Shooting Children: The Other IDF Specialty

Israeli soldiers enjoy killing Palestinian children. This is not hyperbole. This is a tragic fact.

The endless cruelty that we are witnessing in Gaza and the West Bank raises a crucial question—what is the point of remembering the Holocaust of the early 1940s when the people on whom it was committed have now became perpetrators of a Holocaust upon the Palestinian people, whom they see as non-human? All the intimidation that the Holocaust Industry has carried out through the years, all the name-calling of anti-Semitic this and anti-Semitic that, all the laws to protect the Jews—was it all a ploy to hide what has been and is going on in Israel since 1948?

Is the current Palestinian genocide the bitter fruit of this Holocaust Industry, because it has made us blind to Israel’s cruelty, because we are forever lost in the cruelty of yesteryears?

It would appear that the world is emerging from the “hold” that the earlier Holocaust has had upon the modern mind because it is seeing atrocities unimaginable today, carried out by the very hands that we imagined would be less cruel because of the memory of that earlier Holocaust. But no. We see the same dehumnaization, followed by the same gleeful mass murder.

The fact remains, Israeli soldiers enjoy killing Palestinians, especially children. No doubt there is the deep-seated Israeli logic of annihilating future “terrorists.”

More questions come to the fore.

What kind of martial culture exists in the Israeli army which encourages the shooting of little children?

What kind of spirit inhabits an Israeli soldier who aims carefully and sprays a 4-year-old girl on the road with machine gun fire, and then goes off to relax, having done a good day’s work?

How cold must the blood be to shoot a little boy sitting in his father’s car, and then go about with other duties?

Or is it that these Israeli soldiers do not see children, only the hated, non-human “Palestinians” who must utterly be destroyed, no matter what their age or sex?

And all the while, America sends more bombs, more bullets, as if to say, “Keep up the good work.”

“Israeli forces have installed Israeli military infrastructure, like checkpoints, all throughout the occupied West Bank. Palestinian children are at risk every time they are forced to interact with Israeli soldiers,” said Ayed Abu Eqtaish, accountability program director at DCIP. “Israeli forces opened fire with no regard for Ruqaya’s life. This is just one example of the impunity enjoyed by Israeli forces emboldened in an environment where the international community refuses to hold them accountable” (Defense for Children International-Palestine).

“You guys are saying that this is a twelve-year old boy. Stop it. This is a twelve-year old terrorist” (Itamar Ben-Gvir, Israeli National Security Minister).

We are now sadly familiar with what the bombs have wrought in Gaza— 32,552 Palestinians killed, including 13,000 children, and 74,980 wounded. And counting…

What about the bullets dutifully supplied by the cargo-plane load? Since October 7, the US has sent 100 shipments of munitions to Israel.
Leaving aside what these bullets hit when fired at Hamas, this ammo is also used to kill children (not to mention unarmed men and women).

For example, on March 28, 2024, Israeli soldiers shot dead and then bulldozed into a pit full of garbage two Palestinian men who were stopped on a road and then shot. One of them was waving a white piece of fabric. They were just trying to go home on foot.

Here is a very brief and sad list of some of the many children killed by Israeli soldiers, brief because it is so very difficult to catalogue the slaughter of such beautiful little lives, as you are quickly overwhelmed by utter horror.

January 8, 2024, Ramallah, West Bank
Ruqaya Ahmad Odeh Jahalin, aged 4.
Her crime: She was sitting in the backseat of a taxi when she was shot. The IDF confiscated her body, for full investigation.

January 24, 2024. Al-Amal, west of Khan Younis
Nahedh Barbakh, aged 13.
His crime: He stepped outside his house, waving a white flag in order to evacuate as ordered by the IDF. He was shot three times and killed. His older brother, Ramez, aged 20, tried to rescue him but was also shot dead. The family could not recover their bodies because of intense gunfire. The family escaped by breaking through the rear wall of their home in order to avoid going out into the street. The bodies of their two sons were never recovered.

February 22, 2024, West Bank
Nihal Abu Ayash, aged 16.
His crime: He was heading off to play soccer. He was shot first in the leg and then when he got up, he was shot in the head.

December 5, 2023, Gaza City
Salma Jaber, aged 4.
Her crime: She and nher family were trying to escape. She and her nine-year old sister were sprayed with bullets from a tank. Though shot, little Salma bravely tried to run away. When her father picked her up, he too was shot in the arm. Her sister, though shot at, miraculously survived. Little Salma did not.

March 4, 2024. Burin, south of Nablus in the northern occupied West Bank
Amr Mohamed Ghaleb Najjar, aged 10.
His crime: Sitting in his father’s car. Shot in the head by the IDF Israeli forces.

March 14, 2024. Shuafat Refugee Camp, Jerusalem
Rami Hamdan Al-Halhouli, aged 12.
His crime: He held up a lit piece of fireworks. Shot through the heart and his body was confiscated.

Will any of theese murderers in uniform ever be known, let alone brought to justice? Don’t hold your breath. The leaders of the world have long accepted the shooting of kids as Israel’s “right of defense.” Therefore, the slaughter will continue. America is happy to supply the bullets and the bombs to kill many, many more children, just like the few noted above. It’s good business, after all. This is “civilization” against “terrorism.”

Few remember this, but the Israeli soldiers have been shooting children for a very long time.

For example, twenty years ago, in May of 2004, in Rafah, little Rawan Abu Zeid, just 3 years old, was shot in the neck by a nameless IDF sniper. A further 22 children were also shot that day.

Palestinian children have been killed since 1948 in Israel.

What kind of a monstrous country is this place they call Israel? And why is it untouchable? Why are its crimes tolerated? Why can no one stop this cruel barbarity? Is killing Palestinian children not a big deal in this world? Whatever happened to the UN, the ICC, even the ICJ? What justifies their salaries, their existence as organized bodies when they have zero power to stop a little girl or boy being shot? How do these people justify what they do?

Israel, along with the entire Western political class, are now the real terrorists, who will kill without any qualms, who sleep very well at night, because they know that no one will stop them.

But we must also not despair, for that is defeat. We can start by not voting for war-pigs, no matter what party they belong to. Stop enabling these cowardly politicians who will do anything to line their pockets, especially start wars and kill innocents, because for them war is the really big business.

We must learn to emerge from the enchantment that party-politics and party-rivalry puts us all in. Stop being loyal to a party name. It is all a ruse to keep us common folk divided, while those we empower look after all their own “special interests.” Find your own way to defeat this political diabolism that has killed off so much of humanity and continues to do so, because we blindly keep voting.

Here is a report of the endless slaughter of children in Israel by their army of criminals. Next time you hear politicians trying to appeal to some “morality” of theirs, just shove this report in their face. They all have the blood of children on their hands. Stop empowering them, and all their ilk.

C.B. Forde writes from rural Canada.

Twenty-Five Years of Aggression against Yugoslavia: NATO Expansion and the Global Context

A quarter of a century ago, on March 24, 1999, a combined group of NATO countries launched a military campaign against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, which at that time consisted of Serbia and Montenegro.

Over the years, quite a lot has been written about the consequences of this aggression—about the clear violation of the principles of international law, since the UN did not sanction any military action against a sovereign state; about the numerous human rights violations during the bombing; about the commissioned information campaigns against the Serbs, which had nothing to do with reality; and about the impact of the war on the civilian population—from post-traumatic stress syndrome to the increase in cancer because of the use of munitions with depleted uranium cores.

However, several important points should be emphasized. This campaign was NATO’s first offensive operation. The military-political bloc, which was conceived ostensibly for defense against a possible attack from the Soviet Union (a figment of the crazy imagination of Western, primarily Anglo-American, politicians) became an instrument of military expansion. From conditionally defensive, it became offensive. First in Europe and then in other parts of the world, in particular against Libya in 2011. The military campaign against Yugoslavia probably gave NATO strategists confidence in the need for further expansion and homogenization of the whole of Europe under the umbrella of Brussels. The next expansion of the alliance came in a whole bundle. In March 2004, seven states were admitted at once: Bulgaria, Romania, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Slovakia and Slovenia. There is one interesting nuance here—all these countries signed the membership action plan in April 1999, that is, when the bombing of Serbia was in full swing. The connection between the aggression and the co-option of new members is obvious. It should be noted that actually on the eve of the aggression against Yugoslavia on March 12, 1999, Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic, which received an invitation to join in July 1997, joined the alliance. Now NATO’s tentacles are creeping into the Caucasus, the Middle East and Central Asia, as the alliance has various agreements with a number of states in the regions mentioned.

Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic’s signing of an agreement to withdraw from the province of Kosovo and Metohija and hand it over to international forces did not mean total political defeat. He remained in power. Although already in May 1999, the Hague Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia brought charges against Milosevic for war crimes in Kosovo. To get him, it was necessary to lift the diplomatic immunity enjoyed by heads of state.

External tools such as sanctions helped to put pressure and increase social tensions. Agencies at the same time worked on the ground and pumped money into the opposition. The puppet movement Otpor, acting as if on behalf of Serbian citizens, adopted Gene Sharp’s methodology of non-violent (conditionally) resistance and continued to implement its plan step by step.

The moment of the election campaign was chosen to bring people out on the streets.

In October 2000, because of mass protests, Slobodan Milosevic resigned, without waiting for the second round of presidential elections. In fact, the first color revolution, called the “bulldozer revolution,” was successfully implemented in Serbia. What is striking is that many of its thought leaders, such as Professor Cedomir Čupić, are still living quietly in Belgrade and actively criticizing the current authorities. While the younger ones, such as Srdja Popovic, immediately defected to the West and continue their attempts to stage coups d’état in other countries.

A monument, in Tašmajdan Park, Belgrade, to the children killed by NATO bombing. The child represented is Milica Rakić.

Let us now look at the global context of NATO’s war against Yugoslavia.

It should be taken into account that earlier in Yugoslavia a civil war was raging, and NATO countries, including the United States, were actively involved in Bosnia. This gave them an opportunity not only to practice ethnic conflict technologies, as well as new theories of warfare, such as network-centric warfare, but also to use both private military companies and mercenaries (in particular, mujahideen who had previously fought in Afghanistan were brought in as part of the “jihad”). This whole machine was directed against the Serbs, not only to gain operational superiority on the front, but also with far-reaching strategic objectives, which included demonization of the Serbs, creating the image of barbarians who pose a threat to the “civilized world.” And this demonization was successful and was already consolidated in 1999. But if the West then openly blamed the Serbs, it also meant the Russians, who tried to help their brotherly people to withstand the pressure of the West. It is no coincidence that Slobodan Milosevic warned that what the West had done to the Serbs, it would try to do to Russia in the future.

However, a scenario similar to the Yugoslav one had already been conceived for Russia. In the spring of 1999, terrorist organizations intensified their activities in Russia’s North Caucasus. In April, when NATO was bombing Yugoslavia, the self-proclaimed “emir of the Dagestan Jamaat” announced the creation of an “Islamic army of the Caucasus” to carry out jihad in southern Russia. Then began a whole wave of terrorist attacks organized by terrorists under the leadership of Shamil Basayev—seizure of settlements in Dagestan, bombings of houses in Moscow and Volgodonsk.

Therefore, when the question is raised whether Russia could have helped the Serbs more than it did, including the operation to block the Pristina airport, we must remember that the situation was quite difficult for us as well. The North Caucasus was in flames, emissaries of Western security services were working in the Volga region, and separatist projects were emerging in the regions.

It was an active phase of the unipolar moment, which the U.S. used to strengthen its hegemony all over the world, not shying away from any means, including terrorism. And its decline was still far away.

