I recently shared a list of 26 essential books about technology.

But there was an unusual twist to this list—none of these books were written by technologists. They all came from wise humanists, philosophers, novelists, and social thinkers.

This is quite unconventional nowadays—STEM rules everything and everywhere, while the humanities are in crisis. But these are the books I’d assign if I taught in Stanford’s entrepreneur program.

They would give techies a mind-expanding vision from outside the Silicon Valley echo chamber. These books would guide them to concepts and solutions that tech, on its own, will never deliver.

Back in August, I promised that I’d write about some of the individual books on my list.

Today I’m doing just that—offering a rapid-fire overview of some insights from Hannah Arendt, one of the deepest thinkers of the 20th century.

Hannah Arendt

As many of you know, I often study predictions made 50 or 100 years ago, and try to see how accurate they were.

I have done this in the past with J.G. Ballard, Arnold Mitchell, Chris Anderson, Paul Goodman, Oswald Spengler, and others.

Today I turn my attention to an extraordinary analysis from Hannah Arendt’s book The Human Condition (1958). It’s so accurate, it’s almost scary.

Arendt is a constant source of inspiration for me. In this book, she warns us about technologists who are dangerous becuse they are so completely out-of-touch with their humanity. She wrote this book in the mid-1950s, but you might think she was living in Silicon Valley today.

Here’s what she says about these dangerous individuals in the opening pages of her 1958 book:

1. On page one she says that people who are disconnected with the human condition are obsessed with outer space and want to “escape man’s imprisonment to the earth.”

2. On page two, she says that these people are “directed towards making life artificial”—sort of like virtual reality.

3. On page three, she claims that they will eventually want to create “artificial machines to do our thinking and speaking….we would become the helpless slaves…at the mercy of every gadget which is technically possible, no matter how murderous it is.”

4. On page four, she warns us that scientists have already shown (with the development of the atomic bomb) that they create dangerous things but are “the last to be consulted about their use.” So any prediction a scientist makes about the use of new tech is totally worthless—politicians and tyrants will decide how it is used.

5. On page five, she explains that in this kind of society, freedom becomes almost worthless, because people are deprived of the “higher and more meaningful activities for the sake of which this freedom would deserve to be won.”

6. On page six, she says that the people pursuing this escape from the human condition are thus creating “modern world alienation.”

7. On page seven, she says that they inhabit “an ‘artificial’ world of things distinctly different from all natural surroundings”—so that their tech innovations will lead to an inevitable degradation of the environment, and a detachment from the real world.

I read all this in astonishment.

It sounds like Arendt had anticipated my recent article about Silicon Valley turning into a creepy cult—and grasped this potentiality more than 60 years ago.

In other word, she saw all this even before Silicon Valley had a name or a mission.

Arendt’s entire book is filled with insights. I won’t try to summarize everything, but I will share a few more of her provocative views.

Here are 12 more key passages from The Human Condition:

1. “Our whole economy has become a waste economy, in which things must be almost as quickly devoured and discarded as they have appeared in the world.” [It sounds like she is describing scrolling on a smartphone but Arendt wrote this before the first integrated circuit was built!]

2. “The question therefore is not so much whether we are the masters or the slaves of our machines, but whether machines still serve the world and its things, or if, on the contrary, they and the automatic motion of their processes have begun to rule and even destroy the world and things.” [Does that sound familiar?]

3. “The phenomenon of conformism is characteristic of the last stage of this modern development.”

4. “Large numbers of people, crowded together, develop an almost irresistible inclination toward despotism.”

5. “Society always demands that its members act as though they were members of one enormous family which has only one opinion….imposing innumerable and various rules, all of which tend to ‘normalize’ its members, to make them behave, to exclude spontaneous action or outstanding achievement.”

6. “Behavior has replaced action as the foremost mode of human relationship.”

7. “The mass phenomenon of loneliness…has achieved its most extreme and antihuman form. The reason for this extremity is that mass society not only destroys the public realm but the private as well, deprives men not only of their place in the world but of their private home, where they once felt sheltered against the world.”

8. “The loss of human experience in this development is extraordinarily striking. It is not only and not even primarily contemplation which has become an entirely meaningless experience. Thought itself, when it became “reckoning with consequences,” became a func­tion of the brain, with the result that electronic instruments are found to fulfill these functions much better than we ever could.”

9. “We have begun to live in a labor society which lacks enough laboring to keep it contented.”

10. “For mortals, the ‘easy life of the gods’ would be a lifeless life.”

11. “This does not mean that modern man has lost his capacities….although these faculties are more and more restricted to the abilities of the artist.”

12. “It is quite con­ceivable that the modern age—which began with such an unprece­dented and promising outburst of human activity—may end in the deadliest, most sterile passivity history has ever known.”

Does any of that ring true today? Let me remind you that all this was written in the mid-1950s.

I will have more to say in the future about other books on my subversive tech reading list. But even this quick survey of Hannah Arendt’s worldview shows how much we gain from adopting a larger vision of technology from a wise and compassionate human standpoint.

On history's repeating itself

Excerpts from the History of the Peloponnesian War

So revolutions broke out in city after city, and in places where the revolutions occurred late the knowledge of what had happened previously in other places caused still new extravagances of revolutionary zeal, expressed by an elaboration in the methods of seizing power and by unheard-of atrocities in revenge.

To fit in with the change of events, words, too, had to change their usual meanings.

What used to be described as a thoughtless act of aggression was now regarded as the courage one would expect to find in a party member; to think of the future and wait was merely another way of saying one was a coward; any idea of moderation was just an attempt to disguise one’s unmanly character; ability to understand a question from all sides meant that one was totally unfitted for action. Fanatical enthusiasm was the mark of a real man, and to plot against an enemy behind his back was perfectly legitimate self-defense.

Anyone who held violent opinions could always be trusted, and anyone who objected to them became a suspect. To plot successfully was a sign of intelligence, but it was still cleverer to see that a plot was hatching. If one attempted to provide against having to do either, one was disrupting the unity of the party and acting out of fear of the opposition. In short, it was equally praiseworthy to get one’s blow in first against someone who was going to do wrong, and to denounce someone who had no intention of doing any wrong at all.

Family relations were a weaker tie than party membership, since party members were more ready to go to any extreme for any reason whatever.

These parties were not formed to enjoy the benefits of the established laws, but to acquire power by overthrowing the existing regime; and the members of these parties felt confidence in each other not because of any fellowship in a religious communion, but because they were partners in crime.

If an opponent made a reasonable speech, the party in power, so far from giving it a generous reception, took every precaution to see that it had no practical effect.

Revenge was more important than self-preservation. And if pacts of mutual security were made, they were entered into by the two parties only in order to meet some temporary difficulty, and remained in force only so long as there was no other weapon available. When the chance came, the one who first seized it boldly, catching his enemy off his guard, enjoyed a revenge that was all the sweeter from having been taken, not openly, but because of a breach of faith. It was safer that way, it was considered, and at the same time a victory won by treachery gave one a title for superior intelligence.

And indeed most people are more ready to call villainy cleverness than simple-mindedness honesty. They are proud of the first quality and ashamed of the second.

Love of power, operating through greed and through personal ambition, was the cause of all these evils. To this must be added the violent fanaticism which came into play once the struggle had broken out.

Leaders of parties in the cities had programs which appeared admirable—on one side political equality for the masses, on the other the safe and sound government of the aristocracy—but in professing to serve the public interest they were seeking to win the prizes for themselves.

In their struggles for ascendancy nothing was barred; terrible indeed were the actions to which they committed themselves, and in taking revenge they went farther still. Here they were deterred neither by the claims of justice nor by the interests of the state; their one standard was the pleasure of their own party at that particular moment, and so, either by means of condemning their enemies on an illegal vote or by violently usurping power over them, they were always ready to satisfy the hatreds of the hour.

Thus neither side had any use for conscientious motives; more interest was shown in those who could produce attractive arguments to justify some disgraceful action.

[… the search for truth strains the patience of most people, who would rather believe the first things that come to hand.]

As for the citizens who held moderate views, they were destroyed by both the extreme parties, either for not taking part in the struggle or in envy at the possibility that they might survive.

As the result of these revolutions, there was a general deterioration of character throughout the Greek world. The simple way of looking at things, which is so much the mark of a noble nature, was regarded as a ridiculous quality and soon ceased to exist. Society had become divided into two ideologically hostile camps, and each side viewed the other with suspicion.

As for ending this state of affairs, no guarantee could be given that would be trusted, no oath sworn that people would fear to break; everyone had come to the conclusion that it was hopeless to expect a permanent settlement and so, instead of being able to feel confident in others, they devoted their energies to providing against being injured themselves. As a rule those who were least remarkable for intelligence showed the greater powers of survival. Such people recognized their own deficiencies and the superior intelligence of their opponents; fearing that they might lose a debate or find themselves out-maneuvered in intrigue by their quick-witted enemies, they boldly launched straight into action; while their opponents, overconfident in the belief that they would see what was happening in advance, and not thinking it necessary to seize by force what they could secure by policy, were the more easily destroyed because they were off their guard.

Certainly it was in Corcyra that there occurred the first examples of the breakdown of law and order.

There was the revenge taken in their hour of triumph by those who had in the past been arrogantly oppressed instead of wisely governed; there were the wicked resolutions taken by those who, particularly under the pressure of misfortune, wished to escape from their usual poverty and coveted the property of their neighbors; there were the savage and pitiless actions into which men were carried not so much for the sake of gain as because they were swept away into an internecine struggle by their ungovernable passions.

Then, with the ordinary conventions of civilized life thrown into confusion, human nature, always ready to offend even where laws exist, showed itself proudly in its true colors, as something incapable of controlling passion, insubordinate to the idea of justice, the enemy to anything superior to itself; for, if it had not been for the pernicious power of envy, men would not so have exalted vengeance above innocence and profit above justice.

Indeed, it is true that in these acts of revenge on others men take it upon themselves to begin the process of repealing those general laws of humanity which are there to give a hope of salvation to all who are in distress, instead of leaving those laws in existence, remembering that there may come a time when they, too, will be in danger and will need their protection.

…

People always think the greatest war is the one they are fighting at the moment, and when that is over they are more impressed with wars of antiquity; but, even so, this war will prove, to all who look at the facts, that it was greater than the others.

Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, late 400s BC

Mr. Chairman, esteemed members of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, ladies and gentlemen.

The transition from years of confinement in a maximum-security prison to standing here before the representatives of 46 nations and 700 million people is a profound and surreal shift.

The experience of isolation for years in a small cell is difficult to convey; it strips away one’s sense of self, leaving only the raw essence of existence.

I am not yet fully equipped to speak about what I have endured – the relentless struggle to stay alive, both physically and mentally, nor can i speak yet about the deaths by hanging, murder, and medical neglect of my fellow prisoners.

I apologise in advance if my words falter or if my presentation lacks the polish you might expect in such a distinguished forum.

Isolation has taken its toll, which I am trying to unwind, and expressing myself in this setting is a challenge.

However, the gravity of this occasion and the weight of the issues at hand compel me to set aside my reservations and speak to you directly. I have traveled a long way, literally and figuratively, to be before you today.

Before our discussion or answering any questions you might have, I wish to thank PACE for its 2020 resolution (2317), which stated that my imprisonment set a dangerous precedent for journalists and noted that the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture called for my release.

I’m also grateful for PACE’s 2021 statement expressing concern over credible reports that US officials discussed my assassination, again calling for my prompt release.

And I commend the Legal Affairs and Human Rights Committee for commissioning a renowned rapporteur, Sunna Ævarsdóttir, to investigate the circumstances surrounding my detention and conviction and the consequent implications for human rights.

However, like so many of the efforts made in my case – whether they were from parliamentarians, presidents, prime ministers, the Pope, UN officials and diplomats, unions, legal and medical professionals, academics, activists, or citizens – none of them should have been necessary.

None of the statements, resolutions, reports, films, articles, events, fundraisers, protests, and letters over the last 14 years should have been necessary. But all of them were necessary because without them I never would have seen the light of day.

This unprecedented global effort was needed because of the legal protections that did exist, many existed only on paper or were not effective in any remotely reasonable time frame.

