What was World War One about? How did it start? Who won? And what did they win? Now, 100 years after those final shots rang out, these questions still puzzle historians and laymen alike. But as we shall see, this confusion is not a happenstance of history, but the wool that has been pulled over our eyes to stop us from seeing what WWI really was. This is the story of WWI that you didn’t read in the history books. This is The WWI Conspiracy.
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TRANSCRIPT
INTRODUCTION
November 11, 1918.
All across the Western front, the clocks that were lucky enough to escape the four years of shelling chimed the eleventh hour. And with that the First World War came to an end.
From 10 o’clock to 11 — the hour for the cessation of hostilities — the opposed batteries simply raised hell. Not even the artillery prelude to our advance into the Argonne had anything on it. To attempt an advance was out of the question. It was not a barrage. It was a deluge.
[…]
Nothing quite so electrical in effect as the sudden stop that came at 11 A. M. has ever occurred to me. It was 10:60 precisely and — the roar stopped like a motor car hitting a wall. The resulting quiet was uncanny in comparison. From somewhere far below ground, Germans began to appear. They clambered to the parapets and began to shout wildly. They threw their rifles, hats, bandoleers, bayonets and trench knives toward us. They began to sing.
And just like that, it was over. Four years of the bloodiest carnage the world had ever seen came to a stop as sudden and bewildering as its start. And the world vowed “Never again.”
Each year, we lay the wreath. We hear “The Last Post.” We mouth the words “never again” like an incantation. But what does it mean? To answer this question, we have to understand what WWI was.
WWI was an explosion, a breaking point in history. In the smoldering shell hole of that great cataclysm lay the industrial-era optimism of never-ending progress. Old verities about the glory of war lay strewn around the battlefields of that “Great War” like a fallen soldier left to die in No Man’s Land, and along with it lay all the broken dreams of a world order that had been blown apart. Whether we know it or not, we here in the 21st century are still living in the crater of that explosion, the victims of a First World War that we are only now beginning to understand.
What was World War One about? How did it start? Who won? And what did they win? Now, 100 years after those final shots rang out, these questions still puzzle historians and laymen alike. But as we shall see, this confusion is not a happenstance of history, but the wool that has been pulled over our eyes to stop us from seeing what WWI really was.
This is the story of WWI that you didn’t read in the history books. This is The WWI Conspiracy.
PART ONE – TO START A WAR
June 28, 1914.
The Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, and his wife Sophie are in Sarajevo for a military inspection. In retrospect, it’s a risky provocation, like tossing a match into a powder keg. Serbian nationalism is rising, the Balkans are in a tumult of diplomatic crises and regional wars, and tensions between the kingdom of Serbia and the Austro-Hungarian Empire are set to spill over.
But despite warnings and ill omens, the royal couple’s security is extremely lax. They board an open-top sports car and proceed in a six-car motorcade along a pre-announced route. After an inspection of the military barracks, they head toward the Town Hall for a scheduled reception by the Mayor. The visit is going ahead exactly as planned and precisely on schedule.
And then the bomb goes off.
As we now know, the motorcade was a death trap. Six assassins lined the royal couple’s route that morning, armed with bombs and pistols. The first two failed to act, but the third, Nedeljko Čabrinović, panicked and threw his bomb onto the folded back cover of the Archduke’s convertible. It bounced off onto the street, exploding under the next car in the convoy. Franz Ferdinand and his wife, unscathed, were rushed on to the Town Hall, passing the other assassins along the route too quickly for them to act.
Having narrowly escaped death, the Archduke called off the rest of his scheduled itinerary to visit the wounded from the bombing at the hospital. By a remarkable twist of fate, the driver took the couple down the wrong route, and, when ordered to reverse, stopped the car directly in front of the delicatessen where would-be assassin Gavrilo Princip had gone after having failing in his mission along the motorcade. There, one and a half metres in front of Princip, was the Archduke and his wife. He took two shots, killing both of them.
Yes, even the official history books—the books written and published by the “winners”—record that the First World War started as the result of a conspiracy. After all it was—as all freshman history students are taught—the conspiracy to assassinate the Archduke Franz Ferdinand that led to the outbreak of war.
That story, the official story of the origins of World War I, is familiar enough by now: In 1914, Europe was an interlocking clockwork of alliances and military mobilization plans that, once set in motion, ticked inevitably toward all out warfare. The assassination of the Archduke was merely the excuse to set that clockwork in motion, and the resulting “July crisis” of diplomatic and military escalations led with perfect predictability to continental and, eventually, global war. In this carefully sanitized version of history, World War I starts in Sarajevo on June 28, 1914.
But this official history leaves out so much of the real story about the build up to war that it amounts to a lie. But it does get one thing right: The First World War was the result of a conspiracy.
To understand this conspiracy we must turn not to Sarajevo and the conclave of Serbian nationalists plotting their assassination in the summer of 1914, but to a chilly drawing room in London in the winter of 1891. There, three of the most important men of the age—men whose names are but dimly remembered today—are taking the first concrete steps toward forming a secret society that they have been discussing amongst themselves for years. The group that springs from this meeting will go on to leverage the wealth and power of its members to shape the course of history and, 23 years later, will drive the world into the first truly global war.
Their plan reads like outlandish historical fiction. They will form a secret organization dedicated to the “extension of British rule throughout the world” and “the ultimate recovery of the United States of America as an integral part of a British Empire.” The group is to be structured along the lines of a religious brotherhood (the Jesuit order is repeatedly invoked as a model) divided into two circles: an inner circle, called “The Society of the Elect,” who are to direct the activity of the larger, outer circle, dubbed “The Association of Helpers” who are not to know of the inner circle’s existence.
“British rule” and “inner circles” and “secret societies.” If presented with this plan today, many would say it was the work of an imaginative comic book writer. But the three men who gathered in London that winter afternoon in 1891 were no mere comic book writers; they were among the wealthiest and most influential men in British society, and they had access to the resources and the contacts to make that dream into a reality.
Present at the meeting that day: William T. Stead, famed newspaper editor whose Pall Mall Gazette broke ground as a pioneer of tabloid journalism and whose Review of Reviews was enormously influential throughout the English-speaking world; Reginald Brett, later known as Lord Esher, an historian and politician who became friend, confidant and advisor to Queen Victoria, King Edward VII, and King George V, and who was known as one of the primary powers-behind-the-throne of his era; and Cecil Rhodes, the enormously wealthy diamond magnate whose exploits in South Africa and ambition to transform the African continent would earn him the nickname of “Colossus” by the satirists of the day.
But Rhodes’ ambition was no laughing matter. If anyone in the world had the power and ability to form such a group at the time, it was Cecil Rhodes.
Richard Grove, historical researcher and author, TragedyAndHope.com.
RICHARD GROVE: Cecil Rhodes also was from Britain. He was educated at Oxford, but he only went to Oxford after he went to South Africa. He had an older brother he follows into South Africa. The older brother was working in the diamond mines, and by the time Rhodes gets there he’s got a set up, and his brother says “I’m gonna go off and dig in the gold mines. They just found gold!” And so he leaves Cecil Rhodes, his younger brother—who’s, like, in his 20s—with this whole diamond mining operation. Rhodes then goes to Oxford, comes back down to South Africa with the help of Lord Rothschild, who had funding efforts behind De Beers and taking advantage of that situation. And from there they start to use what—there’s no other term than “slave labor,” which then turns in later to the apartheid policy of South Africa.
GERRY DOCHERTY: Well, Rhodes was particularly important because in many ways, at the end of the 19th century, he seriously epitomized where capitalism was [and] where wealth really lay.
DOCHERTY: Rhodes had the money and he had the contacts. He was a great Rothschild man and his mining wealth was literally uncountable. He wanted to associate himself with Oxford because Oxford gave him the kudos of the university of knowledge, of that kind of power.
And in fact that was centered in a very secretive place called “All Souls College.” Still you’ll find many references to All Souls College and “people behind the curtain” and such phrases—”power behind thrones.” Rhodes was centrally important in actually putting money up in order to begin to gather together like-minded people of great influence.
Rhodes was not shy about his ambitions, and his intention to form such a group were known to many. Throughout his short life, Rhodes discussed his intentions openly with many of his associates, who, unsurprisingly, happened to be among the most influential figures in British society at that time.
More remarkably, this secret society—which was to wield its power behind the throne—was not a secret at all. The New York Times even published an article discussing the founding of the group in the April 9, 1902, edition of the paper, shortly after Rhodes’ death.
