A couple of years ago I happened to be reading the World War II memoirs of Sisley Huddleston, an American journalist living in France. Although long since forgotten, Huddleston had spent decades as one of our most prominent foreign correspondents, and dozens of his major articles had appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, The New Republic, and Harpers, while he had authored some nineteen books. Given such eminence, his personal relationships reached far into elite circles, with one of his oldest and closest friends being William Bullitt, the American ambassador to France, who had previously opened our first Soviet embassy under FDR.
Huddleston’s credibility seemed impeccable, which is why I was so shocked at his firsthand account of wartime Vichy, totally contrary to what I had absorbed from my introductory history textbooks. While I had always had the impression that Petain’s collaborationist regime possessed little legitimacy, this was not at all the case. Near unanimous majorities of both houses of the duly-elected French parliament had voted the elderly field marshal into office despite his own deep personal misgivings, regarding him as France’s only hope of a unifying national savior following the country’s crushing 1940 defeat at Hitler’s hands.
Although Huddleston’s sympathies were hardly with the Germans, he noted the scrupulous correctness they exhibited following their overwhelming victory, policies that continued throughout the early years of the Occupation. And although he had on a couple of occasions performed minor services for the nascent Resistance movement, when the 1944 Normandy landings and the subsequent German withdrawal suddenly opened the doors of power to the anti-Petain forces, they engaged in an orgy of ideological bloodletting probably without precedent in French history, far surpassing the infamous Reign of Terror of the French Revolution, with perhaps 100,000 or more civilians being summarily butchered on the basis of little or no evidence, often just to settle personal scores. Some of the worst of the bloodshed came at the hands of the Communist exiles of the Spanish Civil War, who had found shelter in France after their defeat and now eagerly took an opportunity to turn the tables and massacre the same sort of “bourgeois” class-enemies who had defeated them in that previous conflict just a few years earlier.
As I sought to weigh Huddleston’s testimony against the traditional narrative of wartime France I had always fully accepted, most of the factors seemed to point in his favor. After all, his journalistic credentials were impeccable and as a very well-connected direct observer of the events he reported, his statements surely counted for a great deal. Meanwhile, it appeared that most of the standard narrative dominating our history books had been constructed a generation or so later by writers living on the other side of the Atlantic ocean, whose conclusions may have been substantially influenced by the black-and-white ideological framework that had become rigidly enshrined at elite American universities.
However, I couldn’t help noticing one huge, gaping flaw in Huddleston’s account, an error so serious that it cast grave doubts upon his entire credibility as a journalist. Towards the beginning of his book, he devotes a page or so to casually mentioning that in the early months of 1940, the French and British were preparing to launch an attack against the neutral Soviet Union, using their bases in Syria and Iraq for a strategic bombing offensive meant to destroy Stalin’s Baku oil fields of the Caucasus, one of the world’s leading sources of that vital commodity.
Obviously, all military organizations produce a wealth of hypothetical contingency plans covering all possible situations and opponents, but Huddleston had somehow misunderstood such possibilities or rumors as outright fact. According to him, the Allied bombing of the Soviet Union had been scheduled to begin March 15th, but was initially delayed and rescheduled for various political reasons. Then a few weeks later, the German panzer divisions swept through the Ardennes forest, surrounded the French armies, and captured Paris, aborting the planned Allied bombardment of Russia.
Given that the USSR played the leading role in Germany’s eventual defeat, an early Allied attack upon the Soviet homeland would surely have changed the outcome of the war. Although Huddleston’s bizarre fantasies had somehow gotten the best of him, he was hardly incorrect in exclaiming “What a narrow escape!”
The notion that the Allies were preparing to launch a major bombing offensive against the Soviet Union just a few months after the outbreak of World War II was obviously absurd, so ridiculous a notion that not a hint of that long-debunked rumor had ever gotten into the standard history texts I had read on the European conflict. But for Huddleston to have still clung to such nonsensical beliefs even several years after the end of the war raised large questions about his gullibility or even his sanity. I wondered whether I could trust even a single word he said about anything else.
However, not long afterward I encountered quite a surprise in a 2017 article published in The National Interest, an eminently respectable periodical. The short piece carried the descriptive headline “In the Early Days of World War II, Britain and France Planned to Bomb Russia.” The contents absolutely flabbergasted me, and with Huddleston’s credibility now fully established—and the credibility of my standard history textbooks equally demolished—I went ahead and substantially drew upon his account for my long article “American Pravda: Post-War France and Post-War Germany.”
I hardly regard myself as a specialist on the history of World War II, but I initially felt deeply embarrassed to have spent my entire life completely ignorant of that crucial early turning-point in the huge conflict. However, once I had carefully read that National Interest article, my shame quickly dissipated, for it was obvious that the author, Michael Peck, along with his editors and readers had been equally unaware of those long-buried facts. Indeed, the article had originally run in 2015, but was republished a couple of years later due to enormous reader demand. As near as I can tell, that single 1100 word essay constituted the first and only time the momentous events described had received significant public attention in the seventy years since the end of the war.
Peck’s discussion greatly fleshed out Huddleston’s brief, offhand remarks. The French and British high commands had prepared their enormous bomber offensive, Operation Pike, in hopes of destroying Russia’s oil resources, and their unmarked reconnaissance flights had already overflown Baku, photographing the locations of the intended targets. The Allies were convinced that the best strategy for defeating Germany was to eliminate its sources of oil and other vital raw materials, and with Russia being Hitler’s leading supplier, they decided that destroying the Soviet oil fields seemed a logical strategy.
However, Peck emphasized the severe errors in this reasoning. In actual fact, only a small fraction of Hitler’s oil came from Russia, so the true impact of even an entirely successful campaign would have been low. And although the Allied commanders were convinced that weeks of continuous bombardment—apparently representing the world’s largest strategic-bombing campaign to that date—would quickly eliminate all Soviet oil production, later events in the war suggested that those projections were wildly optimistic, with vastly larger and more powerful aerial attacks generally inflicting far less permanent destruction than expected. So the damage to the Soviets would probably not have been great, and the resulting full military alliance between Hitler and Stalin would surely have reversed the outcome of the war. This was reflected in the original 2015 title of the same article “Operation Pike: How a Crazy Plan to Bomb Russia Almost Lost World War II.”
But although hindsight allows us to recognize the disastrous consequences of that ill-fated bombing plan, we should not be overly harsh upon the political leaders and strategists of the time. Military technology was in tremendous flux, and facts that seemed obvious by 1943 or 1944 were far less clear at the beginning of the conflict. Based upon their World War I experience, most analysts believed that neither the Germans nor the Allies had any hope of achieving an early breakthrough on the Western front, while the Soviets were suspected of being a feeble military power, perhaps constituting the “soft underbelly” of the German war machine.
Also, some of the most far-reaching political consequences of an Allied attack upon the Soviet Union would have been totally unknown to the French and British leaders then considering it. Although they were certainly aware of the powerful Communist movements in their own countries, all closely aligned with the USSR, only many years later did it become clear that the top leadership of the Roosevelt Administration was honeycombed by numerous agents fully loyal to Stalin, with the final proof awaiting the release of the Venona Decrypts in the 1990s. So if the Allied forces had suddenly gone to war against the Soviets, the total hostility of those influential individuals would have greatly reduced any future prospects of substantial American military assistance, let alone eventual intervention in the European conflict.
Thus, if the Germans had for any reason delayed their 1940 assault on France for a few weeks, the pending Allied attack would have brought the Soviets into the war on the other side, ensuring their defeat. It seems undeniable that Hitler’s fortuitous action inadvertently saved the Allies from the disastrous consequences of their foolish plans.
Although exploring the dramatic implications of the 1940 outbreak of an Allied-Soviet war may be an intriguing instance of alternative history, as an intellectual exercise it has little relevance to our present-day world. Far more important is what the account reveals about the reliability of the standard historical narrative that most of us have always accepted as real.
The first matter to explore was whether the evidence for the planned Allied attack on the Soviets was actually as strong as was suggested by the National Interest article. The underlying information came from Operation Pike, published in 2000 by Patrick R. Osborn in an academic series entitled Contributions in Military Studies, so I recently ordered the book and read it to evaluate the remarkable claims being made.
Although rather dry, the 300 page monograph meticulously documents its case, with the overwhelming bulk of the material being drawn from official archives and other government records. There seems not the slightest doubt about the reality of the events being described, and the Allied leaders even made extensive diplomatic efforts to enlist Turkey and Iran in their planned attack against the Soviet Union.
While the primary Allied motive was to eliminate the flow of necessary raw materials to Germany, there were broader goals as well. Forced collectivization of Soviet agriculture during the 1930s had led to the widespread slaughter of farm animals, which were then replaced by tractors requiring gasoline. The Allied leadership believed that if they succeeded in eliminating the Soviet oil supply, the resulting fuel shortage would lead to a collapse in agricultural production, probably producing a famine that might sweep the Communist regime from power. The Allies had always been intensely hostile to the Soviets, and the planned operation was actually named for a certain Col. Pike, a British officer who had died at Bolshevik hands in the Caucuses during a previous military intervention twenty years earlier.
This anti-Soviet planning rapidly accelerated after Stalin’s brutal attack upon tiny Finland in late 1939. The unexpectedly fierce Finnish resistance led the Western powers to expel the USSR from the League of Nations as a blatant aggressor, and inspired widespread demands for military intervention among both the political elites and the general public, with serious proposals being considered to send several Allied divisions to Scandinavia to fight the Russians on behalf of the Finns. Indeed, during much of this period Allied hostility seems to have been far greater towards the Soviets than towards Germany, despite the nominal state of war against the latter, with French sentiments being particularly strong. As one British elected official remarked, “One has the impression that France is at war with Russia and merely on very unfriendly terms with Germany.”
The Allies intended to use Polish exile forces in their ground combat against the Soviets, perhaps even sparking a Polish uprising against the hated Communist occupiers of their homeland. Osborn notes that if word of this plan had leaked to Stalin, that might explain why it was at this time that he signed the official orders directing the NKVD to immediately execute the 15,000 Polish officers and police whom he already held as POWs, an incident eventually known as the Katyn Forest Massacre, which ranks as one of the world’s worst wartime atrocities.
All of these military plans and internal discussions by the British and French were kept entirely secret at the time, and their archives remained sealed to historians for many decades. But in the opening of his fascinating account, Osborn explains that after the victorious German armies moved towards Paris in 1940, the French government attempted to destroy or evacuate all its secret diplomatic files, and a trainload of this very sensitive material was captured by German forces 100 miles from Paris, including the complete record of the plans to attack the USSR. In hopes of scoring an international propaganda coup, Germany soon published these crucial documents, providing both English translations and facsimile copies of the originals. Although it is unclear whether these disclosures received any significant Western media coverage at the time, Stalin surely became aware of this detailed confirmation of the information he had already gotten in bits and pieces from his network of well-placed Communist spies, and it must have deepened his distrust of the West. The story would also have quickly become known to all well-informed observers, explaining why Huddleston was so confident in casually mentioning the planned Allied attack in his 1952 memoirs.
