Martians!

What will happen when Putin signs an alliance with the little green men?

There is a danger greater than Putin, greater even than Trump—it is aliens, those that in our childhood we knew as Martians. The Yankee establishment seems very interested in drawing the attention of the American public to non-human technologies and extraterrestrial threats, which seem as problematic to demonstrate as the climate apocalypse. The Pentagon declassifies files with a transparency that would delight the late Dr. Jiménez del Oso. Those who once laughed at UFOs now seem to be convinced that we already have them here. The viewer cannot believe his eyes, while the shadow of a mothership looms over the defenseless United States: What will happen if Putin signs an alliance with the little green men? We can imagine panic on the West Coast, chaos in Washington and desperation in London: Putin is going to enter Paris, escorted by scaly Cossacks.

Such a threat to national security well deserves an increase in the Defense budget, two, three, four, five, as many times as necessary to provide us with the reverse technology that will allow us to overcome the challenge posed at Roswell. Soon, without a doubt, we will see the autopsies of the big-headed Martians who crashed their saucer after a reckless maneuver. And the public will swallow the millstone and cry out for the Military-Industrial Complex to defend them from the legions of Ummo or Ganymede. If intellectual and scientific credit is given to the girl Greta, why not give it to the abductees? At least these have been through a psychiatrist.

Popular Revolutions in Black Africa

Further down, a few thousand kilometers away from this decomposing Spain, in that Africa which we care so little about and from which so many problems come and will come to us, the wrongly labelled “European” Union is witnessing the volatilization of its influence in the Sahel, because of Russia, according to the press addicted to the Regime? Of course, since Putin replaced the coronavirus, all the evils of humanity come from Moscow.

However, the African military leaders who have taken power in recent years in Mali (2021), Burkina-Faso (2022), Guinea (2021) and this year in Niger have not resorted to the Wagner coup d’état, unlike in the past with French paratroopers and mercenaries hired by Paris. They have been military and popular coups that were fueled by France itself, a mere executor of the policies of the American Africom. After the overthrow of the Libyan state in 2011, the jihadists have found a terrestrial paradise in the lands of Fezzan and from there have intervened in Niger and Mali. France orchestrated two interventions to halt the march of the Tuareg fundamentalists on the Sahelian space, but soon discovered that it was much more practical to appease the Salafists in order to maintain their influence in Africa. The military of these countries began to see from their sad experience that the French services always had time to warn the members of the Islamic State of government attacks, in time for them to get their Qatari instructors to safety, for example. Meanwhile, and taking advantage of the occasion, Nigerian uranium was transported to France at ridiculous prices. Somehow the “protection” had to be paid for.

The Sahelian coups are true popular revolutions, like the Egyptian one of 1952, and which have been greeted with enormous popular support. Russian flags and portraits of Putin are more an expression of rejection of French (and European) perfidy than anything else. Macron, completely overwhelmed by his African debacle, has urged a military intervention by ECOWAS (a sort of African NATO) in Niger, as this country provides more than thirty percent of France’s nuclear fuel. However, knowing the internal rejection that an intervention by the sepoys would bring to their regimes, the governments of the zone refuse to move their forces. The United States, that faithful ally of Europe, has already negotiated on its own with Niger and has left Macron and dressed up and nowhere to go, as our grandmothers used to say. It was not for nothing that it was Victoria Nuland—she of F**k Europe!—who was in charge of negotiating the new state of affairs with Niger’s leaders. In case anyone thinks that this does not affect them, they should check their electricity bill in the coming months. France is the powerhouse of Europe.

Nor does it seem to be news that a good part of the weapons destined for Ukraine by NATO are turning up in Africa, where a certain power, very concerned about gender identity, climate change and aliens, is training its jihadist partners for a future pan-African war. Apparently, they can’t find a better way to end the growing influence of China and Russia on that continent. The Sahel and the Caucasus seem to be the next theater of global warfare. And we are not talking about aliens here, but surely the well-informed viewer, who knows where the star Sirius is and also knows that there are sixty genders, has no idea what Nagorno-Karabakh is or who the members of Boko-Haram are. He will find out eventually. And at his own expense.

Sertorio lives, writes and thinks in Spain. this review comes through the kind courtesy of El Manifiesto.

Featured: “Watching From Mars,” number 13, from the Mars Attacks! trading card series (1962). Drawings by Wally Wood, painted by Norman Saunders.

Eschatologies of a Multipolar World

BRICS: The Creation of Multipolarity

XV BRICS Summit: The Multipolar World is Established

The XV BRICS summit made a historic decision to admit six more countries to the organization—Argentina, Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. Thus, in fact, the formation of the core of the multipolar world was completed.

Although BRICS, formerly BRIC, was a conditional association of semi-peripheral (according to Wallerstein) or “second world” countries, the dialogue between these countries, which are not part of the structure of the collective West (NATO and other rigidly unipolar organizations dominated by the United States), gradually outlined the contours of an alternative world order. If the Western civilization considers itself to be the only one, and this is the essence of globalism and unipolarity, the BRICS countries represented sovereign and independent civilizations, different from the Western one, with a long history and a completely original system of traditional values.

Initially, the BRIC association, created in 2006 at the initiative of Russian President Vladimir Putin, included four countries—Brazil, Russia, India and China. Brazil, the largest power in South America, represented the Latin American continent. Russia, China and India are of sufficient scale on their own to be considered civilizations. But they also represent more than nation-states. Russia is the vanguard of Eurasia, the Eurasian “Greater Space.” China is responsible for a significant area of the contiguous powers of Indochina. India also extends its influence beyond its borders—at least to Bangladesh and Nepal.

When South Africa joined the BRIC countries in 2011 (hence the acronym BRICS—the “S” at the end of South Africa), the continent was symbolically represented as the largest African country.

7 Civilizations (1 vs. 6)

At the XV summit, held from August 22 to 24, 2023 in Johannesburg, the final formation of the multipolar club took place. The entry of three Islamic powers—Shiite Iran and Sunni Saudi Arabia and the UAE—was fundamental. Thus, the direct participation in the multipolar world of the entire Islamic civilization, represented by both branches—Sunnism and Shiism—was secured. In addition, along with Portuguese-speaking Brazil, Spanish-speaking Argentina, another strong and independent power, joined BRICS. Back in the mid-twentieth century, theorists of South American unification into a consolidated large space—above all Argentine general Juan Perón and Brazilian president Getúlio Vargas—considered a decisive rapprochement between Brazil and Argentina to be the first step in this process. If this were achieved, the process of integration of the Latin American ecumene would be irreversible. And this is exactly what has happened now in the context of the accession of the two major powers of South America, Brazil and Argentina, to the multipolar club.

Ethiopia’s acceptance is also highly symbolic. It is the only African country that has remained independent throughout the colonial era, preserving its sovereignty, its independence and its unique culture (Ethiopians are the oldest Christian people). Combined with South Africa, Ethiopia is strengthening its presence in the multipolar club of the African continent.

In fact, in the new composition of BRICS, we get a complete model of unification of all poles—civilizations, large spaces, except for the West, which is desperate to preserve its hegemony and unipolar structure. But now it faces not disparate and fragmented countries full of internal and external contradictions, but a united force of the majority of humanity, determined to build a multipolar world.

This multipolar world consists of the following civilizations:

  1. The West (USA+EU and their vassals, which includes, alas, the once proud and distinctive Japan);
  2. China (+Taiwan) with its satellites;
  3. Russia (as an integrator of the entire Eurasian space);
  4. India and its zone of influence;
  5. Latin America (with Brazil + Argentina at its core);
  6. Africa (South Africa + Ethiopia, with Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, etc., emerging from French colonial influence).
  7. Islamic world (in both versions—Shiite Iran, and Sunni Saudi Arabia and UAE).

At the same time, one civilization—the Western one—claims hegemony, while the six others deny it this right, accepting only a multipolar system and recognizing the West only as one of the civilizations, along with others.

Thus, the rightness of Samuel Huntington, who saw the future in the return of civilizations, was confirmed in practice, while the fallacy of Fukuyama’s thesis, who believed that the global hegemony of the liberal West (the end of history) has already been achieved, became obvious. Therefore, Fukuyama can only doomedly lecture Ukrainian neo-Nazis, the last hope of globalists to stop the onset of multipolarity, for which Russia, in Ukraine, is fighting today.

August 2023 can be considered the birthday of the multipolar world.

Having outlined multipolarity, it is time to take a closer look at how the civilizational poles themselves interpret the situation in which they find themselves. And here we should take into account that virtually every sovereign civilization has its own idea of the structure of history, the nature of historical time, its direction and the end of history. Contrary to Fukuyama, who ambitiously proclaimed a single end of history (in his liberal version), each sovereign civilization operates with its own understanding, interpretation and description of the end of history. Let us briefly review this situation.

Each Civilization has its own Idea of the End of the World

Each pole of the multipolar world, that is, each civilization, has its own version of eschatology, somewhere more and somewhere less explicit.

“Eschatology” is the doctrine of the end of the world or the end of history. Eschatologies form a significant part of religious doctrines, but have secular versions as well. Any idea of the linear direction of the historical process and its supposed finale can be considered an “eschatology.”

The multipolar world consists of several civilizations or “big spaces” with a completely unique and original system of traditional values. This is the pole (not the individual state). A pole is precisely a civilization. Each civilization has its own idea of the nature of the historical process, its direction and its goal, and thus its own eschatology.

In some “large spaces” there are even several versions of eschatology, and a number of relatively small political formations, which cannot claim the pole in any way, nevertheless sometimes have a special and even developed eschatology.

Let us outline the different types in the most general terms.

Eschatologies of the West

Eschatology in Western Christianity

Western Christianity originally had the same eschatological doctrine as Eastern Christianity, being one. In Christianity—in both Catholicism and Orthodoxy (and even Protestantism)—the end of the world is considered inevitable, since the world and its history are finite and God is infinite. After the coming of Christ, the world moves toward its end, and the return of Christ itself is seen as taking place “in the last days.” The entire history of the Christian Church is a preparation for the end times, the Last Judgment, and the Second Coming of Christ. Christianity teaches that before the Second Coming there will be a general apostasy in mankind, nations will turn away from Christ and His Church, and will rely only on their own strength (humanism). Later, mankind will degenerate completely and the Antichrist, the messenger of the Devil, the “son of perdition” will seize power.

The Antichrist will rule for a short time—3.5 years, “a time, two times and half a time”), the saints and the prophets Elijah and Enoch, who will have returned to earth, will denounce him, and then the Second Coming, the resurrection of the dead and the Last Judgment will take place. This is what every Christian is obliged to believe.

At the same time, Catholicism, which gradually separated from the united Orthodox trunk, believed that the stronghold of Christians should be the Catholic Church under the Pope, the “City of God,” and the retreat would affect only earthly political entities, the “City of Earth.” There is a spiritual battle between the heavenly politics of the Vatican and the earthly politics of secular monarchs. In Orthodoxy, unlike Catholicism, the main obstacle in the way of the Antichrist is the Holy Empire, eternal Rome.

Traditional Christian eschatology and exactly this—partly pessimistic—view of the vector of history prevailed in Europe until the beginning of the New Age. And this is how traditional Catholics, unaffected by the spirit of modernity, who are becoming fewer and fewer in the West, continue to think about the end of the world.

Protestant eschatologies are more bizarre. In the Anabaptists of Münster or the Czech Hussites, the Second Coming was preceded by the establishment of universal equality (eschatological communism), the abolition of class hierarchies and private property.

Recently, under the influence of modernization and political correctness, many Protestant denominations and the Anglican Church have revised their view of eschatology, finally breaking with the ancient Christian tradition.
Masonic Eschatology: The Theory of Progress

At the origins of the Western European civilization of Modernity is European Freemasonry, in the midst of which the idea of “social progress” was born. The idea of progress is a direct antithesis of the Christian understanding of history; it rejects apostasy, the Antichrist, the Last Judgment, the resurrection of the dead and the very existence of the soul.

Masons believed that humanity develops progressively: in the beginning savagery (not earthly paradise), then barbarism (not traditional society), then civilization (culminating in the European New Age and the Enlightenment, i.e., secular atheistic societies, based on a materialistic scientific worldview). Civilization in its formation passes a number of stages from traditional confessions to the humanistic cult of the Great Architect of the Universe and further to liberal democracy, where science, atheism and materialism will fully triumph. And conservative Freemasonry (Scottish Rite) stopped usually with the cult of the Great Architect of the Universe (that is, with deism—the recognition of an undefined non-denominational “god”), and the more revolutionary, the Grand Orient rite was called to go further—to the complete abolition of religion and social hierarchy. The Scottish Rite stands for classical liberalism (big capital), the Grand Orient and other revolutionary lodges stand for liberal democracy (intensive growth of the middle class and redistribution of capital from the big bourgeoisie to the middle and small bourgeoisie).

But in Freemasonry, in both versions, we see a clearly directed vector to the end of history; that is, to the construction of modern progressive global civilization. This is the ideology of globalism in two versions—conservative (gradual) and offensive (revolutionary-democratic).

England: The Fifth Monarchy

During Cromwell’s English Revolution, the theory of the Fifth Monarchy developed in Protestant circles under the influence of Jewish circles and Sabbataism (notably the Dutch Rabbi Manasseh ben-Israel). The traditional Christian doctrine of the Four World Kingdoms (Babylonian, Persian, Greek and Roman) was declared insufficient, and after the fall of Rome (which for Protestants meant the refusal to recognize the authority of the Pope and the overthrow of the monarchy, regicide) the Fifth Kingdom was to come. Earlier, a similar idea had arisen in Portugal in relation to the maritime Portuguese Empire and the special mission of the “vanished King” Sebastian. The Portuguese and Portuguese-centered (mystical-monarchical) version was passed on to the Portuguese Jewish converts (Marranos) and Jews exiled to Holland and Brazil. One of them was Manasseh ben-Israel, from whom this theory passed on to English Protestants and Cromwell’s inner circle (Thomas Harrison).

Proponents of this theory considered Cromwell himself to be the future world Monarch of the Fifth Monarchy. The Fifth Monarchy was to be distinguished by the abolition of Catholicism, hereditary monarchical power, estates and to represent the triumph of bourgeois democracy and capitalism.

This was continued by the current of “British Israelism,” which declared the English to be the “ten lost tribes of Israel” and spread the belief in the coming world domination of England and the Anglo-Saxon race. The world rule of the “New Israelites” (Anglo-Saxons) was seen beyond the Four Kingdoms and broke with traditional Christian eschatology, as the Fifth Monarchy meant the destruction of traditional Christian kingdoms and the rule of the “chosen people” (not Jews, but the English).

From England, extreme Protestant sects transferred these ideas to the USA, which was created as a historical embodiment of the Fifth Monarchy. Hence the American eschatology in the mythologies of William Blake (in America a Prophecy the USA is represented by the giant Orcus freeing himself from the chains of the old god), who was also an adherent of the theory of “British Israelism.” Blake embodied these ideas in his poem “Jerusalem,” which became the unofficial anthem of England.

USA: Dispensationalism

In the United States, the ideas of “British Israelism” and the Fifth Monarchy were developed in some Protestant denominations and became the basis for a special current of dispensationalism based on the ideas of the Plymouth Brethren (preacher John Darby) and the Scofield edition of the Bible, where the eschatological interpretation in a dispensationalist way is incorporated into the biblical text in such a way that to ordinary people it seems to be a single narrative.

Dispensationalism considers Anglo-Saxons and Protestants (“twice born”) to be the chosen people, and applies to them all the prophecies about the Jews. According to this doctrine, mankind lives at the end of the last “dispensation” of the cycle, and the Second Coming of Christ will soon take place, and all the faithful will be raptured into heaven (the Rapture). But this will be preceded by a final battle (Armageddon) with the “king of Rosh, Meshech and Tubal,” which from the 19th century to the present day has meant Russia. Before this Russia would invade Palestine and, there, fight with the “twice-born” (Anglo-Saxons), and then be defeated by them. After that, there would be a mass conversion of Jews to Protestantism and an ascent to heaven (by means of miracles or spacecraft).

In recent decades, this current has merged with political Zionism and has become the basis of the ideology and geopolitics of the American neocons.

France: The Great Monarch

In France, as early as the late Middle Ages and the dawn of the Modern Age, an eschatological theory of the Great Monarch developed, which claimed that a secret French king, chosen by God, would appear at the end of time and save humanity—from decadence, Protestantism, and materialism. This version of eschatology is Francocentric and conservative, and circulated in mystically oriented circles of the aristocracy. The difference from traditional Catholic eschatology is that the French king, rather than the Vatican See, is the barrier to the Antichrist.

Some researchers consider Gaullism to be a secular and simplified geopolitical version of the Great Monarch’s eschatology. General De Gaulle advocated the unification of the peoples of Europe (primarily the French, Germans and Russians) and against NATO and Anglo-Saxon hegemony. The French writer Jean Parvulesco (following Raymond Abellio) called it “the mystical dimension of Gaullism.”

But the vast majority of the French ruling class is dominated by Masonic eschatology—with the exact opposite understanding.

Italy: The Ghibellines and the Greyhound

In the Middle Ages, the confrontation between the Roman throne and imperial power—after Charlemagne proclaimed himself “Emperor”—at times became extremely acute. This led to the creation of two parties—the Guelphs, supporters of the Pope, and the Ghibellines, supporters of the Emperor. They were most widespread in Italy, the possession of which was the basis for German kings to be recognized as Emperors of the (Western) Roman Empire after coronation in Rome.

The poet Dante was a supporter of the Ghibellines and encoded in his poem, Divine Comedy, eschatological teaching of the Ghibellines that after the temporary rule of the Ghibellines and the complete degradation of the Catholic Church, a true Ghibelline monarch would come to Europe, who would revive the morals and spirituality of Western civilization. He is symbolically represented in the figure of the greyhound (veltro) and the mystical number DXV (515), which yields, after rearrangement of letters/digits the word, DVX, “leader.” Dante expounded the ideas of the World Monarchy in a separate treatise. Here again the eschatological theme is connected with monarchical power—and to a greater extent than with the Catholic Church. For Dante, the French monarchy was seen as being on the side of the Antichrist, as was the Roman throne that had risen against the Emperor.

Germany: Hegel and the End of History

The original version of eschatology is given in Hegel’s philosophy. He sees history as a dialectical process of the scattering of the Spirit through Nature, and then a new gathering of the particles of the Spirit in an enlightened society. The culmination of this process according to Hegel would be the creation of a unified German state on the basis of the Prussian monarchy (during his lifetime it did not exist). In this enlightened monarchy, the cycle of the history of the Spirit would be completed. These ideas influenced the Second Reich and Bismarck, and later in a distorted form Hitler’s Third Reich. It was Hegel who put forward the thesis of the “end of history” in a philosophical context, combining in a peculiar combination Christian eschatology (including the figure of the Christian ruler) and a special mystical-monarchical interpretation of social progress (as a preliminary stage before the creation of the world empire of philosophers).

The German philosopher (Catholic) Carl Schmitt correlated the idea of the Reich with the function of the Katechon, the restainer, which was the meaning of imperial power in Byzantium and which was usurped (according to the Orthodox) in the ninth century by the Frankish Emperor Charlemagne. This line was partly in line with the Ghibelline tradition.

The German Jew, Karl Marx, built a theory of communism (the end of history) on an inverted materialist version of Hegelianism, and the Russian philosopher Alexandre Kojève tried to identify the end of history with globalism and the planetary triumph of liberalism. But it is important that Hegel himself, unlike his sectarian interpreters, was an eschatological, Germano-centered monarchist.

Iberia: The Habsburgs and Planetary Evangelization

Eschatology in the Spanish version was linked to the colonization of the Americas and the mission of Charles V Habsburg and his dynastic successors. Since in the prophecies about the end of the world (Pseudo-Methodius of Patara), the sign of the end of the world was the spread of the Gospel to all mankind and the establishment of a worldwide Christian empire under a Catholic world king. The geographical discoveries and the establishment of vast colonies by Spain gave reason to consider the Spanish Habsburgs—above all Charles V and Philip II—as contenders for the role of world monarch. This Catholic-monarchical version, partly consonant with the French version, but in contrast focused on the Austrian Emperors, the traditional opponents of the French dynasty. Christopher Columbus was a proponent of an eschatological world empire during the reigns of the Catholic kings Isabella and Ferdinand, and reflected his eschatological views in The Book of Prophecies, compiled on the eve of his fourth voyage to the Americas and completed immediately after his return.

After the Bourbon reign in Spain, this eschatological line disappeared. Its echoes, partly, can be found in Catholic circles in Latin America and especially in the Jesuits.

The Fifth Empire in the Portuguese version and its Brazilian offshoot are generally close in type to this version of eschatology.

Israel: The Territory of Mashiach

The State of Israel was established in 1948 in Palestine, as a realization of the eschatological aspirations of the Jewish Diaspora, who had been waiting for two millennia for a return to the Promised Land. Jewish eschatology is based on the belief in the chosenness of the Jews and their special role in the end times, when the Jewish Mashiach will come and Jews will rule the world. It is the best studied. In many ways, it is Jewish eschatology that has determined the main scenarios of end-of-the-world visions in monotheistic traditions.

Modern Israel was created as a state prepared for the coming of Mashiach, and if this function is taken out of the picture, its very existence loses its meaning—first of all, in the eyes of the Jews themselves.

Geopolitically, Israel cannot claim to be an independent civilization, an empire, whose scale is necessary for full participation in global eschatological processes. However, if we take into account the rapprochement of political Zionists in the United States with neocons and Protestant dispensationalists, the role of Jews in the last century in the Masonic lodges, the influence of the Diaspora in the ruling and especially economic elites of the West, then the whole picture changes, and the basis for serious eschatological events turns out to be significant.

The Kabbalistic interpretation of the migration route of the bulk of the Jewish Diaspora describes it as following the Shekhinah (God’s Presence) in exile (according to Rabbi Alon Anava). At the beginning of the Galut (dispersion), the bulk of the Jews were concentrated in the Middle East (Mizrahi). Then the Shekhinah began to rise to the north and the Caucasus (Khazar Kaganate). From there, the path of the Shekhinah led to Western Russia, to the Baltics and to Eastern Europe (Ashkenazi). Then its movement led the Ashkenazi to go deeper into Western Europe, and made the Sephardim move from the Iberian Peninsula to Holland and the American colonies. Finally, the bulk of the Jews concentrated in the United States, where they still represent a majority compared to Jewish communities in other countries. Thus, the Shekhinah remains in the United States. The second largest community of Jews is in Israel. When the proportions shift in Israel’s favor, it will mean that the Shekhinah, after a two-thousand-year circle, has returned to Palestine.

Then we should expect the building of the Third Temple and the coming of the Mashiach. This is the logic of Jewish eschatology, clearly visible in the political processes unfolding around Israel. This idea is adhered to by the majority of religious Zionists, who make up a significant percentage of Jews both in Israel and in the Diaspora. But any Jew, wherever he or she may be and whatever ideology he or she may share, cannot fail to recognize the eschatological nature of the modern state of Israel and, consequently, the far-reaching goals of its government.

Orthodox Eschatology

Greeks: The Marble Emperor

In the Orthodox population of Greece, after the fall of Byzantium and the seizure of power by the Ottomans, an eschatological theory developed about the coming of an Orthodox liberator-king—the Marble Emperor. His figure was sometimes interpreted as the return of Constantine XII Paleologos, who, according to legend, did not die when the Turks took Constantinople, but was carried away by an angel to the Marble Gate and there awaits his hour to free the Orthodox (Greeks) from the oppression of foreigners.

In some versions of the eschatological legend this mission was entrusted to the “red-haired king of the north,” by whom in the 18th century many Athonite monks understood the Russian Emperor.

These are echoes of the classical Byzantine doctrine of the Katechon, the “restainer” who is destined to become the main obstacle in the way of the “son of perdition” (Second Epistle of Saint Paul the Apostle to the Thessalonians) and of the Tsar-Savior from the book of Pseudo-Methodius of Patara. Greek political-religious thought retained this eschatological component during the Ottoman period, although after the liberation from the Turks, Greek statehood began to be built on Masonic liberal-democratic models (despite the brief period of rule by a number of European dynasties), completely breaking with the Byzantine heritage.

Russia: The King of the Third Rome, the Savior of the Sects, and Communism

In Russia, eschatology took a stable form by the end of the fifteenth century, which was reflected in the theory of Moscow as the Third Rome. It asserted that the mission of the Katechon, the restainer, after the fall of Constantinople passed to Muscovite Russia, which became the nucleus of the only Orthodox Empire—that is, Rome. The Grand Duke Moscow changed the status and became Tsar, Vasilevs, Emperor, restraining.

Henceforth, the mission of Russia and the Russian people was to slow down the coming of the “son of perdition,” the Antichrist, and to resist him in every possible way. This formed the core of Russian eschatology, and formalized the status of the Russian people as “God-bearers.”

Forgotten in the era of the Western reforms of Peter and his followers, the idea of Moscow as the Third Rome revived again in the 19th century, under the influence of the Slavophiles, and then became a central theme in the Russian Orthodox Church beyond the Frontier.

After the schism, eschatology became widespread among the Old Believers and sectarians. The Old Believers generally believed that the fall of the Third Rome had already irreversibly taken place, while the sectarians (Khlysty, Skoptsy), on the contrary, believed in the imminent coming of the “Russian Christ.”

The secular version of sectarian “optimistic” eschatology was taken up by the Bolsheviks, hiding it under the Marxist version of Hegel’s end of history. In the last period of the USSR, the eschatological belief in communism faded, and the regime and the country collapsed.

The theme of Russian eschatology became relevant again in Russia after the beginning of the Special Military Operation, when the confrontation (with the Masonic-liberal and materialistic-atheistic) civilization of the West became extremely acute. Logically, as Russia establishes itself as a separate civilization, the role of eschatology and the central importance of the function of the Katechon will only increase.

The Islamic World

Sunnism: The Sunni Mahdi

In Sunnism, the end of the world is not described in detail, and the visions of the coming leader of the Islamic community, the Mahdi, pale before the description of the Last Judgment that God (Allah) will administer at the end of time. Nevertheless, this figure is there and is described in some detail in the hadiths. It is about the emergence of a military and political leader of the Islamic world who will restore justice, order and piety, which has fallen into decay by the end of time.

The authoritative Sufi, Ibn Arabi, specifies that the Mahdi will be assisted in ruling by “viziers,” forming the basis of the eschatological government; and according to him, all the viziers of this “metaphysical government,” as assistants and projections of the unified pole (kutbah) will come from non-Arabic Islamic communities.

The Mahdi will defeat al-Dajjal (the Liar) and establish Islamic rule. A peculiar version of Islamic eschatology is also professed by supporters of the Islamic State (banned in Russia). Various figures in Islam claimed for the role of Mahdi. Most recently, the head of the Turkish PMC SADAT Adnan Tanriverdi proclaimed Erdogan as the Mahdi.

Iran: The Twelfth Imam

In Shi’ism, the Mahdi theme is much more fully developed, and eschatology underlies the very political-religious teachings of the Shi’ites. Shi’ites consider only the followers of Ali, the Imams, to be the legitimate rulers of the Islamic community. They believe that the last, Twelth, Imam did not die, but withdrew into concealment. He will appear to people again at the end of time. This will be the beginning of the rise of the Shia world.

Then there will be the appearance of Christ, who together with the Mahdi will fight with al-Dajjal and defeat him, establishing for a short period—just before the end of the world—a just, spiritual order.

Such views are espoused by the majority of Shiites, and in Iran it is the official ideology, largely determining the entire political strategy of this country.

Shiite eschatology in many respects continues the Iranian pre-Islamic tradition of Zoroastrianism, which had a developed theory of the change of cycles and their culmination in the Great Restoration (frashokart). There the image of the coming King-Savior, Saoshyant, who is destined to be born magically from a pure Virgin and defeat the army of the dark beginning (Ahriman) in the last battle, also plays an important role.

Probably, it was the ancient Iranian doctrine about the struggle of light (Ormuzd) and dark (Ahriman) began through history, as a key to its meaning and about the final victory of the warriors of light, became the basis for the eschatological part of monotheistic teachings. But in any case, the influence of Zoroastrianism on Shi’ism is obvious, and this is what gives Iranian eschatology such a sharp and vivid political expression.

Southeast Asia

India: Kalki

In Hinduism, the end of the world has little significance, although a number of sacred texts associated with the Kalachakra cycle tell of kings of the mystical land of Shambhala, where the conditions of the golden age reign. At the ultimate moment in history, one of these kings, Kalki, believed to be the tenth avatar of Vishnu, will appear in the human world and fight the demon Kali. Kalki’s victory will end the dark age and signify a new beginning (satya-yuga).

Kali-yuga (the age of darkness) is described as an era of the decline of mores, traditional values and the spiritual foundations of Indian civilization. Although Indian tradition is quite detached from history and its cycles, believing that spiritual realization can be achieved under any conditions, eschatological motifs are quite present in culture and politics.

In contemporary India, the popular conservative politician and Prime Minister Narendra Modi is recognized by some traditionalist circles as a divine avatar, either of Kalki himself or his harbinger.

Buddhism: The Buddha of Times to Come

Eschatological motifs are also developed in the Buddhist tradition. The end of time is seen in it as the coming of the future buddha, Maitreya. His mission is to renew the spiritual life of the sangha, the Buddhist community, and to turn humanity to the salvific path of awakening.

On Buddhism were based some political systems of the countries of southeast Asia—Japan, combined with the autochthonous cult of Shinto, centered on the figure of the divine Emperor, and a number of states of Indo-China. In some cases, the appeal to the figure of the coming Buddha Maitreya became the basis for political movements and popular uprisings.

Sometimes eschatological Buddhism found support in communist ideology, giving rise to syncretic forms—Cambodia, Vietnam, etc.