But were there positive outcomes of NATO’s military aggression against Yugoslavia? Let us try to summarize. First: the Yugoslav army seriously repulsed the enemy and as a result NATO had significant losses, which they did not expect initially. Various military tricks were used in different types of military forces and which may well now be adapted for the Special Military Operation (SMO), with appropriate adjustments. Second: the real face of NATO was seen by the whole world, which led to anti-war protests. In particular, Italy left the coalition because of this. Third, the dirty methods of information campaigns and the use of non-governmental organizations as a fifth column were documented and widely publicized. Finally, the international solidarity with the Serbs—Russian volunteers and humanitarian aid, the work of hackers from different countries against NATO, the circumvention of Western sanctions—is also an important experience of a complex nature, which will be useful for crushing the globalist military hydra of the North Atlantic Alliance.

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: Milica Rakić, 3-years-old, killed on April 17, 1999, by a cluster munition during the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia.

Frontline Moscow

Moscow is also a frontline city, just like Donetsk, Sevastopol and Belgorod. A country at war cannot have peaceful cities. It is better to realize this now and fully. And, of course, special measures of behavior, special rules must be introduced in a warring country.

The territory of the home front is not the territory of peace. This is where victory is forged. The victims of Crocus fell on the battlefield. Because Russia today is a battlefield.

Ukraine is also Russia; it is the same continuous Russia from Lvov to Vladivostok, and it is at war.

Public consciousness must become the consciousness of a nation at war. And anyone who falls out of this must be considered an anomaly.

There must be a new code of behavior. The people of a nation at war may not come back when they leave home. Everyone must be prepared for that. After all, on the frontline, and in Donetsk and Belgorod, this is exactly the case. The EU is likely to supply long-range missiles to the war-losing Kiev regime, which in our eyes will finally lose legitimacy in less than two months. We will finally recognize them as a criminal terrorist entity, not a country. And this blatantly terrorist regime, as it falls, is also likely to strike as far as it can reach. What else it will do is hard to speculate—it is better to consider everything. This is not a cause for panic, but a call for responsibility.

We are truly becoming a nation now. We are beginning to realize ourselves as a nation.

And the people have a common pain. Common blood—that given by huge queues of concerned Muscovites to the victims of the monstrous terrorist attack. Common grief. The people have a common fare, when people take the victims in Crocus City Hall to hospital or home for free. It is like at the front—their own. Money, nothing! In a country at war there can be no capitalism, only solidarity. Everything that is collected for the front, for Victory, is permeated with soul.

And the state is no longer a mechanism, but an organism. The state also feels pain, prays in church, serves memorial services, lights candles. The state becomes alive, popular, Russian. Because the state is awakened by war.

And migrants today are called to become an organic part of the people at war with the enemy. To become their own—donating blood, providing free transportation when necessary, queuing at the military enlistment office to be the first to go to the front, weaving camouflage nets, working the third shift. If they are part of society, they too may at some point become a target of the enemy. To go out and not come back. One of the boys who saved people at Crocus Hall is called Islam. But this is the real Islam—Russian. There is another “Islam.”

When you live in Russia, you cannot be non-Russian. Especially when Russia is at war. Russia is a country for those who consider it their Mother.

And now our Mother is in pain.

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 Geopolitika.

Featured: Mother Russia, by Ilya Sergeevich Glazunov; painted in 1968.

How Donald Trump brought Misery to the Palestinians

Robert Inlakesh is a well-known documentary filmmaker, journalist and Middle East expert, who knows Palestine well, especially the endless crimes Israel is committing there.

In 2020, he filmed, Steal of the Century, a two-part documentary, which chronicled the devasting effects of Donald Trump’s Abraham Accords, a supposed “peace deal,” aka, “the deal of the century,” in which Israel was given everything it needed to destroy more. The supposed author of the deal, Jared Kushner, simply put down everything that Benjamin Netanyahu dictated.

For various reasons, the documentary was banned from Youtube. Given the current, systematic genocide of the Palestinian people by Israel, we thought that it important to allow for this documentary to be seen in its entirety.

Please consider supporting the work of Robert Inlakesh.

Steal of the Century (2020), Part 1.

Steal of the Century (2020), Part 2.

And, here is a backup copy of Parts 1 and 2, just in case:

The Philosophy of War in Conceptualizing the Phenomenon of War and Peace

War is one of the oldest phenomena of human history, which is so inseparably connected with it that it is difficult to imagine the existence of human society without it. Many treatises have been devoted to “eternal peace,” the problem of war and peace in the works of Friedrich II, Immanuel Kant, Johann Gottfried Herder, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Carl Philipp Gottlieb von Clausewitz and others. German authors have shown a variety of approaches to the problem of war and peace. Some adhered to the view that the development of history inevitably leads to universal peace, while others have insisted on the inevitability of wars and conflicts. Thus, Kant, in raising the question of the correlation between eternal peace and eternal rest, unlike Frederick II, who assumed the possibility of establishing “eternal peace” in the conditions of monarchical rule, associated the establishment of “eternal peace” with the conclusion of a universal peace treaty, but necessarily in the conditions of a republican form of government. At the same time, Kant’s “eternal peace” appears to be delayed, and its occurrence is achievable only in the future [Zotkin 2016].

In this regard, it was difficult to hope that in the foreseeable future humanity could find harmony in international relations. To this day, the world continues to teeter on the brink of war and peace; in one region or the other approaching the brink, beyond which Pandora’s box may open. What determines the “periodomorphism” that is manifested in the life of states and peoples? Following Heraclitus of Ephesus, who declared war to be the origin of everything, many philosophers have noted the role of war in the history of human civilization. Plato also considered war as a permanent element in the development of society. In The Laws he wrote: “…what most people call peace is only a name; but in reality, there is an eternal, irreconcilable war between all states by nature” [Plato 1972, 86].

Among European philosophers, Plato was one of the first to speak about the factors determining the emergence of wars. He shrewdly recognized the role of the demographic factor in the emergence of wars between states. Many philosophers of Antiquity considered war as an integral attribute of the existence of the state. This was due to the understanding of war as a way of establishing domination, a source of slave power, wealth, territories, which allowed to reach a higher stage of development of the ancient polis/republic. At the same time, not every war was positively evaluated. For example, the ancient Greeks were against wars between Hellenes, as well as internal wars (called strife), because it could lead to the self-destruction of the Greeks [Plato 1971, 270]. Another criterion of admissibility and moral justification of war was the principle of justice. The causes of wars, political, economic, demographic, social and other consequences were also the subject of philosophical reflection.

For a long time, the comprehension of various phenomena of nature and society remained the monopoly of philosophy. But even the emergence of other approaches for the study of these phenomena has not completely displaced this paradigm, which has been formed over two millennia. The founder of positivism, Auguste Comte, asserted that every science is a philosophy in itself, thus unwittingly assessing the cognitive status of philosophy.

More recent forms of knowledge of war, as compared to philosophy, have set aside their predecessor and claim to have exhaustive knowledge of the phenomenon, using their own tools. As disciplinary approaches to the study of war multiplied, many proponents of non-philosophical approaches had the illusion that it was possible to find exhaustive answers to fundamental questions about war through these approaches. However, as life has shown, these misconceptions were quickly dispelled, as these approaches only partially solved the stated problems.

Where and when does the philosophy of war begin? The works of philosophers that have addressed the issues of war are numerous and diverse. Therefore, it is difficult to draw a sharp dividing line between those works that dealt with the problem of war in fragments and those that had a clear indication of the subject of study at hand, as well as those that were fully devoted to war but were not philosophical treatises. For example, we do not find in Clausewitz a clear indication of the “philosophy of war,” although he is considered one of the main classics in this area. Nowadays, some researchers regard Clausewitz not just as a philosopher of war, but as a political philosopher of war, arguing that Clausewitz was perceived in this capacity within the framework of Carl Schmitt’s concept of the “political” [Belozerov 2018a; Belozerov 2018b].

One of the main merits of the Prussian general is considered to be his ingenious formulation of the determinacy of war by politics. Before him, Navia-Osorio y Vigil, the Marquis of Santa Cruz de Marcenado had written about it [Navia-Osorio y Vigil, 1738]. In an even more precise formulation, the philosophical direction of the study was indicated in the fragment, “Philosophy of War” [Lloyd 1790], from Henry Lloyd’s Military and Military Memoirs, translated as Introduction à l’histoire de la guerre en Allemagne en 1756 … ou Mémoires militaires et politiques du général Lloyd. Traduit et augmenté … d’un précis sur la vie… de ce général (Bruxelles: A. F. Pion, 1784), by Germain-Hyacinthe de Romance, a French officer. In it, even before Clausewitz, he laid the foundations of the philosophy of war and before Antoine-Henri Jomini had substantiated the principles of the doctrine of operational strategy. He divided the science of war into two parts: the first was mechanistic in nature and could be taught to students; the second was philosophical in nature and could not be taught. According to a number of researchers, this dichotomy largely determined the strategic thinking of the British theorist. It also influenced the confrontation between two leading strategists of the 19th century: Jomini, a supporter of purely strategic approaches, and Clausewitz, a proponent of philosophy and dialectics [Chalvardjian 2014, 166]. The period of the Napoleonic wars accelerated the process of synthesis of philosophy and military strategy. In France, a participant of the Napoleonic campaign in Russia, Marquis Georges de Chambre, a general of the French army, published his study, which was the result of deep observations, which he called, Philosophie de la guerre (Philosophy of War). In it, he explained the importance of the philosophical approach to the study of war and his attitude to it [Chambray, 1829, V-VI].

The reason for the interest in the epistemological possibilities of philosophy, apparently, was that religious, in particular Christian, interpretations of the origin and laws of war no longer satisfied either political thinkers or military leaders. Niccolo Machiavelli, in addition to political problems, in his works addressed issues of military development. This was because of his official elected position as secretary of the Military Commission of Ten (Dieci di Libertà e Pace), which was responsible for representing Florence in conflicts, as well as his civic position as a political thinker. In his treatise, On the Art of War, he puts forward the idea of replacing the mercenary army with an army of citizens recruited for service by conscription. An essential feature of Machiavelli’s political philosophy was the transition to a secular political-philosophical model of understanding the power interactions of contemporary Italian society, expanding the boundaries of what was permitted by the Church.

As humanity has evolved, new technical means of violence have emerged, and new ways of armed struggle have multiplied, changing the face of war. This in turn led to attempts to rethink its essence and transformations. Each researcher saw in it specific features, the nature of which he sought to penetrate. In methodological terms, this is the basis for synthesizing the general and the singular, the object and subject of the philosophy of war. Is it possible to destroy the philosophical that is present in knowledge as such? The experience of a magnet with a north and south pole comes to mind. Trying to break the magnet in half does not result in the formation of the north and south poles separately in the resulting fragments. Each new piece will have north and south pole just like the original sample. In the same way, philosophy will be inherent in any knowledge that has reached a high stage of development. Whatever the name of a discipline, there will always be a place for philosophy in it. This understanding of the essence of the question of the presence of philosophy in theoretical knowledge became characteristic in the 19th century. New branches of knowledge appeared, where “philosophy” was a constituent part. It was especially widespread in German scientific and popular science literature, where the literary series Natur- und kulturphilosofische Bibliothek appeared. This applied in full measure to the science of war [Steinmetz, 1907].

The changeability of war has been noted by many thinkers, who used various metaphors to convey this property. Thus, Sun Tzu compared war to water: “… The army has no unchanging power, water has no unchanging form. Who knows how to master changes and transformations depending on the opponent and win, he is called a deity” [Sun Tzu, 2002, 51]. Representatives of the French school of polemology also associated changeability with the water element. They compared war with the mythical hero, Proteus, the son of Poseidon, who (according to Virgil) had inexhaustible abilities of transformations. A classic example of the changeability of war is Clausewitz’s statement about the internal and external sources of transformation of this phenomenon: “Thus, war is not only a real chameleon, since it changes its nature somewhat in each particular case, but also in its general forms in relation to the prevailing tendencies, it is a strange trinity made up of violence as its original element, hatred and enmity” [Clausewitz 1997, 58].