After Hitler’s Barbarossa invasion of the USSR in June 1941 suddenly brought the Soviets into the war on the Allied side, these highly-embarrassing facts would have naturally dropped into obscurity. But it seems quite astonishing that such “politically correct” amnesia became so deeply entrenched within the academic research community that virtually all traces of the remarkable story disappeared for the six decades that preceded the publication of Osborn’s book. More English-language books may have been published on World War II during those years than on any other subject, yet it seems possible that those many tens of millions of pages contained not a single paragraph describing the momentous Allied plans to attack Russia in the early days of the war, perhaps even leaving Huddleston’s brief, offhand remarks in 1952 as the most comprehensive account. Osborn himself notes the “precious little attention” given this matter by scholars of the Second World War, citing a 1973 academic journal article as one of the very few notable exceptions. We should be seriously concerned that events of such monumental importance spent more than two generations almost totally excluded from our historical records.
Moreover, even the release of Osborn’s massively-documented academic study in 2000 seems to have been almost completely ignored by World War II historians. Consider, for example, Absolute War published in 2007 by acclaimed military historian Chris Bellamy, an 800 page work whose glowing cover-blurbs characterize it as the “authoritative” account of the role of Soviet Russia in the Second World War. The detailed 25 page index contains no listing for “Baku” and the only glancing reference to the indisputable Allied preparations to attack the USSR in early 1940 is a single obscure sentence appearing 15 months and 150 pages later in the aftermath of Barbarossa: “But on 23 June the NKGB reported that the Chief of the British Air Staff, Sir Charles Portal, had suggested cabling the commands in India and the Middle East ordering them to stop planning to bomb the Baku oilfields, which, it had been feared, might be used to supply the Germans.” Osborn’s revelations seem to have vanished without a trace until they were finally noticed and publicized 15 years later in The National Interest.
While it is quite easy to understand why historians avoided the subject for the first couple of decades following the end of the Second World War, once a generation or two had passed, one might reasonably expect to see some reassertion of scholarly objectivity. Operation Pike was of the greatest possible importance to the course of the war, so how could it have been almost totally ignored by virtually every writer on the subject? Allied preparations in early 1940 to unleash the largest strategic bombing offensive in world history against the Soviet Union hardly seems the sort of boring, obscure detail that would be quickly forgotten.
Even if the first generation of war chroniclers carefully excluded it from their narratives to avoid ideological embarrassment, they must surely have been aware of the facts given German publication of the documents. And although their younger successors had seen no mention of it in the books they studied, one would expect that their mentors had occasionally whispered to them about some of the “hidden wartime secrets” left out of the standard narrative. Moreover, Osborn notes that discussion of the facts did very occasionally appear in professional academic journals, and one might assume that a single such instance would have spread like wildfire within the entire academic community. Yet even after Osborn’s massively documented volume appeared in a respectable academic series, the silence remained absolutely deafening. The case of Operation Pike demonstrates that we must exercise extreme caution in accepting the accuracy and completeness of what we have been told.
Such conclusions have obvious consequences. My website tends to attract a large number of commenters, of widely varying quality. One of them, an immigrant from Soviet Armenia calling himself “Avery” seems quite knowledgeable and level-headed, though intensely hostile to Turks and Turkey. A couple of years ago, one of my articles on World War II provoked an intriguing comment from him:
During the Battle of Stalingrad, Turkey, which was officially neutral but was secretly cooperating with Nazi Germany, had assembled a huge invasion force at the border of USSR (Armenia SSR). If Germans had won at Stalingrad, Turks were going to invade, race to Baku and link up with the German forces there, coming down from Stalingrad to grab the oilfields.
When Paulus’s army was surrounded and annihilated, Turks quickly left the border for their barracks.
Stalin never forgot the Turk treachery and never forgave.
When Germany surrendered, Stalin assembled huge armies in Armenia SSR and Georgia SSR. The plan was to invade and throw the Turks out of East Turkey/West Armenia.
The detonation of two American atomic bombs convinced Stalin to stand down. Some believe US detonated the two bombs not to force Japan’s surrender, but as a message to Stalin.
When questioned, he admitted he was unaware of any reference in a Western source, but added:
It was common knowledge in Armenia SSR, where I am originally from.
WW2 war vets, old timers, discussed it all the time…..seeing more Red Army troops and military hardware assembling near the borders of Armenia SSR and Georgia SSR than they’d ever seen before. Then, they were all gone….
Under normal circumstances, weighing the universal silence of all Western historians against the informal claims of an anonymous commenter who was relying upon the stories he’d heard from old veterans would hardly be a difficult choice. But I wonder…
The official documents discussed by Osborn demonstrate that the British made considerable efforts to enlist Turkish forces in their planned attack upon the USSR, with the Turks going back and forth on the matter until Britain finally abandoned the project following the Fall of France. But if the Turks had strongly considered such a military adventure in 1940, it seems quite plausible that they would have been far more eager to do so 1942, given the huge losses the Soviets had already suffered at German hands, and with a very formidable German army approaching the Caucasus.
Soon after the war, Turkey became one of America’s most crucial Cold War allies against the Soviets, given a central role in the establishment of the Truman Doctrine and the creation of NATO. Any hint that the same Turkish government had come very close to joining Hitler’s Axis and attacking Russia as a Nazi ally just a few years earlier would have been extremely damaging to US interests. Such facts would have been scrupulously excluded from all our histories of the war.
Until a couple of weeks ago, I still probably would have leaned towards favoring the united front of all Western historians against the casual remarks of a single anonymous commenter on my website. But after reading Osborn’s book, I now think the anonymous commenter is more likely correct. This is a rather sad personal verdict upon the current credibility of our historical profession.
These important considerations become particularly relevant when we attempt to understand the circumstances surrounding Operation Barbarossa, Germany’s 1941 attack upon the Soviet Union, which constituted the central turning point of the war. Both at the time and during the half-century which followed, Western historians uniformly claimed that the surprise assault had caught an overly-trusting Stalin completely unaware, with Hitler’s motive being his dream of creating the huge German land-empire that he had hinted at in the pages of Mein Kampf, published sixteen years earlier.
But in 1990 a former Soviet military intelligence officer who had defected to the West and was living in Britain dropped a major bombshell. Writing under the pen-name Viktor Suvorov, he had already published a number of highly-regarded books on the armed forces of the USSR, but in Icebreaker he now claimed that his extensive past research in the Soviet archives had revealed that by 1941 Stalin had amassed enormous offensive military forces and positioned them all along the border, preparing to attack and easily overwhelm the greatly outnumbered and outgunned forces of the Wehrmacht, quickly conquering all of Europe.
As I summarized the Suvorov Hypothesis in an article last year:
And so, just as in our traditional narrative, we see that in the weeks and months leading up to Barbarossa, the most powerful offensive military force in the history of the world was quietly assembled in secret along the German-Russian border, preparing for the order that would unleash their surprise attack. The enemy’s unprepared airforce was to be destroyed on the ground in the first days of the battle, and enormous tank columns would begin deep penetration thrusts, surrounding and trapping the opposing forces, achieving a classic blitzkrieg victory, and ensuring the rapid occupation of vast territories. But the forces preparing this unprecedented war of conquest were Stalin’s, and his military juggernaut would surely have seized all of Europe, probably soon followed by the remainder of the Eurasian landmass.
Then at almost the last moment, Hitler suddenly realized the strategic trap into which he had fallen, and ordered his heavily outnumbered and outgunned troops into a desperate surprise attack of their own on the assembling Soviets, fortuitously catching them at the very point at which their own final preparations for sudden attack had left them most vulnerable, and thereby snatching a major initial victory from the jaws of certain defeat. Huge stockpiles of Soviet ammunition and weaponry had been positioned close to the border to supply the army of invasion into Germany, and these quickly fell into German hands, providing an important addition to their own woefully inadequate resources.
Although almost totally ignored in the English-language world, Suvorov’s seminal book soon became an unprecedented bestseller in Russia, Germany, and many other parts of the world, and together with several follow-up volumes, his five million copies in print established him as the most widely-read military historian in the history of the world. Meanwhile, the English-language media and academic communities scrupulously maintained their complete blackout of the ongoing worldwide debate, with no publishing house even willing to produce an English edition of Suvorov’s books until an editor at the prestigious Naval Academy Press finally broke the embargo nearly two decades later. Such near-total censorship of the massive planned Soviet attack in 1941 seems quite similar to the near-total censorship of the undeniable reality of the massive planned Allied attack on the Soviets in the preceding year.
Although the Suvorov Hypothesis has inspired decades of fierce academic debate and been the subject of international conferences, it has been scrupulously ignored by our Anglophone authors, who have made no serious attempt to defend their traditional narrative and refute the vast accumulation of persuasive evidence upon which it is based. This leads me to believe that Suvorov’s analysis is probably correct.
A decade ago, a solitary writer first drew my attention to Suvorov’s ground-breaking research, and as an emigrant Russian Slav living in the West, he was hardly favorable to the German dictator. But he closed his review with a remarkable statement:
Therefore, if any of us is free to write, publish, and read this today, it follows that in some not inconsequential part our gratitude for this must go to Hitler. And if someone wants to arrest me for saying what I have just said, I make no secret of where I live.
For almost thirty years, our English-language media has almost entirely suppressed any serious discussion of the Suvorov Hypothesis, and this is hardly the only important aspect of Soviet history that has remained hidden from public scrutiny. Indeed, on some crucial matters, the falsehoods and distortions have greatly increased rather than diminished over the decades. No example is more obvious than in the ongoing attempts to conceal the enormous role played by Jews in the Bolshevik Revolution and worldwide Communism generally. As I wrote last year:
In the early years of the Bolshevik Revolution, almost no one questioned the overwhelming role of Jews in that event, nor their similar preponderance in the ultimately unsuccessful Bolshevik takeovers in Hungary and parts of Germany. For example, former British Minister Winston Churchill in 1920 denounced the “terrorist Jews” who had seized control of Russia and other parts of Europe, noting that “the majority of the leading figures are Jews” and stating that “In the Soviet institutions the predominance of Jews is even more astonishing,” while lamenting the horrors these Jews had inflicted upon the suffering Germans and Hungarians.
Similarly, journalist Robert Wilton, former Russia correspondent of the Times of London, provided a very detailed summary of the enormous Jewish role in his 1918 book Russia’s Agony and 1920 book The Last Days of the Romanovs, although one of the most explicit chapters of the latter was apparently excluded from the English language edition. Not long afterward, the facts regarding the enormous financial support provided to the Bolsheviks by international Jewish bankers such as Schiff and Aschberg were widely reported in the mainstream media.
Jews and Communism were just as strongly tied together in America, and for years the largest circulation Communist newspaper in our country was published in Yiddish. When they were finally released, the Venona Decrypts demonstrated that even as late as the 1930s and 1940s, a remarkable fraction of America’s Communist spies came from that ethnic background.
A personal anecdote tends to confirm these dry historical records. During the early 2000s I once had lunch with an elderly and very eminent computer scientist, with whom I’d become a little friendly. While talking about this and that, he happened to mention that both his parents had been zealous Communists, and given his obvious Irish name, I expressed my surprise, saying that I’d thought almost all the Communists of that era were Jewish. He said that was indeed the case, but although his mother had such an ethnic background, his father did not, which made him a very rare exception in their political circles. As a consequence, the Party had always sought to place him in as prominent a public role as possible just to prove that not all Communists were Jews, and although he obeyed Party discipline, he was always irritated at being used as such a “token.”