China: The Heavenly Mandate

Eschatology is virtually absent in Confucianism, which is the dominant political-ethical mainstream of Chinese tradition. But at the same time, it is developed in some detail in the religion of the Chinese Taoists and in Taoist-Buddhist syncretistic currents. According to Taoist ideas about cycles, the history of the world is reflected in the change of ruling dynasties in China. This change is the result of the loss of what the Taoists call the “heavenly mandate,” which every legitimate ruler of China is obliged to obtain and retain. When this mandate runs out, China is in turmoil, with civil war and unrest. The situation is saved only by obtaining a new heavenly mandate and enthronement of a new dynasty.

The Chinese Middle Empire is perceived by the Chinese themselves as an image of cosmic hierarchy, as the Universe. In the Empire, culture and nature merge to the point of indistinguishability. Therefore, dynastic cycles are cosmic cycles by which epochs are measured.

The Chinese tradition does not know the absolute end of the world, but believes that any deviation of the world order, in any direction, requires symmetrical restoration. This theory implicitly contributed to the Chinese revolution and retains its significance to the present day.

In fact, the figure of the current chairman of the CPC Central Committee, Xi Jinping, is seen as a new appearance of a legitimate Emperor who has received a heavenly mandate.

Africa

Garvey: Black Freemasonry

One of the founders of the movement to restore dignity to African peoples was Jamaican-born Freemason, Marcus Garvey, who applied Masonic progressivism to blacks and called for rebellion against whites.

Garvey took a series of actions to bring American blacks back to the African continent, continuing a process that began in 1820 with the creation of an artificial state on the west coast of Africa, Liberia. Liberia’s government copied the U.S. and so too was composed predominantly of Freemasons.

Garvey interpreted the struggle for the rights of blacks not just as a means to gain equality, but actively promoted the theory of the chosenness of Africans as a special people, which after centuries of slavery was called to establish its dominance—at least in the space of the African continent, but also to claim and assert the rights to power in the U.S. and other colonial countries. And in the center of this world movement should stand the Masonic lodges, where only black people are allowed.

The extreme representatives of this current were the organizations Black Power, Black Panthers and later BLM.

Great Ethiopia

In Africa, among the melanodermatic (black) population, their own original versions of eschatology have developed. All of them (as in Garvey’s eschatology) regard African peoples as endowed with a special historical mission (blacks = New Israel) and foretell the rebirth of themselves and the African continent as a whole. The general scheme of African eschatology considers the era of colonization and slavery as a great spiritual trial for the black race, to be followed by a period of reward, a new golden age.

In one version of this eschatology, the core of African identity is Ethiopia. Its population (Kushites and Semites with dark skin) is seen as the paradigm of African civilization, as Ethiopia is the only African political entity in Africa that has not been colonized, either by European powers or by Muslims.

In this version, all African peoples are considered to be related to Ethiopians, and the Ethiopian monarch, the Negus, is perceived as a prototype of the ruler of the great African Empire. This line was the basis of Rastafarianism, which became popular among the blacks of Jamaica and further spread among the black population of Africa and America.

This version is prevalent among Christian and Christianized peoples. Christian eschatology of Ethiopians (Monophysites) acquires original features connected with the special mission of Ethiopia, which is considered to be the chosen country and the chosen people (hence the legend that the ancestor of Ethiopians was Melchizedek, the King of Peace). In Rastafarianism, this Ethiopian eschatology acquires additional—sometimes quite grotesque—features.

Black Islam

Another version of African eschatology is the Nation of Islam, which emerged in the United States. This doctrine claims that both Moses and Muhammad were black, and that God incarnates in black politico-religious leaders from cycle to cycle. The founder of this current, Wali Fard Muhammad, considered himself to be such an incarnation (this is consonant with the Russian Khlysty). After the death of Wali Fard Mohammed believers expect his return on a spaceship.

Parallel to this is the proclamation of the need for black struggle in the United States and around the world—and not just for their rights, but for recognition of their spiritual and racial leadership in civilization.

Under the contemporary leader of the Nation of Islam, Louis Farrakhan, this current has achieved great influence in the United States and has had a significant impact on the ideological formation of black Muslims in Africa.

Black Egypt

Another version of African political eschatology is the KMT current (from the ancient Egyptian name of Egypt itself), which develops the ideas of the African philosopher Sheikh Anta Diop. He and his followers developed the theory that ancient Egypt was a state of black people, which is evident from its name “KMT,” in the Egyptian language meaning “Black Land” or “Land of Blacks.” Anta Diop believed that all African religious systems are echoes of Egyptian religion, which must be restored in its entirety.

His follower Kemi Seba developed the thesis of African monotheism, which is the basis of a religio-political system where power should be vested in a Metaphysical Government expressing the will of God (like the Mahdi viziers in Ibn Arabi’s version). Life should be based on the principle of closed black communities—kilombo.

At the same time, Africans should return to the traditions of their peoples, fully control the African continent, restore as dark a skin color as possible (through melano-oriented marriages) and carry out a spiritual revolution in the world.

The single, sacred Pan-African language should be the restored ancient Egyptian language (medu neter), and Swahili should be used for practical needs. According to the proponents of KMT theory, black people are the bearers of sacredness, Tradition and the people of the golden age. White civilization, on the other hand, represents perversion, pathology, and anti-civilization, where matter, money, and capital stand above spirit.

The main enemy of Africans and blacks around the world is whites, who are considered the bearers of modernization, colonialism, materialism and spiritual degeneration. Victory over whites is the guarantee of blacks’ fulfillment of their world mission and the crowning achievement of the decolonization process.

Latin America

Ethno-eschatology: Indigenism

In Latin American countries, a number of aboriginal Amerindian peoples see the logical end of colonization as the restoration of ethnic societies (indigenism). These tendencies are developed to varying degrees depending on the country.

Many consider the rebellion of Tupac Amaru II, a descendant of the last Inca ruler, who led an Indian revolt against the Spanish presence in Peru in 1780, as the symbolic beginning of Indian resistance to colonizers.

In Bolivia in 2006, Evo Morales, the first-ever representative of the Aymara Indian people, was elected president. Increasingly, voices are being heard—primarily in Peru and Bolivia—in favor of declaring the ancient Indian cult of the earth goddess Pachamama an official religion.

As a rule, the ethnic eschatology of Latin American Indians is combined with leftist socialist or anarchist currents to create syncretic teachings.

Brazilian Sebastianism

A particular version of eschatology, linked to Portuguese ideas about the Fifth Empire, developed in Brazil. After the capital of the Portuguese Empire was moved to Brazil because of a republican coup d’état in Portugal, the doctrine arose that this transfer of the capital was not accidental and that Brazil itself had a special political-religious mission. If European Portugal lost the doctrine of King Sebastian and followed the path of European bourgeois democracy, then Brazil must now assume this mission and become the territory where, in the critical conditions of the historical cycle, the missing but not dead King Sebastian would be found.

Under the banner of such a doctrine the conservative Catholic-eschatological and imperial revolts against the Masonic liberal government—Canudos, Contestado, etc.—took place in Brazil.

Eschatological Map of Civilizations

Thus, in a multipolar world, different eschatologies clash or enter into an alliance with each other.

In the West, the secular model (progressivism and liberalism) clearly prevails, with a significant addition in the form of extreme Protestant dispensationalism. This is the “end of history,” according to Fukuyama. If we take into account the liberal elite of European countries under full American control, we can speak of a special eschatology that unites almost all NATO countries. We should also add the theory of radical individualism, common to liberals, which demands to free people from all forms of collective identity—up to freedom from sex (gender politics) and even from belonging to the human species (transhumanism, AI). Thus, the new elements of Masonic progressive eschatology, along with the “open society,” are the imperatives of gender reassignment, support for LGBTQ principles, posthumanism, and deep ecology (which rejects the centrality of the human being in the world that all traditional religions and philosophical systems have insisted on).

Although Zionism is not a direct continuation of this version of eschatology, in some of its forms—primarily through its alliance with the American neocons—it partly fits into this strategy; and given the influence of Jews on the ruling elites of the West, these proportions may even be reversed.

Russia and its Katechonic function, which combines the eschatology of the Third Rome and the communist horizon as a legacy of the USSR, stands most blatantly in the way of this end of history.

In China, Western Marxism, already substantially reworked in Maoism, increasingly openly displays Confucian culture, and the head of the CCP, as traditional Emperor, is given a heavenly mandate to rule “All that is under Heaven” (tianxia—天下).

Eschatological sentiments are constantly growing in the Islamic world—both in the Sunni zone and especially in Shiism (primarily in Iran), and it is modern Western civilization—the same one that is now fighting Russia—that is almost unanimously presented as al-Dajjal for all Muslims.

In India, Hindutva-inspired sentiments (the doctrine of the independent identity of Hindus as a special and unique civilization) are gradually growing, proclaiming a return to the roots of the Hindu tradition and its values (which do not coincide at all with Western values), and hence outlining the contours of a special eschatology associated with the phenomenon of Kalka and the overcoming of the Kali-yuga.

Pan-Africanism is developing towards the strengthening of radical teachings about the return of Africans to their identity and a new round of anti-colonial struggle against the white world (understood primarily as colonial countries belonging to the civilization of the West). This describes a new vector of black eschatology.

In Latin America, the desire to strengthen its geopolitical sovereignty is based on both leftist (socialist) eschatology and the defense of Catholic identity, which is particularly evident in Brazil, where both leftists and rightists are increasingly distancing themselves from globalism and U.S. policy (hence Brazil’s participation in the BRICS bloc). The ethno-eschatologies of indigenism, though relatively weak, generally add an important additional dimension to the whole eschatological project.

At the same time, the French aristocratic eschatology (and its secular projection in Gaullism), the German version of the end of history in the form of the German Empire, as well as the Buddhist and Shinto line of the special mission of Japan and the Japanese Emperors—(for now, at least) do not play any noticeable role, being completely bought by the dominant progressive globalist elite and the strategies of the Anglo-Saxons.

Thus, we have a world map of eschatology, corresponding to the contours of a multipolar world.

From this we can now draw whatever conclusions we want.

Alexander Dugin is a widely-known and influential Russian philosopher. His most famous work is The Fourth Political Theory (a book banned by major book retailers), in which he proposes a new polity, one that transcends liberal democracy, Marxism and fascism. He has also introduced and developed the idea of Eurasianism, rooted in traditionalism. This article appears through the kind courtesy of Geopolitica.

Featured: Multipolarity I, by Roodslav.

Freedom’s Anchor: An Introduction to Natural Law Jurisprudence in American Constitutional History

In Freedom’s Anchor, Andrew P. Napolitano, the well-known American jurisprudent, vigorously demonstrates that the Natural Law is the very lifeblood of the United States—and without it the nation cannot truly and fully exist. The strength of the book lies in its rich array of caselaw, from Colonial America down to the present-day, in which the Natural Law has functioned as the dynamic “logic” for the rulings rendered. This book will not disappoint, so do make sure to get a copy.

Judge Napolitano is a graduate of Princeton University and the University of Notre Dame Law School. He is the youngest life-tenured Superior Court judge in the history of the State of New Jersey. He sat on the bench from 1987 to 1995 and presided over more than 150 jury trials and thousands of motions, sentencings, and hearings. Judge Napolitano taught constitutional law and jurisprudence at Delaware Law School for one and a half years, at Seton Hall Law School for 11 years, and at Brooklyn Law School for four years. He was often chosen by the students as their most outstanding professor. As Fox News’s Senior Judicial Analyst from 1997 to 2021, Judge Napolitano gave 14,500 broadcasts nationwide on the Fox News Channel and Fox Business Network. He is nationally known for watching and reporting on the government as it takes liberty and property. His newspaper column is seen by millions every week. He is an internationally-recognized expert on the U.S. Constitution and a champion of personal freedom. Freedom’s Anchor is his tenth book.

This excerpt comes through the kind generosity of Academica Press.

What is the Natural Law Tradition? Is the natural law related to the medieval church and the nature of man as a divine creation? Or is it a philosophical methodology linked to Enlightenment ideas of personhood? Perhaps it is a legal rule with specific form and content incorporated by the Ninth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution? The truth is that the natural law is often confounded among many of these questions, and as such, we must look backwards throughout history to discern its complete meaning if we are to look forward and see how we may use it to achieve the best form of government.

Even those who question or reject the existence of a Creator can embrace the concept of natural rights, for they can accept that our exercise of human reason leads us to discern right from wrong, and in turn, discover truth. An atheist will agree that there are certain basic values acknowledged everywhere, in all times and circumstances. After all, even a person deprived of senses has the ability to reason.

The Boston Massacre Trial: Self-Defense as a Natural Right for All

Indeed, “it was not uncommon for colonial lawyers and colonial courts to regard Natural Law and ancient principles of the common law as superior to ordinary legislative acts.” For instance, during the Boston Massacre trial of 1770, in which John Adams and Josiah Quincy II defended British soldiers accused of killing innocent colonial civilians, Adams asserted a self-defense justification. Adams was advised, Roscoe Pound maintained, by Jeremiah Gridley, “the father of the Boston bar, […] that [the] study of the natural, i.e. ideal, law, set forth in the Continental treatises on the law of nature and nations, if unnecessary in England, was important for the American lawyer.” Quincy argued for one of the soldiers by dispelling the notion forwarded by the Crown, that “the life of a soldier was of very little value; of much less value than others of the community.” Quincy argued that “we all reluct at death […] God and Nature hath implanted this love of life.—Expel therefore from your breasts an opinion so unwarrantable by any law, human or divine[.]” He then quoted Blackstone, who… unmistakably invokes the natural law: The law by which the prisoners are to be tried, is a law of mercy—a law applying to us all—a law, judge Blackstone will tell us “founded in principles that are permanent, uniform and universal, always comfortable to the feelings of humanity and the indelible rights of mankind.”

Quincy was quick to remind the jury of the earlier natural law claim he asserted with Adams, including a citation to John Locke. Adams, in his closing discussion of justifiable homicide, also invoked Blackstone and “the laws of nature,” signaling the powerful sway of natural law arguments on juries and the bench at the time.

Of course, as any trial attorney will attest, judges and juries often decide cases on many factors beyond the persuasiveness of the attorneys and compassionate presentation of the defendants or victims. A colonial Boston jury, some scant three-and-a-half years before the signing of the Declaration of Independence, was not sympathetic to a cadre of British soldiers who had just killed or injured several of their fellow Bostonians. However, the natural law appeals of Adams and Quincy were rational rather than sympathetic; and they won the day resulting in the acquittal of six of the soldiers, and convictions for manslaughter, instead of murder, for the remaining two.

Madison, in crafting the Bill of Rights, needed to manage two competing arguments: the disingenuous argument of Alexander Hamilton, that any enumeration of rights “could be used to justify any unwarranted expansion of federal power” as the government is of enumerated powers, and to enumerate rights implies areas of rights the government can reach into beyond those enumerated, on the one hand; and, the Madisonian argument that “any right excluded from enumeration would be jeopardized,” on the other hand. Madison, in this initial proposal to the House “ran together both of these concerns.”

His proposals went to a select committee (of which he was a member) for consideration, and “[e]ventually, the two ideas were unpacked” into the Ninth and Tenth Amendments, which deal with “rights” and “powers,” respectively. That is the Barnett-libertarian view of the Ninth and Tenth Amendments, which Professor Randy Barnett… termed as power-constraint: The two amendments act to constrain the federal government from either expanding its own powers at the expense of individual persons and of the States, or from infringing on the other unenumerated natural rights of individual persons.

Such a bundle of amendments dispels any argument that the founders disavowed natural law and natural rights.

Why else would such a clause exist? What other rights could there be? Of course, there were the state bills of rights, but Madison addressed that concern too! “The powers not delegated by this Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively.” So, after setting up the Bill of Rights to contain a provision to protect non-enumerated rights, Madison returned to protect the rights of the states which created the Constitution and to emphasize that the Constitution provided government only with the powers that the states ceded to it, and nothing more.

Whereas legal positivism dominated the judicial landscape of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, natural law theory jurisprudence began to reemerge and win small victories starting in the middle of 1946 and persisting through today. That is not to say that the Supreme Court adopted a doctrinal approach that examined matters before it with strong deference to natural law and natural rights, but rather that activist and conservative Courts alike ruled on matters in such a fashion as to incorporate into lofty stare decisis certain natural law principles. All of this occurred much to the chagrin of simple fairweather positivists, who grumbled about statutory law, and so-called legal realists, who believe in the importance and primacy of judicial precedent, though, it seems, only when such reliance suited their ends.

We see now that around the end of the second World War a return to Natural Law theories emerged with renewed vigor. During this time, the Third Reich had revealed to humanity the devastation and atrocities of which contemporary society became capable when deploying modern methods of engineering, science, and manufacturing to sinister, horrific and protracted ends and grounding them in positivism. We have also observed the means by which societies sought to safeguard against future abuses through the passage of laws and rules holding government more accountable, such as the Federal Tort Claims Act in 19462 in the United States, which allowed injured persons to sue the federal government in certain limited circumstances, and the Crown Proceedings Act in 1947 in England, which granted English “subjects” (how I loathe the word when referring to persons) the right to sue the Crown without first obtaining a royal fiat.

Though typically at loggerheads, Natural Law theory and legal positivism can find common purchase through soft-hearted approaches to Originalism that factor in the principles behind the Ninth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Justice Antonin Scalia, one of the most significant figures in the spread and modern development of Originalism, brought what he believed to be a greater sense of order and consistency to the bench by calling for judges to restrict their decisions in a narrow fashion by adhering to Originalism, a philosophy he believed would lead toward more authentic and honest interpretation of laws and the Constitution itself.

As time passes, language can undergo semantic shift in which the popular meanings of words change. So, in order truly to understand a statute, some argued, one needed to seize the mantel of the historian and endeavor to determine what was meant by a statute at the time of its passage rather than interpreting the statute according to the contemporary meaning of its words. In 1982, Paul Brest, then a professor at Stanford Law School, coined the term “Originalism” which he defined as “the familiar approach to constitutional adjudication that accords binding authority to the text of the Constitution or the intention of its adopters.” According to Brest, “[a]dherence to the text and original understanding arguably constrains the discretion of decision makers [i.e., judges] and assures that the Constitution will be interpreted consistently over time.”

Different flavors of Originalism focus on different original elements involved in the drafting, creation, adoption, and passage of various elements of the Constitution, its amendments, and legislation written under its authority. The textualists look to the language of the text in question.5 “The plain meaning of a text is the meaning that it would have for a ‘normal speaker of English’ under the circumstances in which it is used.”6 Though textualists focus mainly on the words of the text in question, they will occasionally consult outside sources to determine exactly what a word or a term of art meant to the general public at the time the particular provision was adopted or passed. In other words, they may look to newspapers, other legislation, books, speeches, circulars, broadsides, treatises, or treaties contemporaneous to the particular language they seek to understand. However, such an approach looks to extratextual material only in so far as it clarifies the meaning of the words involved in the piece in question and is not used to try to understand what may have been the intent of those who adopted the law. The textualists care only about the plain public meaning of the words at the time they were written, not the intent of the authors.

Intentionalists, on the other hand, seek to divine the intentions of those who adopted or passed a piece of legislation or provision. They endeavor to do so by considering the text of the law or provision as a persuasive—though not controlling—authority.

Intentionalists will look to a nearly endless variety of sources related, directly, or even imaginarily, to the piece in question. The camps of intentionalists diverge or sometimes disagree over whose intent they should consider. Some believe that the intent of the drafters of a piece should carry more weight when it comes to its interpretation, while others argue for heavier consideration of the intent of those who adopted it. Further wrinkles arise when others advocate for the inclusion of ideas of legal structuralism, calling for evaluation of the relationships between the various branches of government at the time of the passage of language in question to determine how different organs of government relate to and interact with one another.

Was Jefferson partly right about the tree of Liberty occasionally, and only when absolutely necessary, soaking up the blood of patriots and tyrants in order to survive? Or was he right when he observed that in the long march of history, governments grow and liberty shrinks? Or, were intellectual giants from Aquinas to Rothbard right when they argued that so long as we can reason, we will have liberty?

But to exercise reason, we must have free will. Both free will and natural law principles have been imprinted in us. Positive law not faithful to the natural law principles is an artificial fabrication of humans, usually for their own good or tenure in power. Yet all rational adults have natural inclinations to know good from evil.

The issues this work addresses are not those of individual fidelity to natural law principles, but government infidelity to them. Government fidelity to natural law principles assures individual choices, personal autonomy, and authorship of one’s own life. Isn’t that the definition of personal liberty – freedom bounded, as Jefferson said, only by the natural rights of others? Isn’t that the pursuit of happiness?

Short of a government committed to the preservation of natural rights, there is darkness and chaos.

Featured: The Tontine Coffee House, New York City, by Francis Guy; painted in 1797.

Atheistic Humanism, the Democratic Party, and the Catholic Church

David R. Carlin is a former Democratic state senator who was once a leading figure in Rhode Island politics. In his new book, Atheistic Humanism, the Democratic Party, and the Catholic Church, he explains that the “mind” of the Democratic Party has been converted to atheistic humanism, an ideology (or worldview) that is the deadly enemy of Catholicism. It is this ideology that has given America its present-day culture of sexual freedom, abortion, gay marriage, and transgenderism. More and more this atheistic ideology controls the chief propaganda organs of American culture, that is the entire Media-Education-Entertainment Complex, and of course the Democratic Party itself.

This excerpt from Atheistic Humanism, the Democratic Party, and the Catholic Church comes through the kind courtesy of Lectio Publishing.

When I had finished writing about ninety-nine percent of this book, I happened to be driving through my neighborhood one day (I was driving home following a periodic visit to my cardiologist) when I noticed a colorful cloth banner, rectangular in shape, hanging on somebody’s front porch. It said:

  • Pro-BLM
  • Pro-science
  • Pro-choice
  • Pro-feminism
  • Pro-LGBTQ
  • Pro-humanism
  • Pro-immigrant

I slammed on my brakes in order that I might pause for a moment or two to admire the banner, which is a nearly perfect summary of the dangerous anti-Christianity mentality I am denouncing in this book, a mentality I call atheistic humanism. The person who made the banner is, I suppose, an atheistic humanist, and so, very probably, is the person who owns the porch in question.

If you know how to read the language of atheistic humanism, you will know how to interpret the many “pro” labels listed above.

  • “Pro-BLM” means “the USA is a systemically racist society, ruled by white supremacists”
  • “Pro-science” means “we don’t believe in the Bible or any other divine revelation”
  • “Pro-choice” means “pro-abortion”
  • “Pro-feminism” means “we deplore toxic masculinity”
  • “Pro-LGBTQ” means “we endorse an immense variety of sexual perversions”
  • “Pro-humanism” means “anti-Christianity and pro-atheism”
  • “Pro-immigrant” means “pro-open borders”

Atheistic humanists are smart people, at least usually, and so when making propaganda they know how to clothe their dangerous ideas in harmless, often even attractive, words and slogans. And so, instead of saying, “Let’s mass-murder unborn babies,” they say, “Let’s defend a woman’s right to choose.” And instead of saying, “Almost all white Americans are racists,” they say, “Black lives matter.” Instead of saying, “The Bible is bull***t,” they say, “We believe in science.” And so on.

*****

Great civilizations sometimes collapse. If we have any doubts about that, we can read Arnold Toynbee’s multivolume work, A Study of History; or another multivolume work, Edward Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. In the second and third and fourth centuries AD, the old pagan civilization of the Greco-Roman world gradually but (as we now can see in retrospect) inevitably collapsed and was replaced by a new civilization based on Christianity.

It is possible that those of us living today are passing through a somewhat similar crisis of civilization, a crisis in which an old way of life is dying while a new is being born. If in those ancient days paganism, an old thing, was being replaced by a new thing, Christianity, so in our time Christianity, which is now an old thing, is perhaps being replaced something new, a worldview based on atheism. It is not easy for those living through one of these great transitions to know what is happening. Only after the transition is complete, only after the old thing has quite definitely passed away, can we be sure that it is truly dead and that it is therefore too late to save it. As the philosopher Hegel, meditating on the mysterious course of history, once said, “The Owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk.” So I’m not quite sure that our civilization is crumbling; perhaps we are simply going through a bad patch; maybe we’ll have to wait five hundred years before making a definitive judgment on that.

*****

But something is happening, something momentous, whether we call it a bad patch or a collapse of our old civilization. Christianity is under severe attack by a great enemy, and it is this enemy—along with its political arm, the Democratic Party—that I plan to examine in this book. Although this attack is underway in many places, not just in the United States of America…

…But what is this new thing, this new thing that is a great enemy of Christianity? What should we call it? Many Christians, both Catholics and others, like to call it a new paganism, a neo-paganism. I think this is a great misnomer. The ancient paganism of the Roman-Greek world, quite unlike today’s anti-Christianity, was religious. All paganism is religious, paganism being the generic name for polytheistic religions. Ancient paganism certainly wasn’t religious in a Christian or monotheistic way, but without question it was religious. It had multitudes of gods, altars, rituals, and holy days. By contrast, this new thing, this candidate to replace Christianity, is not at all religious. Either it involves outright atheism, or it leans strongly in the direction of atheism. It is a decidedly secular or non-religious faith; more than non-religious, it is anti-religious; very specifically, it is anti-Christianity. At the same time, it is humanistic; or at least in its outwardly most attractive form it claims to be humanistic. A more or less accurate label for it would be secular humanism. A more accurate name still would be atheistic humanism—for atheism is the most thoroughgoing kind of anti-Christianity, and atheism lies at the core of this new and superficially benign faith.

There are various kinds of atheists. Some of them are beastly; they give vent to their basest, most animalistic impulses (think of violent criminals). Others are demonic; they love evil, not for the eventual good it may produce, but for its own sake (think of Nazis). The atheists I will be focusing on in this book are the (apparently) best kind, the humanistic kind. They are neither beastly nor demonic. They make an honest attempt to be human and humane. They even make an attempt (albeit a very unsuccessful attempt) to mimic what they imagine to be the ethic of Christianity. It is atheists of this kind—the “good” atheists, so to speak—that present the greatest danger to Christianity in general and to Catholicism in particular. I should point out, however, that once these “good” atheists are in command of society, the way will open for the entry of atheists of the beastly and demonic.

*****

Ideological Structure of the Democratic Party

To understand today’s Democratic Party we must understand its ideological structure, and to understand this structure we have to see (a) who produces the party’s ruling beliefs and values, (b) who distributes these beliefs and values, and (c) who consumes them.

We may picture this structure as a pyramid. At the top of the pyramid are the producers, relatively small in number. Below them are the distributors, much larger in number. And at the base of the pyramid are the consumers, the enormous number of rank-and-file Democrats. The beliefs and values move downward, as with the force of gravity. They begin with the people at the top of the pyramid; they are eagerly seized upon by the people in the middle; and these middle people energetically pass these beliefs and values on to the party’s rank-and-file…

The producers of these strongly leftist beliefs and values are people who are commonly referred to as intellectuals, but who more correctly should be denominated as ideologues. “Intellectual” is a very broad category; it can refer to any highly educated person who has a lively and continuing interest in some field of thought. For instance, a Shakespeare scholar would be an intellectual, and so would a physicist, and so would a professor of constitutional law. But not all intellectuals are ideologues; in fact most of them are not. An “ideologue” is a sub-category of intellectual. He (or she) is an “activist” intellectual; an intellectual who is promoting a political agenda; an intellectual whose commitment to a more or less revolutionary outcome shapes his (or her) perception of political reality. The pure intellectual studies reality to see what conclusions ought to be drawn. The ideologue already “knows” the conclusions prior to beginning the study; he then shapes the evidence to fit his a priori conclusions.

The producers of the beliefs and values of the Democratic Party are ideologues, leftist ideologues—progressives they like to call themselves. They have a kind of ideal society in mind, and they believe that the Democratic Party is the political vehicle that can, if guided correctly—which is to say, if guided by themselves—contribute greatly to bringing this ideal society about.

Only rarely are these ideologues elected officials. Far more often they are professors at colleges and universities, including law schools; and these are often America’s very best colleges and universities and law schools. They can also be found in significant numbers at leftist “think tanks.” On some occasions they are journalists. Or they are writers of political or historical or sociological books (this last category largely overlapping with the earlier categories).

The distributors of these beliefs and values are persons who may be described as “passive ideologues” in contrast to the “active ideologues” just described. That is to say, they don’t create the leftist beliefs and values they adhere to, but they receive them with enthusiasm. These are the people who dominate what may be called the “command posts” of American popular culture—or what may alternatively be called America’s “propaganda industry.” I have in mind the leftists who dominate such fields as journalism (both electronic and print), the entertainment industry (Hollywood, TV, popular music, etc.), and our colleges and universities. It is also common for public school administrators to be distributors of these beliefs and values, less common (though far from unknown) for classroom teachers to be so. Minsters of liberal churches and theologian-professors at liberal seminaries are also distributors. Finally, we must count the great majority of Democratic elected officials, from local town councils up the President of the United States, as distributors—along with the political activists who help these officials get elected.

Some of these distributors are more enthusiastic in their leftism than others. Those who are very enthusiastic—an enthusiasm that sometimes, especially among young persons, verges on fanaticism—call themselves progressives, while the more temperate leftists prefer to call themselves liberals. Whether progressive or liberal, however, they take their beliefs and values from “above” and pass them along to the common people “below.” They are like missionaries, spreading a gospel they deeply believe in even though they didn’t invent it.