I eventually chose freedom over unrealisable justice, after being detained for years and facing a 175 year sentence with no effective remedy. Justice for me is now precluded, as the US government insisted in writing into its plea agreement that I cannot file a case at the European Court of Human Rights or even a freedom of information act request over what it did to me as a result of its extradition request.

I want to be totally clear. I am not free today because the system worked. I am free today because after years of incarceration because I plead guilty to journalism. I plead guilty to seeking information from a source. I plead guilty to obtaining information from a source. And I plead guilty to informing the public what that information was. I did not plead guilty to anything else. I hope my testimony today can serve to highlight the weaknesses of the existing safeguards and to help those whose cases are less visible but who are equally vulnerable.

As I emerge from the dungeon of Belmarsh, the truth now seems less discernible, and I regret how much ground has been lost during that time period when expressing the truth has been undermined, attacked, weakened, and diminished.

I see more impunity, more secrecy, more retaliation for telling the truth and more self censorship. It is hard not to draw a line from the US government’s prosecution of me – its crossing the rubicon by internationally criminalising journalism – to the chilled climate for freedom of expression now.

When I founded WikiLeaks, it was driven by a simple dream: to educate people about how the world works so that, through understanding, we might bring about something better.

Having a map of where we are lets us understand where we might go.

Knowledge empowers us to hold power to account and to demand justice where there is none.

We obtained and published truths about tens of thousands of hidden casualties of war and other unseen horrors, about programs of assassination, rendition, torture, and mass surveillance.

We revealed not just when and where these things happened but frequently the policies, the agreements, and structures behind them.

When we published Collateral Murder, the infamous gun camera footage of a US Apache helicopter crew eagerly blowing to pieces Iraqi journalists and their rescuers, the visual reality of modern warfare shocked the world.

But we also used interest in this video to direct people to the classified policies for when the US military could deploy lethal force in Iraq and how many civilians could be killed before gaining higher approval.

In fact, 40 years of my potential 175-year sentence was for obtaining and releasing these policies.

The practical political vision I was left with after being immersed in the world’s dirty wars and secret operations is simple: Let us stop gagging, torturing, and killing each other for a change. Get these fundamentals right and other political, economic, and scientific processes will have space to take care of the rest.

WikiLeaks’ work was deeply rooted in the principles that this Assembly stands for.

Journalism that elevated freedom of information and the public’s right to know found its natural operational home in Europe.

I lived in Paris and we had formal corporate registrations in France and in Iceland. Our journalistic and technical staff were spread throughout Europe. We published to the world from servers in based in France, Germany, and Norway.

But 14 years ago the United States military arrested one of our alleged whistleblowers, PFC Manning, a US intelligence analyst based in Iraq.

The US government concurrently launched an investigation against me and my colleagues.

The US government illicitly sent planes of agents to Iceland, paid bribes to an informer to steal our legal and journalistic work product, and without formal process pressured banks and financial services to block our subscriptions and freeze our accounts.

The UK government took part in some of this retribution. It admitted at the European Court of Human Rights that it had unlawfully spied on my UK lawyers during this time.

Ultimately this harassment was legally groundless. President Obama’s Justice Department chose not to indict me, recognizing that no crime had been committed.

The United States had never before prosecuted a publisher for publishing or obtaining government information. To do so would require a radical and ominous reinterpretation of the US Constitution.

In January 2017, Obama also commuted the sentence of Manning, who had been convicted of being one of my sources.

However, in February 2017, the landscape changed dramatically. President Trump had been elected. He appointed two wolves in MAGA hats: Mike Pompeo, a Kansas congressman and former arms industry executive, as CIA Director, and William Barr, a former CIA officer, as US Attorney General.

By March 2017, WikiLeaks had exposed the CIA’s infiltration of French political parties, its spying on French and German leaders, its spying on the European Central Bank, European economics ministries, and its standing orders to spy on French industry as a whole.

We revealed the CIA’s vast production of malware and viruses, its subversion of supply chains, its subversion of antivirus software, cars, smart TVs and iPhones.

CIA Director Pompeo launched a campaign of retribution.

It is now a matter of public record that under Pompeo’s explicit direction, the CIA drew up plans to kidnap and to assassinate me within the Ecuadorian Embassy in London and authorized going after my European colleagues, subjecting us to theft, hacking attacks, and the planting of false information.

My wife and my infant son were also targeted. A CIA asset was permanently assigned to track my wife and instructions were given to obtain DNA from my six month old son’s nappy.

This is the testimony of more than 30 current and former US intelligence officials speaking to the US press, which has been additionally corroborated by records seized in a prosecution brought against some of the CIA agents involved.

The CIA’s targeting of myself, my family and my associates through aggressive extrajudicial and extraterritorial means provides a rare insight into how powerful intelligence organisations engage in transnational repression. Such repressions are not unique. What is unique is that we know so much about this one due to numerous whistleblowers and to judicial investigations in Spain.

This Assembly is no stranger to extraterritorial abuses by the CIA.

PACE’s groundbreaking report on CIA renditions in Europe exposed how the CIA operated secret detention centres and conducted unlawful renditions on European soil, violating human rights and international law.

In February this year, the alleged source of some of our CIA revelations, former CIA officer Joshua Schulte, was sentenced to forty years in prison under conditions of extreme isolation.

His windows are blacked out, and a white noise machine plays 24 hours a day over his door so that he cannot even shout through it.

These conditions are more severe than those found in Guantanamo Bay.

Transnational repression is also conducted by abusing legal processes.

The lack of effective safeguards against this means that Europe is vulnerable to having its mutual legal assistance and extradition treaties hijacked by foreign powers to go after dissenting voices in Europe.

In Mike Pompeo’s memoirs, which I read in my prison cell, the former CIA Director bragged about how he pressured the US Attorney General to bring an extradition case against me in response to our publications about the CIA.

Indeed, acceding to Pompeo’s efforts, the US Attorney General reopened the investigation against me that Obama had closed and re-arrested Manning, this time as a witness.

Manning was held in prison for over a year and fined a thousand dollars a day in a formal attempt to coerce her into providing secret testimony against me.

She ended up attempting to take her own life.

We usually think of attempts to force journalists to testify against their sources. But Manning was now a source being forced to testify against their journalist.

By December 2017, CIA Director Pompeo had got his way, and the US government issued a warrant to the UK for my extradition.

The UK government kept the warrant secret from the public for two more years, while it, the US government, and the new president of Ecuador moved to shape the political, legal, and diplomatic grounds for my arrest.

When powerful nations feel entitled to target individuals beyond their borders, those individuals do not stand a chance unless there are strong safeguards in place and a state willing to enforce them. Without them no individual has a hope of defending themselves against the vast resources that a state aggressor can deploy.

If the situation were not already bad enough in my case, the US government asserted a dangerous new global legal position. Only US citizens have free speech rights. Europeans and other nationalities do not have free speech rights. But the US claims its Espionage Act still applies to them regardless of where they are. So Europeans in Europe must obey US secrecy law with no defences at all as far as the US government is concerned. An American in Paris can talk about what the US government is up to – perhaps. But for a Frenchman in Paris, to do so is a crime without any defence and he may be extradited just like me.

Now that one foreign government has formally asserted that Europeans have no free speech rights, a dangerous precedent has been set. Other powerful states will inevitably follow suit.

The war in Ukraine has already seen the criminalisation of journalists in Russia, but based on the precedent set in my extradition, there is nothing to stop Russia, or indeed any other state, from targeting European journalists, publishers, or even social media users, by claiming that their secrecy laws have been violated.

The rights of journalists and publishers within the European space are seriously threatened. Transnational repression cannot become the norm here.

As one of the world’s two great norm-setting institutions, PACE must act. The criminalisation of newsgathering activities is a threat to investigative journalism everywhere.

I was formally convicted, by a foreign power, for asking for, receiving, and publishing truthful information about that power while I was in Europe.

The fundamental issue is simple: Journalists should not be prosecuted for doing their jobs.

Journalism is not a crime; it is a pillar of a free and informed society.

Mr Chairman, distinguished delegates, if Europe is to have a future where the freedom to speak and the freedom to publish the truth are not privileges enjoyed by a few but rights guaranteed to all then it must act so that what has happened in my case never happens to anyone else.

I wish to express my deepest gratitude to this assembly, to the conservatives, social democrats, liberals, leftists, greens, and independents – who have supported me throughout this ordeal and to the countless individuals who have advocated tirelessly for my release.

It is heartening to know that in a world often divided by ideology and interests, there remains a shared commitment to the protection of essential human liberties.

Freedom of expression and all that flows from it is at a dark crossroads. I fear that unless norm setting institutions like PACE wake up to the gravity of the situation it will be too late.

Let us all commit to doing our part to ensure that the light of freedom never dims, that the pursuit of truth will live on, and that the voices of the many are not silenced by the interests of the few.

In ancient times, people would spend their summer vacations reading books. It is a little quaint nowadays, but you can still do that. Above, you can see two novels I have been reading recently: “War and Peace” (1868) by Lev Tolstoy, and “The Philosophy of the Apple Pie,” by Serena Bedini (2016). Strangely, these two widely different entities have something in common beyond being both definable with the same term, “novels.” Sometimes, differences are the key to understanding what some things have in common with each other. In this case, common element is evil. More exactly, love.

A few months ago, I found a copy of “War and Peace” on my shelves, realizing that I had never read it from start to finish. So, I set myself to engage in the task. My gosh, that was a task.

This novel is more than 1300 pages in its English translation. It starts by doing all those things that manuals about novel writing tell you a writer should never do. It is a slap in the face to the basic suggestion “don’t tell, show.” Tolstoy tells all the time and rarely shows. He tells in the “omniscient” viewpoint that has the writer playing God and telling readers about the details of how characters feel and think. And it starts by throwing in a true crowd of characters. Evidently, when the novel was written more than one and a half centuries ago, people were able to manage such a feat of reading it and enjoying it. At the time, it was what we would call today a “bestseller.”

For a modern reader, it is a feat comparable to climbing Mount Everest wearing tennis shoes — we are just not equipped for that kind of task. Anyway, I managed to do that, but I frequently lost track of what was going on. There are no less than five separate plots ongoing, and I often had to backtrack to understand who was doing exactly what and why. Let me tell you, some books on quantum mechanics I read in the past were easier. But I can tell you it was worth doing — oh, yes. Worth a lot.

It is a story that, if Tolstoy were alive today, could be lifted almost intact from its settings in the early 19th century to our times. Napoleon’s invasion of Russia in 1812, with all its ramifications in European politics, looks so much like what is happening today that it is both bewildering and mesmerizing to read how Tolstoy chronicles the story. Tolstoy is considered to be a genius as a novelist. He was a genius, full stop.

Before I tell you more about “War and Peace,” let me tell you something about another book I have been reading these days. It is “La Filosofia della Torta di Mele” (The Philosophy of the Apple Pie), a 2016 novel by the Italian writer Serena Bedini. In literar terms, it is the complete opposite to Tolstoy’s war and peace. It is light, like a pâte feuilletée, written from the personal viewpoint of a character whose main problem is a persistent cough. She engages in a search for a special recipe for an apple pie in the Tuscan countryside; not the same kind of drama you find when Napoleon’s armies invade Russia. An easy novel for the blasé 21st-century reader that you can complete in one hour or even less. It leaves you with the sensation of a session of wine tasting that didn’t make you drunk, just relaxed and happy.

Comparing the “philosophy of the apple pie” to “war and peace” looks like comparing a bicycle to a space shuttle. Yet, the universe is fractal, and the two novels do have one fundamental thing in common (besides the fact of being, well, “novels”). Before I tell you what is this thing in common, allow me to digress a little.

You know that one of the masterpieces of Jorge Luis Borges is “Historia del Guerrero y de la Cautiva” (history of the warrior and the prisoner). It is above and beyond the “masterpiece” term — it is on another celestial plane. And what makes it such a master-masterpiece is the audacity of the author, who puts together two stories so different that the very idea of trying makes your head buzz: what does a Germanic Warrior of the early Middle Ages have in common with an English woman captured by an Argentinean Indio tribe and wed to their chieftain? There is something, yes, a very fundamental thing: the acceptance of the “other”, that some of us call “love” which, if you think about that, means exactly “accepting the other even though different.” It is too easy to love something that’s exactly like you; that’s called “narcissism.”