The multiplicity of war has been noted and highlighted by many contemporaries. One of them is the French philosopher Alexis Philonenko, who devoted himself to the study of many philosophical problems, among which the philosophy of war occupies an important place. In his Essais sur la philosophie de la guerre [Essays on the Philosophy of War], (1976), he scrutinizes the philosophical work of various philosophers—Machiavelli, Kant, Fichte, Saint-Just, Hegel, Clausewitz, Prudon, Tolstoy, De Gaulle—in relation to the study of the phenomenon of war. In doing so, he addressed the problem of the plurality of interpretations of war, as well as the problem of the correlation between war and peace. Among the reflections on the contributions of European philosophers and thinkers, Philonenko devotes a significant place to the philosophical reflections of Leo N. Tolstoy. Of the twelve chapters, four are devoted to it: “History and Religion in Tolstoy” (IX), “Tolstoy and Clausewitz” (X), “Tolstoy or Fatalism” (XI), “Logic and Strategy: Differential Calculus in War and Peace” (XII). Comparing the two unlike thinkers in their views on war, Philonenko wrote: “If at times it seemed that Tolstoy prevailed over Clausewitz, it must be recognized that a moment later Clausewitz prevailed over Tolstoy, and that in this way the philosopher of violence sometimes prevailed over the apostle of nonviolence, and vice versa” [Philonenko, 1976, 247]. Attention to the philosophical reasoning of Tolstoy, on the part of the French researcher, testifies to his open-mindedness to the work of one of the representatives of the Russian philosophy of war. Such positive interest for Russian thinkers on the part of foreign authors causes positive emotions, because it is not always so. An example of this is Raymond Aron’s arguments about the Marxist-Leninist doctrine of war and the army (which, in fact, was the philosophy of war in the USSR).

Discussing the multidimensionality of the philosophy of war, O.A. Belkov, a Russian researcher at the Research Institute of Military History of the Military Academy of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation, notes: “Taking into account these questions, the clarification of which constitutes the content of the philosophical understanding of war, and the problems that need such understanding, we can identify the areas of philosophical study of war: war as a state of society, different from peace, its essence and meaning, properties and signs; the role of war in the life of humanity and individual countries, the impact it has on various aspects of this life; social consequences of war; value-oriented analysis of war; sources and causes of wars and military conflicts; ontology of war, its existential content; the structure of war, the relationships between the various components of its content; the relationship between war and various spheres of public life and types of human activity; the spiritual side and ethics of war; political, economic, social and other non-military determinants and factors of the course and outcome of wars; internal contradictions of the war; the place and role of the army, the military class in the destinies of the homeland; conceptual and categorical apparatus and methodological principles for the study of war, typology of wars” [Belkov 2019, 120]. This once again proves that in the presence of a single object of study (war), the subject can vary to a large extent.

Realizing the multitude of problems facing the philosophy of war, we will limit ourselves in this article to a few topics: the problem of historical truth about wars and the problem of victory and defeat in war. All the more so because they are related to each other.

Uchronia, or Way of Distorting the Truth

We are all familiar with the term “utopia,” which is applied to something that does not exist in reality but is desirable. It is very often used to refer to an ideal social order, most often associated with an imaginary future. Thomas More used this neologism, an etymological derivative from the Greek “topos” and the negative prefix “u.” That is, it is a place that does not exist. In 1857, a book by French philosopher Charles Renouvier (1815-1903) was published, Uchronie. L’utopie dans l’histoire (Uchronia. Utopia in History). In the very title, the author unambiguously indicated, first, the utopian nature of the concept of “uchronia” and, second, its focus on history. The fabula of this work was the imaginary victory of Napoleon at Waterloo and its socio-political consequences for Europe. Renouvier was far from the first in this kind of historical fantasy. As the sources testify, Titus Livius in his treatise, History of Rome from the Founding of the City (Book IX, sections 17-19) develops a hypothesis about what would have happened if Alexander the Great had directed his conquest to the West instead of the East. A later author, the Abbé Michel de Pure (1620-1680), published in 1659 his novel, Épigone, histoire du siècle futur (Epigone, History of the Future Century), which is considered to be in the genre of uchronia.

Why does such a desire arise—to “remake” history? Most likely, because the real results of the historical process are not satisfactory, which do not always coincide with the desires of the participants, even those who did not take part in them and not even contemporaries. This applies to Marie-Pierre Rey’s four-hundred-page book, L’effroyable tragédie : Une nouvelle histoire de la campagne de Russie (A Terrible Tragedy: A New History of the Russian Campaign) [Rey, 2012], in which the author, deviating from accepted historical facts, gives a modified idea of the events of Napoleon’s campaign in Russia. The former President of the French Republic, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, went even further in a book he wrote called, La victoire de la Grande Armée (The Victory of the Grand Army), [Giscard d’Estaing, 2010]. In it he paints a picture of the victory of the French emperor over the Russian army. The triumph of the campaign is the return to the homeland and the acquisition of great power status by France. An example of a beneficial interpretation of real events was Napoleon I himself.

The “rewriting” of history is becoming an increasingly common practice these days. This is the sin of authors for whom the established ideas about the world status quo are an obstacle to changing it and creating a new world order in which a new history will be required to justify it. For this purpose, the historiosophic concept of uchronia, which provides freedom for the most daring distortions of historical facts, is very convenient.

It is quite understandable why history has become a field of struggle for new meanings and values, because it is very profitable to obtain moral, and other, dividends by appropriating what never belonged to the “uchronists” (in the broad sense) and their ideological sponsors, and to take away from those who were the basis for the resolution of crisis situations, especially those of a historical scale. Such attempts are very productive in cases when witnesses of events pass away or when ruling political regimes impose deliberately distorted ideas about real events on society. Sometimes such a desire outstrips and even replaces thoughtful and objective study of factual material. But history is a rather stubborn thing. Sooner or later, the facts of history become the property not only of specialists, but also of the general public.

In the philosophical reflections of the participant of the Patriotic War of 1812 and foreign campaigns of the Russian army in 1813-1814, Fedor Nikolayevich Glinka sounds a futurological warning to posterity: “The present repeats itself in the future as the past does in the present. Times will pass; years will turn into centuries, and there will come again for some of the kingdoms of the earth a decisive period similar to the one that has now covered Russia with ashes, blood and glory.” [Glinka 2012, 132]. Unfortunately, his warning has been repeatedly confirmed in history.

How can we counter the onslaught of unsafe historical “fantasies” and direct distortions of facts? The surest way is to counter it with historical, documentary truth. This is the only way to bring down the lie, no matter what kind of garb it wears.

In the three-volume work, History of the Patriotic War of 1812, according to reliable sources (1859), the talented Russian historian Modest Ivanovich Bogdanovich gave an objective analysis of the scientific works of Russian and foreign researchers who described the events of the past clash of Napoleon’s and Russian armies. He highly appreciated the contribution of compatriots and foreigners in the reliable description of the events. He praised General Dmitry Buturlin, General Alexander Mikhailovsky Danilevsky, Dmitry Milyutin, Smith, Gepfner. At the same time, he noted the not always high enough level of foreign sources on the War of 1812: “none of them corresponds either to the importance of the subject nor to the current state of science” [Bogdanovich, 1859, IV]. Only a few works by foreigners deserve, in his opinion, praise: “Memoires of the Prince of Wurtemberg” (Erinnerungen aus dem Feldzuge des Jahres 1812 in Russland), “Notes of Count Toll” (Denkwürdigkeiten des Grafen v. Toll) and General de Chambre’s “Histoire de l’expédition de Russie” (Histoire de l’expédition de Russie) (see: [Soloviev 2017, 43]).

M.I. Bogdanovich rightly remarks: “When describing the war, one cannot do without comparing the testimonies of both sides, which alone can serve to impartially investigate the truth.” [Bogdanovich, 1859, V]. Thus he emphasized the methodological significance of the event aspect of the military clash in both epistemological and political terms. This kind of inference honors the author not only as a general, but also as a historian and philosopher.

From the point of view of distortion of the real state of affairs, we should note different levels of this process: distortions of historical truth at the level of concepts and theories, and on the other hand, biased interpretation in their favor at the factual level. The techniques of distorting information for military and political purposes are known at all times. The famous historian Yevgeny Viktorovich Tarle relates examples of “information warfare” during the Patriotic War of 1812: “The false bulletins of Napoleon’s headquarters made in France, Poland, Germany, Austria, Italy the impression they were designed to make” [Tarle, 2015, 155]. As some contemporary Russian researchers note, the French often used methods of distorting information, which can be considered as prototypes of “information warfare” [Bezotosny, 2004, 190-202]. The subjects of falsification were military losses, battle results, superiority of military strategy, and civilizational ambitions [Zemtsov, 2002, 38-51].

Victory and Defeat

The theme of victory and defeat in historiosophic terms was of interest to many authors. It was addressed by our famous compatriot Nikolay Yakovlevich Danilevsky, the ideologist of pan-Slavism, one of the founders of the civilizational approach to history. The original ideas of this thinker in the field of philosophy of politics brought out ambiguous responses from contemporaries. At the same time, the statement of problems was characterized by thorough elaboration. In January-February 1879 in the journal, Russkaya rech’ (Russian Speech), he published an article “Woe to the victors!” in which he addressed the problem of Russia’s military policy in the Eastern Question. He assessed the geopolitical situation in the region pessimistically: “…we were to achieve by war: the resolution of all the obstacles, both moral and material, separating the north-eastern Slavs, i.e., Russia, from the south-eastern Slavs and from all the Orthodox peoples inhabiting the Balkan Peninsula. And all barriers were destroyed by the bayonets of Russian soldiers—and rebuilt again, and some were even strengthened and created again by the pens of Russian diplomats. The negative results achieved by Russian policy far surpassed the negative ones achieved by Russian military art and Russian military valor! The strange and ridiculous sounding paradox, woe to the victors, Russia managed to turn into a sad but undoubted fact” [Danilevsky, 1998]. Indeed, this problem has an even longer history. This situation is enshrined in the winged expression “Pyrrhic victory,” understood as a victory obtained at an exorbitant price, which equalized the winner and the defeated (there are earlier analogues of this expression).

French polemologist Julien Freund in his work, Sociology of Conflict addresses the problem of the correlation between victory and defeat in war. This philosophical problem is always in the center of attention of philosophers, thinkers and politicians. Who really enjoys the fruits of military victory, and whether military and political victory are identical? Speaking of military victory, he writes: “Victory, which means the defeat of the other, is a conclusion that corresponds to the internal logic of conflict, since it aims to break the resistance of the enemy in order to impose our will on him. In principle, since it is a bilateral relation, only one of the opponents can be the winner. Thus, phenomenologically, the triumph of one and the defeat of the other essentially constitutes the most appropriate outcome to the spirit of the conflict. From this point of view, the victory should even be, if possible, the most complete and the defeat, if possible, the most crushing. C. Clausewitz never tires of repeating this, varying the wording.” [Freund 2008, 58].

Modern Russian scientists are attentive to the problem of victory and defeat. It is not difficult to find an explanation for this. Victory or defeat for the Soviet Union was a problem of life and death not only for an individual, but for the entire nation. The war waged by Hitler’s Germany against the USSR was a war of extermination. The historical memory of the people eternally preserves the events that were a crime against humanity. It is a kind of genetic immunity against national ignorance, which in the 21st century can internally disarm a citizen of his country.

Andrei Afanasievich Kokoshin, a specialist in military-political issues, reacted to the book, Winning Modern Wars (2003), by retired American general Wesley Clark, with a small paper, “On the Political Meaning of Victory in a Modern War,” devoted to the consideration of the political component in a military conflict. The work sounds modern and, in a certain respect, leads us to think not only about the political meaning of victory in modern or past wars, but also about its moral content.

The object of study of the philosophy of war can be various specific wars or wars in their totality. Each source provides the researcher with rich material for study and generalizations. In this sense, the Patriotic War of 1812 is of great interest, because it is, in our opinion, a model that includes the rich experience of past wars, and which also became a prototype for future wars.