The article, headlined “Mr. Rhodes’s Ideal of Anglo-Saxon Greatness” and carrying the remarkable sub-head “He Believed a Wealthy Secret Society Should Work to Secure the World’s Peace and a British-American Federation,” summarized this sensational plan by noting that Rhodes’ “idea for the development of the English-speaking race was the foundation of ‘a society copied, as to organization, from the Jesuits.’” Noting that his vision involved uniting “the United States Assembly and our House of Commons to achieve “the peace of the world,” the article quotes Rhodes as saying: “The only thing feasible to carry out this idea is a secret society gradually absorbing the wealth of the world.”
This idea is laid down in black and white in a series of wills that Rhodes wrote throughout his life, wills that not only laid out his plan to create such a society and provided the funds to do so, but, even more remarkably, were collected in a volume published after his death by co-conspirator William T. Stead.
GROVE: Rhodes also left his his great deal of money—not having any children, not having married, dying at a young age—left it in a very well-known last will and testament, of which there were several different editions naming different benefactors, naming different executors.
So in 1902 Cecil Rhodes dies. There’s a book published that contains his last will and testament. The guy who wrote the book, William T. Stead, was in charge of a British publication called The Review of Reviews. He was part of Rhodes’ Round Table group. He at one time was an executor for the will, and in that will it says that he laments the loss of America from the British Empire and that they should formulate a secret society with the specific aim of bringing America back into the Empire. He talks about this a few different times throughout the will, then he names all the countries that they need to include in this list to have world domination, to have an English-speaking union, to have British race as the enforced culture on all countries around the world.
The will contains the goal. The goal is amended over a series of years and supported and used to gain support. And then by the time he dies in 1902 there’s funding, there’s a plan, there’s an agenda, there’s working groups and it all launches and then takes hold. And then not too long later, you’ve got World War one and then from that you’ve got World War two and then you’ve got a century of control and slavery that really could have been prevented.
When, at the time of Rhodes’ death in 1902, this “secret” society decided to partially reveal itself, it did so under the cloak of peace. It was only because they desired world peace, they insisted, that they had created their group in the first place, and only for the noblest of reasons that they aimed to “gradually absorb the wealth of the world.”
But contrary to this pacific public image, from its very beginnings the group was interested primarily in war. In fact, one of the first steps taken by this “Rhodes Round Table” (as it was known by some) was to maneuver the British Empire into war in South Africa. This “Boer War” of 1899-1902 would serve a dual purpose: it would unite the disparate republics and colonies of South Africa into a single unit under British imperial control, and, not incidentally, it would bring the rich gold deposits of the Transvaal Republic into the orbit of the Rothschild/Rhodes-controlled British South Africa Company.
The war was, by the group’s own admission, entirely its doing. The point man for the operation was Sir Alfred Milner, a close associate of Rhodes and a member of the secret society’s inner circle who was then the governor of the British Cape Colony. Although largely forgotten today, Alfred Milner (later “1st Viscount Milner”) was perhaps the most important single figure in Britain at the dawn of the 20th century. From Rhodes’ death in 1902, he became the unofficial head of the roundtable group and directed its operations, leveraging the vast wealth and influence of the group’s exclusive membership to his own ends.
With Milner, there was no compunction or moral hand-wringing about the methods used to bring about those ends. In a letter to Lord Roberts, Milner casually confessed to having engineered the Boer War: “I precipitated the crisis, which was inevitable, before it was too late. It is not very agreeable, and in many eyes, not a very creditable piece of business to have been largely instrumental in bringing about a war.”
When Rhodes’ co-conspirator and fellow secret society inner circle member William Stead objected to war in South Africa, Rhodes told him: “You will support Milner in any measure that he may take short of war. I make no such limitation. I support Milner absolutely without reserve. If he says peace, I say peace; if he says war, I say war. Whatever happens, I say ditto to Milner.”
The Boer War, involving unimaginable brutality—including the death of 26,000 women and children in the world’s first (British) concentration camps—ended as Rhodes and his associates intended: with the formerly separate pieces of South Africa being united under British control. Perhaps even more importantly from the perspective of the secret society, it left Alfred Milner as High Commission of the new South African Civil Service, a position from which he would cultivate a team of bright, young, largely Oxford-educated men who would go on to serve the group and its ends.
And from the end of the Boer War onward, those ends increasingly centered around the task of eliminating what Milner and the Round Table perceived as the single greatest threat to the British Empire: Germany.
DOCHERTY: So in the start it was influence—people who could influence politics, people who had the money to influence statesmen—and the dream. The dream of actually crushing Germany. This was a basic mindset of this group as it gathered together.
Germany. In 1871, the formerly separate states of modern-day Germany united into a single empire under the rule of Willhelm I. The consolidation and industrialization of a united Germany had fundamentally changed the balance of power in Europe. By the dawn of the 20th century, the British Empire found itself dealing not with its traditional French enemies or its long-standing Russian rivals for supremacy over Europe, but the upstart German Empire. Economically, technologically, even militarily: if the trends continued, it would not be long before Germany began to rival and even surpass the British Empire.
For Alfred Milner and the group he had formed around him out of the old Rhodes Round Table society, it was obvious what had to be done: to change France and Russia from enemies into friends as a way of isolating, and, eventually, crushing Germany.
PETER HOF: Yes, well from the British perspective, Germany, after their unification in 1871, they became very strong very quickly. And over time this worried the British more and more, and they began to think that Germany represented a challenge to their world hegemony. And slowly but surely they came to the decision that Germany must be confronted just as they had come to the same decision with regard to other countries; Spain and Portugal and especially France and now Germany.
German finished goods were marginally better than those from Britain, they were building ships that were marginally better than those of Britain, and all of this. The British elite very slowly came to the decision that that Germany needed to be confronted while it was still possible to do so. It might not be possible to do so if they waited too long. And so this was how the indecision crystallize.
I think that Britain might possibly have accepted the German ascendance, but they had something that that was was close at hand, and that was the Franco-Russian Alliance. And they thought if they could hook in with that alliance, then they had the possibility of defeating Germany quickly and without too much trouble. And that is basically what they did.
But crafting an alliance with two of Britain’s biggest rivals and turning public opinion against one of its dearest continental friends was no mean feat. To do so would require nothing less than for Milner and his group to seize control of the press, the military and all the diplomatic machinery of the British Empire. And so that’s exactly what they did.
The first major coup occurred in 1899, while Milner was still in South Africa launching the Boer War. That year, the Milner Group ousted Donald Mackenzie Wallace, the director of the foreign department at The Times, and installed their man, Ignatius Valentine Chirol. Chirol, a former employee of the Foreign Office with inside access to officials there, not only helped to ensure that one of the most influential press organs of the Empire would spin all international events for the benefit of the secret society, but he helped to prepare his close personal friend, Charles Hardinge, to take on the crucial post of Ambassador to Russia in 1904, and, in 1906, the even more important post of Permanent Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office.
With Hardinge, Milner’s Group had a foot in the door at the British Foreign Office. But they needed more than just their foot in that door if they were to bring about their war with Germany. In order to finish the coup, they needed to install one of their own as Foreign Secretary. And, with the appointment of Edward Grey as Foreign Secretary in December of 1905, that’s precisely what happened.
Sir Edward Grey was a valuable and trusted ally of the Milner Group. He shared their anti-German sentiment and, in his important position of Foreign Secretary, showed no compunction at all about using secret agreements and unacknowledged alliances to further set the stage for war with Germany.
HOF: He became a foreign secretary in 1905, I believe, and the foreign secretary in in in France was of course Delcassé. And Delcassé was very much an anti-German. He was very passionate about the recovery of Alsace-Lorraine, and so he and the King hit it off very well together. And Edward Grey shared this anti-German feeling with the king—as I explained in my book how he how he came to have that attitude about Germany. But in any case, he had the same attitude with the king. They worked very well together. And Edward Grey very freely acknowledged the heavy role that the King I played in British foreign policy and he said that this was not a problem because he and the King were in agreement on most issues and so they worked with very well together.
The pieces were already beginning to fall into place for Milner and his associates. With Edward Grey as foreign secretary, Hardinge as his unusually influential undersecretary, Rhodes’ co-conspirator Lord Esher installed as deputy Governor of Windsor Castle where he had the ear of the king, and the king himself—whose unusual, hands-on approach to foreign diplomacy and whose wife’s own hatred of the Germans dovetailed perfectly with the group’s aims—the diplomatic stage was set for the formation of the Triple Entente between France, Russia and Great Britain. With France to the west and Russia to the east, England’s secret diplomacy had forged the two pincers of a German-crushing vise.
All that was needed was an event that the group could spin to its advantage to prepare the population for war against their former German allies. Time and again throughout the decade leading up to the “Great War,” the group’s influential agents in the British press tried to turn every international incident into another example of German hostility.