Only a master-master writer such as Borges could take up the challenge of writing such a story. Picking up enormous challenges and meeting them in full is the hallmark of true genius. Now, of course, I don’t dare compare myself to Borges. I just like to point out how the two stories have exactly one point in common: they are acts of love. Read “War and Peace” from start to finish, and you’ll note something that you might have missed at first, but then it appears to you like a flash of light from heaven.

There is no evil in the whole novel.

There is drama, there are emotions, bewilderment, rage, folly, madness, the whole spectrum of human emotions is there in “War and Peace” — but you won’t find in it a character hating another character. Not that it is a light novel about apple pies and curing one’s cough. Tolstoy is a master writer who masters every facet of the events he describes. Even when he tells us of characters that he finds unpleasant, such as Napoleon himself, he describes them as bumbling idiots, which probably they were, but still human beings with all their feelings, their emotions, their desires. In the novel, French and Russian soldiers fight each other, but do not hate each other. When the French or the Russians take prisoners, they treat them as humanely as it is reasonably possible given the circumstances. Nowhere is there talk of exterminating inferior races nor of herrenvolk who should rule them. There is only one event in the novel that you could be said to be evil. It is a real historical event: the lynching of a Russian student named Vereshchagin guilty (perhaps) of having diffused pro-French pamphlets. But even Count Rostopchin, the person who acts in cold blood to direct a crowd to attack Vereshchagin, is described as having human feelings and conscious of his mistake.

You see the same in “The Philosophy of the Apple Pie,” where, of course, you won’t find battles or lynchings, but that has a light touch that makes everything glow with a certain inner light. A firefly in a hot summer night.

Now, think for a moment about the sad spectacle of our times, where hate for everything different has become the exchange coin of all discourse on the media or anywhere else. How is it that nothing can be done anymore without hating someone or something? What madness is overtaking us? We drink evil, eat evil, breathe evil, continuously see evil, think evil, speak evil.

Tolstoy, philosopher, and historian, couldn’t explain what madness had taken millions of Christians in 1812 to march on to massacre and slaughter other Christians without any conceivable reasons for doing that. He would be even more baffled by our age when millions of human beings can be so easily convinced to hate other human beings without any conceivable reason — they are not required to massacre them with their own hands but, at least, to acquiesce to their slaughter by hunger, artillery, and drones.

We know that love is mostly in the foolish things of the world that God chose to shame the wise and the weak things of the world that God chose to shame the strong. Maybe an apple pie is one of these foolish and weak things that are nevertheless God’s choice to send us a message.

What if there simply is no alternative to America's permanent war party?

[The firing of an Iskander ballistic missile. Photo Credit: By Mil.ru, CC]

What if politics in America plays out not so much via presidential elections, but through a constant, if often obscured, struggle between the permanent war party (the hawks) and, well, everyone else?   If this is the case, then it is not going to be enough to just hold our breath and wait for a more peace-loving Trump to assume office on January 20, at which time, supposedly, the threat of WWIII will be called off.  Instead, a strategy must be devised that hard-headedly accepts that the permanent war party is not going anywhere, even after January 20, and therefore a strategy must be devised which accepts this tragic circumstance, while still giving us a chance to survive.  Such is the conceptual framework which political historian Victor Taki uses as his starting point for discovering a response to the Ukraine war. -The Editors

In the old Soviet anecdote, Radio Armenia is asked about the likelihood that a Third World War will take place. Upon reflection, Radio Armenia declares that a Third World War is unlikely, but it expects such a ferocious fight for peace that not a single stone will be left standing. This joke about Soviet-American relations at the time of the (first) Cold War acquires an uncanny relevance today, now that President Biden’s permission to Ukraine to use American missiles for strikes inside Russia has shifted the discussion from possible scenarios for building a stable peace to ways of avoiding WWIII.

Paradoxically, an ostensible willingness on the part of the nascent Trump administration to end the war in Ukraine has helped the globalist hawks to secure Biden’s consent to take this highly provocative measure. Its limited potential impact on the purely military aspect of the Russian-Ukrainian confrontation has long been emphasized by this policy’s opponents. After all, the Russians have already placed their bombers out of range of those few ATACMS missiles and launchers that Ukraine currently has. However, any analyst who attempts to describe the actions of the Ukrainian leadership and its Western backers in terms of purely military rationality will necessarily miss the intended political and psychological effects of those actions.

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For almost a year the theme of “permitting” Ukraine to use the ATACMS and Storm Shadow/SCALP missiles for strikes into Russia’s interior has served as clickbait to offset Ukraine’s steady loss of ground. It has helped create the impression that it is Russia’s and not Ukraine’s fate that hangs in the balance, and that the articulate representatives of smaller or bigger (East) European nations can decide this fate by convincing the American president to call Putin’s bluff. After the clearly disappointing results of the US presidential elections from the perspective of Zelensky and his American and European backers, this “permission” becomes the last trump card to be thrown on the table in a reckless attempt to thwart Trump’s announced pacification of Ukraine.

The move is Machiavellian enough. In view of Putin’s September announcement that “authorization” of such strikes would be tantamount to NATO’s entry into the conflict, it will indeed be difficult for the Russian leader not to retaliate without losing face once these strikes actually take place. Russia’s retaliatory measures will in turn make it difficult for Trump to continue presenting Ukraine as “Biden’s war.” Apart from the danger of nuclear escalation that this scenario harbors, it will surely bury the prospect of a stable peace in Ukraine, however much the returning American president and his unchanging Russian counterpart would like to see it happen. 

The desire of some to stop the war turns out to be what gives others the opportunity to continue it. Given this circumstance, the doves might have to focus on ways of keeping the conflict within acceptable limits and forsake for the time being the different peace formulas meant to bring the war to a rapid end. Even if some variant of the “Vance Plan” (i. e. Ukraine’s neutral and demilitarized status plus the [existing] frontline as the new de factor Russian-Ukrainian border) could ultimately be accepted by Moscow, last Sunday’s news demonstrates that the global war party will not step back and simply let such an outcome materialize. 

Conclusion 

When an escalating provocation becomes the only way for the sidelined hawks not to lose badly from a prospective peace, the doves might need to reappraise their attitude towards the conflict itself. Continued within certain limits, the conflict represents the lowest common denominator between the otherwise incompatible interests and stakes of the different parties involved. At the same time, once the conflict becomes routine, the logic of de-escalation is likely to eventually prevail, if only because of the implacable law of universal entropy.  

Taking this into consideration, the doves’ strategy should be the opposite of the strategy of the Sicilian aristocracy at the time of Risorgimento, which was famously expressed in Giuseppe Lampedusa’s novel The Leopard (1958). Lampedusa’s characters repeatedly state that “[i]f [they] want things to stay as they are, things will have to change.” By contrast, today’s doves should realize that if they want things to change, things will have to stay as they are. This minimalist approach to conflict resolution in Ukraine might strike some as cynical in light of the daily losses of hundreds of soldiers on both sides of the frontline. However, a straighter road to peace contains the even deadlier traps that have been set by those who would rather flip over the grand Eurasian chessboard than admit their defeat.

A guest post by

Victor Taki

I am a historian interested in imperial Russia’s Balkan entanglements and the intellectual history of the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries. My latest book Russia’s Turkish Wars was published by the University of Toronto Press in 2024.

St Moses the Black, from the Damascene Gallery

You can describe the predicament that we’re in as an emergency … and your trial is to learn to be patient in an emergency.

Wendell Berry

One of my many problems as a human being is that I can’t quite shake my activist mindset. For many years of my life, as a younger man, I ‘self-identified’, to use a phrase we had never heard of, as something called an ‘activist.’ Activism comes in many political colours, but my particular shade was the left-green variety, which set out to save the natural world from the Machine’s toxic impacts. This was not a bad thing to do. Quite the opposite: in its aims if not always in its outcomes, it was a good and a necessary one. The problem was that it trained the mind to see the world in a certain way.

Thinking about it now, I see that perhaps this last claim is the wrong way around. Perhaps my mind always thought that way, and my ‘activism’ was a way of doing something with it. Or perhaps my society trained me to think like that. For I think it is safe to say that ‘activism’ is a child of the Western way of seeing. We are an ‘activist’ culture. We like to identify problems and then solve them. We like to generalise about particulars. We like abstractions. We exist to ‘save the world’ or to ‘fix’ it, or to offer ‘solutions’. It is never enough for us to live in this world, to be content with who and what we are, to accept God’s will. No, we have to improve things; remake them in our image. This is the activist mindset, and it has been elevated to the status of a grand moral cause. It is, I would say, the West’s reason to live: our Big Idea.

My two recent essays about what I called ‘the Void’ of Western culture were certainly the product of Western abstract reasoning. I was trying to get a handle on what had happened to ‘the West’ since its rejection of its founding faith. I suggested in part one that our present moment was not a time of ‘repaganisation’ so much as an empty ‘Void’ with no spiritual core to it at all. Then, in part two, I proposed that we were unconsciously replaying the Christian story in various secularised forms, but that this would not be enough to fill the Void. Some other spiritual force would come to inhabit our throne.

The problem with talking like this is that a logical question then arises: alright, then: what shall we do about this? Once you have offered a great big abstract idea about what’s wrong, you really need to follow it up with a great big abstract idea about how to put it right. This is how we got all the grand and terrible ideologies of the 20th century. My problem - again, one of my many problems - is that while I am still tempted sometimes to identify a Big Idea about what’s wrong, my faith in putting it right with another one has long since collapsed.

I used to believe in Big Movements and Big Ideas. I wrote whole books about them. Not any more. For a long time, I have believed something else instead: that if there is any world-saving to be done - if this notion is not in fact just hubristic and stupid in itself - then it is only going to come from the small, the local and, above all, the spiritual. And if there is no world-saving to be done - well, then our work remains exactly the same.

‘Our work’, in fact, is probably just another bit of generalising. Maybe I should instead just say ‘my work’ and stop trying to palm off responsibility for my own inquiries onto society as a whole. Because the question now, here in the Void, is probably the same one as we have always wrestled with: how, then, shall we live?

Once upon a time, I thought I knew the answer: we should get out there and ‘save the world’. Then, one day, I realised that Chesterton had the number on this way of thinking when he asked, ‘what’s wrong with the world?’ and concluded, ‘I am.’ Much later, I followed Chesterton along the unexpected path into the Christian Church, and now I have another, very different notion of what ‘our work’ is. Unfortunately, it is much harder than coming up with another clever Big Idea. It is also almost impossible to match the Christian solution to the secular problem - at least in the world’s terms. In the world’s terms, in fact, it makes no sense at all.

Rather like Christianity, in fact.

In my recent Erasmus Lecture for First Things magazine, I argued against one response to the Void that is growing in popularity: a certain type of ‘civilisational Christianity’, which sees the Christian way as a useful ‘story’ with which to ‘defend Western civilisation.’ This project seeks to use the ministry of Jesus to promote values which are directly opposed to those he actually taught us to live by. Some of the people pushing this supposedly ‘muscular’ brand of the faith are Christian, but many others are agnostics who see the Christian faith as a mythological prop with which they can support their favoured ideologies, be they liberalism, conservatism, capitalism, ‘the Enlightenment’ or whatever. Whether or not the Christian religion is true, in this argument, is less important than whether it is useful.

This is, in other words, just another breed of activism, and it is still at heart a secular project. It seeks to use an unworldly faith to achieve worldly ends, and it will fail for that reason. C. S. Lewis, who was apparently having to deal with the same thing seven decades ago, explained why:

Religions devised for a social purpose, like Roman emperor-worship or modern attempts to ‘sell Christianity as a means of saving civilisation’, do not come to much. The little knots of Friends who turn their backs on the ‘World’ are those who really transform it.

Lewis’s final sentence contains, to use activist language again, the ‘solution’ to the age of the Void. But what on Earth could it mean? And how could it ‘solve’ anything?