When he began the war against the Russian Empire, Napoleon had numerical superiority, vast combat experience, the combined economic potential of France and conquered Europe, etc., but he failed to use these advantages. The explanations for this on the part of the French were irrational (“barbaric customs”, etc.), but the reasons were quite real—at the minimum, the poor organization of supply of the French army. Napoleonic historian, a participant of the French campaign in Russia, Eugene Labaume described the condition of the French troops: “The weather, which was beautiful all day long, became cold and damp at night. The army settled on the battlefield and settled down partly in the redoubts, which it so gloriously captured. This bivouac was severe; the men and horses had nothing to eat, and the scarcity of firewood made us experience all the severity of a rainy and freezing night” [Labaume 1820, 160]. Labaume, who did not question the victory of Napoleon’s army in the campaign, without wanting to, revealed one of its weaknesses—poor logistics.

Another confirmation of the catastrophic situation of the French troops, who had not yet taken Moscow, is the testimony of Count Philippe-Paul de Ségur, who described the Borodino field after the battle in his memoirs: “…there are soldiers everywhere, wandering among the corpses and looking for food even in the duffel bags of their dead comrades” [Ségur, 1910, 147]. Then he makes a conclusion that diverged from the generally accepted opinion in French historiography, which insisted on the unconditional defeat of the Russians at Borodino: “If the remaining (Russian troops—A. S.) withdrew in such good order, proud and so little discouraged, how important was the mastery of a single battlefield? In such vast areas the Russians will always have enough land to fight on” [Ségur 1910, 148].

But his profound observations and conclusions are disharmonious with other inferences having the character of civilizational superiority: “It is obvious that they (Russian soldiers—A. S.) seemed more resistant to pain than the French; this is not because they endured suffering more courageously, but they suffered less, since they are less sensitive both in body and spirit, which is due to a less developed civilization and to organs hardened by climate” [Ségur, 1910, 149-150]. Similar attempts to belittle the achievements and successes of Russia and its citizens can often be found nowadays in many Western authors.

Conclusion

In conclusion, it is worth noting that the problem of war and peace is still a fundamental one, and addressing it from a philosophical perspective is very important for understanding the origins and essential relations arising in the transition from a peaceful state to a state of war and vice versa. The philosophy of war greatly contributes to this, allowing us to penetrate into the essence of changes in the image of war, and in some cases to anticipate the direction of transformations of modern wars.

In his work “Cherished Thoughts”, the great Russian scientist Dmitri Ivanovich Mendeleev, reflecting on war and the possibility of its elimination as a social phenomenon, wrote: “No matter how much people wish to live in good harmony forever, and no matter what alliances the states make, still ahead, i.e., in the not distant future, or more precisely, in the twentieth century, wars cannot be avoided, and if governments make peace, the peoples will not stop fighting and demanding wars” [Kozikov 2018, 221]. And if governments do not contribute to peacekeeping? Unfortunately, the history of the 21st century shows the emergence of wars and military conflicts in one part of the planet or another. This provides food for philosophical reflection, a vivid example of which is the study of the “world-war” cycle of human development [Danilenko 2008a; Danilenko 2008b]. More recently, Indiana University professor and political anthropologist Edgar Illas’ book, The Survival Regime. Global War and the Political [Illas, 2019]. This suggests that the philosophical analysis of the political-economic content of the phenomenon of war has been and remains relevant.

For references, please consult the original:

Alexei V. Soloviev is Associate Professor in the Department of the Philosophy of Politics and Law, Faculty of Philosophy, Lomonosov, Moscow.

Featured: Crossing the Berezina River on 17 (29) November 1812, by Peter von Hess; painted in 1844.

Operation Al-Aqsa Flood: The Defeat of the Vanquisher

We are pleased to bring you this excerpt from Colonel Jacques Baud’s latest book, which deals with the genocide in Gaza currently being carried out by Israel. The book is entitled, Operation Al-Aqsa Flood: The Defeat of the Vanquisher. We will update this page as soon as this book becomes available. in the meantime, here is the excerpt.

Doctrinal Apparatus Ill-Suited to an Asymmetrical Conflict

The BETHLEHEM Doctrine

This doctrine was developed by Daniel Bethlehem, legal advisor to Ben-jamin Netanyahu and then to British Prime Minister Tony Blair. It postulates that states are entitled to preventive self-defense against an “imminent” attack. The difficulty here is to determine the “imminent” nature of an attack, which implies that the terrorist action is close in time and that there is a body of evidence to confirm it.

In February 2013, NBC News released a Department of Justice “White Pa-per” defining “imminent:”

the imminent threat of a violent attack against the United States does not require the United States to have proof that a specific attack against American persons or interests will take place in the immediate future.

While the principle appears legitimate, it’s the interpretation of the word “imminent” that poses a problem. In intelligence circles, the “imminence” of an attack is defined in terms of its proximity in time and the likelihood of it taking place. But, according to Daniel Bethlehem, this is no longer the case here:

It must be right that states should be able to act in self-defense in cir-cumstances where there is evidence of imminent attacks by terrorist groups, even if there is no specific evidence of where such an attack will take place or of the precise nature of the attack.

In this way, a terrorist attack can be considered “imminent,” even if the de-tails and timing are unknown. This makes it possible, for example, to launch an air strike simply on the basis of suspicions of an imminent attack.

In November 2008, while a ceasefire was in force, an Israeli commando raid killed six people in Gaza. The explanation given by the Israeli army illustrates the BETHLEHEM doctrine:

This was a targeted operation to prevent an immediate threat […] There was no intention to break the ceasefire, rather the aim of the op-eration was to eliminate an immediate and dangerous threat posed by the Hamas terrorist organization.

This doctrine is similar to the one enunciated in 2001 by Dick Cheney, then Vice President of the United States, also known as the “Cheney doctrine” or the “1% doctrine:”

If there’s a 1% probability that Pakistani scientists are helping terrorists to develop or build weapons of mass destruction, we have to treat that as a certainty, in terms of response.

It’s the strategic/operational version of the Wild West “hip shot.” It’s symp-tomatic of the way we understand the law and the way we wage war: without values and without honor.

The problem with the BETHLEHEM doctrine is that it has been systematically used by Israel to justify ceasefire violations. This is true of extra-judicial kill-ings, which are not considered ceasefire violations. A study of Palestinian rocket attacks shows that they are always carried out in response to an Israeli attack, which does not generally appear in our media. From this stems our perception that Palestinian organizations—Palestinian Islamic Jihad and Ha-mas in particular—wantonly attack Israel with their rockets, and therefore engage in terrorist practices.

In its February 2018 report, the Human Rights Council (HRC) reports that during the Gaza border protests (Return Marches), the Israeli army shot dead 183 civilians, including 154 who were unarmed and 35 children. In February 2019, he reports that the Israeli army “intentionally” shot children, medical personnel (wearing badges and shot in the back!), journalists and disabled people. The Palestinian children shot by Israeli snipers with fragmentation bullets while simply standing in front of the border in Gaza in 2018, or the handcuffed and blindfolded Palestinian youth shot in the back in April 2019, are war crimes.

Israel’s supporters claim self-defence, but this is fallacious, as the videos published by the United Nations show. Firstly, because the victims were in a 150 m security strip inside Gaza, separated from Israel by a fence and a wide berm, from which Israeli snipers fire. Secondly, because those killed were “armed” only with stones, and thirdly, because some of those hit (notably children) were shot in the back.

So much for the world’s most moral army, which the United Nations has asked to stop shooting children.

The DAHIYA Doctrine

The Israeli army deliberately ignores the principles of international humani-tarian law and applies the “Dahiya doctrine,” drawn up by General Gadi Ei-senkot, now Chief of the General Staff. It advocates the use of “disproportion-ate force” to create maximum damage and destruction, and considers that there are “no civilian villages, these are military bases… This is not a re-commendation. It’s a plan.”

It’s a doctrine that presents itself as a deterrent, but contrary to Wikipedia’s assertion, it’s a tactic that can only work in a symmetrical context, i.e. when the action has a linear effect on weakening the adversary. In an asym-metrical context, where the determination of combatants depends on the brutality of their adversary, such destruction only serves to stimulate the will to resist and the determination to use a terrorist approach. This is the essence of jihad.

In fact, the very existence of this doctrine shows that the Israelis have failed to understand their adversaries and their operating logic. This explains why Israel is the only country in the world not to have mastered terrorism in three-quarters of a century.

In October 2023, the same logic will be applied. The British newspaper The Telegraph quoted Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari, spokesman for the Israeli army, as saying that for the strikes “the emphasis is on damage, not precision,” the aim being to reduce Gaza to a “tent city” by the end of the campaign.

***

The HANNIBAL Directive

Our media never mention the “HANNIBAL directive,” which came into force in 1986 in the Israeli army, designed to prevent Israeli prisoners from being used as bargaining chips by the Palestinians. It stipulated that those holding the prisoner were to be destroyed by any means necessary (including at the cost of the prisoner’s own life and that of civilians in the area). Applied during Operation PROTECTIVE EDGE, it was behind the total destruction of a Rafah neighborhood on August 1st, 2014, an event known in Palestine as Black Friday.

This directive seems to be still in use, naturally without much publicity. It ex-plains why the Israelis are not impressed by the hostages taken by Hamas:

The European diplomats were also struck by the lack of interest shown by the Israeli government in prioritizing the lives of the hostages held in Gaza.

Very soon after the start of the Hamas operation, Israel announced the deaths of 1,400 Israeli civilians. This number became a leitmotif for refusing any dialogue with Hamas and other Palestinian groups. But this number was revised downwards after 200 charred bodies were recognized as those of Ha-mas fighters. Then, on December 2, 2023, it was lowered again to 1,000 in a tweet from the Israeli government.

An Israeli air force colonel would later confirm that on October 7, a “free fire” was ordered from the air force, described as a “mass HANNIBAL.”

The HANNIBAL directive is applied not only in cases of hostage-taking, but also when soldiers are at risk of capture. For example, on January 24, 2024, near Khan Younès, a tank was damaged by rocket fire, and the Israeli military was unable to approach it to retrieve the three wounded crewmen. The gen-eral staff therefore preferred to bomb the tank and its occupants rather than risk them falling into the hands of Hamas.

In any case, we can see that the Israeli army applies the precautionary prin-ciple neither to the Palestinians nor to its own men. One could say with a cer-tain cynicism that, at least here, Palestinians and Israelis are treated equally.

In mid-December 2023, the discovery of three bodies in a tunnel in Gaza sparked controversy. They were three men held by Hamas, whom the Israeli army spokesman had declared killed by the Palestinian organization. They have no apparent injuries and appear to have been killed by poisoning. Were they killed by the deliberate use of a combat toxicant or accidentally by toxic fumes from explosions (such as carbon monoxide)? We don’t know, but the mother of one of them, Ron Sherman, believes he was deliberately sacrificed by the army. In any case, this illustrates the Israeli army’s failure to respect the precautionary principle.

Extrajudicial Executions

Extra-judicial executions are an important element in Israel’s policy of de-terrence against Palestinian movements. They consist of eliminating militants outside the judicial process, using killers or “one-off” strikes such as air attacks. Legally questionable, they are often strategically ineffective. Three countries use them regularly: the United States, Israel and France. Presented as a preventive measure, they are generally carried out in a punitive manner, like Sicilian vendettas, without any real assessment of their strategic conse-quences. In practice, they fuel a growing process of violence and are a source of legitimacy for terrorism. In fact, they often reflect a lack of real coun-ter-terrorist strategy.