When the Russo-Japanese War broke out, rumours swirled in London that it was in fact the Germans that had stirred up the hostilities. The theory went that Germany, in a bid to ignite conflict between Russia and England, who had recently concluded an alliance with the Japanese, had fanned the flames of war between Russia and Japan. The truth, of course, was almost precisely the opposite. Lord Lansdowne had conducted secret negotiations with Japan before signing a formal treaty in January 1902. Having exhausted their reserves building up their military, Japan turned to Cecil Rhodes’ co-conspirator Lord Nathan Rothschild to finance the war itself. Denying the Russian navy access to the Suez canal and high-quality coal, which they did provide to the Japanese, the British did everything they could to ensure that the Japanese would crush the Russian fleet, effectively removing their main European competitor for the Far East. The Japanese navy was even constructed in Britain, but these facts did not find their way into the Milner-controlled press.
When the Russians “accidentally” fired on British fishing trawlers in the North Sea in 1904, killing three fishermen and wounding several more, the British public was outraged. Rather than whip up the outrage, however, The Times and other mouthpieces of the secret society instead tried to paper over the incident. Meanwhile, the British Foreign Office outrageously tried to blame the incident on the Germans, kicking off a bitter press war between Britain and Germany.
The most dangerous provocations of the period centered around Morocco, when France—emboldened by secret military assurances from the British and backed up by the British press—engaged in a series of provocations, repeatedly breaking assurances to Germany that Morocco would remain free and open to German trade. At each step, Milner’s acolytes, both in government and in the British press, cheered on the French and demonized any and every response from the Germans, real or imagined.
DOCHERTY: Given that we’re living in a world of territorial aggrandizement, there was a concocted incident over Morocco, and the allegation that Germany was secretly trying to take over the British/French influence on Morocco. And that literally was nonsense, but it was blown up into an incident and people were were told “Prepare! You had better prepare yourself for the possibility of war because we will not be dictated to by that Kaiser person over in Berlin!”
One of the incidents —which I would need to make reference to to get the date perfectly right—referred to a threat. Well, it was portrayed as a threat—it was no more of a threat than a fly would be if it came into your room at the present moment—of a gun boat sitting off the coast of Africa. And it was purported that this was a sign that in fact Germany was going to have a deep water port and they were going to use it as a springboard to interrupt British shipping. When we researched it, Jim and I discovered that the size of that so-called gunboat was physically smaller than the king of England’s royal yacht. What? But history has portrayed this as a massive threat to to the British Empire and it’s “masculinity,” if you like—because that’s how they saw themselves.
Ultimately, the Moroccan crises passed without warfare because, despite the best efforts of Milner and his associates, cooler heads prevailed. Likewise the Balkans descended into warfare in the years prior to 1914, but Europe as a whole didn’t descend with them. But, as we well know, the members of the Round Table in the British government, in the press, in the military, in finance, in industry, and in other positions of power and influence eventually got their wish: Franz Ferdinand was assassinated and within a month the trap of diplomatic alliances and secret military compacts that had been so carefully set was sprung. Europe was at war.
In retrospect, the machinations that led to war are a master class in how power really operates in society. The military compacts that committed Britain—and, ultimately, the world—to war had nothing to do with elected parliaments or representative democracy. When Conservative Prime Minister Arthur Balfour resigned in 1905, deft political manipulations ensured that members of the Round Table, including Herbert Henry Asquith, Edward Grey and Richard Haldane—three men who Liberal leader Henry Campbell-Bannerman privately accused of “Milner worship”—seamlessly slid into key posts in the new Liberal government and carried on the strategy of German encirclement without missing a step.
In fact, the details of Britain’s military commitments to Russia and France, and even the negotiations themselves, were deliberately kept hidden from Members of Parliament and even members of the cabinet who were not part of the secret society. It wasn’t until November 1911, a full six years into the negotiations, that the cabinet of Prime Minister Herbert Henry Asquith started to learn the details of these agreements, agreements that had been repeatedly and officially denied in the press and in Parliament.
This is how the cabal functioned: efficiently, quietly and, convinced of the righteousness of their cause, completely uncaring about how they achieved their ends. It is to this clique, not to the doings of any conspiracy in Sarajevo, that we can attribute the real origins of the First World War, with the nine million dead soldiers and seven million dead civilians that lay piled in its wake.
But for this cabal, 1914 was just the start of the story. In keeping with their ultimate vision of a united Anglo-American world order, the jewel in the crown of the Milner Group was to embroil the United States in the war; to unite Britain and America in their conquest of the German foe.
Across the Atlantic, the next chapter in this hidden history was just getting underway…
Martinique resident Anicia Berton believes time spent working on Martinique’s sprawling banana plantations may have contributed to her grandmother’s death from generalised cancer, due to exposure to hazardous pesticides.
“She used these products for years without any form of protection. And when she came home, she brought pesticides with her into the house,” she said.
Berton, who survived breast cancer after being diagnosed six years ago, spoke about what many islanders and scientists see as a direct link between the use of the now-outlawed pesticide chlordecone and incidents of ill health among the Martinican population.
The four-nation Turkey-Russia-Germany-France summit on Syria on October 27 in Istanbul had an impressive outcome. All participants – each with own interests – has some ‘takeaway’ from the summit, which itself is a measure of the success of the event. This is also important because the participants now have a reason to work together.
Such an outcome can be interpreted in the following ways. First and foremost, a major regional conflict impacting international security was addressed without US participation. A sign of our times?
Second, participants didn’t quarrel over President Bashar Al-Assad’s “fate”. The debate becomes pedantic today in terms of ground realities. The Syrian nation should decide on its future. That’s also been Assad’s demand.
Third, some serious thought has been given to the journey towards a Syrian settlement – ceasefire, drafting of new constitution followed by elections under UN supervision.
Four, the participants snubbed the US-Israeli plan to balkanize Syria into “spheres of influence” and have also squashed the Israeli dreams of getting international legitimacy for its illegal occupation of Golan Heights as part of any settlement.
Five, Germany and France have become amenable to the Russian demand pressing the urgency for rendering humanitarian aid to Syria and help in reconstruction. (The US made this conditional on Assad’s removal.) We’ll have to see how it pans out, but the summit also stressed the importance of the return of Syrian refugees (which is a key issue for European countries.)
Six, the participants recognized that the remaining terrorists in Syria must be destroyed – although, significantly, they also supported the Idlib ceasefire deal brokered by Turkey and Russia.
The bottom line is that it is the post-war Syrian order that is under discussion now. However, it must be understood as well that the proxy war is not ending but is rather morphing into the diplomatic war that lies ahead, which of course will be keenly fought, given the divergent interests of the foreign protagonists.
Generally speaking, Russia and Turkey are in command as of now. Their own equations are good but there are grey areas, too. The importance of close coordination between Russia and Turkey cannot but be stressed.
Iran cannot be happy that it has been excluded from the Istanbul summit. But it may prove an underestimation that Iran is in no position to assert its legitimate interests. The close consultations between Russia and Iran – not only regarding Syria – are of course the mitigating factor here.
Similarly, a “post-Khashoggi” Saudi attitude to Syria remains the “known unknown”. The US is in a position to blackmail Saudi Arabia to continue to bankroll its military presence in Syria, but the Saudis cannot have their heart in the overreach to project power abroad. Something has fundamentally changed – Saudis are not used to their prestige being dragged in the mud as in this past month and the traumatic experience cannot but have a sobering effect.
Besides, Saudis dare not cross swords with Turkey on the latter’s Syrian playpen. Above all, Saudis would not want to undermine Russian efforts to stabilize Syria, since Moscow’s goodwill and cooperation is extremely vital for Riyadh in the coming period, now that the raison d’etre of Riyadh’s “Look East” is beyond doubt.
Basically, France and Germany are lightweights in Syria. They had a limited agenda at the Istanbul summit. Russia must know fully well that in the final analysis, US involvement is crucial. It is entirely conceivable that at the forthcoming Russian-American summit in Paris on November 11, Syria will be a major topic of discussion.
The US policy in Syria is at a crossroad and will hinge greatly on the standing of President Trump in the aftermath of the November 6 mid-term elections in the US.
Clearly, this was far from a situation of three major allies of the US staging a mutiny on the NATO ship. Germany and France would have consulted Washington most certainly ahead of the Istanbul summit (which has been in the making for months.)
The big question is how the Turkish-American relations evolve. The Khashoggi affair has brought about certain US-Turkey “proximity”. Ironically, the Deep State in America and Trump are on the same page here – rediscovering the vital importance of Turkey for US regional strategies.
The spokesmen of the Deep State used to defame Turkish President Recep Erdogan for being “Islamist” and “authoritarian” and so on and probably even tried to overthrow him in the failed coup of 2016, but today, they laud him for espousing Islamic democracy as the panacea for the region.