The producers and distributors of these leftist beliefs and values are of course also consumers of their beliefs and values. But the great majority, indeed the overwhelming majority, of consumers are rank-and-file Democrats who are for the most part non-ideological—or would be if left to their own devices. Their motives for adherence to the Democratic Party are various. Sometimes it is a matter of family tradition: “My parents were Democrats, my grandparents were Democrats,” and so on. Sometimes it is a matter of racial identity: “Most blacks are Democrats, I am black, therefore etc.” Sometimes it is a matter of labor union membership: “My union supports the Democrats, therefore etc.” Sometimes it is a matter of economic interest: “The Democrats are good for my paycheck or my welfare check, etc.” Sometimes it is a matter of personal inertia: “I have always voted Democrat, etc.”

Very often it is a matter of imagining that the Democratic Party today is essentially the same thing it was decades ago: “This is the party of FDR and JFK, so how can I not vote for it?” This is what may be called “the fallacy of essentialism.” Some things—geometrical figures, for instance, or numbers—have eternal essences. They never change. A square always was, is now, and always will be a plane figure with four equal sides and four 90-degree angles. Some people imagine that their favorite political party is rather like this; that it remains essentially what it was in its golden age.

Even though these Democratic voters are for the most part non-ideological, and even though they have little or no personal attachment to the leftist values of abortion, homosexuality, same-sex marriage, transgenderism, recreational drug use, and euthanasia, and even though they don’t believe that the USA is a “systemically” or “fundamentally” racist society, and even though the whites among them (most of them are whites) don’t believe it is racist to assign heavy penalties for crimes of violence committed by blacks and other “persons of color,” and even though they have no wish that public schools should teach little kids to adopt an attitude of tolerance toward a variety of sexual perversions—even though all this, these rank-and-file Democrats are willing to go along with the ideological agenda handed down by the ideological rulers of the party. Why? Because it is their party. It is a party they are in the habit of trusting, a party they are in the habit of supporting. Besides, they don’t like the other party, the rival party, the Republicans—just as Red Sox fans don’t like the Yankees. Like good team players, they operate on the assumption that if the captains of their team say ABC while the other team says not-ABC, they will have to agree with leaders of their team; they too will have to say ABC. To do otherwise in the midst of battle would be an act of disloyalty.

In sum, that’s how a small number of people (the ideological leaders of the party), having persuaded a much larger number of people (the propaganda arm of the party), can shape the political preferences of a vast number of people (the rank-and-file members of the party). And that’s how an intellectual elite whose ideas and values are far out of the mainstream can shape the destiny of a nation. A small number of leftist ivory tower intellectuals/ideologues (at Harvard, Yale, Princeton, great state universities, etc.) win converts at vital propaganda outlets (the New York Times, MSNBC, Hollywood, etc.), and these leftist propagandists in turn tell ordinary Democrats what political and cultural agenda they should support.

From the American Dream to the American Nightmare

Higher education has transitioned from a focus on affirmative action (AA) to a focus on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI). How did this come about and what does it mean?

In the minds of their advocates, both AA and DEI are aspirational public policies focused on rectifying “underrepresentation” in the workforce of groups historically subject to inequalities in education and in the workforce. The former policy (AA) was initiated in 1965 and focused on improving equality of access (opportunity). It was subject to lengthy and controversial legal litigation over the use of quotas. By 2014, the U.S. Supreme Court held that “States may choose to prohibit the consideration of racial preferences in governmental decisions.” (DEI) is a later version and continuation of (AA). It arose from several sources including Higher Education and Immigration Law. It is seemingly focused on training of current employees in the workplace, but job applicants are required to subscribe and committed to achieving some version of equality of outcome.

The following account traces the long and circuitous route by which these policies came about. My account of this transition has three interrelated elements: the intellectual origin, the institutional context or evolution of higher education in America, and finally the larger political context. It is important to keep in mind that these controversial policies originated within and were welcomed by the academy, and these policies remain aspirational in the sense that they have no firm legal standing either in legislation or in the U.S. Supreme Court. My contention is that (AA) and (DEI) seek to replace the American Dream of a meritocracy with the Nightmare of egalitarianism.

Part I: Intellectual Origin

The modern context of egalitarianism originated with the success of Newtonian physics and its ability not only to explain and predict natural phenomena but to give us control over them. As Bacon and especially Descartes expressed it, it helped to make us the “masters and possessors of nature.”

Inspired by Newton, the French philosophes developed the idea of the social sciences. Specifically, they sought not only to explain and to predict social phenomena but to gain control over the social world. They proposed to pursue a social technology as a reflection of their Enlightenment Project. Such mastery was not only intended to achieve power but to bring about a social utopia.

(Isaiah Berlin characterizes the Project as follows: “…there were certain beliefs that were more or less common to the entire party of progress and civilization, and this is what makes it proper to speak of it as a single movement. These were, in effect, the conviction that the world, or nature, was a single whole, subject to a single set of laws, in principle discoverable by the intelligence of man; that the laws which governed inanimate nature were in principle the same as those which governed plants, animals and sentient beings; that man was capable of improvement; that there existed certain objectively recognizable human goals which all men, rightly so described, sought after, namely, happiness, knowledge, justice, liberty, and what was somewhat vaguely described but well understood as virtue; that these goals were common to all men as such, were not unattainable, nor incompatible, and that human misery, vice and folly were mainly due to ignorance either of what these goals consisted in or of the means of attaining them—ignorance due in turn to insufficient knowledge of the laws of nature… Consequently, the discovery of general laws that governed human behaviour, their clear and logical integration into scientific systems—of psychology, sociology, economics, political science and the like (though they did not use these names)—and the determination of their proper place in the great corpus of knowledge that covered all discoverable facts, would, by replacing the chaotic amalgam of guesswork, tradition, superstition, prejudice, dogma, fantasy and ‘interested error’ that hitherto did service as human knowledge and human wisdom (and of which by far the chief protector and instigator was the church), create a new, sane, rational, happy, just and self-perpetuating human society, which, having arrived at the peak of attainable perfection, would preserve itself against all hostile influences, save perhaps those of nature” (The Magus of the North, pp. 27-28).

Thus, the intellectual origins lie specifically in the French version of the Enlightenment Project. The Enlightenment Project was the attempt to define, explain, and control the human predicament through science and technology. This project originated among the French philosophes during the eighteenth century, among whom the most influential were Diderot, d’Alembert, La Mettrie, Condillac, Helvetius, d’Holbach, Turgot, and Condorcet. The philosophes were inspired by Bacon’s vision of the liberating power of science, Hobbes’ materialism, Newton’s physics, and Locke’s empiricist epistemology. The Project was epitomized in the nineteenth century by Comte and in the twentieth century by positivism. Denying the Christian concept of sin but still choosing to play God, these philosophes initiated the modern hubristic search for a secular utopia. What the Enlightenment project did was to change our idea of what knowledge is and what it is for.

The legacy of the French Enlightenment persisted throughout the nineteenth century in the works of Comte and Marx. Voegelin maintains that this is a form of Gnosticism, the Christian heretical attempt to achieve heaven on earth. “In the Gnostic speculation of scientism this particular variant reached its extreme when the positivist perfector of science replaced the era of Christ by the era of Comte. Scientism has remained to this day one of the strongest Gnostic movements in Western Society; and the immanentist pride in science is so strong that even the special sciences have each left a distinguishable sediment in the variants of salvation through physics, economics, sociology, biology, and psychology” (Eric Voegelin, The New Science of Politics, p. 127).

Egalitarianism is based upon a False Analogy to Physical Sciences

Our first claim is that affirmative action and DEI are policies based on the contention that there are such things as social sciences (Social studies, or the attempt to study and to understand the human/social world is not committed to the assumption that understanding means prediction and control. Nobel laureate Hayek’s understanding of economics and the market economy explicitly precludes prediction and control)—and specifically social technology able to explain, predict, and control social phenomena. The agents of this policy are deeply embedded in the social science programs of the modern university.

As we shall see, the most influential variants of this policy are Marxist in origin. Karl Marx believed not only that he had found an explanation of the social world but that he could predict its future evolution and identified the working class as the agents of reform through violent revolution. All of Marx’s predictions turned out to be false, so Marxist theory had to be revised. (It is worth noting in this context the modification introduced by Lenin, namely “colonialism,” the exploitation of non-western countries for their raw materials and low cost of labor. This alleged “exploitation” indirectly helped workers in the developed world to enjoy a higher standard of living and therefore not revolt. The same kind of argument can be read back into the domestic economy). The important relevant revision was provided by Antonio Gramsci in his doctrine of the “long march” through the institutions, specifically a revolutionary party needed the working-class to develop organic intellectuals who articulated an alternative hegemonic ideology critical of the status quo. Gramsci maintained that the agent of change was not the working class but the class of intellectuals and that the latter would bring about a peaceful revolution through the gradual take over of the major institutions in society like the university.

A. Hidden Structure Fallacy

Two features of “social” science allegedly analogous to physical science are worth noting. Modern physics does not explain phenomena (e.g. color) by reference to what is directly observable. On the contrary, modern physical science explains what is observable by reference to an initially hidden substructure, not visible to the naked eye (e.g. microbes, molecules, quarks, etc.). Subsequent experimentation gives us access to this initially hidden substructure by means of sophisticated equipment.

In an attempt to replicate this feature of physical science, the alleged “social” sciences explain the surface by reference to an initially hidden substructure (Marxist economics, Freud’s ego, id, etc., choices made behind Rawls’ “veil of ignorance”). So, today, for example, we are told that there is such a thing as “institutional racism.” However, there is a disconnect here. Instead of a hidden substructure that later gets verified or observed, the social sciences present a cornucopia of rival theories with no way to choose among them (libertarian, liberal, socialist, Marxist, Feminist, Critical Theory. Etc.).

To make matters worse, if one social scientist disagrees with another both can dismiss the other by claiming that the rival is a victim of a hidden bias. There is thus an infinite regress of hidden structures: your account, my account, your account of why my account is wrong because it reflects a hidden structure, my account of the hidden structure that explains why you cannot overcome your account (e.g. why “white” people who have not suffered “discrimination” cannot understand “black” people but “black” people can somehow understand and explain “white” people; likewise, “white” people can understand that “black” people suffer from the mental disorder of racial paranoia, etc.). This not only brings civil discourse to an end but it also gives enormous rhetorical advantages or power over the debate. The only social technology produced to date is the power to control debate.

B. No Replication by other Scientists

There is one final twist to the argument. A number of philosophers of science (e.g. Kuhn, Feyerabend, even Wittgenstein) have pointed out, rightly, that a theory in physical science is deemed “true” or in some sense viable if the theory meets the criteria (tests) agreed upon by the community of physical scientists. In short, intellectual acceptability depends upon a prior professional social consensus. Even Hayek pointed out that physical science rests upon assumptions that science cannot establish. Armed with this insight (anticipated by Vico in the 18th century and even to be found in Gramsci), social scientists contend that agreement amongst the community of “social” scientists is sufficient to establish the validity of a hidden structure account about the social world.

The foregoing analogy does not work. To begin with, physical scientists do not merely have conversations but engage in replicable experiments that do identify something “out there” independent of us. Moreover, the physical sciences have allowed us to extend human life, conquer diseases, engage in space exploration, etc. whereas, the “social” technologists to date have wrecked economies, engaged in needless wars, promoted social unrest, and provoked destabilizing mass migrations.

C. Concepts are not Things

In the “social” sciences, we meet only concepts and not things. Microbes and molecules are real; “systemic racism” remains a linguistic expression. There is also the question of who are the authoritative members of the community of social sciences (e.g. tenured members of the Harvard sociology department?). This may begin to explain why the contemporary university seeks to silence dissent and to discredit if not prevent certain kinds of research. Worse yet, the purveyors of this view need to appeal to a grand social consensus outside of their disciplines in order to identify their specific disciplines. Either they deny, for political reasons, that a valid social consensus exists (NO GRAND NARRATIVE) or they invoke an infinite regress. In practice, what this amounts to is that you only speak with others who already agree with you and shun, dismiss, or silence those who do not.

D. IAT Test: An Example of Unreliable Pseudo-Science

Let me give an example of pseudo-social-science. The implicit-association test (IAT) is intended to detect subconscious associations between mental representations of objects (concepts) in memory. Its best-known application is the assessment of implicit stereotypes such as associations between racial categories and stereotypes about members of those groups, e.g., associations involving racial groups, gender, sexuality, age, and predictions of the test taker. The IAT was introduced in 1998 and has been used as an assessment in implicit bias trainings (e.g. in diversity training) designed to reduce unconscious bias and discriminatory behavior.

IAT is the subject of significant debate regarding its validity, reliability, and usefulness in assessing implicit bias. Arkes and Tetlock offer “three objections to the inferential leap from the comparative RT (Reaction Time) of different associations to the attribution of implicit prejudice: (a) The data may reflect shared cultural stereotypes rather than personal animus, (b) the affective negativity attributed to participants may be due to cognitions and emotions that are not necessarily prejudiced, and (c) the patterns of judgment deemed to be indicative of prejudice pass tests deemed to be diagnostic of rational behavior.” (In press: H.R. Arkes, “The Rationality, Interpretation, and Overselling of Tests of Implicit Cognition,” in J.A. Krosnick, T.H. Stark, & A.L. Scott, eds., The Cambridge Handbook of Implicit Bias and Racism (Chapter 11, pp. 319-330). Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2023).

Part II. Institutional Context: Evolution of Higher Education in the U.S.

Historically the modern American university emerged in the 19th century from a variety of sources: religious affiliation, local communities, and private benefactors. From the beginning the university consisted of factions with competing paradigms. The oldest paradigm, the Ivory Tower so to speak, originated in the small liberal arts college with a religious (usually Puritan) affiliation and famously romanticized by Newman. The purpose of liberal education was to preserve, critique, and to transmit our cultural inheritance. In seeking to subordinate itself to the outside world, the university would only compromise itself and become an instrument for commercial or political exploitation.

A teacher is one who initiates a student into a cultural inheritance. The inheritance only comes alive when exhibited in the living embodiment of an instructor. The teacher exhibits academic virtues by consistently and coherently organizing intellectual judgments and inviting the learner to share in that process. Teaching was successful when students learned how to construct a self-understanding inclusive of the inheritance, a particular way of ordering or appropriating the inheritance, and to do so in a way that leads to the acquisition of an intellectual personality of their own.

A second paradigm is the German research model of the university with its emphasis on the disinterested pursuit of knowledge, the graduate school and the training of professionals. In this model, knowledge cannot be in the service of special interest groups because knowledge knows no political boundaries. Although non-political, the spectacular success of this model in science and technology eventually encouraged government subvention.

The third paradigm is utilitarian, wherein the university is seen as an institution for solving various and sundry social problems. In this model, the university exists as a means to social ends defined externally to the university itself (e.g. an A&M).

Looked at from our contemporary perspective, it is now clear that Newman’s moral model of the university has evaporated or has been marginalized; the research model has been corrupted and coopted; the notion of the college graduate as a civil servant has evolved into the notion of a special class which aims to run society. It is the politicized utilitarian model that has triumphed.

At first glance it is clear that institutions that were supposed to be the locus of higher education have become entwined with and encompass an enormous range of social, economic, and cultural activities. In the process, they have become big businesses with vested interests. In attempting to encompass all of these activities, institutions of higher education have abandoned learning. In so doing, such institutions have evolved into fraudulent enterprises. This is not to say that everything that occurs within institutions of higher education is fraudulent; nor is it to say that this outcome was planned or even foreseeable. It is to say that institutions of higher education have evolved, and in the course of that evolution factors internal to and external to the institution, intellectual and non-intellectual, have contributed to the rise of a Tower of Babel, meaning that the experts can no longer communicate with each other and have no clear common purpose. Symptomatic of this problem is a lack of consensus on the meaning of concepts like “learning,” “higher education,” “university;” no one seems to know what “teaching” is as opposed to “instructing” or how to evaluate it; no one seems to know the difference between “research” and “scholarship.” We have, in short, lost all sense of purpose. The fraud consists in maintaining that all of the activities that occur within present institutions of higher education are legitimate, consistent with each other and capable of forming a coherent whole under the rubric of the pious rhetoric that appears in mission statements and commencement addresses.

Although seemingly serving these external interests, universities have become a home for the adversary culture, for all those groups that are hostile to the very activities the university seeks to encompass. What are we to make of this contradiction? Schumpeter has observed that most modern intellectuals (including clergy and media people) are generally at odds with the representatives of the business community even though academics are dependent upon commerce for their own existence and comfort. Part of this opposition is reflected in the firm commitment of the academic world to socialism even when it has been repeatedly shown that centrally planned economies woefully and of necessity underperform free market economies. Schumpeter attributes this opposition to jealously on the part of academics who resent the fact that the leadership of modern culture emerges from the business community instead of the academy. Here we have a clue as to what has happened, namely, something was transformed in the evolution of the university from a medieval to a modern institution.

Higher education is the initiation into an inheritance, and it was from the beginning institutionalized in universities. As medieval institutions, universities saw themselves as the elite defining institutions of the culture, as superior to and independent of the state, as playing both a Socratic role with respect to the culture as a whole and a potentially adversarial role with respect to individual institutions such as the state. The source of our difficulties lies in the conflict between these roles, the conflict between the Socratic initiation into the inheritance and the adversarial relation between a self-defined elitist institution and the rest of the culture.

As Western Civilization evolved the content of the inheritance evolved. Unfortunately, certain historically contingent aspects of the medieval world became mistakenly identified with the content. Given the late medieval context, academics believed in a collective, holistic, and hierarchical common good, a good to which the good of individuals was subordinate, a good that encompassed both the church and the state. Intellectuals, in short, see themselves as the high priests of the collective good The university as agent of the church not only articulated that good but enlisted the subordinate state to promote the conditions necessary to achieve that good.

The modern world is not the medieval world. There are two elements in the medieval view that are at odds with modern culture. The most distinctive institutions of modern culture are individual rights, the rule of law, a republican form of government, and a market economy. First, modern culture is post-Reformation and therefore does not believe in a holistic common good. There is, instead, the individual good rooted, at least initially, in the relationship of individuals to God. There is no holistic common good over which academics may preside, only a cultural inheritance. Universities, however, may still perform the functions of providing a context for learning and maintaining a Socratic role vis-a-vis the rest of the culture. Second, there is no one institution, and therefore no one group, that authoritatively articulates the cultural inheritance. Without a collective good, intellectuals in the modern world are merely trained communicators who might be spokespersons for a particular interest group. Schumpeter’s observations and diagnosis are not only accurate, but we can explain the situation further by reference to the medieval origins of Institutions of Higher Education. The now mythological holistic common good is the metaphysical phantom behind central planning.

The Enlightenment Project allowed academics to reassert the cultural hegemony of the university. College graduates were no longer mere civil servants but definers and implementers of the good. The good was understood as the medieval cosmic order now accessed by physical and social science. Since media people are trained by the academics, they too become advocates of the project. It should come as no surprise that the press is no longer Socratic but adversarial.
How did this happen?

The internal transformation begins with how the Puritan Ivory Tower underwent a remarkable secularization. Inspired by 19th-century Transcendentalists like Emerson and Thoreau (environmentalist, author of “Civil Disobedience,” and whose support of John Brown turned abolitionism into a civil religion), these “heretical” Puritans (now a sect of Presbyterians) surrendered the concept of “original sin” and replaced it with a moral universalism in which it was assumed that all people were naturally good and corrupted only by their environment. As Santayana allegedly remarked, “Thoreau was impervious to the evidence of evil.” What began as WASP Hegemony evolved first into Wilsonian (President of Princeton University became President of the U.S.) Progressivism that assimilated all Americans in the 1920s but by the 1960s had evolved into liberal-egalitarian idealism applicable to the entire multicultural world. This view is expressed in a speech given by Harvard historian Arthur Schlesinger to the American Historical Association (1942) titled “What Then is The American, This New Man?” Schlesinger declared that: “The American character … is bottomed upon the profound conviction that nothing in the world is beyond its power to accomplish.” In his 1989 essay, The End of History, Francis Fukuyama argued that American liberal democracy and modern technology had produced the final form of political association. Henceforth, all societies would, in time, inevitably take on the form of liberal democracy.

What will probably strike some readers as an aside or a remarkable coincidence, worth noting is that the 16th century English theologian Richard Hooker’s critical portrait of Puritan methodology in his Ecclesiastical Polity aptly catches what has become today “Woke” methodology in higher education and its attendant “witch hunt.” Puritans exhibited a Millenarian vision of spiritual redemption through worldly reform; severe criticism of social evils and the conduct of the upper classes; they are virtue signalers; experience themselves as the elect and distinguish themselves from the damned; concentrate popular ill-will against the establishment; recommend a new form of government as the “sovereign remedy of all evils;” turn a blind eye to any part of our intellectual inheritance that is incompatible with their doctrine; anyone who uses tabooed instruments of critique will be socially boycotted and defamed; there is a special role for women: emotionally more accessible, tactically well placed to influence husbands, children, friends, more inclined to than men to serve as spies/”commissars” concerning the state of affections in their circle, and more liberal in financial aid; they are impermeable to argument and have their answers well drilled – beyond shaking by argument; sacred documents had to be carefully chosen and the interpretation standardized; propaganda is a form of political action not a search for truth; where they control the means of communication, all theoretical argument is prohibited (Voegelin, pp.135-144).

Going back to the medieval origin of universities focused on educating the clergy, the faculty had always viewed itself as the moral and intellectual elite. The Puritan roots of higher education in the U.S. always had as its aim the notion of the college graduate as part of a special class which aims to run society. Heretofore, it had been assumed that knowledge cannot be in the service of special interest groups because knowledge knows no political boundaries. In the 1960s, the secularization of Puritanism came to mean that colleges promoted a specific political agenda, namely liberal-egalitarian idealism associated with transcendentalism or humanism. That agenda emerged from the so-called “social” sciences.

The alleged “social” sciences, acting as a kind of “fifth column” starting in the 1960s, achieved intellectual hegemony over the entire university curriculum. The humanities were social-scientized under the aegis of “deconstruction” seeking the hidden structure meaning of texts so that Shakespeare, for example, was now read not as someone who had important insights into the human condition but perhaps as a racist or homophobe. Here is a typical itinerary that reflects a forced interdisciplinarity: the student registers in a philosophy department; instead of the Truth for which she was searching all that she is offered is tiresome analysis; bored, she changes disciplines and ends up writing a thesis entitled “The Phenomenology of Moby Dick” or “How Class Struggle is related to Paternalism.” Following all this, she will be hired in a department of literature, or social sciences, or psychology and will satisfy in turn the disappointed philosophical aspirations of a new generation.

“Deconstruction” became the origin of the view that there are multiple but no authoritative narratives or grand theory. (According to Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, the postmodern condition rejects universalizing theories. Lyotard argues that we have outgrown our needs for metanarratives that bring together social practices. Any narratives we tell to justify a single set of norms are inherently unjust. Little narratives have now become the appropriate way for explaining social transformations and political problems. This is easily translatable as a rejection of Huntington’s “creed” and the promotion of multiculturalism). By a not so strange coincidence with Rousseau’s elusive “general will,” the substitute for an authoritative narrative was whatever the majority, or those who spoke in the name of the majority, voted for or agreed to. As we shall see, this had important implications for immigration policy.

The American Historical Association (the national professional organization for academic historians), issued a statement supporting the removal of Confederate monuments from the public square because the 1861-1865 War was about slavery. American historians and legal scholars acting now in a post-modern idiom for whom the “realities of race and slavery” stain and color nearly all events in antebellum history, just as Marxists stained and confounded everything they touched from an obsession with class struggle, will ignore or dismiss constitutional claims about the right of secession and by an act of will confer “factual” status on the official doctrine that the War was about slavery. And since most academic historians subscribe to that thesis, it is presented as something determined by “experts.”

In philosophy, John Rawls (winner of the Ralph Waldo Emerson Award) was a barometer of the direction of academic thinking. In his youth, Rawls was influenced by Marx’s essay On the Jewish Question, criticizing the idea that inequality in ability justifies the distribution of wealth in society. G. A. Cohen, used Rawls’s writings to inaugurate Analytical Marxism in the 1980s, and the same can be said of Habermas and the Frankfort School. In the Law of Peoples (1999) Rawls embraces a form of multiculturalism)—eschewed and replaced even the historical account of our norms by articulating the method of “reflective equilibrium” to undercover the alleged “hidden” structure of our moral intuitions. Rawls’s theorized, in a series of articles written between 1957 and 1963 and a book in 1971, that justice meant “fairness” which really meant equal basic liberties, “fair” equality of opportunity, and facilitating the maximum benefit to the least advantaged members of society in any case where inequalities may occur.

(The qualification “fair” opens the Pandora’s box that leads ultimately from equality of opportunity to equality of result. See below on Hume’s discussion of “fair.” Notice as well the difference between a society which maximizes benefits for all and one which is focused on maximizing benefits for the least well off. The former defines itself in terms of its “most” successful while the latter defines itself in terms of its ‘least’ successful).

Rawls’ sympathizers and critics pointed out that he had not gone far enough. Even in a system of perfect equality of opportunity there would be some inequality of result. The children of super-achievers would have gained privileges that the children of others did not. Such inequality and the resulting resentment was, as Marxists argued, the root of all other social problems. It is at this point that cultural Marxists hijacked the liberal-egalitarian agenda in the academic world.

(Just as Hooker had in the sixteenth century exposed the logic of Puritan Gnosticism, David Hume had in the 18th century in the Enquiry Concerning Morals exposed the logic of inequality. First, there is no consensus on what is a fair distribution; second, you cannot in advance assign resources to who will make the best use of them because this is not something anyone can know in advance {refutes central planning}; third, if in the beginning you give everyone equal resources this will be followed by interactions that will lead to a new inequality of result; finally, all of this will require an all-powerful central authority to maintain the ongoing equality).

An important transition had occurred. Rather than demanding that Americans live up to their norms, it had now been revealed that those norms, the entire history behind them was inherently evil and exploitative. If so, then against that standard Western Civilization was a fraudulent form of exploitation. What followed was a scholarship of endless denigration of Western achievement. Not even the physical sciences could resist. Western physical science had, unbeknownst, all this time operated within a flawed set of moral foundations. Something, later, like Covid became a social/political/ideological problem and not a medical problem.

This intellectual voyage provided an opening for Frankfort School cultural Marxists like Marcuse. Rawls had to be supplemented by Dworkin who in turn gave way to critical race theory. Pre-law students usually majored in political science (subtly conceptualizing law into applied politics) and when they arrived at Law Schools were introduced to the U.S. Constitution as a document written by white males who had owned slaves. Social technologists turned law schools into preparing graduates to be federal bureaucrats, activist judges, and regulatory agents.

To recruit more like-minded faculty for Gramsci’s “Long March through the Institutions,” a succinct mission statement coined by Marxist student activist Rudi Dutschke in the 1960s, whole new disciplines of inequality grievance studies were introduced. John Ellis (2020), in his book, The Breakdown of Higher Education, shows how Antonio Gramsci inspired Marxists and Students for a Democratic Society, the latter publishing in 1962 the Port Huron Statement. In that document, Students for a Democratic Society “decided . . . their only choice was to “wrest control of the educational process from the administrative bureaucracy…(and) consciously build a base for their assault upon the loci of power” (Ellis, pp. 48-52). They went on to use universities to convert young people to their ideology. Radicals patiently built their numbers until they had achieved a 5-to-1 left-right faculty ratio by the turn of the century (2000). That dominance allowed radicals to control most new faculty appointments, and the left-right ratio accelerated dramatically, reaching about 12 to 1 by 2016. The affected institutions include law schools and business schools. The best discussion of Marxism in higher education is American Academia and the Survival of Marxist Ideas, by Dario Fernandez-Morera (1996).

Part III: Political Background

As we shall see the political context was both a cause and an effect of the growth of affirmative action and its transition to DEI.

The utilitarian conception of the university understood as serving an external political agenda was facilitated by federal funding. In an important sense, there is hardly any longer a totally private institution of higher learning. The external sociological origin of this triumph lies in the commercial exploitation of the university’s research resources, in the political appropriation of the university’s scientific research capacity commencing with the Cold War, and in the vast expansion of the number of people accepted into the institution during the 1960s. It’s always about the 1960s.

In the immediate post WWII period, both major political parties, Democrats and Republicans, shared different but overlapping narratives. Both supported what I shall call the “American Dream,” namely the view that through hard work and merit (talent) any American could become economically successful. It was always understood that a meritocracy meant inequality of result, but this was accepted on the grounds that all were then better off (“a rising tide raises all boats”). Republicans wanted to protect this Dream for those who already had achieved it and for their posterity; and Democrats wanted to extend it to those (unionized workers) who felt that they had been unfairly excluded.

Heretofore, Blacks, when allowed to vote, had, for historical reasons, supported the Republican Party going back to Lincoln and Reconstruction. All of that was about to change. The 1954 Brown v. the Board of Education decision by the Supreme Court outlawing segregated schooling and the 1964 Civil Rights Act protecting voting rights, among other things, convinced Black leaders that their path to the American Dream was paved by increasing the power of the Federal Government, the favored tactic of the Democratic Party. What Democrats discovered was that their power base was no longer with the working class but with groups who perceived themselves as previously excluded (i.e., “victims”). Post WWII economic growth had already lifted many members of the working class into a share of the American Dream, and this led to a steadily increasing movement away from the Democratic Party (e.g., “Reagan Democrats” in the 1980s and many Trump supporters in 2016). These changes did not go unnoticed by cultural Marxists who had already perceived that the great revolution would not be accomplished through the working class. In due course, the cultural Marxists would take control both of the Democratic Party and even the leadership of the Black community. By 1991, the NAACP had, according to Andrew Young, achieved its civil rights goals. But it was losing members, revenue, and influence, so a new direction had to be taken. Blacks formed an alliance with other groups who perceived themselves as victims.