More than one person has approached me since my talk to ask if I was advocating ‘doing nothing’ in the face of all the bad things happening in the world. Christ’s clear instruction - ‘do not resist evil’ - is one of his hardest teachings, though there are many more we are equally horrified by: asking those who strike us to do it again; giving thieves more than they demand; loving those who hate us; doing good to those who abuse us. All of these are so counter-intuitive that they have the effect of throwing spiritual cold water into our faces.

But it gets worse. The most terrible teaching of all, at least for those of us who can’t shake off our activist brains, is the one that goes like this:

If anyone wants to come after Me, he must deny himself and take up his cross and follow Me. For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for My sake will find it. What will it profit a man if he gains the whole world, yet forfeits his soul?

I seem to think about this almost daily. What does it imply? The same thing, it seems, as all the other terrifying teachings: that God turns the world upside down. That in order to ‘save the world’ - and indeed our souls - we must be upside down too. That this whole faith, this whole path, is a paradox. That when we do the thing we do not want to do - the thing we fear - it turns out alright. That trying to ‘save the world’ may destroy it, but that sacrificing yourself for the world may, in the end, save it.

Every fibre of our being screams out against this. Christianity is otherworldly, and we are this-worldly. We want our faith to confirm our human ideas. But it doesn’t, and every time we try to make it do so, we get something like civilisational Christianity or ‘conservative’ Christianity; or, from the other side, liberation theology or the ‘progressive’ Catholic reforms of Vatican II. All of these, from different angles, want the faith to serve the world, because this is what we want. We all have to live our lives, after all.

And yet, on each occasion, the faith is bent by the world instead, and weakened. Why do we see so many young people, especially men, coming into Orthodoxy and ‘traditional’ Catholicism now? Because they want a faith that has not been bent in that way. Because they have seen what Seraphim Rose saw:

Christ is the only exit from this world. All other exits - sexual rapture, political utopia, economic independence - are but blind alleys in which rot the corpses of the many who have tried them.

What a mystery. What a weird, frightening, exciting mystery: that only through death can we achieve life. That he who tries to save his life loses it, and he who sacrifices his life saves it. That God’s wisdom is foolishness to the world, and that Christ has called us out of that world, to a place where we will be hated precisely because we walked away from it. The more you meditate on this, the more impossible it seems. Impossible and ridiculous and obviously true. Sometimes this whole 2000-year-old faith seems like a living koan. Chew on this until you are enlightened. Keep walking.

Christ allows the authorities to kill him, without resistance. His helpless and agonising death sparks a global revolution which is still playing out.

St Anthony gives away everything he owns, runs off to the desert and holes himself up in an unused tomb. His certifiable behaviour creates Christian monasticism by accident.

Thousands of ordinary Christians allow the Roman authorities to burn them alive, feed them to lions, crucify or impale them in public. They do not resist their fates, and they often die smiling. Their sacrifice ends up Christianising the entire empire.

Other ordinary Christians share everything they own, give away the rest, and tend to the sick and dying even if it kills them too. Their sacrifice of love spreads their faith across continents, without the need for either missionaries or state support.

Later Christians, also everyday people, withstand the mass brutality of the communist empire. As they are tortured and persecuted, and as their churches and monasteries are bombed and shuttered, they refuse violent resistance and continue practicing their faith. Their strength gives their Church a strength that the weakened Western Church(es), so long in power, can only envy as they crumble beneath the onslaught of the modern anti-culture.

There are many more such stories, and they all illustrate that living paradox: that only through sacrifice does Christianity ever flourish. This kind of sacrifice is not ‘giving up’, and neither is it ‘doing nothing.’ Do we think that St Anthony or St Francis were ‘giving up’? On what? On the world, perhaps; but not on God or on humanity. Quite the opposite. By walking towards God they made themselves more fully human. They made themselves more able to serve the world than someone who is immersed in it.

What does any of this have to do with the modern Void? Well, all I can say is that my intuition points me hard towards all of these stories and many more like them. What is the ‘solution’ to our modern ‘problem’? For a start, it is to stop thinking like that, because that is Machine thinking. We do not have a ‘problem’ that can be ‘solved’ by politics or war or top-down civilisational projects. We just have a repeat of a very old and familiar pattern: a turning-away from God, and thus from reality. This ‘problem’ is only ever ‘solved’ by turning back again, and societies can’t do that. Only people can, one at a time.

Damn, activism was so much easier.

Still, activism and action are not the same thing. Nobody is called on to be inactive, as if such a thing were even possible. Jesus was so active in the world that he regularly needed to retire from it just to get his breath back. Sitting in a cave all day praying is certainly a form of action: try it if you don’t believe me. But most of us are ‘in the world’, and so the world will challenge us. It will bring us evils like this. What are we to do with them? Stand up for the truth in love. Practice what we claim to believe. Loving our enemies implies that we have enemies - and we have them because we stand for something. Being called out of the world tends to make you unpopular.

Christianity, now as ever, is a radical counter-culture, and the most radical thing about it is what the Orthodox call kenosis: self-emptying. Emptying ourselves of all our petty passions so that we are better equipped to take the world into ourselves. How can you love your neighbour if you can’t see him? How many of us can even see ourselves? Sometimes I get glimpses from the outside and I feel like hiding under the duvet for the next four days.

What, then, should a Christian response to the Void be? I can only offer that same, stumbling intuition; that it needs to be sacrifice. Total sacrifice. There are some who say that such a notion is ‘weak’ or ‘winsome’; that what we need is battle and the crushing of the enemy. They can take their complaints to Christ and all the martyrs. Me, I can’t think of anything stronger than walking towards death confident of God’s love. Are you strong enough to be eaten by lions for your faith? I’m not. Sacrifice does not mean weakness: it requires great strength.

More to the point, it is sometimes the only realistic path. Mythologist Joseph Campbell had some advice about the correct road to take at times like these:

Schism in the soul, schism in the body social, will not be resolved by any scheme of return to the good old days (archaism), or by programs guaranteed to render an ideal projected future (futurism), or even by the most realistic, hardheaded work to weld together again the disintegrating elements. Only birth can conquer death - the birth, not of the old thing again, but of something new. 

Campbell was no Christian, but he knew what the Void represented, and he knew too what had to be done when the end of a culture arrived:

Peace then is a snare; war is a snare; change is a snare; permanence a snare. When our day is come for the victory of death, death closes in; there is nothing we can do, except be crucified - and resurrected; dismembered totally and then reborn.

Activism is no good to me anymore. I have had to let it go. All I am left with is this exhortation to sacrifice, and I don’t really know how to do it. But I know it has to be done. And I know that it has been, so many times, the paradoxical path to renewal. Change comes through walking away, walking through - and thus walking into something new. Only by losing our lives do we save them. This applies to cultures as well as people.

This means, I think, that we have to walk into the Void with a smile on our faces, like the Christians walked into the Roman arenas. Like them, we will be carrying, concealed beneath our cloaks, little spiritual bombs which will, in the end, dismantle their whole edifice. The way of Christ is a spiritual bomb. It detonates under all of our worldly projects, be they from left or right or up or down.

I suppose this comes down to radical trust. I wouldn’t pretend that I have this trust very much of the time. But I do have this intuition, which probably I cannot justify in words: that we are in a desert time again. A cave time. That we need to be ‘dismembered totally, and then reborn.’ That we need to go back to the root and the heart of the matter.

Once there was a slave in Egypt, who worked for a government official. Suspected of murder, he fled his employer and became a bandit, roaming the deserts with a feared gang. He murdered many, and robbed many more. One day, pursued by the authorities, he took refuge in a monastery. The life of the monks affected him so much that he gave up his old ways to become a Christian. He took the name Moses as his new identity.

Moses did not find the monastic life plain sailing, though. He was a violent man, and he struggled with his passions all his life. It was the struggle, though, that gave him the insight he needed. The battle he fought in his heart each day allowed him, perhaps, to see the same battles going on in the hearts of others. Once, he was invited to a meeting that had been called by the Abbot of the monastery to decide what to to about the misbehaviour of another monk. Moses turned up with a basket full of sand on his back. There was a hole in the basket, and the sand was pouring out all over the ground behind him. What are you doing? demanded the Abbot. My sins run out behind me where I cannot see them, replied Moses, and yet I am asked to judge the sins of another.

Moses the Black, or Moses the Egyptian, or sometimes Moses the Robber, is a saint these days, and what I like about him is that he could never have imagined such a thing. He had a deeply inauspicious start, and in that he was just like the rest of us. He was prone to discouragement on his spiritual path, too. To help combat it, the Abbot once took him up on to the monastery roof to see the sun rise. Look, Moses, he said. Only slowly do the rays of the sun drive away the night and usher in a new day, and thus, only slowly does one become a perfect contemplative.

Moses met a fitting end, as he perhaps knew he would. When the monastery was attacked by robbers, he refused to flee. By this time Moses was Abbot himself, and he refused the requests of some of his monks to be allowed to take up arms against the attackers. If they wanted, he told them, they could run, but he would stay. Christ, after all, had told him that those who picked up the sword would die by it. Moses had picked up the sword many times. Now it was his turn to face it. And he did, like a Christian. We are still telling his story 1500 years on.

We are all like Moses. We are carrying our manifold sins and imperfections and passions around on our backs all day, while the Void roars around us. But there is no battling the world, only ourselves. I wish I could clean up all these paradoxes with my Western left brain, but they are not to be conquered. As Moses knew in the end, war gets you nowhere. Only by surrendering do you truly become powerful. Again, the world is upside down. Again, we are called to do the impossible. The impossible turns out to be the true path to victory.

Here we are, at the end of a culture, in the howling Void we have made by walking away from God. How could we possibly save ourselves? I suppose we do it by just being Christians. By following our orders. Paradoxically as ever, we might find that, as a result, a Christian culture is born again and flourishes, for this is the only way they ever emerge: not through the sword, but through the cross.

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During his first term, President Trump decorated the Oval Office with a portrait of President Jackson.

Almost all commentators do not understand what the re-elected President of the United States, Donald Trump, is doing because they wrongly interpret his actions through the prism of Republican or woke ideologies. However, Trump, who has successively frequented the Democratic Party, the Tea Party, and today the Republican Party, claims to be a follower of a fourth ideology: Jacksonianism. During his first term, he decorated the Oval Office with a portrait of his predecessor Andrew Jackson.

But what is Jacksonianism?

Andrew Jackson, whose family had almost all died as a result of the wars against the English, was a lawyer. In this capacity, he wrote the Tennessee Constitution (1796). It was considered to give too much power to the Legislature and not enough to the Executive (the governor), and it did not establish a Supreme Court. However, it was hailed as "the least imperfect and most republican of constitutions" by the President of the United States, Thomas Jefferson.

Section 1 of Article III gives the right to vote to all free men (white and black), 21 years of age or older, who own freehold property or have resided in the county for six months. There is also a provision giving men serving in the militia the right to elect their officers. The Bill of Rights contained in it states that agnostics and atheists have the same rights as believers. These last three provisions were a direct blow to the puritans of the East Coast.

During the war between France and the United Kingdom in 1812, Paris and London imposed a naval blockade. It was to force the Russian Empire to respect it that Napoleon attacked Russia and because Her Majesty’s Prime Minister confiscated 900 American ships that were trying to trade with France that Washington once again went to war against its former colonizer.

During this "second war of independence", Andrew Jackson, who had become a general, distinguished himself as much by his military as by his diplomatic skills. He managed to maneuver Creek Indians, especially Cherokees. This war was useless because it ended with a treaty that established a return to pre-war conditions, but General Jackson won the first military victory in the history of the United States.

Andrew Jackson later retired to Florida, where he was elected governor. He had two British spies executed, although this was not explicitly within his power, which his opponents called an assassination. He ran for president of the United States in 1824 and won a majority of the popular vote and a majority of electors (designated by the governors), but, following a sleight of hand (a post-election agreement by the two other candidates), he was not considered elected. The electoral college (i.e. the representatives of the governors) nominated John Quincy Adams (as in 2020, it nominated Joe Biden against Donald Trump). Furious, he created the current Democratic Party to rally his supporters. The reality of the election stolen by the corrupt political class served as an electoral theme for Andrew Jackson (as for Donald Trump).

