced by the horrors of the battlefield, eventually to take the lives of twelve strangers, and then to end his own. When you make Marines, create killers, send them to war to kill and to destroy, sometimes they can’t leave it on the battlefield. Ian David Long was another casualty of war with 12 innocents as collateral damage . . . when war comes home.
So, this year on November 10th, I will not eat birthday cake, or toast the Corps. Nor will I celebrate the mythology. Rather, I will embrace the reality of the experience; acknowledge the entire process as a charade, a deception, and as a tool of those who profit from our efforts, our sacrifices, our blood, and our lives. And finally, I will again acknowledge my identity as a Marine and accept responsibility and culpability for what I have done and what I have become. And finally, I will speak out to ensure that other young men and women not be mislead into embracing the mythology and lured into the “cult of the marine.”
We now know a little more about which version of the S-300 family the Russians have delivered to the Syrians: the Russians have converted a number of S-300PM and S-300P2 systems to the export version S-300PMU-2 “Favorit” which, by the way, is also the version Russia delivered to the Iranians and to the Chinese. This system uses the 48N6E2 missile and has an official range of 195km. I will skip the rest of the technical details and just say that this is a recent modification with excellent capabilities, so all the rumors about Russia delivering some antiquated version of the S-300 are now proven false (as usual). In fact, this is not the first time that the Russians have delivered an “Israeli-restraining” air defense system: in 1983 the USSR delivered a number of S-200VE “Vega-E” (SA-5b) air defense systems to Syria which significantly limited Israeli operations over and even around (AWACS) Syria.
Combined with the EW systems also delivered by Russia, these air defense systems clearly are having an impact on US and Israeli operations. And while the Americans are admitting that this is a problem for them, the Israelis, as usual, have both complained about this delivery and boasted that they did not care at all. adding that they would continue to bomb Syria whenever they feel the need. The Israelis have even declared that they would be willing to kill Russian crews if their aircraft are shot at. Except, of course, that so far the Israelis have stayed out of the Syrian skies (keep in mind that according to Israeli sources in 2017 the IDF attacked Syria over 200 times, roughly one attack every 2nd day!).
This time around, not only are the Israelis facing a much more competent air defense system, this system is also highly mobile and therefore much harder to locate, which will greatly complicate future attacks. Furthermore, since one S-300PMU2 battalion can track 300 targets (and engage 36 with 72 missiles simultaneously) at a very long range, the Syrians will now improve their early warning capabilities tremendously, which will make it much harder for the Israelis to successfully conduct surprise attacks against Syria.
Sooner or later, however, we can be pretty confident that both the Israelis and the US will have to try to strike Syria again, if only for PR purposes. In fact, this should not be too difficult for them, here is why:
First, and contrary to what is often claimed, there are not enough S-300/S-400′s in Syria to indeed “lock” all of the Syrian airspace. Yes, the Russians did create a de-facto no-fly zone over Syria, but not one which could withstand a large and determined attack. What the combined Russian and Syrian forces have done so far is to deny some specific segments of the airspace above and around Syria to the AngloZionist aggressors. This means that they can protect some specific, high-value targets. However, as soon as the US/Israelis get a feel for what has been deployed and where, and how this entire integrated air defense network works, they will be able to plan strikes which, while not terribly effective, will be presented by the propaganda machine as a major success for the AngloZionists.
Second, air defense operations are always a game of numbers. Even if you assume that each of the air defense missile has a probability of a kill of 1 (meaning that every air defense missile fired will destroy one incoming missile), you still cannot shoot down more missiles than what your own stores allow you to fire. The US/NATO/CENTCOM can, if needed, engage many more missiles in a saturation attack than the Russians have available for defense. This is unlikely to change in the foreseeable future.
Third, the US/NATO/CENTCOM/IDF all have advanced EW capabilities which will allow them to try to disrupt the Russian fire and reconnaissance capabilities, especially if low RCS aircraft (such as the F-22, F-35, B-1B, etc.) are used in the attacks. Low-RCS aircraft (and missiles) don’t have to operate alone and, in reality, they are often engaged with the support of a determined EW effort.
Finally, the Empire also has long-range weapons which could be used to strike Syria (such as the AGM-158 JASSM low-RCS standoff air-launched cruise missile), especially during a combined electronic warfare and standoff antiradiation missile attack.
So, all the AngloZionists really need to do is to be very careful in their choice of paths of approach and choice of targets, use low-RCS aircraft and missiles under the cover of a robust EW engagement and then use a large enough number of missiles to give the appearance that the Empire has defeated the Russian and Syrian air defenses.