Two other interrelated political phenomena are worth noting, namely multiculturalism and immigration. Prior to the 1960s, immigration rules favored Europeans from north-western Europe (U.K. and Scandinavia). In addition, immigrants had been encouraged/required to assimilate to the dominant culture. The dominant culture was, according to Huntington, Anglo-Protestant. The dominant culture encompassed a specific set of norms or “creed” (individual liberty, rule of law, equality before the law, limited government, and market economy).

Elsewhere, it has been argued that those norms, including the transition from an agricultural economy to an industrial and technological economy, had empowered Western Europeans, in general, to colonize (dominate) the globe, allowed Britain to create a global empire in the 19th century on which “the sun never sets,” enabled the U.S. to “win” the Cold War against the Marxist-Leninist Soviet Union, and ultimately become the world’s superpower. “English” is now the world’s universal second language (certainly the major language of commerce, politics, and academe). Assuming this to be the case, success within the U.S. (and economic success as a “developing” “country”) depended upon already possessing or mastering those cultural norms.

Within U.S. politics, Democrats characterized good government as democratization understood as majority rule; Republicans characterized it as limited government or a Republic with a Constitutional legal system that protected individual rights. Post WW II and in response to the Cold War, both major parties promoted decolonialization (self-rule) and democratization, as opposed to Soviet centralization of all power, in international affairs.

The counter-narrative, i.e. the cultural Marxist narrative, is that the success of north-western Europeans and their heirs (Anglo-American world) was the product of the denigration and exploitation of the “non-white” colonized world. The remedy was not revolution (original Soviet Marxist theory) but democratization and multi-culturalism. Multiculturalism is not just about the wide availability of ethnic restaurants but “is about the proper terms of the relationship between different cultural communities.” This is understood to mean that the standards by which the communities resolve their differences, “the principles of justice must not come from only one of the cultures but must come through an open and equal dialogue between them” (Parekh, p. 13).

This has two major immediate implications. Domestically, it means that politics is now about negotiation among different “cultural” groups wherein each group’s culture enjoys equal dignity and respect. The older notions of success and meritocracy through competition are to be discarded as remnants of bias. “Cultural appropriation” occurs when a member of a majority group assimilates a cultural element of a minority group without due regard for its original meaning and thereby implies the subordination and disrespect of the minority culture.

The Democratic Party embraced this view in 1964 with the Civil Rights Act and with the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act. The latter act removed “de facto discrimination” against Southern and Eastern Europeans, Asians, Africans and other non-North-Western European groups.

“Discrimination” simply means making fine distinctions. This is usually a good thing. “Discrimination’ has taken on a largely negative connotation when associated with irrelevant or counterproductive criteria. Several waves of immigrants had been successfully integrated into the creed of Anglo-Protestant culture largely because of assimilation policies. It was now assumed by an ignorant public without any serious discussion or debate that anyone coming to America would fit in simply by osmosis. We were told that America was a “land of immigrants,” something that is impossible. You can only immigrate into a country that already has a culture; and the U.S. already had an Anglo-Protestant culture because of its English settlers. The original settlers were not immigrants but settlers. Of course, if one claims that the misnamed “Native American” tribes were a country, then the English settlers were just another immigrant group. What was overlooked was the deliberate intention of cultural Marxists to welcome those who might resist assimilation to the creed. It all depends on one’s “narrative.”

The Immigration Act of 1990 rescinded the provision discriminating against members of the LGBT+ community. It also introduced for the first time a “Diversity Immigrant Visa” to be determined by the Attorney General to rectify imbalances. “Diversity” has the clear meaning here of referring to cultures or countries. In essence, this transferred authority to deal with immigration issues from the judiciary to the unelected civil service (staffed largely by university trained attorneys). This Act also clarified but extended “family reunification” immigration visas to immediate family members. For immigration purposes, immediate family is defined as one’s spouse, parents, or unmarried children below age 21. Demographically this increases the percentage of the population that is not derived from north-west Europe.

With regard to immigration, it means that all cultures are to be equally respected (= given equal weight). Hence, there is to be no favoritism for north-west (i.e. “white”) Europeans. This reflects the replacement of what Huntington (2005) had called the “creed” by the norms of cultural Marxism (instead of transforming the earth you must repair the damage of climate change, instead of a free market economy you advocate a managed global economy where the difference between crony capitalism and socialism disappears, instead of limited national government you espouse unlimited leadership by the UN, instead of the rule of law you advocate rule through law, and finally, you are defined by membership in a group).

(As Michael Oakeshott put it, “The emergence of this disposition to be an individual is the preeminent event in modern European history… there were some people, by circumstance or by temperament, less ready than others to respond… the familiar anonymity of communal life was replaced by a personal identity which was burdensome… it bred envy, jealousy and resentment… (it developed) a new morality… not of ‘liberty’ and ‘self-determination,’ but of ‘equality’ and ‘solidarity’… not… the ‘love of others’ or ‘charity’ or… ‘benevolence’… but… the love of ‘the community’…(the anti-individual or mass man, i.e., those attracted to identity politics) remains an unmistakably derivative character… helpless, parasitic and able to survive only in opposition to individuality.” See also “Pathology of Identity Politics”).

The alarm bells were beginning to ring. As Schlesinger pointed out:

There remains however a crucial difference between the Western Tradition and the others. The crimes of the West have produced their own antidotes…to end slavery, to raise the status of women, to abolish torture, to combat racism, to defend freedom of inquiry and expression…that continent is also…the unique source—of those liberating ideas of individual liberty, political democracy, the rule of law,… These are European ideas, not Asian, nor African, nor Middle Eastern ideas, except by adoption.

From Affirmative Action to DEI

The undefined expression “affirmative action” began innocuously enough in executive orders issued by Presidents Kennedy and Johnson. It soon began to take on a variety of evolving meanings.

Definition 1 (open-search): Affirmative action consists of those policies designed to advertise all openings as widely as possible and to monitor appointments and promotions processes in order to insure that the process is open, nondiscriminatory, and promotes excellence. (As we shall shortly see, this was clearly the intention and extent of the original legislation).

Definition 2 (punitive): Affirmative action consists of any policy, private or public, ordered by the court to redress proven cases of individual discrimination. The remedy may involve a specific numerical objective, but the numerical objective is limited to a specific time and place.

Definition 3 (backward-compensation): Affirmative action covers any policy designed to redress alleged cases of discrimination against a group by placing members of the group in the positions they would have allegedly held if the alleged discrimination had not taken place. This is a contrary-to-fact conditional: it claims to identify what would happen if something else had not happened. (This was exactly what the original legislation was designed to prevent by adding 703 (h) and 703 (j)—see below).

Definition 4 (backward-compensation): Affirmative action covers any policy designed to redress alleged cases of discrimination against a group by placing members of the group in the positions they would have allegedly held if the alleged discrimination had not taken place. This is a contrary-to-fact conditional: it claims to identify what would happen if something else had not happened.

Definition 5 (forward-preferential): Affirmative action designates any policy in social planning, without any causal claim of what would have been, designed to produce a democratic and diverse society in which all power, resources, rewards, etc. will reflect the percentage of the population of the officially designated groups. Instead of equality of opportunity we shall endorse equality of result. The Hidden Agenda.

Legislative History

It is useful to cite the legislative record concerning these definitions. As then Senator Hubert H. Humphrey put it, “Title VII does not require an employer to achieve any sort of racial balance in his work force by giving preferential treatment to any individual or group.” Senator Harrison Williams noted that Title VII “specifically prohibits the Attorney General or any agency of the government, from requiring employment to be on the basis of racial or religious quotas. Under this provision an employer with only white employees could continue to have only the best qualified persons even if they were all white.” Senator Joseph Clark stated, “Quotas are themselves discriminatory.” If anyone still has any doubts, then recall the words of Representative Emanuel Celler, Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee and the congressman responsible for introducing the legislation:

It is likewise not true that the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission would have power to rectify existing “racial or religious imbalance” in employment by requiring the hiring of certain people without regard to their qualifications simply because they are of a given race or religion. Only actual discrimination could be stopped.

Original Legislation

Titles VI and VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 unequivocally outlaw compensation or preference (see definitions 3 and 4 below). Two provisions spell this out:

703 (h) it shall not be unlawful employment practice… for an employer to give and act upon the results of any professionally developed ability test provided that such test, its administration or action upon the results is not designed, intended or used to discriminate because of race, color, religion, sex or national origin.

703 (j) Nothing contained in this title shall be interpreted to require any employer… to grant preferential treatment to any individual or to any group because of the race, color, religion, sex, or national origin of such individual or group on account of an imbalance which may exist with respect to the total number of percentage of persons of any race, color, religion, sex or national origin employed by any employer.

As we all have come to understand, what a law means depends upon how unelected federal bureaucrats choose to understand it. The labor department had its own definition: Definition 3 (backward-compensation); see above.

Court History

In the pivotal Alan Bakke case (1978), Justice Powell, in the plurality opinion, specifically attacked and rejected the backward-looking argument for compensation (definition 3). “…But for this discrimination by society at large, Bakke “would have failed to qualify for admission” because Negro applicants…would have made better scores. Not one word in the record supports this conclusion. (italics added)… (it) offers no standards for courts to use in applying such a presumption of causation to other racial or ethnic classifications….”

Although Powell urged “strict scrutiny” to be applied to affirmative action programs, in a second opinion he suggested that schools might take race, as one factor, into account in order to achieve a “diverse” student body. Powell did not clarify what he meant by “diversity.” Powell did not link “diversity” to cultures or ethnicity, and he could not link it to egalitarian outcomes because that would have contradicted his official opinion.

Mercifully, the latest Supreme Court decision has ended the waffling and reasserted the primacy of meritocracy.

It is now almost 60 years since the 1964 Civil Rights Act. It has been 60 years during which the university as an institution has been thoroughly taken over by cultural Marxists; during which every institution in the U.S. (civil service, military, medicine, sports, entertainment, etc.) has bent over backwards to root out any vestige of discrimination; during which even the business community has adopted or at least paid lip service to the “woke” agenda; during which we have seen that the top household income positions are held by Indians (India), Taiwanese, Filipinos, Japanese, Chinese, Lebanese, Iranian, Turkish, and Nigerians as opposed to whites. Nevertheless, the household incomes of Blacks (as a whole) and Hispanics (as a whole) continue to lag. Rather than question the original diagnosis for this lag, cultural Marxists have doubled down on outlawed policies of compensation and preference by changing the names.

(Hundreds of thousands of Blacks and Hispanics have achieved economic, social, and professional success. There are several plausible hypotheses about why some prosper and others fail to do so. These alternative explanations and possible alternative policies are dismissed without discussion because they do not fit the cultural Marxist narrative).

Federal Bureaucracy at Work: From Affirmative Action to DEI

Institutions of higher education, seized upon the term “diversity” and linked it to what we have identified as the fourth definition and justification of affirmative action. Borrowing from the Immigration Act of 1990, “diversity” was linked to multi-culturalism (see the online definitions from the Merriam-Webster dictionary and Cambridge dictionary) and the assumption that federal bureaucrats could engage in post-hoc rectification. (For examples of how Federal bureaucracies misrepresent legal decisions see N. Capaldi, “Twisting the Law,” in Policy Review, Spring (1980), pp. 39-58).

“Diversity” and “Inclusion” were specifically derived/defined from immigration law. Immigration law, going back to the 1920s attempt at assimilation had focused on domestic nation retention/maintenance; but specifically the debate surrounding the 1965 ACT, was focused on future nation building. Coupled with America’s foreign policy in the early 1990s following the collapse of the Soviet Union and The End of History conception of remaking the world in our own image, it was a short step to imagining a world homogeneous in all respects. Therefore, the U.S. had to “look” like the UN. Nation building applied to or was retroactively imposed upon the the U.S. “Globalization” came to mean much more than doing business internationally.

The key point of conflict was “equality.” Either the world would aim for a meritocracy (Huntington’s Anglo-Protestant core) with its inevitable version of inequality of outcome or the world would aim for something vaguely egalitarian (cultural Marxism). Hence, the concept of “equity.” Equality means each individual or group of people is given the same resources or opportunities. Equity is different for it recognizes that each person has different circumstances and allocates the exact (additional?) resources and opportunities needed to reach an equal outcome. The term “equity” refers to fairness and justice and is distinguished from equality: Whereas equality means providing the same to all, equity means recognizing that we do not all start from the same place and must acknowledge and make adjustments to imbalances. The process is ongoing, requiring us to identify and overcome intentional and unintentional barriers arising from bias or systemic structures. In such a world, meritocracy becomes a form of unintentional systemic bias (racism?).

Inclusion means the practice or policy of including and integrating all people and groups in activities, organizations, political processes, etc., especially those who are disadvantaged, have suffered discrimination, or are living with “disabilities.”

It is worth noting that people with disabilities surely are victims (perhaps of the “genetic lottery” in some cases), but they are not usually victims of social or institutional policies or arrangements as is alleged in the case of other (racial, ethnic, etc.) groups. However, they are likely to be economically disadvantaged and therefore beneficiaries and supporters of proposed democratic party policies of the redistribution of wealth and positions of power.

All of this sounds like a way of improving productivity by adjusting distribution. It slides easily into equality of result. But there is something even more ominous. To achieve the foregoing noble ends, a new class of administrators needs to be created. The concepts of diversity, equity and inclusion must apply to them, i.e., the members of government bureaucracies and the leaders of every private institution have to mirror the general population. This becomes a sort of bizarre version of what Tocqueville warned us were the dangers of a “democratic” culture. Recall here, as well, Hume’s warning that a specially empowered class is required to maintain the egalitarian structure. To conclude, Bertrand de Jouvenel said it best. Redistribution strives to transfer wealth from the rich to the poor, but all that we have ever accomplished is to transfer power from the individual to the state. The new world of DEI focuses on distribution not production, on equality and not individual excellence, on specially identifiable groups and not autonomous individuals. Nevertheless, the leaders or spokespersons of the groups will enjoy power, prestige, and perks not available to the rest of the group. The end product is neither a classless society nor an egalitarian one. Some are always more equal than others.

Keep in mind that universities, largely influenced by the social science faculty, had already been practicing some forms of affirmative action in the post WWII era and had since then openly welcomed and promoted it. Moreover, the demographics of university personnel has consciously strived to reflect an international demeanor.

The business world soon followed suit. In order to obtain some specific government contracts, private companies had to submit to the Department of Labor not only a bid but an affirmative action plan and show “good faith” in implementing it. The easiest way to “show” good faith is to adopt hiring quotas. It became part of the overhead of conducting a business. Moreover, in order to avoid being harassed, sued and absorbing enormous legal costs by a government agency, even if you are innocent and committed to the most rigorous meritocracy, is to adopt a quota hiring policy. Always remember, the “long march” through the institutions is designed to achieve revolutionary results by gaining control of institutions and government bureaucracies whose employees were all educated in institutions of higher education run by cultural Marxists and their allies and fellow travelers.

The number of well indoctrinated cultural Marxists is further increased and embedded (another “fifth column”) even in the business world by requiring or expecting companies to hire affirmative action officers and diversity training specialists. Diversity training is any program designed to “facilitate positive intergroup interaction, reduce prejudice and discrimination, and generally teach individuals who are different from others how to work together effectively” (“The Impact of Method”).

The Race Issue(s):

Hierarchy: Every society and every social entity has an elite who get privileges. There is no way to avoid a hierarchy. Even egalitarians themselves need, and insist upon, an elite to maintain the proposed equality.

The important question is whether the hierarchy has Functionality. What makes a hierarchy functional or dysfunctional? Answer: if the hierarchy serves to maximize the interests of all relevant parties. Traditionally, Anglo-American societies has aspired to achieve meritocracy because the pursuit of excellence benefits everyone. It benefits everyone because outstanding individuals create things (entrepreneurs, technology, medicine, sports, arts, etc.) that benefit everyone and actually create more opportunities for everyone. American Blacks as individuals have many examples (hundreds of thousands) of being part of the elite—success stories. This refutes every claim that the history of slavery and ‘Jim Crow’ necessarily hold people back.

The Black elites are not mathematically analogous to White elites. However, there is no reason to believe that any talent is proportional to a group’s size. History seems to confirm this. The greatest obstacles to more Black success are fatalism, the assumption that individuals are not responsible for their decisions, poor family structure, poor education policies and teacher union activism, previous government programs of welfare and affirmative action, the greed and corruption of some Black political and cultural elites, misguided liberal political and social theories and policies.

At the same time, a large percentage of American Blacks are dysfunctional (illegitimacy, unemployment, literacy, numeracy, imprisoned, etc.). THIS IS A FACT! Apologists automatically assume that (a) everyone is born ‘good’ and corrupted only by their environment (same way they presume that gun deaths are caused by guns not by people), (b) claim America is inherently racist or anti-Black achievement, (c) that the solution requires non-Blacks to make unending concessions (now its reparations), and (d) just in case equality of outcome is still not possible in a meritocratic society, then meritocracy has to be surrendered, OR replaced by egalitarianism and we as individuals are all to be conceptualized by group membership (class, race, culture, whatever). This is the hidden agenda of cultural Marxists.

Many Americans have believed, even before 1776, that Blacks (sub-Sahara African origin) as a group would never fit into American society. Even as late as Lincoln, Americans considered the policy of repatriating or emigrating Blacks to another less challenging environment (originally, e.g., Liberia). Affirmative action and DEI policies in a “woke” environment are beginning to exhaust the public’s patience and trust. It is time to consider that this may be the only viable alternative. Other countries are also beginning to learn that mass migrations often bring people from other cultures and subcultures that reject or resist assimilation.

Summary

The seamless transition from affirmative action to DEI reflected a series of public policies that challenged the Anglo-Protestant norms of America’s original settlers (liberty) and set in motion the current conflict with the norms of cultural Marxists (equality). That conflict originated in institutions of Higher Education with the domination of the social sciences by the utopian vision of a social technology. It was aided and abetted in institutions founded by Puritans under the influence of Transcendentalist millenarianism. The conflict spread beyond the universities when cultural Marxists gained control of the Democratic Party.

Nicholas Capaldi is Professor Emeritus at Loyola University, New Orleans.

Featured: Dante and Virgil in Hell, by Filippo Napoletano; painted ca. 1619-1620.

Why Soft Power is not Applicable in Russia

The use of foreign theories and models is unlikely to benefit our state and people.

From the mid-2000s to the early 2020s, there was a vogue for “soft power” in the Russian community of political scientists and international scholars—numerous articles on the subject were published, dissertations were defended, and representatives of a number of Russian NGOs and foundations eloquently tried to convince that it was they who were engaged in “soft power” issues in order to promote Russia’s interests abroad. One must agree that the term coined by Joseph Nye Jr. was indeed an attractive one. True, he also talked about hard power, smart power, and cyber power. And then there is sharp force (by Christopher Walker) and sticky force (by Walter Russell Mead). And different views on how exactly to apply power to exercise US domination led to polemics between theorists of the said methodologies.

But it is “soft power” that has become popular in Russia. Probably because it was opposed to hard power. And although in 2008 Russia resorted specifically to hard power in South Ossetia, soft power continued to be discussed just as actively.

This approach is generally wrong. Instead of developing its own concepts, strategies and doctrines, Russia has been musing over models that were alien to us. And their analysis did not have enough critical depth to realize the importance of an authentic and sovereign approach to the conduct of international affairs. Because of this, a Russian theory of International Relations has not yet emerged, although attempts by a number of Russian scholars and political scientists have been made for many years.

The fascination with the West is not a trend of recent decades. During the Soviet era, we (alas) also began to use terms and concepts formulated by our ideological opponents. The term “bipolar world,” the “Third World,” and more specific definitions, such as the “Cuban Missile Crisis” are all products of the U.S. presidential administration and the pool of American political scientists serving the White House and the State Department.

The same phenomenon has occurred with soft power. And, having created in their own imagination some model that, theoretically, can influence others, domestic political scientists began to talk about the need to apply it at the global level.

If we take into account that “soft power is more of a figurative generalization than a normatively expressed concept,” this approach could be justified.

However, the initial positions and capabilities of Russia and the United States in this regard are very different from each other.

First, the budget used in the United States for all kinds of psychological operations, cultural and ideological influence, scientific and educational programs, as well as maintaining a staff of its own agents around the world is not comparable to the funds that even under ideal conditions Russia would have for conducting its foreign policy.

The formation of the U.S. soft power apparatus began as early as the 1970s, and it was quite diverse. From USAID, the Peace Corps and organizations like NDI and the Republican Institute, to Saul Alinsky’s network projects and Protestant missionary groups—all of them have been working for decades in different regions of the world, collecting the necessary data and developing unique methods of social engineering (it should be noted that the school of behaviorism, i.e., human behavior management, originated in the United States). The budgets of millions of dollars were allocated, year after year, and mastered by a whole army of scientists, specialists and executors. The best methods that proved themselves in one or another country/region were scaled up at the global level.

Second, soft power does not exist on its own, but only in conjunction with hard power.

While hard power—the ability to coerce—stems from a country’s military or economic strength, soft power arises from the attractiveness of a country’s culture, political ideals and policies. Hard power remains crucial in a world of nations trying to assert their independence. It was at the heart of the Bush Jr. administration’s new national security strategy. But in Nye’s view, the neoconservatives who advised the president made a serious miscalculation—they focused too much on using America’s military might to force other countries to do Washington’s bidding, but paid too little attention to soft power. In Nye’s view, it was soft power that was supposed to prevent terrorists from recruiting supporters from among the moderate majority. And it was soft power that was supposed to help deal with critical global problems that required multilateral cooperation among nations. This is what Nye discussed in his book, which was published in 2004, after the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

Again, the U.S. hard power budget is also dozens of times greater than what Russia has spent on military and defense.

Third, the author (Nye) himself should be more closely scrutinized. With a Ph.D. in philosophy and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Joseph Nye, Jr. is by no means a pacifist or a proponent of exclusively controversial diplomacy. From 1977 to 1979, he served as Assistant Under Secretary of State for Security Support, Science and Technology. He was also chairman of the National Security Council panel on nuclear nonproliferation. From 1993 to 1994, he was chairman of the National Intelligence Council, and from 1994 to 1995, he served as U.S. Under Secretary of Defense for International Affairs. Thus, his main experience has been in the security services, and he was a decision-maker. And in 1994, the U.S. military intervention in Haiti took place, in order to return to office President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, who had repeatedly violated the country’s Constitution. Of course, this was done under the guise of “restoring democracy” to improve Bill Clinton’s rating. Interestingly, in 2004, the U.S. itself had already financed Aristide’s overthrow, having created the necessary conditions (both in terms of destroying the country’s economy and creating a controlled opposition). The mentioning of such a change of mood on the part of the US is not accidental, because we are talking about soft power as a kind of political tool. And this period is precisely the time of a series of color revolutions in the post-Soviet space, which the U.S. was behind. Is not this the manifestation of the “soft power” of the professional strongman Joseph Nye? The understanding of this has come to the Russian political science community relatively recently.

By the way, Joseph Nye himself introduced the term “soft power” back in the late 1980s and regularly used it in his works before the book with the same title was published.

For example, in a 1990 work, Bound Lead: The Changing Nature of American Power, he argues for the need to control international processes, albeit not directly, but by asserting its strategic interests. And for this purpose, the U.S. has the necessary resources, which must be properly allocated—one part to maintain military power and the other to skillful diplomacy, which he called “soft power.”

We read: ” The United States has both the traditional hard power resources and the new soft power resources to meet the challenges of transnational interdependence. The critical question is whether it will have the political leadership and strategic vision to convert these power resources into real influence in a transitional period of world politics. The implications for stability in the nuclear era are immense. A strategy for managing the transition to complex interdependence over the next decades will require the United States to invest its resources in the maintenance of the geopolitical balance, in an open attitude to the rest of the world, in the development of new international institutions, and in major reforms to restore the domestic sources of U.S. strength” (pp. 260-261).

There are rather obvious attitudes towards the continuation of the US global dominance. At the time of writing, the USSR was still in existence, but Nye had already warned of the need to invest in new international structures in order to control world processes through them.

Another mistake of Russian political analysts is that they have started to refer to U.S. diplomacy in general as nothing but “soft power.” One can often encounter such expressions as “US soft power in the post-Soviet space,” “US soft power in Central Asia,” etc. etc. It is as if a wide range of instruments of diplomatic influence conducted by the U.S. State Department did not exist before. And all this was long before Joseph Nye invented his term.

According to Nye’s definition, a country’s “soft power” is based on three sources: culture, political values and its foreign policy. Any state has all of these, but their essence and form are different. If the U.S. is based on Protestant religious culture, exclusivity and superiority, with an emphasis on God’s chosenness (the doctrine of Predestination) with a moralizing bias, other countries and peoples have different views on world affairs.

Developing this idea, Olga Leonova rightly notes that “soft power” is formed on the basis of the attractiveness of not only the general culture of a given country, but also its political ideals and traditions. Hence, political culture is meant here. Indeed, when the political course of a given country finds a positive response among its partners, the potential of “soft power” increases. Consequently, the resources of “soft power” include political institutions, political doctrines and concepts expressed in the country’s activities, both at the domestic political level and in the international arena.

But does U.S. foreign policy resonate positively in other countries? Of course, there is a certain correlation between public support and military interventions. For example, after the U.S. invasion of Iraq in March 2003, the U.S. rating plummeted in many countries that were considered allies. Apparently, this worried Joseph Nye, who saw the critical attitude of the vast majority of the world’s peoples toward his country as a threat to the attractiveness in which resources had been invested over the previous decades.

But definitely, the attractiveness of the USA is also related to the welfare of the citizens who live there, and in the 1990s and early 2000s, this country was considered promising for life, work and career. But in recent times, the rising unemployment rate, crime rate and declining quality of life as such in the US leaves much to be desired. Of course, there are very poor countries from where illegal migrants try to get to the US via Mexico, but this is done out of desperation and inflated expectations. It is doubtful that the segment of illegal migrants who are not highly skilled and unable to actively contribute to the U.S. economy can be attributed to the “soft power” effect.

Consequently, there is an illusory component to this model. Just as the picture in Hollywood movies is different from real life in the United States, the culture, political values, and image of U.S. foreign policy itself is distorted by the imagination of those affected by these three components.

If we simplify the comparison of “soft power” of different countries on the basis of these three components, we can say that we have the same name for a culinary dish, but the proportions of ingredients and their quality (as well as the preparation process) will be different; so it makes no sense to give this dish the same name.

Let the US stay with its soft, hard, smart and other powers. They, of course, should be kept in mind, but only analyzed through a critical prism and take into account how they can use these tools against us.

We, on the other hand, need to develop our own concepts, theories, and doctrines based on domestic history, culture, and values, and in accordance with the current political moment.

Leonid Savin is Editor-in-Chief of the Geopolitika.ru Analytical Center, General Director of the Cultural and Territorial Spaces Monitoring and Forecasting Foundation and Head of the International Eurasia Movement Administration. This article appears through the kind courtesy of Geopolitika.

Featured: Ten Men Pulling on Ropes, by Claude-Joseph Vernet; pen and ink, ca. 18th century.

What Conspiracy? On the Nefarious Purpose, Means and Ideas of Globalist Imperialism, Part 2

Read Part 1 and Part 3.

The Disinformation Racket of US/European Imperialism

1. The Rule of Lawfare and the Military Industrial Complex’s Animosity to Trump

Part 1 of this essay focussed upon the purpose and some of the means of the US/ European Axis globalist imperial project. Some of those means veered into what is simply dismissed out of hand by the media and those, like academics who parrot what they say, as conspiracy theories. As I indicated in the conclusion of Part 1 the facts are the facts, and if there is any larger theory about why those facts are occurring then it is reasonable to ask who is behind them, who benefits, as well as what are the benefits of making a cluster of things happen which all form a pattern. That cluster is one in which oligarchs and technocrats preside over a neo-feudal global order. The vassals who serve them do the dirty work of censoring, economically and socially ostracizing, fining and imprisoning those who are obstacles to the expanse and implementation of this order. On the domestic front, the oligarchs and their vassals keep pressing on. The most recent development are, as reported by The Epoch Times (one of the rare newspapers that was debunking Russiagate as it was being concocted):

31 counts of wilful retention of national defense information; one count of conspiracy to obstruct justice, one count of withholding a document or record, one count of scheme to conceal, one count of corruptly concealing a document or record, one count of concealing a document in a federal investigation, and one count of false statements and representations, information about the national defense, lying to federal investigators, obstructing justice.

The intricate legalities are all being explained by politically legal scholars and fact-checkers so that if the former President is sentenced to a prison sentence of a hundred years it would be perfectly legal as well as reasonable. The serious charges come under the Espionage Act. It would be hard to get more serious. Then there are the obstruction of justice, document concealments and lies told to agents who themselves worked for bosses who routinely lied and obstructed justice. People who don’t take their truths from CNN and the cabal of oligarch-intel agency funded media are pretty much all asking the same questions, which all point to the US operating under two sets of laws. The most often asked ones are:

  • Why is it that state intelligence officials who are publicly opposed to Donald Trump such as Peter Strzok, James Comey, James Baker, Andrew McCabe, John Brennen and James Clapper have lied under oath and never been charged with obstruction of justice, while Michael Flynn, and Roger Stone have served time in prison for that? And why does the mainstream media not only not care about such double standards but employ these people to offer political commentary?
  • Why has the use of a private email server for conducting affairs of state so that personal and state affairs can be intermingled without public scrutiny or historical record, so that, for example, a pay (the Clinton Foundation) to receive special US government favours might be concealed, never been subject to any serious media scrutiny? And why was it simply dismissed by James Comey as “extremely careless” instead of a crime?
  • How is it that a story fabricated in a presidential campaign about the opposing candidate being a Russian operative was not only so effective that it was repeated as if it were true in the media, but also used as the basis for spying on that campaign and imprisoning people for ‘process’ crimes is treated as if it were perfectly legitimate? How is this act of spying on a Presidential campaign not worse than Water Gate?

