The Russian World and its Cathedral

On the threshold of the jubilee congress of the World Russian People’s Council in the Kremlin, which is dedicated to the Russian World, it is necessary to address the very concept of “Russian World” in a little more detail.

The very combination of the Russian World caused a lot of controversy and heated politics. Everyone tried to interpret it arbitrarily, and depending on the position of individual authors changed the very meaning. Some turned it into a caricature, others, on the contrary, glorified it in every possible way, but often to the detriment of the content.

First of all, the most important distinction should be made: the Russian World does not mean the same thing as the Russian Federation as a nation-state. This is probably recognized by everyone. But some believe that the Russian World is broader and larger than Russia, others that it is narrower and more localized, while others place it in a somewhat intermediate position.

In the first case, and this is the most correct and meaningful use of the term “Russian World,” we are talking about Russia as a civilization. And it is in this sense that it is understood by the World Russian People’s Council, as an association of all people who consider the Russian civilization as their own—regardless of where they live and what state they are citizens of. In this case, the Russian World coincides with the Russian civilization, but this in turn does not exclude other peoples united with the Russians by the community of destiny, but includes them. Hence the closeness of the concept of the Russian World to Russia-Eurasia, as Eurasian philosophers understood it. It is not just a country, a state, but the whole world, a flowering of ethnicities and cultures, a spiritual historical cosmos, united for centuries around the core of the Russian people. To be part of the Russian World in this understanding means to share the spirit and culture, manifested in all its splendor in multidimensional and multipolar forms of historical creation, encompassing politics, economics, art, industry, ethics.

In this understanding, the Russian World is inextricably linked to the Orthodox Church, but by no means to the detriment of other traditional faiths. Here again we see a direct connection with the World Russian People’s Council, whose head is His Holiness Patriarch Kirill of All Russia, but in which the heads of the main confessions of Russia invariably participate.

Of course, the basis of the Russian World is Russia as a state, and this is clearly seen in the fact that the President of the Russian Federation himself takes part in the most significant events of the All-Russian People’s Congress, turning in fact such solemn national and all-voluntary meetings into a kind of analog of the Zemsky Sobor. But the Russian World is wider than just the state, and the Russian people is bigger than the totality of Russian citizens. In this sense, the Russian World is formed around Russia, and its President and the First Hierarch of the Russian Orthodox Church are symbols and axes of the entire civilization, a magnet of attraction and the core of a complex and non-linear community of peoples, cultures, and individual citizens.

It is worth mentioning two other—not true, but quite common—interpretations of the Russian World, because any concept acquires its true meaning when it is compared with what it should not be understood as.

Thus, under the Russian World in no circumstance can be understood only the totality of ethnic Great Russians, i.e., Eastern Slavs, concentrated historically in the eastern regions of Ancient Russia, where Vladimir, later Muscovite Rus’ was formed and where at some point was moved the capital together with the Grand-Ducal throne and metropolitan cathedra. Such interpretation completely distorts the initial sense, excluding from the Russian World both western Russians (Belarusians and Malorussians), and all non-Slavic ethnoses of Russia itself. Strictly speaking, practically nobody understands the Russian World in this way, but its opponents, on the contrary, try to artificially distort the meaning and endow this expression with a completely inappropriate meaning. Therefore, it will not be superfluous to emphasize once again that under the “Russian World” are understood all Eastern Slavs (and therefore, not only Great Russians, but also Belarusians and Malorussians), as well as all other ethnic groups that have linked their fate at one stage or another with the Russian people. Therefore, the Russian World can include, for example, Georgians, Armenians or Azerbaijanis, who, although they are currently outside Russia, retain their belief in historical closeness and spiritual kinship with Russians.

Here, however, the main thing is not whether these or those ethnic groups consider themselves part of the Russian World, it can change and depend on many factors, including some may consider themselves part of it, and some may not, and others do not consider themselves part of it now, but tomorrow they will. The main thing is that the Russian World itself is always open to brotherly peoples. It is important that Russians themselves are ready to consider as part of the Russian World those who want it, strive for it and share with us our common destiny. And this openness does not depend on the historical moment or historical mood. When we talk about the Russian World, this openness is a fundamental axiom. Without it, the Russian World is not valid. This is its semantic deep axis. The Russian World does not exclude, but only includes. We can call it by the Western term “inclusiveness,” but only we are talking about a special inclusiveness—about Russian inclusiveness, and in fact, about Russian love, without which there is no Russian person.

Therefore, the Russian World can in no way be narrower than Russia, but only wider.

And finally, it would be wrong to identify the Russian World with the three branches of the East Slavic tribe, that is, only with the Great Russians, Belarusians and Malorussians. Yes, we three East Slavic peoples make up the core of the Russian World. But it does not mean that other non-Slavic peoples are not its organic and integral part.

Thus, having fixed the correct interpretation of the Russian World, and having rejected the wrong ones, we can continue thinking about it.

The question immediately arises: what are the boundaries of the Russian World? After we have defined it, it becomes clear that these borders can be neither ethnic, nor state, nor confessional. These are the boundaries of civilization, and they are not linear and strictly fixed. How can we place Spirit, culture, consciousness within strict physical boundaries? But at the same time, when we get too far away from the core of the Russian World, we cannot help but notice that at some point we find ourselves in a foreign territory, in the space of another civilization. For example, Western European, Islamic or Chinese. And it is not only the language, phenotype and mores of the local population that is important here. We have left the limits of the Russian World; civilization has crumpled, we are in a new cultural circle different from ours.

Darya Dugina drew attention to such a concept as “frontier.” It is not a linear border, but an intermediate strip, a no-man’s or neutral territory that separates one civilization from another. The property of the frontier is to change constantly, shifting in one direction or another. Moreover, the frontier has a life of its own; its territory is a place of intense exchange of cultural codes, where two or even more identities converge, conflict, diverge and enter into dialogue again. Darya experienced the frontier in Novorossiya, while traveling through the new territories. She shrewdly captured the very life of this area, where the fate of the Russian World is being decided today. Undoubtedly, Ukraine, Malorossiya belongs to the Russian World. Historically, it is its cradle. But later, as the center shifted to the east, it itself turned into a civilizational frontier, became an intermediate zone between Eurasian Russia and Europe. Hence the intersection of influences—in language (influence of Polish), religion (influence of Catholicism), culture (influence of liberalism and nationalism, deeply alien to the Russian code). Thus, the Ukrainian frontier in turn became an area of tension between two centers, poles of attraction—between the Russian World and the European West. This was clearly seen in the electoral politics of Ukraine (while there were still elections there), and led to a terrible fratricidal war.

Another example of the borders of the Russian World is brotherly Belarus. Its people were also separated from us, the Great Russians, for a while, and became part of first the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, then the Polish state. With all the originality and authenticity of the established Belarusian identity, peculiarities of language and culture, this frontier was not divided into two poles of attraction. With full sovereignty and independence, Belarus is an organic and integral part of the Russian World, remaining quite an independent state.

Thus, the Russian World does not necessarily mean either absorption, or war, or the presence or absence of state borders. If the Ukrainian frontier would behave the same way as the Belarusian frontier, no one would attack the territorial integrity of Ukraine. The Russian World is open and peaceful, ready for friendship and partnership on various grounds. But it cannot respond to acts of direct aggression, humiliation and Russophobia.

President Putin once answered the question where Russia ends, and in this case “Russia” meant the Russian World: there, where a Russian person can reach, where we will be forced to stop. And it is quite obvious that we will not stop before we restore the integrality of our “Russian world” lands; the natural contours and harmonious (albeit complex) fronts of our civilization.

The Russian World is based on the Russian Idea. And this Idea, of course, has its own peculiar unique features. Its construction is determined by traditional values, absorbing the historical experience of the people. The Idea cannot be invented or developed, it grows from the depths of our social consciousness, matures in the people’s depths, seeks an outlet in the insights and masterpieces of geniuses, military leaders, rulers, saints, ascetics, laborers, simple families. The Russian Idea applies to everyone:

  • Russian families who answer its call with fertility and creative labor;
  • our army that defends the frontiers of the Fatherland at the cost of their lives;
  • the state apparatus, which is called upon to serve the country on the basis of ethics and loyalty;
  • the clergy, not only praying incessantly for prosperity and victory, but also tirelessly enlightening the people and educating them in the foundations of Christian morality;
  • the rulers who are called to lead the state to glory, prosperity and greatness.

The Russian World is that ideal which is always above us, forming a horizon of dreams, aspiration and will.

And finally, what does the Russian World mean in International Relations? Here this concept acquires even more significant weight. The Russian World is one of the poles of the multipolar world. It can be united into a state (like China or India), or represent several independent states, united by history, culture and values (like the countries of the Islamic world). But in any case, it is a State-Civilization with its own original and distinctive identity. The multipolar world order is built on the dialogue of such “worlds,” State-Civilizations. And the West in this context should no longer be perceived as a bearer of universal values and norms, universally binding for all peoples and states of the world. The West, NATO countries are one of the worlds along with others, one State-Civilization among others—Russia, China, India, Islamic bloc, Africa and Latin America. The universal world is made up of a set of separate poles—large spaces, civilizations and fronts, separating and connecting them simultaneously. It is a delicate construction that requires delicacy, subtlety, mutual respect, tact, familiarity with the values of the Other, but only there can a truly just world order be built. And in this world order it is the Russian World, and not only Russia as a state, that is a full-fledged pole, the center of integration, a unique civilizational entity, based on its own traditional values, which may partly coincide and partly differ from the values of other civilizations. And no one can tell from the outside what to be and what not to be for the Russian World. It is decided only by its peoples, its history, its Spirit, its path in history.

All these are the main topics of the World Russian People’s Council dedicated to the Russian World.


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


War and the Future of Russia

Alexander Dugin recently sat down with Pavel Volkov of Ukraina.ru to discuss the current war in the Ukriane and its implications for the future of Russia. We bring you this English translation through the kind courtesy of Geopolitka and Ukraina.ru (Part 1 and Part 2).

Pavel Volkov (PV): Alexander Dugin, against the background of recent events, is a freeze on the Ukrainian front possible?

Alexander G. Dugin (AGD): The Palestinian conflict has seriously changed the situation. All the countries subordinate to the US were at war with us until the last moment, and Ukraine had huge support. We often underestimate it for political and propaganda reasons, but in fact it was so unprecedented that we can say that Russia was at war with NATO. Now there is a new object—the Islamic world. Even if it is a coalition of a few countries, say, Lebanon, Syria, Yemen and Iran—it is already enough to divert a huge part of military attention to another region. And then there is Taiwan. So, Ukraine is absolutely no longer the only front in the struggle of the unipolar Western world against the multipolar world. New front lines are emerging, and the topic of Ukraine is shifting from an exclusive first priority to a secondary one.

The West is loyal, the West will support Ukraine for a long time, but probably not with such enthusiasm. And in this situation, it can offer us some new move, for example, to freeze the conflict in order to carry out rotation, prepare fresh personnel, etc.

PV: On what terms?

AGD: That’s the thing; all the terms of truce that can be offered now will be twenty stories below what we can consider minimally acceptable. They will be humiliating, impossible demands that no one will even consider seriously. What happened with the grain deal? When Moscow realized that its terms could only be twenty levels below the minimum acceptable, it aborted the deal. And with the ceasefire, there will be even tougher demands for various reasons—because of overheated expectations in Ukraine itself, because of the radical demonization of Russians in the West, and because of the overestimation of our weakness. At one point, we did demonstrate weakness by withdrawing from Kiev and retreating from the Kharkov Oblast. After that, the West had the impression that Russia was finished, Russia was weak, Russia was a colossus on clay feet, and now it could be done away with. And then we rebuilt, and it turned out that this was not exactly the case; but expectations remained high.

So, I think that proposals for peace talks may now follow, but even the initial terms will be so unacceptable that Russia, even with great desire, will not be able to accept them for a thousand reasons. Now we are starting the presidential election campaign, and it will obviously be held under the banner of victory; and anything that even remotely resembles victory will be welcomed. And anything that will resemble defeat or betrayal, neither the incumbent nor the future president has the authority to accept. That’s why I’m not too worried about peace talks. That’s the worst thing we go to pieces on; but it turns out it’s not the only thing. We’ve seen enough of other problems during the Special Military Operation.

PV: If not negotiations, the what?

AGD: We are more likely to see a destabilization of the situation in Ukraine itself. Feeling the weakening of support, the Ukrainian elites will flounder, shifting responsibility to each other. Zelensky is now in a very difficult position. He may have canceled the elections rationally. When a country is at war, it is usually ruled by a dictator, a person who, due to historical circumstances, is forced to concentrate all the power in his hands—there is nothing special about that.

But in the West, the constant holding of elections, the constant reproduction of electoral cycles, is in a sense an essential tool. It is necessary to constantly change leaders so that they do not fall into a sense of impunity, and even pro-Western leaders who are too welded to their seats are overthrown by the West. That is why this idea of postponing the elections, which Zelensky seems to have agreed with the West to do, is actually working against him. There are double standards there; they can support canceling the elections and then blame it on Zelensky.

PV: But if for some reason the freeze does happen, what risks will it bring to Russia? After all, Russia is also heated in a certain way.

AGD: It is. The worst thing that can happen in this war is peace, i.e., a truce on the terms of the enemy. The fulfillment of these conditions will not be able to be presented as a victory. Because indeed we have huge casualties—people are losing loved ones, losing children, blood is flowing through the souls of Russians, and just saying that we will freeze the conflict will not be accepted by anyone; it is fraught with the collapse of the country and the system, and it is better not to even think about it.

I think that our authorities soberly realize that it is impossible to freeze the conflict without victory, without bright, tangible, visible positive results. Of course, there will be talk about it; someone who dreams of Russia’s defeat inside and outside Russia will exacerbate this situation; but as far as I imagine the supreme authorities, this is impossible. We will talk about peace when we have victory.

PV: How do we understand that victory has come?

AGD: There can be different ways: victory over the whole of Ukraine or the liberation of only Novorossiya, or even a part of Novorossiya within the four regions that are already part of Russia within their administrative boundaries. But at least the consolidation of the borders of the four new regions can be considered a minimum victory, which will not actually be a victory. In my opinion, this is not even a minimum, but a failure and defeat in the eyes of our society, which has already shed so much blood. Half of Ukraine—with Odessa, Mykolaiv, Kharkov, Dnipropetrovsk, maybe Sumy and Chernihiv—is still a good thing. But no one will even talk to us about four regions; they will offer us even less than what is already unacceptable for us. The distance between what can be the basis for peace talks for Ukraine and the West and for us is too great. Until the positions are brought closer together, until we launch a powerful offensive with a siege of Kiev, it will be impossible to negotiate.

PV: So, the basis for negotiations can only be the direct military seizure of territories?

AGD: Yes, or if the Ukrainian government collapses. On the other hand, we can come to negotiations if everything collapses. But, of course, this is unlikely. In short, the difference between the two minimal sets of peace proposals is now so great that further fighting is inevitable. And with it will come political processes inside Russia and inside Ukraine. Inside Russia, they are predictable—the strengthening of the “Victory Party” and the final liberation from the “Traitors’ Party;” while in Ukraine, in my opinion, we should expect disintegration. When people do not get what they dream of, when the difference between what is proclaimed and what is real becomes completely unacceptable, they look for someone to blame. Someone must answer for the failure of the counter-offensive. It will weaken Ukrainian society, split the elites.

At the beginning of the Special Military Operation, both society and the elites of Ukraine turned out to be quite consolidated by Nazi propaganda, expectation of trips to Europe and, above all, hatred towards us. Russophobia, the feeling of rage, hatred, the desire to kill, to destroy really consolidated the society, but this also has its limits.

The failure of the counteroffensive has shown that Russia is very strong, and this failure is something that Ukrainian elites and Ukrainian society will have to deal with. How they will react, I honestly don’t know. Whether this failure will be enough to hit them hard enough to make them collapse and give up, or whether they will be able to rebuild and continue to resist, I can’t say.

But in any case, our prospects may not be brilliant, but they are not bad, are reliable, connected with the president’s will to lead the country to victory, while the situation in Ukraine will worsen. Zelensky is fed up—first he made us laugh like a clown, then he poured out blood, used all methods of attracting attention, and now he has nothing to impress, surprise and inspire. So, his star is starting to fade; plus the West is distracted on other fronts. In this situation, I think that very, very slowly the initiative will pass to us. Very slowly, because it is difficult to fight against all of NATO, and with such a rabid, hate-pumped puppet as Ukraine. Consider a pack of rabid wolves given long-range missiles. We don’t really know how to respond to this.

PV: The problems may split Ukrainian society, but it will not then love Russia. Are there any non-military tools left to pull Ukraine out from under the external control of the West, or has that train left?

AGD: I don’t think there are any left. That train has left. They were there, but we did not use them. So now there is no solution to this problem other than a military one. Another question is what to do next. If we imagine that we have liberated Ukraine up to Lvov, what will we offer them next? Of course, we have to offer them something. But this is not a question for today. The war will be so complicated and long that we will have time to think about it.

I am absolutely convinced that there is no other way out but Empire and Orthodoxy, a powerful world pole with the preservation of classical culture and classical worldview in contrast to the modern degenerated West, mobilization of the Slavic deep beginning. We need this; it will be quite acceptable for Ukrainians as well. But first we need to break the back of the Western liberal-Nazi political machine. Destroy it. Then we will think what to say to the Ukrainians. Until our boot is on the border with Poland and Hungary, it is useless to talk about economy, ideology—no one will listen to us. Only after a crushing military victory will they take what we say seriously.

So far, we have often squandered the threat potential. It is fine when experts say this, but when our major military and political figures say: “Don’t do this, or you will be badly off,” and then the “badly off” does not come, they significantly lower the value of Russia’s words and declarations. In this situation, until we answer for our words with deeds, until we fully defeat Ukraine on the battlefield, it seems to me that in the current situation, it is simply irresponsible to talk about any other leverage. No one will listen to us. Economics does not play a role—they blow up gas pipelines, which take dozens of years and billions of dollars to build. Frankly speaking, the economy, except for the military economy, does not matter now. And the military economy means a sufficient number of high-quality weapons and good uniforms for soldiers. That’s the only thing that matters.

PV: But the economy is also a standard of living. This is, among other things, what attracts Ukrainians to Europe. It is not so unimportant that in the same new regions there is development, people have a place to live, they study, they have high-tech and high-paying jobs. That would be interesting for them.

AGD: No, it would not be interesting for them. First of all, no one will show it to them. Secondly, if Ukraine had fought for comfort, it would have kept itself together with Crimea; and being a bit more subtle and flexible in its policy towards Russia, would have gotten European comfort and the country would be in a generally good position. No, the Ukrainians sacrificed all of this for one thing: to kill a Russian. The rage of their Russophobia supersedes any considerations of “looking to get comfortable” and “who gets paid how much.”

I do not believe that we are dealing with material motivation of our enemy at all. Our adversary is demon-possessed. You can’t do that with a demon. The demon is sent to destroy, to kill, to die. He will not think where it is more profitable for him—with the Russians, in the new territories to live, or in the West. His consciousness lives completely separate from his body. And in this struggle with the Ukrainian demoness, no arguments about the fact that the new territories are better, cities are being built, will not work at all—firstly, they will not be shown, and secondly, they will not believe.

As long as a person is possessed by a demon, what do you say to him? What to explain, for example, to a drunken person? Don’t walk on the highway—you’ll get run over? But he goes there because his legs are moving. He can’t think, he can’t hear anything. And demon possession is even worse. It deprives one of all critical thinking; he can evaluate nothing, see nothing, believe nothing. The possessed live in an absolutely illusory world, where the material factor itself turns into some demonic aspiration. We say to them—here is comfort, here is convenience, here is prosperity; and they say—no, you are lying to us, the material factor is when a Russian is killed, a Moskal should have his eyes gouged out, burn him, then it will be a material factor. Somewhere out there in Mariupol, houses are being built and former citizens of Ukraine are living happily in them—no one will believe it. Even if they see it, they won’t believe it. Until we break the neck of the military-political machine, nothing will change; no one will listen to any arguments.

PV: What about the people in the new territories and the several million refugees who came to Russia? They have lived in Ukraine for a long time, and after Maidan, they were subjected to corresponding treatment. They are complex, and there must be some special way of dealing with them?

AGD: They’re complicated, but easier than the ones on the other side. Of course, they need an approach to them, but right now, admittedly, I don’t have time for them. Russia’s existence is in question. Of course, I realize that it is important, but if there is no Russia, there will be neither these people nor other people, no people at all. We in the capital live in a kind of frozen state, while in reality there is a bloody battle for history going on at the front—in Zaporozhye, in Kherson, in the Donbass. We walk the streets, ride scooters, and below us all the ground under the asphalt is soaked with the blood and pain of those people who are fighting for us.

People who have recently found themselves inside Russia at least understand what all this is for. It is they who have to explain to us what is happening. We can’t tell them anything, because Russia, in general, is also to blame for allowing all this to happen. When Ukraine started behaving in an absolutely Russophobic manner, why didn’t they stop it when they could have? We have made so many mistakes in relation to Ukraine over the last 30 years that we are partly to blame.

And the people who live in the new territories have seen everything for themselves; they made their own choice; they are our teachers; they are much more awakened. This is the war in which they were the first to wake up and awaken Russia. We must treat them with utmost care and love, but it is they who must lead us forward to Lvov. I think it is not they who need our support, but we need theirs. The people of the new territories are our vanguard, showing us the way. As for our social obligations to them, I think we are fulfilling them. If not well, we fulfill them; even worse, before our elderly population. We are now in a situation where we are overcoming the nightmare into which our country collapsed in the late 1980s. It is a shared tragedy. We must restore the unity of our Empire—it is simply a historical duty and for this we can and must pay any price at all. There will be no Empire—there will be no Russia. There will be no us. There will be not only no future, but even no past.

If we defeat the West in Ukraine, then we confirm by deeds that we are the pole of a sovereign civilization, the pole of a multipolar world; we shall preserve our present, our future and our past. If not, we are finished. We will be erased from history.

PV: Alexander Gelievich, you represent one of the popular philosophical and political movements in Russia. It is interesting how you and your supporters see the future of Russia.

AGD: Everything starts with geopolitics. To be an empire, as Brzezinski said, Russia must establish control over Ukraine. Geopolitics is linked to ideology—the more we realize ourselves as a sovereign Russian civilization, Russian world, Russian Empire, the more we will turn to our roots, our attitudes, which we abandoned especially 100 years ago, with the Bolsheviks firstly, and then again in the 1990s. We actually betrayed ourselves completely in 100 years, first by abandoning religion, Orthodoxy, the Tsar, and then by abandoning social justice and defending a very special Soviet civilization. We have betrayed ourselves twice in 100 years and it does not go in vain. We betrayed the Empire, we betrayed the Russian world, we betrayed our identity and now it is necessary to restore it.

PV: Perhaps Brzezinski is not exactly the kind of thinker on whose ideas Russian society should rely. What does empire mean to you? What is the configuration of power, property, social structure? What is it all about?

AGD: The empire, which we will build as Ukraine is liberated, should have a completely independent ideological, political, social structure, which will be based on the continuity of different stages of Russian history. There will be elements of Orthodoxy and supreme autocratic power, and social justice—in the Soviet period this was the main requirement of our Russian people and other peoples of Russia. At the same time, of course, atheism, materialism, the completely plebeian, petty and disgusting idea of material progress we must discard, returning to the ideals of the Church, Orthodoxy, to the ideals and high aspirations, to the principle of aristocracy of the spirit—these are all things that have been lost over the last 100 years that we must restore as we win on the Ukrainian front.

PV: It seems to me to be some kind of eclecticism—both autocracy and social justice at the same time. And who owns the property? After all, social justice depends directly on how to distribute what we have.

AGD: Only materialists have in their minds the question of distribution of property. Property is important. But in fact, there are many other options besides total material equality (communism) and bourgeois inequality. If we are talking about a socially oriented solidarity society, the gap between rich and poor should not exceed some normal limits. In a solidarity society there must be mutual aid. The principle of autocracy in no way contradicts the principle of social justice.

PV: Well, communism is not about full material equality, but about the absence of exploitation. Did I understand correctly that in the solidarity society of the empire of the future, the rich and the poor will remain, i.e., there will be capitalism, but with a “human face”—with a more equitable distribution?

AGD: No, capitalism is the Anglo-America, Western model that destroys everything. Capitalism is not just a society with a market, but a market society, where everything is sold, where everything is bought, where there is only one class—the bourgeoisie. Capitalism is the essence of what we are fighting. No capitalism! There can be no capitalism in a full-fledged holy empire. It’s a completely different system. But why should we speak in terms of Western political models only? Socialism, capitalism—all these are borrowings from Western culture, which is alien to us. We need to build a Russian society and we will have Russian property. This is the way Russian people have traditionally understood property.

PV: In different eras, Russian people have understood property in different ways. What do you mean?

AGD: Read the Eurasianist jurist Nikolai Alekseev’s The Russian People and the State. It’s a wonderful book. He said that the most correct approach is the idea of relative private property. Relative private property is roughly what was understood in the Soviet Union as personal property. It is at our disposal, but we cannot do whatever we want with it. For example, a dog is in our possession, but we cannot kill it because that would be immoral to society and heartless to the dog itself. It would be a crime. It is the same with all that is entrusted to us. We should treat land, houses, means of transportation, and other things with social and moral consideration. That’s beautiful!

PV: It is immoral to kill a serf, too; Saltychikha was punished for it at one time, but he is still a serf. But that’s not even the main question. On what principle will we be entrusted with something? Someone will be entrusted with an oil rig, and someone will be entrusted with a khrushchevka apartment in a dormitory district of a provincial town, right?

AGD: No. I am absolutely convinced that the people’s wealth—oil, gas, natural resources—all should belong to the state. Exclusively to the state, because they cannot be the object of private property; no matter how much people help to extract them. The subsoil belongs to the state, to all the people. Therefore, every citizen of this beautiful Empire of the Russian future has the right to some share in the nation’s wealth. Another thing, each of course will need to provide a minimum—a minimum of housing, a minimum of land. This will be the task of a strong autocratic power, because it is a support.