Erdogan, in turn – or at least a part of him – had always hankered for recognition by the West when he sought Turkey’s historic leadership role in the Middle East and uniqueness to act as a bridge between the West and the region. Equally, Trump is eternally grateful to Erdogan to refrain from spilling the beans on the Khashoggi affair and for helping him finesse a major crisis for his presidency on the foreign-policy front.
Suffice to say, this “transition” in the US-Turkey tough love can profoundly affect the geopolitics of the Middle East – provided of course Washington plays its cards carefully in regard of Erdogan’s wish list on a host of pending issues, including some of great sensitivity.
Syria is somewhere at the top of Erdogan’s priorities. Howsoever unpalatable it may appear, Erdogan will expect the Americans to throw their Syrian Kurdish allies under the bus. Yesterday, the Turkish army bombarded Kurdish positions east of Euphrates.
Now, how Turkish policies play out in Syria is difficult to predict, since the variables are too many. A US-Turkey rapprochement is hard to reach. But then, Turks and Americans are also old allies and they have a way of knocking their heads together and start working together again.
The history of ideas provides us with the names of those few men and women who challenged the boundaries of tolerance. Professor Robert Faurisson was one such man. Faurisson, who died last Sunday at age 89, was a French academic who didn’t believe in the validity of parts of the Holocaust narrative. He argued that gas chambers in Auschwitz were the “biggest lie of the 20th century,” and contended that deported Jews had died of disease and malnutrition. Faurisson also questioned the authenticity of the Diary of Anne Frank many years before the Swiss foundation that holds the copyright to the famous diary “alerted publishers that her father (Otto Frank) is not only the ‘editor’ but also legally the ‘co-author’ of the celebrated book” (NY Times ).
In the France of the late 1960s-1970s Faurisson had reason to believe that his maverick attitude toward the past would receive a kosher pass. He was wrong. Faurisson may have failed to grasp the role of the Holocaust in contemporary Jewish politics and culture. And he did not grasp that Jewish power is literally the power to silence opposition to Jewish power.
In 1990 France made holocaust revisionism into the crime of history denial. Faurisson was repeatedly prosecuted, beaten and fined for his writings. He was dismissed from his academic post at Lyon University in 1991.
I am bothered by the question of why Jews and others attached to their politics are desperate to restrict the story of their past. This question extends far beyond the holocaust. Israel has enacted a law that bans discussion of the Nakba – the racially motivated ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people that occurred a mere three years after the liberation of Auschwitz. Similarly, exploring the role of Jews in the slave trade will cost your job or lead to your expulsion from the labour party. My attempt to analyse the true nature of the Yiddish Speaking International Brigade in the 1936 Spanish Civil War outraged some of my Jewish ‘progressive’ friends.
Jean-François Lyotard addressed this question. History may claim to relate what actually occurred, but what it does more often is operate to conceal our shame. The task of an authentic historian is, according to Lyotard, similar to that of the psychoanalyst. It is all about removing layers of shame, concealment and suppression to try to uncover the truth.
It was the work of Faurisson that helped me to define the historical endeavour in philosophical terms. I define history as the attempt to narrate the past as we move along. To deal with history for real, is to continually re-visit and revise the past in light of our cultural, social and ideological changes. For instance, the 1948 Nakba came to be thought of in terms of ethnic cleansing in the early 2000s when the notion of ‘ethnic cleansing’ entered our vocabulary (and our way of understanding a conflict) following the crisis in Kosovo. The real historian reevaluates the past and embraces adjustments that place our understanding of that past in line with our contemporaneous reality and terminology.
Professor Faurisson and the controversy around his work illuminates the distinction between real history and religion. While history is a vibrant dynamic matter subject to constant ‘revision,’ the religious approach to the past is limited to the production of a rigid unchanging chronicle of events. Authentic history invokes ethical thinking to examine the past in light of the present and vice versa, religious history often operates by denying or rejecting increasing ethical insight – it judges actions and events according to set predefined parameters. The question at stake is not what happened in the past but the freedom to research and evaluate the past without being threatened by ‘history laws.’ In the same manner I support ‘progress’ in cancer research, although I do not produce scholarly comments on related scientific findings, I support the past being continually re-examined although I offer no judgment of any kind regarding the validity of those historical findings. For history to be a valid and an ethical universal pursuit, history laws must be abolished.
In 2014 I met Robert Faurisson and discussed with him different questions about the meaning of history and what the past meant to him.
Respondents in both the United States and Europe turned out to be generally reluctant to trust their mainstream media to provide unbiased coverage of events related to Russia, with the number of respondents adhering to this point of view ranging from 43 to 53 percent depending on the country.
An opinion poll was conducted recently by the French Institute of Public Opinion (IFOP), in which respondents in the United States and Europe were asked the following question: “Do media in your country report objectively about Russia?”
About half of respondents in France (53 percent) and Germany (50 percent), as well as 47 percent of respondents in the UK and 43 percent of respondents in the United States, said that they don’t believe that their media provides objective information about Russia.
At the same time, only 25 percent of French and 33 percent of British respondents said that they trust their media to provide unbiased information about Russia, with 39 percent of those polled in the US and Germany agreeing with this assessment.
The opinion poll was held as US politicians and intelligence officials continue to accuse Russia of attempting to meddle in the election processes in the United States — accusations which Moscow has vehemently denied.
At the same time, London blames Russia for the alleged poisoning of several people in the British city of Salisbury earlier this year, despite the fact that the Russian authorities have strongly rejected these claims.
The survey was conducted among 4,033 respondents aged 18 and above from the US, the UK, France and Germany, in August 2018.
Last week France was sued at the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity over nuclear tests conducted on atolls in the Pacific Ocean. Sputnik spoke to Alexandre Dayant, a research fellow at the Lowy Institute, about the consequences of the French nuclear tests.
Mururoa and Fangataufa atolls in the South Pacific saw 196 nuclear tests over three decades until President Jacques Chirac finally ended the programme in the 1990s.
The French also conducted nuclear tests in the Sahara Desert.
A French Polynesian opposition leader, Oscar Temaru, filed a complaint at the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague on October 10 claiming France had carried out crimes against humanity, in the form of local islanders.
Alexandre Dayant, a research fellow at the Lowy Institute in Australia, said the French carried out the tests between 1966 and 1996, first in the atmosphere and then in the sub-soil.
French Polynesians Have Paid Heavy Toll For Tests
Mr. Dayant said thousands of inhabitants have paid a heavy toll through birth deficits, congenital malformations and infirmities.
“The testing programme and its intentions were kept secret, and little information was provided about the possible effects of radiation to the people who worked there. For decades, France argued that the controlled explosions were clean,” Mr. Dayant told Sputnik.
“In the absence of an exhaustive epidemiological study, it was very difficult to estimate the number of potentially affected people at the time. Throughout the period of the Sahara and Polynesia trials, approximately 150,000 site workers (military contingent, contingent, civilian workers) and a local population of 80,000 were potentially exposed to doses of radioactivity,” Mr. Dayant told Sputnik.
French Polynesia, an overseas territory with a population of 290,000, is best known for the tourist resort island of Tahiti, 300 miles west of Mururoa and Fangataufa.
“This case aims to hold all the living French presidents accountable for the nuclear tests against our country,” Mr. Temaru said when he filed the complaint.
The Armaments Observatory published a study showing “the explosions have weakened the seabed and the soil is contaminated sustainably because of the fallout and the presence of toxic and radioactive debris (heavy metals and plutonium)” which threaten the population and the environment.
“Despite the mounting evidence, the French government denied all suggestion that the nuclear tests were harmful to health until 2010, when it introduced the Morin Law, a programme to give compensation to victims of radiation exposure. Nevertheless, the number of compensation cases accepted between 2010 and 2017 scandalized victims’ associations — only 13 out of more than a thousand filed. The main reason came from the fact that it was still difficult for victims to prove the link between their disease and the tests,” Mr. Dayant told Sputnik.
Call For French Polynesia to Become Independent
He said Mr. Temaru was a separatist who wanted the islands to eventually become independent like nearby Fiji and Kiribati.
Mr. Temaru claimed the Polynesians had sought a “responsible dialogue” with France since 2013 but their pleas had been “ignored and despised”.
“Fifty years after the first nuclear test on Mururoa, French Polynesians are still fighting for recognition of the effects of nuclear testing. This is why this claim, in front of the ICC, can help to put events back on the agenda,” Mr. Dayant told Sputnik.
“I don’t think Polynesians believe their claim will be heard. For the pro-independence party in French Polynesia, making this claim is more of a useful way to put events back on the political agenda, and on the international scene,” said Mr. Dayant who pointed out that when the ICC was set up it made it clear it would not prosecute crimes committed before July 2002.
Will other countries face similar claims at the ICC?