In the latest Trump case the big issue was why what seemed to be a case about classified documents moved to one in which the centrepiece was NDI documents. Given the proximity of its timing with the Durham Report, and the ramping up of people pushing further into the Biden money trail, ever more questions about China spying and the Biden family (all to be found in the laptop from hell stuff, which high ranking CIA, FBI and military officials conspired to dupe the public into thinking was a Russian Psy-Op) to those who sit back and wonder why now—it wreaks like a two month old abandoned fish factory still full of fish in a record drought year. Not that I think it will make a scrap of difference to how Trump is politically parsed. For those who hate him it confirms “He was a spy;” to those who don’t, some will think he has behaved very foolishly, and given his enemies a great opportunity to be rid of him once and for all—possibly; and for those who think the deep state has been at him from the day he announced his presidential campaign run, this will only confirm that Trump is seen as threat to the deep state.

The one piece that everyone knows about in the NDI bits was Milley’s plan to conquer Iran. Once upon a time, a President who stopped that, and kept evidence about the kind of shenanigans the MIC was up to he would have been carried aloft by professors and journalists chanting “No More Wars.” Now they tut-tut over their coffee and granola nodding beneath the Ukrainian flag they have draped in their kitchen along with the commentary that a President who had the temerity to hang onto evidence of a general plan to invade Iran is a danger to world peace. By the way—does anyone know how many Presidents have previously held onto any NDI documents after leaving office? Has anyone ever cared about this before? That’s the kind of question tens of millions are asking right now. And their answers are why Trump is still their preferred choice for President. And, funnily enough, they are the people who identify as patriots, while the people invoking the espionage act are the ones who think the flag, the national anthem and 1776 are embarrassing or just plain rancidly racist symbols.

Bill Barr, and Judge Napolitano have weighed in about the seriousness of these charges. But even if so, the DOJ has long since lost all credibility in terms of who it prosecutes and why. For those who want to know if the legalities of locking away a President are open and shut because not even a President is allowed to keep such secrets as what Milley was plotting on behalf of the USA and the rest of the world, I refer the reader to the legal analysis by Will Sharf. He is “a former Assistant U.S. Attorney, who worked on two Supreme Court confirmations, and clerked for two federal appellate judges.” The most important part of his argument comes down to intentionality—which by the way was the aspect that Comey said absolved Hilary of any criminality. The following two sections from Sharf’s analysis are the most pertinent:

Did he really think these documents, like years old briefing notes and random maps, jumbled together with his letters, news clippings, scribbled notes, and random miscellaneous items, “could be used to the injury of the United States”? Or did he just think of them as mementos of his time in office, his Personal Records of the four years, akin to a journal or diary?

If he thought these boxes were his Personal Records, he may have believed that NARA simply had no right to receive them at all. Meaning that he did not willfully withhold anything from an official he knew had the right to receive them. Because he didn’t believe that anyone had the right to receive them.

By breathlessly bandying around classification levels and markings, the Special Counsel is trying to make this case seem much, much simpler than it is. Classification levels do not automatically make something NDI, and having classified documents in your possession is not enough to convict here.

Just because something is classified—even Top Secret, SCI, NOFORN, FISA, pick your alphabet soup—does not mean that it is National Defense Information (NDI) within the meaning of the Espionage Act.

NDI, for the purposes of an Espionage Act § 793(e) prosecution, is defined as one of a long list of items “relating to the national defense which information the possessor had reason to believe could be used to the injury of the United States or to the advantage of any foreign nation.”

A lot of the documents listed in the indictment are older, or seemingly random. Would Trump in 2022 have had reason to know that a 2019 briefing document “related to various foreign countries, with handwritten annotation in black marker” could harm the US or help foreign countries?

Tough to say, because we can’t see the documents, but that’s a question the jury is going to have to decide in the end, and Trump’s legal team needs to drive home this point over and over again

Just as I write this essay Hunter Biden has agreed to plead guilty to minor tax offences and fire-arm possession. None who are not working for the uni-party see this as anything other than a blatant play to make the charges on Trump look “fair,” which is what Trump said and which is yet another example of why he still garners supporters when he should have been dead and buried after Pussy-gate, though contending against the wife of an adulterous President who had been accused of rape put boys-locker-room- dirty-talk in perspective.

The media, like the Democrat Party, carefully picks its women victims—Tara Reade no good; Juanita Broaddrick no good—they accused a man from the party of all things wise, and noble, and loving; E. Jean Caroll very good. She targeted a threat to the entire world; even though the story of sexual abuse (not rape) in the changing room of a Manhattan luxury department store during opening hours might leave someone who has ever been in a luxury department store, and noted the lack of privacy that you might want if you just could not control your urges at that moment, somewhat sceptical—surveillance cameras? could she not cry for help? It did not take long for the “me-too-movement’s” slogan “believe every women” to segue into the formula: “believe every woman who is a victim of a predator the press does not approve of.” That shows just how morally serious Hollywood and mainstream journalists are in their defence of anyone who claims to be a woman (even when it is so they can beat penis-less women at sports, or perve on them in nude spas and showers and toilets). Trump supporters include women, gays, and trans, blacks, Latinos and whites. I have heard dozens of them say why they support him—and what they all have in common is that they deeply resent being made fools of, and would much rather someone who kicks back rather than fold.

The Donald Trump phenomenon exists for one simple reason—a massive number of people think the country has gone mad and bad, and that they would rather support a deeply flawed man who sympathises with them, even if they have nothing else in common with him than people who mock, deride and try to use them as clients for building a world where they are the ones to be disposed of. Trump is a symbol of resistance to the disintegration of the USA. One might think surely there could be a better symbol—and surely his time has gone. I do not know if the latter claim is true or false, but the reaction to him and his support base seems to be just as deranged as it ever was, and the dirty tricks just as dirty. And yes there are far more eloquent critics of what is occurring who might throw their hat into the electoral ring. But political destiny has a funny way of clearing away the strictures of the more pure among us, and providing someone who can fight in the mud. The thing, though, that always puzzled me was why did so many former celebrity friends who begged him to be on their tv or radio shows (including the biggies like Letterman, Colbert, Winfrey, Stern), who fawned all over him as they encouraged him to run for president, then turn on him when he actually decided to act in line with their advice and run? They all shared his politics. It was the politics of the Democrats for decades: let’s employ Americans instead of off-loading manufacturing to where wages are cheap; let’s side with the little guy at home and not do what Republicans do—give free reign to multi-national corporations who are responsible for the industrial wasteland occurring in our town and cities. Trump’s run in 2016 could have been lifted straight from the Warren Beattie movie Bulworth, a film that was basically a piece of 1990s Democrat agit-prop).

Trump’s politics never changed—he was saying this in the 1980s and being slapped on the back by the same lot who called for his impeachment, or whatever it took, to free the nation of this plague resting under the world’s worst comb-over. Of course it was not that much of a puzzle really. They followed the money—and as much as Trump had, it was peanuts compared to his opposition. They and the people who paid their salaries were part of a much larger global sweep of oppositional forces, that included the world’s wealthiest men and their companies, as well as the globalist political and administrative classes, and all the vassals on the globalist private and public ticket. Their motto was not America first in Trump’s sense of creating jobs in America, and developing prosperity for the American working class, but America and Western Europe first—in the sense of supporting policies for the world’s wealthiest oligarchs and an America-led (first) alliance with Western Europe to impose its values, its priorities, and its access and control of resources. To that end it requires the Military Industrial Complex, that also includes the creation of a standing world army (NATO) under its supervision to be ever-ready for the endless wars which it helps fuel, as it runs over or undermines any regime that is in its way.

That is why Tucker Carlson, in his third Twitter show, and racking up 30 million tweets in 12 hours, made the salient point that the line Trump crossed had been to position himself against the Industrial Military Complex. For Tucker the moment Trump sealed his fate and galvanized the Military Industrial Complex against him was when he said, in his campaign, that the “weapons of mass destruction in Iraq was a lie.” Everyone knew that. Anti-Republican journalists and anti-war academics—which is to say most of them at that time—had been saying this for years. But it was then the propaganda machine against Trump as Hitler went into full effect, as the story that was endlessly repeated was how much less safe the world was with the reckless orange-haired Hitler having the authority to press the button.

According to Hilary, and her cheer squad of journalists, it came so very, very close when Trump called Kim Il-Jong “Little rocket man” at the UN. So dire was the situation that eventually, after Trump had “lost” the 2020 election and hence was bound to pound the blow-up-the-world switch out of a temper tantrum, that one of the MIC’s very own men, General Milley, phoned China to tell them that the world was in safe hands—his.

The pressure from the MIC, though, did feed into some of Trump’s very dangerously deluded and rash diplomatic decisions, like the assassination of General Soleimani, discussed below, and the bombing of Syria because of faked and staged chemical attacks attributed to the Assad regime.

Unfortunately, it was precisely these acts of reckless and ill-advised international aggression that gave Trump a moment or two of respite from the media and military officials doing their baying for Trump’s blood. That tells us a lot. Whereas when Trump met with President Putin in what, to me as someone who has spent much of his life teaching Political Science, saw as a fairly well conducted piece of public diplomacy, the press acted as if Trump and Dr. Evil were ghoulishly gloating over the latest plan for Russian nuclear devastation of the USA.

One would never know from the press, who, as Tucker rightly sees, have become the Military Industrial Complex’s propaganda wing, but one of Trump’s worst failures was that in trying to revive America’s industrial base and keep the US out of new wars, he handed over the state department to neo-cons, who had gravitated around Trump like flies to cow-dung, only to dump on him as soon as he either decided not to go along with some scheme or other that they had cooked up, or had blithely walked into some other scheme aimed to derail him. In any case, no matter how many qualifications we may want to add to Tucker’s general claim, I think it fair to say he has a point. Trump was definitely seen as an existential threat to the military industrial complex.

Pat Bet-David (not a Democrat, but no Trump fan-boy) also made a point that is even more telling in an excellent interview with Whitney Webb. Webb’s One Nation Under Blackmail is possibly the most important work on politics in the US I have read—ever. Its research is meticulous and the case she makes about the role of organized crime within the government of the USA is rock-solid, as is the account of the elaborate list of players and their political connections involved in the financial crimes and blackmailing sting being run by Epstein (who is the centre of the two volume work) and Israeli intelligence. She is no partisan, and pulls no punches about presidential corruption, and the corruption that runs through the most powerful political and financial families in the US. She tends to lump Trump in with the rest of the mobsters, blackmailers and laundromat operators running the country. While she notes that the mainstream media has protected—by lying about the extent, and dates of—the Epstein-Clinton connection (as they have also done with the Gates-Epstein connection), and have exaggerated the Trump-Epstein connection (which were financial rather than Trump seeking young girls, though Webb also rightly draws attention to just how the press has neglected the financial arm of Epstein’s/Mossad operations), her negative appraisal of Trump—unlike the disinformation of the mainstream oligarchic- funded jeer-squad—is well made.

The essence of Webb’s critique of Trump is that he is too influenced by Israel, and that his administration was heavily staffed with people with very close ties to Israel, that he did not pardon Julian Assange or Edward Snowden, that his business interests have crooked ties (the Scarfo and the Pritzker families), which also connects with him being mentored by that blackmailing sleaze-bag friend of J. Edgar Hoover, Roy Cohn. But for all that, Bet-David posed the right questions to her, which go some way to understanding why Trump has the support base he has. “Why,” he asked “have the top 10 organizations in the USA and globally hated Trump so much?” And “What institutions that have hurt America so badly, and that hate America, love Trump?” Whitney did not have an answer to that.

David’s podcast has a huge audience, but not as huge as Tucker’s; so for the mainstream media David might as well not exist. But when Tucker made his point—with great applause from George Galloway (yes that is the kind of alliance that is occurring which tells you that all old political categories are total junk for making sense of the world now)—the rest of the mainstream media chimed in immediately calling Tucker Carlson a conspiracy theorist.

Just as the word conspiracy now means anything your eyes and ears inform you of that has not been authorised by the media and the various state agencies of the uni-party behind it, the word theory has lost any meaning. Tucker was not laying out a theory. He was providing an insight, which to be sure was based upon a conjecture. But unlike those denouncing him as a conspiracy theorist, he was trying to identify why all these actors have done what they have done. And what they have done is destroy the rule of law by making politics take primacy over procedure. In doing this they have essentially criminalized what half the population or more value and think. And worst of all, without even realizing, let alone caring that they have done so they have broken the bonds of social unity that provide the requisite cultural condition for a functioning republic, or liberal democracy.

This is why increasingly, people who are all too aware of Trump’s policy errors and disasters (the most egregious of which, outside of international diplomacy, is another one that his enemies supported, was giving control of the pandemic to Anthony Fauci) and personality, are coming around to the position (which has always been my position) that this is only about Trump in so far as he has been a catalyst in exposing the powers who have had as little compunction in destroying the US constitution as they have had in claiming that half the country is a domestic terror coalition of “white supremacists,” homophobes, transphobes, and whatever nasty prefix plus ist or phobe occurs to them. The same concatenation of political crimes has now spread far beyond the USA.

In the USA, the first amendment is nothing but a quaint reminder of the racist and unemancipated ruling class who came up with a constitution so disturbing that the National Archive has to provide a warning about the harmful nature of its language. Fact checkers justify this by pointing out that it is not only the Constitution that gets a trigger warning, which is one more symptom of what a mad-hatters tea-party our “fact-checkers” merrily engage in.

The occasional instances and slithers of constitutional victory still give hope to those who think that politics in the USA is anything other than lawfare. Politicized law, though is not only bad law, it is law that spells the end of democracy. When it is commonplace it indicates that the rule of law has been replaced by the rule of lawfare. The United States—and much of the Western world—has adopted the rule of lawfare. The death of the rule of the law, and the transformation of the rule of lawfare is the result of the organizations and institutions that are essential to the information that enable citizens to make informed political choices becoming nothing more than sites of mis- and disinformation that target enemies and protect friends. There is nothing new about academics being ideological lunatics, nor partisan and stupid journalists, it is the active suppression of any countervailing voices that has turned the sites of information gathering and flow and framing into propaganda agencies.

The reason that the ruling class of the US opts for lawfare not warfare against the recalcitrants who prefer Old Glory to the 22 pride flags available to choose from is because their resistance to the world where elections don’t amount to anything anymore is restricted to some placards, irate podcasters and off grid journalists, and a generally politically docile group whose time is not devoted to white supremacist bivouac, and shooting black people practice, nor to figuring out which hair dye, gender operation, or pronoun they might come up with as they invent ever new ways to sexualize children, run down cities, destroy citizenship, and take out their political opponents. Astonishingly—and shhh, I will let you into a big secret that the media will never tell you: their time is largely taken up with work so they can keep putting the ever more expensive bread on the table, whilst having to react to the latest intrusion into their children’s welfare at school and their parental rights, along with the destruction of their personal safety and public order.

When lawfare does not suffice, though, the ruling class sends out the right signals to a client underclass which it keeps in drugs, squalor, and dependency, on the streets, while also giving them the green light to physically harm who they want and just steal stuff as the need comes upon them. Thus employees who oppose shoplifters will lose their job and possibly go to court. Woe betide anyone who might just happen to want to prevent a black person committing a crime. The ruling class wants blacks to be criminals as well as clients, though it also offers career paths for blacks who want to preside over and make a political living off ensuring the black client-underclass stays a client-under class. Black crime is not crime, and the most productive black citizens are ones that protect blacks so they can be unleashed from squalid neighbourhoods so they can commit crime.

The contender for the greatest North American writer of the Twentieth Century, Ralph Ellison, in his masterpiece, The Invisible Man, wrote about how the communists had used the resentment of the black under-class to make their own political advancement. This is no longer the strategy of communists, but of the American political class, and it has become institutionalised and corporatized in almost every organization that trains and employs professionals. The self-interest and political delusions of that class are so entwined that to even dare to say it, or which is the same thing, to criticize DEI—and all the variant formulae in social circulation—as a package of abstract inanities entrenching clientelism, polarised identities, managerial technocratic authority and the death not only of democracy but of a society in which intelligence, spontaneous solidarity based upon shared loves and sacrifices, and the cultivation of talents and initiative is hammered into fragments of divided groups, each grasping for more of the resources available to a diminishing number of them, is to become unemployable within any large scale private or public organization. It is also to be potentially accused of a crime—a hate crime.

Nothing illustrates where the United States and its vassal states is going and how the media has become the instrument for lawfare better than the mainstream narrative about the “insurrection” that took place on January 6. It was the world’s first insurrection that ever took place without any attempt at a military coup, without anyone trying to control any media, without guns, and without plans. It was an insurrection of disgruntled mostly middle aged, out of shape, typical Americans in good humour, balancing their hotdog, and cokes (the black fizzy stuff you drink, not the white stuff cut up on credit cards and snorted by celebrities, lawyers, politicos, bankers and others who generally hate MAGA types), and placards or flags whilst wandering outside the capitol. They would have all been home for dinner, after believing they at least had the opportunity to express their point of view about how the election was stolen, had it not been for the Antifa and deep state plants turning the party into a violent opportunity for the police to beat the living daylights out of them, whilst killing a couple to show that they meant business. They did so knowing full well that the media would make out that it was the protestors who were responsible for the deaths.

As far as the media were concerned protesting about election irregularities in the US was a white supremacist take-over of the nation by hotdog wielding flag-carrying, red baseball cap wearing coca-cola heads—it was absolutely terrifying for anyone who did not want to use their own eyes, who did not see the line of protestors being quietly ushered by police into the capitol building from the back, or missed the footage where something generally terrifying was police-instigated and deadly—at least for Rosanne Boyland crushed amidst the police induced mayhem, and Ashli Babbitt, shot at point blank range, for trespassing in the capitol, and caught up in the push and shoving by a policeman who was never endangered by her, or anyone in the capitol. Fact-checkers and Wikipedia will make their deaths out to be their own fault. Brian Sicknick’s death, from stroke, incurred after the riot, was, on the other hand, widely reported to have been caused by the protestors before any retractions occurred.

Though, when the protests against Trump winning the election went down that was not only reasonable but something to be proud of, as a beaming James Comey, employed to be a public servanta, said of his wife and daughter protesting against a President whose administration he was supposed to be serving. Attacks upon the supreme court building were not insurrections, nor were the protests outside the white house when the George Floyds protests were peacefully burning down various shopping areas with the approval of various senators and congress members. The mainstream media thinks that everyone has the memory of a gold-fish, and it does so because it mostly employs journalists who do.

2. Media Lies and Warfare. And Just to Refresh your Memory, Some Examples from Jacques Baud’s Governing By Fake News

That some half of the population of the United States see a tremendous amount of conspiring taking place is because there is a tremendous amount of conspiring taking place. And it has changed the entire social fabric and political culture of democratic nations in the West. Though there is one great irony in this: the same kind of machinations that the CIA have engaged in for decades against regimes seen as inimical to US interests, with the media reporting their disinformation, are now par for the course in the US itself. Not that long ago it was not that easy to find a Professor working in the area of geo-politics who was unaware of the nefarious extent of the CIA and the work it did in cooperation with some less than illustrious companies such as United Fruit. Likewise, when the Iraq wars happened there could be found plenty of professors and even a few journalists who thought something stinky was going on. But when it comes to the Russian war, the academics and journalists speaking out against the role of the US and Western Europe in igniting that war are a tiny handful. From the mainstream, Tucker was the only person I can think of who thought the whys’ and wherefores’ of the war deserved scrutiny, and from the universities there is Mearsheimer and a couple of others. The main ones I am familiar with are podcasters, or independent analysts who do regular interviews with podcasters.

But of all those who have spoken out about the false information being spread by the mainstream media about the NATO led war in Ukraine, none in my opinion has laid out the most compelling case against what the US and Western Europe have done in the region than Jacques Baud, a Colonel, “ a former member of the Swiss Strategic Intelligence, a specialist in Eastern Europe and former head of Doctrine of the United Nations Peace Operations. Within NATO, he was involved in programs in Ukraine, including after the Maidan Revolution of 2014 and 2017.” He has on the ground experience of the region, and knows NATO and how intelligence services work from the inside. Plus he has the courage to speak his mind when he sees stupid decisions drawing the world into unnecessary wars. And the internal turmoil now transpiring in the US is a reflection of the confused imperial mind-set which has been interfering in global events to the detriment of the world as a whole, as well as Western civilization which now rallies behind pride flags, crushing inflation, lawfare, infantilism, broken cities and neighbourhoods, race and ethnic hostilities, and hyperbolic moral and meaningless slogans howled by angry and blue-haired non-binaries, their professors and fogged-brain old hippies, and spouted out in more “professional” form in media sites and policy documents to be used by doctors, dentists, corporations, schools, universities, law firms—all of which it passes off as emancipation.

The present war in the Ukraine is but the latest in a long list of US adventurist disasters, and it may very well be a prelude to the big event, War with China, something that is even floated by leading US military officials. And the blue haired non-binary/ professional coalition are perfectly fine with it. Getting the military to go gay and trans was a masterstroke in getting the usual anti-war lot to become another front for the MIC.

Jacques Baud’s Operation Z, and his earlier book Governing By Fake News: International Conflict: 30 Years of Fake News Used by Western Countries provide what I consider the best account of how US imperial foreign policy consists of a great tapestry of disinformation spread by a Media that has abdicated all commitment to researching and reporting on the truth of things.

In this essay, I have drawn attention to deliberate decisions undertaken to achieve strategic objectives in disinformation, but I have also emphasised throughout that it is the amalgam of contradictory interests that is intrinsic to the sorry tale that we are now caught up in. However, I have also mentioned—as I frequently do—the importance of ambition and lack of knowledge in shaping the world. That is one of the lessons I have carried over from Plato—“evil is ignorance” was his (Socratic) formulation. Not being a metaphysician (and having a strong antipathy to most metaphysical enterprises and claims) I am happy to rephrase it to “evil is often ignorance.” I also think that folly is the footman of evil, and there is none so foolish as they who think they know what they don’t (that’s also Socrates), and live by and fight for false convictions. This is what Baud concentrates on. Thus in the concluding section of Governing by Fake News, “A problem of democracy” he writes:

It would be wrong to believe that fake news masks a will. That would be a “conspiracy” interpretation. In fact, the opposite is true: we act without understanding the situation or in haste, and then, in order to hide the errors of governance, we invoke fake news. As a classified presentation by the UK’s Joint Threat Research Intelligence Group (JTRIG) on influence operations states: People make decisions for emotional reasons, not rational ones2024. This is what happened during the Coronavirus crisis in most countries: by ignoring the Chinese experiences, precious time was lost in preparing for the crisis, and emergency measures (generalized containment) had to be taken with catastrophic consequences. The real problem is not the “infoxes” that “get the buzz,” but the subtle distortions of facts that lead our democracies down the wrong path. Our opinions are deliberately distorted by assumptions or mere suspicions, framed in such a way that they appear as established facts.

I agree that Baud has identified a real problem. But one cannot dig away at fake news and not constantly hit a wall of wills as one runs into PSY OPS and false flags, a panoply of gaslighting techniques and examples, endless examples of disinformation created by intelligence agents, and countless lies wittingly told by government officials. All of this exists alongside of the commonplace refusal of media outlets to demand journalistic protocols that would prevent falsehoods of great magnitude and implications for the fate of a nation. Media outlets routinely air false stories, so much so that they are now playing a major part in the Industrial Censorship Complex by protecting the false and denouncing the true. So in spite of his disclaimers about wilful intentions, and a preface that suggests incompetence is the greater crime, in page after page he speaks of the lies that have been told in the West’s fight against its enemies. Thus on the very page after he the citation I provided above, he also writes “Tony Blair will go into Iraq knowing that the charges against Saddam Hussein were false.” And earlier in the book he also noted:

There are very few verifiable and irrefutable facts to support our picture of countries like Russia, Iran, Syria, etc. Gaddafi was probably a dictator, but where are the mass graves of the massacres attributed to him? Omar Bashir was probably a dictator too, but where are the mass graves of the 400,000 deaths in Darfur between 2003 and 2006? By having created and accepted these lies without batting an eyelid, we have generated hundreds of thousands of other deaths and an immigration that we can no longer control.

Indeed, in a book which is possibly the best single compendium of the disinformation about nations and events involving those leaders or nations which have thwarted the geopolitical objectives of the West—objectives which are now impossible to disassociate from globalist liberal progressivism—the word lie accompanies the narrative like a bass drum does a rock song.

But, it is true that many of those, indeed the overwhelming majority, who participate in making up the wall of wills, ambitious as they are, are not very bright, and act out of ignorance. I do not blame Baud, a man with an extraordinary military and peacekeeping career who has taken a stand on the Ukraine war that leaves him marginalized, and open to denunciation and humiliation, for framing the problem the way he does so that the added debris of being a conspiracy theorist is not also piled upon him. And Baud wants his readers to join him in being rational and objective about the information he has presented. Thus he sees

The inability of Western intelligence services to analyse situations objectively and factually is a vulnerability on two levels. The first is the disproportionate influence of the American, British and Israeli services, which are said to have far superior analytical capabilities. The second is that a rumour or the action of a group of individuals could well lead to a major conflict. Our services lack the method and experience to understand strategic realities. Faced with the complexity of security problems, Western services have sought answers in the accumulation of data. Paradoxically, however, data has become their weakness. Pseudo-experts attribute this to the growing inability of the services to process the mass of information. This is incorrect: the problem is their inability to see the bigger picture.

Unlike Baud, I think reason is something everyone thinks they have, and, as I detail at more length in the third part of this essay, the Enlightenment dream of creating a perfect society out of the kinds of creatures (for in spite of our virtues, it is the lack thereof that never disappears—our weaknesses, and susceptibility to laziness, superstition, ambition, lust, greed etc. are perennially with us), is akin to a child trying to move the ocean into a hole with a teaspoon, and, indeed, nothing was ever going to be more irrational and more assured of creating a totalitarian society than the attempt to build a “rational” one.

But I tarry too long with where I think Baud is both giving away too much to his enemies, and hoping too much for where and how much reason figures in our lives. For when faced with the kind of reader who most needs to read it, he will be met with the self-satisfied smugness of closed mind who thinks him a Putin stooge, so maybe his strategy is a way to get a bit of listening space. For the rest of us, though, who want to know what is going on, Baud’s downplaying the intentionality behind fake news has little bearing on what is a rigorous and compelling account of the disastrous nature and direction of Western foreign policy and geopolitical objectives and tactics. I urge the reader of this essay to get a hold of that book, and work his way through the fake news that has operated in tandem with the geopolitical objectives, policies and interventions of the USA and, more generally, the Western imperial alliance. For I can only cover a small sample of the examples that his book provides to make his case.

Let’s start with the lie that Al Qaeda emerged as a response to the Soviet invasion, when the Soviet invasion was itself a response to the “American attempt to destablise the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul with jihadist movements six months earlier. The chaos that followed once the US had achieved their strategic objective of rolling back Soviet influence in Afghanistan led to the emergence of the Taliban. Hardly anyone in the West had ever heard of these goatherders with machine guns in one hand, and a Koran in the other until 9.11. Then, when the attacks upon the USA were interpreted as being master-minded by Osama Bin-Laden the Taliban was ostensibly a party to a global jihadist movement.

In fact, goats aside, it was a regional Sunni sectarian power intent in federating the different ethnic groups that made up the Afghan resistance. I am not saying I would like to be ruled by the Taliban. But the nature and cultural undergirding of social groups, and their existential and political priorities, options and choices in Afghanistan are what they are—and in the 20 years or so of US led post-Taliban occupation, nothing was done that created a more viable or more Western orientated government with a strong support base. The Taliban were the government prior to the US-led invasion and they are again now—after all the killing, the sequence of corrupt governments and the debacle of the US abandonment, leaving those who had cooperated with them to their, fate along with the billions of dollars’ worth of weapons they also left behind for the Taliban (the mainstream figure now touted is $7 billion—I don’t know whether that is closer to the mark than the 80 plus billion claimed by critics of the withdrawal—though I do know if Snopes says it is 7 billion I am more inclined to believe the 80 plus figure). But let us see Baud’s account of the Taliban’s response to the US demand for them to hand over Bin Laden after 9.11. For it is just the kind of fact that most people either never knew or have forgotten:

The Taliban’s position is clear: they are ready to hand him over, but demand proof of his guilt. The Americans provided evidence, but the Afghan High Court of Justice ruled that it did not prove his involvement and refused to hand him over. The Taliban then asked the Americans to make a “constructive proposal” to resolve the crisis. But this request was never reported as such in the Western media and the Americans did not respond. Yet the Taliban sought a solution. On 21 February 2001, they offered to extradite him to the United States in exchange for an agreement on the sanctions affecting the country, but for reasons that were never fully clarified, the US government refused. After 9/11, the issue of OBL’s extradition came up again and the Taliban envoy told the US chargé d’affaires in Islamabad that if the US provided evidence of his responsibility, the “problem could be easily solved.” But in reality, the evidence of OBL’s involvement is of little interest to the Americans, as they had already decided to intervene in Afghanistan long before “9/11.” On 4 September 2001, exactly one week before 9/11, the National Security Presidential Directive 9 (NSPD9)52 was submitted to President George W. Bush for signature. Classified SECRET, it is entitled Defeating the Terrorist Threat to the United States53, and in a TOP SECRET classified annex, it directs the Secretary of Defense to plan military options “against Taliban targets in Afghanistan, including leadership, command control, air defence, ground forces and logistics.“ It was approved on 25 October 2001.