However, once Communism sharply fell out of favor in 1950s America, nearly all of the leading “Red Baiters” such as Sen. Joseph McCarthy went to enormous lengths to obscure the ethnic dimension of the movement they were combatting. Indeed, many years later Richard Nixon casually spoke in private of the difficulty he and other anti-Communist investigators had faced in trying to focus on Gentile targets since nearly all of the suspected Soviet spies were Jewish, and when this tape became public, his alleged anti-Semitism provoked a media firestorm even though his remarks were obviously implying the exact opposite.
This last point is an important one, since once the historical record has been sufficiently whitewashed or rewritten, any lingering strands of the original reality that survive are often perceived as bizarre delusions or denounced as “conspiracy theories.” Indeed, even today the ever-amusing pages of Wikipedia provides an entire 3,500 word article attacking the notion of “Jewish Bolshevism” as an “antisemitic canard.”
In a subsequent article, I summarized several of the numerous sources describing this obvious reality:
Meanwhile, all historians know perfectly well that the Bolshevik leaders were overwhelmingly Jewish, with three of the five revolutionaries Lenin named as his plausible successors coming from that background. Although only around 4% of Russia’s population was Jewish, a few years ago Vladimir Putin stated that Jews constituted perhaps 80-85% of the early Soviet government, an estimate fully consistent with the contemporaneous claims of Winston Churchill, Times of London correspondent Robert Wilton, and the officers of American Military Intelligence. Recent books by Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Yuri Slezkine, and others have all painted a very similar picture. And prior to World War II, Jews remained enormously over-represented in the Communist leadership, especially dominating the Gulag administration and the top ranks of the dreaded NKVD.
Perhaps the most utterly explosive and totally suppressed aspect of the close relationship between Jews and Communism regards the claims that Jacob Schiff and other top international Jewish bankers were among the leading financial backers of the Bolshevik Revolution. I spent nearly all of my life regarding these vague rumors as such obvious absurdities that they merely demonstrated the lunatic anti-Semitism infesting the nether-regions of Far Right anti-Communist movements, thereby fully confirming the theme of Richard Hofstadter’s famous book The Paranoid Style in American Politics. Indeed, the Schiff accusations were so totally ridiculous that they were never even once mentioned in the hundred-odd books on the history of the Bolshevik Revolution and Soviet Communism that I read during the 1970s and 1980s.
Therefore, it came as an enormous shock when I discovered that the claims were not only probably correct, but had been almost universally accepted as true throughout the first half of the twentieth century.
For example, The “Jewish Threat” by Joseph W. Bendersky summarizes his years of archival research and he documents that Schiff’s financial support for the Bolsheviks was widely reported in the American Military Intelligence files of the period, with British Intelligence taking the same position. Kenneth D. Ackerman’s 2016 study Trotsky in New York, 1917 describes much the same material. In 1925, the British Guardian published this information and it was soon widely discussed and accepted throughout the 1920s and 1930s by numerous major international media outlets. Naomi W. Cohen’s 1991 hagiographic volume Jacob Schiff devotes several pages to summarizing the various stories of Schiff’s strong Bolshevik ties that had earlier been published in leading American periodicals.
Writing nearly a century after the events under discussion, these three Jewish authors casually dismiss all the numerous accounts they provide by highly-credible observers—American and British Intelligence officers and prominent international journalists—as merely demonstrating the delusional nature of the extreme anti-Semitism that had infected so much of the world in those bygone days. Yet most serious historians would surely place far greater weight upon contemporaneous evidence than upon the personal opinions of those writers who happen to gather together that material evidence generations afterward.
Henry Wickham Steed was one of the foremost journalists of his era, and he had served as editor of the Times of London, the world’s most authoritative newspaper. A couple of years after his retirement, he published his lengthy personal memoirs, now conveniently online, which contain the following very intriguing passages:
Potent international financial interests were at work in favour of the immediate recognition of the Bolshevists. Those influences had been largely responsible for the Anglo-American proposal in January to call Bolshevist representatives to Paris at the beginning of the Peace Conference — a proposal which had failed after having been transformed into a suggestion for a Conference with the Bolshevists at Prinkipo. The well-known American Jewish banker, Mr. Jacob Schiff, was known to be anxious to secure recognition for the Bolshevists…
… the prime movers were Jacob Schiff, Warburg, and other international financiers, who wished above all to bolster up the Jewish Bolshevists in order to secure a field for German and Jewish exploitation of Russia.
Schiff’s own family later confirmed this widely-accepted history. The February 3, 1949 Knickerbocker column of the New York Journal-American, then one of the city’s leading newspapers, reported the account: “Today it is estimated by Jacob’s grandson, John Schiff, that the old man sank about 20,000,000 dollars for the final triumph of Bolshevism in Russia.” The present-day value of the figure quoted is probably some $2 billion, a very substantial sum.
Despite this enormous volume of convincing evidence, for the next half-century or more, Schiff’s name almost entirely vanished from all mainstream texts on Soviet Communism. As I wrote last year:
In 1999, Harvard University published the English edition of The Black Book of Communism, whose six co-authors devoted 850 pages to documenting the horrors inflicted upon the world by that defunct system, which had produced a total death toll they reckoned at 100 million. I have never read that book and I have often heard that the alleged body-count has been widely disputed. But for me the most remarkable detail is that when I examine the 35 page index, I see a vast profusion of entries for totally obscure individuals whose names are surely unknown to all but the most erudite specialist. But there is no entry for Jacob Schiff, the world-famous Jewish banker who apparently financed the creation of the whole system in the first place. Nor one for Olaf Aschberg, the powerful Jewish banker in Sweden, who played such an important role in providing the Bolsheviks a financial life-line during the early years of their threatened regime, and even founded the first Soviet international bank.
Perhaps the extreme caution and timorous silence exhibited by nearly all Western historians on these sensitive elements of World War II and the Bolshevik Revolution should not entirely surprise us given the professional and personal risks they might face if they strayed from orthodoxy.
Consider the very telling example of David Irving. During the first half of his professional career, his string of widely-translated best-sellers and his millions of books in print probably established him as the most internationally successful British historian of the last one hundred years, with his remarkable archival research frequently revolutionizing our understanding of the European conflict and the political forces behind it. But as he repeatedly demonstrated his lack of regard for official orthodoxy, he attracted many powerful enemies, who eventually ruined his reputation, drove him into personal bankruptcy, and even arranged his imprisonment. Over the last quarter-century, he has increasingly become an un-person, with the few occasional mentions of his name in the media invoked in the same talismanic manner as references to Lucifer or Beelzebub.
If a historian of such towering stature and success could be brought so low, what ordinary academic scholar would dare risk a similar fate? Voltaire famously observed that shooting an admiral every now and then is an excellent way to encourage the others.
The destruction of Irving’s stellar career came at the hands of Jewish activists, who were outraged at his balanced treatment of Hitler and his ongoing commitment to investigating many of the widely-accepted wartime myths, which he hoped to replace with what he called “real history.” In the introduction to his new edition of Hitler’s War, he recounts how a journalist for Time magazine was having dinner with him in New York in 1988 and remarked “Before coming over I read the clippings files on you. Until Hitler’s War you couldn’t put a foot wrong, you were the darling of the media; after it, they heaped slime on you.”
As Irving was certainly aware, the unreasonably harsh vilification of enemy leaders during wartime is hardly an uncommon occurrence. Although it has largely been forgotten today, during much of the First World War and for years afterward, Germany’s reigning monarch, Kaiser Wilhelm, was widely portrayed in the Allied countries as a bloodthirsty monster, one of the most evil men who had ever lived. This vilification came despite Wilhelm having been the beloved eldest grandchild of Britain’s own Queen Victoria, who according to some accounts died in his arms.
Moreover, although Allied propaganda routinely portrayed Wilhelm as a relentless warmonger, he had actually avoided involving Germany in a single major military conflict during the first twenty-five years of his reign, while most of the other leading world powers had fought one or more wars during that same period. Indeed, I recently discovered that only a year before the Guns of August began firing, The New York Times had published a lengthy profile marking the first quarter-century of his reign and lauded him as one of the world’s foremost peacemakers:
Now … he is acclaimed everywhere as the greatest factor for peace that our time can show. It was he, we hear, who again and again threw the weight of his dominating personality, backed by the greatest military organisation in the world – an organisation built up by himself – into the balance for peace wherever war clouds gathered over Europe. ‘(‘William II, King of Prussia and German Emperor, Kaiser 25 years a ruler, hailed as chief peacemaker,’ New York Times, 8 June, 1913)
That brief excerpt from the Times encomium points to another matter than I have never seen mentioned. I devoted much of the 2000s to digitizing and making available the complete archives of hundreds of America’s leading publications of the last 150 years, and when I occasionally glanced at the contents, I gradually noticed something odd. Although the English-language world today invariably refers to Germany’s wartime ruler as “Kaiser Wilhelm,” that was only rarely the case prior to the outbreak of war, when he was generally known as “Emperor William.” The latter nomenclature is hardly surprising since we always speak of “Frederick the Great” rather than “Friedrich der Grosse.”
But it is obviously much easier to mobilize millions of citizens to die in muddy trenches to defeat a monstrously alien “Kaiser” than “Good Emperor William,” first cousin to the British and Russian monarchs. The NGram viewer in Google Books shows the timing of the change quite clearly, with the Anglophone practice shifting as Britain became increasingly hostile toward Germany, especially after the outbreak of war. But “Emperor William” was only permanently eclipsed by “Kaiser Wilhelm” after Germany once again became a likely enemy in the years immediately preceding World War II.
Actual publications of the period also reveal numerous discordant facts about the First World War, matters certainly known to academic specialists but which rarely receive much coverage in our standard textbooks, being relegated to a casual sentence or two if even that. For example, despite its considerable military successes, Germany launched a major peace effort in late 1916 to end the stalemated war by negotiations and thereby avert oceans of additional bloodshed. However, this proposal was fiercely rejected by the Allied powers and their advocates in the pages of the world’s leading periodicals since they remained firmly committed to an ultimate military victory.
War fever was certainly still very strong that same year in Britain, the leading Allied power. When prominent peace-advocates such as Bertrand Russell and Lord Loreborn urged a negotiated end to the fighting, and were strongly backed by the editor of the influential London Economist, they were harshly vilified and the latter was forced to resign his position. E.D. Morel, another committed peace advocate, was imprisoned for his activism under such harsh conditions that it permanently broke his health and led to his death at age 51 a few years after his release.
As an excellent antidote to our severely distorted understanding of both wartime sentiments and the domestic European politics that had produced the conflict, I would strongly recommend the text of Present Day Europe by Lothrop Stoddard, then one of America’s most influential public intellectuals. Written prior to America’s own entry into the conflict, the work provides the sort of remarkable scholarly detachment which would soon became almost impossible.
Although the demonic portrayal of the German Kaiser was already being replaced by a more balanced treatment within a few years of the Armistice and had disappeared after a generation, no such similar process has occurred in the case of his World War II successor. Indeed, Adolf Hitler and the Nazis seem to loom far larger in our cultural and ideological landscape today than they even did in the immediate aftermath of the war, with their visibility growing even as they become more distant in time, a strange violation of the normal laws of perspective. I suspect that the casual dinner-table conversations on World War II issues that I used to enjoy with my Harvard College classmates during the early 1980s would be completely impossible today.