He was elected by a landslide in 1828, when many states had adopted the consultative vote to indicate to their governors the electors they should choose (Reminder: the United States Constitution does not indicate that the president must be elected by universal suffrage, direct or indirect, but by the representatives of the governors. In the words of the "founding fathers", it was especially not a question of establishing a democracy). He was therefore the first president elected, not by, but with the support of universal suffrage. In his inaugural address, he pledged to push the Indians back to the West. His popular base came to cheer him at the White House, but his supporters were so numerous to crowd that they devastated it and forced him to flee through a window.

Jackson had married young Rachel who believed she was divorced, but in reality the act had not been registered. His opponents made a scandal of it, accusing him of living with a married woman. In fact, Rachel died before his second term. He therefore entrusted the role of "first lady" to his niece Emily who married her cousin, Andrew Jackson Donelson, who was his private secretary.

When he formed his administration, Andrew Jackson dismissed corrupt officials. Unable to replace them, he ultimately appointed his relatives and friends. Jackson appointed one of his friends, John Eaton, Secretary of War. For reasons of convenience, he was staying at the White House during the absence of the president. The anti-Jacksonians then spread the rumor of a scandalous life of the Eaton couple.

These sex scandals, all invented by his puritan opponents, caused Jackson to separate from his vice president, who thought like the East Coast elite.

In 1830, Andrew Jackson passed the Indian Removal Act. It was about sharing the territory of North America by placing the Indians west of the Mississippi. 70 treaties were signed for $68 million in compensation. Jackson then opposed the legendary David Crockett (representative of Tennessee). About fifty tribes were displaced, including the Cherokees who also signed a peace treaty. The tribe appealed twice to the Supreme Court to clarify its meaning. The exodus of the Cherokees (the episode of the "Valley of Tears") was particularly hard, a quarter of them died during the displacement. However, this genocide did not take place under Jackson, but under the presidency of his successor. Today, the Cherokees, who, unlike the other Indians, did not question these treaties, are the only tribe that is prosperous.

Andrew Jackson, like George Washington and many others, was a slave owner. Two centuries later, the woke movement presents him as a slave owner and a slaughterer of Indians, an adversary of minorities. In reality, he had adopted as a son an Indian baby, orphaned by war, whom he named Lyncoya. He was therefore accused, by his contemporaries, of corrupting civilization by introducing an Indian to the governorship of Florida, then to the White House.

He approved of the "Monroe Doctrine" which meant, at that time, that the European powers abstained from colonizing the Americas while the United States forbade itself from intervening in Europe. This principle was only twisted half a century later to allow the United States to colonize Latin America without European rivalry.

In 1832, he vetoed a law extending a private/public Central Bank of the United States (initially created by Alexander Hamilton). Similarly, in 1836, he vetoed the creation of the Federal Reserve (today’s Fed). In the meantime, he made sure to repay all of the country’s public debt. This is the one and only time in their history that the United States was not in debt (the public debt is now $34.5 trillion, or 122.3% of GDP).

Andrew Jackson, who symbolizes in the popular imagination the resistance to the power of financiers, appears on the $20 bill. The Democrats wanted to remove his image to replace it with that of a black woman symbolizing the dignity of minorities.

His opposition to the central bank crystallized the conflict between the elites and the farmers. He believed that this bank had monopolistic powers and played a role in political life, implying that it corrupted parliamentarians so that they would vote against the interests of the people. Andrew Jackson managed to broaden the electoral base in many states so that at the end of his mandates, seven times more citizens could participate in the electoral consultations. His re-election, in 1833, was triumphant: 55% of the popular vote against 37% and 219 electors against 49 for his rival (Reminder: in the United States the president is not chosen by electors. The popular vote indicates to the governors the color of the electors that he asks him to choose. It is only these electors who designate the president). His opponents accused him of populism.

Then came the dispute over customs duties, which would turn into a civil war 25 years later (which, contrary to official history, has nothing to do with the abolition of slavery that both sides practiced). South Carolina decided not to apply federal customs tariffs (sectionalism). Andrew Jackson, presenting the danger of a civil war, condemned these actions as well as the idea of secession. He threatened to kill those who took this path. The president managed to restore calm and preserve the unity of the nation by successfully proposing a middle position between that of the southerners (free trade) and that of the northerners (protectionists).

Andrew Jackson was the first US president to be assassinated. At that time, presidents had no personal protection measures.

Andrew Jackson always defended the central power against the governors, not out of a centralizing principle, but out of distrust of local elites. He tried to prevent civil war by appealing to the people. In his view, the interests of peasants and early workers coincided, while those of large landowners and captains of industry diverged. In this conflict, the central bank played the main role by speculating internationally and making the US economy dependent on fluctuations in foreign markets. It was therefore he who concluded tariff agreements with the United Kingdom, Russia and the Ottoman Empire. He designed a vast network of means of communication across Latin America to export US products to the Far East. He negotiated with the European powers for indemnities for the Napoleonic Wars. He was intractable with the French king, Louis Philippe. He failed, however, to buy Texas from Mexico, probably because he surrounded himself with bad diplomats. Although the expression is later, Andrew Jackson began to think of the "manifest destiny of the United States" ("To extend ourselves over the whole continent which Providence has allotted us for the free development of our millions of inhabitants who multiply every year"). However, it was only after him that this concept justified the extension of "the perfect form of government" throughout the world.

Jackson’s puritan opponents presented him as an atheist fighting against the Churches, as a manipulator of the populace against the educated elites.

On July 13, 2024, an individual linked to the US Intelligence services in Ukraine attempted to assassinate candidate Donald Trump. The Secret Service, responsible for his security, acknowledged a malfunction, but none of its members were sanctioned.

Jackson and Trump

The example of General Jackson has become a doctrine under the leadership of the President’s private secretary, Andrew Jackson Donelson. It is organized around two strong ideas:
• From a tactical point of view: move the conflicts opposing the federated states to the federal power towards the division opposing the people to the puritanical elites of the East Coast.
• From a strategic point of view: substitute trade for war. Tactics For example, during his first term, President Trump pushed the Supreme Court to refer the issue of abortion to the responsibility of each federated state. This led to his woke opponents, including Kamala Harris, wrongly accusing him of banning abortion, even though it is legal in 38 states.

Tactics

For example, during his first term, President Trump pushed the Supreme Court to refer the issue of abortion to the responsibility of each federated state. As a result, his woke opponents, including Kamala Harris, wrongly accused him of having banned abortion when it is authorized in 38 states.

Andrew Jackson tried to reform the electoral system in order to give the right to vote to all males, regardless of their skin color. He only succeeded in imposing universal suffrage for the election of senators. Donald Trump intends to extend universal suffrage to the election of the president by eliminating the electoral college designated by the governors.

Let us remember that the Constitution was designed by large landowners who wanted to found a monarchy without nobility and especially not a democracy. In their minds, and in the text they wrote, there was not supposed to be universal suffrage. Contrary to what we think, the debate on the 2020 election refers first to the ambiguity of the text of this constitution and not to the counting of the votes cast. The massive re-election of Donald Trump has proven that the reality of the popular vote has nothing to do with the impressions of the ruling class.

Trump, like Jackson, has consistently relied on the popular vote. Both have designed “populist” election campaigns, meaning, in their case, that they respond to people’s expectations rather than endorse the solutions they imagine. Trump has relied on Steve Bannon’s Cambridge Analytica techniques: scanning social media to analyze what people think, then targeting specific profiles with messages designed for them. In contrast, his opponents have relied on Cass Sunstein’s behavioral and cognitive techniques.

A quick note on crowd reactions. Andrew Jackson’s supporters who came to cheer him devastated the White House, not because they wanted to destroy it, but because there were too many of them. Similarly, Donald Trump’s supporters damaged the Congress buildings, not because they wanted to destroy them, but because there were too many of them. There was never an attempted coup as their opponents claim, but rather a mismanagement of the crowd by the police as Joshua Philipp (The Real Story of January 6) has shown.

Strategy

Andrew Jackson wanted to end the Indian wars by compensating and deporting the tribes, with the mixed success that we have seen. It is to be feared that Donald Trump will approach the Israeli-Palestinian question in the same way by compensating the Palestinians and forcibly displacing them to the Sinai. However, this would be to put on the same level the “manifest destiny of the United States” and the expansionism of the “religious Zionists”. This risk exists, but for the moment, there is no evidence that this will be the case.

Andrew Jackson expanded U.S. trade around the world, negotiating bilateral (not multilateral) deals. Donald Trump, a businessman, has withdrawn from multilateral trade deals like the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). While his predecessors were about setting standards with their economic partners and then imposing them on China, Trump has no use for international standards as long as the U.S. can penetrate markets.

by John Helmer, Moscow 
  [@bears_with](https://twitter.com/bears_with)

In politics — the Kremlin is no exception — politicians don’t mean what they say.  In gardening, the plants always mean what they say. Gardeners, obliged to record what that is, are more likely than politicians to tell the truth.

In the records of Russian politicians since the Bolshevik Revolution, only one leading figure stands out as having the eye, ear, and nose for what plants have to tell. Not the present nor the founding one. The only gardener among them was, and remains, Joseph Stalin.

Nothing has been found that he wrote himself on his gardening except perhaps for marginal comments in books he read.  There is no mention of books on gardens or gardening in the classification system Stalin’s personal library adopted from 1925. He kept no garden diary. Without a diary recording the cycle of time and seasons, the planting map, colour scheme, productivity of bloom and fruit, infestation,  life and death, he must have committed his observations – “he possessed unbelievably acute powers of observation” (US Ambassador George Kennan) – to memory,  as peasants do.  

Unlike the tsars who employed English, Scots, and French architects and plantsmen to create gardens in St. Petersburg and Moscow in the royal fashions of Europe, defying the Russian winter to display their power and affluence without shovelling for themselves, Stalin dug his gardens himself in the warm weather of his dacha at Gagra, on the Black Sea. There he was photographed with his spade tending parallel, raised beds of lemon trees (lead image, top).  There is no sign of him wielding trowel and fork in the garden at Kuntsevo, his dacha near Moscow, where the photographs show him strolling in a semi-wild young forest or seated on a terrace in front of a hedge of viburnum. No record of Stalin digging at Kuntsevo has been found.

There is just one reminiscence of Stalin speaking to a visitor about his gardening. “Stalin is very fond of fruit trees. We came to a lemon bush. Joseph Vissarionovich carefully adjusted the bamboo stick to make it easier for the branches to hold large yellow fruits. ‘But many people thought that lemons would not grow here!’ [He said]  Stalin planted the first bushes himself, took care of them himself. And now he has convinced many gardeners by his example. He talks about it in an enthusiastic voice and often makes fun of would-be gardeners. We came to a large tree. I don’t know it at all. ‘What is the name of this tree?’ I asked Stalin. ‘Oh, this is a wonderful plant! It’s called eucalyptus,’ Joseph Vissarionovich said, plucking leaves from the tree. He rubs the leaves on his hand and gives everyone a sniff. ‘Do you feel how strong the smell is? This is the smell that the malaria mosquito does not tolerate.’ Joseph Vissarionovich tells how, with the help of eucalyptus, the Americans got rid of the mosquito during the construction of the Panama Canal, how the same eucalyptus helped with the work in swampy Australia. I felt very embarrassed that I did not know this wonderful tree.”   

Stalin read a great deal of philosophy, Roman and Russian history, art, and agronomy, and so he is bound to have reflected on the way in which the ideas of the classics he read took physical form in the gardens of the time. Especially so on the ancient idea of the paradise garden. It is this transference between thinking and digging, between the idea of paradise and the cultivation of it, which a new book, just published in London, explores in a radical way.

Olivia Laing, author of The Garden Against Time, In Search of a Common Paradise, knows nothing whatever about Russia or its gardens or its politics – except for propaganda on the Ukraine war she has absorbed unquestioningly and briefly repeats from the London newspapers. That’s a personal fault; it’s not a dissuasion from the book of reflections she has written out from her garden diary to an end which Russians understand to aim at, not less than the English.