There is much more to that story that Baud tells and that the mainstream US journalists either never knew or never cared to discover, but let’s move onto the Dafur “genocide.” I leave aside the intricacies of the conflict there, and the details Baud provides which indicate what a ridiculously simplistic summary of the issues and events have been spread by the media—and will just cite this passage from Baud:

At the outset of the Darfur crisis, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) mentioned the figure of 180,000 dead. By early 2005, when the UN mission was established, the most common estimate was 200,000 dead. During this period, when the author had a very good overview of the situation and collaborated with the main Western intelligence services, no major clashes took place and humanitarian access was generally good. However, in 2008, Jan Egeland, the then OCHA coordinator, stated that 400,000 was closer to the reality. However, ten years later, the figure most often put forward is 300,000 dead, while remaining purely speculative. Despite numerous rumours and the claims of some humanitarian NGOs, no mass graves, mass graves or evidence of massacres on this scale have been found. In fact, these figures are derived from statistical estimates and projections based on unverified and unverifiable testimony. But this does not prevent the international community from accusing the Sudanese government of “genocide.” To justify this accusation, two notions are played on alternately: mortality due to the consequences of violence (lack of hygiene, lack of water and food, etc.) and mortality due to the acts of violence themselves. In fact, they are mixed. In addition, the role of local armed actors is deliberately minimised in order to attribute their violence to the government. Between early 2005 and mid-2006, at the request of the head of UNMIS, the mission’s intelligence unit (JMAC) carried out four studies on violent mortality in Darfur. All available sources are used: international (such as WHO and ICRC) and non-governmental organisations, the African Union mission (AMIS), the UN security service (UN DSS), Sudanese security services, Western intelligence services and the rebel groups themselves. In most cases, there are photographic documents or detailed reports (police, medical, military, and/or human rights bodies). The results are surprising: Period Number of deaths: June 2004—March 2005 400 April 2005—July 2005 1 200 August 2005—January 2006 500 February 2006—July 2006 400 Total (June 2004—July 2006) 2500 . (JIC Assessment, International Terrorism: Impact of Iraq, Joint Intelligence Committee, 13 April 2005, TOP SECRET (declassified January 2011) Table 2—Victims of violence in Darfur (2004-2006)) These figures are probably still too high, but they include all forms of violence, from simple crime to tribal skirmishes.

The point of this is simply that while a huge number of people in the US don’t know anything about the world, including their own world, those that think they do, when they hear or see the word Darfur, will associate that word with some completely fabricated figure that is supposed to lend support to there having been a genocide. Information is inseparable from association, and when the information is so shoddy, so are the associations and hence the judgments relying upon those associations are bound to be ignorant. And the judgments made so forthrightly by all sorts of influential people are often shockingly ignorant when it comes to commentary upon the enemies of the US. One might add, there is a reason why such a bunch of half-baked brains dreamt up the neo-con disasters that have plagued the US, and, the irony, is that their equally half-baked brained liberal opponents invariably end up just doing a variant of the same thing—thus was the Obama supported/ assisted Arab Spring really just one more stab at regime change that was supposed to make the Middle East the latest democratic flower child to join in US/ European progressive cultural wisdom.

Since the USA abandoned the Shah of Iran to his fate, thereby giving further confirmation to the famous line of Kissinger that “It may be dangerous to be America’s enemy, but to be America’s friend is fatal,” Iran has become viewed by the West, as George Bush Jr, put it in 2002, as part of the axis of evil. Whether true or not, Baud makes a convincing case that at least from the time the story of Irangate broke—where the Regan regime was secretly selling arms to Iran to finance the war against the Contras in Nicaragua—the West has been spreading fake stories about Iran. Thus, for example, in 1988 when the US shot down the Airbus of Iran Airflight 655 that killed 290 people 66 of whom were children), the US government and media concealed the fact that the US cruiser which bought down the airbus was in Iranian waters and then concocted the story that the airbus was really an Iraian F-14 “in a dive against the ship.”

Most people in the West have no idea that Iran had tried to improve relations with the West at the end of the Cold War, that it was neutral during the first Gulf War (given its earlier history with the US backed invasion by Saddam, that was about as good as an “alliance” was like to be), that hostilities with the Taliban, who had assassinated nine Iranian diplomats in 1988, led to it providing intelligence to the Americans, as well as supporting the US invasion of Afghanistan. And for their thanks, as Baud points out a month after James Dobbin at the Bonn Agreement had “thanked Iran for having convinced its Afghanistan allies go join the coalition of national unity,” Bush Jr. identified Iran as belonging to the axis of evil. That old imperial American gratitude yet again.

The following point raised by Baud is also an excellent account of the sheer stupidity of the US when it comes to even thinking though its own geopolitical interests:

By intervening in Iraq in 2003, with the support of the country’s Shiite majority, American strategists did not understand that they were creating a continuous axis between Iran and Lebanon, which they reinforced by isolating Syria after 2005. They thus generated a feeling of encirclement among the Gulf monarchies, as evidenced by a SECRET message from the American embassy in Ryadh, dated 22 March 2009108. This is what will later push Saudi Arabia and Qatar to reassert Sunni influence through the revolutions, which affected secular Arab countries. The West perceived them as democratic outbursts, whereas they were essentially a defensive reaction of the Gulf monarchies that felt threatened. This is all the more true since most of their oil wealth is located in areas where their Shiite minorities are in the majority.

Baud’s analysis of Iran is astute and raises issues rarely noted by Western journalists, but before passing onto briefly look at what he says about Syria and Venzuela, I should mention his account of the assassination of General Soleimani, an assassination much trumpeted by President Trump. Baud has nothing good to say about the impact of Trump’s presidency on global affairs, and whenever his name occurs in this book, it is because of the recklessness of Trump’s interventions. The case of Soleimani is a very good example of a presidential decision making tenuous and fraught diplomatic relations even worse. As Baud points out Soleimani’s assassination was rooted in Trump’s

claim to American authority over Iraqi oil, in payment for investments in the country! In order to put pressure on Iraq, Trump proposed to Prime Minister Adil Abdul-Mahdi to complete the reconstruction of the country’s infrastructure in exchange for the transfer of 50 % of the oil.

The refusal to accept this by Abdul-Mahdi led Trump to respond that he would help internal Iranian opposition overthrow the regime. Subsequently violent protests erupted in Baghdad.

In December of that same year an Iranian-made missile hit a base housing Iraqi and US units fighting ISIS and killing a US mercenary. Although there was no definitive proof of who was behind the strike, Trump accused the Iranians for it, leading to a retaliatory strike in Syria against Iranian backed soldiers. These strikes in turn incited rioters storming the American embassy in Baghdad, while Soleimani was accused of being the brains behind the storm along with plotting operations against four American embassies in the Middle East.

Unable to provide any definitive proof to Congress, the government segued from lie to lie—even claiming “that Soleimani had helped the terrorists prepared for 9.11” (obviously relying upon the fact that most Americans would have no idea about the hostility between Al Qaeda, Saudi Arabia, and Iran, and there was never the slightest evidence for the involvement of Iran, just as there had never been anything reliable linking Al Qaeda to Saddam Hussein). On the day that Pompeo was reduced by journalists wanting to know more about the “imminent threats” to the US embassies he could only bluster that the plans were real, though none knew where they were supposed to be, President Trump changed tack—the issue was not the threats—but Soleimani’s “horrible past.” Baud continues:

On the same day, Donald Trump confessed that this “imminent threat” was not the problem, but rather the general’s “horrible past “! He is referring to his alleged responsibility for the death of 600 American soldiers in Iraq since 2003. An accusation relayed in France by the pro-Israeli media, like Dreuz. But it is false: the Pentagon spokesman confesses that he “has no study, no documentation, no data to provide to journalists that could confirm these figures. Unverified, the number of 600 was not originally attributed to Soleimani, but to Iran. This is also a lie: it originated in January 2007, when US Vice President Dick Cheney was looking for pretexts to strike Iran.

After the generals of the Joint Chiefs of Staff unanimously and categorically refused to strike Iranian nuclear capabilities about which there was no intelligence, Cheney claimed that Iran had supplied directional anti-vehicle mines (responsible for the deaths in question)274. Another lie: the devices were made in Iraq, with equipment purchased from the United Arab Emirates, as confirmed by the very serious Jane’s Intelligence Review.

Baud has no illusions about there not being any internal opposition to the Iranian regime—though he is right to point out the inanity of thinking that the government’s lack of support translates into Iranians in any way supporting US/Western geopolitical intrusions in the Middle East. What is a fantasy is that Iran is today considered to be a global supporter of jihad—any dreams that the Ayatollah may have had of a possible Shia led pan-Islamic alliance seem ridiculous in light of the enmities within the Islamic world—and that is aside from the fact the Iranian form of government is not even universally supported by Shia Muslims.

But the fantasy about Iran is widely held and Baud gives the example of the French writer and philosopher Michel Onfray on the popular program in France “On n’est pas couché,” claiming that “Iran rejoiced, after the Charlie Hebdo killings.” But, as Baud rightly points out: this was not the case at all; “it was unequivocally and publicly condemned by the Iranian President.”

On that front I think a far stronger case can be made that it is the Saudis, a US ally, that have helped sponsor global terror—as it maintained a revolving door of terrorism, geeing jihadists up to leave the country, then locking them up or providing intel to the US as they returned. Further it has spent a fortune funding mosques and imams sympathetic to their Wahhabism in a hegemonic attempt to spread Islam globally. We know why the US lets the Saudis get away with what they do, but apart from it being a dangerous game, the double standards are not lost on anyone who doubts that the US is bringing more order and peace to the world.

Baud also rightly draws attention to the real issue—already mentioned—the Tehran Damascus axis “which frightens Gulf monarchies.” And while there are undoubted hostilities between Iran and Israel, Baud argues that the threat to Israel is persistently overplayed by Israel and the USA and exaggerated by the media.

As with America, Israel’s bungling, and indiscriminate responses to attacks have often played a role in unnecessarily increasing hostilities between them and other regional players. Unlike the US though, the very existence of Israel is precariously poised given its very regional location, so it is more understandable that they overreact or operate outside international norms that they too give lip service too. But however much sympathy one may have for the plight of Israel, bad decisions are still bad decisions, and the law of unintended consequences does not bypass a people simply because of the past horrors they have experienced, and sought to avoid again. That Israel unnecessarily created a fierce enemy for itself can be seen in the creation of Hezbollah in the context of the conflict with the PLO. The settlement of some 300,000 refugees in the aftermath of the “67 war and Black September in Jordan in 1970 had exacerbated Shiite hostility against the Palestinians. Israel’s attempt to put a stop to the PLO “launching attacks into Israel from Southern Lebanon was disastrously handled. Instead of taking advantage of the local schisms and tensions, Israel indiscriminately fought against Lebanese Shiites and Palestinian Sunnis “quickly creating unanimity between them.” Up until then the Lebanese Shiites had not had any particular beef with Israel—and anyone familiar with Sunni-Shia hostilities in the Middle East knows that the religious divisions between Sunni and Shia can be every bit as acrimonious as between Muslims and Jews. If you have not done so find some Sunni-Shia scholarly debates and sit back with the popcorn—it is a theological equivalent of UFC.

Baud’s chapter on Iran also discusses the widely reported claim that President Ahmadinejad, quoting Ayatollah Khomeini, had called for Israel being “wiped off the map,” when what he said was that “the regime that occupies Jerusalem must be erased from the page of history.” The difference may seem moot. But I think Baud is right to draw attention to a mistranslation which calls for the extermination of a people rather than a geopolitical call for regime change. Certainly no journalist in the USA seems to think that their support for what is de facto support for Russian regime change is a call for genocide, even it goes along with Lindsey Graham gloating over money being well spent when it leads to dead Russians. But it is precisely because such conflations between regime and a people are made by choosing to be inattentive to what is actually said that the media de facto endorses perilous geopolitical political adventures. Likewise, the conflation is also at the heart of the unconscionably cruel and stupid tactic that has become commonplace in the West and is part of the armoury to be used against Russian and Iran amongst others to deploy sanctions as a means of inducing regime change. The tactic itself only shows the utter contempt for the ostensible morally based grounding of the West—its willingness to use people, who simply want to get on with living their lives under the conditions they have been thrown into, as cannon fodder in creating a world that fits their picture of the good and the true.

Another primary piece of disinformation discussed by Baud is that surrounding Iran’s nuclear programme. Baud points out that Iran had already abandoned it nuclear weapons program in 2003, and that this had been confirmed in 2007 by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the National Intelligence Council, and reinforced in 2012 by Mossad and the CIA. Neverthtless, the US intelligence agencies had disclosed that they were seeking a pretext to overthrow the Iranian government and that Prime Minister Netanyahu went on record to the UN General Assembly saying that Iran would soon have nuclear weapons, thus contradicting a memo from Mossad to South African intelligence saying that Iran was not presently engaged in the production of nuclear weapons.

While it is true that Iran frequently has engaged in bellicose rhetoric about Israel, Iran, nevertheless, signed the Vienna agreement in 2015 in the hope of having sanctions lifted for reducing nuclear capabilities. But the sanctions were not lifted, and in 2018 Netanyahu, a Prime Minister caught up in domestic scandals that may still end up sending him to prison, falsely claimed that Tehran had been lying about its nuclear program. In fact he was using documents dating back to 2002! Trump would follow up on Netanyahu’s falsehood, and adding few of his own in a tweet of July 10 2019: “Iran has long secretly “enriched,” in total violation of the terrible $150 billion deal signed by John Kerry and the Obama administration. Remember that this agreement was due to expire in a few years.” Baud continues:

In a few words, he manages to lie on three points. Concerning enrichment activities, it should be remembered that for military use, uranium must be enriched to 90%. Iran never exceeded 20% before the JCPOA. With the treaty, Iran had agreed to limit itself to 3.67% for a period of 15 years; and in its report of 31 May 2019, the IAEA confirms that Iran has kept to these limits. Moreover, in January 2019, during her hearing before the Senate Intelligence Committee, CIA Director Gina Haspel confirmed that Iran had complied with the JCPOA, thus contradicting Trump. As for the $150 billion, this is not the amount paid by the US, but the total of Iranian assets that should be “unfrozen,” and the total is probably much lower. In August 2015, in an audit to the Senate Finance Committee, Adam J. Szubin, Treasury Undersecretary for Financial Intelligence and Terrorism, estimated the amount at “just over $50 billion.” Another lie. Finally, as far as the timetable is concerned, Donald Trump seems not to have read (or understood) the JCPOA. He claims that: In seven years, this agreement will have expired and Iran will be free to create nuclear weapons. This is not acceptable. Seven years is tomorrow. This is another lie. While some of the treaty’s provisions do indeed expire in 2025 (e.g. on centrifuge development), the most significant clauses (e.g. on the prohibition of nuclear weapons development, nuclear fuel reprocessing or the application of IAEA safeguards) do not have a time limit.

The absurdity of sanctions being imposed upon a state for doing what it is not doing is only matched by the absurdity of what it hopes to achieve, regime change. That is supposed to occur because “the people” will supposedly think that a primary cause of their economic woes, the US, by imposing sanctions are really their friends. There may be cases where this strategy has worked, but off the top of my head I cannot think of them. What is far more common is that the US then gets caught up in fantasies of its own making about some genuinely popular leader of a government in waiting that is pushed by the media.

This is the line being pushed about Alexei Navalny, the subject of another book by Baud, The Navalny Case: Conspiracy to Serve Foreign Policy. Navalny is an oligarch who had received five year suspended sentence for engaging in a scam with his brother (who went to prison for 3 and ½ years) that involved sweeping up state companies at a pittance and then making a killing by (illegally) selling them privately, the most notable of which was the cosmetic company Yves Rocheter. Reading about Navalny in the West today one gets the impression he is a saintly victim and bastion of democracy, when he is just another profiteer operating a network of accounting trails and shelf companies concealing illegal activities. For some reason, the kind of fraud that everyone in the West accepts as fraud does not count as fraud for Western journalists and officials if perpetrated in Russia. It is amazing just what location does to someone. We all know now that a Nazi is not a Nazi, if he is a Nazi in Ukraine.

Likewise Navalny’s xenophobic and racist involvement in the far right “Russian March” has no impact upon him being held up as the liberal alternative to dictator Putin. Nor does the fact that his popularity rating with Russians hovers around the 1 percent mark—a complete irrelevancy for the Western media. What really matters is what is ostensibly his most important credential, viz., he is yet another example of mad Vlad’s poisoning escapades—which seem to convince everybody, except anybody who actually investigates them, and discovers, as is the case in this instance, the whole story is yet one more concoction by British intelligence agencies. Anyone wanting more details about Navalny’s “poisoning” should read chapter 4 of Baud’s Navalny book. For my part, I would really like to know how much Russian mafia/oligarch money makes its way into the British secret service. Our journalists, though, will not report this because they will never receive intelligence briefings about such national secrets.

Sometimes it is not just the nefariousness of the fake news that astounds one about the fakery the US is willing to engage in to try and bring about regime change but the sheer stupidity of the claims, that can be uncovered almost instantly. That is certainly the case with Juan Guaidó’s claim to be president of Venzeuela. One does not need to be a great fan of Chávez or Maduro to see that the US interest in Venezuelan democracy has much to do with oil, and that the support shown for Guaidó comes straight out of Keystone casting who were responsible for those Kops who bear such a striking resemblance to US neo-cons. The recognition of Guaidó as President of Venezuela, by Mike Pence and Donald Trump, though, made any electoral shenanigans that Maduro and his cronies might have been up to mere child’s play, because while Maduro is not universally beloved, he does a have a strong enough support base (as do pretty well all socialists in Latin America). But there was not even the need to have a skerrick of electoral legitimacy for declaring Guaidó to be President. Indeed, as Baud points out, the day after his self-proclamation as President of Venezuela more than “80% of the population had never heard of him.”

Apart from hardly anyone knowing who is Guaidó is victim to another bit of reality that his Western enablers either don’t know or don’t care about, viz. the opposition in Venezuela, which may amount to some half of the country, is not unified into a common program or political spearhead. Whether Maduro should be popular is one thing, but he is popular is another, and, unlike Guaidó, the people of Venezuela at least know who he is.

Baud also recounts the comical spectacle of February 2019 when Guaidó “had called for a million” volunteers to distribute aid at the Colombian border, and a concert organized by Richard Branson was supposed to attract 250,000 spectators—to which Maduro responded by having a concert of his own. (Why one might ask would Richard Branson, the very vocal supporter of the Ukraine war, the great supporter of a global energy renewable reset ever on the search for the right minerals and materials to keep his aviation industry afloat, be meddling in Venezuelan politics ?) In any case, on the big day “there were only a few hundred activists on the Tienditas Bridge, and the concert attracted only about 20,000 people.” But it gets better, the money collected by Branson and the funds from international organizations “had been squandered by Juan Guaidó’s confidants in hotels, luxury clothes, and with prostitutes.” You have to love the Latino crooks, they really get their priorities right—party, party, party all night long!

This, though, was a mere prelude to an even more burlesque piece of political theatre involving Guaidó and his political handlers—the April 2019 coup, “the final phase of operation freedom;” a call for a mass insurrection no less. Again Baud recounts the US led coup that turns out to be one more comic caper of the Keystone variety:

On 30 April 2019, there are two rallies in Caracas: one by supporters of Juan Guaidó and one by supporters of the government; but the international media only picks up on the opposition demonstration. The repeated announcement of the possible defection of high-ranking military personnel had encouraged insurgents to try to enter the La Carlota military base in Caracas to rally the armed forces. CNN reporter Jake Tapper tweets that the government military is firing on the crowd. Problem: he uses photos of pro-Guaidó soldiers, clearly recognisable by their blue armbands! The media is playing a loop of images of armoured national guard vehicles ramming into the demonstrators. This could be an outbreak of violence, as we have seen elsewhere in the world; but no one mentions that Guaidó supporters stole identical vehicles the same morning and that they could have used them to stir up tension. In fact, we don’t know anything about it, but no media outlet is in any doubt.

As USA Today reported, “as the hours dragged on, opposition leader Juan Guaidó stood alone on a highway overpass with the same small cadre of soldiers with whom he launched a bold effort to spark a military uprising.”

In the hands of USA Today this looks more Hamlet than Malvolio or Buster Keaton. But it is a stunning indictment of the utter inability of the US to find competent friends to get the regimes it wants. But given the kind of regime the US itself is perhaps that is simply one more confirmation that what we are witnessing is an imperial power that having found itself through picking up spoils from the imperial fall out of European powers all but destroying themselves, has simply over reached itself, in part by failing to fathom and cultivate what kind of resources were needed to live up to its promise of being the global defender of a way of life in which freedom and initiative would ignite new achievements of the human spirit—that proved to be too hard, though, which is why they turned to the emancipation lot that now flies their flags.

Empires are nothing if not great sacrificial alters requiring serious priests, warriors, and the breeding of generations who themselves are made for sacrifice, and not simply for their own indulgence. Once the ruling class succumbs to indulgence it’s Goodnight Irene—get back into the darkness. Every political philosopher worth anything has warned against the dangers of indulgence, and the US went from a generation of greats to a generation of indulgent brats in the time it took to say Dr. Spock. None can doubt the economic power of the US at its height, but as far as empires go in the annals of history, it is the equivalent of a three minute chart topping pop song.

In any case, the fiasco of Guaidó is but a symptom of US incompetence compounded by relentless pursuing policies that are supposed to be in the national interest but keep on generating ever greater enmity. It might well be that there are better ways to run the economy than Maduro’s socialism, but the spirit of enterprise is not helped by out and out corruption combing international and national players who find loopholes for escaping taxes to pay for developmental infrastructure and social capital. The economic choices of South American governments cannot be separated from ruling class, landed and military economic interests, cooperating with foreign capital garnering its interests with military and police brutality. The class polarisations in Central and South America have deep historical rooted.

Those class conditions when combined with Cold War, and US interference—from the supply of weapons and training to coups, and the propping up of regimes with death squads—in the region, plus the political clout of cartels go someway to explaining why socialism seems to many to be a better option than what they have. A figure like Chávez is the product of a society that has a very different developmental trajectory to Western Europe, North America or Australasia. Baud is right to point to the economic success of Chávez’s nationalisation strategy :

A period of growth followed that no previous government had achieved. The gross national product per capita, which had stagnated between $1,000 and $4,000 for decades, rose to $13,500 in 2010. Poverty is reduced from 70.8% (1996) to 21% (2010), while extreme poverty falls from 40% (1996) to 7.3% (2010).”

But I am less sure than Baud that this strategy did not also come with economic problems down the road, much like Cuba’s initial successes may have not helped move beyond the jolt that was needed. For while US sanctions have made matters worse, I am not convinced that the imposition of one party rule over a nation’s economy and the obstacles for national capital investment have not created major problems. This is a big issue, but creating a political framework for a successful economy strikes me as the most difficult balancing act which ideological thinking does not help. But the cultivation of an educated political elite who can veer between the pernicious interests of global capital and the more locally brewed style of corruptions is an endless challenge, one which Western market democracies once seemed to rise to, but no longer. Nevertheless, what Baud notes immediately following the points about its economic success are indisputable:

In the last decade of the 20th century, the US was absorbed in the aftermath of the Gulf War (1991) and ‘9/11’, with a foreign policy focused on the Middle East and North Africa. Apart from a coup d’état that temporarily overthrew Chávez in 2002, the United States are abandoning the subcontinent, which is tilting almost entirely to the left in Venezuela’s wake: Chile (March 2000), Brazil (January 2003), Argentina (May 2003), Bolivia (January 2006), Ecuador (January 2007), Paraguay (August 2008), Uruguay (March 2010) and Peru (July 2011). One of the consequences of this shift to the left, dubbed the “pink tide,” has been the arrival of other players, such as China, which is taking advantage of this “vacuum” to aggressively move into the continent.

Note the last sentence. Of course empires are rivals—and I cannot help but see the Belt and Road Initiative as anything other than an imperial initiative. But it is a far superior initiative than what has been displayed by the countless decades of US economic and military meddling in Latin America which has done nothing so much as make it a hated country. One could respond with the question, if it is hated, why are so many Latinos flooding the borders? But the hopes of economic advancement, and opportunities behind the mass migration, not to mention the extent of criminal migration and the drug/human/ and child trafficking, do not automatically translate into a desire to embrace the constitution or values of the host country. Many who flood the border come carrying the flag of the country they are leaving behind. And it is very easy to justify breaking the law to enter into a country whose wealth, whether rightly or wrongly, is widely seen as owing a lot to the plunder and political interference in their own country. None can dispute the fact, though, that the existence of the cartels is directly related to the demand for drugs coming from North America, and hence has created unliveable conditions for those wanting to escape from the hellish concoction fueled by drug wars and drug lords.

Further, given that there are no values in the United States sufficiently robust to galvanize civic unity amongst the larger population—even the flag and national anthem are seen as racist by many of the pedagogical class—who could blame those clambering to enter the USA from its southern “border” for simply wanting to take what they can get? Which is exactly what the ruling class of the US teaches, albeit the getting is wrapped up in identity, being a Latino suffices to make one a client for those taking the progressive road to political power. In any case, the ruling class in the United States (using its pedagogical wing) sees the entire globe rather than its particular portion of it, as its rightful asset, which is why its journalists and academics speak incessantly about how the world should be, as if they had the knowledge and the right to run it. Their entitled and extremely grand aspirations, though, fail to take into account that it is highly likely in the not too distant future, possibly in my life time, that the border flood may well end up in territorial (re)annexation by Mexico and the cartels, as the US collapses amidst the race wars it has been creating for itself. The greater geopolitical explosions has been igniting may also ignite a great racial bonfire at home. That the US has created enemies of people and regimes it need not make enemies of seems to be its stock in trade. Another great example of that is the US treatment of Syria.

As Baud points out in his chapter on Syria in Governing by Fake News, Syria had been a member of the coalition against Iraq and had deployed 1,450 troops in Desert Storm. Although Clinton had helped broker a peace process between Hafeez al-Assad and the Isreali government, Bush Jr.’s and Sharon’s governments derailed that. After 9/11 Syria had also provided information that the CIA had admitted was extremely valuable about the activities of the Muslim Brotherhood in Syria and Germany, but John Bolton, who would briefly pop up as yet another neo-con spoiler in the Trump administration, in his role as Undersecretary of State “added Syria to the axis of evil.” Syria did not join the second Iraq war, rightly seeing that it would only exacerbate the problem of jihadism in the region, though it would have to bear the brunt of some 1 ½ million Iraqi Sunni refugees. In a country where the ruling elite has a leader from a minority Islamic sect, which is generally hated even more than Shiites by sectarian Sunni jihadists, the Alawites, which make up some 13 percent of the Syrian population, this was one more existential threat that the Assad regime had to face and which was primarily a US creation.

It does seem that while the US understands the existential threat due to surrounding demographics that confronts Israel, in the case of Syria, that is simply an opportunity to be used. And it was used. But rather than achieving any greater concord in the region, it was used for contributing to even greater chaos which would eventually create the opportunity for Islamic State. While nature also lent a hand—a drought that went for some five years from 2005, so did other political events, such as the assassination of Lebanese Prime Minister Rafic Hariri which, with no credible evidence, was blamed on Syria, though as Baud rightly points out his death left Israel as the major beneficiary of the aftermath of the political vacuum it created in Lebanon. And, as Baud also notes, the regional break up of Syria has been a long term goal to enhance Israel geopolitical strategic advantage as laid out by the Yinon Plan in 1982 published by the World Zionist Organisation. It has also figured in long term US plans, as is evident from a CIA memo of 1986 which states that “American interests would be best served by a Sunni regime, controlled by moderates guided by business.”

Although Baud does not say this, it is noteworthy how the US government and reporters love bandying around the vacuous word “moderate” when dealing with value differences they have no idea of how to address. Under Obama the Muslim Brotherhood were rebadged as moderates, which is clearly nonsense if one takes into account their long term strategic political objectives, as say laid out in the writings of Sayyid Qutb, or any of the official declarations which call for a world living under Islam. The fact is that the differences between the Muslim Brotherhood, Al Qaeda and even Islamic State is one of the constituency of its appeal, the tactic deployed, and the theological emphasis—Muslim Brotherhood is seen as a sell-out for being willing to use the political mechanisms available to it to be rid of the plague of sins which so horrified Qutb when he visited the West, while Islamic State’s hatred of the Shia and even Sunnis who did not wish to join them in the new caliphate, or who believed it had no theological legitimacy. While Islamic State’s (videod) beheadings are extremely shocking—it is difficult to argue that the use of bombs and assassination, or that anything about a world caliphate which would require non-Muslims being Dhimmis is moderate. Words like “extremist” and “moderate” are mobile classifiers—thus now an extremist is someone in the US who thinks one’s sexual organs are a biological not a voluntary condition—which tell us far more about the people using them than the person or group classified as such. And what is pertinent here is that a political program that is faith based and has local and traditional roots and tentacles is not something that CIA or US imperial meddling can simply modulate to suit its interests. Peace can only exist when there is a recognition of implacable or non-negotiable differences and a search by the different parties takes place so that common objectives might be found in some areas, and that the no-go areas be understood as such. This is what the West has done with its Middle Eastern allies, but refuses to do with Iran and Syria, both of which it absurdly portrays as more “extremist” countries that need to undergo regime change so they can join the good guys.