To some extent, the transformation of “the Good War” into a secular religion, with its designated monsters and martyrs may be analogous to what occurred during the final decay of the Soviet Union, when the obvious failure of its economic system forced the government to increasingly turn to endless celebrations of its victory in the Great Patriotic War as the primary source of its legitimacy. The real wages of ordinary American workers have been stagnant for fifty years and most adults have less than $500 in available savings, so this widespread impoverishment may be forcing our own leaders into adopting a similar strategy.
But I think that a far greater factor has been the astonishing growth of Jewish power in America, which was already quite substantial even four or five decades ago but has now become absolutely overwhelming, whether in foreign policy, finance, or the media, with our 2% minority exercising unprecedented control over most aspects of our society and political system. Only a fraction of American Jews hold traditional religious beliefs, so the twin worship of the State of Israel and the Holocaust has served to fill that void, with the individuals and events of World War II constituting many of the central elements of the mythos that serves to unify the Jewish community. And as an obvious consequence, no historical figure ranks higher in the demonology of this secular religion than the storied Fuhrer and his Nazi regime.
However, beliefs based upon religious dogma often sharply diverge from empirical reality. Pagan Druids may worship a particular sacred oak tree and claim that it contains the soul of their tutelary dryad; but if an arborist taps the tree, its sap may seem like that of any other.
Our current official doctrine portrays Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Germany as one of the cruelest and most relentlessly aggressive regimes in the history of the world, but at the time these salient facts apparently escaped the leaders of the nations with which it was at war. Operation Pike provides an enormous wealth of archival material regarding the secret internal discussions of the British and French governmental and military leadership, and all of it tends to suggest that they regarded their German adversary as a perfectly normal country, and perhaps occasionally regretted that they had somehow gotten themselves involved a major war over what amounted to a small Polish border dispute.
Although our standard histories would never admit this, the actual path toward war appears to have been quite different than most Americans believe. Extensive documentary evidence from knowledgeable Polish, American, and British officials demonstrates that pressure from Washington was the key factor behind the outbreak of the European conflict. Indeed, leading American journalists and public intellectuals of the day such as John T. Flynn and Harry Elmer Barnes had publicly declared that they feared Franklin Roosevelt was seeking to foment a major European war in hopes that it would rescue him from the apparent economic failure of his New Deal reforms and perhaps even provide him an excuse to run for an unprecedented third term. Since this is exactly what ultimately transpired, such accusations would hardly seem totally unreasonable.
And in an ironic contrast with FDR’s domestic failures, Hitler’s own economic successes had been enormous, a striking comparison since the two leaders had come to power within a few weeks of each other in early 1933. As iconoclastic leftist Alexander Cockburn once noted in a 2004 Counterpunch column:
When [Hitler] came to power in 1933 unemployment stood at 40 per cent. Economic recovery came without the stimulus of arms spending…There were vast public works such as the autobahns. He paid little attention to the deficit or to the protests of the bankers about his policies. Interest rates were kept low and though wages were pegged, family income increased by reason of full employment. By 1936 unemployment had sunk to one per cent. German military spending remained low until 1939.
Not just Bush but Howard Dean and the Democrats could learn a few lessons in economic policy from that early, Keynesian Hitler.
By resurrecting a prosperous Germany while nearly all other countries remained mired in the worldwide Great Depression, Hitler drew glowing accolades from individuals all across the ideological spectrum. After an extended 1936 visit, David Lloyd George, Britain’s former wartime prime minister, fulsomely praised the chancellor as “the George Washington of Germany,” a national hero of the greatest stature. Over the years, I’ve seen plausible claims here and there that during the 1930s Hitler was widely acknowledged as the world’s most popular and successful national leader, and the fact that he was selected as Time Magazine’s Man of the Year for 1938 tends to support this belief.
Only International Jewry had remained intensely hostile to Hitler, outraged over his successful efforts to dislodge Germany’s 1% Jewish population from the stranglehold they had gained over German media and finance, and instead run the country in the best interests of the 99% German majority. A striking recent parallel has been the enormous hostility that Vladimir Putin incurred after he ousted the handful of Jewish Oligarchs who had seized control of Russian society and impoverished the bulk of the population. Putin has attempted to mitigate this difficulty by allying himself with certain Jewish elements, and Hitler seems to have done the same by endorsing the Nazi-Zionist economic partnership, which lay the basis for the creation of the State of Israel and thereby brought on board the small, but growing Jewish Zionist faction.
In the wake of the 9/11 Attacks, the Jewish Neocons stampeded America towards the disastrous Iraq War and the resulting destruction of the Middle East, with the talking heads on our television sets endlessly claiming that “Saddam Hussein is another Hitler.” Since then, we have regularly heard the same tag-line repeated in various modified versions, being told that “Muammar Gaddafi is another Hitler” or “Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is another Hitler” or “Vladimir Putin is another Hitler” or even “Hugo Chavez is another Hitler.” For the last couple of years, our American media has been relentlessly filled with the claim that “Donald Trump is another Hitler.”
During the early 2000s, I obviously recognized that Iraq’s ruler was a harsh tyrant, but snickered at the absurd media propaganda, knowing perfectly well that Saddam Hussein was no Adolf Hitler. But with the steady growth of the Internet and the availability of the millions of pages of periodicals provided by my digitization project, I’ve been quite surprised to gradually also discover that Adolf Hitler was no Adolf Hitler.
It might not be entirely correct to claim that the story of World War II was that Franklin Roosevelt sought to escape his domestic difficulties by orchestrating a major European war against the prosperous, peace-loving Nazi Germany of Adolf Hitler. But I do think that picture is probably somewhat closer to the actual historical reality than the inverted image more commonly found in our textbooks.
Rockets Raining Down – An excerpt from the documentary “Occupation Of The American Mind”, an analysis of how Israeli propaganda experts spin Israel’s attacks on Palestinians, and how US media repeat this spin, reversing the reality of what’s actually going on.
In what appears to be an admission of the growing divide between Israel and Jews living outside the country, the outgoing Minister of Education and Diaspora Affairs Naftali Bennett warned against what he sees as “assimilation” of Jews with communities around the world, describing it as “one of the greatest disasters in the history of the Jewish people”.
The remarks, which were reported by Arutz Sheva, were made at the annual International Bible Quiz in Jerusalem, which takes place each year on Israel’s Independence Day. It’s reported that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was in audience.
Expressing grave concern over Jewish “assimilation”, Bennett who heads the New Right party with Ayelet Shaked, is reported saying: “The State of Israel has experienced the most prosperous and successful era it has known, but during these very days, one of the greatest disasters in the history of the Jewish people is taking place – we are losing millions of our Jewish brothers and sisters in the diaspora. Like an iceberg melting away, so many of our people are slipping away before our eyes.”
He called on the state of Israel to act “without delay, with all [our] strength, creativity, and determination, in order to save [our] brothers and sisters, members of the Jewish people around the world, from assimilation and anti-Semitism.”
Bennet insisted that the task of stemming the tide of Jewish “assimilation” needed to be “the project of the state of Israel”, explaining that “whenever we needed financial or political assistance, the Jews of the world mobilised to help”.
Bennet concluding his addressing saying: “We have a duty to ensure that we will be a sovereign and united Jewish state for all eternity.”
A personal account of detention, racism and broken rules
An international activist who was documenting this incident was also detained by the soldiers, she describes her detention as follows:
I’ve been at Salaymeh checkpoint every other day for a month and a half just trying to document the soldier’s harassment of the children, keeping in contact with the UN, so they can hopefully help if children are arrested. I am always mindful not to antagonize the soldiers and try to interact with them as little as possible. My hope is that an international presence will result in less violence because the soldiers will know they are being watched and may be held accountable.
On the day that I was detained I was filming a soldier as normal, who threatened to arrest another activist who I was with. Because I’d witnessed a lot of broken rules and violence by the army during my time at Salaymeh checkpoint, I knew it was important to keep filming. The commander asked me to move away, and when I kept filming, she told me that she would have another soldier move me with force. When I didn’t stop filming, she told me to come with her and that she had the authority to make arrests. I was very unsure of what to do in this situation – I had been told before that soldiers could not make arrests, but I was confused, and I was afraid of what might happen so I complied and went with her. I later found out that what the commander had said was in fact a lie and that she had absolutely no legal authority to detain me.
I was kept at Salaymeh checkpoint for an hour and a half, being told that the police would come but they never did. I was then put into a military van without being told where I was being taken. They then drove me around the city back and forth for half an hour which was very confusing. I still don’t know why they did this but I believe now that they were trying to shake off the UN who were trying to find out where I was being held in order to assist me. Eventually I was taken to a military base where they were also holding the Palestinian child who had been arrested. We were both held there for over 5 hours. During this time I was marshalled around, sporadically questioned, never given any food or water and never having anything explained to me. I was told that I would never be able to return to the country and that I would be deported that day. The whole time I was denied access to my lawyer and I was never given any reason for why I was being held.
What struck me the most about being detained with the Palestinian child was that as an international I was treated far better. I, an adult, was not handcuffed, and I was allowed to keep my things. He however, a child, was handcuffed, restrained, frisked, and they took his phone and his things. It was shocking and angering to me that this child was treated so much worse than me – it made it very obvious to me that the treatment of Palestinians undoubtedly has its roots in racism. – Full article
Children in Al-Ram living in close proximity to the separation barrier
Defence for Children Palestine – May 9, 2019
The Israeli separation barrier cuts Al-Ram off from East Jerusalem, restricting movement for these two Palestinian siblings who live near the barrier. Sadeen Q., 12, says the Israeli army fires tear gas from behind the barrier into their home. Shawqi Q., 10, dreams of a day when the barrier will be gone. In 2004, the International Court of Justice advised Israel to dismantle portions of the barrier. Israel has yet to comply.
Zaid’s school experience in Nablus is framed by soldiers
Defence for Children Palestine – May 9, 2019
“Soldiers and settlers stormed the school and suddenly broke into the classroom and started to assault the students before arresting me,” said Zaid M., 15., about an Israeli raid during an exam. He says that interrogators threatened to assault him unless he told them which of his peers were involved in stone-throwing. The school’s principal says that weekly army raids and other disruptions negatively impact the school and its students. DCIP has found that children living or studying near Israeli settlements are at higher risk of arrest.
Waiting for reconstruction, Oday lives in a damaged house
Defence for Children Palestine – August 16, 2017
Israel’s 50-day assault on the Gaza Strip in 2014 left thousands homeless. The assault completely destroyed or severely damaged 17,800 Palestinian homes and partially destroyed another 153,200 homes. In the wake of the destruction, the blockade has slowed reconstruction progress. Oday M., 16, from Khuza’a in the southern part of Gaza, has moved back into his partially destroyed house while waiting for construction to finish on a new home.
Americans are sick of fighting a 20-year war against an undefined enemy they can’t seem to beat. With morale and recruitment scraping bottom, the world’s best-funded military reckons that, if it can’t win, it can at least look like a winner.
The US Army looked to World War II, the last war the US could decisively be said to have “won,” for inspiration when designing its new service uniform to invoke “the most prominent time the Army’s service to our nation was universally recognized,” as sergeant major Daniel Dailey, the Army’s highest-ranking enlisted soldier, told the New York Times. But the specter of World War II – when Americans were hailed as “the good guys” – was conjured up long before the military decided to reenact its golden age through cosplay. Indeed, the US has been borrowing from the WWII playbook since before the War on Terror officially began.