People living in their homes on their land will give birth to Russian children, and they will be loyal and grateful; they will be real carriers; they will be brought up in the right way. We need to change everything. When we apply to the future Empire the principles of what we had in the 20th century, or what we see in the West, these are absolutely false examples. It is necessary to build a completely new society. And this new society is the society of the future Empire, which will have to break with the West, with its ideas about capitalism, socialism, equality and inequality.

PV: No socialism, no capitalism, no equality, no inequality—it’s hard to see how you can walk somewhere in the middle.

AGD: Everything has to be different. Everything has to be solidarity, has to be spiritual, has to be very highly developed, highly educated, highly organized. And we are capable of that. These are our ideas, our dreams. And in the 19th and even in the 20th century, the goal of our ancestors was to build precisely such a just society. And when we gave it some concrete form according to Western models—one or the other—we just came to contradictions. There should be a very open development.

Everything will be resolved as we win in Ukraine. We will not be able to move beyond where we stand if we don’t do a renewal and revitalization of the system in Russia itself. And so, as we strengthen ourselves, as we reclaim our own identity, we will win victory after victory. Each victory on the front will actually mean a victory within the system and the establishment in our society of the correct laws and proportions that have been monstrously broken throughout the last hundred years of history—in the seventy-year Soviet cycle and especially the last thirty years of liberal de facto external governance of the country.

PV: If the correct laws and proportions, as you say, were destroyed exactly 100 years ago, then they were correct at the beginning of the 20th century? That’s the society you think was good? But it was capitalism with feudal vestiges.

AGD: No. There were a lot of falsehoods then also. What people dreamed of in the 19th and 20th centuries should be realized in the 21st century. All those concrete forms of realization that these dreams took require a very serious critical analysis. But the most important thing is why we reject the last hundred years, because then the Church was rejected, sacredness was rejected. We followed the Western path of materialism, atheism and then for the last thirty years—capitalism. Before that, socialism. We got carried away by the materialistic, atheistic ideas of the West, and so we destroyed everything. We have destroyed our society, we have destroyed our spirituality, we have destroyed our families, we have destroyed our culture.

We are being danced around by some crazy women like Pugacheva (they were dancing until the last moment), scaring us with their senseless hysterical shrieking. Then, at a critical moment for the country, the monster was in Israel, mocking the country, choking on Russophobia. And when even there it is required to show some tact and courage with regard to the new homeland (apparently, not so new, since that’s where it escaped to), it runs away from there again. This is the kind of ugliness that the last hundred years of our history have produced. Disgusting scum of the human race have come as models in our culture. Similar figures in politics, economics, and so on. Now we have to get out of it.

PV: Are such characters only a product of the era you mentioned? What about all those heroes of the Great Patriotic War and not only, whom that era gave us? And in the 19th century and earlier, were all patriots and not a single traitor?

AGD: I am not saying that we should go backwards. We need to move forward and realize the dreams of Russian people, Russian patriots who fought for Russia, who saw its shortcomings, but who dreamed of a better Russia, of the Russia of the future. These are their dreams that we must realize. Not just to restore what was. If everything had been perfect in the 19th century, there would have been no revolution. And the people who made revolutions, perhaps many of them were also driven by good thoughts. These good thoughts, these bright dreams, love for Russia, loyalty to God, understanding of our culture, our identity, its defense, the will for justice—these ideals, these traditional values should be embodied now in the Russia that we will build. So here, yes, monarchy and Orthodoxy are principles. They are beautiful.

We have had autocracy throughout our history. And for the last hundred years it has also been monarchy, only it was not called that. Autocracy is the most important principle of organizing such large territories. The principle of Empire, the principle of Orthodoxy and the spirit, the superiority of the spirit over matter—this is the orientation of our entire society. If it doesn’t happen, there’s no point. We are not of this world. Our Empire is not of this world. Or rather, partly of this world, and partly not. And this spiritual dimension, this vertical, is the main thing to convey. It is necessary to realize the dream of our ancestors the 19th century, the 20th century—but without religion, without faith, without Church, without God, without Christ—any, even the most perfect, society will be worthless.

PV: But you can’t make people believe in God if they don’t.

AGD: You know, when the Special Military Operation started, many people, especially volunteers, went there with the red flag, some with the imperial flag. But now, more and more of us are gradually seeing the Savior of the Uncircumcised—the banner with Christ is the most common among the volunteer units. Christ Himself will come if we turn to Him. He will come to us. If people realize their love for the Motherland and begin to simply leaf through our history page by page, they will see the importance of the Church. There is no need to force anyone. There should be no compulsion here. I am absolutely convinced that every Russian person is deeply Orthodox. Many people just don’t realize it. There is no need to force, no need to impose anything on anyone. You just have to tell them.

When people are tortured for 70 years with atheistic propaganda, beating out of them ideas about the spirit, about religion, about the soul, about eternity, about heaven, about the resurrection of the dead, who can stand it. What will happen if you are put in a cell for 70 years, tortured, false views implanted into your consciousness, and then for 30 years even worse—they say, take care only of yourself; there is no justice, no country, only you, while you live; and then you turn into a machine and upload your stinking dreams and episodes of your idiotic life to a cloud server. That’s how you’ll be preserved if you don’t steal enough money to freeze you and then unfreeze you someday.

These infernal, satanic ideas about life that our man has been indoctrinated with, they get knocked out on the fronts. They are dislodged when a man thinks about what it is to be Russian. To him comes this banner with the Savior of the Uncircumcised, and who will bring it? We will. Priests will bring it. Russian people will bring it. The state will bring this banner with the Savior. One should look at it and everything will become clear by itself.

And of course we will help people to return to themselves, and not force them to swear an oath to a new ideology. We don’t need to invent any new ideologies. We need to return to ourselves, because the return to God is not a return to the past, it is a return to the eternal. There is the eternal. The West has decided to build its civilization of the last centuries on the fact that there is no eternal, that there is only time. This is a false idea; the devil speaks through their mouths. This is the devil we are fighting against today, every day in Avdiivka, in Kherson, near Bakhmut. This is a real devil, because he believes that there is no eternity. And we are soldiers of eternity.


Featured: The Baptism of Russia, by Mikhail Shankov; painted in 2003.


Eurasian Discussion on Transcaucasia

A collection of interviews with Valery Korovin, one of the most prominent representatives of the International Eurasian Movement, entitled, Imperskiy razgovor o Karabakhe: geopolitika i etnosotsiologiya konflikta (Imperial Conversation about Karabakh: Geopolitics and Ethnosociology of the Conflict) was published at the exact moment of a sharp escalation of tension in the Transcaucasus, primarily around Karabakh. The authorities of both Azerbaijan and Armenia have taken a number of steps in recent months and weeks that have worsened their relations with Russia in unprecedented ways. The leaders of the Eurasian Movement in Azerbaijan and a number of pro-Russian journalists in Armenia were arrested. Openly anti-Russian statements and steps by both Nikol Pashinyan and Ilham Aliyev followed one after another. The old alliance agreements between Moscow and Yerevan and Baku began to be cynically and demonstratively trampled upon. The Russian Foreign Ministry moved from usual restraint to verbal notes of protest and much harsher statements than usual. Finally, Vladimir Putin and Sergei Lavrov spoke about the aggravation of the situation.

At such a tense moment, when the threat of a new major war in the Transcaucasus could materialize in a matter of weeks, and only the titanic efforts of Russian and Iranian diplomacy to convince hotheads and Western agents in Yerevan and Baku to come to their senses and stop, the appearance of Valery Korovin’s theoretically rich, profound and at the same time practical analysis of the situation in the region is extremely timely.

His small, new book, in addition to a fresh preface, includes 19 interviews given to various media on Armenian and Azerbaijani topics. Five of them were given during the color revolution in Armenia in the spring of 2018; four, during the Karabakh War in the fall of 2020; the remaining ten relate to 2011, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2021, June 2022 and May 2023. The common feature of most of the interviews is rather aggressive questions of journalists obsessed with nationalism and chauvinism, and Valery Korovin’s convincing objections, which reveal step-by-step, the Eurasian vision of the Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict and the ways of resolving it. In relation to each specific new event in the region, Korovin lays out the recipe for a resolution by way of a Eurasian solution, which rejects the very concept of unitary nation-states, and the disastrousness of the Atlanticist baits of the United States and Europe, dangling the fanciful carrot of membership in the EU and NATO in front the face of Yerevan and Baku.

Valery Korovin’s thesis runs through the book: inter-ethnic conflicts throughout post-Soviet space have no solutions in the format of “nation-states.” Attempts to follow this path inevitably lead post-Soviet republics to collapse, impoverishment, destruction of infrastructure, rupture of traditional economic and cultural ties, complete subjugation of their politics to the dictates of the West, and, finally, wars, genocides, and ethnic cleansing. Genuine self-determination of peoples does not require their separation into different states, but presupposes the preservation of their own ethnic identity within the framework of what N.S. Trubetskoy called “pan-Eurasian nationalism” almost a century ago. In the face of this integration program of uniting the whole of internal Eurasia around Moscow, around Russia, all kinds of private nationalisms and chauvinisms that hinder integration, be it Russian, Azerbaijani, Armenian or Georgian, should be resolutely denied. At the same time, on the external contour, Valery Korovin’s Eurasian program allows for the inclusion of both Iran and Turkey in the integration processes, if its authorities are ready to break with the West and take such a turn. In reality, this has not happened so far.

The answer to the question of who benefits from the disruption of Eurasian integration, the incitement of wars and ethnic conflicts, the manic desire to conquer territory against the will of the ethnic self-determination of its people, is simple: firstly, the globalist West, especially Britain and the USA; secondly, those local post-Soviet elites for whom, after 1991, “independence” became an intrinsic value for personal enrichment through the socio-economic degradation of the republics under their control, which was achieved at the cost of orientation towards the West and hostility towards Russia, Iran, and China. This is a recipe for disaster. Valery Korovin is trying to stop Armenia and Azerbaijan on this path, warning them that Russia will not tolerate the collapse of its geopolitical program in the Transcaucasus. His convictions to restore a single strategic and civilizational space of the peoples of Transcaucasia with each other and with Russia will undoubtedly be heard by all reasonable people who care about the survival of their peoples, and will be furiously rejected by pro-Western Atlanticists. Time will soon show whether the pattern of all major wars of the 18th-20th centuries between Russia and Europe (Northern, Patriotic, Crimean, World War I, Civil War, Great Patriotic War), in which the second, southern, Transcaucasian front was invariably open, will be repeated.


Maxim Medovarov is a historian, philosopher and journalist. This article appears through the kind courtesy of Geopolitica.


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

Read Part 1 and Part 3.

The Disinformation Racket of US/European Imperialism

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read Part 1 and Part 3.


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


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


The Merits of the British Empire

“I study the course of events in India very closely; and what do I see? Why, that you are doing everything you possibly can to teach the inhabitants their own strength. You establish schools; you educate the people; they read your language, many of them even your newspapers; and the leading men know what is going on in Europe just as well as you yourselves. But the day will come when some agitators will set these thinking masses in motion; and then what force have you to oppose to them? If ever here was a nation determined to commit suicide it is England. She holds India, as she herself allows, by the force of arms, and yet she is doing everything in her power to induce the conquered country to throw off the yoke.”

There was a great deal of reason undoubtedly in what he had urged. However, there is one argument in favour of further education in India, which is, that the better educated the natives of India become, the greater probability of their seeing that their own interests are far more likely to be cared for under a British than a Russian rule. But this still leaves open the question of whether they might not prefer to govern themselves, which undoubtedly will some day be the case.

(Fred Burnaby, A Ride to Khiva, 1877)

We live in an age in which assumptions determine much of what we do. These assumptions need not be based on any desire for truth, but simply for expedience (which is commonly known as “ideology”). For example, there is the easy assumption that genders cannot exist, and this has become a “truth” in western society, a truth given vehemence by the weight of authority and the law.

And when our society casts an eye backwards, history is to be understood through the lens of so many assumptions that it is often difficult to stay abreast. To make things easier, to be on the safe side, just assume that anything that Europeans ever did in the past was not only wrong, but morally reprehensible and outright cruel, because “whiteness” is inherently violent. Our present age is much given to empty moralizing in order to fabricate caricatures—but that’s another topic entirely.

And no topic is more morally fraught than colonialism, which as any worthy denizen of the university scene knows is to be roundly condemned. To say anything that might be deemed a defense thereof is instantly called out as “racism” or “white supremacism.” Having a past carefully construed a certain way is crucial to the powerbrokers of our world, and this fabrication can never have flaws, errors, or lies. To say otherwise is a betrayal of humanity itself, ergo akin to Nazism.

Nigel Biggar’s latest book, Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning, therefore, goes straight for the jugular—it addresses the question of morality and colonialism: “What I have written is not a history of the British Empire but a moral assessment of it.” In other words, the British Empire was not an evil cancer let loose upon the world, nor was it organized banditry, robbing the hapless of their wealth—but a great force for good, which heaved much of what has now descended into being the “third world” into modernity. In effect, when the British left their colonies, they left them quite a lot better than they found them. This fact cannot be denied, though objections be raised by pointing to this or that injustice. Why is India, for example, today the largest democracy? In fact, who created what is today known as “India?” But let’s not get waylaid by the famous Monty Python skit, “What have the Romans ever done for us?”

Because Mr. Biggar is giving us a “moral reckoning” rather than a historical summary of colonialism, what he ends up doing is to return impartiality to the study of history, which is in much need of rescue, having entirely dashed itself on the rocks, so intent has it been listening to the Siren-song of “political activism”: “What is wrong, however, is when moral and political motives refuse to allow themselves to be tempered or corrected by data and reason. For then, the motives distort and mislead; and when they distort and mislead repeatedly and wilfully, they lie.” Perhaps, the whole idea is to use history for political ends—where entire populations can be given permanent “victim,” ergo morally superior, status, while relegating another population to the role of “oppressor,” who can then be held up for cathartic abuse by the victim-class. Thus, we slouch our way to virtue, for the past is filled with all the sins that we have repented from—they were slavers, we are givers of reparations to populations we have labeled the eternal victims of history.

Because the book is a moral assessment of the British Empire, Mr. Biggar wisely avoids a chronological structure of the beginning, middle and end. Instead, each chapter unpacks a moral question to which historical data is adduced. This method directly addresses the “moral” habit of mind that is now commonplace when dealing with the past, in that we are continually asked to judge the past, usually in order to reify our own moral superiority to it. But more sinisterly—in order to govern how we must behave, think and live.

Each chapter also deals with the various arguments that anti-colonialist thought uses in order to deny the achievements of the British Empire. Thus, the first chapter deals with motivation, in which the idea of “conquest” is mapped out, in a reasoned and balanced manner. Just as with the growth of the Roman Empire, the British one also became what it did as a “consequence of international rivalry and war, and the associated need to gain a competitive advantage.” It wasn’t so much conquest as cooperation. For example, the majority of India was not British, for there were a total 461 princely states that were independent (most of them later regretted that they joined the “India” or “Pakistan” that came afterwards—and many of the problems now besetting both these post-colonial countries are products of this misunderstanding of cooperation: for example, Gilgit, Baltistan, Kashmir). In effect, Indian and Pakistani hegemony was exerted upon these once-independent princely states, with the result that now there is much resentment, strife, and rivalry, which is far from having been resolved. Most princely states did not want to join India or Pakistan, but were forced to.

All this means that the building of nationhood is not some fairy-dust that comes ready at hand the moment the blinkers of colonialism are removed. Rather, the nations that emerged from the British Empire, for example, could never truly get their act together. Why is that? Could it be that the greater project of Empire was stymied by the consequences of the Second World War?

But such a question is never honestly, let alone fully, answered; and the usual strategy is deflection by anti-colonialists. The funny thing about these anti-colonialists… they often tend to be people who have benefitted the most from colonialism. But let’s just put that down to the many ironies of history, shall we?

Another favorite topic is slavery, which existed in the world long before the British and is flourishing today, with little or no objection from anyone in power, especially from people who have strong opinions about slavery in the past. This is a very curious abuse of history, where crimes of today are ignored, while much breast-beating is done for crimes, real or imagined, of the past. Be that as it may, it is always emphatically stated that the slave-trade and the use of slaves was a cash-cow for the British Empire, a monolith entirely demolished by serious history, as Mr. Biggar explains. But then it was also the British who actively worked to destroy this ancient institution of captive labor, with men like Adam Smith, but mostly because of Christian charity: “The vicious racism of slavers and planters was not essential to the British Empire, and whatever racism exists in Britain today is not its fruit… The British Empire cannot be equated with slavery, since, during the second half of the empire’s life, imperial policy was consistently committed to abolishing it.”

Racism, of course, is a staple in any anti-colonialist argument. But there is much confusion, given that the stress today is on skin color and not on race as such. This is not surprising, given how difficult it is to pin-down what “race” ultimately means; whereas skin-color is a no-brainer. Thus, today the concern is with “shadism” rather than racism. But the attitude of the British Empire is best summed up by Sir Cecil Rhodes, a man anti-colonialist love to hate: “I do not believe that they are different from ourselves… a man, white or black who has sufficient education to write his name, has some property, or works. In fact, is not a loafer.” Rhodes was interested in the qualities and conditions of civilization, available to all of humanity, and which had nothing to do with shadism. Instead, the greater accumulation of data leads to a more disturbing conclusion—that it is our present age which is obsessed with skin-color, wherein the greater the melanin, the greater the innate virtue; the lesser the melanin, the greater the innate evil. Such is the new “Natural Law” of Western officialdom, which has entirely replaced the original, Christian understanding of Natural Law, grounded in dignity: that mankind is made in the image of God. Now, skin color determines the man. Melanin, yet another progressive pixy-dust, dissipates evil.

Mr. Biggar proceeds assiduously examining the various objections of the anti-colonialists and undoing them by patient laying out of data. Thus, the old stand-by arguments in which the grand themes of genocide, exploitation, greed, conquest, violence are delivered as “evidence” for the “crimes” of the British Empire are all weighed in the scale of reason and found either wanting, or to be exaggerated or simple fabrications: “To describe British colonial government as simply or generally oppressive and exploitative, as is commonly done, may satisfy certain ideological prejudices but it obscures the complicated historical truth. Colonial rule would not have been possible at all without the widespread acquiescence, participation and cooperation of native peoples.”

The examples that Mr. Biggar provides are essential to his method of tackling anti-colonialist themes—but this method also does something that is crucial, given the posture that the West has now assumed, of equating anything “white” with everything evil, especially “white” males. The strength of Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning therefore is its fearless honesty. Like all true human endeavors, the British Empire was not a concerted effort to build a utopia for “white.” Rather, it was a system of deep cooperation between British and native interests and aspiration, chief among them being the pursuit of peace: “…peaceful politics usually requires compromise, and some compromises are morally justified, even obligatory.”

This pursuit peace flies in the face of what is now being attempted in the West, where through sheer political will a shadist utopia is indeed being constructed, which is gradually, but relentlessly, yielding a dystopia, marked by fear and loathing of humanity which does not bear the government-approved shade of skin, and in which humanity is assigend labels of either oppressor or victim. And never the twain shall meet. Such is the world that anti-colonialists seek to build as an answer to colonialism?

Mr. Biggar’s book is also a wake-up call to those of that live in the West, where violence can be justified by convenient references to the past; one in which humanity lives in a never-ending agon of one shade of people against another. Long forgotten is the idea that history provides each one of us a moral responsibility to be our brothers’ keeper. Not in some mealy-mouthed way, but in a genuine care for one another in the context of community. Finally, it was the necessity of this care that marked the British Empire, however loudly the anti-colonialists may decry this conclusion.

The book ends with very crucial question: “And yet exaggeration of colonialism’s sins is often not at all reluctant, but wilful, even gleeful. Far from being resisted, it is embraced. The anti-colonialists want the worst to be true, and so they meet any suggestion to the contrary not with the eyes of curiosity, but the fist of aggression. But why? What is going on here, psychologically, even spiritually?”

Although Mr. Biggar proceeds to provide an answer, it is necessarily an incomplete one—and it is as it should be, because it is a question that more and more needs to be asked again and again—why this gleeful hatred? Why hatred as morality?

Mr. Biggar has written a fascinating, spirited and triumphant book. His data and arguments cannot easily be put aside. If honesty is the true quest of doing history, then anti-colonialist arguments have been rather deftly gutted by this book and can no longer be taken seriously. That is, if truth still matters.


C.B. Forde is a full-time farmer and part-time reader, yes, even of books recommeneded to him by his wife.


Featured: John Eardley Wilmot, by Benjamin West; painted in 1812.


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

Read Part 2 and Part 3.

Intelligence and the Global Imperialist Purpose of Disinformation, and Malformation

This is the first part of an essay in three parts. The second part is on the disinformation spread by the intelligence agencies and media of the US / European Alliance to destroy any nations that oppose their hegemony and the new world they are pushing for. It is also a ‘review’ of two books by Jacques Baud, Governing By Fake News: International Conflict: 30 Years of Fake News Used by Western Countries and Operation Z. The third part is a philosophical critique of the bad ideas that were the seeds of the modern metaphysical project that was the launching pad for the Enlightenment and the technocratic view of the world that accompanies it.

Introduction

The supporters of the world in which the Pharmaceutical Industrial Complex, the Tech Industrial Complex, the Media Industrial Complex, the Censorship Industrial Complex, the Military Industrial Complex, the Mass Killing of the Unborn Industrial Complex, The Mass Mutation of Children Industrial Complex, the Mass Brainwashing and Infantilizing of Minds through Entertainment, Media and Academic Complexes, the Mass Use of Sport for the Political Agenda Complex, and the Mass Religious Industrial Complex, and so forth believe that what they are doing is achieving human progress and emancipation, while its enemies are brainwashed, haters, bigots, and conspiracy theorists, who must be set straight, silenced, or reduced to penury, or imprisoned.

Yet they hate with little or no understanding of what the criticisms against them are (i.e., they really are bigots) and they readily denounce those who criticize them as the dupes of conspirators such as Vladimir Putin or QAnon, or white supremacists—allying a world historic figure (like him or not Putin is undeniably that) engaging in a geopolitical struggle for the fate of a people with lunatics in the basement or a bunch of retards, whose numbers are sizably swelled by FBI informants, at a bivouac playing with guns comes easily to the mental pygmies who see themselves as the great harbingers of what the social philosophers like to call ‘the to come’, and whose idea of thinking and building community is yelling hater, racist, homophobe or whatever two syllable word makes its way through the sludge of their brain synapses and into their vocal chords as they then proceed to vape them. Now that I have got that off my chest, let us examine what kind of criticisms of the globalist ruling class and their paid-up enablers and dupes are being regularly dismissed as “conspiracy theories.” At the same time allow me to demonstrate that the disinformation spread by our intelligence services is creating a misinformed public that is now malforming the new generation and their world.

Yes—There is a Coalition of Interests working to Create a Globalist Empire Presided over by Oligarchs and their Hired Help.

The forces that direct or enable the unipolar world view of ‘progressivist’ globalist corporatism and the US/ Western European hegemonic imperial axis (yes the EU is an empire) involves an overlapping set of contradictory interests and immediate objectives. The forces are constituted by oligarchs and global corporations, unions, NGOs and philanthropic foundations, elected politicians and radical political activists such as members of Antifa, the BLM, and Extinction Rebellion, government officials, military and intelligence officers, journalists, academics, entertainers and sportspeople, business professionals, school and even pre-school teachers, students and members of minority underclasses, amongst others. That sure sounds like a massive coalition—and it is.

But in many, even most, of these organizations it is not a matter of everyone in it agreeing with the values or designs—lots of corporate people, academics, teachers, journalists athletes (especially women in sports having to compete against biological men), may think what their organization is now normalizing is madness and socially destructive and that DEI and ESG are rubbish. But they know they have to keep their views to themselves, because their organization is no longer simply in the business of making money, or accumulating knowledge and instructing students in that knowledge, or informing an audience about who has done what and how that came to be: they are beholden to the values designated by and represented by their organization. They are part of the brand and hence representatives of the social legitimacy, value, and justice of the organization.

What matters is the pyramid nature of organizations and institutions, i.e. the values and ‘designs’, the dominant ethos—the ethos that one must comply with if one is to be appointed, retain one’s job or get ahead within these organizations. What the Nazis called Gleichanschaltung, the coordination or alignment of institutions and organizations by the party leadership and those beholden to them to achieve their political objective, is now the norm in what were previously identifiable as liberal democratic regimes, as the major parties form broader policy consensuses that the electorate has no say in approving. Western political leaders who defy even some of these consensuses quickly find themselves denounced by the media and other politicians as being “fascists” and “Nazis.”

Employees who are openly critical of any number of the socio-political policies that leadership/ management ‘teams’ of institutions, companies, or organizations have signed up to will lose their job, or have their career “stalled.” The recent requirement in the first two divisions of the French football league to wear “pride” jerseys, or the WHO “Standards for Sexuality Education in Europe”—a “framework for policy makers, educational and health professionals and specialists”—which states that children under four should be instructed in the “enjoyment and pleasure when touching one’s own body,” “early childhood masturbation and discovery of own body and own genitals,” and “have the right to explore gender identities”—are indicative of how policy makers, educationalists, corporations, and organizations intertwine to ensure that no part of society be free from the values, symbols and practices serving their objectives.

These objectives are anathema to billions of people on the planet. China, and Asia more generally, Russia, and much of Central Europe, Africa, and all Muslim nations are firmly united against the values of the West, and their ruling classes make no secret of how degenerate they think the West is. This does not stop the West, though, from exhibiting its moral superiority, which ostensibly includes being respectful of cultural diversity. Thus when the US Ambassador to Japan, Rahm Emmanuel, recently weighed in on a contentious bill declaring that there “should be no unfair discrimination” against the gay and transgender community,’”he marshalled ‘a group of 15 foreign ambassadors in Tokyo to record a four-minute video nudging Japan to embrace LGBTQ rights and, by implication, same-sex marriage. The response from a Liberal Democratic member of the upper house of the Diet, retorted by tweet: “If Ambassador Emanuel wants to use his position as U.S. ambassador to Japan in any way to influence Japan, we will take immediate action to make him go back to his country.”