The US and West more generally has suffered under the massive delusion, perhaps nowhere more conspicuous than in its inane reading of the events taking place in the Arab world in 2011 as a democratic uprising of a liberal sort. In any case Syria offered opportunities for potential cooperation with Western powers because of the precarious nature of the leadership and the country’s demographics, but the West had no interest in pursuing those opportunities. Indeed it seems that the opportunities it and other supporters of the Syrian opposition happen to focus upon are energy related. More specifically gas pipeline-related. This summary from Lauren von Bernuth in 2017 is apposite:

Two competing oil pipelines vying to run through Syria. Both pipelines seek to connect the largest natural gas field in the world, located 3000 meters below the floor of the Persian Gulf, to … Europe. Qatar owns roughly two-thirds of the mineral rights to the Persian Gulf gas field and Iran owns the other one third. One pipeline starts in Qatar and runs through Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Syria, and Turkey into Europe… The other pipeline runs from Iran through Iraq and Syria and into the Mediterranean Sea…The first pipeline proposed to Assad was the Qatar pipeline and he rejected the proposal. Assad then later approved the Iranian pipeline, which was expected to be completed in 2016, but the Syrian war disrupted that. Now let’s look at the Syrian war: Russia and Iran are supporting Assad, while the U.S., Saudi Arabia and Turkey are supporting the rebels. So the Qatar pipeline was rejected by Assad and it just so happens that the countries with a vested interest in that pipeline are supporting the rebels.

But back to Baud, the US had been funding opposition groups and clandestine activities since 2005—2006 to bring down the al-Assad government:

In 2006 the US government began funding the Justice and Development Movement (JDM), an opposition organisation inside and outside Syria. Between 2006 and 2010, the US spends $6.3 million to fund Barada TV, a TV channel designed to spread anti-regime news, and another $6 million is used to train Syrian journalists and activists. Based in London, it began broadcasting messages in support of an overthrow of the regime in April 2009. It will play a key role in 2011 through its coverage of the riots at the start of the revolution and its messages designed to inflame public opinion by disseminating false information about the reaction of Syrian law enforcement agencies, relayed by the Western media.

The so-called Arab Spring was a media event, an event that was partly due to protests occurring simultaneously in the region, albeit for different objectives. Western reporters were not interested in local grievances nor the local contours of sectarian conflicts and alliances, nor the precarious balances of power and opposition that the various ruling elites in the region have to grapple with. Like bulls in a China shop, Western journalists continued to do what they have largely been trained to do: act as a cheer and jeer squad on the basis of the propaganda they picked up from their media friends, who know as little as they do, and their mostly useless education. For them it was simply a matter of cheering on what they saw as a nascent liberal world order that they would have freely adopted had it not been oppressed by homophobia, racism, cis-genderist persecution, white supremacy, anti-feminism, imperialism, and Islamophobia, and tyrannical pronouns. The difference between liberal progressive la-la-land and neo-con la-la-land has nothing to do with genuine conceptual analytics, but much rather has to do with their preferred style of imperialism. That and the respective fantasies they like to tell each other in their respective grandiosely stupid conversations about how they will make the world. In any case Obama’s Arab Spring was simply a variant of the Bush dogma that the Arabs all wanted to live in democratic states and all that needed to be done was for the people to get together and overthrow the non-democracies under which they live—cut to Thunderclap Newman singing “We just got to get it together cause the revolution‘s here” and you get a good idea of the memory bank of the mental capacity of the more stately members of the Western ruling class today.

The fabricators of this nonsense were the kind of people who simply could not understand how difficult it is to keep peace in lands where sectarian differences affect almost every area of life, which is also why the political powers of the region would be either monarchs, or military dictators, and that eliminating strong men like Saddam Hussein or Muammar Gaddafi would not open up more liberal, let alone more stable regimes with the people all merrily singing “We are the World.” Had the US had its way, Assad, would have had a fate similar to Gaddafi, and Syria would have come out of it like Libya. Surprise, surprise, Assad did not like that particular script. In any case, Libyan rebels linked up with Syrian rebels to fuel a civil war, in which the rebels mainly consisted of foreigners—which is to say it was a funny kind of civil war.

Although the Western media were spinning stories which would make Assad’s government seem like a total hell-hole—Baud compares the response of the Syrian government to ongoing Kurdish demonstrations between 2005 and 2009 to that of French authorities to the Yellow Vests in France—and while there were sectarian discontents with historical roots going back at least siege of the city of Hamah in 1982—where thousands, estimates range from five to forty thousand—died, which were preceded by the events involving the Muslim Brotherhood revolt in the 1970s—the protests against Assad were never going to bring down the Assad government. There was discontent but not insurrection—though to appreciate this differentiates requires the reader not to have accepted the super-updated definition of an insurrection as whatever journalists and the uni-party say it is. Moreover, the army which was predominantly Sunni was mostly loyal to Assad. That the dissident faction in the Syrian Army were mainly Muslim Brotherhood is part of the reason why the US had rebranded the Muslim Brotherhood as moderate. And while the Assad government is Ba’athist and a carry-over from the Arab nationalism of the mid 20th century, its constitution is not strictly secular, its head of state must be a Muslim, and it incorporates elements of Islamic law into its judicial system.

Assad himself is urbane and sophisticated (as is his well-educated wife), and I mean urbane in the best sense—a doctor by training, who has only been turned into a tyrant by a media happy to villainize anyone they are paid to. But he has had to work with the social values and priorities that operate in Syria. Given the forces his government has had to balance, that there would be discontentment is inevitable. But the fact is that some 70% of the Syrian Population (according to independent surveys recognized by NATO!) support Assad.

In the West the media misrepresents the scale of discontent by passing off fabricated examples. Thus, for example, a massacre of 260 civilians was reported to have occurred in Homs—but that number seems to have no definitive basis—and by the time the BBC reported it that number had become 55 deaths. Some people definitely died. But who were they, and who killed them? Baud points out that it is most likely that the dead were pro-government Christians killed by anti-government militia.

Another piece of news fakery was in 2012 when a BBC journalist tweeted that the Syrian air force was bombing civilians in East Aleppo with Russian “MiGs.” Except—the planes were not MiGs, but Su-24s or Aero L-39s which don’t carry bombs. And, and in any case, civilians were not bombed. Yet another false massacre report was in Al-Houla. And as in the previous example from Homs, the numbers shift around, so that as one zooms in on the facts they seem to evaporate, or turn into their opposite. Franceinfo repeated information about this massacre from the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a highfalutin name for a Sunni Islamist opponent of the Syrian regime operating out of a London flat who is on the Saudi and Qatari pay roll (interesting isn’t it what alliances take place between enemies when money is involved). But, says Baud: “we see practically nothing: no place, no person, no weapon or date is identified. Eventually a journalist from Germany’s FAZ discovered that there were people killed in Al-Houla, and they were Shia converts, who had been knifed, not killed by heavy weapons, which suggests that it was not the Syrian army but opposition rebels. That there is the problem of reliability about the numbers of victims in the conflict, as well as who the victims really are, owes much to the fact that most of the information about the conflict comes from this guy in the London flat.

Of all the whoppers told in the Western press and governments about Syria, the biggest would have to be that Islamic State was somehow the creation of al-Assad. Anyone who knows anything about Assad and Islamic State would know just how crazy this is, but that was what the French Minister of Foreign Affairs was saying in 2014, and it was an idea repeated by the French philosopher Bernard-Henry Lévy, who has become a leading philosophical apologist for the US/ European imperial axis. This particular conspiracy theory ignores the most salient and disturbing fact that Western alliance of the French, British, and French and the Turkish governments and special services have, commencing with Muslim Brotherhood and Libyans mentioned above, armed and trained Islamists in their war against Syria, and that:

The militarisation of the Syrian revolution by the West forced the government to concentrate its forces in the west of the country. The result was a security vacuum in the east, which allowed the joining of Iraqi and Syrian Islamist forces, and the transformation of the ‘Islamic State in Iraq’ into the ‘Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant’. A dynamic map of the Syrian war shows that the Islamic State has grown from Iraq and the Turkish border and has established itself on Syrian territory in the wake of armed groups, such as the Free Syrian Army (FSA), supported by France and the United States.

Finally, while Baud’s analysis of what has occurred in Syria contains far more examples, I will conclude his discussion of Syria (and he has much, much more to say) with his discussion the white helmets, a topic that the journalist Vanessa Beeley has also covered in detail. The white helmets have a received a lot of press coverage, and they are presented as angels in human form. They were nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2016. But given that Barack Obama, whose main claim to fame was being a black man who was the President, (lesser know was that he presided over some ten times more drone strikes than George Bush Jr.) , and that Henry Kissinger, who had been the brains behind the secret war in Cambodia that opened the way for the Khmer Rouge to take over the country, have won this prize founded by the inventor of dynamite, one might be wise to be a tad sceptical about just how peaceful they really are. Baud is sceptical:

In reality, the White Helmets only operate in areas hostile to the Syrian government and in the hands of Jabhat al-Nosrah. Numerous videos show some of its members participating in the beheading of little Abdullah Issa by militants of the Nur al-Din al-Zinki Movement, or with weapons and an Islamist flag in hand. British journalist Vanessa Beeley posted videos on YouTube showing White Helmets participating in the making of the ‘Mortars of Hell’, which project ‘barrel bombs’. Just after the recapture of East Aleppo, the young French development worker Pierre le Corf visited the White Helmets’ headquarters and noted the collusion with Jabhat al-Nosrah. This does not prevent Agnès Levallois, on France 5, from underlining the “quite remarkable” character of the organisation… which will be allied with Turkey during its October 2019 offensive against the Syrian Kurds!

In addition the Ministry of Foreign Affairs had to report to parliament in 2018 that the one and half million Euros that had been given in aid to the White Helmets “was not traceable in the field and was likely to have been used to acquire weapons.”

What Baud’s book shows over and over—and with far more examples than I can recount here—is not only how absolutely unreliable the Western media is as a source of reliable information about the world events that appear in the daily news, but how time and time again it is simply a means of mis- or dis-informing the public about the truth. The process of disinformation has one overall objective—to create broad base support for military and intelligence interventions that serve the larger game plan of the US/ European imperial alliance. Were the players not such a bunch of duds and sad-sacks, who think they are super educated and have fine tastes in all the stuff they can get their mits on, were the outcomes ones in which the world was more peaceable and a better place because tyrants were now no longer amongst us, instead of a place where the Western Axis of evil tyrannically presides over its own internal chaos and spreads even more chaos to regions already caught up in their own conflicts, then one might wish to ignore books like Baud’s.

But all of the events discussed in Baud’s books are part of the long trail, which to be sure goes back much further than the end of the Cold War, but at least in the Cold War, the Soviets were an imperial power that were even worse on so many fronts than the US/ Western imperium—I know that could be debated, but I think the numbers stack up that way. But that is now irrelevant. For the US/ Western alliance was completely unprepared for what it would do after the Cold War ended, except more of the same. So they decided to keep on targeting Russia, adopting the narrative that it was just like the USSR, except there was a massive pile of wealth to be made.

It certainly did not take long for the US con-men to make their way into Russia and join in the asset stripping operation. Nor did it take long for US intelligence to try and destroy the more stable post-Yeltsin government that Putin was creating amidst a war, and terrorists bombing civilians, and organized criminals seizing the nation’s energy and commanding the information flow, after moving on from the more mundane operation of taking people’s apartments at gun point. Instead of the victor of the Cold War building a peace, it simply proceeded to build more wars.

3. Baud’s Operation Z And What the Mainstream Media Never Told You

Baud’s Governing by Fake News presents an excellent case of the diabolical fabrications and calculations that have step by step led to where we are today. And that is to a global war, partly concealed by the fact it is a proxy war. His Governing by Fake News goes into many of the details leading to the war, but his Operation Z provides a comprehensive account of the events leading to the war, as well as what has been occurring since it broke out. I will simply focus upon some of the key points that Baud relates which clarifies how Ukraine has split the way it has. Russia’s “Operation Z “is in response to a civil war on its border. It is the response of a government to persecuted Ukrainians who identity with their Russian roots, who do not want to be subjected to the rule and persecution of the Kiev government, and who when given a chance have chosen to join the Russian Federation. Were Kiev to allow the de facto now also de jure, from Russia’s perspective, boundaries of Ukraine to be redrawn, and to cease being a proxy member of NATO which is funding and helping conduct this proxy war, the war could end immediately. The reason it does not is no mystery. The American/ European Union Alliance wants regime change in Russia.

Baud commences with the emotional and cultural level of perception. Everybody I talk to who has a small teaspoon worth of facts and a belly full of bile with which to make their pronouncements about the war in Ukraine and Putin—“That animal!” exclaimed a recent visitor to my house—seems oblivious to the fact that their response is extremely emotional, that it is based upon images and ‘talking points’ that are part of a larger information war against Russia. The British empire has been at war with Russia since long before the USSR existed, and the British government continues to do all in its power to ensure the entire population accept its version of what the conflict is about and who is to blame.

The USA is a relative new-comer to imperial politics, though Woodrow Wilson thought it wise to dispatch some seven thousand troops to Siberia to contain the Bolsheviks, stave off Japanese expansionism, and help the Czech legion caught up in the civil war. It was also part of the larger liberal imperial vision pushed by Wilson which left a leading place for the USA as a harbinger of a new world order. The other members of NATO all have their reasons for aligning themselves with the US/ European imperial axis. But Baud also rightly identifies the fact a number of significant Western leaders “have a family history” which gives them a dog in the fight. They include Chrystia Freeland, the Canadian Foreign Minister, the current President of the EU Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, the German chancellor, Olaf Scholz, the US Secretary of State, Anthony Blinken, and US Under Secretary of State, Victoria Nuland. That is quite an astonishing group of people given the power they wield.

Baud says their political action “is guided more by emotion and ideology than by reflection,” and once again he announces his faith in the power of reason, at the juncture where the only reason we see is the reason of power politics, and heritage. It would be astonishing if this were sheer coincidence that the most important Western and European leaders—and let’s not forget Hunter and, Joe’s Ukrainian connections, which to be sure are more to do with veins of money than blood—all identify with a national heritage and identity which is defined by its denial and persecution of the Russian heritage, identity and language, of those who also have been born into the same land. Though none of these people grew up there, and none of them will die for the cause they have weaponized. That cause is not simply an independent Ukraine, but a Ukraine which is weaponised against Russia, and committed to breaking up the Russian federation. Baud quotes former director of the CIA, Robert Gates’s, recollection that Dick Cheney in 1991 wanted the Soviet collapse to be an occasion for the dismemberment not only of the Russian empire but itself. Moreover, the dissolution of the Soviet Union was accompanied with promises that there would be no NATO expansion Eastward. This has been a point repeatedly made by Russia, and it was confirmed by Robert Gates (Assistant to the President and Deputy National Security Adviser from 1989-1991) in 2000—now, of course, denied by Western propagandists.

There was also the problem of minority rights for ethnic Russians in former Soviet countries such as Georgia, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and of course Ukraine. It is precisely because of the Russian ethnic minorities in these countries and their mistreatment that these countries are fearful of Russian invasion. The fears are strongly enough felt. But Baud rightly points out that while it suits Western interests to publicly condemn China’s treatments of the Uighurs, allies who persecute Russians are not chastised. And it was the extent of that persecution—not just cultural attacks, but threats and acts of ethnic cleansing—that would lead to the separatist regions in the Donbas. This was all in the penumbra and aftermath of the Maidan of 2014 that so misleadingly reported in the West, as if almost the entire country supported ousting a legitimately elected president because he did not want to proceed with moving unequivocally to closer ties with the EU.

While it is understandable why Western urban Ukrainians were not happy with the decision of a President most of them did not want, a sympathetic understanding of the complexity of the political demography of Ukrainian society played no part in either Western interference or reportage. Isolated voices of formerly respected journalist Robert Parry and Soviet specialist Stephen Cohen were simply smothered or denounced by the mainstream pushing ahead with its blatant disregard of any facts that told a more complex story than one that could be supported by photo-ops of (nefarious) members of the Ukrainian resistance with John McCain and Victoria Nuland. The role of Ultra-nationalists and the foreign volunteers who joined in the attack upon the ethnically impure to build a more racially pure Europe was also not part of any official story. To be sure this was not the swamp out of which Zelensky arose—his was the private-media oligarchically built swamp.

In discussing the ultra-ethnic nationalists and neo-Nazis Baud introduces nuances which give a clearer picture of the sentiments of Ukrainian nationalists of today and of yesterday, and the mass murder of Jews that Ukrainian national hero Stepan Bandera engaged in. He points out:

The apparent ambiguity about the collaboration between Ukrainian nationalists and the Third Reich—especially in the massacre of Jewish civilians in the Ukraine—is probably explained by the fact that our view emphasises the Jewish character of the victims, whereas the Ukrainians of the time saw them as partisans who threatened the German rear in areas with a largely Jewish population. All this does not detract from the criminal nature of these organised massacres, but it could explain that they were not dictated by anti-Semitism, but by the desire for reprisals. This is not much better, but it explains the logic. In other words, there is a difference between Ukrainian militants and the Nazis of the Third Reich. This is reflected in the names “neo-Nazis” or “Ukrainian-Nazis.”

But anti-Semitism runs deep amongst Ukrainian nationalists, and there are reasons for it, which are closely bound up with the hatred felt toward the Soviet Union:

The “founding” element of Ukrainian antisemitism is the “Holodomor” (holod: hunger; mor: plague). It is believed to have caused between 4 million and 7 million deaths in 1932-33 and is considered in Ukraine to be genocide, often compared to the Jewish ‘holocaust’. Despite its magnitude, which makes it perhaps the largest massacre in history, it remains largely ignored in the West, and its character as ‘genocide’ is disputed, in part to challenge the presence of antisemitism in Ukraine. Whatever the reality, the over-representation of Jews in the Communist Party leadership and among the NKVD cadres has left the Ukrainian imagination with the feeling that they orchestrated the Holodomor. The result is a deep-seated hatred that targets both the Moscow leadership and the Jews. In 2021, the Jerusalem Post reported that the Ukrainian far right was demanding an apology from Israel for the Holodomor and the crimes of communism. Today, although not a ‘doctrine’, violent antisemitism is growing alarmingly in Ukraine.

I will not repeat points I have made in other essays in this magazine about the war about Azov and other ultra-right militias in Ukraine and their role in the larger political machinations in Ukraine which have led to the persecutions of those who ethnically identify with Russia and not with the post 2014 Ukraine, whose first legislative act was “the abolition of 2012 Kivalov-Kolesnichenko law, which established the Russian language as an official language on a par with Ukrainian.” This sparked off the rebellions in the South, which led the government to respond by sending in troops, which in turn generated the formation of a separatist political movement needing to militarise itself against the attacks directed at them. As Baud notes:

The army was largely composed of Russian speakers, who were torn between their duty as soldiers and their loyalty to their community, whose demands they shared. The repression of the demonstrations was not carried out willingly by the soldiers, who then tried to escape recruitment, committed suicide at the front or deserted to the rebels. The task of the armed forces is virtually impossible. Moreover, the Ukrainian army, which has been made up of professionals since 2013, does not have enough manpower to respond to the situation. It is undermined by the corruption of its cadres and no longer enjoys the support of the population. According to a British Home Office report, during the March-April 2014 recall of reservists, 70% did not show up for the first session, 80% for the second, 90% for the third and 95% for the fourth. On 1 May 2014, the new government ordered the conscription of young people between the ages of 18 and 25 in all parts of the country, including the southern regions. Desertions to the rebel regions are becoming increasingly common. The problem became so serious that the Ukrainian parliament passed a law allowing officers to use their weapons against their men if they tried to desert. In October-November 2017, 70% of conscripts did not show up for the “Autumn 2017” recall campaign. This is without counting suicides and desertions (often to the benefit of autonomists), which reach up to 30% of the workforce in the ATO area. Young Ukrainians refuse to fight in the Donbass and prefer to emigrate, thus contributing to the country’s demographic deficit.

The vacuum created in the army by a combination of the refusal to fight one’s ethnic kin, desertion, and suicide opened the way for formally incorporating the ultra-nationalist and neo-Nazi militias into the government forces. But those forces had played a crucial part in the Maidan, and they were not going to simply vanish into the background because the electorate wanted less tattooed, and fiercely pugnacious looking politicians. The Maidan had also opened the country to far right foreign volunteers seeing this conflict as an opportunity to build a racially pure white land not sullied by Slav, or Muslim bloodlines. There were also Russian orthodox and Serbian nationalists fighting alongside the republican separatists. The Western Press would happily note the presence of the latter, whilst, with the occasional exception, ignoring the explosion of neo-Nazi and ultra-nationalist militias, beating up and killing Russo-centric-phile Ukrainians. The new government were happy enough for these thugs to go about their business as it concerned himself with a socio-economic and political lunge Westward accompanied by its punitive actions against those in the South/ East who were reacting to being treated as second class “citizens.” Though the Western press completely ignored this. Hence when Putin made eliminating the Nazi element in Ukrainians an objective of “Operation Z,” it was greeted with a combination of incredulity and derision by journalists who had got up to speed by reading intel briefs and each other’s propaganda.

There would be some 14000 victims in the war waged by Ukraine in the Donbass from 2014. Baud notes that UN reports 80% of civilian casualties came from Ukrainian strikes, and in the period from October 1 to March 30 2020 almost 85% of civilian casualties were from Ukrainian artillery shelling. The Western media also largely ignored all of this, and went with the story that all of a sudden Vladimir Putin woke up and decided to invade a peaceful freedom loving people led by a wise man so talented he once played piano on tv with his balls. (Ok they mainly kept silent about that particular skill-set that had been witnessed by everyone with a tv in Ukraine.)

The one story about the Donbas that Western media had been running with was a complete fabrication. It had involved disinformation being spread in a resolution by the European Union Parliament relaying unverified reports from Polish intelligence sources referring to “direct military intervention,” ceasefire violations “mainly by regular Russian troops” and claims that Russia has “increased its military presence on Ukrainian territory.” The Ukrainian Prime Minister Poroshenko would claim in the following year that Russia had sent 200,000 troops to Ukraine. A few months later he would claim to the UN General assembly that Ukrainians were having to fight heavily armed Russian soldiers. There were, so he said, some 75 Russian military units operating in Ukraine. Poroshenko’s reputation as an inveterate liar as well as a crook mattered little to those wanting to spread these stories, even though in the same time span other Ukrainian officials including the head of the Ukrainian General Staff and the head of the Security Service found no evidence to support these claims. It was true that some 50 or so young Russians had been captured who had come to fight in the Donbas.

In 2018 Alexander Hug, Deputy Head of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) Observer Mission concede that OSCE has made no observations confirming the presence of Russian troops in Ukraine.

Another story that went under the radar was the role of the West in pushing for reconquering the autonomous republics through economic incentives. As Baud notes:

In May 2014, the International Monetary Fund warned Ukraine that it would not get its $17 billion loan if it did not regain control of the east of the country: If the central government loses effective control of the East, the programme will have to be rethought. This is what is pushing Kiev to relaunch its offensive against the Donbass. Ukraine receives a first tranche just after the events in Odessa. There is therefore international pressure to push Ukraine to re-establish its sovereignty over the entire territory.
From the initial coup which had been abled and abetted by the CIA and US government officials to the civil war encouraged by IMF pressure, to the lies about Russian troops occupying the Donbas back in 2014 the fabrications surrounding the US all conspire to build the case of Russian aggression. The great value of Baud’s book is that it provides a one stop shop for refuting these lies. And it is particularly good at debunking the big lie which, to the mis-and dis-informed imbibers of fake news, is the definitive proof of Russia’s long term plot for Ukrainian conquest. The big lie, of course, is that Russia conquered Crimea, and Crimea now suffers under the Russian jackboot, which is why acts of Ukrainian sabotage in Crimea are treated as acts of liberation, the likes of which take us back to the French resistance in occupied Paris.

Baud’s debunking of the Crimea lies start with UN Resolution 68/262 which declared the annexation of Crimea to be illegal. The Resolution took its “legal” point of departure from the Budapest Treaty of 1994 guaranteeing the territorial integrity of Ukraine, which thus renders invalid the Crimean referendum in 2014 that overwhelmingly voted to join the Russian Federation, so it could be relieved from Ukrainian ethnic-nationalist persecution.

The first problem with US Resolution 68/262 is that it ignores the fact that Crimeans had on a number of previous occasions expressed their desire to be ruled by Moscow. Baud also points out that the initial transfer of Crimea to Ukraine in 1954 had no legal basis: it had not been approved by the Supreme Soviet of the USST, the Supreme Soviet of the Russian Republic or the Supreme Soviet Republic of the Republic of Ukraine. Like so much else to do with the war, the mismatch between a war that is supposed to be a water tight case of legal violation, and the lack of a legal basis for Ukrainian possession of Crimea is something that has never been discussed, as far as I know, in the Western media. The transference was an act of fiat by the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet, i.e. its transfer was a dictatorial decree by Khrushchev. The irony that the great defenders of democracy against a(n elected) Russian President with a support rating (confirmed by independent sources) far surpassing any Western leader appeal to an act by a (non-elected) Soviet President who was a dictator that had neither the modicum of constitutional support that existed in the USSR nor popular support from a people who had never identified as Ukrainian is only matched by the same people who accuse all their enemies, including Trump and Putin, of being just like Hitler. But what should one expect from people defending a regime which has used, and gone along with the butchery of neo-Nazis against their ethnic enemies? How anyone outside the West can believe anything anymore the West says would be a mystery were it not for the fact that—with very few exceptions—they don’t.

As the Soviet Union was on the verge of collapse, the people of Crimea were asked in a referendum in 1991, whether they wanted to be administered by Moscow or stay with Kiev, 93.6% went with Moscow. Only people who ignore Crimea’s history would be surprised by this fact. That referendum led to the brief restoration of the Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic of Crimea, and this was essentially ratified by Ukraine who also voted in a referendum for the continuation of the USSR in 1991. The Donbas, by the way, is politically conspicuous by its lingering pro-Soviet sentiments. Some months later—in December 1991—Ukrainians held a referendum for independence from the Soviet Union, and in February of the next year the Crimean parliament declared its independence. Some two years later, in December 1994, Ukraine did a deal with Russia—it would surrender its nuclear weapons from its Soviet days in exchange for “security, independence and territorial integrity.”

At this stage, though, Crimea no longer considered itself legally a part of Ukraine. To emphasise the point: this was even prior to the persecution that led to the referendum after the Maidan. In the 1990s, in the eyes of the people of Crimea, it was not the Russians but the Ukrainians who had acted aggressively and illegally. That was in March 1995 when the Ukrainian government “abolished the Crimean constitution by authority, sent in its special forces to forcibly remove Yuri Mechkov, president of Crimea, and de facto annexed the Republic of Crimea.” The response in Crimea was to create another constitution reinstating the Autonomous Republic of Crimea. Wanting to placate the situation, after it was ratified by the Crimean parliament, it was confirmed by the Ukrainian Parliament in December 1998.

Ukraine had also signed a guarantee offering protection “of the ethnic, cultural, linguistic and religious originality of national minorities on their territories.” After the coup and the repealing of the law on official languages, the Kiev regime had destroyed all semblance of having any legitimate claims over what the people of Crimea could not do. None of these intricacies were widely, if ever, reported in the West when Crimeans voted to become part of the Russian federation. Nor were the large scale demonstrations taking place in Crimea that mirrored what was going on in the Donbas, in response to the abolition of the Official Languages Act, given much cover by the Western press. As was also the case in the Donbas the solution of sending in armed forces to quell the protests triggered mass disobedience in the ranks of the Ukrainian army—some 20,000 out of 22,000 military personnel (and the majority of the army in Crimea identified as Russian). There were also mass defections among the police. Had this been in Venezuela the media would have been swarming the place. But information fakery and brainwashing are as much acts of omission as well as commission.

Those journalists who went on the ground to report the events taking place in Crimea and the Donbas are now all viewed as Putin stooges, traitors and criminals in the West, and are on Ukrainian kill lists. Gonzalo Lire was arrested (for the second time) a month or so ago and no more has been heard of him. Some have had their assets frozen. Such is the free world today. And the freedom is as fake as it is precarious.

The Western project is now as fake as the news it supplies about the war, and the war is conducted purely along the lines of fake moral principles. A fake war hero leading a fake democracy is fawned over by celebrities oozing fake care and fake morals all holding fake beliefs picked up from fake news cobbled together by fakes posing as journalists. The weapons are real and so are the bodies though the public is smothered in fake news, and endless jabber and talking points and descriptions of how the war is going—Putin is dying, is dead, is a hologram already, and Russia has lost and just keeps losing more and more each day—Russia is completely broke—and the sooner it wakes up to itself and accepts its own demise then the world will live as one, just like John Lennon’s ditty predicted. Meanwhile the US/ European hegemonic world order is as dedicated to stupefying the human race as it is a neo-feudal order in which every aspect of life is to be calculated and controlled. Sure the leaders of this ghastly future are a bunch of brainless fakes—their masters are cunning and have real wealth, but their souls are hollow and the world they are making is one vast fakedom. But anyone who says this is a conspiracy theorist spreading disinformation.

There are many reasons why the West now stands for what it stands for. The destruction of its cultural roots is one large part of the story. In the final part of this essay I will explore the role played in the philosophical attack upon Christian culture as it helped lay the basis for the kind of technocratic dehumanised world we have become.

Read Part 1 and Part 3.

Wayne Cristaudo is a philosopher, author, and educator, who has published over a dozen books. He also doubles up as a singer songwriter. His latest album can be found here.

Featured: Mujer saliendo del psicoanalista (“Woman Leaving the Psychoanalyst”), by Remedios Varo; painted in 1960.

The Sorovkin Line

The best way to verify the failure of the current Ukrainian offensive, at least so far, is the discretion and silence of the media. Had the operation gone differently, it would have grabbed all the headlines. But the sad reality is different: the fearsome German leopards have become an endangered species and a reward of one million rubles is given to the Russian serviceman who catches one of these vermin. Rheinmetall’s shares plummeted when the photos of German scrap metal made into phosphatin in the steppes of New Russia began to be published. But the fault lies not with the machines or the brave Ukrainians who dare to crew them, but with their sponsors—those who devised an offensive to satisfy Western investors’ need for victories. Because this adventure was not designed on military criteria—but on marketing.