Like WWII, the US’ forever-war, which has long since spilled beyond the Middle East, is being fought on multiple fronts against countries that, left alone, would pose no threat to the US. In both cases, the American people had to be tricked into supporting long, bloody, expensive conflicts that served little strategic purpose for the US – but strongly benefited their allies.
Neocon think tank Project for a New American Century (PNAC) infamously called for a “new Pearl Harbor” to advance its foreign policy goals, and the attacks of September 11 were used to shred the Constitution and pitch the country headlong into nearly two decades of unparalleled destruction, destabilizing the Middle East for generations and bankrupting the US. Neither attack happened without plenty of warning, however, and both were arguably permitted to take place in order to manufacture consent for extremely unpopular wars.
With the US barely out of World War I, President Franklin Roosevelt faced a population 80 to 90 percent opposed to entering another global conflict; he even ran on the promise that “your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars.” Not only did Roosevelt deliberately place the US’ Pacific fleet in harm’s way by anchoring it in Pearl Harbor against the advice of fleet commander Admiral James Richardson; he relieved Richardson of his command for complaining, reportedly telling him “Sooner or later the Japanese will commit an overt act against the United States and the nation will be willing to enter the war.” US military intelligence, which had cracked the Japanese encryption codes, intercepted radio messages indicating Japan planned to attack Hawaii. The attack was allowed to happen, and overnight, a population allergic to war was baying for Japanese blood.
Several government agents, including FBI Minneapolis field office chief counsel Coleen Rowley and FBI Special Agent Robert Wright, came forward before September 11, troubled by evidence that seemed to point to a foreign group planning an attack on American soil. Saudi nationals training at flight schools and Israeli “art students” probing security vulnerabilities in government buildings set off alarms in government agencies all over the country. But the administration of President George W. Bush, packed with PNAC alumni, ignored and even punished these whistleblowers. The Twin Towers were destroyed, the PATRIOT Act (pre-written and ready to go) was rammed through a docile Congress and, less than a month later, according to General Wesley Clark, the decision to invade Iraq had been made, even as hostilities had barely commenced in Afghanistan. Clark was told of a classified memo from Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld that described how “We’re going to take out seven countries in five years,” and while their timetable is a little behind, Iran is the only country on that list where the US and its allies haven’t attempted a regime change.
It’s worth looking at what triggered the Pearl Harbor attack, because it is happening again. When Japan refused to pull its forces out of China, the US imposed an oil embargo on Japan, cutting the nation off from 80 percent of its oil supply and leaving it no choice but to seek fuel elsewhere. The closest oil was in then-Dutch Indonesia, but US-controlled Philippines physically barred the way. The US had thus almost guaranteed Japan would have to attack the US, allowing Washington to enter the war with the American people’s approval in order to fight Germany, whom Roosevelt perceived as the “real” enemy.
The US has imposed the strictest sanctions on Iran yet, repealing the last waivers last week in the hope of forcing the country into a similarly suicidal act. Iran has threatened to close the Strait of Hormuz if it is blocked from using the waterway, which sees 20 percent of the world’s oil traffic. US officials have deemed such a move “unacceptable,” suggesting massive retaliation would follow, and a US carrier strike group is on its way to the region, supposedly acting on a “credible threat” that Iran plans to target US interests. Regardless of who fires the first shot – and Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif has warned Trump a false flag attack is extremely likely – war with Iran would be the result, and Americans would be cheering it on. The question is not if, but when.
War with Iran wouldn’t benefit the US at all – a 2002 Pentagon wargame simulation has even indicated the US would lose. But Iran is the strongest enemy of Israel left standing, and Trump’s inner circle – like the neocons at PNAC (whose members included John Bolton) – has made it clear where his priorities lie. Just as laying waste to Iraq, Syria, Libya, and Yemen only created an endless supply of enemies for the US while crossing Israel’s regional rivals off the list, attempting to destroy Iran will have devastating repercussions for the US while ensuring no one is left to challenge Israel’s regional dominance. It is no coincidence that the intel suggesting Iran was plotting an attack on American targets in the Middle East – the tip that triggered the deployment of the carrier strike group Abraham Lincoln to the region last month – came from the Mossad, the Israeli intel agency whose motto is “by deception, thou shalt do war.” Israel has been lying about Iran’s ambitions for decades. In the same way, Britain, not the US, stood to benefit from the US attacking Germany in WWII. While the US did eventually profit from Germany’s defeat, splitting a destroyed Europe with the Soviets, Britain needed US intervention if it hoped to survive at all.
World War II was a golden era for propagandists on both sides, and the US’ reliance on the art has only grown since the days when buck-toothed racist Japanese caricatures spoke to American civilians in broken English: “Please, take day off!” Hitler remains the exemplar of evil in the American mind only because history is written by the victors – Stalin, whose body count was significantly greater, was cast as kindly Uncle Joe, until the military-industrial complex required a new enemy to maintain military spending levels and the Soviet Union was transformed from powerful friend into formidable foe. Anti-Nazi propaganda has flourished since the war’s end, with lurid tales of lampshades and soap made from concentration camp victims, and “Nazi” itself has become shorthand for anyone we disagree with politically.
Americans are told again and again that military intervention is the only way to “save” the people of Libya, Syria, or Iraq, especially their women and children. While Libya may have taken the cake for most bizarre propaganda narrative yet, with stories that Muammar Gaddafi was doling out Viagra to his soldiers to ensure they were at the top of their rape game, the terrorist White Helmets in Syria won an Oscar for their convincing portrayal of a noble civil defense force, convincing the folks back home that Bashar Assad was a gas-happy monster instead of the cosmopolitan statesman who’d received the French Medal of Honor just a few years before.
An important part of both eras’ successful propaganda campaigns was bringing the war closer to home. Most Americans couldn’t care less about what is happening halfway around the world, no matter how many babies are supposedly being thrown into ovens or out of incubators. During WWII, this was accomplished with a speculative story in Life magazine on how the Nazis might invade the US. One of the routes took the Nazis up through Mexico. The narrative hasn’t changed much since then, except now it’s ISIS camped out at the border, lustily eyeing our “freedoms.”
Trump isn’t the only American aware that the US is no longer “winning.” But enacting the rituals of the last time it tasted victory is not going to catapult the world back into the golden age of the American empire. Those who refuse to learn from history are doomed to repeat it – worse, they are doomed to think repeating it is a good idea.
As far as I know, no evidence has yet surfaced that definitively establishes direct CIA involvement in the U.S. regime-change operation in Venezuela. But it is a virtual certainty that the CIA is directly embroiled in the operation.
How do we know that? Because that’s what the CIA does. It’s what it has always done. Regime-change has always been one of the core missions of the CIA. If there is a U.S. regime-change operation, you can bet your bottom dollar that the CIA is at the center of it.
You can also be certain of something else: secrecy. The long-established modus of the CIA is to keep its role in regime-change operations secret, even if it has to lie or commit perjury to maintain that secrecy.
For example, think back to the Chilean coup in the 1970s.
When the Chilean people elected Salvador Allende president, the CIA immediately went into action. It began offering bribes to Chilean congressmen to get them to vote against Allende’s confirmation. (Allende had received only a plurality of the votes and, therefore, under the Chilean constitution the Chilean congress determined who was going to be president.)
It also orchestrated the kidnapping and assassination of Gen. Rene Schneider, who was the overall commander of Chile’s armed forces. He was standing in the way of a CIA-inspired military coup, which the CIA was secretly inciting within the Chilean national-security establishment.
In the months leading up to the coup, the CIA was doing its best to maximize the economic suffering of the Chilean people. GOP President Richard Nixon called it “making the economy scream” and it was intended to aggravate the economic crisis that had been brought on by Allende’s socialist policies. The CIA even tried to starve the Chilean people to death by bribing truckers who delivered food across the country to go on strike.
All of this CIA mayhem was kept top-secret. In fact, CIA and U.S. involvement in the 1973 coup was considered so secret that the CIA may well have played a role in the Chilean execution of American Charles Horman during the coup. He had inadvertently discovered strong circumstantial evidence of the U.S. role in the coup and, therefore, posed a grave threat to the secrecy of CIA involvement in the coup.
When CIA Director Richard Helms was summoned before Congress and asked about CIA involvement in the circumstances surrounding the coup, he committed perjury in order to keep the CIA’s role in the coup secret. When he was later convicted of lying to Congress, his CIA counterparts glorified him for having lied to Congress for the sake of “national security.”
It was no different with respect to the CIA’s regime-change operations against Cuba.
Although the CIA was planning and orchestrating the invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs through the use of Cuban exiles, the CIA was doing everything it could to hide its own role in the invasion.
Later, the secrecy was expanded to include the CIA’s partnership with the Mafia to achieve regime-change in Cuba through the assassination of Cuban leader Fidel Castro.
In 1954, the CIA successfully planned and orchestrated the regime-change operation against Guatemala’s democratically elected president, Jacobo Arbenz. Secrecy, once again, was the policy. It wasn’t until years later that the American people discovered the CIA’s role in the operation.
The year before, 1953, the CIA had done the same in Iran. In a coup in which the CIA’s role was kept secret at the time, the CIA successfully ousted the country’s democratically elected prime minister, Mohammad Mossadegh, and replaced him with the Shah. The CIA then proceeded to train the Shah’s secret police force, the SAVAK, in the dark-side arts of torture, indefinite detention, and assassination in order to help him maintain his grip on power. Again, secrecy was the order of the day.
There is something else to keep in mind as the Venezuela regime-change operation continues to unfold — the short term vs. the long term.
In the short term, the CIA secretly celebrated its regime-change operations in Iran, Guatemala, and Chile. Medals were secretly passed out to CIA participants. The long-term results of those interventions, however, proved to be disastrous. Relations between Iran and the U.S. continue to suffer. Guatemala was ruled by a succession of brutal military dictatorships that threw the county into a 30-year-long civil war that killed more than a million people. Chile was ruled by a brutal military dictatorship for more than 15 years, one that rounded up, incarcerated, tortured, raped, or killed some 50,000 innocent people. Moreover, don’t forget the disastrous long-term results of the U.S. regime-change operations in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and Libya.
Of course, the solution to all this mayhem is not to require the CIA to provide real-time transparency in its regime-change operations. It wouldn’t comply with such a law anyway, based on concerns for “national security.” The only solution is to abolish the CIA, the NSA, the Pentagon, and the military-industrial complex, restore America’s founding foreign-policy principle of non-interventionism, and restore a limited-government republic to our land.
Youth under Occupation, a documentary produced by Al-Haq Organization and The Young Women Christian Association (YWCA), which sheds the light on the Israeli violations in the Occupied Palestinian Territory and their impact on the Palestinian youth, within 18 minutes of testimonies given by four young men and women.
In this essay I propose that there are many things about climate change that the general public, journalists, academics, environmentalists and politicians may think they ‘know’ to certainly be true that are actually, at the least, highly equivocal (or demonstrably false) and that once these misconceptions are corrected perceptions of the issue are (or, at least, should be) transformed. Note that throughout I use the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) definition of ‘climate change’: ‘a statistically significant variation in either the mean state of the climate or in its variability, persisting for an extended period (typically decades or longer)’. By ‘global warming’ I mean a rise in the Global Average Surface Temperature of the Earth.