Of course, there would have been no opportunity for Emmanuel to make such a tweet with another US ally, Saudi Arabia. But the fact that ambassadors from the West use their position to publicly comment on legislation is one further symptom of the West’s division of the world into allies, and suzerainties, and enemies. There is no room for international dialogue, just as there is no room for domestic dialogue. There are those who are on the right side of history and those of the wrong side, and the West is the right side.

Thus, as it is with Western ambassadors, it also the assumption of our political, corporate, pedagogical leaders that their job is to articulate and enforce values which have little or no connection to our historical and civilizational experience. The state and church have become one. The political class is also the priest class. It has a monopoly on the truth and its task is to instruct us in that truth, to lead us, and punish us if we refuse to accept it. The reach and power of the political class far exceeds that of the Church in the Middle Ages. For those who might object—but what about the Inquisition (and leaving aside all the historical ignorance and nonsense about the Inquisition)—I can only respond—Iraq? Or Afghanistan?

Within a generation we have abandoned a political and social consensus in which governments of free people existed to facilitate, not dictate, the choices of its citizens—there was disputation between parties over what governments should be doing to facilitate that—how much education, how much healthcare, how much welfare etc. But the political consensus was that the diverse range of social interests would be represented by political parties, that those interests had to be able to express themselves (that was why in the US, McCarthyism was viewed, even by many anti-communists, as a threat to the American way of life), and that the electorate would elect a government, which when in power, acted in conjunction with a public service generally providing advice on policy options that reflected the prevailing realities that a governing party needed to consider, realities that preserved the integrity of the nation.

Thus the government was not simply trusted to pander to the interests of the party’s constituents, but to represent the people as a whole. People complained, and were not persecuted because they did so. Number crunchers advised and parties wheeled and dealed—and compromised. Politicians knew that if they wanted to attain and retain power they had to have broad appeal. It was far from perfect. State and society were corrupt—very corrupt, and the secret deals between organized crime and the state infiltrated many areas of public policy (see especially Whitney Webb’s meticulously researched, One Nation Under Blackmail); but it was not a world in which we must comply with decisions made by leaders in almost every aspect of our lives. It managed to hold serious class differences and antagonisms together—in large part that was because identity politics had not become so widely circulated and influential, and having professional training did not then mean being ideologically inducted in every area of study and professional development into a world view where one’s best way to advance was to prove one’s victimhood. Even when governments were extremely polarizing, and protests were widespread, as say in the Thatcher government, none seriously thought the nation was on the brink of civil war—okay, the academic Marxists and some students banged on about revolution, but none listened to them, and they said the same thing no matter who was in government.

Western societies are completely polarized and that is reflected by that fact that some half of the Western population do not trust our institutions, nor the policies that come from the ruling class consensus. But the fact that the ruling class and those who work on its behalf only press down further on the most polarizing of issues, issues which are becoming exponentially crazier by the second—”women” with penises winning women’s beauty competitions, and sweeping up the trophies in women’s sports.

Crazy as that is, how crazy was the logic that not only demanded that people take a vaccine if they wanted to keep their jobs (even though, if the vaccine worked, why would the vaccinated care whether other people did not take a vaccine)? But even crazier was the fact that it was part of a general undertaking to ‘”give”’ (of course at a price) ‘this vaccine to the entire world”—and if that meant disrupting the entire global economy to get everyone vaccinated then that was fair enough for Gates, the logic being, until we get almost everybody vaccinated globally, we still won’t be fully back to normal.

As the craziness also keeps mounting up so does the frustration and anger, and political decisions to crack down against that hostility. Defiance of the vaccine mandate by truckers in Canada quickly segued into the state demanding asset confiscation. Who would have foreseen that in 2019? But that’s the thing. Increasingly we are presented with a present that was not only unforeseeable, and the unthinkable—at least to anyone who was not considered a lunatic. Likewise, if anyone had said to gay rights activists twenty years ago, that one of the major issues of the 2020s would the demand for the right for drag queens and skimpily clad transsexuals to perform or read to children under the age of 7, they would have been castigated for thinking that gay people would be so perverse as to dream up such a thing.

But this issue is pushed by the media, by legislators, academics and corporate and organizational leaders—and it is issues like this that make people who just want to go to work, put bread on the table, and have their kids well educated and well-adjusted to deal with the trials that adulthood will bring boil over with rage. And the media paints them as extremists, and the parent who wants its non-binary or trans child to be immersed in his world is presented as a fearful and persecuted victim of bigotry and cruelty.

That the American ruling class deemed a riot, far less destructive in terms of lives and property than riots which had been all but justified and sanctioned by the main stream media, to be an insurrection only illustrates the fragility and the extent of hatred of the ruling class and organizations in the United States—no wonder “hate speech,” and “misinformation” (which is synonymous with non-approved information, and opinions) are now part of the conceptual acid-baths to dissolve the first amendment of the constitution of the US.

In countries with no first amendment rights, hate speech legislation is well entrenched. And the same larger agenda and the values that hold it together accelerate as the social antagonisms mount. And as they mount the media and the ruling class and the amalgam of groups serving that class deal with the problem by further denunciations and laws and penalties.

The sheer scale and range of those involved in dismantling the nation and the various practices and values that held it together and replacing it with a globalist political order, as well as the vast inequality of opportunities and resources of those working for the triumph of a global order, based upon “progressive” (Western) rights-based and anti-traditional values defy the logic of a centralized command system, even if we can locate all manner of overlapping centralized command systems (leadership/management “teams”) within the various organizations and institutions.

This lack of any obvious overarching centralized command system is one reason why any criticism of the alliance of interests is so readily dismissed as a conspiracy theory. The parties doing the dismantling all have a stake in the globalist, liberal, totalitarian world we in the West now live within—i.e., they are, in the parlance of the globalists, “stakeholders” in this new world order. It is true that in spite of whatever conspiracies may take place when powerful people make decisions that affect entire nations, most of those involved in doing their bidding are not party to any conspiracy. They are just complying with what their rulers, their leaders, and managers have decided is for the good of the nation or institution, or organization.

Anyone who bothers to look more closely at the various agendas coming out of such forums and organizations, or foundations such as the Trilateral Commission, the Club of Rome, the Bilderberg group, UN and World Economic Forum, the WTO, G20, G7, WHO, the Gates Foundation, to name just a few, or the financial donors partners and behind them—names like, or professionally linked to, Rothschild, Rockefeller, Gates, Soros, Warburg, Warren Buffet, Larry Page, Jeff Bezos, Ford, Kellogg, Mark Carney, Michael Bloomberg, JP Morgan Chase, Google, Volkswagon, Coca Cola, Blackrock, Shell, Goldman Sachs.

These are just some of the names that everybody recognizes which provide financial backing for the kinds of priorities, policies and narratives which have been adopted by Western nation states, organizations and corporations.

One way that one can recognize whether a particular policy is globalist is to take cognizance of the oligarchical interest funding a cause, or rights-claim. Thus, for example, consider the following answer by Jennifer Bilek to the question, “Who is funding the Transgender Movement?”

These include but are not limited to Jennifer Pritzker (a male who identifies as transgender); George Soros; Martine Rothblatt (a male who identifies as transgender and transhumanist); Tim Gill (a gay man); Drummond Pike; Warren and Peter Bubett; Jon Stryker (a gay man); Mark Bonham (a gay man); and Ric Weiland (a deceased gay man whose philanthropy is still LGBT-oriented). Most of these billionaires fund the transgender lobby and organizations through their own organizations, including corporations.

Separating transgender issues from LGBT infrastructure is not an easy task. All the wealthiest donors have been funding LGB institutions before they became LGBT-oriented, and only in some instances are monies earmarked specifically for transgender issues. Some of these billionaires fund the LGBT through their myriad companies, multiplying their contributions many times over in ways that are also diGcult to track.

These funders often go through anonymous funding organizations such as Tides Foundation, founded and operated by Pike. Large corporations, philanthropists, and organizations can send enormous sums of money to the Tides Foundation, specify the direction the funds are to go, and have the funds get to their destination anonymously. Tides Foundation creates a legal firewall and tax shelter for foundations and funds political campaigns, often using legally dubious tactics.

These men and others, including pharmaceutical companies and the U.S. government, are sending millions of dollars to LGBT causes. Overall reported global spending on LGBT is now estimated at $424 million. From 2003-2013, reported funding for transgender issues increased more than eightfold, growing at threefold the increase of LGBTQ funding overall, which quadrupled from 2003 to 2012. This huge spike in funding happened at the same time transgenderism began gaining traction in American culture. $424 million is a lot of money. Is it enough to change laws, uproot language and force new speech on the public, to censor, to create an atmosphere of threat for those who do not comply with gender identity ideology?

The globalist agenda is not a spontaneous uprising of the “masses,” it is a paid for operation by the richest people of the planet. And although the PR machines and mainstream media work incessantly to create the image of being geniuses intent on saving the planet, the fact is that they are money people—frequently they belong to, or have been adopted into a dynasty, and their philanthropic work is invariably a way to make massive money. Bill Gates on one occasion talks of making twenty times the return on the work undertaken by his and his former wife’s Foundation.

These unelected people are the true global leaders, lifting up others who serve their interests along the way. They consider themselves wise enough to identify the most important problems facing the species as well as how to solve them, and they have the resources to buy people who do their will. The fact that their ‘employees’ may not think they are pursuing their agenda, or be critical of a system which is so inequitable is irrelevant—which is also why the alliance mentioned in the opening of this essay is so contradictory. But contradictions are as intrinsic to a person’s life as they are to that of any group or alliance. Thus it is, for example, that academic Marxists and progressivists generally think they are tearing down capitalism and contributing to a utopia, even though they are enabling greater corporatist control over the world’s people’s and resources. The narrative of emancipation has contributed to a reality of totalizing enslavement; the critics of capitalist society have been the builders of a world of total calculability—and it is simply a matter of time before no natural part of our world be accessible without someone owning it and renting it to us.

People rarely know what they are doing because they have not the patience to consider all the possible implications of their action, to see whose interests they may also be serving when insisting upon getting their way. Transgender activists insisting upon the legalization and normalization of hormone blockers or surgical amputations and constructions of children don’t particularly see themselves as being but the means for massively enriching and empowering Jenifer Pritzker, Pfizer, Janssen Therapeutics, Abbot Laboratories. VIIV, Bristol-Myers Squibb Company and Boehringer Ingelheim Pharmaceuticals, not to mention Google and Microsoft who are also investing heavily in the trans project. Nor do they generally have a clue that they are the means for creating a world not only in which natural child birth may only be granted to those deemed by the state to be worthwhile parents, but in which human beings may be a completely synthetic fabrication.

Likewise, those who support NATO supplying the weapons, training, and tactical information for the Zelensky government and its supporters in Ukraine’s war against Russia, are largely ignorant of the fact that they are supporters of ethnic nationalists intent on ethnic cleansing, though that is exactly what the post-Maidan Ukrainian governments in cooperation with various battalions, para-military groups etc. have been. They might also be the kind of people who think they are anti-militaristic, or opposed to Western imperialism, yet they are fully supporting the entrenchment of a globalist military industrial complex that is ever ready to attack any socio-political order that deviates from a globalist Western led hegemonic imperial order.

Likewise, the doctors and health practitioners and bureaucrats and citizens who attacked people critical of mRNA vaccines against COVID were certain that because the stakes seemed so high—mass death—this ultimately justified ensuring people comply with whatever health policy was mandated—lockdowns, masks, vaccines within certain professions being a requirement of continued employment and pushed upon the population as the sole way of successfully protecting people against the virus, channeling hospital resources in such a way that there was an economic incentive to conflate “death by” and “death with” COVID.

These people’s unwavering commitment to ensuring a better health outcome along with the support of the media, social media platforms, and the academy led them to denounce and destroy the career of anyone speaking publicly about the need for a better informed exploration of the scale of the risks involved in prioritizing these policies over alternatives, especially over the use of potential treatments, such as Hydroxychloroquine and Ivermectin which, for year had been widely available for treatment of other diseases and had been relatively free of malign side effects, were suddenly targeted as dangerous drugs. Studies which supported their value as partial treatments were discarded, while everyone had to trust a vaccine developed at “warp speed,” which simply meant one in which there simply was not enough time to observe potentially dangerous side-effects. People were pressured—and in many professions forced to take drugs created out of a relatively new vaccine technology—at least that is how it seemed.

While the coalition of forces intent upon, or enabling a technocratic corporatist globalist world occurs because people think they are pursuing their advantage, those who serve that coalition are also helping build a society, in which the sole purpose of the middle class, will be to monitor and punish an enslaved class which provides the bodies and organs, and labour power to service the desires of a relatively small ruling class in pursuit of transhumanist/ eugenically engineered lives, i.e., lives without sickness or death in bodies that are part nature and increasingly large part machine. A number of people, including myself, think that it is also becoming ever more apparent that the rest of us will also be increasingly made of machine parts that can be surveilled, programmed, controlled, and dependent upon those who design and run the machines. Just as the globalist future is transhumanist, it is, as the COVID experience demonstrated, a bio-political one—as COVID has fizzled out, WHO keep uttering dire predictions about what will be the next ‘plague’ requiring global compliance.

The irony, lost on most academic supporters of the new world, is that the most influential philosopher upon the project of radical emancipation, Michel Foucault, saw the great danger of bio-politics. Yet the academy is an institution that plays a decisive role in forming the professional technocrats whose livelihoods are increasingly dependent upon the administration and economization of life so that everyone becomes the clients of corporate owners, managers, and state officials who may oversee all aspects of our lives so that we may comply with the directives and dictates that will ‘save the planet’ and the species. The radical students, who played such a decisive role in the Russian and subsequent communist revolutions, as well as the rise of National Socialism, and the identity politics that would flow from the student revolution of the 1960s in the West, never doubted that they had the ability and right to dictate what the future should be. What they did not realize—because they did not care about it—was that their solutions were inevitably technocratic and elite driven (for they were the professionals in waiting), and as such would require the resources of others who would find some material use for them. That they thought they knew the way to improve the world, yet so easily gravitated into the service not simply of the capitalist class they taught were the cause of all social ills, but of those who had the greatest capital and social reach is indicative of just how indifferent or blind they were to their own role in world-making.

People are easily swayed, especially when they are swayed toward a position that builds upon commitments and priorities they already stand by. The mimetic effect of personal development, and social bonding is such that so many of the above issues have demonstrated that narrative conformity can emerge very swiftly amongst those of similar professions, backgrounds and social and economic stakes and interests. People do not need to bond together and say, “this is the objective and this is the plan of attack”—though as the WEF, UN etc. documents show some of that definitely goes on, and there is a class of oligarchs who openly “conspired” with intelligence agencies and vested political interests to censor information they disapprove of, whilst pouring money into elections and candidates, activist and ‘philanthropist’ organizations and foundations, educational institutions, etc.

It is not a conspiracy theory to point out the existence of what former Clinton administration employee, editor Foreign Policy magazine, and columnist for the Daily Beast, and contributor to USA Today, David Rothkopf, has, in his book of 2008, called a “superclass” (Superclass: The Global Elite and the World They Make)—the existence of this class is simply a reality. Like Bill Clinton’s one time teacher, the brilliant Carroll Quigley, who, in Tragedy and Hope, also wrote extensively on various groups and persons funneling resources to support government policies suiting their globalist and imperial interests, Rothkopf’s work is not a critique of this class, but simply an account of its activities. Take the two following passages, one discussing how members from the same pool of people are regularly found on boards and management of the largest companies, the other noting how they often even go to the same schools.

“With regard to the concentration of power among individuals, perhaps a more telling demonstration is how boards and management of the biggest companies overlap, linking the superclass in an extended network.

For example, if you were to take just the top three corporate executives (in most cases the chairman, CEO, and executive director) of the top five biggest companies as well as the members of their boards—approximately seventy people—you would find that they have active connections fanning out to more than 145 other major companies either through board memberships, advisory positions, or former positions in senior management. Of these 145, thirty-six are among the one hundred largest in the world and fifty-two are in the top 250. Sixteen of these companies have more than one representative from the top five companies on their boards. These sixteen are Akzo Nobel, ABB, Astra-Zeneca, British Airways, Deutsche Bank, Ernst & Young, Ford, GE, Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers, Lloyds TSB, Pfizer, Royal Bank of Scotland, Sara Lee, Unilever, and Vodafone—all major, major players in their own right. Of these, which one has the most crossover to the top five companies? Goldman Sachs, with four links.”

And

“Networking among the corporate elite can thus take a variety of forms. Working together, doing deals together, sitting on boards together, even attending gala events together—all these things help forge the networks that empower and define the superclass. And these networks begin early. For example, take the Harvard Business School class of 1979. This class alone graduated Meg Whitman, the CEO of eBay; Jeffrey Skilling, the former president of Enron; John Thain, former president of Goldman Sachs and currently head of the New York Stock Exchange; Ron Sargent, the CEO of Staples; George McMillan, the CEO of Palladium Group; Elaine Chao, the secretary of labor (who also happens to be married to Republican Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky); and Dan Bricklin, who developed the first electronic spreadsheet. And because schools like Oxford, Cambridge, France’s École Polytechnique, the Indian Institute of Technology, and the University of Tokyo all perform a similar function, cadres of leaders emerge into the world with important linkages even before other layers of ties begin to form.”

Business and political interests are so entwined that where one ends and one begins is not that obvious, with lucrative careers open to politicians once they retire, whether through speaking engagements, or joining a board or the accruement of massive investment portfolios, and property ownerships gathered in a life of “public service.” The leverage of well-funded interest groups and lobbyists working on behalf of corporate interests are just part of the flow of modern democratic politics, in no small part because of the economic opportunities they provide for employment and national wealth. Journalists and academics and left-wing parties may well speak out against the dangers of huge wealth disparities—and there are grave dangers, not the least being how the ostensible critics of corporate control can be bought under their influences without even realizing that they have been bought. That there are economic/ material interests is a fact of life. But there are in every type of society a class of people who forego material advantage in favor of the things of the spirit is also profoundly important.

Journalists are often called the fourth estate, but along with academics those at least who were driven by a desire to make the society conscious of the powers being served through their reportage were aspiring to usurp the role of the first estate, by instructing the population in the ideas of the absolute they served. Over time they have not proved themselves to be less susceptible to corruption than the worst of the members of the first estate. The source of that corruption was the same as the source that did so much damage especially to the upper clergy by the time of the French revolution—viz., the betrayal of a very elementary demand of the spirit to serve the spirit of that part of life and our soul that requires a class of persons to instruct and help bond their flock (the public) in the first place. In the case of academics and journalists that spirit is the spirit of truth, the truth to be found in their respective areas of specialization or information gathering. And what has led to that corruption is the elevation of power itself above that commitment—their own power, and the desire for the power of whatever interest they purport to represent has become viscerally equated with the truth. But it is not. Representative systems always involve a devolution and dilution transpiring between the party to be represented and the representative. But even more importantly the representative class forms a set of interests due to it being a class of representatives. It thus becomes as natural to professional representatives as the air they breathe to assume that must first be well provided for so they can help the other members of their group. Of course, this is completely self-serving.

But material interests are by nature self-serving, and politics is a material before it is a spiritual power—something anyone can see if they but consider how political power originates in violence and protection rackets. In sum, the dangerous alliance of economic power, and political power, an alliance that is intrinsic—those with economic power need legislators to assist their enterprises, those seeking political power require economic assistance—could only be mitigated by spiritual resistance. That resistance previously took a cultural form. Its preservation required pedagogical cultivation—it required well educated teachers who understood the larger cultural and historical backdrop to the traditions of the spirit presiding over the group. The desire to completely overhaul the traditions by political means was bound to lead to corruption—and it has. What corrupt spirits with economic power have always known is that political power can be bought. The totalizing character of corporate power advanced in tandem with the totalizing character of political power.

Anyone familiar with what has happened to the university will know the story—neoliberalism merges with radical identity politics to create an economic-political alliance destroying all intellectual independence and any higher values of the spirit that do not fit into DEI or ESG or what university administrative leaders on an obscene salary dictate and bullying social justice warriors push in the class room. The latter think they are bringing down capitalism but they are so naïve that they take no historical cognizance of how corporations have pushed for exactly the same social outcomes that they preach—destruction of the traditional family, traditional faith, gender roles, the creation of open borders, greater ideological conformity, dismantling the nation state in favour of globalism. In some ways they are immediate material beneficiaries as job opportunities for the best of them open up globally. That they all push not only for the same political agenda but the very same party is just one other indication of how the very professions that pride themselves on opposing the corporatization and commodification of the world have so readily surrendered their critical capacities (and I speak of them en masse because almost all their members have surrendered) to enable that.

The disease of politicization of the spirit has also infected other state agencies that always had to be beholden to political authority as institutions, but which, nevertheless, required that their own personal political preferences be put aside. That requirement, i.e., to put aside one’s own political interests and beliefs, in service to an elected government also involved a spiritual component that was of far greater value to the preservation of the body politic that the various political representatives who came and went. Though, the entire society worked better when even the managers of corporations and political representatives bowed their heads to a higher power of the spirit than their own material interests. DEI and ESG are no substitutes for a higher power because they are simply means for getting power, and for forming a society in which its members tear at each other to get and to have. The better Marxist and leftwing critics—people like Erich Fromm and C.B. MacPherson—knew human betterment was not just having more stuff.

What we now have then is a society in which corporate interests, and political interests have indeed conspired to get what they want at any cost, and that means extinguishing any critical response to the nightmare world they are making.

The Spooks and their Megaphones

That intelligence agencies and members of the military have demonstrated their commitment to certain political parties which in turn are served by the mainstream media is not a theory about people conspiring, it is a reality, as are the walls of censorship, shadow-bans, algorithmic concealment and preference, media silence and the like. Take the New York Post (May 5 2023) story that Michael Morrell was attempting to give Biden’s 2020 presidential campaign some ammunition to “push back on Trump” during the debate as he urged John Brennan to sign on to the letter calling Hunter Biden’s laptop a possible Russian disinformation operation.’ That intelligence and military officers were ‘conspiring’ to have a party win an election is not a theory it is just what happened. As did the disinformation campaign about Trump and Russia—as I was write this even Jake Tapper from CNN momentarily thought that retrieving the credibility of the mainstream media might require some small amount of soul searching. Though The New York Times, having reporting the results of the John Durham Report, showed the way forward—the Russia stuff was all a big nothing burger of right-wing conspiracy theorists. There was, though, nothing new in the Durham Report—the report only makes public what people who explored the story 7 or 8 years ago, outside the mainstream media, already knew. That no prosecutions will flow from the various acts of conspiring with foreign parties to influence an election by spreading disinformation and lies, that the parties knew to be lies, is itself indicative of how successful the tactics of denouncing anyone who draws attention to the coordinated disinformation that transpired between the ruling party, the intelligence agencies, military officers, and the media as spreaders of disinformation has been.
The amount of disinformation involving the alliance of intelligence agencies and the media has been astonishing.

Allow me to cite some tweets from Mike Benz in December 2022 when he too was also noting the disinformation involving Michael Morrell and other CIA directors:

“Morrell was one of the 7 CIA directors—Michael Hayden, James Woolsey, Leon Panetta, David Petraeus, Michael Morrell, William Webster & Robert Gates—on the board of the Atlantic Council, who DHS deputized to censor the 2020 election, & who was partnered with Burisma.” “The Biden Admin has given GWU (George Washington University) in government grants to censor the internet.” “The Atlantic Council is the anchor of EIP, part of its “core four.” When EIP published its 292-page report about how they censored tens of millions of conservatives with DHS in the 2020 election, they made their launch event an Atlantic Council event.”

Or take these from Andrew Lowenthal—link provided by Matt Taibbi in his “Report On The Censorship-Industrial Complex.” Lowenthal had spent 18 years as Executive Director of @Engage Media, an NGO formed “to protect digital rights and freedom,” and what shocked him was the pervasiveness within the profession to collaborate with the very powers that they should be scrutinizing. He writes:

“The (Twitter) Files show an uncanny alliance of academics, journalists, intelligence operatives, military personnel, government bureaucrats, NGO workers and more. Some I know personally… I had always understood “civil society” to mean ‘not the military.’ The former exists to check the latter. So I was shocked to see the depth of collaboration. For instance, “civil society” groups coordinating with Pentagon officials in an “election tabletop” exercise… Twitter emails and Slack communications suggesting heightened levels of data access for the military. Or military contractors like Mitre being part of the Aspen Institute’s “Information Disorder” report along with NGO and academic colleagues… Tech firms collaborate with each other, and the state. Companies organize “IndustrySynch,” “Industry comms,” “pre-sync,” and “Multi-Party Information Sharing,” collaborating on a ‘whole range’ of subjects, from election security to state-media labelling… Tech companies not only collaborate on content, they gather regularly for ‘private sector engagement’ with the FBI, DOD, DHS, House and Senate Intel Committees, and others, each agency getting its own meetings… Twitter staff ask for Twitter General Counsel (& former FBI Deputy General Counsel) Jim Baker’s blessing for EIP and Virality Project partner Graphika to “inform their partners in USG 3-5 days before publication’ of a report detailing Pentagon disinformation operations… Graphika receives money from the Pentagon, Navy, and Air Force, while simultaneously supporting human rights organizations such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch… As reported by @shellenbergerMD, The Aspen Institute combined WaPo, NYT, Rolling Stone, NBC, CNN, Twitter, Facebook, Stanford, and “anti-disinfo” NGOs like FirstDraft to practice an oddly prescient “hack and leak” exercise on the Hunter Biden laptop BEFORE its release… Last week Secretary of State Anthony Blinken was alleged to have instigated the “Russian” “hack” letter signed by 50 former intel officials. At RightsCon, civil society’s biggest digital rights event, Blinken spoke on ‘disinformation’ with Nobel Prize winner Maria Ressa.”