In recent weeks, the prestigious Western press has discovered that the Russians do not fight all thatbadly, that they seem to know something about artillery and fortification and that they are not just the horde of drunks and incompetents described to us by our “experts.”

Moreover, it has been proved that the Muscovite barbarians have an overwhelming air dominance and are very effective in electronic warfare, even more so than the invincible Americans. General Sergei Surovikin, who took over the leadership of the front line of the Special Military Operation in September last year, is to blame for all this. When this general took command, the objectives of the Russian intervention in Ukraine were partly achieved: the essential one, which was to prevent the ethnic cleansing of the Donbass, and some secondary ones, such as the land link between Crimea and the rest of the Russian Federation, the control of the Sea of Azov and the destruction of the Ukrainian air force and a good part of its army. But the Maidan regime did not fall and the West succeeded in preventing a peace agreement in March and April 2022. Another NATO success was the accelerated rearmament of Zelensky’s battered army. The few Russian troops guarding the front were not reinforced after the April political failure and in August-September the Ukrainian offensives in Kharkov and Kherson took place.

The first one was a success due to the poor coverage of that front, but the Russians managed to withdraw without great losses and after brilliant rearguard battles in Krasniy Liman, where they broke the Ukrainian encirclement twice. The army of Kiev paid for its military success with a very high number of casualties, because Russian air superiority compensated in part for the low density of its ground forces. At Kherson, the Ukrainian offensive was a bloody failure, especially at the Ingulets, where the ford of that river cost thousands of dead in front a Russian line that remained unmoved. It was Surovikin’s fear that the Noya Kakhovka dam would burst and leave his thirty thousand men cut off from communication—which made him to take the most difficult decision of the Russian intervention: to abandon Kherson and withdraw to the right bank of the Dnieper. Political rather than military defeat for Russia and spectacular propaganda success for Zelensky.

Surovikin announced difficult decisions and the Special Military Operation changed course: three hundred thousand reservists with combat experience were mobilized, the front was fortified, the military deployment was given depth and density, and a war of attrition began in which Russian missiles severely damaged the enemy power grid and destroyed Ukrainian warehouses, airfields and military devices. In August, the liberation of Artyomovsk (Bakhmut) by the Wagnerites began and Zelensky took the defense of the city as a personal challenge. After nine months of fighting and repeated refusals to retreat, “Zelensky’s Stalingrad” was conquered by the Russians in May, after causing seventy thousand casualties to the Kiev army. Another important fact: out of every ten Ukrainian dead in Artyomovsk, eight were killed by Russian artillery fire. Nor is it insignificant that, contrary to what usually happens, the casualties of the attackers were lower (about forty thousand, of which there were about twenty thousand dead) than those of the defenders.

There were obvious signs that launching an offensive against the Surovikin Line was madness. But in recent months Ukraine has undergone a mysterious eclipse: General Zaluzhny, the true national hero of that country, disappeared from the public stage and has been seen only in pictures of dubious authenticity. His role in the political and military life of Ukraine has suddenly diminished, which is very important because, undoubtedly, he is the best replacement left for Kiev in case Zelensky’s regime collapses, which is less and less popular among his American sponsors, who are in growing disagreement with the British, the best allies of the current leader. Zelensky has never paid much attention either to military advice or to the human cost of his initiatives. If his heart did not tremble in the Ingulets or in Artyomovsk, neither has it trembled in Orekhovo, nor in the villages of the gray zone: Ukrainian elite brigades, armed and trained by NATO, like the famous 47th, have been sacrificed in an offensive that has barely touched the Russian front line.

More than two hundred and fifty armored vehicles rust before the unmovable Surovikin Line, which reminds us of the excellent tradition of the Russian military engineers, that of Totleben in Sevastopol or the Soviet defenses in Kursk. There is only one difference: Totleben faced an enemy that had far superior armament to that of the backward Russia of Nicholas I. Zhukov’s men at Kursk had Manstein’s Wehrmacht on the other side of their lines. Surovikin faced an army armed and trained by Gayrope, unable to match Russia’s armament production figures. The arsenal of the democracies is stretched to the limit and time is increasingly running on the side of the Kremlin. 2024 is an election year in America and the senile Biden is presenting himself to his electorate with a war he cannot win and which neither Russia nor China are interested in “freezing.” They are in no hurry.

Prigozhin’s “Sanjurjada”

When the Nazi hierarchs were living their particular eve of the apocalypse in Berlin, the news of Roosevelt’s death reached them, which Goebbels immediately identified with the Miracle of the House of Brandenburg in 1761, when Tsarina Elizabeth died and was succeeded on the throne by Peter III, a crowned idiot but a devoted admirer of his uncle Frederick. Old Fritz, who was thinking of committing suicide, made peace with his kinsman and succeeded in pulling Prussia out of the worst predicament in its history. Something similar has happened these days with the Prigozhin Sanjurjada, the product of a power struggle with Shoigu and Gerasimov, which the peculiar condottiero of the Wagner Group has lost. Possibly he knew it long before and his absurd move had to do with a personal solution to the inevitable absorption of his tercios by the Russian command.

A few short hours were enough and the storm dissolved in the warm breeze of the steppe. Despite the popularity of the Wagnerites, all Russia closed ranks with its president, from the Patriarch to the communists. This was not going to be another February 1917. But it was fantastic to see the headlines in the Western press: Putin was already on his last legs; civil war had broken out in Russia; the Kremlin was showing signs of weakness; a full-fledged putsch; a bunt like that of Pugachev.

There was no miracle for the Zelensky Household, the Ukrainian dictator will not recover his luxurious villa in Crimea, nor will the Czech foreign minister go next summer to its beaches (unless as a prisoner of war). Russia, like the Surovikin Line, is stronger than all that.

Sertorio lives, writes and thinks in Spain. this review comes through the kind courtesy of El Manifiesto.

Featured: Kulikovo Field, by Pavel Ruzhenko; painted in 2005.

A Conservative’s Run for the United States Senate in New York

This account of my attempt to become a member of the United States Senate from New York in 1974 might interest those wanting to know more about the early history of the New York State Conservative Party.

The only extant public evidence of my ill-fated quest for higher political office is found in an article in the Long Island Press, Monday, June 10, 1974, entitled, “Prof. will bear Conservative banner against Javits”:

The state Conservative party is expected to designate a political neophyte as the candidate for U.S. Senate to take on Sen. Jacob K. Javits. Dennis Bonnette, a 36-year-old philosophy teacher at Niagara University, will be tapped for the Senate race when the Conservative State Committee meets Saturday in Queens, according to informed Conservative sources. Bonnette, a political unknown, is described as a “slim professorial type,” and is the father of five children. He holds a doctorate in philosophy.

(I was actually thirty-five years old at the time, not thirty-six as the article states.)

In 1973 and 1974, I ran for the local Lewiston-Porter School Board in Niagara County, New York, twice, doing quite well on a shoestring campaign. For reasons I can no longer recall, I became interested in running for Congress shortly thereafter. I do recall meeting Dr. Warren Carroll at Kris Popik’s apartment one night, during which we discussed various aspects of running for Congress. Kris had been my graduate student at Niagara University and later became Dr. Kristen Popik Burns, Dean of the Graduate School at Christendom College. Dr. Carroll was then working as Administrative Assistant for Congressman John Schmitz. He later went on to found Christendom College and served as its first President for many years.

I went through the tiresome process of appearing before all the local committees of the Conservative Party, seeking support for the Conservative Party’s congressional nomination. One must recall that the Conservative Party in New York was and still is a minor party, but has always been very influential in New York politics, since conservative politicians, running as Republicans, frequently get their winning margins by being listed on the Conservative ballot line. In a few cases, the Conservative Party has even had its exclusive candidate win the seat sought, including a singular U.S. Senate win by James L. Buckley in 1970.

Soon I received a call from Raymond R. Walker, Chairman of the Niagara County Conservative Party and one of the founders of the NYS Conservative Party. He told me that the Republican candidate running for the same congressional seat had contacted him, wondering why I kept “shadowing” him before all the local Conservative Party committees. Walker told me that he was thinking of something bigger for me, namely, to seek the nomination of the New York State Conservative Party for the U.S. Senate seat then held by liberal Republican Jacob Javits.

Walker arranged a meeting between me and Leo Kesselring, a chief assistant to then U.S. Senator James L. Buckley, brother of the famous founder of the National Review, William F. Buckley. Kesselring and I met subsequently and he apparently then recommended my name to the Conservative Party leaders in New York City.

This effort to secure the Conservative Party nomination was not entirely quixotic, since in 1970, Jim Buckley had won a U.S. Senate seat running on that ballot line alone—splitting the vote between a Democrat and liberal Republican—thereby, winning the statewide race with just 38.75% of the vote.

In fact, the Party was planning on getting a major name to run for the other New York Senate seat in 1974 and intended to make a major campaign aimed at winning. Unfortunately, Senator Buckley was the first senator to call for the resignation of then President Richard Nixon. Since fully half of the NYS Conservative Party’s funding at that time came from outside the state, that funding dried up instantly when Republicans all over the country vented their anger at Senator Buckley! So, the Party decided to select a lesser known candidate and run a less intensive campaign. Still, my Niagara County Chairman, Ray Walker, had hopes of getting the nomination for me and then making the race a realistic prospect through aggressive fundraising and campaigning.

The Party flew me down to New York City to meet with the Party leaders: Serphin R. Maltese and J. Daniel Mahoney ( Party founder and Chairman). Maltese would later go on to become a longtime New York State senator (District 15) and Mahoney later was appointed by President Reagan to become a judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.

I was to go to the NYS Conservative Party headquarters on Park Avenue. Unfortunately, I found that I had exited my ride on the wrong side of the avenue address, that is, instead of going to South Park Avenue, I got out at the same address on North Park Avenue! I had no choice but to walk some eight city blocks to the correct address. Half way to my destination, I encountered Grand Central Station. I was tempted to walk through it, but having no knowledge of the internal complexities of this grand edifice, I decided it might be more prudent instead to walk around it. So I did.

I think I arrived at the offices before noon and met with Maltese for some time. He had some other work to do and so put me in a room with a huge pile of newspaper clippings and a phone. He told me I could read up on the political issues which the candidates would be debating in the campaign and also invited me to make calls anywhere I wished to from that phone. I did call my brother and his wife, who then lived in New Jersey—resulting in them braving New York City traffic to come see me briefly!

Around noontime, Maltese took me to a restaurant to have lunch with Party Chairman J. Daniel Mahoney. During the lunch, I recall one of them saying that they liked to run college professors for office, since they were less likely to faint before an audience! I expressed some concern as to whether Niagara University would grant me a sabbatical leave for purposes of the campaign. They assured me that it would not be a problem. After lunch, we went back to the headquarters, where they told me that I was set to become the Party’s nominee for the Senate election in the fall. They had to meet with the various county chairmen in the afternoon, but arranged my ride by limousine back to the airport so that I could return home that same day.

I left New York City fully convinced that I would be the nominee of the NYS Conservative Party for the U.S. Senate seat in the fall 1974 election.

After I returned home, I was informed that on that very same afternoon, for the first time in the history of the NYS Conservative Party, the state county chairmen had staged a revolt against the Party leadership. They refused to back my nomination as proposed by the Party leaders and, instead, decided to back the nomination of Barbara Keating, a gold star medal wife with five children, whose husband had been killed fighting in Vietnam. She was also the daughter of Kenneth Keating, who had served in the U.S. Senate from New York from 1959 to 1965.

Nonetheless, it turns out that I had the solid backing of the upstate delegations of the Party, representing fully one third of the entire State of New York. Niagara County Chairman Ray Walker encouraged me to go to the state convention in New York and fight Keating for the nomination, which I did. And so, a second flight to New York City ensued. But, it turned out that I was not the only candidate challenging Keating. When I arrived in New York, I learned that infamous attorney, Roy Marcus Cohn, was also seeking the nomination—and so a three way fight was on.

I recall addressing the convention delegates in one of those then famous smoke-filled rooms—giving a speech ending with a phrase given me by Walker, to the effect that the American Eagle could not fly on two left wings! It was well-applauded. The strategy of the convention came down to this: Keating, Cohn, and I each had the support of roughly one-third of the state. But the fly in the ointment was that, since Keating had the official Party backing, all absent delegates had been told to give their proxy votes to Serphin Maltese, who would then vote them for Keating on the first ballot. The net effect meant that the rough outcome would be that Keating would have about half the votes and Cohn and I would split the remaining half.

As a result, I remember standing in the back of the hall with my campaign manager, Ray Walker, and Cohn and his campaign manager, while the two of us candidates made a handshaking deal (one of those famous backroom deals!) to the effect that whoever of the two of us appeared to be getting fewer votes on the first ballot would withdraw and throw his support to the other. As the balloting got underway, we each were getting about the expected totals. But, at some point, my manager concluded that I was getting fewer votes than Cohn and so signaled me to withdraw and give my support to Cohn, which I did. At that point, I found out that it is easier to obtain support than to shift it to another person. Many delegates did not want to support Cohn, given his intensely bad notoriety.

Roy Cohn was a prosecutor in the Rosenberg atomic bomb spy trials in 1951, claiming later that his personal recommendation convinced Judge Irving Kaufman to give both Julius and Ethel Rosenberg the death penalty for giving atomic secrets to the Soviets. I remember listening to the radio the day they were electrocuted, with it taking five electric shocks before Ethel Rosenberg was pronounced dead. Regarding the specific atomic secrets charge against them, there is evidence now that, while Julius alone had many contacts on other matters with a Soviet spy named Aleksandr Feklisov, Julius “didn’t understand anything about the atomic bomb” and that Ethel “had nothing to do with this” and “was completely innocent.”

In 1953 and 1954, Roy Cohn was the leading assistant to Senator Joseph McCarthy during the infamous Army-McCarthy Senate hearings. From 1959 to 1963, Cohn was president of the Lionel Train Company. Even during the 1974 Conservative Party convention, Cohn was bragging that he’d been acquitted of professional misconduct charges, despite having alleged perjury by five witnesses testifying against him.

(Note that from 1971 to 1978, Cohn became a major mentor to, and lawyer for, a construction businessman named Donald J. Trump, defending Trump against housing discrimination charges in a case settled out of court. In the 1970s and 1980s, Cohn was charged three times with professional misconduct, including perjury and witness tampering, and eventually disbarred by a New York Appellate Division Court.)

While Cohn failed to defeat Keating in first ballot of the convention, he did get over 25% of the vote, which earned him the right to engage in a primary fight with her. I recall him standing at a pay phone begging some source for an instant $25,000 to get that primary fight going. He told me he would give me a phone call later in the summer, but he never did. He went down in flames in the primary and Barbara Keating went on to garner 16% of the votes in the fall election, which was won by liberal Republican incumbent Senator Jacob Javits who got 45% of the vote. Liberal Democrat Ramsey Clark got the remaining 38%.

Later on convention night, as I was riding in an elevator with my campaign manager, Ray Walker, he let it slip that he may have miscounted the votes and that I actually had more votes than Cohn on that critical first ballot—which would have meant that Cohn should have withdrawn in favor of me!

After I returned home a defeated candidate, I received a phone call from Serphin Maltese, offering to make me the Party’s nominee for NY State Comptroller, an offer which I refused. Democrat incumbent Arthur Levitt, Sr., easily won reelection in 1974.

Thus ended my single attempt at election to the United States Senate.

Postscript: It appears I came much closer to winning the nomination than I initially thought. During the convention, a professor from St. John’s University in Brooklyn, who was a major force in the Party (probably Dr. Henry Paolucci), told me that he had led the revolt against the leadership that ended my pre-selection for the nomination and instead led to the nomination of Barbara Keating. He also told me that had he known me better at that time (perhaps, had he heard my speech earlier), he would not have led that revolt, but rather would instead have backed me for the nomination.

Post postscript: After James L. Buckley left the United States Senate, he was appointed by President Ronald Reagan to a seat on the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. Shortly after the above article was published, former United States Senator James Lane Buckley, who was still a sitting Senior Judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, passed away on August 18, 2023, at the age of 100.

Dr. Dennis Bonnette retired as a Full Professor of Philosophy in 2003 from Niagara University in Lewiston, New York, where he also served as Chairman of the Philosophy Department from 1992 to 2002. He received his doctorate in philosophy from the University of Notre Dame in 1970. He is the author of three books, Aquinas’ Proofs for God’s Existence, Origin of the Human Species, and Rational Responses to Skepticism: A Catholic Philosopher Defends Intellectual Foundations for Traditional Belief, as well as many scholarly articles.

The Hispanic: Its Meaning and the Ecumenical

In February 2022, the second edition of my book Hispanoamérica contra Occidente (Latin America vs. the West), which was first published in Spain back in 1996, appeared in Buenos Aires. So, most of my friends did not know it. I added a single final chapter “Notes on the Original Argentina.”

The book came about because of two facts: a) A conference in 1984 at the Versailles Congress Palace together with Julien Freund, Alain de Benoist, Guillaume Faye and Pierre Vial, which gave title to this book, and b) An epistolary exchange with Don Gonzalo Fernández de la Mora about Hispano-ness.

In France, I argued that Hispano-America, unlike Anglo-America, is the continuation of what is most genuine to the West, based on the notion of “that which non-Western traditions never foresaw or even imagined” (Pierre Aubenque, Le probleme d´etre chez Aristote, p. 13), as well as linguistic, artistic and cultural expression.

And before the eminent Spaniard, I affirmed that Hispanicity in America is not limited to the monarchy and the Catholic religion, as determined by thinkers such as de Maeztu or García Morente, but opens us to all the culture of the Mediterranean that comes through the Hispanic. The Hispanic in us is both vehicle and matrix.

The term “Latin American,” universally accepted, became a politically correct expression used by the Church, Freemasonry, Marxists, liberals and progressives. A term that is strange to us, of us with a false name. The semantic struggle is the first thing that is lost in war—for the denominations of the enemy are adopted.

I say all this so that you will see that my meditation on America and Hispanidad is not born in this conference but comes from far away, from forty years ago.

I read a few months ago (27/3/22) a report by the Spanish professor Carlos X. Blanco in which he affirmed that: “There could have existed a different universal Order, which generalized the values of Greek philosophy, Roman law and the German-Christian concept of the person. But this Hispanic Empire had enemies everywhere. Hispanidad, more than a nostalgia and an “imperial dream” should be reactivated in a geopolitical key. A ‘Hispanist’ pole in the southern hemisphere of the Americas, extending to the entire Portuguese-Spanish speaking continent and the Iberian Peninsula, (to Asia in the Philippines and Africa with Guinea) could play a great role as a counterweight to the poles that rule the world today: the declining Anglo-Saxon, the emerging Chinese, the Eurasian Russian, the Arab, etc.”

I would only correct the verb and instead of saying “generalized” I would have said “populairized” because we are the heirs of those values. Besides, the concept of person is not a German-Christian creation but comes from long ago, at least since Boethius (480-524).

We can have two approaches to the Hispanic: as a vehicle or channel through which the Mediterranean peoples (Spain, Portugal, France, Italy, Syria, Lebanon, Greece, Romania, etc.) that reached America express themselves, and as an ecumene, that is, as a great space of land inhabited by men who have and who feel, think and believe in common values. The Hispanic is neither the German Kultur nor the French civilisation, but contains a worldview about man, the world and its problems that is different from both.

In the first aspect (as a vehicle), the eagerness of the millions of immigrants who came to America in search of progress stands out above all—understood in a broad sense as the passage from the worst to the best, as taught by the Greek philosophers. It was also a vehicle for the Indians who incorporated hundreds of Spanish words into their multiple languages, e.g., cow, horse, sheep, etc.

Today, especially from England, the theory of “original peoples” is used to refer to the Indians. However, we Creoles are also native peoples. The difference with the Indians is that they have the “originality” while we have the “originality, because we are neither so Spanish nor so Indian,” as Bolivar said.

One of the traits of the Hispanic American man is the idea of progress, which is not the same as that of the Anglo-American. The latter, after the amazing increase of inventions produced by the interweaving of science and technology, whose product is technology, bought, adopted and assumed the myth of ineluctable Progress, not realizing that progress is good as an ideal but bad as an idea. If progress means to go from the worst to the best, to go forward, it is good; or does anyone not want to progress? But progress is meaningless if we do not know where we are going, and it is dangerous if we go the wrong way. Thus, if we emphasize comfort, which Hegel argued is infinite, progress will always be unsatisfactory. This technological progress ended with two atomic bombings in Japan, causing thousands and thousands of innocent deaths. We know that evil in the innocent is philosophically inexplicable, and that it is produced by a perversion of the cause that commits it.

On the contrary, for the Hispanic man, progress was always an aspiration and not an inspiration. It was an ideal and not an idea, and thus it traveled to America.

All the great progresses of mankind have not been for the sake of progress or for the benefit of the future, but for the sake of a current image, be it glory, the homeland, the welfare of the family, and so many others.

This aspiration to progress is what defines progress for Hispanic man, but his action is not inspired by the myth of progress.

This leads us to a deeper and more essential aspect of progress. “From the point of view of the spirit, progress is only valid when it develops in intensity or depth, never linearly or horizontally. The depth of progress indicates to us the degree of existential interiorization of the subject. And this is the profound meaning of progress, the increasingly intense interiorization of the truths that we know or, better, that we sense. The process of interiorization has successive degrees that contain one another in a hierarchy similar to the celestial one.” That is why we can affirm that in the spiritual life, whether mystical or intellectual, he who does not advance goes backwards (Alberto Buela, Epítome de metapolítica, p. 117).

Manuel García Morente, that great Spanish master of philosophy, posited the Christian gentleman as the archetype of the Hispanic man (Manuel García Morente, La idea de Hispanidad). And he was not wrong. But “this theory of archetypes has two flaws. One, it lacks scientific rigor—we can load it with the greatest virtues as García Morente does with the Christian gentleman, or with the greatest vices as the Argentine liberals do with the gaucho. And, two, it is always ascribed and determined to a temporal moment and to a precise place in the history of a people” (Alberto Buela, Hispanoamérica contra Occidente, p.52). Its validity disappears. It is then necessary to look for its specific features on the other hand.

Hispanicity as “being Hispanic” has been given in history under multiple and varied forms and will be given under many others which we cannot ascertain. It has always stood for the hierarchical sense of life, beings and functions. This hierarchy as a necessity of the inferior with respect to the superior: “What a good vassal he would be if he had a good lord,” affirmed Don Quixote, and not the other way around as the liberal bourgeois world postulates it. Hierarchy that is projected in a total vision, and not that of the specialists of the minimum who lose sight of the vision of the whole. Hierarchy that is based on objective values beyond discussion and not, conversely, on subjective values, arising from the primacy of conscience, the axial axis of the modern world. Thus, the necessity of the inferior, the vision of the whole and the objectivity of values are the expression of the hierarchical sense of being Hispanic.

The second trait is found in the preference of the self and the consequent lack of fear for the loss of identity.

Self-preference is not selfishness but an existential disposition that makes one not afraid of mixing with others. This is what the Spanish and Portuguese had when they arrived in America and what the millions of immigrants who came later had.

I have studied it as the first step of the dissident hermeneutics that I propose as the method of dissent:

Every method is just that, a way to get somewhere. Dissent as a method starts, no longer from the description of phenomena like phenomenology, but from the ‘preference of ourselves.’ It starts from a valuative act as a resounding lie to methodological neutrality, which is the first great falsehood of scientific objectivism, whether that proposed by dialectical materialism or that of technocratic scientism (Cf. Paul Feyerabend, Against Method). It breaks with the progressivism of Marxism for which every negation carries in itself a progressive and constant overcoming. On the contrary, dissent is not omniscient; it can say “I do not know,” and thus, being the method of popular thought, it can deny the validity of something without having to deny its existence.

The preference is made on the basis of a given situation, a historical, political, economic, cultural locus. In our case, South America or the Patria Grande. This requires or demands dissent, a situated thought, as rightly spoke the popular philosophy of liberation with Kusch, Casalla et alii, and not the Marxist philosophy of liberation with Dussel, Cerutti and others, which is a European branch transplanted in America. It has as a principle demand the hic Rhodus, hic salta (This is Rhodes, now jump—a Latin idiom meaning, “Show us what you say you can do”) of Hegel at the beginning of his Philosophy of Right. Only from a determined place can dissent be genuinely raised, because to raise it from an ‘abstract universality,’ for example, humanity, human rights, equality, etc., etc., etc., is worthy of the distrustful criticism of the left in general, which sees in dissent a dangerous reactionary-populist deviation” (Alberto Buela, Teoría del Disenso, p. 32).

The third and last of the features we will deal with here is the existence of a common enemy, the Anglo-Saxon. This is a Spanish heritage that Hispanic Americans, including all those of Mediterranean culture who arrived in these lands, have experienced and suffered since the civil wars of Independence. That great Mexican sociologist Pablo Gonzalez Casanova counted 700 military invasions and more than 4000 Anglo-Saxon interventions in Our America, from the battle of San Juan de Ulua in 1567/68 in Mexico to Grenada in 1983, Panama in 1989 and Haiti in 2004.

These successive and continuous struggles have shaped a certain awareness of the public enemy, the hostis. The one who harasses and opposes me. The one who prevents me from developing according to my own standards and values. In a word, the one who does not let me be by me and for me.

These struggles and experiences tend decades after decades and centuries after centuries towards the search of a Great Homeland, of a Great Space, of an Ecumene as we envision it.

The term “ecumene” (οἰκεομένη) is the present participle of the verb οἰκέω, meaning “to inhabit in one’s own house” and encloses the idea of “a large portion of inhabited land.” For the Romans, the Empire was their ecumene, just as for the Greeks it was Hellada, and for the Christians until the end of the Middle Ages, Christianity. These ecumenes, each in its own time, coincided with the limits of what was considered the world. (Ecumene is also used in human geography, designating the appropriate environment for collective life. And since it means environment, in Spanish, the gender has even been changed and we speak of “the ecumene” in the masculine).

The idea of ecumene is certainly linked to that of humanism, but understood as “a living form that develops in the soil of a people and persists through historical changes” (W. Jaeger, Paideia, p.11). Classical Greco-Roman humanism seeks the realization of man’s being through his formation. The reference to the soil of a people, according to the quotation, shows us the incarnation of ancient humanism, which the greatest of the Latin poets, Virgil, reinforces when he advises to think from the genius loci. A concept that encompasses the ideas of climate, soil and landscape.

This deep-rootedness, which was maintained in Hispanic humanism, is lost in enlightened humanism, which is, with minor variations, the one currently used by liberal and social democratic regimes and the United Nations around the world.

Other ecumenical summaries cover a multitude of countries, even some scattered ones, as is the case of the Arabian one. The opposite is true of the Indian ecumene, which is limited to a single country.

Ecumenes spatially determine not only an appropriate environment for collective life but also a world of values shared by the people who inhabit it. And in this sense the Hispanic or Ibero-American ecumene is an example of homogeneity, because of the common religion, language, law and customs.

The Enlightenment theory that is fully valid today consists in sustaining that pluralism should be considered not only within the cultural ecumenes but also within the national States that compose them. Since we do not share this theory, we ask ourselves: How should the question be posed?

We maintain, on the contrary, that pluralism should not occur within nation-states, as Dalmacio Negro Pavón likes to say, but that pluralism should occur between cultural ecumenicals. The risk of ecumenical pluralism within the nation-state is noted by the famous liberal political scientist Giovanni Sartori when he states: “Gathering many cultures on the same territory is dangerous. Thus, those who are not ready to integrate should not enter a country. For, immigration not followed by integration leads to the death of pluralism and democracy” (Giovanni Sartori, “Pluralismo, multiculturalismo e inmigración,” in Il Giorno, September 15, 2001).

It is the ecumenical cultures that produce the true and authentic plurality of the world, as they are constituted on the basis of shared values, language, beliefs, experiences and institutions.

Thus, cultural pluralism must be understood as an interculturalism where each identity is considered among others, but on the basis of its difference. In this lies the coexistence, or better, concord of communities.

To understand cultural pluralism as multiculturalism; that is, a cultural relativism that simultaneously leads to the exclusion of other cultures to avoid their denaturalization, or what is worse, to value the other for the mere fact of belonging to a minority and not for its merits or value in itself, is the serious mistake made today by cultural anthropologists and multiculturalists or progressives of thought.

(Multiculturalism is based on two stages in the development of cultural anthropology: a) on the cultural relativism of Franz Boas (1858-1942), the precursor of North American anthropology, who maintains that it is not possible to speak of superior or inferior cultures; and b) on the stage of decolonization in the 1960s and 1970s, when the former “objects” of study of the conquest of America and imperialism in Africa and Asia were transformed into “subjects” who studied their own realities).

When in the name of this multiculturalism, which as we have seen is a sectarian and exclusionary relativism, one ecumenical group invades the others, this produces the denaturalization of those groups. Thus the “Americanization” of the European, the “imbecilization” of the Ibero-American, the “terrorization” of the Arab ecumenical, etc., is encouraged. Erroneously, from the invading ecumene it can be thought that a transfer of meaning is produced, even though not all Europeans are North Americanized, nor are all Ibero-Americans imbeciles, nor are all Arabs terrorists.

This transfer of meaning and interference of one ecumenical group in another, as is happening today with the Anglo-American ecumenical group, is of maximum risk, because it indicates the emergence of an ecumenical totalitarianism, by which one imposes itself on the rest. The world would thus lose its richness of varied aspects, its character of beauty, for what it is—a cosmos—to become a single, uniform and homogeneous “orb.”

Alberto Buela is an Argentinian philosopher and professor at National Technological University and the University of Barcelona. He is the author of many books and articles. (This article was given as a paper presented at the Global Conference on Multipolarity, on April 29, 2023)

Featured: Valencia: Las grupas (Valencia: The Hind Quarters, referring to decorations of the horses), by Joaquín Sorolla; painted in 1916.