Although the exact terminology and language may vary, we are repeatedly told that the essential ‘facts’ about climate change are that:
a) Global warming is happening, at rate that is unprecedented and accelerating
b) It has been caused by our carbon dioxide emissions from burning fossil fuels
c) It has already caused an alarming and accelerating rise in sea levels
d) It has already caused an alarming and accelerating increase in the frequency and intensity of extreme weather events
e) It has already caused alarming and accelerating global species extinctions
f) We are experiencing a climate change crisis that will soon be catastrophic (potentially even causing a mass extinction event) if we don’t stop climate change
g) We can stop climate change by urgently switching to renewable energy sources, such as wind and solar, so eradicating our emissions
h) The science behind the above points is settled and beyond reasonable dispute.
My assertion is not that these ‘facts’ are ‘fake news’ (deliberately reported falsehoods) or ‘myths’ (implying that there is no truth whatsoever in them) but that they are fundamental misconceptions based on misunderstandings of what the science and evidence actually tell us. These misconceptions appear to have assumed the mantle of ‘collective beliefs’ (or ‘memes’) that through extensive repetition in the media are mistakenly taken to be indisputable truths, despite the ready availability of science and evidence to disprove (or, at the least, seriously question) them. Few people will have heard the opinions of scientists (including many of the world’s most eminent climate scientists) who doubt this ‘man-made climate change crisis’ narrative because their voices have largely been silenced (typically by branding them ‘climate change deniers’ or even ‘science deniers’). In the current climate of hostility to even considering alternative viewpoints there is apparently only one politically correct position to take, the ‘right’ position of accepting that the alarmist narrative is beyond dispute.
It’s hardly surprising that these misconceptions have arisen because for most people (whether they be the general public, politicians or, indeed, journalists) their exposure to the climate change issue is predominantly through the media. Furthermore when the media concerned is mainstream (such as the BBC), and so ‘trusted’, people reasonably believe that they are being told the ‘whole truth’ by unbiased journalists who must have understood and critically investigated the science and evidence. Sadly such understanding and critical analysis is rarely to be found, journalists typically simply taking on trust what the ‘scientific authorities’ tell them (as gleaned from Press Releases and ‘executive summary’ documents from which all the complexities and profound uncertainties, unknowns and ambiguities have largely been expunged). This often superficial understanding is then communicated to the target audience using unscientific, emotional, hyperbolic language (such as ‘climate emergency’ and ‘climate change crisis’) and quoting extreme outlier predictions that are virtually impossible to occur in order to create an impression of urgency and danger; rhetoric appealing to the emotions coupled with alarming images (like ice calving, hurricanes and wildfires or computer-generated drowning cities) are always likely to sway public opinion far more powerfully than rhetoric appealing to logic coupled with complicated science, graphs and data. In this way highly improbable risks in the far future come to be perceived as existential crises today. In fact if you want to convince the general public (and journalists and politicians) that ‘we are experiencing a man-made climate change crisis’ then, because few will understand the fundamental differences between man-made climate change and global warming, let alone the differences between man-made climate change and natural climate variability, you typically need only convince them that ‘global warming is happening’ (which nobody denies). So one temperature graph showing warming (there are thousands available on Google Images) is all it may take to apparently ‘prove’ your case. Yet evidence that global warming is happening is not evidence that man-made global warming is happening and not evidence that climate change is happening (let alone evidence that man-made climate change is happening) because the global warming may just result from natural climate variability. Natural climate variability is variability in the mean state of the climate on all temporal scales (beyond that of individual weather events) resulting from natural processes.
This confusion was epitomized in ‘Climate Change – The Facts’, Sir David Attenborough’s BBC documentary (that appeared on British TV 18th April 2019) that was a catalogue of scientific misconceptions, spanning claims of man-made climate change causing escalating heatwaves, droughts, storms, floods, ice melt at the Antarctic, sea level rise, species extinctions and widespread coral death. Sample criticisms of the programme can be found here and here and here. It included the claim (also being made by such extremist groups as Extinction Rebellion) that globally we must achieve net-zero carbon dioxide emissions by 2050 and not exceed a further half a degree Centigrade of global warming if we are to avoid a climate catastrophe and possible mass extinction event – a claim that, to put it as charitably as possible, is not at all supported by the science, as is evident to anyone with even the most basic understanding of climate science or anyone who has actually read the IPCC SR15 report that ostensibly formed the basis of this claim. Furthermore to achieve this goal would, according to the IPCC, ‘require unprecedented changes in our lifestyle, energy and transport systems’, effectively a global social and economic revolution.
The essential problem for those who are prepared to open their minds to alternative viewpoints is that to understand the flaws in the alarmist narrative’s simplistic certainties requires that you delve quite deeply into the science, statistics, politics and economics of climate change – and that is time-consuming, hard work that requires quite a high degree of scientific literacy. However if you do make the effort a very different (far less alarming) picture appears:
1) Global warming and climate change are both unequivocally happening (the latter being reflected in, for example, glacier retreat and sea level rise) but so far both at a rate that is well within the bounds of natural climate variability (and not unprecedented)
2) There are substantial uncertainties about the extent to which human activity (principally in the form of global warming from greenhouse gas emissions and global cooling from aerosol and soot emissions) has contributed to the observed post-industrial global warming and climate change, not least because of the extreme difficulty of separating man-made climate change from the ‘background noise’ of natural climate variability. Nevertheless on the balance of probabilities human activity was responsible for half or more of the global warming observed between 1950 and 2010 (a period of escalating carbon dioxide emissions)
3) Sea levels are rising at a rate of about 7-8 inches per century, a rate that has remained steady despite our escalating carbon dioxide emissions, i.e. the cause is probably predominantly natural. We could globally cease all carbon dioxide emissions overnight and sea levels would continue to rise, an inevitability to which we must adapt
4) There is no remotely compelling scientific evidence that extreme weather events have increased in frequency or intensity in post-industrial times (although the reporting of such events certainly has)
5) There is no remotely compelling scientific evidence that climate change (man-made or otherwise) has resulted in widespread species extinctions (most extinctions have been attributed to habitat loss, over-exploitation, pollution or invasive species)
6) If you remove the (entirely natural) El Niño warming of 2015-16 there has been little statistically significant global warming this century
7) Recently (essentially this century) global warming has been slowing down (while our carbon dioxide emissions have continued to escalate), this illustrating the fact that there is no direct (or linear) correlation between global surface temperatures and carbon dioxide emissions
8) It is impossible to control the Earth’s average surface temperature (on the timescales of decades to centuries) just by controlling our carbon dioxide emissions
9) It is impossible to stop climate change happening – climate change is inherently complex, unpredictable and uncontrollable
10) It is impossible to specify a threshold for global warming beyond which the climatic effects become net-harmful (the 20C goal of the Paris Climate Accord is essentially politically arbitrary)
11) Carbon dioxide is an incombustible, colourless, odourless and tasteless gas that is a very effective plant nutrient. Thanks to our carbon dioxide emissions increasing concentrations in the atmosphere there has been a greening of the Earth that is already equivalent in size to twice the area of the USA and could fundamentally change the Earth’s carbon cycle by adding such a vast carbon sink. Furthermore, as the ‘fuel’ of photosynthesis and the creation of oxygen, it is absolutely essential to the existence of complex life on Earth (which includes us). Dr. Richard Lindzen, Professor of Atmospheric Sciences at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has stated that the idea that carbon dioxide is a dangerous, planet-destroying toxin ‘will be remembered as the greatest mass delusion in the history of the world’
12) Carbon dioxide concentrations in our atmosphere today are about 46% higher than their (280ppm) pre-industrial level (largely because of our emissions) but about four times lower than their average level and at least 10 times lower than their highest level in the history of the Earth (based on paleoclimatology estimates)
13) The global average surface temperature today is about 10C higher than its pre-industrial level but about 60C lower than its average level and at least 130C lower than its highest level in the history of the Earth (based on paleoclimatology estimates)
14) Climate change computer models are proving very unreliable guides to future climate change (in particular they are substantially overestimating warming) – yet it is the most extreme ‘predictions’ of these models that are driving global climate and energy policies
15) The future costs and impacts of decarbonization may well exceed the future costs and impacts of man-made global warming, i.e. even if future man-made global warming becomes net-harmful it may not be cost-effective to mitigate it with decarbonization
16) Based on observational estimates of climate sensitivity (simplistically how much warming you get when you double the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere) on the balance of probabilities further man-made global warming this century is unlikely to exceed 1.50C and its climatic effects might actually be net-beneficial for humans and the environment for many regions of the world [Here I am assuming climate sensitivity not exceeding 20C (based on the best empirical evidence) and ‘business as usual’ emissions trajectories leading to carbon dioxide concentrations not exceeding 700ppm by 2100. Note that by ‘business as usual’ I mean a reasonable extrapolation of economic, population and energy mix trends. This is not to be conflated with recent trends which have roughly tracked the IPCC scenario RCP8.5 (its most extreme emissions scenario, which is virtually impossible to occur)]
17) Climate disruption (e.g. the failure of the Gulf Stream) before the end of this century resulting from man-made global warming is not absolutely impossible but is extremely unlikely
18) A ‘mass extinction event’ before the end of this century resulting from man-made global warming is a virtual impossibility; however a global economic recession/depression resulting from climate policies designed to limit future warming to a half degree Centigrade (and so ostensibly avert such a catastrophe) is a virtual certainty
19) Intermittent wind and solar power is not the solution to any potential future climate change problem (certainly with any foreseeable development of battery technology to ‘plug the intermittency gap’)
20) Climate change science is currently immature, highly disputable and not remotely ‘settled’. This is precisely why many very different interpretations of the science have arisen
Based on the above points the politically correct vogue for councils/counties/countries to declare a ‘climate change emergency’ is clearly profoundly scientifically misconceived (in fact it is hard to avoid the word ‘delusional’) based on any reasonable definition of the word ‘emergency’. It might well make good political sense (to attract the ‘green vote’) but it makes no real scientific or economic sense. For example, the only statistically significant change in Britain’s climate for hundreds of years has been that it has warmed slightly – yet the UK Parliament has now declared a ‘climate change emergency’. Basically it is hard to see how climate change that so far has probably been net-beneficial for humans and the environment, that has lifted us out of the misery of the Little Ice Age that preceded it, with its droughts, crop failures, famines and epidemics, and has been accompanied by the Industrial Revolution’s soaring wealth and life expectancy (according to the World Bank’s World Development Indicators 2014) could reasonably, in the round, be described as an ‘emergency’; indeed quite the opposite.
Despite all of the above, if nevertheless the radical global decarbonization route is to be followed it cannot succeed without global concerted action, in particular from major emitters like China (30% of the world’s carbon dioxide emissions, and rising – and funding about $36 billion of coal projects globally according to the IEEFA). Decarbonization unilateralism by small emitters is worse than pointless. For example even if Britain (1.1% of global emissions) somehow totally decarbonized its economy (with technologies not yet viable, like Carbon Capture and Sequestration), as is being recommended by its Committee on Climate Change, the future reduction in global warming would still be undetectably and unmeasurably small (estimated to be of the order of a hundredth of a degree Centigrade by 2100) and so basically just extremely economically, socially and environmentally damaging ‘virtue signalling’. The only basis on which this could possibly be described as even vaguely rational or responsible would be if major emitters, like China, followed Britain’s lead – and there is, to say the least, a negligible chance of that.