The archetype of this mode of action is Operation ANGER OF GOD (Mivtza Za’am Ha’el), also known as Operation BAYONET, carried out by the Mossad to punish the perpetrators of the attack on the Israeli Olympic team in Munich in 1972 (Operation BERIM & IKRIT). Within a year, almost the entire Palestinian commando was eliminated: Wae Zwaiter (Rome, October 16, 1972), Mahmoud Hamchari (Paris, January 9, 1973), Abd El-Hir (Nicosia, January 24, 1973), Basil Al-Kubaissi (Paris, April 6, 1973), Ziad Muchassi (Athens, April 12, 1973), Mohammed Boudia (Paris, June 28, 1973), Kamal Nasser, Mahmoud Najjer and Kamal Adouan (Beirut, April 9, 1973). Its leader, Ali Hassan Sala-meh, was killed in Beirut on January 22, 1979, followed by his sec-ond-in-command, Khalil al-Wazir (alias Abou Djihad), on April 16, 1988 in Tunis. In the end, only one member of the group, Jamal al-Gasheï, seems to have escaped the wrath of GOD, while an innocent man was mistakenly killed in Lillehammer (Norway).

These actions are punitive operations. What our countries and Israel con-sider part of the game is called terrorism when others do it. By accepting it from Israel, we create a permissive environment that could well legitimize the elimination of some of our political leaders. Which could happen.

Since 1988, Israel has been using specially trained units to operate clandes-tinely in the occupied territories. Known as “mista’aravim” or YAMAS, these are ad hoc formations that operate clandestinely (in Arab clothing—hence their name) in the occupied territories for reconnaissance missions, comman-do actions or extra-judicial executions. Mista’aravim actions are mainly car-ried out in the West Bank by Sayeret Duvdevan (Unit 217).

The best-known of these was Mossad’s attempt to poison Khaled Mashal, political leader of Hamas in Jordan, in 1997. It ended in failure: the two Israeli agents carrying Canadian passports were arrested; then Israel had to provide an antidote and release Sheikh Ahmed Yassin in exchange for the release of his agents. The result was Israel’s loss of credibility with the international com-munity and the mistrust of Jordan—with which Israel has a peace treaty.

Mista’aravim are the equivalent of the Groupe Antiterroriste de Libération (GAL) units used in Spain in the 1980s, which are considered a form of state terrorism. However, the advantage of this type of action is that it can elimi-nate an individual without razing an entire neighborhood or destroying entire families. But it requires agents who are all the more competent and coura-geous because the Palestinians have strengthened their counter-espionage and internal security capabilities. This is why this type of operation has be-come almost impossible to carry out in Gaza, but is still common practice in the West Bank. In Gaza, Israel prefers to carry out its actions “at a distance,” using more sophisticated means such as drones or guided missiles, which have a devastating effect on the civilian population.

With some 2,300 known assassinations, Israel rivals the United States as the country that regularly assassinates opponents and terrorists. When carried out on foreign soil, an “elimination” is a complex operation, relying on a net-work of local informers (“sayanim”), most often recruited from the Jewish diaspora. But this has a perverse effect: it turns the previously well-integrated Jewish community into an object of distrust, perceived as a “5th column” in many countries of the Near and Middle East.

But extra-judicial executions not only carry a significant political risk if un-successful, they tend to legitimize illegal violence and terrorism, as evidenced by the Arabian Peninsula Jihad Base’s (APJB) Inspire magazine:

[The assassination of leaders of the civil and military unbelievers] is one of the most important arts of terrorism and one of the most advanta-geous and deterrent types of operation. These methods are also used by the enemies of Allah. The CIA has authorization from the US gov-ernment to assassinate presidents, if it is in the national interest of the United States, and they have used it more than once. In the CIA, there’s a special department for that! So I don’t know why we’re prevented from doing it?
This is a case of Islamist asymmetry: the “cure” is worse than the “disease.” The assassination of leaders has no dissuasive effect. It makes the dead a martyr and an example to follow. It hardly ever leads to the end of terrorist action, but keeps the flame of resistance alive and takes on more varied forms.

With highly decentralized structures, the elimination of cadres does not necessarily weaken the terrorist group, but it does force its hierarchy to renew itself more rapidly and apply new methods and policies of action. This is what happened with Hamas.

But on August 21, 2003, Israeli forces eliminated Ismaïl Abou Shanab. At the time, he was considered a Hamas moderate, and his assassination triggered widespread condemnation and an unprecedented mobilization of the Pales-tinian population. Attacks resumed in step with the eliminations carried out by Israel.

In September 2023, on the LCI channel, where journalist Darius Rochebin praises the assassinations carried out by the Ukrainian secret services, Gen-eral Christophe Gomart explains that France also carries them out. He is a perfect illustration of the Western way of thinking. Like the Israelis, he thinks it’s useful to shoot a leader “because in fact it’s the leaders who decide, and it takes longer to train a leader than it does to train an ordinary soldier,” so:

We destabilize, we disorganize, and the idea in war is to disorganize the adversary in order to weaken him and make it possible to win, and therefore to overthrow him… that’s what we did in the Sahel against the terrorist leaders: we sought to disorganize the terrorist or jihadist Not only does this illustrate a tactical approach to the fight against terror-ism, but it is not valid for highly decentralized insurgent structures, made up of small, quasi-autonomous groups. This partly explains the operational and strategic failure of French action in the Sahel.

This somewhat childish vision of war may work in a conventional conflict, but not in an unconventional context, and certainly not in a jihadist one. It flies in the face of what a British SAS officer told me during my counter-terrorism training in Britain during the war in Northern Ireland in the mid-1980s. The British had extremely detailed files and information on the various command-ers of the Irish Republican Army (IRA), down to knowing their every move. When I asked why they didn’t eliminate them, the officer replied:

Because we know them. We know their psychology, their families, their networks, their way of fighting, and we can better anticipate their ac-tions, even pre-empt them. If we kill them, others will come along, per-haps more effective, more aggressive, and we’ll know nothing about them.

Of course, such an answer is only possible when you have studied your op-ponent thoroughly and know him in great detail. The fact is that today, we know very little about our opponents. Even public figures like Vladimir Putin are so poorly known that he is diagnosed with illnesses he doesn’t have. It’s the same in Palestine.

Experience shows that extra-judicial executions have no operational effect. On the contrary, they encourage the spirit of vengeance and tend to mobilize the spirit of resistance. This phenomenon is all the stronger when civilians are killed in the process. They inspire contempt rather than admiration, as they represent a success not achieved in face-to-face combat. Moreover, as in the case of Operation Al-Aqsa Flood, the Israeli military are not fighting a “brave” battle. This is why these executions become a substitute for real suc-cess against terrorism. They therefore appear more as proof of weakness and incapacity than as a demonstration of effectiveness.

According to some (unconfirmed) reports, SHABAK has set up a clandestine unit, code-named INDIGO, whose mission is to hunt down the perpetrators of the crimes of October 7, 2023. But with evidence mounting that the vast majority of these crimes were the result of errors of conduct, the question of the extent to which this group will punish the real perpetrators of the massacres remains open.

***

Operation Al-Aqsa Flood

Strategic Objectives

Over and above the historical objectives of Palestinian resistance, which are aimed at creating a Palestinian state or returning to the land taken from them, the objectives of Operation AL-AQSA DELUGE essentially concern the situation in Gaza.

The operation’s central strategic objective is to end the blockade of the Gaza Strip and restore normal living conditions for the population. This includes the end of permanent surveillance by Israeli forces, restrictions on trade in goods, and measures that prevent economic and social development. This objective follows on from the “Marches of Return,” which were led by civil society, but were met with sniper fire.

Achieving this goal involved enabling objectives, the most important of which was to bring the Palestinian question back onto the international stage. In November 2012, the United Nations General Assembly granted Palestine the status of “non-member observer state of the United Nations.” Since then, however, no progress has been made in dealing with the Palestinian question, and the situation has even deteriorated with the arrival of Israel’s ul-tra-nationalists in power.

The second intermediate objective was to interrupt the normalization pro-cess between Israel and certain Arab countries. Not because of normalization itself, but because it sidelined the Palestinian question. The Palestinians had always wanted these issues to be linked, so that there would be leverage to force Israel to implement UN decisions.

The third intermediate objective was to rally the Muslim community around the issue of the future of the Esplanade of the Mosques (or Temple Mount), which is closely linked to the Palestinian question. As Ihsan Ataya, a mem-ber of the political bureau of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PID) and head of the PID’s Arab and International Relations Department states:

The aim of Operation AL-AQSA RELIEF was stated from the outset: to prevent the Al-Aqsa Mosque (in Jerusalem) from being attacked, Muslim religious rites from being insulted or defamed, our women from being assaulted, efforts to Judaize the Al-Aqsa Mosque and normalize its occupation by Israel from being implemented, or the mosque from being divided in time and space.

It has to be said that, while the blockade of Gaza has not been lifted, these three intermediate strategic objectives have been at least partially achieved. To what extent they will lead to a lasting and just solution to the Palestinian question is an open question, but Hamas has clearly underlined the responsi-bility of the international community to enforce the decisions it has taken.

Operational Objectives

First Objective: The Gaza Division

The first objective was to destroy the elements of the Gaza Division and the surveillance installations encircling the Gaza Strip. On October 12, Abu Obeida, spokesman for the Al-Qassam Phalanges, explains:

Operation AL-AQSA DELUGE was aimed at destroying the Gaza Division, which was attacked at 15 points, followed by 10 more. We attacked the Zikim site and several other settlements outside the Gaza Division headquarters.

This objective may seem outdated to us, since it was clear from the outset that the Palestinian operation could not maintain its momentum for very long, and that the fighting would necessarily continue in the Gaza Strip itself. Con-sequently, the destruction of infrastructure could only be temporary, but highly symbolic.

To understand this, you have to put yourself in the Palestinians’ software. Victory is not achieved by destroying the adversary, but by maintaining the determination to resist. In other words, whatever the Israelis do, however much destruction and death they cause, the Palestinians have already emerged victorious from this operation. Faced with a numerically and materi-ally stronger adversary, victory in the Western sense of the term is not possi-ble. On the other hand, overcoming fear and feelings of powerlessness is al-ready a victory. This is the very essence of the notion of jihad.

Consequently, all the humiliations the Israelis can inflict on their prisoners or the civilian population can only make the Palestinians feel better, and lower the military’s thirst for vengeance. In fact, this is what is happening around the world: the Israelis are obliged to use their censorship to hide the crimes com-mitted by their soldiers, and the idea of “the most moral army in the world” is now totally discredited.

Second Objective: Take Prisoners

The second objective was to seize prisoners in order to exchange them for those held by Israel. Very quickly, testimonies in the Israeli press showed that the aim of the Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PID) fighters was not to carry out a “pogrom,” but to seize soldiers in order to exchange them for Pal-estinians held by Israel. The aim was to gain leverage to resume the negotia-tions interrupted by the Israeli government in November 2021. Since then, it has been known that Hamas would carry out such an operation. The depu-ty chief of staff of the Al-Qassam Phalanges, Marwan Issa, had declared that “the prisoners’ file will be the surprise of the enemy’s next surprises.”

Clearly, the aim was not to kill civilians, but rather to obtain a bargaining chip for the release of some 5,300 prisoners held by Israel. Eyewitness ac-counts in the Israeli press suggest that the original idea was to take only mili-tary prisoners (who are “more valuable” than civilians for an exchange). These same accounts show that the Palestinians were surprised to find so few mili-tary personnel on site, which can be explained by the fact that part of the gar-risons had been redeployed to the West Bank a few weeks earlier. Yasmin Porat’s testimony, mentioned above, shows that Hamas fighters stayed with civilians in their homes, waiting for the security forces to intervene. The testi-monies indicate that the Palestinian fighters left with civilian prisoners only after the Israeli military had intervened, firing indiscriminately into the houses with their tanks. It therefore appears that the capture of civilians was more the result of a combination of circumstances than a decision taken in advance.

The death of civilians was therefore not an objective, and the fact that the freed hostages declared that they had been treated with respect, and even in a friendly manner, tends to confirm that this was not a “pogrom” against the Israeli population.