Judging by their past attacks against Syria, the US and the Israelis are far more concerned with the need to appear very powerful, effective and quasi-invulnerable than by actually achieving some meaningful military objective. Of course, this need to appear invulnerable also means that the AngloZionists really cannot afford to have one of their aircraft shot down, hence their current reluctance to test out the Syrian air defense capabilities.
Sooner or later, however, the Israelis will have to try to “defeat the S-300″ as they would put it.
The problem for the Israelis is that they don’t really have any good options. The problem is not so much a technological one as it is a political one.
Let’s assume that the Israelis conduct a successful strike against a meaningful target (if their attack is symbolic, the Russians and Syrians can just limit their reply to the usual protests and denunciations, but take no real action). What would Russia do? Well, the Russians (Shoigu specifically) have already indicated that, if needed, they would increase the number of S-300 batteries (and required support systems) delivered to Syria. Thus, the main effect of a successful attack on Syria will be to make subsequent attacks even harder to plan and execute. Would that really be a desirable outcome for the Israelis? I don’t think so.
If each successful Israeli strike makes each subsequent strike even harder while increasing the danger for Israeli aircraft, what would be the point of such attacks? Are there any truly high-value targets in Syria whose destruction by the IDF would justify triggering a further degradation of the situation in Syria? Conversely, if you were Syrian (or Iranian), would you not want the Israelis to strike Syria (or even S-300 batteries) hard enough to force the Russians to deliver even more air defense systems (not necessarily S-300s by the way!)?
Just as with the case of Hezbollah in Lebanon (which the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982 helped create), and the coming to power of Hassan Nasrallah at the head of Hezbollah (which the murder of Abbas al Moussawi by the Israelis in 1992 propelled to the position of Secretary General of the organization), the Israelis are re-discovering again and again the truism: while simple, brute force violence does appear to be effective in the short term, in the mid to long-term it always fails unless backed by meaningful political measures. The big axiomatic truth which the Israelis still are stubbornly refusing to recognize is that all true security is always collective (something the Russians have been repeating for years now). In the case of Syria, Israel would be much, much better off negotiating some kind of deal with the Russians, the Iranians and the Syrians (even an unofficial one!) than trying to prevail by blowing up targets in Syria.
I would even argue that with the Trump presidency now dramatically increasing the rate of collapse of the AngloZionist Empire the Israelis need to start making plans to involve other actors in their regional policy. The truth is that the US is not in a position anymore to remain a key player in Middle-Eastern politics and that decades of abject submission to the Likudnik agenda have irreparably damaged the US credibility and influence in the Middle-East (and the rest of the world).
I would compare the delivery of S-300PMU-2 “Favorit” batteries to Syria to a chess opening or an irreversible move like castling: it does not, by itself, decide the outcome of the game, but it does create a baseline environment in which both players will need to operate. For the Russians, the next step is quite obvious: to continue to deliver all types of air defense systems to the Syrians (especially more Pantsirs) with the goal of eventually being able to protect the entire Syrian airspace from any attacks by the US or Israel. The main elements of a multi-layered air defense network are already deployed, Syria now only needs larger numbers. I very much hope that Russia will provide them.
The midterm elections went largely as expected. Republicans strengthened their position in the Senate and lost their majority in the House. President Trump was not lucky enough to escape the traditional first-term midterm curse. But the expansion of majority control in the Senate is an important achievement. The party that controls the White House has typically lost Senate seats in midterm elections. That didn’t happen this time. What’s more, some staunchly anti-Trump Republicans are no longer there. For instance, two Republican representatives who have been critical of the president — Barbara Comstock and Mike Coffman — lost their races. Senators Bob Corker and Jeff Flake, other Trump critics, are retiring, which will bolster the president’s position inside the GOP congressional caucus. Control over the Senate gives the president a free hand in foreign policy and diminishes the possibility of impeachment to the point that it can no longer be a serious concern.
Since their blue wave was not completely beaten back, Democrats now have a chance to block every initiative put forward by the administration, such as the allocations for the fence to protect the border with Mexico and other steps aimed at curbing migration, the “giant tax cuts for Christmas” that will be offered to individual taxpayers to continue the tax-cutting trend, and the moves to bid a final farewell to Obamacare. A partial government shutdown over spending for the border wall is possible as early as December.