Of course these 20 conjectures are a great deal more complicated, qualified and uncertain than the 8 simple, absolute and certain ‘facts’ at the start of this essay. Given a choice between the complex uncertainties of my conjectures and the simple certainties of the ‘facts’ many would prefer the latter. So can we reduce all this complexity to a relatively simple ‘alternative climate change narrative’, at the very real risk of being as trite as the original set of ‘facts’? If forced to make such a gross simplification my suggestion would be:
a) Global warming is happening, albeit at a rate that is unexceptional and not accelerating
b) It has been caused by both human activity and natural activity (i.e. it has not just been caused by our carbon dioxide emissions)
c) It has caused a rise in sea levels, albeit at a rate that is unexceptional and not accelerating
d) It has not caused an increase in the frequency or intensity of extreme weather events
e) It has not caused accelerating global species extinctions
f) We are not experiencing a ‘climate change crisis’ or a ‘climate change emergency’ (indeed arguably quite the opposite) but climate disruption in the far future, although very unlikely, is not impossible
g) We cannot stop climate change but we can reduce climate change risks (albeit at an economic, social and environmental cost that may be prohibitive) by gradually transitioning to lower carbon-intensity energy sources (like natural gas), so reducing our emissions
h) The science behind the above points is immature and subject to dispute. There is almost total scientific consensus that global warming and climate change are happening and that we are contributing to them – but profound disagreements about the extent of our contribution, whether it will lead to ‘dangerous’ climate change and whether urgent global decarbonization is the correct policy response.
Now all this is highly controversial and iconoclastic because it subverts the politically correct orthodoxy on climate change, those alarming ‘facts’ that we are not supposed to question. Many would doubtless disagree with this alternative, more circumspect and far less alarming narrative, perhaps saying ‘well that’s not what the IPCC say.’ The IPCC is typically described as, ‘The internationally accepted authority on climate change’ and is viewed with reverence, not to say awe, by most academics, politicians, environmentalists and journalists, who regard it as virtually infallible and omniscient in all climate change matters. In fact many of my 20 points are directly derived from IPCC reports. Actually I suspect that the IPCC would privately agree with most of these 20 points (but would never publically admit it for fear of reducing the fear). Furthermore the IPCC, in keeping with its remit from the UN to support the UNFCCC (the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, which is the main international treaty on climate change), focuses almost exclusively on man-made climate change at the expense of important aspects of natural climate change and is arguably predisposed to a ‘presumption of guilt’ of carbon dioxide emissions. Basically to ignore the opinions of the IPCC would be as foolish as to believe that they are beyond reasonable dispute.
To really understand the climate change issue we must accept that it is far more complicated and nuanced and uncertain than the simplistic way it is typically reported in the media. We must open our minds to the wide range of expert opinions about the issue, give them deep thought, apply common sense, make careful judgements, and above all be wary of any simplistic all-purpose solutions, such as urgent global decarbonization. Unfortunately few people have available to them the time, inclination and perseverance to do that. As Dr. Richard Lindzen has said, ‘Most arguments about global warming boil down to science versus authority. For much of the public authority will generally win since they do not wish to deal with the science.’ The apparent overwhelming message from the authorities (as mediated by the media) is that we are experiencing a man-made climate change crisis that can only be fixed through urgent and radical global decarbonization and it is perfectly understandable (although regrettable) that the vast majority of the general public and journalists and politicians simply choose to believe this. Why do all that hard, time-consuming work when you can just believe. The simplistic certainties of the alarmist media narrative may be based on profound scientific misconceptions (as the authorities are well aware) but the attitude of the authorities appears to be that because a ‘climate change crisis’ in the distant future is not impossible this possible end justifies the dubious means – after all, even this alarmist narrative has failed to get the nations of the world to act decisively. If the authorities communicated the climate change issue honestly, in all its complexity and uncertainty, it would give governments even more reason to avoid or delay decarbonization. So the behavior of the scientific authorities is perfectly understandable, although regrettable, because it risks radical climate change policies being implemented that may be the cause of deep global regret in the future. And of course the behavior of the media is also perfectly understandable (although regrettable) because bad news sells; it is hard to monetize a ‘no climate change crisis’ story.
When people say that they believe in the climate change crisis because they ‘believe in science’ what they may actually be saying is that because they don’t really understand the science they choose to believe in the alarmist narrative promoted by the authorities and abetted by the media. Few people choose the ‘road less travelled’ of opening their minds to the competing arguments in the climate change debate, embracing complexity, uncertainty, doubt and social opprobrium when they can simply choose to believe what they think the authorities and other ‘right thinking’ people believe. On the one hand you have an apparently scientifically-straightforward, very easy to understand, very certain, very alarming problem (‘our carbon dioxide emissions are causing a climate change crisis’) with an ostensibly very simple solution (‘decarbonize’) and on the other hand you have a scientifically-challenging, very hard to understand, complex, nuanced and uncertain problem that may or may not be alarming and which has no simple solution. To put it another way, on the one hand you have an imminent existential planetary crisis that can only be solved by the radical and urgent transformation of global society and on the other hand you have a possible distant future problem with no obvious ‘correct’ policy response today. It’s not hard to see why certain people, in particular young, idealistic and impressionable people, may be more attracted to the former idea and want to break out the banners and ‘save the planet’ through a world revolution.
Within the climate science community the divide is essentially between those (epitomized by the IPCC) who predominantly put their faith in climate models (i.e. virtual world projections of what might happen in the future) and those who predominantly put their faith in empirical scientific evidence (i.e. real world observations of what has actually happened). The former group tend to focus on the possible high risks of future climate change and urge rapid global decarbonization just in case whilst the latter group tend to focus on the probable low risks of future climate change (and high costs and impacts of decarbonization) and urge circumspection. It might be said that the latter group is looking at the issue in the manner of a businessman, assessing the balance of probabilities, costs, benefits and risks (they are essentially gambling and saying that urgent decarbonization is probably a bad bet) whilst the former group is simply saying that there is a huge potential risk and therefore something (radical global decarbonization) must be done, almost irrespective of the probabilities, costs and adverse impacts. As Obersteiner et al put it in Managing Climate Risk, the key unresolved question is whether global decarbonization ‘will fundamentally reshape our common future on a global scale to our advantage, or quickly produce losses that can throw mankind into economic, social, and environmental bankruptcy.’ Climate scientists who question the dominant man-made climate change crisis narrative are not saying that there is a clear scientific verdict of ‘Innocent’ – instead they are simply saying that our guilt has not been proved beyond reasonable doubt (or even on the balance of probabilities). Perhaps here we need the Scottish legal system’s verdict of ‘Not Proven’.
The fundamental problem with the climate change problem is that it is a ‘wicked’ problem: it is impossible to predict our climate future, determine whether it is benign or alarming and know how best to respond because there are simply too many variables, too many unknowns and too many uncertainties. However we choose to respond is a vast gamble with humanity’s future; however we choose to respond may result in deep regrets.
Discussions which frame Palestine’s precarious future within the context of US President Donald Trump’s so-called “deal of the century” versus the two-state compromise continue. Apparently with just these two dangerous options on the table, Palestine is being pushed into oblivion.
In anticipation of Trump’s deal, a group of former officials from European countries have sent a letter to EU Foreign Ministers and the EU High Representative for Foreign affairs and Security Policy. They call upon the EU to reject the US deal and affirm “the internationally agreed parameters for a two-state solution.”
Their letter calls the Oslo Agreement “a milestone of transatlantic foreign policy cooperation” and describes Trump’s decisions as “gambling with the security and stability of various countries located at Europe’s doorstep.” This is in the context of the US terminating its financial aid to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA). If Europe does not reject Trump’s deal, the letter warns, the result will “accelerate the demise of the two-state option and fatally damage the cause of a durable peace for Palestinians and Israelis alike.”
A close reading of the letter shows that there is more concern about the EU retaining the upper-hand when it comes to diplomatic negotiations, rather than what happens to Palestinians within the context of Trump’s forthcoming deal. Indeed, in conclusion, the letter states that the current rift in policy is “a defining opportunity to reinforce our shared principles… and thereby manifest Europe’s unique role as a point of reference for a rules-based global order.”
All the concerns exhibited by such former this and former that people are alien to the Palestinian struggle for liberation; where were they when they were in positions of power and influence? What did they do or say then of any benefit to the Palestinians?
It is a fact that Palestine was changed, seemingly irrevocably, by European colonisation and the US has now stepped in to hasten the process. The EU is merely vying for international influence when it comes to Israel and it does so at the expense of Palestinian territory and Palestinian lives; it holds no moral high ground when it comes to protecting Israeli colonialism.
Unlike the US on this occasion, though, it has the backing of the so-called international community due to the common factor which is the “two-state solution”, a fatal compromise which rewards the state responsible for the ongoing ethnic cleansing of the people of Palestine. Since the international community has long since manipulated general consensus as being equivalent to fairness and legitimacy, the EU is diplomatically a step ahead in terms of international relations.
As far as Israel is concerned, both the US and the EU are serving the colonial agenda. The US is focusing on promoting overt normalisation of relations with Israel and providing incentives, while the EU has normalised such relations and maintains the illusion of supporting Palestinian rights. However, the underlying premise remains the two-state imposition supported by the Oslo Accords, the milestone diplomatic endeavour which duped the Palestinians and deprived them of their land.
If the EU is measuring its success by Oslo, it should be clear about its underlying agenda and detriment to Palestinians. Telling the EU to reject Trump’s plan in order to support an obsolete paradigm is just a matter of choosing which violation to uphold; of choosing the lesser of two evils: Trump’s plan or the two-state compromise. Both prioritise Israel, normalise colonialism and render Palestinians as mere recipients of humanitarian aid given in compensation for stolen land and shattered lives.
The EU might well achieve its aim of being an international point of reference, but it is worth reminding Brussels that a “rules-based global order” is not tantamount to justice. Europe’s position, though less belligerent than that of America’s, is also based on the premise of protecting Israel’s colonial project in Palestine at all costs, most of which are being paid by the indigenous Palestinians.
Facebook is receiving congratulations from the darkest corner of the web for reverting to the discredited gatekeeping of the legacy media and further eroding freedom of inquiry on the Internet, which in its early days gained popularity as an antidote to the very censorship we see Facebook (and Paypal and Amazon) imposing.
When they were all up and coming capitalists, the CEOs of these companies preached freedom of expression. Now that they’ve made it into the billionaire’s club they have abandoned the very ideals which brought them fame and fortune. Their conceit that they are avatars of new thinking for the digital age is now exposed as a cheap trick driven by the college campus nanny doctrine that there must be “safe spaces” erected where “micro-aggression” emanating from radical ideas cannot be allowed to penetrate.
Freedom of speech means nothing if it doesn’t mean freedom for your fiercest rivals in the ideological and political struggle. The Tech Tyrants have a megalomaniacal confidence in their own righteousness, which has increasingly transformed the Internet into a zone of conformity. As Heather Mac Donald notes, “They consider any disagreement with their own political outlook as a manifestation of ‘hate,’ and as such, fair game for suppression.”
What they ignore in their hubris is that there are few things more disturbing to Americans than suppression of the advancement of human knowledge through the free competition of ideas. Not so very long ago rights for homosexuals and their marriage were offensive topics proscribed by gatekeeping media. Today that suppression appears to modernists like a relic from a dark age, while suppressing conspiracy theorists and black Muslims is hailed as a virtue. It’s a case of the double standard, freedom of speech for me, but not for thee: my radical cause deserves to be publicized, while your radicalism is offensive to my dogma and therefore will be policed off Facebook and eventually, social media in general.