“It is a difficult question to answer to, due to the different geopolitical relationships that other Pacific Islands countries have with the US, UK and Russia. However, if successful, this particular legal procedure can be used as a precedent for future international claims,” Mr. Dayant told Sputnik.
Former French presidential candidate Jean-Luc Melenchon’s home has been raided by police, as part of an investigation into alleged misuse of EU funds that also targeted political firebrand and Macron critic Marine Le Pen.
The leader of France’s left-wing La France Insoumise (France Unbowed) livestreamed the unannounced intrusion on Facebook, vowing to exact revenge on France’s Minister of Justice Nicole Belloubet for the raid, which targeted his home as well as his party’s headquarters.
“Nicole Belloubet, are you proud of what you are doing? Have you forgotten everything: who are you, who I am? So you have no dignity? All shots are allowed?” he said during the livestream.
“You do not know what you’re up against – a political force, not an isolated person. We will make you pay politically.”
Melenchon then urged his supporters to meet at the head office of France Unbowed in Paris for an impromptu rally. Police reportedly seized phones and computers from the headquarters as part of their investigation.
The searches are believed to be part of an ongoing probe into fraudulent claims to the EU to cover for fictitious staff members. Melenchon is also under scrutiny for alleged financial irregularities during his 2017 presidential campaign.
Marine Le Pen, the leader of France’s right-wing National Rally, was targeted by a similar EU funds probe last year. Le Pen dismissed the allegations made against her as political persecution.
A raid on National Rally’s headquarters in February 2017, which came amid the French presidential election, was slammed by the party as a “media operation whose sole purpose is to try to disrupt the smooth running of the [Le Pen’s] presidential election campaign.”
Both Melenchon and Le Pen have been fierce critics of French President Emmanuel Macron, who triumphed over the two politicians in last year’s presidential election.
In September, Melenchon led a rally against Macron’s newly-signed labor reforms, describing the demonstration as necessary to prevent a “social coup d’etat” aimed at French workers.
France will be facing the Hague-based International Criminal Court (ICC) for alleged crimes against humanity over a series of nuclear tests it had been conducting in the South Pacific for some three decades.
A French Polynesian opposition leader said a complaint has already been filed to “hold all the living French presidents accountable for the nuclear tests against,” conducted against Polynesia – French oversees territory in the South Pacific.
“It’s with a great sense of duty and determination that we filed a complaint at the International Criminal Court on October 2 for crimes against humanity,” Oscar Temaru said at the United Nations.
“We owe it to all the people who died from the consequences of nuclear colonialism,” he added.
France carried out 193 out of 210 nuclear tests from 1960 to 1996 in Polynesia. For decades, it had claimed that the explosions were controlled and clean and denied its responsibility for the health and environmental impacts of the testing.
Back in 2013, declassified documents of the defense ministry however revealed that extent of plutonium fall-out from the tests was kept hidden.
According to the documents, plutonium fallout hit the whole of French Polynesia, a much broader area than France had previously admitted.
French daily Le Parisien wrote at the time that the documents “lifted the lid on one of the biggest secrets of the French army.”
French Polynesia with a population of about 290,000 people is best known nowadays for its tourist island of Tahiti, which was exposed to 500 times the maximum accepted levels of radiation.
“We see French nuclear tests as no less than the direct result of colonization,” Temaru said, adding the testing was imposed upon the islanders “with the direct threat of imposing military rule if we refused.”
Temaru said France has “ignored and shown contempt” for repeated offers since 2013 to come to the table under supervision of the United Nations.
Earlier this year, French Polynesia’s nuclear test veterans organization, Moruroa e tatou, said only if France increases its compensation efforts 100 times, it will become credible that it takes the problem seriously.
Marking the 52nd anniversary of the first of the weapons tests, the organization said in July that despite confessions from France it was working on compensation for victims of the weapons test, the process was not functioning as it should.
It said France has been considering only four cases this year, while 100 times more cases would have to be dealt with.
SYRIA, seat of an Islamic Caliphate. Syria, site of the Middle East’s newest liberal democracy. Syria, socialist paradise. Syria, a corrupt and murderous dictatorship that practices genocide. Syria, a failed state. Syria a state that is too strong. Syria, soon to be partitioned into ethnic enclaves. Syria, a pawn of Iran. Syria, a tool of Russia. Syria, a haven for terrorists that threaten our friends and way of life. Syria, where Saddam sent his fabled WMDs. In other words: Syria is whatever you want it to be. Syria, if it exists, apparently only exists to satisfy your desires, where you get to freely confuse where you think the world ought to go, with where it is going.
Syria, if you take at face-value any of the many authoritative North American and European pronouncements about “what needs to be done,” has seemingly joined the list of “disappeared” nation-states. It was a country made to vanish into thin air, like Libya, Iraq, and Yugoslavia before it. Anything goes when it comes to Syria: it can be whatever we imagine it to be. It was as if “Syria” was just a name for a template. We speak and behave as if it were first a tabula rasa—a clean slate—or more accurately, terra nullius—a land belonging to no one. It is land that belongs to no one, that is, until we arrive on the scene and forge our models for a new Syria. Syrians are not allowed to have their Syria until we first get a say on what Syria will be.
Syria Not For Syrians
Over the past seven years we have seen in virtually every side to the foreign debate about Syria’s present and future(s) an immense amount of apparently self-gratifying wishful thinking. We have witnessed the very real danger involved in the ideological mode of thinking, especially when the ideologies are backed by real material power and conveyed as action on the ground. Whenever we have the rare chance to hear any Syrians, they are instantly dismissed and disqualified by one side or another. We are happier dealing with a “Syria” that is a figment of our political imaginations, a projection of the discontent we have with our own domestic politics, a method for beating up all “enemies, foreign and domestic”. “Syria” is the plaything of those who are equal to any of our hedge fund managers: we pick a side, and bet on it. More than that even, “Syria” is a meeting ground for fantasy and political economy, and it’s a sign of just how ugly is the recolonization effort wrought by neoliberal globalization.
And it most definitely is the case that what we are dealing with here is globalization’s destruction of sovereignty, of national self-determination. How do we know that? Watch this: while there was no real debate about the US sending troops to Syria (where they can cancel out Syria’s sovereignty), there was instead massive, urgent, melodramatic panic about the US sending troops to its own border, where they could affirm US sovereignty. If a nation can send its troops to another continent, but not to its own border (i.e., stay at home), something is really wrong. Some must have wondered what US troops were doing on the US border, as if they naturally belonged in Syria instead. The jarring juxtaposition of the two contrasting stances came out in a single question by a reporter at a White House press briefing—a reporter who nevertheless failed to note the contrast:
“there seems to be a perception that, at times, the President makes announcements and then the White House has to come up with policy to match what the President said. Like with the talk about the military at the border, there weren’t really a lot of details about that at first. And with the issue with Syria, and him saying he wanted to, kind of, pull all the troops back”.
In another White House press briefing, reporters once again failed to notice the absurd contradiction between their thinly veiled criticisms of Trump’s desire to pull US troops back from Syria, while apparently complaining about the decision to send troops to the US border. The only way one can reconcile these two apparently contradictory positions is to recognize that they both reduce to a common denominator: the destruction of nations as viable entities. Any and all nations, everywhere, have been the target. Some were surprised to learn that this included the US itself.
Syria, likewise, is denied the right to defend itself. It has no right to its own territory. Israel is free to bomb at will, as are a range of NATO members, and the US can freely decide to make a presence for itself, to create “interests” on Syrian soil (which in principle, does not exist). When other nations send forces at the request of the Syrian government, then those nations suddenly have no right to be there. Why not? Because they are there precisely as a result of decisions made by the Syrian government, and Syria can have no government because it also has no soil. Who decided on this arrangement?
For globalization to work, it required a policeman. After all, neoliberals believe that states are still useful as law enforcers. This introduced a fatal flaw into the globalist agenda, which was pushed and enforced by states: not all states are equal in power, and thus the only reliable global policeman was the US. The US, some would argue, has no right to determine who crosses its borders, yet retains the right to decide on who is allowed across Syrian borders. That such arrangements are subject to a backlash in the US itself, the power core of globalization, is the main reason that globalization is in such extreme jeopardy.
For the globalists, Syria and the US are nonetheless alike in one key respect: they both belong to the rest of the world. What they are not allowed to belong to is themselves. The world the globalists tried to invent out of thin air was one of forced associations, unwanted encounters, and false dependencies. No wonder that the reactions have in some cases been so scathing, so filled with spite. If such reactions are deemed a problem, and if one wanted to avoid such reactions, then logically you would cease creating the causes of the problem. But the world imagined by globalists is never inhabited by real people; it’s a world where everyone is subject to “learned helplessness” and like a repeatedly abused dog learns to “just take it”—a world that is unreal, inhumane, and was therefore never sustainable.