These tweets report facts not theories. They are facts that once upon a time would have shocked enough journalists for them to become public scandals of such a magnitude that the ruling class would have had to respond to the public outcry. They refer to something involving infinitely greater collaboration, abuse of citizens’ rights, and consequence for the destruction of the republican constitution and democratic components of the United States than Water Gate. Yet, the mainstream media has remained silent on this, preferring instead to have journalists attack the owner of Twitter Elon Musk as well as those like Matt Taibbi and Michael Schellenberger working on the Twitter files, and any other journalists reporting on what Schellenberger has called the Industrial Censorship Complex. Without free speech there can be no freedom—for freedom requires expressing oneself, however wrong (as opposed to libellous) one may be, in order to garner the information, one needs to navigate one’s way through life. Without freedom of speech, freedom of assembly to express dissent is impossible, and without freedom of assembly for peaceful dissenters there can be no collective political alternatives to the prevailing political order and party, and the dictates that it lays down. No matter how it is wrapped up the attack upon freedom of speech is a means for preserving the social and political interests that ‘conspire’ to suppress opposition to what they do with their power.

In a world where the partisan nature of journalists is a crucial component of them having a career it is difficult to know how many even care enough to look at the information that has come out of the Twitter files and elsewhere disclosing the scale of complicity between intelligence agencies, oligarchs, and media/ tech employees. One might think that in an open democratic society, the public would be extremely well informed about the alliance between intelligence agencies and oligarchs, or extremely concerned that that alliance has dictated what information is favoured and promoted, or banned or buried in the information algorithms designed by people who have a background or are openly serving commands from intelligence agents. That domestic intelligence agencies spy upon citizens deemed subversives —for that is what they were designed to do —may not be troubling if those people really are plotting acts of terrorism, but it is a different matter when they spy upon people who comply with the law and who are simply representing interests that have every right —deplorable as they may be —to be represented.

Yet when we see how the media and tech platforms are now operating it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the objective of intelligence agencies has long been to shape a certain kind of society, which is not simply one shaped by the wishes of the electorate. Certainly almost fifty years ago (1977) Carl Bernstein had written a widely read article on the CIA’s use of the media in Rolling Stone (when it was a magazine whose writers did not see themselves as working for ‘”The Man”), and that story was considered something of a revelation, and something that suggested governmental malfeasance. According to Bernstein:

The use of journalists has been among the most productive means of intelligence gathering employed by the CIA. Although the Agency has cut back sharply on the use of reporters since 1973 primarily as a result of pressure from the media), some journalist operatives are still posted abroad.

Further investigation into the matter, CIA officials say, would inevitably reveal a series of embarrassing relationships in the 1950s and 1960s with some of the most powerful organizations and individuals in American journalism.

Among the executives who lent their cooperation to the Agency were Williarn Paley of the Columbia Broadcasting System, Henry Luce of Tirne Inc., Arthur Hays Sulzberger of The New York Times, Barry Bingham Sr. of the LouisviIle Courier Journal, and James Copley of the Copley News Service. Other organizations which cooperated with the CIA include the American Broadcasting Company, the National Broadcasting Company, the Associated Press, United Press International, Reuters, Hearst Newspapers, Scripps Howard, Newsweek magazine, the Mutual Broadcasting System, the Miami Herald and the old Saturday Evening Post and New York Herald Tribune.

By far the most valuable of these associations, according to CIA officials, have been with The New York Times, CBS and Time Inc.

Matt Taibbi’s recent Substack essay, “A Century of Censorship” pushes the connection between an administration and media control back to Woodrow Wilson and the 1917 “Espionage Act.” As he points out “Wilson’s administration also decided that any publications violating the act were ‘non-mailable matter,’ and this rationale was used to suppress dissenting views by aggressively enforcing the postal codes so no subversive publications could reach their subscribers. At least 74 newspapers were denied mailing permits at this time.”

While, then, there is a long history of media being an outlet for government misinformation, the most conspicuous new development is the brazen openness of the connection between a political party and administration and the media. Thus the career movement between (former?) intelligence agents and mainstream media outlets is simply par for the course, nicely summed up in the Corbett report (episode 432):

“I mean could you imagine, if say, the ex-director of the CIA was currently a contributor to MSNBC that would be crazy wouldn’t it? Or could you imagine if a former FBI agent was now an active national security contributor to NBC News, or if a former FBI special agent was now the CNN political analyst there, a former Homeland Security official was a CNN national security analyst, or a former DEA administrator was an MSNBC legal and political analysts with his own podcast cheque it out folks, or James Baker, former FBI general counsel, if he was a CNN legal analyst, or if Frances Townsend, the former Homeland Security advisor for George W Bush, was now CBS News senior security and law enforcement analyst, or if a retired CIA chief of Russia operations with CNN national security analyst or if the retired FBI supervisory special agent James Gagliano was now the CBS News security and law enforcement analyst, or Philip Mudd, the former CIA counterterrorism official, was now the CNN counterterrorism analyst that would be crazy wouldn’t it, oh yeah?’”

Crazy? Well, that is the norm today—and the reason James Corbett is simply dismissed as a kook, in spite of him constantly using public source and verifiable information in such documentaries as he has done on the CIA and the funding of Al Qaeda, or questions concerning all the weird stuff surrounding 9/11—that is the kind of stuff journalists and academics simply roll their eyes over. Unlike mainstream journalists—and on 9/11 Matt Taibbi has had plenty to say without showing he has really done any journalistic probing—I confess I was until relatively recently simply unaware of the extent of the serious unanswered questions surrounding the event. By the way, I am not saying I or anyone else, not involved in the planning and execution, knows exactly what happened, but someone like Corbett has raised important questions about 9/11 that are just not answered by repeating the name bin Laden ad nauseam. And once again it is a story covered up by the media rather than covered by it—and there are too many aspects about it to mention here, but it is just one other example where the media is simply serving as a public outlet for what intelligence agencies want the public to think.

Much less well known than the increasingly obvious fact that the mainstream media has a long history of being an intelligence outlet is the connection between the founding and funding of Google and the CIA. Alan MacLeod writes of this in his book Propaganda in the Information Age, (one can also hear him in discussion with Whitney Webb in Unlimited Hangout, and I cite from a summary of that show, where MacLeod notes that

“a prior investigation by Dr. Nafeez Ahmed found that the CIA and the National Security Agency (NSA) were ‘bankrolling’ research by Sergey Brin at Stanford University, which ‘produced Google…’ Not only that… but his supervisor there was a CIA person. So, the CIA actually directly midwifed Google into existence. In fact, until 2005, the CIA actually held shares in Google and eventually sold them.”

It continues:

“Ahmed explained that Brin and his Google co-founder, Larry Page, developed ‘the core component of what eventually became Google’s search service…’ ‘with funding from the Digital Library Initiative (DLI),’ a program of the National Science Foundation (NSF), NASA, and DARPA. In addition, the intelligence community’s Massive Digital Data Systems (MDDS) initiative, a project sponsored by the NSA, CIA, and the Director of Central Intelligence, ‘essentially provided Brin seed-funding, which was supplemented by many other sources.’ Brin and Page ‘regularly’ reported to Dr. Bhavani Thuraisingham and Dr. Rick Steinheiser, who were ‘representatives of a sensitive US intelligence community research programme on information security and data-mining,’ Ahmed shared. Ahmed has argued that the involvement of intelligence agencies in the birth of Google, for example, is deeply purposeful: that they have nurtur[ed] the web platforms we know today for the precise purpose of utilizing the technology… to fight [a] global ‘information war’ — a war to legitimize the power of the few over the rest of us.”

Infowars

Anyone who is familiar with the magnitude of the audience (often outstripping the audience of The New York Times, CNN and the various confabulations of mainstream fabulists) reached by podcasts and podcasters who do address issues of disinformation and suppression of information—to take some at random, George Galloway’s MOATS, Glenn Greenwald, Whitney Web and Unlimited Hangout, the Last American Vagabond, The Free Thought Project, The Grayzone, PBD podcast, 21st Century Wire, the Corbett Report, Derrick Broze, Grand Theft World—knows that the attempt by the mainstream media to disinform them is only working on its own “stakeholders.” Unfortunately those stakeholders are running the institutions and governments within the West. And whether wittingly or not, they do so on the basis of either not informing, or misinforming, or disinforming people about world making events.

While the collaboration of intelligence agencies and the media may have a long history, it is only in the last seven or eight years that the majority of journalists and academics would simply be the mouth pieces of globalist oligarchs and their political agents, at least on domestic issues—international issues are, as I will discuss in more detail below, another matter. We now live in an age which, Alex Jones, in the late 1990s succinctly and brilliantly formulated as “Info(rmation) Wars.” Jones has made all sorts of wrong or exaggerated predictions, and wading into the Sandy Hook massacre, by his own admission, was an act of folly. But think what you will about his style and some, possibly even much, of his content, he is in the fight against globalist disinformation. His program has a vast audience and he was a driving force giving a voice to the huge number of anti-globalists in the United States who were responsible for Trump’s 2016 victory. His book attacking the WEF’s “recovery plan,” The Great Reset: And the War for the World has sold by the truckload—there are over 3500 reviews on Amazon, almost all positive. And it has sold because it informs his audience about the details of the social and technocratic plans laid out in Klaus Schwab’s book, The Great Reset.

While the policies and plans Schwab lays out suit those who attend Davos and believe in “sustainable development,” population control, and the kind of state control that was exercised to deal with COVID, the curtailments of liberty that their execution requires (not the least being freedom to criticise the plans and their authors) are widely detested. Jones is the establishment’s embodiment of “disinformation.” And as such he is a litmus test of what one thinks of the right to dissent. The mainstream media have cheered every attempt to destroy him. And the attempts reveal the extent of corporate statism in the Western World—if Jones really were just a nut job, how could he possibly be such a threat to the state?

The problem with Jones is that he expresses the concerns of millions of people who hate the direction their lives and that of their children are being dragged in—and that is why they not only listen to Jones but to his guests, some like Peter McCullough, Robert Malone, and Judy Mickowitz, were prestigious scientific researchers whose careers were destroyed by research that failed to comply with some of the scientific consensuses that underpin the technocratic bureaucracy that demands complete obeisance.

In a world where inquiry into medical practices was not dominated by the outcomes required by those responsible for most of the funding exploring whether vaccines may lead to autism would be an extremely important subject. But Mickowitz’s career came to an abrupt end when she produced data which suggested there was a spike in autism that could be tracked to the proliferation of vaccines. I have no idea whether her research conclusions are scientifically correct. But her story is indicative of the fact that medical research today is inexorably linked to research grants, and grants are inexorably linked to outcomes which do not contravene the enormous investments made by pharmaceutical companies. How distant we are now from Karl Popper’s falsification principle being an essential criterion for any scientific endeavour can be seen in the imbecilic formulation that became a mandatory phrase during the pandemic, “I trust the science.”

Jones was the first to be censored by YouTube and other social media platforms, Mickowitz was not that long in following, and shortly thereafter so was the elected President of the United States. The media and the academy saw this as a victory. And for them it was, because they no longer cared what people thought—so long as they would shut up and do what they were told. Those of us who believe in the importance of freedom of speech know that the issue is not whether you like what someone says, or whether you think it based upon being well informed or being a complete dope.

Certainly, the people who impose censorship always think they are virtuous as well as wise. Of course, none who is not a journalist or academic, and has not been brainwashed by them, and has ever spent any-time with them suffers under such a delusion. I know the logic is circular, but not less circular than you should trust our opinions because we are journalists and academics and we trust each other’s opinions. When Alex Jones was banned from the various social media sites, people with a college education in the main thought it was a good thing because they had been informed that he publicised an outrageously hurtful and misinformed opinion on the massacre at Sandy Hook: he thought and said aloud that the massacre did not take place, and the photos and new items about it were staged.
Jones was not the original source of this “theory” which he was airing on his program—and which had never played a particularly important role in the more general arguments he was making about disinformation and how it is used by globalists and how the USA was losing the qualities that made it a free and prosperous country. It had been expounded previously by the philosopher James Fetzer (whose book on Carl Hempel is probably the definitive book on the fairly well-known philosopher of science) and Mike Paleck, Nobody Died at Sandy Hook: It was a FEMA Drill to Promote Gun Control. The title encapsulates the argument, and it included essays by other academics. The various contributors to the book supplied what they believed was compelling evidence against there being a massacre. The “evidence” had to do with the school buildings, various photos such as those of the car park and the students filing out of the school, and the school itself being closed. The argument combined with the photos do give the impression of Fetzer, Paleck and the other authors having a case. But strange as the circumstantial evidence may have appeared, that “evidence” would evaporate in the face of the testimony of anyone who was a first-hand witness of the event, or knew any of the survivors, and victims of the massacre. To publicly claim that their testimony should be discounted because they are actors or liars does seem to the lay person to be a strong case of defamation. Although facts are inevitably only notable in so far as they are meaningful, facts remain facts. And the case about Sandy Hook was a matter in which one’s opinions count for nothing when compared to the facts. So it is not surprising that Fetzer and Paleck and their publishers were sued for defamation, and that the publisher apologized to Lenny Pozner, whose six year old son was killed in the shooting. The settlement in that case was $450,000.

The lawsuits against Jones for defamation which commenced in 2018 culminated in the $1 billion verdict against him—it was the largest defamation award in US history. By that stage Jones himself had admitted he had been wrong, on numerous occasions. He was embarrassed by it, and he conceded that he had become over medicated and paranoid. He had, then, by his own admission, aired an opinion that was misinformed—and although he was repeating misinformation, he never claimed as far as I know to be the source of the idea that the Sandy Hook shooting was a hoax. And there is nothing to indicate he believed he was lying at the time he expressed his opinion.

But what is most striking about the verdict is that there seems to be no sense of proportionality between crime and punishment. Jones did not murder the children—and there are no instances of civil cases against murders in which the plaintiffs receive anything even close to that amount. Moreover, there is nothing to indicate that Jones’ fortune was primarily due to his opinion about Sandy Hook. In various interviews I have seen e.g., with Joe Rogan, Michael Malice, Tim Pool, and Steven Crowder he consistently makes the point that Sandy Hook is but a very small portion of his work—he compares the “amount” of time devoted to talking about Sandy Hook as akin to a sentence in a large book. It is difficult to see how the amount awarded to the plaintiffs could be considered anything other than an attempt to destroy the potential for Alex Jones to have a livelihood, and that this decision was based upon his political influence, and he was being used as an example not of what might happen to people who expressed false or defamatory opinions—for the thing about this case, and the thing which makes it stick out as such a politicized judgment is that its severity has no parallel. When major media companies are sued, they are not targeted in such a way that they can never operate again. And even if Jones had underrepresented, had lied, about his worth, the idea that it is remotely close to a billion dollars is absurd.

For his part, Jones made the salient point that those responsible for using the false claim that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and sending hundreds of thousands of people in the US led invasion of Iraq to their death have not paid any financial penalty. Like him or hate him, there is no denying the truth of that particular quip. He also riposted with another salutary and brilliant quip consisting of two words—“Jeffrey Epstein?”—when journalists, going for the kill, cornered him for claiming there were paedophile networks that operated at the highest political levels.

The case of Alex Jones should concern everyone who understands that if we cannot express our scepticism and our criticism, even if we are mistaken, we can never have a society in which not only independent thinking is valued, but our own personhood is taken seriously. For no person can avoid mistakes, and the idea that there are a group of people who we should always agree with because they are our ‘leaders’ or truth czars or brilliant political pundits on television (forgive my oxymoron), or celebrities (forgive me citing just morons), or scientists, or professors—the latter of whom, on extra-ideological issues, at least rarely agree on anything—is simply childish. But that is what the progressivist globalist project requires—getting us all to think like children—imbecilic children (see my “Dialectics of Imbecility”). Moreover, their hold upon the world along with the world itself is so fragile that they cannot tolerate the cracks in the edifice that some crackpot might open up lest the whole world collapses. The problem they faced, though, was not that their schemes and objectives and policies were facing resistance from about as many people who were paid-up people making careers out of the narratives supporting globalisation were opposing it. Some of the opposition embraced social media, others expressed their dissent by voting for outsider candidates. Opposition voices with a large audience like Jones had to be either censored, outright, for good, or for enough time for them to change the error of their ways and get back in the flow of the main stream, or demonetized, or algorithmically buried. As for more mass opposition the media had to go on full attack deploying labels to highlight the disinformation they were using to denounce, break down, or when nothing else worked imprison dissenters.

Thus, critics of the COVID vaccines are anti-vaxxers. Parents who object to schools and librarians having their kids be ‘entertained’, danced to, read to etc. by drag queens or trans people are ‘anti-drag queen’ or transphobes, or parents who do not want school libraries carrying sexualized material are homophobes. People who are not of the opinion that the world will end by 2030 unless oil and coal are eliminated are “climate deniers.” People who express the desire to have border controls so that national sovereignty and citizenship are preserved are racists—those who illegally enter into the US are designated with the same terms as those who legally enter as migrants. Whites are all racists, and hence in need of training by others (often whites) who can get them to not offend or harm with their whiteness. Everybody is a white supremacist, or if black or Asian or something else, a lackey thereof, if they do not accept that the pockets of black poverty suffice to discount not only white poverty (which is larger in absolute numbers, though not proportionally), but the substantial black middle class, and hence who do not accept that racism is the cause of black poverty in the US, or that the cure for black poverty lies in employing critical race theorists to train the entire society. A white supremacist is also anyone who does not go along with BLM and has the temerity to point out that black on black crime, as well as black on white crime, is proportionally far higher than white on black crime. Being labelled a white supremacist also is equivalent to being a “domestic terrorist”—and the President of the USA has himself declared that white supremacists are the greatest source of domestic terrorism within the USA today. People who are critical of the fact that entire suburbs in Western Europe have become enclaves of Muslims who do not want to make cultural compromises with the host country are Islamophobes, as is anyone else who brings up the issue of the prevalence of honour killings in Muslim communities, and the problem of women being forced to wear the veil. Anyone opposed to supporting the Zelensky government in the war against Russia is a “Putin stooge.” A protest gone awry, in no small part due to government and Antifa plants is an insurrection.

On that front, Gateway Pundit, always dismissed as a source of mis- and disinformation by the media that wants to monopolize mis- and disinformation, noted that the FBI admitted having 8 informants inside the Proud Boys organization on January 6, whilst court documents put the number at 40 undercover agents, and the DC Metro Police had 13 undercover operatives —this is straight out of Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday—and if this was not enough to make anyone with a modicum of information or good sense realize that the word “insurrection” should be synonymous with a government intelligence operation designed to terrify anyone thinking of participating in a demonstration against whatever the government, and the media and the corporate decide is truth, it was left to one solitary main stream tv journalist, now sacked, to show the footage of police politely ushering in protestors at the back of the capitol building. Any elected governments or presidents whose policies halt the progress of what Klaus Schwab and the Davos crowd and Justin Trudeau herald as the “Fourth Industrial Revolution” are equated with Nazis. Every oppositionist position to what, in the once relatively free world, was a matter of potential policy for public discussion is now cause for some new denunciative label—even if one sided with the mainstream, one might think there might be some old school defenders of the English language somewhere who still believe words and names should be used correctly.

But as we can see each label is itself an example of disinformation—whether in the form of an outright lie, or in ensuring that anyone who wants public policy and debate to be better honed and pitched be presented as a bigot, or a monster. But it seems for the moment the worst kind of monster is the bigot who does not believe a woman can have a penis, or that someone born without one is really a man.

Pride: Dragging and Transitioning the Population into the New World Order

It has become very obvious in the last few years—and amongst those who also note this is Jacob Dreizen in his important (albeit belligerent and sarcastic) DreizenReport—that the LGBTQ pride flag is the symbol of Western led globalist freedom. Thus very early in the Biden administration US embassies were authorized to fly pride flags—in 2016 on his becoming Foreign Minister of the Conservative Party Boris Johnson had also overturned the decision not to allow pride flags to be flown from embassies. Pride flags have also been flown at the UK and US embassies in some Islamic countries such as the UAE which has incurred a backlash from locals. China has just recently demanded that pride flags, along with the Ukraine flag be taken down from visiting embassies, because they are simply Western propaganda.

The pride flag had also been flown in US embassies in Russia in 2020 and 2021, until Russia introduced laws in December of 2022 banning LGBTQ propaganda. The political significance of the LGBTQ movement as a cipher for Western progressive values was also driven home early in the Russia-Ukraine war by MI6 chief Richard Moore who tweeted, “With the tragedy and destruction unfolding so distressingly in Ukraine, we should remember the values and hard won freedoms that distinguish us from Putin, none more than LGBT+ rights.”

The Western media has also been awash with stories about LGBTQ and the war in the Ukraine, whilst refusing to mention that Ukraine has never been a haven of LGBTQ freedom, and that when Western powers have tried to push Zelensky to legislate for same sex marriage—gay adoption is also prohibited there, he has refused to do so. He knows that it simply could not fly there, and he already has enough popularity problems on his hands (also unreported by Western journalists).

While, as the above examples illustrate, the West has used such symbols as pride month, and the pride flag as a means of its core value and virtue—not just the acceptance of sexual diversity, but its celebration—the move from personal acceptance of private same sex acts to institutionally valorising it commenced with same sex unions. The first country to legally recognize same sex marriages was the Netherlands, which was also the first to legalize euthanasia—both occurred in 2001. Same sex marriage followed by Belgium, two years later, and the provinces of Ontario and British Colombia. It was only, though, within the last ten years that same sex marriage became increasingly common place in Western Europe and Latin America. In Asia and Africa, it is only permitted in Taiwan and South Africa. Hilary Clinton eventually came to support same sex marriage in 2013, Obama had come out for it the previous year.

It was not just, though, that political parties in the West started flip-flopping on the issue, the push for same sex marriage was a symptom of a major transformation in the gay movement itself. In the 1960s and 1970s the gay movement was generally part of a wider sexual revolution— “free love” —and attack upon the family and the Christian religion (the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence began in 1979). It was only as politicized gay people started aging and dying that they had to come to grips with the legal issues surrounding wills and inheritance. They had, in other words, been dragged into a world where sex mattered less than legal bonds. Gradually the issue of gay parenting was also taking on importance, not the least reason with the increase in divorce, more people came to identity as gay in the aftermath, and the matter of child rearing became important. That would morph into increasing number of gay people wanting to adopt—in countries such as Australia and Great Britain the acceptance of a gay couple raising children morphed into gay adoption, and along with single parents, gay people were legally entitled to adopt before they could marry. It is also noteworthy that around the same time there were an increasing number of stories coming out of Great Britain that religious couples were finding it increasingly difficult to adopt. There were very understandable reasons why gay people wanted to participate in the institutions that they, if not individually at least as a movement, had generally rejected—that included the Christian Church as well.

Even before newly elected Biden authorized embassies to fly the pride flag, he had overturned President Trump’s ban on transgender people joining the military. Trump had always been ‘liberal’ of sexual issues, even supporting same sex marriage, but he objected to gender reassignment being on the military dime, and was also aware that the army needed people who can kill people and follow orders, rather than express their identity. But inclusivity and diversity has now been restored as a central value of the US military, and US leadership, with the US Navy having a drag queen as its “Digital Ambassador.” They were a little behind the CIA and FBI who had also used pride in diverse sexual orientation as a recruitment strategy. Likewise the administration more generally ensured that it employs people (like Rachel Levine, and Sam Brinton, at least before the source of his fetching wardrobe became widely publicized) whose sexual identity is not only part of their cv but on public display.

What is happening in the public sector has also become part of the public presentation of corporations. Although none in their life has ever seen a woman act like Dylan Mulvaney Bud Light decided to promote it as the face of beer. The strategy of using a fake woman to promote a fake beer backfired, but it has not stopped other corporations—the most visible of the recent ones has been the Target draping its store with pride flags and parading mannequins in LGBTQ attire, which has also lost a lot of money. The backlash is interpreted by the progressive liberals as a sign of how far society has to go before there is full acceptance of sexual diversity, when, in fact, it is led by people who object to a lifestyle based upon sexual identity being constantly publicly promoted and pushed upon them and their children. The riposte by liberals is that this is what the LGBTQ have to face every-day of their lives. And to a large extent this is correct.

Though, what is the real issue is not that, it is that the politicization and promotion of the LGBTQ life-style is but one further step in a society which has made sexual exhibitionism part of its daily culture. For the real drive—from the point of view of the diverse—or perverse (depending where you come from) people engaging in it—the constant exhibition of sexuality is the drive to push ever further into the sexual possibilities available to the species. That in turn is a drive not only for increasing sterile acts of sexual expression, but a drive for the destruction of life. The society that celebrates and routinizes sexuality is one which not only widely requires sterility through birth control, but freely available abortion. How one reacts to this fact morally is irrelevant to the point I am making—for the point of raising it is to get people to see what kind of world they are making and to at least have some sense of how far from traditional it is, and hence too why people from more traditional societies are so hostile to this. For my interest in all this is primarily social and political—to be cognisant of what happens with the political and social choices we are making.

And what has happened with the choices that have become prioritized in the West is that we have the world we have: it is a riven world—domestically it is one verged on civil war, internationally it is one at war. The riven-ness is veiled by the media and the universities and schools which see their task as educating people to accept that this riven world is one which is more just and more free than the old one, and that the only obstacle to its realization, domestically, is some demon like a Donald Trump, or, internationally, Vladimir Putin. The complete destruction of institutions required to instantiate this justice and freedom is not even noticed, nor is the reality of the freedom it achieves. Again the misery of what the new justice is is exhibited by the extent of identity conflict, particularly racial and ethnic conflict. Though this too is veiled by blaming the conflict on white supremacy. The problem with having a class of people whose job it is to educate, but who themselves are simply rote learners and appliers of ideas, at best (e.g., Marx, Foucault, the Frankfurt School) not sufficiently well thought through, and at worst (choose any of the thousands upon thousands of academic scribblers pointing out how racist, homophobic, transphobic etc. the West is, whilst having or aspiring to have tenured academic jobs to write their ‘critiques’) imbecilic ideas, is that they cannot see what they are doing in any other terms than those which valorise themselves and their ideas, as well as their policies and institutional and social changes. More jobs in schools, universities and corporations for people to give more classes to the bored or too stupid to understand the stupidly of what they are doing scribbling about how racist they are or the society around them is—that is now what justice is.