The prisoner exchanges of November 2023 illustrate Hamas’s strategy, at the heart of which were military prisoners, not civilians. That’s why the Pales-tinians released the women and children first, and kept the military (especially the top brass) for later. We’ll come back to this later.

Tactical Objectives

The Hamas attack targeted 25 military objectives located in the “Gaza en-velope.” The three main tactical objectives of the operation were:

  • the Zikim naval base in the north of the Gaza Strip, which was attacked by Hamas marine commandos, who resisted Israeli counter-attacks for several days;
  • the Erez checkpoint, in the north of the Gaza Strip, which manages part of the fence’s surveillance facilities; the Gaza Division command post at the Re’im site, where the heaviest fighting will take place on October 7; and the Urim intelligence center some 17 km from the Gaza Strip, in order to damage Israeli surveillance installations.
  • A document discovered near Kibbutz Mefalsim, 2 km from the Gaza Strip, containing data on the number of soldiers and security forces, shows that the operation was meticulously prepared and directed against military installations.

Russia did not Lose the Russo-Japanese War

War against Russia was necessary for Japan, both for territorial gains and for acquitting the status of a world power. The idea of the inevitability of war with Russia had been implanted in the minds of the Japanese people long before 1904. The famous Irish writer Lafcadio Hearn wrote back in 1895 that when the Japanese move on Russia, even the dead Japanese soldiers and sailors who died in the recent war with China will come to their aid. The ambitiousness of Japanese politicians was supported by Western powers interested in weakening Russia. The U.S., Germany, and England provided Japan with enormous assistance in rearming, training, and military supplies for the army.

By 1904, Japan had concentrated five times more armed forces in the Far East than the Russian armed forces. They were equipped with the most modern Western European and American weapons. The Japanese fleet was at least twice as large as the Russian Pacific fleet.

Sovereign Emperor Nicholas II foresaw the war with Japan and prepared for it, but, unfortunately, Russia by 1904 did not have time to re-equip the Siberian and Far Eastern railroads for military transportation, which was one of the decisive reasons for the defeats of the Russian army at the beginning of the war.

Tsar Nicholas II was not a bellicose man and considered war the greatest evil, so he tried in every way to avoid it. In negotiations with Japan, he was ready to make major concessions, up to the lease of part of the island of Sakhalin. But, as noted by S. S. Oldenburg, “Russia could avoid the struggle only by surrender. By self-removal from the Far East. No partial concessions—and a lot were made—could not only prevent, but also postpone the war.”

And war broke out. On the night of January 26-27, 1904, Japanese ships treacherously attacked the Russian squadron in Port Arthur. In his manifesto to the people, Emperor Nicholas II stated:

“In our concern for the preservation of the peace dear to our heart, we have made every effort to strengthen the tranquility in the Far East. For these peace-loving purposes, we have agreed to the revision of the existing agreements on Korean affairs between the two empires, proposed by the Japanese Government. The negotiations on this subject, however, were not brought to an end, and Japan, without even waiting for the receipt of the last reciprocal proposals of Our Government, announced the termination of the negotiations and the severance of diplomatic relations with Russia.

Without warning that the interruption of such relations would mean the opening of hostilities, the Japanese Government ordered its destroyers to suddenly attack our squadron, which was moored at the naval base of the fortress of Port Arthur. Upon receipt of the report of our Viceroy in the Far East, we immediately ordered an armed response to the Japanese challenge.”

Some Russian politicians of that time doubted the expediency of the war. And the liberal-revolutionary public immediately declared that Russia did not need territories thousands of versts away and, in order to have good-neighborly relations with Japan, it had to “withdraw from the Far East.” However, Russian politicians and public figures understood the significance of the Russo-Japanese war. This understanding was later expressed by Sergei S. Oldenburg:

“Since the days when Peter the Great cut through the ‘window to Europe,’ no war was as much a struggle for the future of Russia as the Russo-Japanese war. The question of access to ice-free seas, of Russian predominance in a vast part of the world, of the almost unpopulated expanses of Manchuria was being decided. Otherwise, having made its mark on its entire future in Asia, Russia could not evade this struggle.”

In addition, we can say that Russia’s war with Japan was predetermined in heaven. This is evidenced by the following mystical cases. Seven days before the war began, one Valaam elder had a vision, later recorded from his words and kept in the archives of the Valaam Monastery.

In this subtle vision an angel in the form of a young man appeared to him and foretold the coming calamities. Here is how the elder himself told about it:

“One night a bright Young Man came to me and said: ‘Come with me, and you will see something that no one on earth understands.’ The Young Man turned the other way, and I saw a huge beast walking in the distance, and behind it a dark cloud went over the Russian land. I became afraid, and I took a step back. But the Young Man said: ‘Where will you go? There is nowhere to hide from it. But know that it does not concern you.’ Then I felt a kind of strength within me and I began to look at everything. I asked: ‘What does it mean?’ The young man said: ‘One, the beast is war, and two, the cloud is punishment.’”

In addition to this vision there was another mystical incident, confirming the predetermination of the war with Japan. Two months before it began, a pilgrim, an old Russian sailor, a participant in the famous defense of Sevastopol in 1854, during the Crimean War, came to the Kiev-Pechersk Lavra. At the Kiev shrines he prayed diligently for the Russian fleet in Port Arthur. And then, one day, he had a vision: the Mother of God standing with her back to the bay, who was holding an oblong shawl in her hands. With Her feet She was trampling naked double-edged swords. The sailor was very frightened by this vision, was struck with fear, but the Mother of God calmed him and told him that the war would soon begin, in which Russia would face severe trials. And in conclusion She said that it was necessary to paint an icon, which should exactly reflect this vision, and send it to Port Arthur.

When the old sailor began to speak of this vision everywhere, few believed him. And only after the attack of Japanese ships on the Russian squadron in Port Arthur did the Orthodox believe in the truth of Our Lady’s apparition to the sailor. Ten thousand Kiev worshipers collected the sum necessary to paint the icon, “Solemnity of the Mother of God,” or, as it is called otherwise, the icon of the Mother of God “Port Arthur.” Soon this icon was painted and sent to Port Arthur. But by that time, it was already besieged by the Japanese, and attempts to deliver the icon there ended in failure. And so it was sent to the Headquarters of the Commander-in-Chief, General Kuropatkin.

From the failure of the spiritual order, the beginning of the war was also unsuccessful for Russia in other respects. In March 1904 near Port Arthur there was a battle between Russian and Japanese squadrons. By tragic accident, at the very beginning of the battle, the Russian battleship Petropavlovsk, on which Admiral Makarov, Commander-in-Chief of the Fleet, was stationed, exploded on a mine. The ship sank in a matter of minutes. Among the dead was the Admiral himself. Left without leadership, Russian ships were defeated. The death of a remarkable naval commander, Admiral Makarov, was a heavy, irreplaceable loss. With his name, Russia reasonably associated hope for victory in this war. But the death of the Russian squadron in many ways predetermined further defeats, as after that Russian troops were deprived of support from the sea. The strategic position of the Russian army and fleet worsened. Taking advantage of the situation, the Japanese inflicted a heavy defeat on the Russian troops at Mukden and defeated the squadron in the Tsushima Strait.

Nevertheless, these defeats did not bring Japan victory over Russia. Sergei S. Oldenburg writes:

“The Russian army even after Mukden remained a formidable fighting force, and the Japanese were severely exhausted, despite the victory. They took the advantage of their earlier readiness for the last time – and yet they did not achieve a decisive result. Talk of Mukden as an unprecedented and shameful defeat was explained by political considerations – to show the unfitness of Russian power.”

After Mukden, the Japanese army could no longer fight actively. The economy and finances of Japan were undermined. Military losses were enormous:

“In the hostilities, Japan lost 270,000 men, including 86,000. The number of dead on the part of Russia was 36,000 thousand less. The economic and financial situation remained stable.”

In this regard, after the Battle of Tsushima, the Japanese Emperor appealed to U.S. President Roosevelt with a request to begin negotiations with Russia on the conclusion of peace, as Japan was unable to continue the war.

Emperor Nicholas II did not want to make peace, realizing that the defeat of Japan was inevitable and everything depended only on time. Nevertheless, he was forced to enter into peace negotiations, as internal turmoil began in Russia, which turned out to be more dangerous than the Japanese armies. The enemies of the Russian Orthodox monarchy provoked the revolution of 1905. The Russian Orthodox Church sounded the alarm. “There is a difficult war going on,” wrote Metropolitan Anthony (Vadkovsky) at that time, “it will be necessary for all to unite in high self-sacrifice, full patriotic feeling; but instead of this, internal turmoil reigns in our land. Native sons of Russia, under the influence of harmful teachings of enmity, unknown in the old days, tear her maternal heart. There is no love for the Church, reverence for authority has disappeared… This is where the real grief and misfortune of Russia.”

It must be said that huge foreign funds were involved in the organization of anti-state demonstrations. “Japan allocated money for the organization of strikes and riots in Russia,” writes historian Oleg A. Platonov. “Through front men and organizations, Japan financed trade union funds to support the strikers… In addition to Japanese money, Russian revolutionaries received huge sums from anti-Russian organizations and individuals in Europe and America.”

Of course, it should not be stated unequivocally that the revolutionary riots were organized with the help of foreign money. They became possible because a part of Russian society, infected by socialist teaching, decided to build a state according to human reasoning, and not according to the Divine gift, which for Russia is the monarchy, the power of God’s Anointed One—the Tsar. This position was a consequence of unchurching, a retreat from the Orthodox faith. People wished to live “freely,” without Gospel laws limiting them in action, so, as St. Righteous John of Kronstadt said about that situation, “faith in the word of God, in the word of truth has disappeared and has been replaced by faith in human reason; the press in the majority has become corrupted—there is nothing holy and honorable for it… there is no obedience of children to their parents, of students to those who teach them… Marriages are ruined, family life is decaying; there is no firm politics—everyone is politicking… everyone wants autonomy. The intelligentsia has no love for the Motherland and is ready to sell it to foreigners, as Judas sold Christ to the evil scribes and Pharisees.”

Departure from the Orthodox faith, forgetting of moral and ethical principles led to the possibility of using foreign money in the Russian revolutionary movement. And it was used at full scale, bribing educated Russian people and directing their activities to the struggle against the Orthodox monarchical statehood. The remarkable pastor of that time, Archpriest John Vostorgov, wrote directly about the betrayal of national interests by the intelligentsia during the Russo-Japanese war: “Never since the beginning of Russia has the absence of the most mediocre reason of state, patriotism and simple decency, been discovered to such an extent in people who consider themselves representatives of Russian thought. In this moment of grief and upheaval of the Fatherland, they found it convenient to destroy all the foundations of power and order… They welcomed and fanned each of our failures, they infected the troops going to battle with despondency; it finally came to the point that Russian students sent greetings to the Japanese Mikado (on Japanese victories—the author); they sent from Switzerland, to the Japanese army, to General Kuroki, the most detailed map of Northern Manchuria, so that the enemies could inflict harm to the Russian army without error… Cains, Hams and Judases have raised their seats in Russia. Cains killed the best Russian people—the Tsar’s servants: the Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovich was killed, Bobrikov was killed in Finland, Pleve was killed. The Hams rejoiced at the humiliation of the Motherland and mocked its suffering. The Jews took Japanese money, bought weapons with it for rebellion inside Russia, organized strikes of workers in factories that prepared military supplies, in shipyards that built military ships, on roads that transported troops.”

Today we can say with all certainty that whoever and however one evaluates the outcome of the Russo-Japanese War, the Sovereign Emperor Nicholas II should be honored and praised for the fact that in the conditions of outright sabotage, secret political intrigues and moral and spiritual betrayal on the part of liberal society, he managed to bring Russia to the threshold of victory, and only the burgeoning revolution of 1905 prevented this war from reaching its victorious conclusion.

Igor Evsin is a ooet, writer and journalist. He is the author of twelve books. He is a monarchist who lives and works in Ryazan. This article appears through the kind courtesy of Ruskline.