“Terra nullius. From the Latin terra, earth, ground, land, and nullius, no one’s.
“Thus: no one’s land, land not belonging to anybody. Or at any rate, not to anybody that counts.
“Originally: land not belonging to the Roman Empire.
“In the Middle Ages: land not belonging to any Christian ruler.
“Later: land to which no European state as yet lays claim. Land that justly falls to the first European state to invade the territory.
“Empty land. Uninhabited land. Land that will soon be uninhabited because it is populated by inferior races, condemned by the laws of nature to die out. Land where the original inhabitants are, or can soon be rendered, so few in number as to be negligible.
“The legal fictions summed up as terra nullius were used to justify the European occupation of large parts of the global land surface”. (Lindqvist, 2007, pp. 3–4)
Syria was land not belonging to the Roman Empire, until it was. It is also land not belonging to the American Empire, and powerful interests in the US would obviously like to change that. Outside of the high echelons of the military-industrial-complex, other US interests have also vested themselves in Syria. A loose coalition has formed, ranging across from generals in the Pentagon right across to establishment media, freelance “journalists,” self-appointed humanitarian activists, and university-based anarchists and some Marxist academics. They all agree on one fundamental point: Syria can no longer belong to Syria alone; Syrian decision-making, and the right to make decisions about citizens on Syrian territory, is to be subject to some sort of veto wielded by foreigners, backed by US firepower.
For this mission of foreign ideological occupation to work, Syria first has to be symbolically and politically emptied. Only an empty zone can be so liberally filled with fantasy and spectral assaults: fabricated gas attacks, mysterious missile strikes in the dead of night, cities in ruins suggesting they were once occupied by a settled, peaceful civilization that has long disappeared, even mystery adversaries jamming US communications. The Onion, interestingly, had it right when in playing to the propaganda that has become the norm, it portrayed Syria as a land being trampled on by legendary monsters and super-human beasts, ruled by fears that “bombed-out buildings and blast craters could be harboring bands of angry scorpions, komodo dragons, mace-wielding cavaliers in full chain mail, or, as children recently swimming off the country’s coast discovered, giant piranhas”. Chemical weapons, the weapons of the new barbarians, are an essential feature of the kinds of made-up tales that are made to prevail in a frontier zone of projected fantasies of monsters. In the land of make-believe “evil,” Sadistic Arab “dictators” unleash troops powered by Viagra to engage in systematic rape, rip babies from incubators, threaten to massacre entire cities, and then wipe out communities with poison gas. Accusations we would never tolerate against our own, let alone treat credibly, are instead freely plastered on others. It’s amazing that in the new, fastidious and prickly racism-consciousness that prevails in North American media and academia, such routine colonial racism is instead still perpetuated, as much as the incessant myth-making.
Fantasy is useful in other ways: by dismissing the value of evidence, and replacing facts with belief, any accusations can be given the weight of “credibility”—but only if enough people have been successfully trained to mistake credibility for truth. What the US has developed, for example, is a fact-free, faith-based approach in its foreign policy rhetoric, one that is used to justify permanent US intervention. Why? Because there is no objective argument one can make for one country to occupy another. It’s not a matter of logic and rationality; it’s a matter of ideology and a thirst for power.
Having projected onto Syria an absence of “civilization,” this creates wide open space for demonization. Demonization is a valued part of Western myth-making structures, especially in justifying imperial domination. Demonization turns very human opponents into monsters (and they are referred to as such, as monsters, animals, and of course “evil”). Adversaries of the West are played up as villains in a morality tale, that always allocates to us—by default—the role of saviours and victors, if we will have our victory (as the late Charles Krauthammer put it, “The choice is ours. To impiously paraphrase Benjamin Franklin: History has given you an empire, if you will keep it”). We thus have these endless moral crusades on our part, where morality is used to mask politics.
Moral crusaders love it when in the distance they make out the outline of a new terra nullius on the horizon. Places like Syria offer the opportunity for adventure, to go out and exercise yourself, to use Syria as part of your own personal self-fulfillment, an object of your ambition and desire. Eurocentric missionary aspirations flourish in such contexts, robed as “humanitarian interventionism,” “internationalism,” “solidarity,” “civil society activism,” “democracy-building,” “conflict resolution,” “peace-building,” or just plain regime-change.
The paradox of foreign intervention is that it empties everyone, not just Syria. Britain and France earlier this year saw their foreign policy being taken over by the US, restricting any domestic parliamentary debate about the decision to militarily strike Syria, until well after the fact. The US was no exception: the decision to attack Syria in April of this year was done without Congressional approval. The process had been emptied of political representation by those elected and legally appointed to (dis)approve war-making, as dictated by the respective constitutions, which for a moment vanished. War, in violation of both international and domestic laws, damaged democracy in the US, UK, and France. This is what imperialism in the globalist age looks like, even when one of they key actors sometimes likes to sound like an angry anti-globalist.
The key themes of this renewed terra nullius are thus:
land without a legitimate state to own it;
civilization vs. barbarism (along with civilized vs. barbaric forms of violence, for example, Tomahawk missiles vs. nerve gas);
demonization and dehumanization;
a nation-state reduced to a “regime” which is reduced to one person who is reduced to a monster/animal; and,
a fertile site for imposed models.
One question readers might ask is: why? Why should “terra nullius” or anything resembling the idea be in use here? One simple theory is that any society works with a finite set of cultural materials. These cultural materials can be reproduced, amended, extended, or reworded. We end up with multiple translations of a small set of original sources. Imagine that centuries after European colonialism began, we are still speaking of “civilization” vs. “barbarism,” in the very same terms. A second theory, that goes with the first, is that except in cataclysmic situations (which are extremely rare—the exception), real cultural change occurs only very slowly, at an almost glacial pace. Changes to our basic cultural materials do take place in our lifetimes, but often more in form and application than a change in the original “code”.
Moral Imperialist Economy
Whenever members of a society imagine the rest of the world as a mass of “problems,” and imagine themselves as possessing the “solutions” to those problems, what we have then is the structure for a relationship that involves a transfer of capital. The producers of problems owe a permanent debt to the exporters of solutions—ideally. Reality is different of course: this structural relationship of extraction needs to be maintained, and sometimes the maintenance costs exceed the profits. First, let’s look at some of the basic elements of the moral imperialist economy. Ideologically transforming Syria into a new terra nullius is a form of creative destruction (paralleled by real, military destruction), and as we should know, crisis always creates opportunity, and opportunity attracts opportunists.
Syria is a free for all for various patrons and clients. These new Wild Wests are a great place for freelancers of all kinds to upgrade their status, for example. Syria has thus been transformed into a Wild West of misinformation, of selective information, of forms of activism and a way to invest political interests in the creation of custom-made propaganda. Inevitably there are patrons for this or that stream of propaganda, whether it’s a news agency, the CIA, a NGO of some sort, or elements of “the crowd” funding one’s work through something like “gofundme”. The result is a kind of wild stock market for values of all kinds.
New commodities are produced by the new information warfare, designed to conduct war on the minds of all media consumers, whether of the established or social media kind (it makes little difference). One of the key new commodities is, of all things, the baby photo. Not just any babies though—no, these always have to be dead babies, sometimes mangled, sometimes partly decomposed, sometimes about to die, or those that have barely escaped death but are nonetheless permanently disfigured, burnt, or without limbs. These commodities are avidly traded by all sides. The open borders/refugee advocates have their photo of a dead Syrian child on a beach; the regime changers have pictures of child gas victims; and even the anti-imperialists have their photo of a little Palestinian boy, seized from a hospital bed, looking helpless moments before being beheaded by beefy bearded jihadists. Printing dead baby photos is like printing money. Such photos call the attention of powerful patrons, supposedly “provoked” to act when the photos are sufficiently publicized. When such patrons intervene, it further raises the value of such photos, virtually creating a demand for more. Now the most conclusive way to make one’s case “credible” is by flashing the appropriate dead baby photo. This commerce is part of the humanitarian trafficking that liberal imperial globalism encourages.
Wildly inflated numbers, numbers that go up, come down, that get divided, are indicative of the existence of this kind of stock market. Thus the debates over the number of civilians “killed by the regime,” and how often the number is inflated to include all the soldiers and civilians killed by those opposed to “the regime”. So everyone who has been killed in Syria was supposedly killed by the Syrian state—that’s convenient, because after all we have the moralistic demon tales that instruct us that “Assad is a monster,” and just like a monster, he “kills his own people”. (Funny, isn’t it, how easily we always manage to imagine these low-down Third World leaders as sub-humans.)
Status upgrades come easily: take the appropriate moralistic, virtuous stance in front of the right audience—by just saying that you believe in X or Y—and lo and behold you have achieved a status upgrade. You are one of the good people, a trusted source, a credible figure, because you said the right things to the right people in the right place at the right time. This internationalized form of virtue signalling is almost as good as printing money, and nearly identical to it in its most basic sense.