As for freedom—it is even more pathetic than what passes for social justice. It is the freedom to have blue hair, to have tantrums and call out everybody who does not accept the real you as a genocidal transphobe, to have one’s body amputated and rebuilt with the help of drugs. It is the freedom to have one’s very own pronoun. Though, to be fair, for men with autogynephilia, it is the freedom to be almost permanently aroused as one has open access into women’s spaces that were once private and cordoned off from the male gaze—their dormitories, toilets, and prisons and expose themselves with the protection of the law. For men who want to be applauded and acclaimed for their achievements, but who are not competitive against their own biological kind, it is the freedom to compete against biologically weaker competitors. It is the freedom to humiliate and devalue women who want to excel in some activity to compete with their biological kind so they can explore the transcendence involved in combing discipline and service in striving to reach beyond limits. It is the freedom to be morally superior and to have economic advantage and enhanced social status in a competitive world. It is the freedom to be special and to receive special attention. In a culture in which being a white heterosexual male youth is to be derided by teachers, becoming trans is increasingly a way out, a way of having attention, love even—and that extra attention and “love” will be appealing not just to white heterosexual boys being bullied by their teachers. The huge spike in girls wanting to be boys is also their way of escaping the burdens that are part of being a woman. Being a grown up is to take on a new burden in another phase of life. Being trans today appears a new life option, an easy option, encouraged at every step by professionals who tell them constantly how brave they are and that they are doing the right thing, for to say otherwise is now a way to lose one’s profession. They really are much braver than they realize because they think they will find their true selves, when they are simply the unwitting cannon fodder in a vast war of social experiment and anti-traditionalism in the globalist alliance of oligarchs and their sterile complexes of compliant identities.

Thus it is that having realized one has made a gigantic mistake, and wanting to retrieve whatever biological vestiges (sadly by adopting further surgery) of their presurgical nature they become hated. Transphobia has nothing on the hatred that Western trans people have for apostates. Irrespective of fact checkers telling us that it is only a teeny weeny number of people who re/ or de-transition, twenty years from now, as a large number of transitioned children on reaching adulthood discover that their biology does not “recognize” the equipment that was reassigned to them, we will be witnessing one hell of a social backlash. What they considered to be discomfort or even intense dislike of their gender will end up far, far more debilitating than the discomfort they feel now—this story of the deep regret involved in deciding too young or too swiftly to surgically change one’s sexual parts is being told time and time again, but not by the mainstream media. The freedom exercised by Big Pharma and the medical professions and the various other unions and boards that have enabled this, along with the parents who have brainwashed their children into being “free,” will be legally protected from any liability.

The real reason that the overwhelming majority of people recoil against the new freedom in general, and the trans contagion, especially among youth, and middle aged men, is not because they fear trans people. Where there is any fear it is the fear to speak their mind about what they don’t like, it is the fear of being bullied or losing a job from defending the rights of biological women to have private spaces. What they often fear is what the West has become. But it is not a phobia of trans people per se that drives people to speak out against the trans contagion and corporate push to celebrate trans-ness—people might think a bearded bloke dressed up as a deranged girl looks stupid, but that does not make them scared. And yes when it comes to teachers and doctors and deranged parents banging on about the right of the child to determine what sex they are (as if in the long run that might not do more damage than allowing children the right to drive and drink beer) they might get really angry.

Recently Chris Hayes at MSNBC exclaimed, like some giant moral version of a puffer fish, that it was “None of your Goddamned business” if you do “not like” “gender affirming care.” The new civil war plays it out as much by the deliberately misleading choice of words (though I get the fact that Hayes is too stupid to have the faculty of deliberation, lacking that faculty is now a requirement for getting a network job) as by the infantilization of the population and the sexualization of infants. For some reason that can only be grasped by an undeveloped brain it is ‘right wing’ to think that children who are instructed to read sexualized material and to choose a sexual identity are being “groomed.”

But, apart from the fact that brainwashing children about their sexuality, and playing havoc with their hormones and preparing them for surgery is grooming, and indeed that it is one that uses children for sexual gratification of adult voyeurs, is hateful, the most common response to the trans contagion is pity. It is a pity to see a young adult who identifies as the opposite sex think that all their problems come down to other people not accepting that their sexual identity is contrary to their biological nature. It is a pity that someone is so vulnerable that they think that if they do not have a new pronoun they will consider suicide. It is a pity that someone thinks that this issue, which might in very rare cases be a real one, a tragedy not simply a life style choice, has become not only so central to what the West stands for, but a source of derision and contempt for people who see this as but the final gasp of a civilization in its death throes. It is a pity that someone can think that not seeing the trans identity issue the same way as someone who embraces it as a way out or into a much better life is portrayed as an extremist and accomplice to genocide. It is a pity if someone thinks that by taking drugs, putting on women’s clothes and makeup that they pass for a woman, even when they look and act nothing like a woman. It is pitiable to see a glum looking bearded young trans male who thinks that the reason they have suicidal tendencies is because nature gave them the wrong body, and that when they have the new body and identity, and everyone congratulates them on their bravery and emancipation they will be happy.

The trans issue is one of the most pitiable examples of the cultural descent of the West—the parents of the child, who goes to school as a little girl in the morning and returns in the evening saying she is now he, are also to be pitied, as are the children who along with all the other craziness, all the fear about the environment and the hatred (for the identity people it’s anyone they deem to be their persecutor, and for the mainstream it’s the Russians and next the Chinese), and now the burden of having to decide before knowing anything important about life of whether their sexual parts have been a massive error of nature are to be pitied because the world they are growing up in will have no safe spaces. (And the very designation of such spaces in universities today is yet another sign of the Orwellian reality in which slavery is salvation.)

The trans issue and the pronoun issue are symptoms of a society in which all real priorities have been abandoned because the culture has completely lost any bearing toward the future. It is a culture in which freedom has been extinguished—for freedom is useless, indeed meaningless in a life, if not undergirded by the virtues, by discipline and by knowledge. Further, discipline is one of the most fundamental mechanisms of social survival. Discipline is a cultural and social necessity. It is even more primordial than freedom, which is a far later and rarer cultural plant.

Culturally discipline begins with the designation of the name that distinguishes the life-path that awaits one—and the first name one receives equips one for the role that one must play socially. Some eighty years ago the brilliant Rosenstock-Huessy pointed out that the devaluation of names, which he saw in the widespread dropping of Christian names, was a serious symptom of a culture in decline. How right he was. It was a sign that the culture had been plagued by social amnesia. That it had no idea of its debt to its Christian heritage. Those who despise that heritage can now exult in the neo-pagan revival which has taken hold in the West. Had they learnt anything from the two most anti-Christian regimes to have emerged to drive out their Christian heritage, the Nazis and the Bolsheviks, they might have realized that people will always find some god to follow and sacrifice themselves and others to. And that a God who sacrifices Himself is far more benign than a God or Idea (a God by another name, albeit a loveless God in its most insubstantial form) that can only live off human sacrifices.

The story of what Christianity contributed to the West and to the world has been told best, in my opinion, by Christopher Dawson and Rosenstock-Huessy, and even, more briefly, by Chesterton. It would take me too far afield to discuss the Christian contribution to the classical virtues and how an orientation to reality which accepts that we are born in sin, and that we will continue to sin, and that we must make our world through being open to redemption and grace, which requires cultivating a culture of forgiveness and awareness of our frailty and lack, our weaknesses, and the insurmountable permanence of our ignorance equips us for a far better way of dealing with life than the technocratic fake world and fake love that we are hurtling toward in the name of emancipation, and progress. But the Christian way of life is one which drew upon, fused and reinvigorated traditions, and in so doing offered a culture in which freedom began to flourish. It was not the freedom of simply following a law we gave ourselves (the philosophical freedom of Rousseau and Kant), nor the freedom of unleashing the appetites and doing one’s will (the diabolical freedom of Alastair Crowley and the Marquis de Sade), nor the freedom of surrendering to the determinations of the universe (Spinoza and the Stoics) it was the freedom to act under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, to enter into a new path of life by following where the Spirit takes us, and to be open to life being breathed into the broken and damaged parts of what we are. It could work with classical virtues, but it was not limited by those virtues.

Some twentieth century philosophers seeking a radically emancipated future had sought to interpret love, hope and faith in purely political and material terms. But the freedom that had been such a creative power in every aspect of the life of the West, from its art to its enterprises to it spirit of inquiry, and the bonds of solidarity it established (to be sure ever precarious, ever compromised by powerful people and powerful appetites uncurbed by the higher laws of the spirit) was only ever of nourishment and durability where it was not disassociated from the spiritual service which enables being open to its source. Freedom as a thing in-itself is a path to nothingness. And combing it with other wisps such as equity does not make it more substantial.

But the story of the growth of freedom in the West is one which is also a falling away from the spirit, a falling into anomie and alienation (the ailments that almost all-important sociologist of the late 19th and early 20th century explored). The 20th century and what had been made out of the industrial revolution of the previous century in the West was one of unprecedented plenty, unprecedented possibility—and the unimaginable horrors of the gulags and gas chambers, of wars of anticolonialism. Freedom without the Holy Spirit (which is also to say, freedom in service to the spirits of Imperialism, Nazism, and Communism) was a contradiction of material abundance, spiritual impoverishment and mass death. The world wars—the mass death—also opened up new possibilities of material advancement and freedom—the economic freedom of women and the transformation of social roles and the family. As with every gift, blessing, or new potential, it is what one makes of them that mattered. We are witnesses today of how that has played out, for better and worse.

For all that the freedom opened up by the explosions and inventiveness that have preceded us have been an experiment, an unprecedented cultural experiment, and the current trans contagion is one more contribution to the dark side of the experiment. The darkness comes not from the fact that some people genuinely have gender dysphoria, but that their suffering is an occasion for profiteering, economically and politically, and that profiteering must be protected from being criticized.

Sexual politics is not really about sex per se—it is about rearranging institutions around one variable of human experience—in the case of LGBTQ sexuality, the focus is upon a variable that is not capable in and of itself of giving natural birth. To be sure all love is fecund, and involves a creative even ‘supranatural’ birth. But the sexual act is an act of desire, and while desire may activate who we wish to be with, the act is completely irrelevant to love. It is only in the deluded sentimental culture in which the dizzying enticements of romantic love are essentialised as love itself that the foundation of the perpetuity of the species is passed onto such a fleeting and ephemeral quality. The culture that makes the sentiment of romantic love the bedrock of marriage and child rearing was always bound to end as it has, in a society of fractured relationships, presided over by divorced parents and children becoming moved from one “family” to another. Of course quite a few make a fist of it, but the more the society licenses desire the more the search for the One becomes a kind of farce. Again LGBTQ are not responsible for this—like everyone else they are thrown into their world and much of that world has already been devouring itself through excess and indulgence. And my point (now made in a number of essays in this magazine) is not about any wish to persecute people for their sexual preference. Liberality is a virtue when it does not drive out our understanding of the complexity of consequences and the importance of thinking through institutional arrangements. That takes far more than sentiment- it takes learning from generations of experience, and that is precisely what the liberal progressive mind set refuses to do because it simply focusses upon thwarted desire and the delusion that men—or white men—or white wealthy men—or white wealthy men without a disability (the logic is farcical) have had it all. The only person that has it all—in terms of having every desire satiated—is, as Plato astutely observed a tyrant, but the ‘all’ of a tyrant is a gaping maw of appetite that devours everything.

Plato knew of the Greek tyrants, and he wrote centuries before Roman emperors would forever be immortalized as beasts by Roman historians who despised the imperial debauchery. Our “progressive” historians generally don’t trust Tacitus or Suetonius. But that is because they have little appreciation of how the Republic, for all its flaws, relied for its existence upon the classical virtues. And the historians who saw the fish was rotting from the head down were making the case that Rome could not survive if it was ruled by men drowning in their own appetites.

Love is essentially self-sacrificing. A society which flourishes, which is also a society in which love is genuinely a driving power enabling social and personal flourishing necessarily imposes a limit upon pleasure and consideration of where it fits—with sacrifice—in the scheme of a society and in an individual life. To be sure there can be a strong case that the suffocation of desire is replete with dire social consequences, and to an important extent what happened in the West in the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century was an attempt to release bonds that were hard felt. More the generation that spearheaded the sexual revolution had been raised in a culture shrouded by their parents experiencing two sequential catastrophes. No wonder they wanted to dance and sing—and have lots of sex. But the pushing of it into institutions has not led to more dancing and joy, but to ever greater fracture and a society that now holds itself together by waging war—for only the completely deluded fail to grasp that a proxy war is a real war—even if it is a particularly cowardly war, a war without self-sacrifice by those instigating it, with warriors supplied by the people who cannot escape the consequences of a corrupt government pushed by foreign powers and oligarchical money who have used Ukrainian (very white) supremacists thugs to ensure the inevitability of a war. It is also a war of the completely morally bankrupt who think they are moral because they fly flags of a country which they know nothing about, nor care anything about except that it is at war against their greatest fear. This is the context of the trans contagion, of adults sacrificing children to their own deluded sterile death-wish fantasies by pretending the child knows its will. If the parents, doctors, teachers etc. pushing this agenda saw themselves, or could even see how monstrous they appear to others they could not stand it. Hence too they must protect themselves from themselves by pushing ever further for more censorship and sounding ever more removed from reality as the reality they are defending is a completely absurd technological fabrication that is profit driven, and pharmaceutically and surgically induced.

And to repeat, the trans contagion in the Western world is ultimately not about transexuality or trans identity per se. Anyone who has spent time in Thailand knows that “ladyboys” are almost a feature of the country—one might be greeted at a tourist destination with the words “Ladies, gentlemen and ladyboys.” In Thailand, though, the existence of ladyboys has a completely different cultural significance—transsexuality is not a weapon against the family, it is not the symbol of solidarity and freedom, it is not an excuse to change the language to ensure total conformity of thought in the name of “emancipation.” It needs no flag. It just is what it is.

Unlike in Thailand, transsexuality in the West is primarily about politicizing people who are the damaged product of a deeply damaged culture, a culture which has become putrefied through its own indulgence, through its excess, through its over medicalisation, through its hyper-sexualization, through its expansion of the state into the very capillaries of the smallest social unit, the family. The liberal totalising reach of the state was preceded by the Nazis and communists. But the scale and scope of the liberal state may well be heading toward the excesses of the worst regimes. This was recently noticed by a refuge from North Korea, Yeonmi Park, who has attained some kind of celebrity by talking and writing about the similarities of what is happening in the West with North Korea. Naturally, she is mocked, and derided by liberal youth who are completely brainwashed into thinking that she is a threat to their emancipation.

College kids doing Humanities in the last thirty or forty years have been thrilled by the paens to excess (mere joy and play – jouissance) to be found in French authors such as Bataille, Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan, not realizing that there have been very sound reasons why cultures generally supress excess. ‘Nothing in excess’ was one of the Delphic utterances. The West’s hegemony over the globalist project is nothing if not excess. But the greatest excess is what I have hinted at already—an excessive love of death.

Depopulation and Eugenics

The turn that the sexualization of the culture, which was precipitated earlier but broke out completely in the 1960s in the West, is one that ties in with another key plank of the globalist agenda, viz., population /depopulation and eugenics, and the technocracy and bioweaponry that enables that agenda.

In spite of the mistake to lump in all political elites throughout history in the one basket, a mistake that has no bearing on the ‘thesis’ and evidence supplied in the book, Gavin Nascimento’s A History of Elitism, World Government and Population Control is an invaluable resource for those wanting to track the Malthussian rationale of the globalist project, involving governmental agencies engaging in brainwashing their populations, and using them as the material for bio-experimentations.

His book commences with the claim that “some of the most trusted medical authorities—and indeed pioneers in medical history—secretly worked for different government agencies, most prominently the CIA.”

Using the example of MKULTRA (Nascimento uses MKULTRA as an umbrella term to include a variety of clandestine projects of behavioural/ bio modifications), which the Church Committee Report, of the US Senate, in 1975, listed as involving “radiation, electroshock, various fields of psychology, psychiatry, sociology, and anthropology, graphology, harassment substances, and paramilitary devices and materials.” Nascimento points out:

This clandestine agenda was skillfully carried out through dozens of well-respected Hospitals, Universities, Prisons and Government Agencies, amongst other select locations. This included a large number of North America’s most elite universities, such as Stanford, Princeton, Columbia, Cornell, McGill, Harvard, Johns Hopkins, and many others. Trusted health authorities like the Addiction Research Center in Lexington Kentucky, the FDA (Federal Drug Agency) and NIH (National Institute of Health) were all involved in MKULTRA. Chemicals, drugs, poisons and different hallucinogens were supplied by leading pharmaceutical-vaccine companies, like Eli Lilly & Company and Sandoz (Today Novartis) and Parke Davis (Today a subsidiary of Pfizer). Funding for MKULTRA research was inconspicuously made through “Nonprofit Foundations” like the Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology and the Geschickter Foundation. Although scarcely known, at least two major Foundations — the Josiah Macy Foundation (See HERE and HERE) and the pioneering Rockefeller Foundation— were also sources of MKULTRA funding. According to Historian Alfred W McCoy, the Ford Foundation was also used as a front for CIA “mind-control” research.

Nascimento then presents a lengthy list of experiments and operations which have been discovered thanks to declassified documents, reports and research articles which illustrate the shocking scale and scope of the projects. They include: Operation Sea-Spray, finally exposed in 1976, though first undertaken in 1950, which involved the Navy spraying “the entire San Francisco Area” with the bacteria Serratia marcescens (SM), in the following year the same experiment along with another bacteria was sprayed in Fort McClellan Alabama Florida leading to a huge spike (240%) in reported cases of pneumonia—SM was also sprayed in Key West, which also suffered a spike in pneumonia cases. In Virginia and Pennsylvania, in 1951 experimenting on unwitting Black people to test the racial biological response to exposure to Aspergillus fumigatus; an experiment in 1951 involving hypnotizing young girls to unconsciously carry out hypothetical bombings. In 1953 children at Clinton Elementary School in Minneapolis were repeatedly sprayed with zinc cadmium sulfide, a toxic chemical. That same chemical was “being secretly sprayed” in the poor neighbourhood of Pruitt-Igoe in St. Louis. In none of these experiments was there any attempt to monitor the health outcomes. Another experiment—this time in the mid 1960s was conducted to test the bacteria Bacillus globigii (BG). It was released in Washington’s National Airport and Greyhound Bus station—again without any knowledge of the commuters “who, in turn, reportedly spread the bacteria to more than 200 cities.”

A year later the CIA would release the same bacteria in New York’s subway system. It was not only in the USA where such experiments were being conducted by intelligence services. In 2002 (April 21) the Guardian (when it was it was not easily dismissed as being another medium of disinformation) reported that millions of unsuspecting UK citizens had been subjected to clandestine biological weapons trials.

Given the above one should hardly be surprised that many people who knew about such operations as those mentioned above—which seem to the mere tip of a large iceberg—began to question not only the mandates of health officials, but the source of the virus. Was it really a super-deadly virus that originated with bats? Or was it a plan-demic (Mikki Willis)? Or a scam-demic (Corbett)? Or a pseudo pandemic (Iain Davis)? All sorts of information pertinent to the origin of the disease concerning the Wuhan laboratory smelled funny. Take this from Newsweek magazine April 2020, ( Mikki Willis in his Plandemic: Fear is the Virus, Truth is the Cure, alerted me to it):

“The NIH (with NIAID Director Dr. Anthony Fauci’s backing) promised $7.4 million to the EcoHealth Alliance to study bat coronaviruses from 2014 to 2019— and in doing so, to conduct gain-of-function research. A large portion of that went to the Wuhan Institute of Virology. The lab also received millions from a program called PREDICT, funded by the United States Agency for International Development, which works closely with the NIH.”’

Or, what about Event 201 exercise conducted by the Gates Foundation with the World Economic Forum “hosted to illustrate the potential consequences of a pandemic and the kinds of societal and economic challenges it would pose.” As Willis comments:

“The Event 201 scenario is fictional, but it’s based on public health principles, epidemiological modeling, and assessment of past outbreaks,” the speaker explained. “In other words, we’ve created a pandemic that could realistically occur.” The simulation kicked off with a well-produced—but fake—news video. “It began in healthy-looking pigs,” a polished female newscaster announced solemnly, over B-roll of a writhing herd. “Months, perhaps years ago. A new coronavirus spread silently. Infected people got a respiratory illness with symptoms ranging from mild, flu-like symptoms to severe pneumonia,” the voiceover continued, as chilling images were projected on the screen at the front of the room. “The sickest required intensive care. Many died. At first, the spread was limited to those with close contacts . . . but now it’s spreading rapidly throughout local communities.” International travel helped the illness hop borders, the news reel explained, until it was a full-scale global pandemic. The simulation predicted the spread of conspiracy theories, as the elite panel discussed the most effective ways to prevent the flow of public disinformation.

Censorship was rampant as millions clamored for a vaccine—even one that would be experimental and not fully tested. Hospitals were overflowing, and masks and gloves were scarce. Event 201 took place in October 2019—five months before COVID-19 was declared a pandemic. An event of this complexity and magnitude would take months to write, prep, and produce, placing its date of conceptualization at least one year prior to the actual pandemic. The question that arises for anyone paying close enough attention is—if this collection of wealthy and powerful knew that far in advance exactly what would be needed and in short supply, why did they wait till the actual pandemic to begin addressing those critical details?

Mysteriously, while Event 201 was “hosted” by Johns Hopkins University, the World Economic Forum, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, it was paid for by Open Philanthropy, an opaque charity run by Facebook cofounder Dustin Moskovitz. An investor in Chinese CRISPR technology company Sherlock Biosciences, Dustin had considerable gain from an “epidemic” that would get his technology authorized under an Emergency Use Authorization (EUA). (In fact, that’s what wound up happening.)’

In a speech given by David Martin at the EU COVID Summit this year, he raised a number of point that I think are completely unknown to most people. I quote at some length from the highlights of his talk because I doubt if many people are familiar with it, though they should be:

The common cold was turned into a chimaera in the 1970s and in 1975, 1976 and 1977 we started figuring out how to modify coronavirus by putting it into different animals pigs and dogs, and not surprisingly by the time we got to 1990 we found out that coronavirus as an infectious agent was an industrial problem for two primary industries: the industries of dogs and pigs dog breeders in pigs found that coronavirus created gastrointestinal problems and that became the basis for Pfizer’s first spike protein vaccine patent filed.

In 1990 they found out that there was a problem with vaccines they didn’t work do you know why they didn’t work it turns out that corona virus is a very malleable model that transforms, changes – it mutates overtime… every publication on vaccines for Coronavirus from 1990 until 2018 – every single publication – concluded that Coronavirus escapes the vaccine impulse because it modifies and mutates too quickly for vaccines to be effective and since 1990 to 2018 that is the published science… There are thousands of publications to that fact, not a few hundred, and not paid for by pharmaceutical companies. These are publications that are independent scientific research that shows unequivocally including efforts of the chimaera modifications made by Ralph Baer in the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill all of them show vaccines do not work on coronavirus.

In 2002 the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill patented, and I quote an infectious replication defective clone of Coronavirus.. for those of you not familiar with the language let me unpack it for you: infectious replication defective means a weapon. It means something meant to target an individual but not have collateral damage to other individuals… That patent was filed in 2002 on work funded by… Anthony Faucci from 1999 to 2002. And that work patented at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill mysteriously preceded SARS 1.0.

SARS is not a naturally occurring phenomenon – the naturally occurring phenomenon is called the common cold, it’s called influenza-like illness, it’s called gastroenteritis: that’s the naturally occurring coronavirus. SARS is the research developed by humans weaponizing a life system model to actually attack human beings and they patented it.

When the CDC (enters for Disease Control and Prevention) in April of 2003 filed the patent on SARS coronavirus isolated from humans … they downloaded a sequence from China and filed a patent on it in the United States. Any of you familiar with biological and chemical weapons treaties knows … that’s a crime a crime in the United States. The Patent Office went as far as to reject that patent application on two occasions until the CDC decided to bribe the Patent Office to override the patent examiner to ultimately issue the patent in 2007 on SARS Coronavirus… The RTPCR, which was the test that we allegedly were going to use to identify the risks associated with Coronavirus, was actually identified as a bioterrorism threat by me in the European Union sponsored events in 2002 and 2003… In 2005 this particular pathogen was specifically labelled as a bioterrorism and bio weapon platform technology described as such—that’s not my terminology that I’m applying.

We have been lured into believing that Ecohealth alliance and DARPA and all of these organisations are what we should be pointing to, but we’ve been specifically requested to ignore the facts that over $10 billion have been funnelled through black operations, through the cheque of Anthony Faucci and a side-by-side ledger where NIAID has a balance sheet, and next to it is a biodefense balance sheet equivalent dollar for dollar matching, that no one in the media talks about. And it’s been going on since 2005. A gain of function moratorium, the moratorium that was supposed to freeze any efforts to do gain of function research, conveniently in the fall of 2014. The University of North Carolina Chapel Hill received a letter from NIAID saying that while the gain of function moratorium on corona virus in vivo should be suspended because their grants had already been funded, they received an exemption…- a biological weapons lab facility at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill received an exemption from the gain of function moratorium so that by 2016 we could publish the journal article that said SARS Coronavirus is poised for human emergence in 2016.

By the time we get to 2017 and 2018 the following phrase entered into common parlance among the community there is going to be an accidental or intentional release of a respiratory pathogen.