Mark Zuckerberg and his Facebook cohort have banned and removed Minister Louis Farrakhan of the Nation of Islam from Facebook and Instagram. Farrakhan dissents from the conformist narrative about Israeli Zionism and Talmudic Judaism, while having the highest respect for true Jews. He is demonized and expelled by invoking “anti-Semitism.” All it takes is for the charge to be made and under the dictatorship of the Tech Tyrants, the accused is banned without the right of appeal or due process. This is from the playbook of Communist despot Vladimir Lenin and Nazi Judge Roland Freisler.
Last February Amazon banned three magisterial volumes of black history produced by the Nation of Islam’s scholars, The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews. To add insult to injury, this ignominious book-banning occurred during Black History Month. Amazon claims for public relations’ purposes to be an anti-racist organization, yet here we observe the white liberals who own Amazon sneaking through a ban on brilliant and thus far irrefutable works of black history.
The Canadian-Israeli researcher David Sheen appears to draw upon these books as the foundation of his lectures on the forbidden fact of the Judaic role in the black slave trade. As a white Judaic man he has the privilege of saying without fear of being banned, what Louis Farrakhan and his organization were the first to uncover and publish. This is white supremacy of the most hypocritical type.
Underneath all the slogans and name-calling is the struggle between ideas. The white nationalists who parade in the streets and fire guns at Judaic people, are too obtuse to perceive that their alleged combat contra Judaism is in truth a losing battle against their own philosophical allies. Talmudism of the “settler” type practiced since the founding of the Israeli state in 1948 is a form of racial-supremacist neo-Nazism. Hitler was under the influence of Kabbalistic and Talmudic ideology from 1919 onward. He was channeling the most ferocious racism on the planet.
Decades ago Hebrew University Prof. Yeshayahu Leibowitz warned of the ascendance of what he termed “Judeo-Nazis.” There are indeed Nazi rabbis teaching young people in the Israeli state today. They convey Hitler’s ideology to their students. For this writer to report it may cause me to be banned.
Facts have been judged too hot for you to handle and your infantilization is enforced by self-appointed commissars of the news, imitating the old model of gatekeeping perfected by the increasingly obsolete legacy media. This is a betrayal of the very idea of the Internet. In the 1990s John Perry Barlow, one of the earliest advocates of the Internet, witnessed it functioning as a revolutionary alternative to the censorship common to television and the newspapers, “We are now, as a global group, going into a period where the old editorial system, the old way of stomping down consciousness to a bearable aperture is about to get blasted.”
This is less the case in 2019. The bold promise of a new liberty online is being circumscribed and narrowed by a thousand incremental acts of suppression, which if it continues, over time will forge an Internet which mirrors the decrepit censorship system it was supposed to surpass and overcome.
For the advancement of knowledge without interdiction by partisan expurgators masquerading as objective journalists, a free and untrammeled Internet is absolutely essential, indeed fundamental to what it means to be fully human. “Human rights” is an empty shibboleth if it does not signify the right to know and argue freely according to conscience, something John Milton proposed in 1644, in his essay Areopagitica. He wrote, “If reading is regulated, then music, conversation, every incident of social life must be regulated too.” Four hundred years later and we have yet to learn what Milton knew.
Facebook, Paypal and Amazon will not suppress the Nazi rabbis or the pro-rape rabbis. Just as liberal white supremacy is the covert weapon against blacks in the Nation of Islam who are not willing to submit to the plantation mentality, Nazi ideology and genetic supremacy can be preached with impunity as long as it is done under Zionist or Talmudic auspices. If you understand this, then you know what a mockery is the solemn piety and finger-wagging that accompanies the suppression of heretics like Paul Joseph Watson and Louis Farrakhan.
Rabbis at the Israeli-government-funded Bnei David academy, an elite yeshiva (Talmud school) preparing Israeli youth for leadership positions in the Israeli army, glorify Hitler and the Nazis and urge the enslavement of Arabs. Don’t ask Wikipedia or the legacy news about these Israeli Nazis. You’re not supposed to know. This is what Facebook, Paypal and Amazon are working toward: a vacuum where Correct Think can safely extinguish vital information that has been damned as hateful by people who hate freedom.
Rabbi Eliezer Kashtiel lectures his students at Bnei David academy as follows:
“The gentiles will want to be our slaves. Being a slave to a Jew is the best. They’re glad to be slaves, they want to be slaves. Instead of just walking the streets and being stupid and violent and harming each other, once they’re slaves, their lives can begin to take shape….Yes, we’re racists. We believe in racism. There are races in the world and there are genetic traits inherent in nations. This demands that we think how to help them. There are differences among races…. There are nations around us with genetic defects. The Arab wants to be under Occupation because they have a genetic defect. They don’t know how to run a state. They don’t know how to do anything. Look at how they act.”
Rabbi Giora Radler, addressed the Bnei David academy youth:
“Let’s begin by asking the question: was Hitler right or not? He is the most correct person there is. He was definitely right in every word he said. His ideology was correct. There is a male world which fights, which deals with honor and the brotherhood of soldiers. And there is the soft, ethical feminine world which turns the other cheek.”
Louis Farrakhan has the highest respect for true Jews. But he has righteous anger when he sees Palestinian civilians murdered weekly with no tears shed by the white rulers of America. Neither does he suffer gladly black youth being summarily gunned down by members of American police departments which have been trained by Israeli police in the same tactics they use to wantonly take the lives of Palestinian youth.
The Internet Overlords are turning toward a dictatorship over the mind which they are imposing incrementally, using the pretext of combating white nationalism. (Last time we checked, Minister Farrakhan was not white). Combatting the white Talmudic extremism that is reviving the Hitler cult and has taken thousands of Palestinian lives is not on the agenda. How can it be, when the driving force behind Facebook’s censorship is its own deeply concealed white supremacy?
Our thoughts turn to China and other nations not captive to the Anglo-Zionist networks. American diplomats and newspaper and Internet pundits pompously lecture China on freedom of expression and democracy, presuming, as the British empire did in the 19th century, that the Chinese are dull and slow-witted. Can anyone expect the Chinese to loosen their hold on the Internet when they see American tech tyrants such as Mr. Zuckerberg practicing censorship and limiting free expression?
Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg is encouraging the closing of minds around the world in the name of opposing racism and hatred. Communist Party boss Xi Jinping censors to maintain “Confucian harmony.” Both are pretexts for thought control and the fear that a political or theological rival might get the best of the argument and win adherents.
Gaslighting Farrakhan presupposes that his support among people of color will decline because Facebook has silenced him. Yet the record shows that he has gone from strength to strength as a result of the attacks of the white power structure. Blacks in America are aware that Minister Farrakhan is being censored because he will not behave on the plantation. Moreover, his defiance is a lightning rod for people of all colors who are fed up with the crushing dominion of money over the free spirit of humanity.
Mr. Farrakhan’s position in the black community is not dependent on where he’s at in digital cyberspace. He’s the visionary who organized and led The Million Man March in the streets of Washington D.C. He is the one who has healed and empowered the black family. He has ennobled the black man and woman in the face of the pernicious hate and racism of the prestigious Rabbi Maimonides, who centuries ago taught the western world that blacks are lower than the level of human. Farrakhan reminds his people that they are the imago Dei, even as Maimonides classed them only slightly above apes. So who is the hater?
Louis Farrakhan’s love for his people cannot be disputed. Telling the black community he is a hater flies in the face of everything they know about him. Meanwhile, buildings are named and statues are erected to Maimonides by the closeted liberal white supremacists who cleverly sear their rivals with the stigma of “hater.”
The world is to be made safe for white supremacist Talmudism by any means, including making a charade of the West’s own hallowed principles of free speech. The blowback has already begun, however. In the HipHop World they are saying, “Minister Farrakhan has been instrumental in quelling beef, guiding the leaders like (rapper) Snoop and mending wounds that have been long-standing in the community. He’s a staple. Now, he has said something that people of a certain persuasion may take the wrong way, but what do you think Black people and others of color must contend with daily?”
The history of martyrdom demonstrates that blatantly repressive tactics against women and men who put their life on the line for their ideals will always help to propagate those ideals. Such a man is the Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan. Zuckerberg, Bezos and the other Internet monopolists will never defeat him.
Michael Hoffman is a former reporter for the New York bureau of the Associated Press. His writing has appeared in the New York Times and the New York Review of Books. He is the author of the textbook Judaism Discovered, and a popular condensation, Judaism’s Strange Gods: Revised and Expanded. Mr. Hoffman is managing editor of Revisionist History® newsletter.
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I understand Daniel Larison’s frustration with US actions abroad, with him, finally, starting to use proper terminology about US foreign policy, which includes such terms as lunatics, fanatics and now degenerates–about time:
But truth to be told, it is not just Trump Administration, this applies to US political class as a whole, granted with few and notable exceptions. Can we start from the beginning and admit–US political class as a whole is utterly incompetent and aggressive. Replacing Bolton with someone else will make few, if any, differences. Even what passes in the US for so called realists is an amorphous group of good ol’ American exceptionalists, who still think that US is “good”. It is not–this whole, let’s call it for what it is, US imperialism and militarism is a natural state of what came to be known as national security-warfare state which sits firmly on the foundation of a large financial capital, which in desperate attempts to save itself will go to any length to find something to consume. So, low life Bolton or Pompeo are merely material manifestations of the most sinister interests of globalist financial mafia, which will dispose of the remnants of the American Republic if need be.
The transformation I observed in the US since 9/11 cannot be described in words other than an accelerating slide towards totalitarian society. And then you have, of course, moral freaks such as Maddow and HRC:
And here is my pitch–could it be that there are few, if any, simply decent human beings left in US political class? By decency, I, of course, do not mean nice on the surface people who pay taxes and attend church on Sunday–by that I mean not being a moral freak and lowlife scumbag in a larger metaphysical sense. I mean people who do the “right thing” and who are honest in the most fundamental way, under most difficult circumstances. Judging by the position United States finds itself today–no such people exist anymore. Just zombies, but that is precisely a social demand of a system–honest (and competent) people are simply filtered out. Look at the faces and behavior of Marco Rubio, Mike Pence or imbecile Joe Biden–little, fragile people who convinced themselves through ballot, which is to say through professional lying to people, that they are great. Indeed, it is not just the Ship of Fools, it is the Ship of Zombies. Zombies have no morality or decency and that is their defining characteristic which makes them not human and that can explain a lot. The system is IN the process of implosion and we observe it right in a front of our eyes and do not expect anyone to save it–there is simply no one decent out there.
Taking a careful look at the run-up to the U.S./Israeli war on Iran exposes the inner workings of the U.S./Israeli deep state and the covert operations that the CIA and Mossad carry out around the world to lay the groundwork for war.
In this article, I will detail how the U.S. and Israel astroturfed protests in Iran, infiltrated them with rioters, and ran an atrocity propaganda campaign about Iran massacring protestors to manufacture consent for war.
This article will be an examination of the deep state’s war on Iran, prior to the full-scale U.S. invasion.
This article will be specific to Iran, but should be seen as a case study for how American, Israeli, and often British intelligence lay the groundwork for targets of empire around the world. … continue
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