It is true that the Republicans’ failure to hold on to the House is nothing in comparison with what happened in 2010, when the Democrats lost 63 seats there. But a loss is always a loss. The speaker of the House is a very important position that will be used to promote the Democratic Party’s agenda. This could breathe new life into the House Democrats’ attacks against the president over his alleged ties to Russia.
All in all, things have taken a turn for the worse for President Trump and his administration — it is always better to have control over both houses than control over just one of them, even if that one has become stronger. Besides, Republicans lost their races for the governors’ offices in the Great Lakes region — Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin — states where Donald Trump won two years ago. On the other hand, support for the president was evidently decisive for Senator Ted Cruze who won a surprisingly competitive Senate race in Texas. With the president’s help, GOP candidates won Senate seats in Indiana, Missouri, and North Dakota.
The results prove that Donald Trump is apparently much more popular than his opponents believed. Democrats won only a relatively small majority in the House. Despite all of the president’s verbal gaffes and missteps, he clearly has the support of a broad sector of American society. And now this is clear to everyone. By adopting a policy of total obstruction, Democratic lawmakers might be paying only lip service to their party. Many things could change during the next two years, but today Donald Trump is in a strong position to win a second term and lead the Republican Party to success in 2020. The strong economy improves his chances.
How does the outcome of the midterms impact US-Russian relations? Even before the election results were known, the State Department had issued a statement saying Russia was to face “more draconian” US sanctions over the alleged “Skripal poisoning.” It read, “Today, the department informed Congress we could not certify that the Russian Federation met the conditions.” The administration knows that anti-Russian, anti-Chinese, and anti-Iranian sentiments are running high in Congress, on both sides of the aisle. Several sanctions bills that will affect the Russian economy will soon be considered by Congress, including the Defending American Security from Kremlin Aggression Act, which proposes restrictions on both purchases by US citizens of Russia’s sovereign debt as well as investments in Russian energy projects. These rounds of sanctions will continue to mount.
With a Democratic majority in the House of Representatives, “Russiagate” will force the president to adopt a tougher stance toward Moscow. This calls into question the fate of a full-fledged Putin-Trump summit, at least prior to November 2020. It could lower the odds of any progress in arms control.
On the other hand, the president would not be putting himself in any danger by extending the New START Treaty or launching negotiations over a new strategic nuclear-arms agreement. The idea of renewing New START in 2021 seems to be fading, but no one would gain if arms control became a historical artifact. Democratic control of the House does not prevent Donald Trump from addressing this problem. With a Republican majority in the Senate, a new treaty has a good chance of being ratified. Extending New START will strengthen, not weaken, the president’s position.
No summit is needed for doing something as simple as reviving the forgotten 1972 Incidents at Sea Agreement or the 1989 Prevention of Dangerous Military Activities Agreement. The impasse in the talks on Ukraine does not prevent a dialog on Syria. The situation in Libya is clearly an urgent problem of mutual concern. The deterioration in the relationship does not rule out the possibility of maintaining unofficial contacts, including between groups of experts. If the two countries continue to cooperate in space, they can cooperate in other areas too. The president has his hands tied regarding domestic issues, but he enjoys even greater foreign-policy freedom than before. He could use it to boost his popularity before the 2020 presidential race. Lowering the threat of war is one sure way to gain more voters’ support.
Our world is run by oligarchs, the holders of vast wealth from monopolies in banking, resource extraction, manufacturing, and technology. Oligarchs have such power that most of the world doesn’t even know of their influence over our lives. Their overall agenda is global power — a world government, run by them — to be achieved through planned steps of social engineering. The oligarchs remain in the background and have heads of state and entire governments acting in their service. Presidents and prime ministers are their puppets. Bureaucrats and politicians are their factotums.
Who are politicians? Politicians are people who work for the powerful while pretending to represent the people who voted for them. This double-dealing involves a lot of lying, so successful politicians must be good at it. It’s not an easy job to make the insane agenda of the powerful seem reasonable. Politicians can’t reveal this agenda because it almost always goes against the interests of their constituents, so they become adept at sophistry, mystification, and the appearance of authority. For example, wars for Israel have been part of the agenda of the powerful for years. Since 2001, wars for Israel have been sold as “the war on terror” and lots of lies had to be made up as to why the war on terror was a real thing. The visible faces promoting the war on terror were neoconservatives in the US, almost all of whom were advocates for Israel, or Zionists. Zionists are not the only members of the oligarchy, but they seem to be its lead actors. ... continue
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