In this wartime it’s necessary to keep reflecting on this end, on the aesthetic and philosophical purpose of the paradise garden. Laing begins her book and her garden with John Milton’s lament for gardening in wartime – in his case, the English Civil War of 1642-46 and the counter-revolution of 1660. “More safe I Sing with mortal voice, unchang’d”, Milton observed at the beginning of Book 7 of his Paradise Lost, “to hoarce or mute, though fall’n on evil dayes/ On evil dayes though fall’n, and evil tongues;/in darkness and with dangers compast round,/And solitude.”  

At the same time, Laing records for herself and Stalin certainly knew, “what I loved, aside from the work of making [the paradise garden], was the self-forgetfulness of the labour, the immersion in a kind of trance of attention that was as unlike daily thinking as dream logic is to waking.”

Source: [https://www.rulit.me/](https://www.rulit.me/books/vstrechi-s-tovarishchem-stalinym-read-60539-2.html)

Through the near eighty years of my life, I’ve made gardens in each of the houses I’ve lived in, four of them are in Russia. The first was on the bank of the Osetr (“sturgeon”) River, in the only brick cottage of the dying village of Ivanchikovo (“Little John”).

In a semi-circle around the front of the old house and its timbered verandah (Russian has also adopted the Hindi word, веранда), I excavated a trench in which I planned a tall hedge of roses, with underplanting of blue and white scilla siberica for the early spring, iris siberica for late spring, and mauve colchicums for late summer and autumn.

They were the evil days of Boris Yeltsin, however. Ivanchikovo’s collective farm had collapsed, and there was almost nothing, certainly no seed, no bulbs, not even flowers in the local shop or nearby market. What I should plant, I decided, was what I could fossick from the wild of the untended sovkhoz fields, the verge of the river stretching up to Kukovo (“Baker”) and down to Tregubovo (“Three Lips”), and the forest nearby. I started with wild roses. 

I also asked for the advice of the other villagers, my neighbours. They were unused to speaking with foreigners: the last of them they told me were German soldiers in retreat fifty years before. The only gardener in the village was a Soviet Army officer who had been made redundant at the rank of Lieutenant Colonel and pensioned off with a pittance. In his cottage garden he had planted an orchard of apple trees. By patient experiment and skilful grafting, he explained, it was his ambition to revive as many of the old varieties of Russian apples as he could find. His paradise garden was filled with apples. Ground flowers he had excluded,  he told me.

In the rear garden of my cottage the hedgerows were composed of raspberry and blueberry bushes. A tree of Bolshevik vintage cast ample shade on to the narrow sward. Shade meant more specialized plantings for which there was no obvious source but the forest. For the time being, my priority was the front garden.

After a week of hiking, searching and excavating I had enough wild rose bushes to fill the trench and promise a luxuriant screen of flowers, blooming twice in the summer, I hoped. To cheer the poverty-stricken husband and wife on the left who had taken my fence palings for their oven fire, and to deter the wealthy transplant from Moscow who was erecting a double-storey house to the right, I engaged the local priest to conduct a ceremony of exorcising the evil spirits inside and around the house and to bless the garden for fertility and beauty.

But money and force defeated the plan. Without a preliminary word, the neighbours from Moscow — formerly high-ranking officials of the now defunct Communist Party — arranged for  construction trucks to make their deliveries of bricks, cement, timber, and workers by driving  across my garden. Dozens of tyre tracks destroyed the roses.

This was a violation of my private property rights, as the Yeltsin regime had announced them. But like everything else he did, this was false, and for me there was no recourse. My little paradise garden, blessed by the Church, hadn’t been nipped in the bud. It had been annihilated before it had a chance to bud.

My second Russian garden was planned and planted at the same time in Moscow. It was in the square in front of my apartment house at Kolobovsky pereulog (“Bun Lane”), in the Tverskaya  district of the old city. The building dated from the time of reconstruction after Napoleon had left. The square had been intended for the residents, my new neighbours. Its four corners had been planted with shade trees which had survived the Revolution and the Germans. But the space underneath had long ago been covered by refuse, then cars in various states of disrepair, poisoned by patches of oil, suffocated by weeds.

As the only non-Russian to own an apartment in the building, I was the only one to think of spending personal cash on the public space in front, for the benefit of our collective, so to speak. My neighbours gave their consent to my tossing my money on to the garden.

To remove the cars first of all, I installed a waist-high fence around the square in the wrought-iron style of the century before. The next task was to clear the surface rubbish; dig up the impoverished sandy soil, adding black top soil and worms; prune the dead boughs of the trees and fertilize the roots; lay down out diagonal paths from corner to corner; and plan plantings of spring and autumn bulbs in the quadrants formed by the paths, as well as an annual display in a raised circle in the centre.

Restored public benches on Strastnoy Boulevard.

Four old wrought-iron park benches, salvaged from elsewhere in the city, were placed in the quadrants, bolted to concrete foundations sunk into the soil, repainted. The babushki of the house were invited to take their morning and afternoon sittings there. They would become the guardians of the budding paradise. They shouted off drivers attempting to repair and oil their engines. They stopped dog defecation. They prevented anyone cutting the spring display of snowdrops and daffodils. In thus defending the Kolobovsky Pereulog garden, these women were, unlike my neighbour at Ivanchikovo, true communists.

Both gardens were ruined by theft.  To steal is a venal sin but in Russia not a mortal one. It was common in Russia, not only during Yeltsin’s time in the Kremlin, but after. It continues for me. Venal sins can be repented, reversed, compensated. But to ruin a garden is a mortal sin. No  punishment fits that crime.

This is because the paradise garden is a morality play on the soil —  as Laing has discovered, without her forgetting the deadly simple mechanics of how the land is owned, the labour paid for, the neighbours fenced off.  The English garden is not such a thing, Laing concludes in a revolutionary fashion.  Rather, it’s a “confidence trick. To reshape the land in your own image,  to reorder it so that you inhabit  the centre and own the view. To fake nature so insidiously that even now those landscapes  and the power relations they embody are mistaken for being just the way things are, natural, eternal, blandly reassuring…”

In trying to understand the idea of the paradise garden and to make it for herself, Laing writes of the English precursors of communism – the Levellers  and the Diggers of the Civil War period. About them, she notes, they are remembered for “declaring the earth to be a ‘common treasury’, given by God equally to all men and never intended to be bought or sold.” Laing has studied Karl Marx and the English socialists, some of whom gardened seriously  – William Cobbett, William Morris, George Orwell, E.P. Thompson. With their point of view, Laing goes on the attack against the English style in gardens – the fashion which was aped by Catherine the Great and her tsarist successors  in those palatial gardens which remain on show in St. Petersburg.

One of the “English views” in Catherine the Great’s garden at Tsarskoye Selo, nationalized in 1917.

This month it is the 93rd anniversary of Stalin’s idea, implemented by the Central Committee on [November 3, 1931](https://johnhelmer.net/russian-gardens-and-the-war-against-the-anglo-american-grass-sward/), to design, build, and pay for public parks and gardens as national policy. The pleasure garden of the rich and powerful for the preceding three thousand years had been revolutionized and democratized for the first time. “The parks of culture and rest,” the Central Committee declared, “represent a new kind of institution that has numerous political and didactic obligations to fulfil, all of which are for the wellbeing of millions of workers”.  The creation of Moscow’s Gorky Park had been an idea of Stalin’s inside the new layout he conceived for Moscow from Red Square to Sparrow Hills (called Lenin Hills between 1935 and 1999).  

For Laing, the privatisation of peasant farmland, the enclosures by Act of Parliament, the replacement of the village common with the aristocratic lawn and the ha-ha  to view it, the creations of Capability Brown and Humphry Repton – all are to be understood now to be “status symbols and adornments, a way for money  to announce its presence in a more comely or displaced form.”

“But where does the money come from?” Laing asks. Her answer is unique in the modern English gardening literature. In probing for the origins of the great English gardens, Laing goes from the corrupt Elizabethan trade and privateering concessions of the 16th century to the sugar and tobacco plantations of the US and Caribbean worked by slavery and the East India Company slaughter of India during the 18th and 19th centuries.  “There are gardens that have come at far too high a price, and I am glad that Crowfield is now obliterated, and that the historians at Middleton Place have tried to recover and foreground the stories of the enslaved people who build and paid for its garden, with its rare camellias and azaleas.”

Laing is confident enough of her own values to record her debts for gardening imagination and skill to the English garden writers Monty Don, Beth Chatto, Rosemary Verey,  Christopher Lloyd, and to several garden custodians at the university colleges of Oxford and Cambridge. She leaves out the best known of them, Robin Lane Fox, the classics don at New College where he has been the Garden Master.  Lane Fox is also the longest continuing garden  columnist for the Financial Times, platform for the display of what very large sums of money can buy. Laing calls that money laundering – “us[ing] gardens to cleanse and frame their reputation …to rise above the degraded and exploitative sources of their wealth.”

Source: [https://johnhelmer.net/](https://johnhelmer.net/cabbages-and-rothschilds-%e2%80%93-the-special-horticulture-of-spreading-manure-grafting-and-forcing-for-the-enrichment-of-everybody-%e2%80%93-well-almost-everybody-%e2%80%93-well-somebody-with-ta/)

For the land, the peasants are bound to fight the aristos, the communists against the oligarchs, the garden writers against each other – for the idea of the land and the idea of the paradise garden are collectively and personally a moral geography that’s worth fighting for.  

Laing correctly identifies this idea with John Clare (right), the 19th century farm labourer poet who ended up locked in an asylum. “His knowledge,” Laing writes, “was another way of saying his familiar ground , the place he knew… that knowledge  is itself a function of place, in which one’s capacity  to make sense of things, to generate understanding , is a product of being in some way rooted  and at home, and that, even more strikingly, this sense of home  is reciprocal: that one doesn’t  just know, but is known.”

In the story of this book, Laing succeeds in keeping the garden she makes. Milton wasn’t so fortunate. He went blind and was pursued by the counter-revolutionaries empowered by King Charles II. They are the “evil tongues”, the “dangers compast round”, and the “evil dayes” against which Milton wrote his Paradise Lost, “propelled” — Laing retells the story — “by an almost intolerable need to understand what it means to have failed and what one ought to do once failure has occurred, both by imagining a process of future reparations and by re-envisaging  the nature of an intact , untarnished world.”

Laing’s has got the question right, but not quite the answer. “A garden dies with its owner”, her book concludes.

I believe the opposite, and Laing is honest enough to allow it — the owner may die, the garden may remain in place. I am obliged to conclude so because my third garden in Moscow is being stolen from me as I write, but not quite yet.

The fourth, in the village of Kurlek, by the Tom River in the Tomsk region of Siberia, is the garden of Tatiana Vasilievna Turitsyna, my dead wife.   

By the acts of oligarch Oleg Deripaska and Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, this garden too is being stolen from me, but not quite yet.

Yet is a long time, mind you.

For how long, Old Blind John claimed optimism at the very end of his Paradise Lost, “Som natural tears they drop’d, but wip’d them soon;/The World was all before them, where to choose/Thir place of rest, and Providence thir guide.” In the Russian politics I know, as Stalin knew, there is no place of rest and no Providence.

by Editor - Sunday, November 17th, 2024

Mike Benz delivered this lecture at Hillsdale College reviewing the origin and structure of the "intelligence state," often referred to as "the blob."

Timestamps:
1:19: The Inauguration of Organized Political Warfare
11:20: NSC 10/2 and the Plausible Deniability Doctrine
15:08: Diplomacy Thru Duplicity
16:04: Smith-Mundt Act, The CIA Media Empire
19:40: The Department of Dirty Tricks
20:36: The CIA As Servant Of The State…

— Mike Benz (@MikeBenzCyber) September 24, 2024

Selected transcript:

MIKE BENZ: The "intelligence state" is a concept that implies that intelligence has taken over the state and that it has somehow gone rogue. Something has gone very wrong -- that intelligence, which is supposed to serve the state, has subsumed it. I will present the essential history of the intelligence state, but there is something beyond it that I think, beginning with, helps elucidate.

...

We'll sort of speed-run the essential history all the way up to the present, but we're going to start in the year 1948. This is the sort of "Year Zero" of the founding of the intelligence capacities of the U.S. government. Instead of learning what you'd find in an ordinary history book, we're going to start with a document that I'm curious if anyone has ever seen, called "The Inauguration of Organized Political Warfare."