Four times in April of 2019 seven months before the allegation of patient number 14 patent applications of Moderna were modified to include the term accidental or intentional release upper respiratory pathogen as the justification for making a vaccine for a thing that did not exist… By September 2020 there would be a worldwide acceptance of a universal vaccine template.

One might have thought that the facts mentioned in this speech just might have been reported or discovered by journalists when the pandemic was announced. He is no dummy—he is the founder and CEO of M·CAM that has developed a widely used and valuable public equity index. Before the pandemic David Martin was interviewed regularly enough on Bloomberg, CNBC and the like. Now he has joined the ranks of the disappeared and, if cited, condemned. But no achievement can be so great for journalists that if they provide serious facts that go against “the narrative” they won’t be ghosted or denounced as conspiracy theorists. Even having served as Pfizer’s former chief scientist and vice-president of the allergy and respiratory research division of the drug company, and forty years’ experience in the pharmaceutical industry does not count for anything if, like Michael Yeardon, one has the temerity to think the virus was designed, the pandemic planned, the dangers no more than a flu, the medical cartel’s response created far more dangers than the disease, and that the pandemic just happened to create an unprecedented opportunity for those who openly publicize the need to redesign the world and reset it according to their intelligence, and compassion, and financial backing. That is why there is nothing unreasonable in the claim by Iain Davis that “The COVID 19 pseudopandemic was the first concerted attempt to establish a single, centralised form of global governance which had any realistic prospect of success. For the first time in human history, advances in technology made total global control entirely feasible.”

The only difference between Davis and what Klaus Schwab and his mates are claiming is that COVID was not something that came from bats, but has all the hallmarks of something being planned. But even if the journalists are right—”nothing strange here—stop believing in conspiracies, just trust the science, as embodied by Anthony Fauci, and take the vaccine so that we will all be safe,” there is no ignoring the fact of the fusion of the global push for vaccines, the huge investments in biometrics, the development of centralized digital currencies—in Australia we now have many venues where paper money is simply not accepted. The step from computer viruses to natural viruses is so facile, so obvious that even if the project involves a vast number of participants working to a common goal, some with more, some with less information and a role to play (most being clueless about the endgame and hence their real role in it), it can be symbolically boiled down to one name—Bill Gates.

In James’ Corbett’s documentary Who is Bill Gates?, Corbett explores the extent to which vaccines and biometrics were so easily fused “for the task of creating an identification system tied to a digital payments infrastructure that will be used to track, catalogue and control every movement, every transaction and every interaction of every citizen.” A friend and business partner of Bill Gates, Nandan Nilekani, also a co-founder of Indian multi-national Infosys India had launched the massive biometric id system which would be a kind of prototype for what Gates and his various capital partners in biometric systems and vaccine development was doing. While the most repeated argument about the necessity of the COVID vaccine was the success of the polio vaccine, in India the oral polio vaccine supported by the Gates foundation had proven to be a disaster with (according to a paper in International Journal of Environmental Research) over 490,000 developing paralysis from it—Corbett also refers to studies showing “that 80% of polio cases are now vaccine-derived.”

The fact that someone has made such vast sums of money from computer software, and r & d against computer viruses then moves into a field involving the patenting and development of vaccines against real viruses, and finds the solution to a global pandemic of just the sort he had been talking about and preparing for years in the development of a technology which is essentially turning every one into a digital data/information complex which could be accessed by anyone with access to the data base, and then to also be part of a larger plan to ensure that their property would also be centrally digitalized and hence all freedom of movement and decision could be controlled is beyond being made up. Conspiracy theory? No fact.

COVID was the biggest blessing that Gates and all those investing in a transhumanist digitalized control world could have received.
If you wished to travel, or you have a certain profession such as a teacher or nurse, or wanted to go to certain concerts, you had to be vaccinated . But if you wanted to riot and burn down buildings to protest against an accidental death by a policeman or to express your hatred of Donald Trump that was not necessary. The widespread acceptance (indeed for many enthusiasm for the) vaccine was already to draw the population into an acceptance of it being the government’s ‘duty’ to genetically modify our bodies if that would keep us alive longer. To say that was a gigantic step is a very big understatement. The COVID vaccine now fully completed the journey of eugenics and population control kicked off by Thomas Malthus, and continued further by Darwin and his cousin, the pioneer of modern eugenics and founder of Social Darwinism, Francis Galton. While the Nazis pursued a eugenics program in conjunction with a genocidal one against those they deemed living viruses, in the United States eugenics and enforced sterilization of the poor and mentally unfit developed without needing to resort to concentration camps. Iain Davis has a chapter on the development in his book. And he cites a judgment from one of the United States’ most prestigious and influential jurists, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., Holmes ruled in the Buck vs Bell case of 1927, a case and decision that Davis rightly notes was helping consolidate the eugenics program being pushed by the Rockefeller and Carnegie Foundations: ‘It is better for all the world if, instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind. The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the Fallopian tubes.”

The eugenics movement had its most important ‘success’ in the creation of the development of what would become Planned Parenthood, an organization at one time headed by William Gates Snr., and founded by Margaret Sanger. Her rationale for birth control was grounded in her eugenicist faith that everything should be done to prevent mentally or physical sick children, as well as those who were genetically determined to become delinquents and prisoners, and the overbreeding of the ‘working class’. It was also a means to extirpate “defective stocks”—i.e., poor whites and blacks—”those human weeds which threaten the blooming of the finest flowers of American civilization.” Had the US not gone to war with the Nazis, and had the Nazis not displayed how savage eugenics, which, in its inception, was presented as a most humane way of achieving human betterment, and breeding, who knows exactly what trajectory the eugenics movement may have taken in the United States. But the direction it did take, as Nascimento points out, in the aftermath of the Second World War, was a crypto-form, concealing itself under the “sheepskins” of genetics, population control, and Family Planning. Nevertheless, population control and eugenics were ever paired in the minds of the Malthusians and Social Darwinians. The following passage by Nascimento is salient on the interplay of the triad of crypto-eugenics:

The Rockefeller Establishment was once again intimately involved here. The prestigious Institute for Human Genetics in Copenhagen, for example, was founded with Rockefeller money under the Directorship of Dr. Tage Kemp, a prominent Rockefeller scientist and Eugenist from Denmark. The Institute went on to become a leader in the field of “Genetics” whilst continuing its research into Eugenics. Correspondingly, the influential Population Council was founded by CFR veteran and Rockefeller Foundation Chairman John D. Rockefeller III in 1952, where he chose the former President of the American Eugenics Society (AES) Major General Frederick H. Osborn — the nephew of AES co-founder (alongside Madison Grant) Henry Fairfield Osborn Sr. — to be his first Director and succeeding President. According to the Wall Street Journal, six of the Council’s ten founding members were intimately involved with the Eugenics Establishment. Frederick, who was also a CFR veteran, openly praised the Nazi Eugenics program in 1937 and even distributed Nazi propaganda to different institutions including High Schools. More significantly, he was a key figure in the perceptual transmutation of Eugenics to the more amenable terminology of Genetics and Population Control. The new strategy proved highly effective, and by 1968 the Population Council methodically recruited thirty Governments worldwide to adopt Population Control programs. This culminated in an infamous partnership between the U.S. and Indian Governments in which millions of Indian civilians were sterilized—many of them forced and virtually all of them coerced… Another useful vehicle that was hijacked and weaponized by the Eugenics Establishment in the wake of World War II, was Environmentalism. Just three years after the War ended in 1948, Henry Fairfield Osborn Jr—cousin of Frederick Osborn and son of Henry Fairfield Sr—published Our Plundered Planet, proclaiming the world to be severely overpopulated (“more than two billion human beings”) and in urgent need of having its numbers reduced through Population Control. Failure to do so, he suggested, would result in famine, starvation, or war. In fact, Osborn went so far as to claim the recent World War—and even the First World War before it — were both the “spawn” of overpopulation. Unsurprisingly, the book was well received, widely propagated, and quickly became a Best Seller. That same year, a friend of Osborn Jr that worked as an Associate Director under Nelson Rockefeller during the War, William Vogt, published Road to Survival, which likewise alleged the greatest threat to the Planet, and thus Humanity, was the evil of overpopulation which would result in recurring cycles of famine and war if left unchecked, thereby threatening the security and well being of the United States.

Nascimento continues by elaborating on the financial role played by the Rockefeller and Ford foundations and others in fostering the fear of the impending doom that overpopulation would cause, including the impending doom to the environment. It is one of the many ironies—which only goes to show how self-serving material interest is—that the social scientists who were so devoted to pushing a radical transformation of society to liberate it from the perniciousness of capitalism so readily swallowed and marched in step with ‘studies’ that were built from the financial backing of the biggest capitalists on the planet. For it was precisely the richest people of the planet who were pouring money into schools and universities and research institutions, the media, the entertainment business, and the political parties to push the agenda of the impending horrors of overpopulation.

It was—and remains the case—that it was a very rare and very brave researcher who dared to question the consensuses that were formed in a matrix of interests and economic incentives, where livelihoods had become completely dependent upon the ability to come up, not just with research projects, but research conclusions. The science had been bought and paid for and it was all to uphold the objective of decreasing the population. Thus too it was devoted to ensuring that the very things that helped human beings better survive and live better lives—specifically the energy systems that contributed to higher economic growth, and the creation of technologies that helped overcome famine, and the raising of life-expectancy—were to be seen as forces of destruction imperilling the entire planet. To be sure, it took time to edge out of the schools, universities and research institutions those who argued that the consensuses were often bogus. That the dissenters included noble prize winners, or scientists from prestigious universities, who had published in the best scientific journals did not matter. For at the same time as the funding for scientists coming up with the right answers was increasing, the reliability of scientific articles in journals was plummeting—a piece in The Economist (10/25/13), “Problems with scientific research: How science goes wrong”:

“Modern scientists are doing too much trusting and not enough verifying—to the detriment of the whole of science, and of humanity. Too many of the findings that fill the academic ether are the result of shoddy experiments or poor analysis. A rule of thumb among biotechnology venture-capitalists is that half of published research cannot be replicated. Even that may be optimistic. Last year researchers at one biotech firm, Amgen, found they could reproduce just six of 53 “landmark” studies in cancer research. Earlier, a group at Bayer, a drug company, managed to repeat just a quarter of 67 similarly important papers. A leading computer scientist frets that three-quarters of papers in his subfield are bunk. In 2000… roughly 80,000 patients took part in clinical trials based on research that was later retracted because of mistakes or improprieties.”

Eight years earlier another paper by John Ioannadis in PLoS Med. 2005 Aug; 2(8): e124 bore the disturbing title, “Why most published research findings are false.”

The other thing that was happening was academic independence had been vanquished, as control over the what could and could not be done in the university was passed from the academic ‘community’ to the administrators of the university. Management and administration dictated the values and policies of the university, and the kind of research that was not only desirable, but permissible. The administrators of the universities, in spite of the inflation of student fees, also required ever more dependence upon the largess of donors, and foundations who pay the research bill. The university has long since become a corporation, and the trade-off was that the corporations adopted values that fitted what the university had come to teach. In the Humanities that was the plethora of ‘social justice’ narratives that just happened to neatly fit the values that the richest people on the planet were also supporting. As Victor Davis Hanson notes in “Silicon Valley’s Moral Bankruptcy”:

of those seventeen U.S. tech companies claiming a value of $100 billion, 98 percent of their aggregate donations are directed to Democrats. Dustin Moskovitz, a cofounder of Facebook and worth a reported $11 billion, gave Hillary Clinton $20 million in 2016 and Joe Biden $24 million in 2020. Karla Jurvetson, the former spouse of the tech mogul Steve Jurvetson (SpaceX, Tesla), sent some $27 million to Elizabeth Warren, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Joe Biden. Reid Hoffman (LinkedIn) pledged nearly $5 million to stop Donald Trump in 2020. Some fifteen Silicon Valley rich people sent more than $120 million to left-wing candidates between 2018 and 2020 alone.

The adage you get what you pay for is very fitting for the nexus between research grants and money poured into universities, the corporate character of research and teaching today, and the ideological employees and components that run through them. Sexual diversity as we indicated above is not simply a private matter it is a publicly and corporately funded requirement as is racially profiled hiring and student selection. So what do they want for their money? To that Nascimento answers—that one thing many of them want is control of the population as well as diminishing its size. He also suggests that the surge in gender dysphoria may be a consequence of a deliberate tactic in the war for depopulation. That war has drug companies involved in the alpha and omega—first creating the drugs that create the dysphoria, then providing the drugs, and the various instruments and technologies used by the surgeons, to satisfy the need for “gender reassignment.”

That might sound crazy—but surely if the massive spike in trans drugs and surgery is due to people identifying with the other sex, then it is reasonable to suppose that there has been a chemical change taking place in the population. Of course, the political argument—you know the one that takes up an entire undergraduate education today so it can be deployed for any and every occasion – is that in the past trans people were oppressed so they kept it to themselves—there have, so the nonsense goes, always been a fairly large minority wanting to cut off and stitch on new parts. The evidence for this is that professors say it is so. It may well be ,though, that the spike is due to chemical affects. The question, then, is, were these affects intended or are they simply side-effects of drugs? If the latter was the case, though, then why is there not greater attention to the problem in tracking which drugs are causing this dysphoria, and how that side-effect can be eliminated. But now that being trans must not ever be seen as a medical problem, but as a perfectly normal condition like having blond hair, even though extra-normal drugs and surgery are essential for completing the transition there can be no justification for seeking for the side-effect, let alone curing it. The logic is straight out of Lewis Carroll but it certainly leaves pharmaceutical companies and surgeons in a win-win situation.

And before this is simply dismissed as a ridiculous conspiracy, consider the ethical dilemma and the logic of really believing that unless there is depopulation there will be mass starvation. In other words, if people really believed what they were writing about the population bomb or climate change back in the 1960s—Exhibit A: Paul Ehrlich who was immensely popular back in the day foretold the “extinction of “all important animal life in the sea” by 1979, and that England would not exist by 2000—surely it would be crazy not to do all one could to stop the population increasing—and if that meant giving people drugs to make them sterile, or engage in sterile sexual practices, how could that be wrong? One reason I generally find moral argument to be useless is that people can reason themselves into believing anything—far better to look at what happens when people do a, b, c etc. and then talk about the consequences of actions, and not intentions—intentions are overrated, as very little in life turns out as intended.

In any case, here is a fact. In 1969, the former Director of the Behavioural Science Division at the Ford Foundation, Bernard Berelson published a paper in the journal Science, where he surveyed “the most promising Population Control ideas in circulation at the time.” Amongst the works he cited most worthy of consideration, included the clandestine sterilization proposals of Dr. Melvin M. Ketchel and Professor Paul R. Ehrlich. Unsurprisingly, Berelson concluded that the “Establishment of involuntary fertility control methods were likely the most effective means of population control.” The month after that paper appeared, Frederick Jaffe, the Vice President of Planned Parenthood under Alan F. Guttmacher, sent a memo to him outlining dozens of population control proposals including “Encourage increased homosexuality.” “Require women to work,” and use “Fertility control agents in water supply.” Family Planning Perspectives, Vol. 2, No. 4 (Oct 1970), pp. i-xvi (16 pages).

The following year in 1970, “the Father of the [contraceptive] pill” Carl Djerassi, published a paper entitled, ‘Birth Control After 1984,’ where he deliberated on both Bereleson and Ketchel’s proposals and then expanded on their practical application. For example, Djerassi notes that a sterilant “added to food or water would (need to) be a general environmental pollutant. It would have to be considered a pesticide, albeit one that is directed primarily at humans.” He then proceeds to emphasize that ‘since initial biological screening for such an agent would be carried out not in man but in animals, an agent truly specific for man would completely escape detection.’ In other words, a weaponized pesticide could serve as the perfect disguise for a Population Control program.

Nascimento then goes onto argue that this weaponization of a pesticide in the ‘war’ against overpopulation might well have been carried out with the application of the herbicide Atrazine.

As exposed by Professor Tyrone Hayes, Atrazine has contaminated the water supply throughout the world, which includes the drinking supply and the water we use to grow crops. Professor Hayes originally studied the herbicides effects on frogs and found it was causing chemical castration and “males didn’t breed properly,” some demonstrated unnatural “homosexual behavior,” and others even “completely turned into females.”

What makes Hayes’ findings especially concerning, is that frogs have biological responses similar to humans. In fact, a 2003 study found that men exposed to Atrazine had significantly lower sperm counts compared to those who had not been and a 2013 study found that babies exposed to Atrazine in their mother’s womb developed abnormal genitals.

Unfortunately, Atrazine is far from the only problem. In 2017, a major study examining 185 smaller studies conducted in multiple countries throughout the world showed a 59% decline in healthy male sperm counts from 1973 to 2011. In 2021, one of the authors of that study, renowned Epidemiologist Shanna Swan, warned that sperm counts are on track to reach zero by 2045, meaning humanity may no longer be able to reproduce naturally. Despite this, there are still an alarming number of people worldwide that have been misled to believe “overpopulation” is the greatest threat to society.

Swan claims different manmade chemicals, including Atrazine, are overwhelmingly to blame and may even be partly behind the rising trend in “gender dysphoria” and “gender fluidity.” When asked in a recent interview if the U.S. government was protecting its people from these harmful chemicals through regulations, she replied (18:03) “It doesn’t protect us and it could. It could do better.” She also points out (18:07) that the chemical manufacturers “often remove the chemical that we’ve identified as harmful and replace it with another one with a slightly different name, which causes the same harm.” For those who are not hopelessly naïve, this certainly reflects the “crytpo-eugenics” policies that Carlos Patton Blacker unambiguously wrote about to Dorothy Brush 60 years ago.”

Now let us be clear here, knowing this does not mean that we can know for sure that Atrazine has caused the sperm decline or increase in homosexuality or massive increase in gender dysphoria. But the rise in infertility, of people identifying as homosexuals, and ‘trans-ness’ is a fact not a conspiracy theory. Likewise the intentions expressed by the authors mentioned above are not the product of a theory—they too are facts. Likewise the role played by the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations in supporting research that requires investigating tactics of depopulation. Whether or not the specific tactic of using pesticide to do it is a theory. The thing about theories is that they are not facts, but they are means for exploring further facts, which in turn may help us see the meaning of certain facts more clearly, or, as in this case, who or what is responsible for them. When theories are constructed to explain the meaning of actions of people with economic, political and social power it is perfectly understandable why those same powerful persons do not want the meaning or even the facts themselves to be widely known.

We know that all sorts of experiments were conducted on unwitting subjects in the West—and I can think of several other examples that Nascimento does not mention involving atomic tests in Australia and Pacific islands. There was also the claim almost ten years ago that the WHO tetanus vaccine was spiked with an infertility chemical, and that when the Kenyan Catholic doctors found evidence to support this claim, WHO subsequently engaged in an elaborate coverup—see the documentary by Andy Wakefield and Robert Kennedy Jnr., Infertility: A Diabolical Agenda.

Conclusion

It is not a theory that there are numerous examples of liberal democratic governments complying with research institutions and scientists who are not only paid for by tax payers but private ‘philanthropists’ and their various foundations. One does not need to invoke masons, or the Illuminati to know this (I will briefly discuss these groups in the third part of this essay). And the only reason anyone would not know this is because of a lack of knowledge, in part because there is such a bombardment of information, including disinformation, in today’s white noise media, or because they have forgotten it – for much has been reported over time in the mainstream media – or because they are too lazy to go an follow up if the facts are raised.

The term conspiracy theory today had largely become a synonym today for the excuse ‘I don’t want to explore this mater further because I am too lazy, and or/so gullible I trust sources that have been proven multiple times to be sources of disinformation and vehicles for the same groups of people and organizations that have conducted unconscionable experiments on at least three generations.’ Our news today is bound up with routines and laziness, the laziness of someone who slumps in the chair at the end of the day and wants to have their thoughts and information packaged and presented by a network, or broadcaster, or print source they have incorporated into their routine. To a large extent this combination of routine and laziness is a symptom of the low level anomie and mild depression that is not uncommon in people today due the nature of their work, diet, mental habits etc. One of the most common responses I receive from friends in my circle when I raise facts they are not aware of is that they dismiss what is being said because they have never heard of these facts, and instead of thinking they will check them out, they simply return to the induced slumber and comfort that comes from talking about what they know, which is what the networks, etc. served up, as part of their deficient mental diet.

So, the fact that there are facts which people either have never heard of or refuse to see alone does not make a theory about who is doing what and why it is true, nor is it an excuse for making up facts, but it certainly should make us wary of simply accepting that the ruling class and its enablers should be trusted. That was previously the one thing that Marxists could often be relied on—before most of them disappeared into more progressive causes which just happen to serve the interests and tactics of a class which pays their wages, and funds the organizations, and institutions which form their thoughts. They can’t and because they can’t we now find ourselves in a world war – a war in which the disinformation campaign is so great and so successful that most people in the West don’t even think that is the case.

In the next part of this essay, I want to focus upon another author, an author who I suspect may not want anything to do with the likes of Alex Jones, or Gavin Nascimento, or even my good self, but I am only assuming that because he is a very cautious writer and nothing in the four books by him that I have read or the articles he has published veers into the territory of population control or the objective of progressive globalism being a neo-feudal transhumanist world consisting of three major classes. The author I am talking about is Jacques Baud, and the two books I will discuss in the next part of this essay are Governing By Fake News: International Conflict: 30 Years of Fake News Used by Western Countries and Operation Z

Read Part 2 and Part 3.


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


Featured: Bordando el manto terrestre (Embroidering the Mantle of the Earth), by Remedios Varo; painted in 1961.

Eurasianism: A Reaffirmation of Empire

Contemporary Eurasianism is undoubtedly marked by the strong personality of Alexander Dugin (1962). However, Eurasianist thought cannot be reduced to that of the latter (which he does not claim). At the same time, the Eurasianist movement has been able, during the two clearly differentiated phases of its history, to gather original and independent thinkers (and regularly in disagreement), while keeping a very specific intellectual identity.

Pyotr Savitsky: Father of Eurasianism and Theorist of Topogenesis

Eurasianist thought was born in exile at the beginning of the 1920s, at the initiative of certain White Russian intellectuals. Its main theorists were Prince Nicholai Trubetzskoy (1890-1938) and Pyotr Savitsky (1895-1968). The Eurasianist movement gradually broke up during the 1930s, before disappearing after the Second World War: the fairly complex thinking of Eurasianism was probably no longer suited to the simplistic confrontation of ideologies typical of the Cold War. However, Eurasianism experienced a revival in Russia in the 1990s (it was then referred to as neo-Eurasianism), around the personalities of Alexander Dugin and Alexander Panarin (1940-2003). It is not insignificant to note that the two historical phases of Eurasianism reacted each time to a fall: the fall of the “White Empire” of the Romanovs for classical Eurasianism, and the fall of the “Red Empire” of the USSR for neo-Eurasianism. We can thus readily define Eurasianism as a will to rethink the fundamentally imperial identity of Russia, at times when it seemed threatened with dissolution.

Before Eurasianism

If the double birth of Eurasianism is thus linked to precise contexts, the latter was obviously not constituted like Athena already emerging armed from Zeus’ brain. Without falling into the always somewhat vain exercise of “searching for precursors,” it is obvious that Eurasianism is rooted in a typically Russian intellectual soil, inaugurated by the father of Slavophilism, Aleksey Khomyakov (1804-1860). He interpreted history as the confrontation of two principles: the Iranian principle and the Kushite principle. These two principles were conceived as covering all the structural dichotomies of the world. To the Iranian/Kushite opposition thus corresponds the oppositions freedom/determinism, spirituality/ materialism, peasant civilization/industrial civilization, autocracy/plutocracy, Orthodoxy/Catholicism and Protestantism, East/West. Khomyakov thus radically opposed to a Kushite West an Iranian East, to which he integrated Russia. This integration of Russia with the East nourished Khomyakov’s interest in Iran and India (he would go so far as to learn Sanskrit to be able to read in the original the classical works of Hinduism). This conception of a Russia, open to the East but closed to the West, would become a constitutive pillar of Eurasianism.

The work of Constantine Leontiev (1831-1891) can be seen as a link between nineteenth-century slavophilism and twentieth-century Eurasianism. The latter, a veteran of the Crimean War, conceived of “Western progress” as a globalist and aggressive process of standardization of humanity from below. In contrast, he defended a diversity of men and cultures, finding its unity in a common imperial identity. This dialectic of the respect of the human diversity in the unity of the empire, put in opposition with the petty-bourgeois uniformity of the Western State-nation, will find itself in the Eurasianist thought. Thinking that the future of Russia was not in Europe but in Asia, Leontiev invited his compatriots to consider themselves no longer as Slavs, but as “Turanians” (the term “Turanians” designating, in the vocabulary of the time, the Turko-Mongolian peoples of Central Asia). Inaudible for his contemporaries, this renewal of Russian identity proposed by Leontiev will find an echo among Eurasianists.

The Idea of Eurasia

Eurasianist thought is vast and embraces many fields and themes. It is thus impossible to reveal it in its entirety here (we would in any case be hard pressed to give an account of Nicolai Trobetzskoy’s structural linguistic work). However, Eurasianists share a common way of conceiving the Eurasian discourse in itself. Totally anti-constructivist, Eurasianist thought considers that Eurasia pre-exists in its essence. The idea of Eurasia is an Idea, in the Platonic sense of the term, and the purpose of the Eurasianist discourse is therefore not to construct it, but to unveil it. This Eurasian Idea is thus fundamentally revealed in a territory that is neither Europe nor Asia, but a third continent: Eurasia. That the Idea of Eurasia is revealed in the territory of Eurasia may seem a very trivial statement, but it is not. Indeed, it means that, for the Eurasianists, Eurasia is a fact of nature, whose unity and specificity will have to be demonstrated by the geographical sciences. Eurasianism is thus thought of, on the theoretical level, as a scientific demonstration of the Eurasian Idea. Eurasian thought is thus characterized at the same time as a metaphysics and as a science (Trubetzskoy thus spoke of a geosophy of Eurasianism).