Featured: The Theotokos Port Arthur, 1904.

A Philosophy of War by Henri Hude

The English edition of A Philosophy of War, by the French philosopher, Henri-Paul Hude, has just been published. We are happy to bring you an excerpt from this very important and timely book.

What is war today? To answer this question, we can no longer rely on notions of war elaborated in various classic works, because we are faced with a new problem—how to save humankind from annihilation in a total world war involving weapons of mass destruction. The simplest answer is to establish a “Leviathan,” whose promise and project is straight forward: cancel all powers except one, which will be universal and absolute, and start a war without end against all free powers and all liberties. This way eventually you will get peace forever. But can Leviathan actually deliver on this promise? And peace at what cost, because Leviathan demands absolute and unlimited power over the entire human race? It is this problem that Philosophy of War lays out in all its chilling detail. Is there another solution that can bring political and cultural peace to the world? Indeed, there is, and this book next details a very clear path, one that also ensures that we do not become enslaved by Leviathan. Nations, and their “wisdoms” (that is, “religions”) can unite as peace becomes possible. If you love liberty and desire peace, then this book is for you.

Please consider supporting the work of Professor Hude by purchasing a copy of the book.

I was twenty years old and suffocating at the Ecole Normale Supérieure, in Paris, often just called “Ulm” because of its location on the rue d’Ulm. There, Marxism lay heavy and it was oppressive. But there was an exchange program with Amherst College, in Massachusetts. Seizing the opportunity, I fled to America. On the flight over, I listened to Dvorak’s Symphony No. 9, “From the New World.” In America I breathed free. I enrolled in a course on the Cold War (even then!). But I was not a diligent student. I meditated, read, wrote, reflected, contemplated and prayed. I was happy. France is my mother. America was my first love.

I spent a year at Amherst, as a teaching assistant in French, in what was then called the Department of Romance Languages, at the top of the hill, next to the great library, which was so precious to me, since I also had to return to the Sorbonne with a demanding piece of work on the status of logic in William of Ockham.

Next to the library was a memorial, which looked over a particularly beautiful view of the forest below that stretched as far as the eye could see. Nature has never moved me more than in its autumnal glory in New England. Large stone parallelepipeds were arranged in a sober, solemn semicircle. Names of battles were engraved on them. I always sat on the one that read, “Normandy.”

Another memory comes to me, with particular intensity, one day, when we came to revisit the D-Day landing beaches. Our sons were swimming in Omaha Beach. They were playing, splashing and shouting with joy. It was life, freedom and the pursuit of happiness. I kept an eye on them. But I was thinking of your sons of long ago.

When I arrived in the United States, my mind was in a fog. At Ulm, my first “caiman” [slang for a supervising tutor who resembles an allegator because he devours your time, your freedom] had been the philosopher Jacques Derrida, one of the pontiffs of French Theory. From the outset, our relationship was atrocious. I dumped him, but was left with a choice between two other tutors, a half-mad Nietzschean and the famous Marxist theorist Louis Althusser. I made the rational choice, though I soon realized that I had fallen out of the pan and into the fire. Good God! Between French Theory, Marx and the Antichrist, where to go? I went to America, thanks to my English tutor.

I am a citizen, a philosopher of action. The practical is my element. I abhor idle questions. I love knowledge, not sterile erudition. For me, man is the decision-making animal. But to decide, you have to see things clearly and live in the real world. What I encountered in the United States was reality. When I landed in Boston, I was intellectually cataracted. I knew the world existed, but I saw everything through a kind of fog; I could not really see that it existed for real. I knew there was a God, but that was even less clear. Between God and me, a wall. Among you Americans, the veil dissipated, my lens cleared. After much reflection, one winter’s day, at dusk, after the rain, I left Crossett, where I shared an apartment with three truly excellent roommates, and, walking aimlessly, stopping suddenly, in the light of a street lamp, I admired the damp bark of a birch tree, its tender green beneath the brilliant white, hemmed in black. I was finally in the world and the world was here. Later, the wall fell, too.

By the time I left the States, my mind was at rest. There is nothing like a year of freedom, in a free country. For America was then a free country: a well-possessed middle class, powerful industry, a functioning political constitution, a decent culture, both classical and original. Infinitely less ideology than in Europe. A serene harmony between religion and freedom. Common sense and natural fairness. Free discussion between convinced and civilized people. Opportunities for all. A shaken but still substantial moral consensus. You could feel that something was beginning to sour, but the mood was still excellent, compared to the fetid atmosphere I had left behind.

On the plane ride back, I again listened to Dvorak’s Symphony No. 9. But I was now returning, strengthened, to my Europe that was slashed by wars, revolutions, ideologies, totalitarianism and absurd atheism. The America from which I returned was more like the Old World, but not frozen or hardened, rather preserved alive and modernized, like an eighteenth-century Europe that had evolved without trauma, highly civilized, without anti-religious fanaticism. Is it all over? Does that America no longer exist? Must America also be a heartbreak for me?

If it does not find both reason and God, the USA will have a war and it will lose it. It will remain a great nation, like France after Napoleon and his excesses. As for Europe, alas, I wonder if there will be any of it left.

****

Finally, the question for the USA, which I am taking the liberty of asking, in publishing this book, is quite simply: “Have you decided to be Leviathan?” And the second is its sequel: “Or will you decide, on the contrary, to make us dream again?”

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Let us take a closer look at Leviathan’s prerogatives. Leviathan will have at its disposal all national armed forces, which will have become international mobile gendarmerie squadrons; the nations themselves having become mere territorial administrative divisions within the state. This unique and rigorous organization will prevent the proliferation and dissemination of weapons.

Armed groups outside the world’s public forces shall all be classified as terrorists. National independence, local autonomy, freedom of association and individual freedom will no longer be relevant. Given the level of risk, the precautionary principle will demand that all citizens and groups be considered potential terrorists and placed under continual surveillance. Every opponent of Leviathan becomes an irresponsible, reckless person; a madman, an insurgent, a terrorist, a criminal, because mankind can only choose between (1) War or (2) Leviathan politics (Leviathan’s continual, universal and irresistible action of force, constitutive and conservative).

Leviathan is the solution to the problem of real Absolute War, but on condition that all claims to freedom, all claims to natural rights, are repressed. This repression is the essence of Leviathan’s policy. It is indeed a war against any plurality that might be reborn—against peoples and nations, against individuals, groups, families, against all freedoms. Through this heroic, titanic act of force, Leviathan, a single, total state, unjustly threatened by the deaf hatred of all, but indifferent, free and resolute, sure of its right to absolute power, will impose itself on all, not without the consent of all, and truly at the call of all. It thus shall force them all to total disarmament (military, political, legal, technical, physical, moral and intellectual). From what was a chaos of nations and individuals in mortal danger, it shall make a single world people, no longer terrified, but reassured by their partly happy, partly angry submission to absolute world power. Barring a profound cultural change, such is our future.

To preserve humankind’s right to survival, Leviathan will neutralize any threat, even preventively, in a discretionary manner. It will generalize and trivialize the anti-terrorist practice of targeted assassination, but not only against individuals, also against human groups.

The Leviathan State shall remain a Republic, unique and universal. There will still be a social pact. This pact will be made between every terrified individual on Earth and the unique Leviathan, endowed with absolute power, spiritual as well as temporal, whose sole law shall be public salvation. It shall be the very reason and free will of every individual on Earth.

To be strong enough, Leviathan shall remain concentrated. It must include only the wealthy and educated elite—and only them—provided they adhere to Leviathan’s policies. They are the ones who will benefit from medical progress. What will be the relationship between the rich and the rest? “The relationship between humans and animals is the best model we have for the future relationship between superhumans and humans.” No doubt this is why the culture of powerlessness talks so much about animal rights and promotes vegetarian eating. Inferior individuals will be reassured to know that they will not end up as corned beef.

Excluded from sovereignty will be the people, and above all the middle classes, if there are any left. These masses shall be deprived of political and economic rights. This deprivation shall be ensured by biocratic surveillance, repression and prevention—including genetic augmentation or diminution, remote brain control and regular intake of various prescribed drugs/medication. Elections could probably continue without much inconvenience, but we shall need to be sure that their outcome will not endanger Leviathan. The anxious fear of death and war, and the culture of powerlessness, will allow us to associate a reassuring servitude with a happy awareness of security and freedom.

Analysis of the Leviathan inevitably has the whiff of a “conspiracy theory.” Let us say a few words about this. What we call “conspiracism” lies at the crossroads of (i) a hypercritical philosophical tradition, (ii) the new postmodern class struggle and (iii) the historical dynamic tending towards the realization of Leviathan.

A) Philosophical conspiracy is central to the constitution of modern and postmodern critical reason. Marx, Nietzsche and Freud set out to reveal or denounce the occult interests, material or impulsive, unconscious or masked, that pull all the strings in our individual or social lives. More radically, this conspiracism goes back to Descartes. Its major feature is “doubt,” the basis of philosophical modernity, which remains inoperative without the introduction of the “Evil Genius,” a hidden, fictitious or mysterious power which, in its power and malignity “has employed all its industry to deceive me.” But then,

B) why do modern and postmodern elites hate “conspiracy?” For the same reasons that Descartes reserved the use of modern, critical reason for a thinking, conservative elite. If everyone began to doubt everything in morality, law, history, religion and, above all, politics, there would be revolution, communism or anarchy. Postmodern enlightened elites do not hate hypercritical (and therefore conspiratorial, in the philosophical sense of the word) reason, but since they have disrupted certain social equilibria and renewed the class struggle, they do fear revolution, if the use of criticism does not remain their monopoly, or were insufficiently controlled. Globalization, for example, would then be the object of a more or less Marxist critique. Marxism has long accustomed minds to seeing ideologies as the masks of powers and their means of domination. In line with this idea, conspiracy theorists (especially in long-developed countries) see in the praise of globalization an ideology at the service of elites and capital against people and labor. Elements A) and B) converge as follows:

C) with the dynamics of the Leviathan, which unfolds by virtue of a rather impersonal and involuntary logic, which surpasses all those who pride themselves on creating it. The elites believe, often in good faith, that Leviathan is the solution, even if they have reservations about one aspect or another. Leviathan will undoubtedly favor the elites, but their privileges will serve the general interest, and the people are quite irresponsible when they oppose it. Their populist demagogues will be potential terrorists. The people, who do not see it that way, think like George Orwell and attribute historical dynamics to the psychotic will to power of monstrous and perverse elites, from whom it is always legitimate and rational to expect the worst.

In summary, the term “conspiracy” is somewhat contradictory, as it tends to disqualify a political critique of globalization in the name of a modern or postmodern reason that is nonetheless philosophically conspiratorial. It is also a source of confusion, because it mixes relatively classic and timeless political issues (such as the tensions between oligarchy and democracy) with the problematic of Leviathan, specific to the hypertechnical age.Let us now complete our analysis of Leviathan. Under its empire, war can only exist between Power and each individual or group, large or small, potentially delinquent or rebellious. This war, if well waged, will be reduced to a reassuring political and cultural police action, as extensive as necessary, but conducted with discretion—and to a gendarmerie or special forces action, or secret political police, against all attempts at secession or sedition (liberation). This war will be permanent and without end, just as the fight against the underworld is for the police.

The social pact implies adherence to the politics of Leviathan (its constituent war). The freedom of the social pact exists authentically as unconditional adherence to global security totalitarianism, which has become the only reasonable regime imaginable. And all rational liberals have finally rallied to enlightened despotism.

Leviathan will not afford, especially in just a few decades’ time, to let a single lone wolf slip through its net, even for a moment. One would be enough to destroy everything. Universal control shall therefore be preventive. Surveillance shall be continuous, focusing not only on outward appearances, but also on everything that cannot be seen with the naked eye, such as brain waves and hormonal flows. Anything that is not authorized must be prohibited under the most severe penalties.