Did you know that George Kennan, in 1948, wrote this memo called "The Inauguration of Organized Political Warfare"?

George Kennan is known as a godfather figure of American diplomacy and the Central Intelligence Agency. He was famous for this "long telegram" and was the chief strategist of the containment strategy against the Soviet Union during the Cold War.

But before all that, when all of this was getting started, he penned this top-secret memo, which was not declassified for 60 years. It was declassified in 2005, and I think it helps elucidate the story as we're going to proceed here. We're going to go through this memo, but I want to give some context first. "The Inauguration of Organized Political Warfare" was written just 12 days after the Central Intelligence Agency did its first government overthrow operation, its first election-rigging event. That was on April 18, 1948, and this memo was written just 12 days after that.

The particular focus was what had just happened in Italy. Italy was having its first democratic election after World War II, and it posited a U.S.-backed candidate on one side and a Russia-backed candidate on the other. When the rules-based international order was being established in 1948, we had these coordinating bodies through the National Security Council. The very first memo, which I have on screen here, emphasizes how important it is for the U.S. to control the political affairs of Italy. You'll see National Security Council Memo 1-1 is titled "The Position of the United States with Respect to Italy."

Kennan wrote, "Italy is obviously the key point. If the Communists win there, our whole position would probably be undermined."

What happened in this case was that in 1947, the Central Intelligence Agency was established under the National Security Act, and it was originally intended to focus on gathering and analyzing intelligence. But because of the key importance perceived by the U.S. State Department to influence the Italian election, the CIA developed a makeshift, ad hoc, thrown-together-at-the-last-minute, $250 million operation to swing that election in favor of the U.S.-preferred candidate. I have some statistics here and a little bit of context because we’re going to see this as a repeating theme.

About $250 million of U.S. taxpayer money was spent to prop up our preferred candidate. The CIA made use of off-the-books sources of funding to finance it. Bags of money were delivered to selected politicians to pay for their political expenses, campaign expenses, posters, and pamphlets. We threatened the Italian government that aid money from the U.S. would be withheld if the wrong person got elected. Newly created CIA proprietary media organizations like Voice of America Radio and Radio Free Europe set up a vast spawn of Italian news networks to create a surround sound inside that country to broadcast U.S. propaganda and messaging. We funneled aid money through churches and charity fronts to mafia and union street muscle. We worked with Hollywood to project Greta Garbo films and others into the country.

The reason I’m starting with this context is not just because it will help explain the rationale for the beast that was created six weeks after this memo was penned—also by George Kennan—but to help understand that this is the intelligence services co-opting all of these organizations. This means that when the U.S. government provides funding or assistance, suddenly the churches they were working with are no longer simply churches—they are instruments of statecraft. The nonprofit charities are no longer simply charities; they become instruments of statecraft. The media is no longer independent; it becomes an instrument of statecraft. Hollywood becomes an instrument of statecraft, and organized criminal mafias do as well.

The predecessor to the CIA, the OSS, together with our War Department (as it was called at the time), was working with criminal groups in Italy as well as with church organizations and others who were being prosecuted by Mussolini. They served as a sort of guerilla resistance to assist the U.S. Army and intelligence operations. We had that network established. It was unseemly but seen as necessary in a time of war, but it was maintained in times of peace for political warfare. Suddenly, organized crime becomes not a criminal offense but rather a sanctioned instrument of statecraft. To drive that point home, Miles Copeland, one of the founding members of the CIA, wrote in his own book that, "Had it not been for the mafia, the Communists would by now be in control of Italy."

Why was all this necessary? Well, in the eyes of the U.S. State Department, we would have lost the election if the intelligence community hadn’t rigged it. They assessed that 60% of the vote would have gone to the Communists -- but for CIA intervention.
I urge you throughout this to remember that when you hear "Communist" or "fascist" in the historical data points we’re going to go over, understand that in the post-2016 world, all of this infrastructure has been repurposed to take out populism. Every time you see "Communism," as much as we abhor that with every fiber in our souls, the biggest threat right now to the intelligence state and to the "blob" (as we’ll come to discuss) is domestic populism. This is actually the language they use.

When you hear them say "the Communists would have won," today they use the exact same language to describe stopping the rise of populism and stopping populist political candidates.

...

This is from George Kennan, April 30th, 1948, just the week before the Central Intelligence Agency had achieved this incredible win in Italy. George Kennan, the State Department, and the White House were so overwhelmed with delight about the world of possibility if we could simply scale the Italian operation.

But the problem was, it was very much against everything this country had stood for, for a century and a half before that. I'm going to read some of the highlighted items here. You’ll see the phrase "political warfare" dots this in a very deliberate way: organized political warfare by the U.S. government to further our national objectives, to further our influence and authority using means both overt and covert, including black psychological warfare and many other techniques.

George Kennan says here, "We have been handicapped, however, by a popular attachment to the concept of a basic difference between peace and war." You’ll see he actually crossed out part of the draft because, again, this is a top-secret memo that was written in 1948 and wasn’t declassified until 2005. The hard record preserves his own scrawls. You’ll see at the bottom, it says, "We’re hamstrung by this basic difference between peace and war, by our public’s yearnings." Then that’s crossed out, and it says, "by a national tendency to seek a political cure-all and a reluctance to recognize the realities of international relations."

Basically, he is saying, "Listen, we answer to the voters, the people, and they’re not going to like this. They don’t understand international relations. They think there’s a difference between peace and war." World War II is over; it just ended three years ago. But if we go into peacetime mode and do not continue political warfare, then we will lose the opportunity to dominate the 20th century.

You’ll see here references to the Italian elections, right? We had just engaged in the Italian elections 12 days prior. This political warfare has to be directed and coordinated by the Department of State. We’ll come back to that because, as we’ll see, the shape of the intelligence state extends far beyond intelligence—it’s really a tool of statecraft.

Here is an interesting and telling vision from this CIA godfather. It says, "We cannot afford in the future, in perhaps more serious political crises, to scramble into impromptu covert operations as we did at the time of the Italian elections." He’s saying, we did this. It was great. It was amazing. But we need this capacity everywhere. We need it in every country on earth where there might be a political crisis, where there might be a need to protect U.S. national interests, trade interests, financial interests, or security interests. We need the same network we had in Italy, working with everyone from cultural influencers to the media, to the churches, to the charities, to organized crime networks—even if we don’t use it, just in case we need it. So we don’t need to scramble if an opposition politician decides to go sideways against a U.S. national interest agenda.

I’m setting the stage with that before we go back in time and go through the history of this. Less than two months after George Kennan wrote "The Inauguration of Organized Political Warfare," saying, "Since 1789, we have never done this sort of thing in any organized fashion. The American people aren’t going to like it, but we have to do it." Less than two months after that, George Kennan sponsored the very act that would permanently change the structure of the American government and the way our country works.

This was National Security Council Memo 10/2. Now, for folks who are not familiar, the National Security Council (NSC) is called the "interagency." It coordinates with the State Department, the Defense Department, the CIA -- everyone -- so that they are all working in a complementary fashion. It's in the White House and provides executive oversight of everything.

You’ll see this memo here, NSC 10-2, and it’s right here on the State Department website, under state.gov. What I’m about to read here sanctioned U.S. intelligence to carry out a broad range of covert operations, including propaganda, economic warfare, demolition, subversion, and sabotage. It was sponsored by George Kennan. He pushed for this right after he wrote "The Inauguration of Organized Political Warfare," but he would later say it was the greatest mistake he ever made because of the monster it created.

What NSC 10-2 did was give the intelligence community -- this burgeoning, newly created CIA -- and what we now have, 17 intelligence agencies plus the ODNI, not just spy organizations but lie organizations. What I mean by that is because of the phrase used in NSC 10-2, I'm going to read it, "All of these activities, which are normally illegal, can be carried out so long as they are planned and executed so that any U.S. government responsibility for them is not evident to unauthorized persons, and if uncovered, the U.S. government can plausibly deny any responsibility for them."

This is from 1948: "All covert operations, including sabotage, demolition, and controlling the media, are now legal as long as they are planned and executed so that any U.S. government responsibility is not evident to unauthorized persons." So, effectively, you are cast out of Eden. If you eat the apple from the tree of knowledge, you are not allowed to know, and they are not allowed to tell you. Their job is to lie to you. If they get caught, the U.S. government can then lie above the agency level, above the CIA. The State Department gets to lie to the world because the CIA had these covert links, and they could say it was not an officially sanctioned U.S. government operation -- something went rogue, someone wasn’t authorized, someone took it into their own hands.

I’m going to read this analysis that I think is a useful summary: "Plausible deniability encouraged the autonomy of this newly created CIA, which was created the year earlier, and other covert action agencies in order to protect the visible authorities of the government."

We’re going to come back to that as we discuss the power structure of all these different organizations. But I want to drive this point home immediately, which is that this was seen as a major growth opportunity because of how effective it was in the 1940s and 1950s to be able to take over the world through diplomacy and duplicity.

The problem with diplomacy through duplicity is that plausible deniability is the core doctrine that governs the interagency, which controls all major U.S. government operations on national security, foreign policy, and international interests. Because you lie to the outside world, you also need to lie to your own citizens to prevent the outside from finding out.

While the lies may help you successfully acquire an empire, you now have to permanently maintain an empire of lies, not just abroad but at home.

...

In 1948, when the founding fathers of the intelligence state were setting this all up, they were intensely aware of the monster they were creating. In 1948, Congress passed the Smith-Mundt Act, because, again, in 1948, as all of this was being established, the CIA was brand new, and NSC 10-2 had just come out. Congress said, "Okay, okay, listen, you guys are creating a monster here. We want to make sure that we don't build this empire of lies and that Americans are not being inundated with this sprawl of information control that you are conducting around the world in order to conduct organized political warfare on all countries on planet Earth."

Many folks in this room are probably familiar with what happened during the Obama administration, which repealed this essential safeguard, which had been with us since the moment all of this was created in 1948, with very little fanfare. It was tucked into an NDAA. It was really only discovered by the public after the damage had been done that the Smith-Mundt Act was modernized to get rid of that restriction. It was effectively amended, and the headline was, "U.S. Repeals Propaganda Ban, Spreads Government-Made News to Americans."

For decades, this anti-propaganda law prevented the U.S. government's mammoth broadcasting arms from delivering programming to American audiences. "Mammoth" is not a big enough word. After World War II, at this exact time in 1948, the UN Declaration for Human Rights came out and forbade the territorial acquisition of other countries by military force. Against these new international norms and standards, international law, you could not simply have a military occupation of the Philippines like the United States had in the early 1900s.

So, with hard power ruled out as the dominant means to have an empire, the U.S. transitioned to a soft power empire, dominated by agencies like the Central Intelligence Agency, democracy promotion programs at the State Department, later USAID, and the whole swarm army we're about to meet. But even right out of the gate, the Central Intelligence Agency immediately moved into the media space to control the messaging that people around the world experienced.

...

One essential way to cut through how this is structured is to understand that there is a key distinction between the American homeland and the American Empire. We live in the American homeland, but the American Empire is everywhere else.

Today, even though all the major U.S.-domiciled corporations get the lion's share of their markets, revenues, and supply chain resources from everywhere else on Earth, we, as a country, pale in comparison to the globe. The issue arises when people on the homeland want to put their own interests first—they run up against the empire managers, and therefore against this blob apparatus, and, by extension, the intelligence state.

In this inauguration of organized political warfare, you see that even though the emphasis is on giving the CIA this capacity, the entire operation is coordinated by the U.S. State Department, which does not have a plausible deniability license. It’s supposed to be our official U.S. government policy, but secretly, the CIA answers to the State Department in all things.

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What happened after 1948? There is a list of CIA regime change operations after Italy. The CIA orchestrated coups in 85 countries following the Italy operation that George Kennan and other State Department officials were so inspired by. They did achieve their goal of expanding this strategy to virtually every country, continent, and region on earth and building these networks, whether they were needed or not.