Like in the Wild West, betting in the saloon is also common when it comes to Syria. The US State Department under Obama placed all its bets on some entity they invented, which they liked to call “moderate rebels” (why not “respectable terrorists” or “polite criminals”?). They lost. Numerous left-wing academics signed on to regime change years ago, and because they only pretend to be seasoned analysts for their day jobs, they did not foresee the collapse of the anti-government forces in Syria. That list included noted “post-colonial” scholars and anthropologists, united in their belief in “democracy promotion” and remaking Syria into something palatable to them, with the right leaders in place. Five years later and a smaller group—including feminists like Gloria Steinem and Judith Butler, anarchists like Noam Chomsky and the anthropologist David Graeber, the Marxist David Harvey, and advocates of recolonization like Michael Walzer—placed their bets on socialist Kurdish militias, presumably increasing the value of their bet by the important sign value of their brand name authority. Ironically, in the process of re-imagining legendary Rojava as the site of a second Spanish Civil War, they were openly collaborating with Donald Trump (not naming him directly, since “the US government” was more convenient). These signatories were thus complicit with the very same commander-in-chief of the armed forces they were calling on for support of Syrian Kurds. They wanted “the US government,” whose President is Donald Trump, to impose sanctions on Turkey, and to develop a foreign policy that put Kurdish interests at the forefront. You can be sure that, elsewhere, in front of different crowds, they return to “the Resistance” by puffing up their little chests and sounding all “anti-Trump”—but when it came to cheering their favourite band of ethnic anarchists, they could dispel with appearances. Less “prestigious” characters, publishing in a less “prestigious” outlet, countered the call to “defend Rojava”, a call which appropriated “progressive” politics for the cause of imperialism (reigniting an old marriage). (David Harvey, by the way, having cashed in on abundant sales of his volume, The New Imperialism, has recently changed his mind: he has decided that imperialism is merely a metaphor, “rather than anything real”. Out of curiosity, we have to wonder if “capitalism” is also a metaphor, rather than anything real, seeing how Marxists have linked capitalism with imperialism. Perhaps even socialism is a metaphor, rather than anything real.)
Of course activists, academics, and the freelancers that make all the Twitter noise, are just bit players in the drama of their dreams. Some of the really big heavy hitters are the various weapons manufacturers, politely termed “defense contractors,” and their army of lobbyists in Washington, DC. For them, any sniff of a chance for permanent occupation smells like permanent war, and thus permanent profit, paid for by debt in the present to be paid by future tax-payers. Advocates of permanent occupation concede only one alternative to occupation: regime change, thus recolonization, which has the same effect as permanent occupation. Advocates include beneficiaries of status upgrades like Senator Lindsey Graham, converted into the de facto US Secretary of State by his friends at Fox News and CNN.
For powerful patron states like the US, “chaos” offers valuable opportunities—in the technocrats’ language, this is duplicitously referred to as “preventing chaos”. The official assumption, intended for popular consumption, is that “chaos” predates foreign intervention. Remember: other peoples are producers of problems, chaos is thus a permanent and normal state for them. Add to the assumption that chaos predates US intervention the assumption that there is no Syrian government (the officially existing one is not acceptable to the US, so it vanishes), then Syria becomes the name for a wide-open wilderness. That means the US gets to train and reinforce “local forces”—like the separatists cheered on by a select group of leftist academics. But this all costs money, what to do? Here comes Trump’s transfer of costs for extracting capital: emphasis is placed on Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States to pay for the costs of US occupation and proxy-training in Syria. This model is essentially one that places the US in the role of an international mercenary. Where such support payments are not forthcoming, then there is the fallback of debt-financed US military spending. The loans are provided by a range of creditors, domestic and foreign, including foreign central banks. Many states thus own US debt, and what we see here is essentially the rest of the planet financing its own domination by a US debt-fuelled warhorse. (This is one of the “secrets” that ought to inform revised and reworked theories of imperialism: empires function best and last longest when the ostensible objects of imperial domination actively collaborate in supporting empire. Theories uninformed by this observation can become trite conspiracy theories of imperialism.)
To maintain the value of US “investment” in Syria, the US needs to create a need for protection, while reducing the value of alternatives (competitors). One way to create a need for protection is to create that crisis that would seem to beg for it: phony gas attacks, like those happening at the end of a week of public debate that erupted after Trump announced he wished to withdraw US forces from Syria soon. Another means for bolstering US intervention in Syria is by invoking the threat of Iran.
As mentioned at the start of this section, the structural relationship of extraction needs to be maintained, and sometimes the maintenance costs exceed the profits. For example, “humanitarian activists” who plead for greater accessibility to refugees, disconnecting the fact of their homelessness from our own military interventions which uprooted those people in the first place, is one way that costs can exceed profits. Humanitarians need to prove that they are needed, and refugees prove the need. However, the backlash from citizens in receiving countries who realize that refugee entrants, in large enough numbers, will usher in a new wave of de facto austerity measures as health, education, and public housing come under pressure, represents a threat to humanitarians and their careers. With humanitarian profit-seeking threatened, one way to respond is to caricature critics as xenophobic haters, which further inflames opposition to their project—few people accept having their pockets picked and being insulted. The result is a generalized closing of doors and the rise of parties that demand an end to foreign occupations.
Finally, I do not mean to imply that all imperialism reduces to economic factors alone. There are several different types and methods of imperialism, and sometimes military imperialism is decidedly uneconomical, just as economic imperialism can appear totally pacific. Again, trite conspiracy theories about the presence of oil pipelines, or plans for building them—in other words, that there must always be some wonderfully profitable economic opportunity for imperialism to make sense—are sometimes wrong. What I am suggesting is that all types of imperialism must involve loss for the dominated, there is a transfer of values and costs, and a system of extraction, such that every type of imperialism could be analyzed as if it were economic in nature.
Dreaming of Power, Projecting Our Fantasies
No doubt most citizens in places like the US and Canada do not spend much time, or any time, worrying about Syria—and that is probably a good thing. If only their example could be followed by those with much greater power, or those with much louder voices.
One of the striking features of the Syrian war are those individuals outside of Syria who have decided to make Syria their business. This goes well beyond personal curiosity and a desire to learn about a different place—it’s instead something which is invested with a thick desire to turn Syria into something which they want and currently lack. Syria is experienced vicariously and voyeuristically. Some are learning what they can because they wish to stop our intervention in Syria, and in the process they are learning a great deal about their own society. Others, however, engage in no such reflection.
For those outsiders who would presume to have a say in Syria’s future, Syria is required to put on a pleasing performance. Syria has to perform like a “democracy” before it can be left alone; some on the left instead argue it is already democratic, and see in Syria the salvation of a true liberalism. What unites both is the assumption that Syria is culturally empty: it can create nothing of its own. At best, Syria and other places like it (target nations) are pictured as mere fertile ground ready to be planted with foreign seeds. The only job locals have is to be receivers of imports. Why would a country with a civilization that long predates either Karl Marx or Adam Smith not have a right to develop its own approaches?
As I wrote about elsewhere earlier this year, there is an internal debate among North American leftists as to whether Syria’s Ba’athists are “true socialists”. As I wrote then,
“does Syria exist to satisfy dogmatic demands in exchange for certification from those US Marxists who have never held power and thus know nothing about actual responsibility?… US Marxists in particular have an overweening sense of their centrality to the world, when they are beyond marginal at home. Perhaps their role as peripheral spectators in domestic politics is what has them casting about overseas for a mission to fulfill their frustrated ambitions”.
One would think Syria had submitted an application for a job, and “history” put us in place to acts as its judges. If Syria is not a “democracy,” or is not “socialist,” what then? Does it get destroyed as a result? I would hate to be on the receiving end of such “solidarity” and I would pray that “internationalists” learn the virtues of minding their own business.
“We’re not particularly keen to be friends with you. We’re not begging you for friendship. We want normal, civilized relations—which you arrogantly refuse, disregarding basic courtesy. You are misguided to think you have friends. Your so-called friends are just those who can’t say no to you. This is your only criteria for friendship”.—Vassily Nebenzia, ambassador of Russia to the UN Security Council, responding to US ambassador Nikki Haley on April 9, 2018.
Pregnant women in the United States could be exposed to ionizing radioactivity from nuclear waste shipped around the nation, a radioactive waste watchdog told Radio Sputnik’s Loud & Clear this week.
Given the number of shipments of nuclear waste traveling around the country, “Pregnant women and the fetus and the womb should not be exposed to any ionizing radioactivity if it can be avoided. This is going to happen. Given these kinds of shipment numbers — many thousands — there’s going to be exposures to pregnant women in this country,” says Kevin Kamps, radioactive waste specialist at Beyond Nuclear.