This naturalistic conception of Eurasia explains why the delimitations of the latter have never been the object of a clear consensus among Eurasianists, without them regarding this state of affairs as a real problem. Indeed, being defined by geographical and not historical-political criteria, Eurasia is not delimited by borders in the strict sense of the term, but rather by peripheral zones, by boundaries. Globally, Eurasia corresponds to the territory of the former USSR. In the East, Mongolia and possibly Tibet are generally added to it. Dugin excludes the Kuril Islands, which he proposes to return to Japan. The problem of the eastern limits of Eurasia has never really worried Eurasianists, insofar as they think of an opening of Eurasia to Asia, and see in the Asian countries natural allies in the face of Western hegemony (Alexander Panarin, who was a professor of political philosophy at Moscow State University, thus theorized the construction of a Sino-Eurasian alliance against the American “new world order”).

The problem of the Western limits of Eurasia is quite different, and has been of great concern to Eurasians (which is explained by their conception of a Eurasia closed to the West). The Eurasian territory is also based on that of the former USSR, excluding the Baltic States and the enclave of Kaliningrad, and with the addition of Bessarabia for some. Ukraine is considered Eurasian, but suffers from a very ambiguous status. As a western boundary of Eurasia, and because of its historical links with Poland, Ukraine is seen as having been largely influenced by the West (to such an extent that Eurasianists called the westernization of Russia in the Petersburg period “Ukrainization”). As a result, Eurasianists always considered that an independent Ukraine detached from Russia could not be anything other than a Trojan horse of the West in Eurasian unity.

The Concept of Topogenesis

Alexander Dugin describes this basically continental Eurasian space as “tellurocratic,” characterized by a traditional and socialist spirit, and opposes it to a “thalassocratic” Atlantic space, modern and capitalist (an opposition that we already find, mutatis mutandis, in The Peloponnesian War, where Thucydides opposes a “tellurocratic” and aristocratic Sparta to a “thalassocratic” and democratic Athens). The geographical opposition between a continental Eurasian space and a maritime Atlantic space is thus coupled with a civilizational opposition. Eurasian thought holds that civilization is conditioned (and not determined) by place. This is what Pyotr Savitsky proposed to call “topogenesis” (and which he considered a scientific concept): A specific geographical space conditions a specific civilization. To the Eurasian space thus corresponds a Eurasian civilization.

In the eyes of Eurasianists, religion is at the foundation of any civilization. The Eurasian civilization is thus for them fundamentally Orthodox. Atheism, deism, Catholicism, or Protestantism are seen as Western elements, foreign, and even opposed to Eurasian civilization. Thus, with a few exceptions, all Eurasianists are explicitly Orthodox. However, without questioning the sincerity of the personal faith of the Eurasianists, some criticized the ensuing notion that Russian Christianity thus does not seem to be based on a supernatural revelation, but simply as an expression of the Eurasian topogenesis; Father Georges Florovsky distanced himself from the movement for this reason, seeing in it a naturalistic reduction of the Christian mystery. Nevertheless, Eurasianists always remained conscious that not all Eurasians are Orthodox, and stressed that Russian Orthodoxy, while keeping its central role, can recognize, esteem, and fraternize with other Eurasian religious expressions. Thus, in the inter-war period, the Jewish Eurasianist Yakov Bromberg defended the existence of a specifically Eurasian Jewishness through the Khazar experience. More recently, Dorji-Lama, a spiritual leader of the Kalmyk Buddhists, joined Alexander Dugin’s Eurasianist organization.

But it is especially to Islam that the Eurasianists opened up, underlining the precocity with which the Russian empire was equipped with a representative institution of the Muslims of Russia (the great Muftiate of Russia was created by the empress Catherine II in 1788), and not forgetting that 40% of the citizens of the ex-USSR were Muslims. They held the existence of a specifically Eurasian Islam, Turkic, and influenced by Sufism and Shiism (Wahhabi Islam is on the other hand absolutely rejected as non-Eurasian, and being totally subservient to hated America). Dugin, mobilizing a conceptuality drawn from his reading of René Guénon, affirmed that Turkic Islam and Russian Orthodoxy are both linked in their essence to the “Primordial Tradition” (as well as all the authentically traditional religions) coming from “Hyperborea,” which he situates in Siberia (this conception is not foreign to Russian mythology; indeed, in the fourteenth century the archbishop Basil of Novgorod affirmed the existence of a secret terrestrial paradise in Siberia, which obviously refers to the biblical myth of the Garden of Eden and is very reminiscent of the Buddhist myth of Shamballah). Muslim personalities thus drew closer to Eurasianism: Talgat Tadzhuddin, former grand mufti of Russia, joined Dugin’s Eurasianist movement; and especially Nursultan Nazarbayev, former president of Kazakhstan and promoter of a specifically Turkic Eurasianism, distinct from the properly Russian Eurasianism (and to whom Dugin devoted a dithyrambic book).

As we can see, topogenesis is neither a determinism nor a universalism; it conditions and adapts that which exists. The various religions and cultures of Eurasia keep their particular identity, while showing common civilizational traits, making them all converge in the Eurasian unity, understood as a community, both natural and mystical, of destiny. The concept of topogenesis is thus a nodal point of Eurasian thought, where a dialectic of the one and the many is woven, founding an imperial affirmation of identity that respects (but also embraces) the particular identities of Eurasian peoples. it should also be noted that this strictly organicist conception leaves no room for individual choice—a Mormon Tatar who loves the country cannot be anything but a dangerous anomaly from a Eurasian perspective).

A Differentialist Critique of Western Universalism

This notion of topogenesis is also the basis of the Eurasian critique of Western universalism. The latter is understood as postulating the existence of a unique human civilization, the different cultures being only the expression of this unique civilization at different historical stages of advancement, obviously leading to the Western model, seen as the most advanced and most desirable historical stage of humanity (Eurasianists note that white supremacism is finally only a naturalized form of this universalism). Western civilization is thus seen as the goal of all humanity, and its model of development as the unique direction of history. Alexander Panarin considers that this superiority complex of the West comes from the obvious power of its industrial and consumerist model, while underlining that the contemporary ecological crisis undeniably demonstrates its harmful character.

To this historicist universalism of the West, justifying its political hegemony as well as the cultural westernization of the world, Eurasianists resolutely oppose a “geographist” differentialism. In their eyes, the Western model is absolutely not universal. As we have already said, each geographical space corresponds for Eurasianists to a given civilization, the Western model therefore legitimately and exclusively corresponds to the Western geographical space. Eurasianism thus defends an incommensurability and an equality of civilizations between them, which must each be respected in their specificity. The inexpiable fault of the West is thus to have believed itself superior to the rest of the world, granting itself the right to invade it “for its own good,” scorning thereby the irrefutable right of each people to remain itself and to develop according to its own internal logic; that is to say to remain faithful to its own topogenesis. The Eurasianists thus always presented themselves as anti-colonialists and Third Worldists (and this already in the 1920s; that is to say at a time when this was not yet fashionable). In France, Aleksander Dugin came closer to the New Right led by Alain de Benoist, which also carried a differentialist critique of Western universalism, while Aleksander Panarin, for his part, came closer to certain researchers from postcolonial studies. The latter affirmed in this respect that the providential mission of Eurasia is to take the lead in the revolt of the Third World against Western hegemony.

Eurasia as Ideocracy

Panarin’s Eurasian messianism undeniably reproduced certain “tics” of Russian nationalism. It is an observation that can be extended to the whole of Eurasianist thought, which grants Orthodox “Holy Russia” the role of the “spearhead” of Eurasia. Eurasianists, however, have always denied being reactionary. In the 1920s, they strongly criticized White Russians who stubbornly remained monarchists, and instead claimed to be “futurists” (and even “cosmists” for the most left-wing). If they rejected the Marxist ideology, they saw in the Soviet experience an important step in the process of political incarnation of the Eurasian Idea. For the Eurasianists, the Russian people, Orthodox and theophore, were providentially elected to carry out this process, i.e., to make the Eurasian empire come true. The latter, political incarnation of the Eurasian Idea, is thus understood by Eurasianist thought as an ideocracy, aristocratic and authoritarian regime, of religious and socialist essence, expressing the Eurasian organicity.

The Eurasianists trace the history of the constitution of the Eurasian ideocracy, through a historical meta-narrative breaking with traditional Russian historiography. Indeed, the Rus’ of Kiev is thus seen as denying its usual founding role. Only Saint Vladimir of Kiev (958-1015), for his historical choice of Byzantine Christianity, and Saint Alexander Nevsky (1220-1263) are preserved. The latter, confronted in the East by the Mongols, and in the West by the Teutonic Knights (launched in the famous Baltic, or Northern Crusades), chose to recognize the suzerainty of Batu Khan, grandson of Genghis Khan, and to oppose the Teutonic Knights—thus making the choice of Eurasia against the West (the Eurasianists also contrasted Saint Alexander Nevsky with another Russian prince, Daniel of Galicia, who made the opposite choice, and whom they condemned to hell-fire for that; one finds here the dual character of Ukraine in Eurasianist thought)—because it is indeed the Mongolian empire which is seen as the matrix of the Eurasian ideocracy. The Eurasianist historiography, in an original way, thus rehabilitated Genghis Khan and the Genghisids. Lev Gumilev (1912-1992) pointed out the Christian dimension of the Mongol empire, including among its high aristocracy (the mother of Kublai Khan, emperor of China and grandson of Genghis Khan, was a Church of the East Christian princess). While traditional Russian historiography sees in the affirmation of Muscovy a founding struggle for national liberation against the Mongols, Eurasian historiography sees in Moscow the heir to the Mongol empire. The providential mission of the Russian people is therefore to bring to its historical completion the work that the Mongolian people started: the constitution of the Eurasian ideocratic empire.

It is difficult to assess the influence of Eurasianism on contemporary Russian politics. Those who have made Dugin into an eminence grise of the Kremlin, or even into a Eurasianist of President Putin, have probably greatly exaggerated. However, it would be wrong to underestimate the capacity of Eurasianist thought, with its mystical, political and scientific roots, to infuse some of its ideas into the state ideologies of the countries of the former USSR (as the examples of Russia, Kazakhstan and, to a lesser extent, Kyrgyzstan demonstrate).


Grégoire Quevreux currently teaches philosophy at the Institut Protestant de Théologie de Paris, and is completing a doctoral thesis on process theology under the direction of Professor Cyrille Michon. This article appears through the kind courtesy of PHILITT.


Featured: “The Road in the Rye,” by Grigoriy Myasoyedov; painted in 1881.

Regarding Russian Sovereignty

Lately we have been witnessing a formidable ideological and informative offensive, encouraged by the US and the globalist centers of power, against Putin’s Russia. The media sepoys keep repeating a series of mantras, in which present-day Russia seems to be some dictatorial hell, where “dissidents,” homosexuals and immigrants are persecuted. For right-wing neoliberals, Russia is still communist. For left-wing neoliberals, Putin’s Russia is a kind of reincarnation of “fascism.”

However, this aggressive attitude of Biden’s is nothing new. From time immemorial, long before the Communist Revolution, the Anglo-Empire has been at odds with Russia for geopolitical reasons. England first and the US later (its successor), as thalassocratic powers, have seen Russia as an enemy to be defeated, regardless of the political regime.

The Crimean War

The Crimean War was a conflict fought between 1853 and 1856 by the Russian Empire and the Kingdom of Greece against a league formed by the Ottoman Empire, France, the United Kingdom and the Kingdom of Sardinia. It was triggered by British policy, determined to prevent Russia’s influence over Europe, given the possibility that the Ottoman Empire might collapse, and was fought mainly on the Crimean Peninsula, around the naval base of Sevastopol. It resulted in Russia’s defeat, which was embodied in the Treaty of Paris of 1856.

Since the end of the 17th century, the Ottoman Empire had been in decline and its military, political and economic structures were unable to modernize. As a result of several conflicts, it lost to Russia territories north of the Black Sea, including the Crimean Peninsula. Russia sought to undermine Ottoman authority and assume protection of the large minority of Orthodox Christians in the Ottoman European provinces. France and the United Kingdom feared that the Ottoman Empire would become a Russian vassal, which then might upset the political balance between the European powers.

British Prime Minister Lord Palmerston was a decisive player in the development of this anti-Russian strategy, which would become a constant in British foreign policy, and continued later in the 20th century by Halford John Mackinder, one of the creators of geopolitical science, and ideologue of the Treaty of Versailles and of British support for the White Russians.

The Russian Civil War (1917-1923)

Although this civil war was an internal conflict, geopolitics and conflicting links with foreign powers played a considerable role. The Reds (Bolsheviks) fought against the Whites. The Bolshevik bloc had a clear ideological, political and geopolitical identity. They were Marxists; they were committed to the dictatorship of the proletariat; and geopolitically they were oriented towards Germany and against the Entente (England, France, USA).

In contrast, the White bloc was not uniform, neither ideologically nor politically, ranging from revolutionary socialists to tsarist monarchists; but from the geopolitical point of view, the Whites tended to favor an alliance with France and England. Only small segments of this movement maintained a pro-German orientation, as was the case of the Cossack leader Krasnov and the Northern Army.

Mackinder, the main ideologist of British support for the Whites, was convinced that, because of the disparity of this bloc, in case of victory, it would lead to a segmentation of Russia into small states, since each general or “war-lord” would end up becoming the founder of a new state. The British strategy for the dismemberment of Russia followed, step by step, that employed in Latin America after independence from Spain. There it succeeded, and what could have been a great continental bloc was dismembered into innumerable small states at odds with each other.

In Russia, this was not the case. The victory of the Bolsheviks frustrated English pretensions. Mackinder was perfectly aware that, after this victory, the USSR was going to be a great power, as happened.

After World War II, the USA took over from England as the vanguard of the Anglo-Empire. The Cold War was not only (but also) a confrontation between liberal-capitalism, represented by the USA (and its allies/vassals, England, France and Germany), and Marxist socialism or real communism, represented by the USSR. The geopolitical component was also very important.

Collapse of the USSR

The changes in the USSR began with Gorbachev’s ascension to the post of General Secretary of the CPSU. The situation he found was not good at all. The defeat and humiliation in Afghanistan hung over Soviet society. The social, economic and ideological engine was starting to grind to a halt. The economy was suffering from military expenditures and the ineffectiveness of absolute statehood. The Marxist worldview had lost all its appeal, and even the Western communist parties were dissociating themselves (at least in the eyes of the public) from the USSR and proclaiming their “Eurocommunism.”

Gorbachev had to take a position on the future strategy of the USSR, and he did so by adopting the theories of convergence, as a foundation, and starting rapprochement with the Western world through unilateral concessions. [Convergence: theories emerging between 1950 and 1960, according to which, as technological development progressed, capitalist and socialist systems would form an increasingly close group, i.e., they would tend to converge].This policy, which was called perestroika, was based on the assumption that the West should respond to every concession with analogous moves in favor of the USSR. This was clearly not the case.

Perestroika was a chain of steps aimed at the adoption of parliamentary democracy, the market economy, glasnost (transparency) and the expansion of area of civic freedom. But in the Eastern bloc countries and in the periphery of the USSR itself these changes were perceived as manifestations of weakness and unilateral concessions to the West. Secessionist movements began in the Baltic republics, Georgia and Armenia.

After the failed coup attempt of 1991, led by the most conservative sectors of the CPSU, the rise of Boris Yeltsin was unstoppable. On December 8, 1991, he met with the presidents of Belarus and Ukraine in the Bialowieza Forest, where an agreement was signed for the creation of a Commonwealth of Independent States, which meant, de facto, the end of the existence of the USSR. However, from this point on, a process was set in motion that threatened not the existence of the USSR, which was already extinct, but of Russia itself.

It seemed that Mackinder’s dream would indeed be put into practice. Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Belarus, Ukraine, Moldova, Armenia, Georgia, Azerbaijan, Yugorussia and Dagestan began their independence processes. Yeltsin’s declaration, made in Ufa on August 6, 1990, went down in history: “Take as much sovereignty as you can swallow.” The new republics appealed (of course!) to the right to self-determination of the peoples. Thus, for example, the constitution of the Republic of Sakha, adopted on April 27, 1992, declared “A sovereign, democratic and legal government, based on the right of the people to self-determination.”

The national policy of the Russian Federation itself was established by Ramzan Abdulatipov [President of the Chamber of Nationalities] and Valery Tishkov [Chairman of the State Committee of the Russian Federation on Nationalities], both of whom openly advocated the conversion of the Federation into a confederation, with complete separation of the national republics.

The conflict in Chechnya had a special impact. Since 1990, and thanks to self-destructive tendencies operating in Russia, various nationalist movements had arisen, most notably the National Congress of the Chechen People, led by Dzhondar Dudayev, a former general of the Soviet air force. On June 8, 1991, Dudayev proclaimed the independence of Chechnya, initiating an protracted armed conflict, which was complicated by the intervention of Islamic fundamentalism.

Reaction

In the face of all these events, broad sectors of Russian public opinion began to see that Yeltsin’s policies were leading to the destruction of Russia. And to make matters worse, there was the problem of tremendous economic chaos, which had plunged the majority of the population into misery, while a few oligarchs enriched themselves with savage privatizations. In September and October 1993, a revolt broke out, with the Supreme Soviet (the parliament) itself at the center. On October 4, military units loyal to Yeltsin put an end to the revolt by bombing the Supreme Soviet.

The political forces that united against Yeltsin were very diverse: communists, nationalists and supporters of the orthodox tsarist monarchy. But they all had one thing in common—the defense of Russian sovereignty and Eurasianism. It was this coalition of forces that would support the emergence of Vladimir Putin and the rebirth of Russia.

Vladimir Putin and Russian Sovereignty

As we mentioned, Boris Yeltsin’s period of government in Russia led the country into unprecedented economic chaos and a real danger of fragmentation. The savage privatization of companies and infrastructures gave birth to the emergence of the so-called “oligarchs,” former officials and politicians of the communist regime who accumulated a great deal of power and wealth with these privatizations, wealth that contrasted with the growing misery of the majority of the Russian population.

In September and October 1993, the discontent of a large part of the population against Yeltsin’s policies led to the uprising of the Duma (parliament) against the president. The previous elections had given a majority to Vladimir Zhirinovsky, a populist and nationalist leader, but the very presidential-structure of Russian politics meant that in reality the Duma had very little power. In this uprising converged the patriotic and anti-liberal forces that would form the basis of the patriotic movement that would be led by Vladimir Putin, namely, Zhirinovsky’s nationalists, the Russian communist party (actually national-communist) of Gennady Zyuganov, and tsarist and orthodox religious groups. Despite their ideological differences, these groups had in common their opposition to liberalism and Westernism, and their defense of the integrity and sovereignty of Russia.

The rebel deputies made a strong stand in the Duma building, which was shelled by military units loyal to Yeltsin. The uprising was crushed—but from that point on Yeltsin’s political course began to waver. Yeltsin’s eight years in power had been a truly dark period in Russian history, with an anti-national government allied to the interests of foreign powers. His policy of change towards a Western-style liberal society was based on Western foreign investment and large loans from international financial institutions. However, none of this materialized in reality—the loans from the International Monetary Fund came in dribs and drabs, immensely smaller than promised and served only to pay the interest on the foreign debt.

In a way, a certain parallel can be drawn between the Russian and Spanish transitions: Governments that respond to foreign interests by dismantling industry, privatizing companies face the danger of fragmentation due to growing nationalism. The only difference is that in Spain there has not been the patriotic reaction that took place in Russia.

Although the uprising in the Duma was crushed by force, it showed the failure of the Yeltsin project. The oligarchs, enriched by savage privatizations, and who supported liberal and pro-Western policies, withdrew their support for the president and promoted an unknown Vladimir Putin, thinking that he would carry out a policy more in line with their interests. Yeltsin resigned on December 31, 1999. Thus, the year 2000 was the beginning of a new era in Russia.

Vladimir Putin was an Apparatchik. He had nothing to do with the patriotic and sovereigntist forces that had led the 1993 uprising. But Putin came from the Security Services (the former KGB) and was educated in the idea that these services, together with military might, were meant to defend the national interest.

From the beginning of his mandate, Putin suggested a more assertive and nationalistic foreign policy, which would not be subordinated to the interests of the Western powers, which gave him the support of the Russian military elite. But, at the same time, he skillfully enlisted the support of Boris Berezovsky, the leading oligarch of the Yeltsin era, who thought, wrongly, that Putin would further his interests.

Putin forced the oligarch Vlaadimir Guzinsky into exile. He also brought about the fall of Roman Abramovich and Alexander Voloshin, other powerful oligarchs. Subsequently, the new leaders of these oligarchs helped him to drive Berezovsky out.

In fact, from the very beginning, Putin initiated a battle for control of the economy, which led to a confrontation with the oligarchs. He succeeded in exiling Berezovsky and Abramovich. Later, in July 2000, he arrested Vladimir Gussinsky, the largest media owner, accusing him of having stolen ten million dollars from the state-owned Russian Video company.

In late 2003, at the end of his first term, Putin arrested the powerful oil industry millionaire, Mikhail Kodorkovsky, accusing him of tax evasion and corruption. At this time, and using these arrests as an excuse, the West began to accuse Putin of “authoritarianism” and of returning to the police methods of the Stalinist era. This campaign was joined by the media (New York Times, 2003, Washington Post, 2003) and the U.S. State Department itself claimed that the basic freedom of Russians was in danger. As we can see, the Western (more specifically US) animosity towards Putin goes back a long way—from the moment he refused to be a puppet like his predecessor, Yeltsin, had been.

Kodorkovsky perfectly represented the former functionary of the communist apparatus, enriched by the savage privatizations of the Yeltsin era. He tried to use his immense fortune to finance his campaign for the Russian presidency, emboldened by Western support, which presented him as a representative of “liberal and democratic” values.

The concentration of wealth in the hands of a few oligarchs had caused some 31 million Russians (more than 20% of the population) to subsist on the equivalent, or less, of 50 dollars a month. According to a UN study, half of the Russian population lived in poverty, and according to figures from the Russian State Statistics Committee, in 2002, more than forty million Russians suffered from malnutrition. In such circumstances, it no longer seemed so strange that many Russians longed for the Soviet era.

Along with this data concerning the quality of life, the destruction of the state health care system should be noted. All this led to a drop in life expectancy from 70 years for men in the Soviet era to 57 years.

The Putin government’s political offensive against Kodorkovsky was central to President Putin’s second election in 2003. He projected an image of fighting the oligarchs that made him very popular among a population that, in the words of political scientist Yuri Tsyganov, wanted to see all Russian gangsters prosecuted and punished for the social destruction they had wrought in Russia.

Kodorkovsky had been characterized, not only by the accumulation of great wealth, but by his intention to use it politically. He had made large contributions of money to what he called “democratic opposition parties,” and had tried to exploit social discontent to instigate a change of regime.

In view of all this, the Western propaganda that keeps talking about “Putin’s oligarchs” is pathetic, when precisely what has characterized Putin’s domestic policy has been the persecution and economic and political neutralization of these oligarchs, enriched during the Yeltsin period, and who had been characterized by their support for liberal and Western ideas in Russia.

Towards the end of his second term, in 2007, Putin gave an important speech at the Munich Conference on security policy. In this speech he set out a whole doctrine of international relations based on multipolarity, a doctrine that is essential to know in order to understand the deep roots of the current conflict with Ukraine.

This doctrine can be summarized in the following points:

  • The unipolar model of the world is not only unacceptable, it is impossible.
  • The USA has overstepped its national borders in every sense, imposing its economic, political, cultural and educational policies on other nations.
  • Decision making on the use of military force should be within the UN.
  • NATO is advancing its border forces to Russia’s borders.
  • Whatever happened to those promises given by our Western partners after the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact?
  • With one hand “charitable aid” is given, with the other hand economic backwardness is preserved and profits are collected.
  • The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) has become an instrument for securing the interests of some states against others.
  • Russia, in its millennia-long history, has always had an independent foreign policy. We will not change this tradition.

With these eight points Putin clearly laid down the basic lines of his international policy. The mere fact of maintaining the unity of Russia against the policies of balkanization and disintegration of the Yeltsin era readily implied a confrontation with the unipolar “New World Order,” cherished by the USA ever since the collapse of the USSR. Maintaining Russian national pride, its refusal to ask for forgiveness, the uninhibited assumption of its own history (from Tsarism to the USSR) constituted a provocation against the ideology of this “New World Order,” which consists of nothing more than exporting and imposing the values of American society on the entire globe.

To all this must be added the low permeability of Russian society as a whole to the ideological project of Agenda 2030, with all its tentacles: neo-feminism, climate hysteria, gender ideology, immigrationism and multiculturalism. Russia has become a problem for the “New World Order,” a “problem” with a vast expanse, reserve of raw materials and nuclear weapons.

During the Trump period the globalist rubber never met the road. This president proved to be the least globalist of all US presidents (he did not initiate any war), more concerned with domestic issues of the American nation, and whose moves in international politics did not clash (at least head-on) with Russia.

With the arrival to power of Biden everything changed. This character, who is nothing more than a puppet of the neo-con sectors of the Democratic Party, made it very clear in his electoral campaign that his policy would be aimed at making the USA once again the world LEADER. This meant that the USA would return to the policy of Unipolarity (disguised as “multilateralism”) and, therefore, the confrontation with any power that opposed it.

Let us recall that the neocons are the spokesmen of a messianic vision of America as a nation united only by a creed that can be extended to all mankind. In the neocon theory, the USA is a “universal nation” that has “human rights” as its foreign policy axis, in the same way as the Soviets had Marxism-Leninism. Biden’s America is thus once again the expansive epicenter of “liberal democracy.”

For the neocons, that is, for Biden, liberal democracy and the market economy can be built anywhere in the world, with the help, if necessary, of American fighter-bombers and missiles; or, better still, a puppet state, as in the case of Ukraine. Any opposition is “tribalism,” Nazism, Stalinism or all of them at once. Naturally, the arms lobby smiles complacently.