Leviathan will control everything. Attempt and intent will be punished as much as action. A sci-fi movie like Minority Report is a pretty good approximation. As it is impossible to take the slightest risk of recidivism, extra-judicial elimination is the only conceivable measure against any untimely exercise of freedom. But Leviathan will be worry-free. With technical progress, death is no more than an instantaneous, painless, non-tragic and unannounced obliteration. Public opinion will just believe it to be a natural death.

It is in Leviathan’s interest to make people believe that war is an inevitable effect of the unchecked ecological crisis, since this would be the cause of a global food crisis, leading to a furious struggle by all for the means of subsistence. In the final analysis, this crisis is itself the effect of human proliferation. Peace therefore will require that Leviathan have the right to regulate demographics and impose appropriate morality—libertarian or rigorist as the case may be—to ensure that the set numbers are respected. Aldous Huxley understood that the reproduction of the species is too serious a matter to be left to the freedom of individuals. Here again, a science-fiction film like Gattaca provides a pretty good approximation. “The love of servitude cannot be established except as a result of… a greatly improved technique of suggestion… a foolproof system of eugenics, designed to standardize the human product and so to facilitate the task of the managers.” Demographic and eugenic totalitarianism, as well as the most imperious sexual moralism (lax or rigorous, depending on what social utility requires), will be therefore indispensable to social and political control, barring major cultural change—and this (it should be noted) irrespective of anything one might reasonably think on the subjects of demography and ecology. All growth is incompatible with totalitarianism, without which there can be no true Leviathan, and therefore no guaranteed world peace.

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Molotov’s Proposal that the USSR Join NATO

This proposal sheds important light on Russian attempts to cooperate with the West when it came to a comprehensive defense agreement. Thus, Vyacheslav Molotov proposed that the Soviet Union join NATO. The West rejected this proposal because of a lack of “democracy” in the USSR. In other words, the purpose of NATO was to oppose Russia.

It is important to revisit this proposal in the light of the Russophobia that now pervades the psyche of the Western ruling class.

Presidium, CC CPSU

To: Comrade G.M. Malenkov and Comrade N.S. Khrushchev

According to reports from Soviet embassies and missions and in the foreign press, the Soviet draft of a General European Agreement on Collective Security in Europe has provoked positive responses from quite broad public circles abroad, including such French press organs as Le Monde… At the same time, the Soviet draft has, for understandable reasons, provoked a negative reaction from official circles and from supporters of the “European Defense Community” in France, England and other West European countries. It should be noted that official circles in France have also taken measures to mute the Soviet proposal. Among opponents of the European Defense Community there are also those who don’t support the proposal for a General European Agreement. In this regard the main argument advanced against our proposal is the thesis that the Soviet draft is directed at dislodging the USA from Europe so that the USSR can take its place as the dominating power in Europe. Especially broad use of this thesis is being made in France. Meriting attention in this connection is a conversation between our ambassador in Paris, comrade Vinogradov, and the Gaullist leader [Gaston] Palewski, who said the Soviet proposal is unacceptable in its present form because it excludes the USA from participation in the collective security system in Europe. According to Palewski attitudes to the Soviet proposal would change if the Soviet government declared the USA could take part in the system of collective security in Europe in its capacity as an occupying power in Germany, bearing in mind that the occupation of Germany would not last forever. From this statement of Palewski’s it follows that the USA’s participation in the General European Agreement on a system of collective security would be of a temporary character and limited to the period until the conclusion of a peace treaty with Germany.

The thesis of the dislodgement of the USA from Europe is also being used against the Soviet proposal by supporters of the European Defense Community in England and other countries, by official circles that support the plan for the creation of such a “community” and its so-called European army.

Taking this into account, the Foreign Ministry considers it advisable to limit the possibilities of using this argument against the Soviet draft by sending the governments of the USA, England and France a note which states that on its part the Soviet government sees no obstacle to the positive resolution of the question of the USA’s participation in the General European Agreement on Collective Security in Europe. In the Foreign Ministry’s view it would be inadvisable to declare that the participation of the USA would be of a temporary character. In this regard the Foreign Ministry proceeds from that fact that from the point of view of the interests of the struggle against the European Defense Community it would be inexpedient to indicate the temporary character of the USA’s participation in the General European Agreement.

In introducing a proposal for the participation of the USA in the General European Agreement, the Foreign Ministry considers it advisable not to change the previous proposal that the Chinese People’s Republic would participate in the system of collective security in Europe as an observer

It is necessary to consider another argument deployed against the Soviet proposal, namely that it is directed against the North Atlantic Pact and its liquidation. In order to limit the use of this argument against the Soviet proposal the Foreign Ministry considers it advisable that simultaneously with our proposal about the participation of the USA in the General European Agreement we should, in the same note, pose, in an appropriate form, the question of the possibility of the Soviet Union joining the North Atlantic Pact. Raising this question would make things difficult for the organizers of the North Atlantic bloc and would emphasize its supposedly defensive character, so that it would not be directed against the USSR and the people’s democracies.

The simultaneous posing of the possible participation of the USA in the General European Agreement and possibility of the USSR joining the North Atlantic Pact would be advantageous for us because it would be perceived as demanding a concession in return for the USSR’s agreement on the participation of the USA in the General European Agreement… However, the Foreign Ministry’s view is that our agreement on the admittance of the USA into the General European Agreement should not be conditional on the three western powers agreeing to the USSR joining the North Atlantic Pact.

Most likely, the organizers of the North Atlantic bloc will react negatively to this step of the Soviet government and will advance many different objections. In that event the governments of the three powers will have exposed themselves, once again, as the organizers of a military bloc against other states and it would strengthen the position of social forces conducting a struggle against the formation of the European Defense Community. Such a negative attitude toward the initiative of the Soviet government could, of course, have its negative side for us in so far as it affected the prestige of the Soviet Union. Taking this into account, the Foreign Ministry proposes that the Soviet note should not state directly the readiness of the USSR to join the North Atlantic bloc but limit itself to a declaration of its readiness to examine jointly with other interested parties the question of the participation of the USSR in the North Atlantic bloc.

Of course, if the statement of the Soviet government meets with a positive attitude on the part of the three western powers this would signify a great success for the Soviet Union since the USSR joining the North Atlantic Pact under certain conditions would radically change the character of the pact. The USSR joining the North Atlantic Pact simultaneously with the conclusion of a General European Agreement on Collective Security in Europe would also undermine plans for the creation of the European Defense Community and the remilitarization of West Germany.

The Foreign Ministry considers that raising the question of the USSR joining NATO requires, even now, an examination of the consequences that might arise. Bearing in mind that the North Atlantic Pact is directed against the democratic movement in the capitalist countries, if the question of the USSR joining it became a practical proposition, it would be necessary to raise the issue of all participants in the agreement undertaking a commitment (in the form of a joint declaration, for example) on the inadmissibility of interference in the internal affairs of states and respect for the principles of state independence and sovereignty.

In addition the Soviet Union would, in an appropriate form, have to raise the question of American military bases in Europe and the necessity for states to agree to the reduction of military forces, in accordance with the position that would be created after the USSR’s entry into the North Atlantic Pact.

At the present time, however, it will be sufficient, taking into account the above considerations, to include at the end of the note a statement of a general character: “the Soviet Government keeps in mind that the issues arising in connection with this question must be resolved in the interests of strengthening world peace and the security of peoples.”

The draft resolution for the CC of the CPSU is enclosed

I ask you to examine it.V.M. Molotov26 March 1954

This document appears through the kind courtesy of the Digital Archive at the Wilson Center.

Israeli Genocide in Gaza: Analysis of the Numbers

On January 22nd, media organizations across the globe reported the milestone of 25,000 Palestinian deaths at the hands of the IDF, (Israeli Defense Forces), since Hamas militants attacked Israel on October 7th.

Sources for Palestian Casualty Figures

Palestinian casualty figures originate with the Hamas Ministry of Health in Gaza, but are being used and accepted by the U.S. State Department, Human Rights Watch, and various officials and agencies of the United Nations, including the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA).

One Catholic source places the number of fatalities higher. Father Ibrahim Faltas, the Vicar for the Franciscan Custody of the Holy Land, believes the true figure is closer to 30,000. According to Father Faltas, some 10,000 children have been killed and another 40,000 have been orphaned.

The Hamas Ministry of Health does not distinguish between civilian and military casualties among Palestinians.

The Israelis, and the Israelis only, are claiming that 9,000 Palestinian fatalities—35% of the total deaths—are those of combatants.

Unprecedented Proportion of Civilian Casualties

Others dispute this claim, with varying estimates of 60 to 90 percent civilian fatalities. Even if Israeli figures are taken at face value, it means that the IDF is killing nearly two civilians for every armed combatant which it kills, a ratio unprecedented in modern warfare.

This means that the percentage of civilian fatalities suffered by the Palestinians in the last three and one half months, 65%, is nearly double that suffered by the Germans and the Italians in the entire Second World War, and more than double that suffered by the Japanese in the same conflict.

This statistic is all the more astonishing when one considers that each one of those countries was subjected to a protracted campaign of strategic bombing by the Allies, in an era when aerial bombardment was far less precise than it is today.

The percentage of civilian fatalities in World War II for Nazi Germany was 37 percent, for Fascist Italy 34 percent, and for Imperial Japan 31 percent, respectively.

Damning Information from Israeli Source

n an analysis published in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, Professor Yagil Levy stated that with a civilian death rate in Gaza of 61 percent, “The ratio [of civilian to military fatalities] is significantly higher than the average civilian toll in all the conflicts around the world from the second world war to the 1990s.”

“Without Parallel in Recent History”

2024 Population of Gaza Strip—2,375,000

As of January 23, 2024:

1.) Total Palestinian casualties—88,844

Palestinian fatalities—25,490

Palestinian wounded—63,354

Total fatalities as a percentage of the population of Gaza—1.1%

Total casualties as a percentage of the population of Gaza—3.75%

Percentage of women and children casualties—69%

2.) Total Palestinian displaced persons—1,900,000

Total displaced persons as a percentage of the population of Gaza—80%

3.) Total Palestinians with exhausted food supplies/facing catastrophic starvation—577,000

Percentage of Palestinian population facing starvation—24.3%

4.) Total Palestinians suffering from infectious diseases—350,000

Percentage of Palestinian population which is sick—15%

5.) Total housing units damaged or destroyed in Gaza—360,000

Percentage of homes damaged or destroyed—60%

6.) Total United Nations worker (UNRWA, WHO, UNPD) fatalities—153

7.) Total journalist fatalities—117

8.) Total all non-Israeli Gaza fatalities—25,760

9.) Total Palestinian casualties, West Bank—4,708

Total Palestinian fatalities, West Bank—360

Total Palestinian injuries, West Bank—4,348

10.) Total Palestinian casualties, Gaza and West Bank—93,552

Total Palestinian fatalities, Gaza and West Bank—25,850

Total Palestinian injured and wounded, Gaza and West Bank—67,702

11.) Total Israeli Casualties, Gaza and Green Line Israel—8,293

Total Israeli Fatalities—1,413

(504 soldiers, 69 police and security officers, 770 civilians, 70 Israeli Arabs)

Total Israeli Injured and Wounded—6,632

Total Israeli Hostages Taken—248

Total fatalities as a percentage of the population of Israel—.015%

Total casualties as a percentage of the population of Israel—.09%

12.) Total Israeli displaced persons—200,000

Total displaced persons as a percentage of the population of Israel—2%

Kýrie, eléison! Christe, eléison! Kýrie, eléison!
Our Lady of Palestine, Pray for Us!
Queen of Peace, Pray for Us!
Our Lady of Fatima, Pray for Us!

C. Joseph Doyle is the Executive Director of the Catholic Action League of Massachusetts. Since 2019, Doyle has also served as Director of Communications for the Friends of Saint Benedict Center. This article appears through the kind courtesy of Catholicism.