Nuclear waste is shipped past Americans all the time without many of us knowing it. Even waste passing by on a train is emitting radioactive particulates, and some of those can have negative consequences over time.
“It’s like an X-ray. It will cause harm,” Kamps said. Nurses often ask patients to wear protective aprons while taking X-rays to minimize exposure to the radiation, since X-rays are technically a carcinogen according to the World Health Organization. Medical News Today has reported that approximately 0.4 percent of cancers in the US are triggered by CT scans. (CT scans use X-rays and computer imagery to generate pictures of the body to help doctors with diagnoses.)
Transporting nuclear waste products is a risky business for public health outside the US, too.
“If you have exterior, or external contamination, on the shipment — which has happened hundreds of times in France, 50 times in the US that we know of — those dose rates increase significantly. In France, on average, it was 500 times the permissible [amount of contamination] on one-third of the shipments. In one case it was 3,300 times [the] permissible [amount]. So if that’s one to two chest X-rays per hour, times 3,300 times permissible, that’s 6,600 chest X-rays per hour,” Kamps told Loud & Clear.
A so-called “counter-terror” operation, involving around 200 policemen, is underway on Tuesday in France, with the police forces raiding the headquarters of Islamic organization Centre Zahra France in the country’s north, France Info radio station reported, citing the prefecture of the department.
Centre Zahra France is a Shiite organization, known for its anti-Zionist rhetoric, namely, in social media.
Eleven people were detained in the raid in the commune of Grande-Synthe, a suburb of the port city of Dunkirk, local media reported on Tuesday.
“This morning, starting from 6 a.m. [local time, 04:00 GMT], the national police has been carrying out an operation in the Grande-Synthe commune, Nord department. The operation is being conducted within counter-terrorism efforts… Centre Zahra France’s activity has been followed up closely due to the fact that its leaders grant support to a number of terror organizations,” France Info radio station reported, citing the Nord prefecture’s statement.
The police have also raided 12 homes of the Centre Zahra France’s major leaders.
There have been ups and downs in the relationship between Russia (the Soviet Union) and the US, but both nations have become accustomed to the fact that their arsenals of offensive nuclear weapons are under the control of an agreement to prevent an arms race in this area. Some type of treaty has been in place since the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty was concluded in 1963. Since 1972, when the first Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT I) agreement was signed, there have always been negotiated constraints on nuclear arsenals. But today, there are ominous signs that the system that has worked so well to push the superpowers back from the brink of the nuclear abyss is being unraveled.
Andrea Thompson, Under Secretary for Arms Control and International Security, speaking before a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on Sept. 18, claimed that Russia’s new strategic weapons that were announced by President Vladimir Putin last March were an obstacle to Washington’s agreement to extend the New START treaty. She also asserted that the issue has not been discussed through the formal New START process. She did not explain why not. The official said the final decision had not been made as yet and, “All options are on the table.” The same applies to the other remaining treaties that Washington is accusing Moscow of violating.
The options under consideration are: withdrawing from the New START; renegotiating the provisions related to the verification process; or signing another treaty instead, such as the 2002 Moscow Treaty or the Strategic Offensive Reductions Treaty (SORT). The undersecretary said that the US administration wanted Russia’s recently unveiled strategic nuclear weapons to be included in the count.
Negotiations are possible over the issue of the new weapons that are being tested or are already part of Russia’s arsenal. Moscow has been calling for a strategic dialog for quite some time, and Russia is not to blame because Washington is reluctant to start the process, whatever its motivation. A duplication of the 2002 treaty is unacceptable. It has already been finalized. No such radical reduction is possible without other nuclear states joining in, and they are not doing so. It’s really hard to understand why the undersecretary would bring this up, knowing perfectly well the proposal would have no chance.
David Trachtenberg, Deputy Undersecretary of Defense for Policy, also insists that the extension of New START was uncertain, despite the fact that on-site inspections and monitoring were useful.
The Senate hearings showed that the lawmakers are divided on the future of arms control and are prone to putting the blame on Russia for violating each and every agreement in existence without taking a proper look at what the US is doing. There is slim chance of an extension of the New START and hardly any prospects for a new deal.
The New START will expire in 2021 unless extended by agreement of the US and Russian presidents or replaced by a follow-on treaty. The US and Russian presidents discussed the New START during a phone conversation in January and at the Helsinki summit in July, where the Russian leader suggested that the parties thoroughly review all the components of the arms-control regime, including New START and the INF treaty, the 2011 Vienna Document on confidence-building measures in Europe, and the Open Skies Treaty. After meeting Nikolai Patrushev, the head of Russia’s Security Council, US National Security Adviser John Bolton said the extension of the New START was far from a slam-dunk decision. Meanwhile, the United States is moving ahead and designing a new ground-based missile that is in open violation of the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Force (INF) Treaty.
The long-range Kalibr sea-based cruise missile that was added to the arsenal of the Russian armed forces in late 2017 would violate the presidential nuclear initiatives (PNIs) of 1991 if it were equipped with a nuclear payload. Technically, it is capable of carrying a nuclear warhead but it does not. Russia’s non-strategic arsenal is large and sophisticated enough as it is — there is no need to violate its obligations under the PNIs. The US has a great numerical advantage in sea-based long-range missiles, and there is no verification mechanism in place to ascertain whether or not they are equipped with nuclear warheads.
The US has always been reluctant to discuss ways to enhance the PNIs by adding verification measures. The long-range cruise-missile capability demonstrated by Russia’s Navy during the Syrian conflict came as a surprise, but this does not mean it is a violation. Things change and it’s only natural to adapt to a new reality. It’s widely believed that the best way to tackle the problems related to national security is through talks, but the US administration and many people in Congress see it differently.
There is something important to remember — the US sea-based nuclear-tipped TLAM/N missiles are still part of the US arsenal, and there is no way to make sure they are not clandestinely installed on nuclear attack submarines. This issue could be discussed separately from the strategic nuclear agenda. The problem cannot be neglected. No one is standing in the way of launching a dialog. President Bush and President Gorbachev managed it. In theory, President Trump and President Putin could do the same thing, but the American leader should be prepared to be attacked for dealing with Russia. Those in America who stand in the way of an arms-control dialog between the two leading nuclear powers are actually undermining the country’s security, but they will do it anyway in order to pursue their own political ends, because they are filled with hatred against both the US president and Russia.
The 2018 Nuclear Posture Review states that the United States will pursue a nuclear-armed, submarine-launched cruise missile in order to “provide a needed nonstrategic regional presence, an assured response capability.” How does this jibe with the fact that the PNI is still in effect? It looks like the initiatives’ future is as uncertain as the fate of other treaties.
Of course Russian strategists have never forgotten that the US still has 50 empty silos ready to hold ICBMs, with several hundred additional warheads that are also in storage and could potentially be loaded.
There are only three years left until the New START expires. The experience of history demonstrates that that is hardly enough time to prepare a new treaty that actually has no chance of being ratified by the Senate in an era when the overall bilateral relationship is at its lowest ebb. The US still has no clear idea of what its future nuclear triad will be like. Discussions are underway. All we know is that it is investing more than $1.2 trillion over the next 30 years to modernize its aging nuclear forces, which will include new ground-based missiles, new missile submarines, and a new bomber.
No major arms-control treaty will be concluded until the administration and Congress know exactly what components will be included in the arsenal and what programs are to be implemented to achieve the established goals —once all the assessments and estimations are complete and the guideline documents in place. Thus, an automatic five-year extension is the only hope for the New START’s survival. That could be accomplished through a simple executive agreement. Without a New START in effect, other agreements, such as the INF Treaty and the PNIs, have no chance. The very real prospect of an end to arms control and the non-proliferation regime is looming. That’s something leading experts in Russia were warning about as far back as 2015. Very serious discussions must be launched right now in order to prevent such a scenario. It’s a scary prospect!
The good news is that the patient can still be saved. There is still a little time left, although not much. There are no options but for Russia and the US to put their differences aside, forget about Ukraine, Syria, trade wars, and other issues that divide the two nations and concentrate on ways to save arms control or whatever is left of it. With their relationship at its lowest point since the end of the Cold War, it is even more vital to keep the nuclear risks in check and prevent a new nuclear arms race. Russia (Soviet) and US officials have always emphasized that any plan that keeps nuclear weapons under control and subject to proper verification procedures is a better option than an unfettered arms race. The US administration and its lawmakers seem to disagree.
In December 1945 and January 1946, the British Mandate authorities carried out an extensive survey of Palestine, in support of the work of the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine. The results were published in the Survey of Palestine, which has been scanned and made available online by Palestine Remembered; all 1300 pages can be read here.
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