José Alsina Calvés is a historian and philosopher who specializes in political biography, the history of science and the history of ideas and edits the journal Nihil Obstat. This article appears through the kind courtesy of Posmodernia.


Featured: Cover of the magazine, Chasovoy (The Watchman), 1932. Inscription on the shield reads, “God with us. Russia will rise again.” The title below, “Christ is risen.”

The Prescience Of Rudyard Kipling

In 1896, English writer and political observer Rudyard Kipling published a short poem titled, “The Deep-Sea Cables”:

The Deep-Sea Cables

The wrecks dissolve above us; their dust drops down from afar --
Down to the dark, to the utter dark, where the blind white sea-snakes are.
There is no sound, no echo of sound, in the deserts of the deep,
Or the great grey level plains of ooze where the shell-burred cables creep.

Here in the womb of the world -- here on the tie-ribs of earth
Words, and the words of men, flicker and flutter and beat --
Warning, sorrow and gain, salutation and mirth --
For a Power troubles the Still that has neither voice nor feet.

They have wakened the timeless Things; they have killed their father Time;
Joining hands in the gloom, a league from the last of the sun.
Hush! Men talk to-day o'er the waste of the ultimate slime,
And a new Word runs between: whispering, "Let us be one!"

The late nineteenth century was the halcyon age of the British Empire, an empire for which Kipling is often remembered (or, more accurately, detracted) as an “apologist.” It is rare to find a mention of Kipling in the popular press without a damning association, with his 1899 verse encouragement of the American takeover of the Philippines, “White Man’s Burden.”

On that reading, and given Kipling’s reputation as the “unofficial poet laureate of Empire,” it would be justified to explicate “The Deep-Sea Cables” as a typical pith-helmeted glorification of British rule over the planet—now, with the laying of the submarine cables, aided by the cutting edge of communications technology. With the “deep-sea cables” spiderwebbing the ocean floor, Kipling seems to be anticipating, the world will finally, as the British Empire aimed for all along, “be one.”

I take a very different view of “The Deep-Sea Cables,” and a very different view of Kipling. The later British Empire subject Eric Blair, who very much wrote in Kipling’s shadow, when he wrote about imperialism as George Orwell, adopted a cynical view of British rule which Kipling, the usual interpretation goes, was too tally-ho and forward-march to understand. However, if we take Kipling on his own terms, and read the poem for what it says, I believe we arrive at a much darker vision for the touted unity of humanity than one finds when “The Deep-Sea Cables” is read flat against the page and in the darkroom redlight of post-imperial autopsies. “The Deep-Sea Cables” was not encomium but Greek tragedy, a warning against the hubris of men who think they have become like the gods.

In the September, 2019, issue of The Kipling Journal, I find an intriguing note about “The Deep-Sea Cables,” linking it to a couple of other Kipling poems “in which we are treated to a glimpse of a huge blind sea monster, which an underwater earthquake hurls up to the surface.” Godzilla some sixty years in advance, perhaps. But I think the analogy is more than coincidental. The 1956 Japanese movie Godzilla, like “The Deep-Sea Cables,” can also be read two ways. On the one hand, Godzilla is a campy horror flick—more for laughing at than for being frightened by—about a monster (so obviously a guy in a rubber suit) lurching out of the Pacific Ocean to stomp around Tokyo. On the other hand, Godzilla is a commentary on war, imperial politics, and the nightmare of nuclear holocaust. “The Deep-Sea Cables,” too, can be read as a celebration of empire; or, as I read it, as a warning about human pride, about the false ecumenicism of what today I think we would call “globalization.”

To get a sense of what Kipling was trying to say in “The Deep-Sea Cables,” let us start with the last line of the poem. Here, we find the word “Word” curiously capitalized. This is the hinge of the work.

In a 2015 essay in Modern Fiction Studies, Heather Fielding interprets the capitalization this way: “As the capitalization of ‘Word’ indicates, Kipling ascribes a clear moral authority to the unifying power of the telegraph wires, which enable communication and in the process draw subjects of different nations toward a ‘common good’ that was certainly imperial, Christian, and British in nature.” In the endnote following this sentence Fielding drives the point home further: “Of course, Kipling’s vision of the common structure uniting mankind is an imperialist one. As Bernhard Siegert argues [in Relays: Literature as an Epoch of the Postal System, trans. Kevin Repp. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999], ‘[t]he command given… in the “deserts of the deep” was not to become one, but to become ‘British.’” Again, the standard “Kipling as imperial apologist” interpretation.

But consider that Rudyard Kipling, although notoriously difficult to pin down theologically was a product of a British education, and as such would no doubt have been more than passingly familiar with the Holy Bible. Even if Kipling was an atheist, as he himself seems to have said, he would have known the foundational text of Christianity much better than most in our contemporary secular culture do. The Bible would have been baseline for his literary development, storehouse for the imagery and phrasing which a poet deploys in his crafting of lines. In the Bible, in the Gospel of St. John, we read of the “Eternal Word,” Who came into the world, which knew Him not.

The capitalization of “Word” in Kipling’s poem has nothing at all to do with the glorification of empire, nor of being British, nor of being Christian. Kipling was no Pollyanna, no evangelical soapbox orator. Kipling’s odd use of the capitalized “Word” is a warning, with unmistakable Biblical overtones, that man is arrogating to himself a power which he does not understand, and which has the potential to ruin him.

Working backwards from the last line, the rest of “The Deep-Sea Cables” follows from this single capitalized word. At the beginning of the poem, we find ourselves at the bottom of the pitch-black sea, with the wrecks of the vessels which men have built “dissolv[ing]” above us and “drop[ping] down from afar.” The world of men is distant from this deep, dark place. The surface of things, the ships and commerce and battles of nations, is another world, one which, heretofore and while the old technology has prevailed, has left this abyssopelagic cosmos undisturbed. “Blind white sea-snakes” live here, slithering in “great grey level plains of ooze.”

But now there is a new trick that men have learned, a new Promethean moment in their history. It is on this otherworldly muck-bottom that the cables which men have laid—and by Kipling’s day submarine telegraph cables were already a highly-developed technology—repose, providing a home for mollusks. This unpeopled deep is not where men ought to go—this is the strong sense of Kipling’s poem overall.

The Biblical motif of the poem continues. It is impossible for me to read the second stanza, about “the womb of the world” at the sea floor, “the tie-ribs of earth” where the planet is mortised and tenoned, without thinking of the first chapter of Genesis, of God’s awful might in calling forth the bottomless waters out of nothingness. Or of the Book of Job, wherein God taunts a member of his puny human creation who dares inquire after the ways of the Almighty:

Then the Lord answered Job out of a whirlwind, and said:
Who is this that wrappeth up sentences in unskillful words? Gird up thy loins like a man; I will ask thee, and answer thou me.
Where wast thou when I laid up the foundations of the earth? tell me if thou hast understanding.
Who hath laid the measures thereof, if thou knowest? or who hath stretched the line upon it?
Upon what are its bases grounded? or who laid the corner stone thereof,
When the morning stars praised me together, and all the sons of God made a joyful melody?
Who shut up the sea with doors, when it broke forth as issuing out of a womb;
When I made a cloud the garment thereof, and wrapped it in a mist as in swaddling bands?
I set my bounds around it, and made it bars and doors:
And I said: Hitherto thou shalt come, and shalt go no further, and here thou shalt break thy swelling waves.

Hast thou entered the depths of the sea, and walked in the lowest parts of the deep?
(Job 38: 1-11, 16)

Once we have this Biblical context in place, the poem knits together, and in a way very unlike the glib celebration of the British Empire that many scholars understand “The Deep-Sea Cables” to be. This is Godzilla, a shudder at what is going to come out of the “ooze,” the “waste of the ultimate slime” if men keep “whispering” words in the blind, deaf, and dumb deep, “Joining hands in the gloom, a league from the last of the sun”—where men ought not go. In their hubris, Kipling is saying, men are making a new dispensation, a new “Word” for the world. This is not empire; this is something that men do not understand. And it will cost them dearly in the end.

Kipling senses that the old world of politics and dominion—the ships whose wrecks filter down as rotted powder from above (and Kipling would have been completely aware, of course, that the British Empire rested on naval prowess)—is meaningless in the new age of instantaneous information sharing. Some people have called this network of telegraph cables “the Victorian internet,” which may sound outlandish at first, given the extraordinarily slow (by today’s standards) rates of information transmission of which even the best telegraph cables were capable. But I think the internet metaphor is more apt than might at first appear. It seems that Kipling’s poet’s antennae were sensing, in “The Deep-Sea Cables,” what a later inspired writer, Marshall McLuhan, tried working out in the 1960s—namely, that new modes of communication exert profound, transformative influence on human society. Whispers across cables thrill the pride of man—we are becoming one! But as the second stanza gives way to the third and last, we find this chilling turn: “For a Power troubles the Still that has neither voice nor feet./They have wakened the timeless Things; they have killed their father Time.” This is no longer empire. This is now myth, the eternal retelling of the same story of man’s rise and fall.

Who is “Father Time?” In the deep of the underworld, Tartarus, dwelt the old, wild gods, the Titans, imprisoned there by the Olympians, the bright and shining deities (“Zeus” comes from an Indo-European root meaning “to shine”) who banished the horrible Titans to their prison in the bowels of the earth. While there are many theories on the etymology of the name of one of the Titans, Cronus, in Kipling’s day the most common would probably have been “Father Time,” thought to derive from the Greek word chronos. Cronus was identified in Roman mythology with Saturn, the god of bounty. In ancient Rome, the Temple of Saturn was where the imperial treasury was housed.

Cronus as Saturn, Saturn as the god blessing the political dominion of Rome over the known world. But once a line is crossed, the god no longer blesses, but destroys. In the myth of the Titans, all was well until Saturn, Cronus, “Father Time,” thought that his children were going to usurp him, just as he had usurped his father and mother, the heavens and the earth. Fearing this rebellion by his offspring, Cronus ate his children one by one. The god turned on his empire. The Titan devoured what he had brought forth.

Rudyard Kipling was no Boy Scout cheerleader for progress and the British Empire. He was, above all else, a poet, a man with a mystical connection to the incantatory power of words. “The Deep-Sea Cables” represents one of the most prescient and accurate foreshadowing of the dangers which men were stirring up—“the timeless Things” which men were “waken[ing],” the “Power troubl[ing] the Still” which men were disturbing with their globalist chatter in the primordial deep.


Jason Morgan is associate professor at Reitaku University in Kashiwa, Japan.


Featured image: “Rudyard Kipling,” by Sir Philip Burne-Jones, painted in 1899.

Towards a Reappraisal of Colonialism: The Life Of Sir Alan Burns

In the modern Western, especially English-speaking, world in which “critical theory” (lower case!), i.e., “any philosophical approach that seeks emancipation for human beings and actively works to change society in accordance with human needs” has largely replaced empirical research in the Humanities; knowledge has been for the most part reduced to subjective opinion. Descriptive analysis has been supplanted by prescriptive dogma.

From this cesspool of learned ignorance, inter alia influenced by notions of “knowledge and power” (le savoir-pouvoir), espoused by the French intellectual chameleon Michel Foucault, modern “critical theories” (on race, gender, etc.) have become dominant. In the current caliginous academic world, driven on by publish-or-perish, hermetic peer review and the ability to churn out innumerable “scholarly” journals, this has becoming something of a thriving industry on campuses, and increasingly in everyday life. One of the hallmark publications of this was Edward Said’s famous work Orientalism (for a concise rebuttal of Said, there is the work by Buruma and Margalit). Based on this and patterned after Foucault’s post-modernism, the discipline of “post-colonialism” or “decolonial theory” emerged. One definition is that it “is a title coined to describe the intellectual work articulating a broad rejection of Western European supremacy by colonial/racial subjects.”

Simply put, this activism disguised as science ascribes all the ills of what is generally known as the “Third World” to the colonial activities of European powers. As this work is largely idea(l) driven, all manner of “evidence” can be herded to prove the previously established thesis. This, as the French public intellectual Michel Onfray has shown in in his recent book L’Art d’être français : Lettres à de jeunes philosophes (“Lettre 6—Sur l’islamo-gauchisme;” Islamo-leftism, another postcolonial discourse which reintroduces pre-revolutionary theocracy), like all such “critical theories,” works on the same scheme: essentializing [i.e. oversimplification], the liberal application of Godwin’s law, verbosity, exaggeration, denial and amalgamation—lumping together antithetical groups of victims and perpetrators, real or imagined. When one looks at the world today, especially the in the former European colonies, one cannot but be heartbroken, in many instances. The question is whether such “colonialism” lies at the root of these countries’ desperate state?

The book under review here, The Last Imperialist. Sir Alan Burns’ Epic Defense of the British Empire is, to present my conclusion first, a well-researched and fact-driven antidote to the popular and populist mythography of modern theorists. The author, Professor Bruce Gilley, perhaps best known in the field of Colonial Studies for his (in)famous article, “The case for colonialism” (Third World Quarterly, 2017), is to be commended for this well-written vindication of the British Empire, what it was and what it wasn’t. This biographical tour-de-force shares the same to-the-point literary gusto as the books written by the Sir Alan Burns, Gilley’s subject. Gilley, like Burns himself, prefers intellectual honesty to going with the languid flow.

It should be note here that this book is not a whitewash of colonialism. It is a realistic portrayal of many aspects of the last six or seven decades of the British Empire, based on the career of one of its major proponents, who held numerous key positions in various parts of it. The book opens with an ironic epilogue—Sir Alan Burns at the end of his career, learning of the death of his old adversary in the Gold Coast (now Ghana), Dr. Joseph B. Danquah, dying in prison as a political prisoner of Kwame Nkrumah’s regime.

Sir Alan Cuthbert Maxwell Burns, of Scottish descent, was born in Basseterre (Saint Kitts) in 1887. His family and early life on the multiracial and multiethnic Island, and his schooling in England. On p. 19 it is noted that Burns considered his limited formal education to be an advantage: “a strong character and sound common sense are far more valuable assets to a colonial official than the most brilliant academic distinctions;” university produced young colonial officials who were “full of zeal and theory” but lacking in what he considered most important “unlimited patience and a real sympathy for the people among whom the young officer will work.”

The book goes on to describe his further career, from his own writings and those of his colleagues and opponents, initially in the Caribbean and later largely in West Africa. We see here a man who took his posts seriously, having a genuine interest in the people and places he served. This can be seen in many of his publications, such as the Nigeria Handbook which first appeared in 1917 and was appreciated especially by the indigenous population (p. 60). Later, from 1924 on, as Colonial Secretary of the Bahamas, Gilley eloquently describes the realities of life, balancing local and international interests (especially rumrunning into the United States of the Prohibition Era), encouraging and when necessary, goading the local parliament to do their duty and take responsibility. Here, he also produced the first accurate map of the Bahamas. When he left in 1929, his empathy and administrative skills were praised by all.

His next posting, until 1934, was as Deputy Chief Secretary to the Government of Nigeria. Throughout the book, we see how Burns adapted to new situations, especially the tide of growing nationalist sentiments after World War I. We see what the British Empire was and wasn’t, e.g., p. 91: “It has been the policy of British colonial administrations to build up a national consciousness which would one day make it possible to give independence to a united country.” The language may seem dated, but not the will to do good. On p. 92, we read: “With all its imperfections, European government in Asia and Africa has given to the native inhabitants of the tropics greater personal liberty and economic opportunity than they have ever enjoyed before.” Among the challenges Burns faced were occasional uprisings, often to do with the challenges caused by modernity; and the protestors or rebels can, historically speaking, hardly be seen as early forms of anti-colonial resistance, as they are often depicted in modern postcolonial historiography. It is clear that the ruled also saw advantage in British rule—had there indeed been popular opposition, it would have been no match for the always short understaffed British, especially during the Great War, when only a bare skeleton administration remained—or perhaps we must suppose that mass Stockholm syndrome is a defining aspect of colonialism?

Throughout the book, the voices of the governed, the alleged victims come to word in a balanced fashion, such as Ahmadu Bello (p. 92) “The was no ill-will after the occupation. We were used to conquerors and these were different; they were polite and obviously out to help us rather than themselves;” Chinua Achebe (p. 93) “Let us give the devil his due: colonialism in Africa disrupted many things, but it did create big political units where there were scattered ones before.”

Among Burn’s activities in this period was his pioneering work History of Nigeria (1st ed. 1929) later deemed “tainted colonial historiography,” and the foundation of the Lagos Public Library in 1932. Here Gilley notes (p. 95): “Along with the drawing of maps, the creation of libraries is another colonial endeavor that has been scorned by later critics as devious and wicked. Having first imposed an alien conception on the outer geography of place, the colonialists next implanted an alien conception on the inner geography of the mind. Such libraries were intended, the critics allege, to create a pro-colonial native elite that would perpetuate European rule and train a literate work force to boost colonial profits. All those elderly lady volunteers affixing labels and dusting stacks are transformed by such works into powerful agents of imperial reach as they assist Africans to sign out copies of Baudelaire. ‘The violence of the library’ and ‘conceptual contamination’ are stock phrases. The effect of colonial libraries was to ‘dismember the dynamism and effectiveness of the oral tradition,’ one alarmed scholar complained. ‘Library colonialism remains one of the most hidden but deadly instruments of neo-colonialism’ he warned. On those quiet shelves ‘the malignant influences of Western civilization are diffused among literate Africans like invisible bubbles of air.’”

The next step is of course the burning of books, such as practiced in Canada as a “purification par la flamme,” led by a self-invented Indian, Suzy Kies. This alleged incarnation of colonial evil, Burns himself noted (p. 97): “We do not try to assimilate the colonial peoples, nor to turn them into imitation Scotsmen—or even Englishmen—but to help them develop a higher civilization of their own, soundly based on their own traditional institutions and culture.”

Thereafter, follow accounts of Burns’ next posting in British Honduras (Belize), 1934-1939, a stagnant backwater of the Empire when he arrived. His major activities here were road building, rediscovering the Mayan past which “offered a potential source of meaning and a unity for a place that had long been dismissed as nothing more than a timber settlement” (p. 107), including the founding of a national museum. Here, again, he worked to reform and make local government more effective and fairer. Upon his departure, again his achievements were hailed by even his most stern critics.

The beginning of the war found him in England, where he helped to broker the “Destroyers-for-bases deal.” From 1942 to 1947, he was back in Nigeria, installing, in 1946, a new, more democratic constitution with an African majority. Here, in 1943, transpired what would be the defining moment in Burns’ career, the ritual “Ju-Ju” murder.

The tides were however turning, Britain after the War had lost its desire for Empire, this murder case demonstrated the British government’s changing attitude. While the ruled, who had no taste for being the victims of such murderous rituals, demanded and expected justice, the rulers were hesitant; cultural relativism was coming of age, as Gilley notes (p. 179f.): “Not for the first time, Western progressives who claimed to speak on behalf of the Third World were contradicted by actual existing Third World people.” This seems to have been a turning point for Burns, who now increasingly went on record as a staunch defender of the Empire (p. 172): “The ‘tyranny’ of European rule has replaced tyrannies less bearable… In the past we have made many mistakes in our colonial administration and we will probably make many more in the future, but against our mistakes we can set a record of achievement which has not been excelled by any nation in the world, and on balance we have nothing to be ashamed of.” The historical reality is that more often than not, the British had been asked (sometimes repeatedly before they agreed) to govern by indigenous peoples. As Gilley notes (p. 172) “most colonialism was done by colonials.”

From 1947 until his retirement in 1956 Burns served as Permanent Representative of the UK on the United Nations Trusteeship Council. This is arguably the most relevant section of the book for understanding the present situation. The world mood after the Second World War was decidedly “anti-colonial.” The Trusteeship Council, originally mandated to oversee the trust territories, largely former mandates of the League of Nations, or territories taken from nations defeated at the end of World War II, to self-government or independence, but which also sought to decolonize the remaining “empires” (mainly Britain, France, Portugal and Belgium). Gilley notes (p.195): “The more important question is whether the UN adequately prepared colonies for independence. On this issue, scholars have been silent for an obvious reason: the failure of the UN to direct its attention to the post-colonial future was an inexcusable mistake, arguably a crime against humanity that the body continues to celebrate. Under the growing influence of anti-colonial voices, the UN became what one scholar called a “decolonization machine,” more concerned with ending colonialism than with the lives left behind. It was a mistake that Sir Alan Burns would try to avoid.” Here we see an excellent portrayal of how questions of good governance became overshadowed by emotive racial questions. The grandstanding professing the evils of colonialism was led by countries such as the Soviet Union, Yemen, Egypt, India or the Philippines whose democratic credentials were (and are) somewhat wanting (p. 219): “It is notorious that the most severe criticism comes from the representatives of countries where the administration is most corrupt, the treatment of minorities or the working classes is the most discriminatory, and the constitution so unstable that it is shaken by frequent revolutions.”

The mythical American “anti-colonial” attitudes and policies are also discussed, who saw in every self-proclaimed liberator another George Washington. These countries often insisted on a prescribed timetable (as was the case for the Trusteeships, which as with Somalia was an utter failure) for independence. Burns noted that in determining when a colony was ready for independence (p. 209f.): “There are not enough astrologers assigned to the UN for this task.” The question was as Gilley notes here: “What if the people of a colony did not want a timetable? Would it be undemocratic to force one upon them? Who exactly spoke for colonial peoples: coffee-house radicals in London, Soviet stooges at the UN or the elected native representatives of colonial legislatures? Part of the hypocritical incoherency of the UN policy at this time was the definition of what constituted a ‘colony.’ The criterium was the ‘salt-water fallacy,’ only colonialism overseas was considered ‘colonialism,’ expansion over land was seen as “nation-building” (p. 217f.)—ergo the Soviet Union with its Warsaw Pact Satellite states was not seen as colonial. That France and Portugal also saw their overseas empires as parts of their country did not count; the Belgians (Flemish, Germans and Walloons) noted logically that it would only be right if every UN member would be open to scrutiny for all groups ruled by a particular country (“Belgian Thesis” p. 218).

Having left the UN thoroughly fed up, Burns undertook further missions, such as in Fiji and in the Caribbean. He and his wife were back in Basseterre in 1967 when the new union of St. Kitts, Nevis and Anguilla were formed. The latter did not like the arrangement and demanded the reinstatement of British colonial rule (p. 259), forming a republic two years later, once their request had been turned down.

The tide had however turned for good. Decolonization was pursued on an international level, its proponents as Burns noted (p. 222) were “less concerned with the welfare of the indigenous inhabitants than with the spread of ideological propaganda.” History speaks for itself. Rushed independence—due more to the fact that the now defeatist colonial powers themselves jumped ship rather than mythical freedom fighters who often metamorphosed into butchers—had “virtually guaranteed failure in many places at the costs of hundreds of thousands of lives.”

But post-independence failures, famines, wars, rigged elections, refugee crises etc. are faded out while colonial atrocities, real or imagined, are highlighted, (p. 261): “Alan [Burns] noted that more people had been killed by police firing on riotous mobs in independent India than in the entire period of the Raj—this before the worst violence of the 1970s and 1980s.” Burns noted correctly that (p. 262) it does no good to bend over backwards in avoiding any reference to these things. [Recovery] can only be retarded by a refusal to face the facts or to recognize that everything is not lovely in the garden of independence.” As for these states “until they are prepared to admit their own responsibility for much that has gone wrong, they will not be able to correct the mistakes and to achieve the status which all their friends wish them to attain.”

It is clear that neither Sir Alan Burns nor his defense of the British Empire can be deemed racist, patronizing or the like. He was a dedicated civil servant, devoted to both the Empire and the people it ruled. His goal was not a Tausendjähriges Reich or a dictatorship of the proletariat (both as the book notes, idealized by many colonial nationalists) or some other such ill-conceived utopian dream, but rather, though imperfectly achieved, to lead the ruled to self-rule of their own making, within the confines of inescapable modernity. Although many of his colleagues, as he often complained to London, were not up to his standard, others were.

In conclusion, we hope that this book will contribute to a recalibration of the debate on colonialism and the British Empire in particular. Not to nostalgia for what is no more (and probably never was). Merely to an empirical, fact-based understanding. The fate of many former colonies is indeed determined for a large part by how long and how well they were governed. This can be seen especially in the presence (or lack thereof) of true civil society (not imported neo-colonial NGOs), the building block of democracy. South American states continued and some continue to pursue Spanish colonial exploitation, Haiti’s long independence has not been especially beneficial to its population. Countries that were never colonized, such as China have no real democratic institutions. The real question is do human rights apply to all humans, are the values of the Enlightenment really Eurocentric? Are cultures fixed and static categories; that most be preserved regardless of human cost (as has been noted by Marxists scholars such as Vivek Chibber)?

Indeed, one of the problems with postcolonial theory, critical or other, is that it negates the foundations of reason, reverses cause and effect and denies Ockham’s razor. Thus, before we judge too harshly, it should be asked how European colonialism came to be and what was the situation beforehand (Europeans didn’t introduce e.g., slavery or human sacrifice), and what would have been the alternative in a modernizing world that was becoming more interconnected? Did not the British Empire with some degree of success prevent large scale pillage and exploitation (often fending off American economic exploitation)? It is however easier to judge a theorized past than to learn from our past successes and failures based on empirical evidence. Gilley noted in his 2017 article about European colonialism “both objectively beneficial and subjectively legitimate in most of the places where it was found” — words to bear in mind, especially now, when the former colonies, the so-called Third World is subject to an orchestrated hostile takeover, by imperious, iron-fisted Chinese debt colonization. Tibet, Hong Kong, Xinjiang and the despotic threats made to Taiwan and islands in the South China Sea do much to put the British Empire in a proper historical perspective.


Professor Dr. Robert M. Kerr studied Classics and Semitics largely in Vancouver, Tübingen and Leyden. He is currently director of the Inârah Institute, for research on Early Islamic History and the Qur’an in Saarbrücken (Germany).


Featured image: “Britannia Rules the Waves,” by Nicholas Habbe, painted in 1876.