Fifty of these regime change operations took place during the Eisenhower administration between 1952 and 1960. By the early 1960s, this began to come home, leading to a chain of events that caused the first real structural change to the intelligence state. During that time, the intelligence state was targeting the New Left within the Democratic Party in much the same way it is targeting the populist right today. There was a new faction within the Democratic Party, made up of not necessarily limousine liberals but anti-war protesters, civil rights activists, and supporters of third-world people's movements. Many in the Democratic Party were socially, politically, and informationally aligned with countries targeted by the CIA.

The CIA was seen as a right-wing force because it was primarily targeting socialist and communist governments, aiming to privatize state-held industries. The agency began to do the same things against the left that they are now doing against the populist right.

Huge CIA operations were reported in the U.S. against anti-war forces. The CIA was bribing the National Association of Students and launched something called Operation Chaos, which was designed to permanently shape the composition of the Democratic Party by purging the popular populist leftist faction. Does that sound familiar? The intelligence state isn’t targeting George Bush, Mitt Romney, or John McCain—it is targeting one faction of the conservative wing of the GOP in order to purge that out.

The next image I have here on screen is COINTELPRO. This was on the FBI side, but it was done in tandem with the Central Intelligence Agency. The "COINTEL" refers to counterintelligence, which is basically when the FBI deals with threats from foreign countries using this foreign predicate. I’ll get to that a little more in a second.

Now, the first thing that forced the restructuring of the intelligence state into its current form was a series of scandals that led up to and ultimately culminated in what was called the Church Committee hearings. Also, there was the Pike Committee. On the left here is Frank Church. He was the Democratic senator who spearheaded those hearings. It was the first time the Central Intelligence Agency ever had congressional oversight. It had been around for 30 years, and members of Congress were not allowed to see what it was doing. There was no oversight, no accountability—no one was saying, "Hey, let me look at that." There was no gang of eight. It was only with the Church Committee that we created a House Intelligence Committee to allow a select handful of members of the House to conduct oversight. It was only then that we created the Senate Intelligence Committee to do the same on the Senate side.

This is Frank Church here on the left, holding up the famous "heart attack gun," which was in the CIA assassination guide and part of their research and development. They were assassinating world leaders, political dissidents all over the world, and were working on ever more extreme ways to kill people and get away with it, adhering to their government license for plausible deniability. The heart attack gun, which you can look up on YouTube, was discussed in an open hearing of Congress, with the director of the Central Intelligence Agency testifying. It was essentially a dart gun that induced a heart attack, making the cause of death appear natural.

On the right here is Christopher Pyle. He was one of the first whistleblowers to expose what was going on—not from the CIA, but from the U.S. Army. He provided very damning evidence that the U.S. military had active operations to survey and infiltrate any public meeting of 20 or more people in the United States, regardless of the group’s political affiliation—right, left, mothers’ knitting groups, religious groups, etc. He revealed troves of documents showing that the U.S. military perceived it was necessary to maintain political control over the civilian population to prevent any popular bills from getting passed or people from getting elected who might undermine the military agenda. This amounted to a basic usurpation of the concept of civilian-run government in a democracy.

At that time, many thought leaders within the targeted section of the Democratic Party began to realize, due to these disclosures, that almost everything around them was not real—their media, culture, and music were all being used as instruments of statecraft, often directly against them. On the left is a memo from the Church Committee hearing notes on the CIA's use of journalists and clergy in intelligence operations. The center picture is the Congress for Cultural Freedom, a giant network of CIA-funded and directed cultural and media institutions, primarily in Europe but extending globally. The CIA co-opted thought leaders in leading magazines, musicians, poets, and even hosted musical events to attract people in dozens of countries, aligning them with the U.S. State Department agenda.

Very famous figures were involved in this, including many from spaces you might not expect. For example, Gloria Steinem, the famous feminist, was funded by the Congress for Cultural Freedom. At the time, our State Department was using this as a means to win the Cold War by promoting feminism to oppose patriarchal structures in countries east of Germany.

Even in the 1960s, labyrinthine money laundering and hiding it from public accountability were already very robust. The Church Committee hearings popped off, and then Jimmy Carter won in 1976, coasting on popular resentment against the intelligence state. He was fiercely opposed by the intelligence state and conducted what became known as the "Halloween Massacre," where he fired 30% of the CIA’s operations division in a single night, dramatically cutting the agency’s budget. There was this brief moment of accountability and a rollback of these plausibly deniable octopus-like operations against the American people.

Then Ronald Reagan came to power. In 1983, he embarked on structural changes to the way the intelligence state worked in order to restore the powers the CIA had lost during the Carter administration, including signing into law the bill that established the National Endowment for Democracy, which is now today's premier CIA cutout. The CIA became less visible because of its previous scandals and diffused itself into a liaison role within a public-facing network of captured institutions. The intelligence state moved into the whole of society, embedding itself into cultural and media organizations, universities, NGOs, and other publicly visible sectors.

Fast forward to 2016, and I’ll wrap this up. As our NGO sphere, university centers, media organizations, union groups, and cultural groups developed a "favors for favors" relationship—this "you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours" dynamic—they would get grants from the State Department, USAID, or the National Science Foundation in exchange for cooperation. What we are up against is this network, this blob, this congealed structure where the intelligence state serves the public-facing functions of government. The CIA is simply a support agency for the State Department on national interest grounds and for the Pentagon on national security grounds.

When you see the CIA or the intelligence state do something, understand that it’s to serve a State Department official, a Pentagon official, or the stakeholders around them. It’s not a rogue agency in the sense that it answers to the State Department and does the dirty work.

Maybe I’ll close with a Sopranos reference. Tony Soprano runs a mafia outfit in New Jersey, and he has these goons, these enforcers who do the plausibly deniable dirty work so that the FBI can’t trace it back to him. There’s a character, Furio, who is the muscle, breaking into people’s homes, beating them up, and undermining their "democracy." If you are in that home and it’s your democracy being destroyed, your friends and family being arrested, you might say, "Oh, the CIA did that." But what’s gone rogue is something much deeper than just the intelligence state—it’s the entrenched forces in diplomacy and defense that the CIA is tasked with serving and doing the dirty work for.

During the period of the Wagner Group insurrection in the spring of 2023, the biography of the mercenary group’s founder and principal owner, Yevgeny Prigozhin, was spread far and wide. The fact that he had once served meals to Vladimir Putin prompted sniggering among our mainstream commentators. Just imagine that such a person could rise to the power, influence and wealth of Prigozhin! This was proof positive of the endemic corruption and distorted values of the ‘Putin regime,’ they opined.

However, my point in writing today’s installment is to demonstrate that upward mobility of those with great talent and imagination has long been and remains a competitive advantage of Russia. That was so under Peter the Great in the first quarter of the 18th century, it was certainly true in much of the Soviet period until the 1980s. And it revived very nicely in the ‘Roaring 90s’ when the hero of this piece, Sergei Gutzeit, restaurateur, vineyard owner, restorer of landmark buildings at his own expense, founder and chief benefactor of a lyҫėe for aspiring talents from the lower classes began his steep rise up the success ladder in the circle of another rising star, Vladimir Putin.

All of these issues came to mind this afternoon when my wife and I took lunch in Gutzeit’s first and still best earning restaurant Podvorye located in the Petersburg suburb of Pavlovsk where he has kept his primary residence and focus of his charitable works for decades.

Pavlovsk is named for the Emperor Pavel (Paul I), son of Catherine the Great and father of Emperor Alexander I, best known as the conqueror of Napoleon. Paul’s elegant and modestly sized palace is a ‘must see’ tourist destination for both foreign and domestic visitors to Northwest Russia, alongside the much larger and more demanding Summer Palace of Catherine in the town of Pushkin (formerly Tsarskoye Selo), 5 km away.

However, the success of Gutzeit’s restaurant opposite the palace park had little to do with location, location, location. Gutzeit opened the Podvorye in 1994 on an unpromising plot of land that the grudging city authorities offered him. It is wedged between the train tracks on one side and a busy local highway on the other. It was his unique architectural solution and his talents in hospitality services that won him a loyal clientele from among the top business and political circles of Petersburg after a very few years.

As for architecture, the Podvorye restaurant and the ensemble of outbuildings adjacent to it are made from immense stripped logs in a style that resembles the stage settings for 17th century or still earlier Russia as shown in Rimsky Korsakov operas in the Mariinsky Theater. The basic menu was built entirely around traditional hearty Russian cuisine that is very well turned out, in copious portions and priced very fairly. And on weekends it was the rule to regale diners with rounds of Russian folk songs by musicians who invited the children especially to join in.

Gutzeit’s fortune was assured in October 2000 when Vladimir Putin decided to celebrate his first birthday as president in…the Podvorye. The specially prepared meal for the presidential party remains on page one of the printed menu and is currently priced at 55 euros in ruble equivalency. In typical Russian fashion, the meal opens with a shock and awe array of eight different meat, fish, salted vegetable, marinated forest mushroom and other appetizers which invite rounds of vodka shot glasses, then moves on to a fish or meat soup followed by the mains of fried fish or meat. Fasting for a day ahead of such a meal is a good idea.

On the other hand, for normal dining, the out of pocket cost is much lower. By way of example, I mention that our favorite dish is half a roast duck served with stewed cabbage and a baked pear with lingonberry filling. One portion is more than sufficient to serve two and today costs the equivalent of 12 euros. Back in the 1990s, when Russian farming was reeling from the shock therapy administered at the advice of Western advisers, Gutzeit had to import his ducks frozen from France to be satisfied with quality and uniform portions. Then when relations with France soured, he shifted to frozen ducks from Hungary. Now chef assures me that they arrive fresh from farms in Rostov (Russia) and I assure you that the quality is superb.

But, to resume my story of Gutzeit’s rise: once word of the President’s visit got around, the Podvorye was filled daily to capacity. Back in the 1990s and early in the new century, the diners were predominantly foreigners whose reservations were made for them by the premiere hotels in St Petersburg where they were lodged. I recall how in about 2004 my wife and I spotted former British prime minister John Major at another table.

Those were the glory days when Gutzeit made a fortune that he immediately invested in other commercial ventures and also in charitable works, the first of which, was a free of charge soup kitchen for the poor run daily from a large, specially built canteen adjacent to the restaurant.

Nowadays the clientele is almost exclusively middle class Russians from near and far. They arrive as couples, as families with kids, and as groups of friends.

Aside from opening other restaurants in the region, Gutzeit created the ‘Russian Village’ in Upper Mandrogi, a Russian equivalent to America’s Williamsburg on a riverbank site jointly agreed with tour operators of cruises in the rivers and canals running north from Lake Ladoga that are very popular in the summer season. This venture provided work opportunities to artisans in traditional decorative handicrafts.

With the proceeds of his businesses, with his own money Gutzeit undertook the restoration of dilapidated buildings from the late eighteenth, early nineteenth centuries in the Pavlovsk area. In one of these complexes he opened what I would call his most ambitious and far-sighted project which was inspired by the lyҫėe within the Catherine Palace which Alexander I created initially with a view to educate his younger brothers together with a small group of talented students from outside the royal entourage. Today it is best known as the school where the young Pushkin studied. Gutzeit’s vision was to help create a new patriotic but broadly educated and widely traveled elite to help guide the country’s future.

The school was named for Russia’s revered Foreign Minister in the second half of the 19th century, A.M. Gorchakov. Gutzeit directly oversaw the selection of the 18 candidates for the first class and following classes from among children of low income intelligentsia families. He oversaw the program of travel abroad in the West and domestically around Russia that the students were given gratis. The school is still going strong and I expect to hear more about its graduates when I meet with Gutzeit at the start of next week.

In reviving the tradition of what was called in Pushkin’s time the Tsarskoye Selo lyҫėe, Gutzeit was a good 20 years ahead of the Putin government. It is only now that a project to revive that school in the original Catherine Palace complex is being realized.

Meanwhile, Gutzeit never abandoned the love for fresh produce that directed him to cooking and restaurant ownership. Originally born and educated in Odessa (Ukraine), Gutzeit got his start in business in the food markets of the north where he traded in vegetables. The latter partly explains his decision early in the new millennium to buy a farming estate in the Crimea. His main crop there is grapes for wine, and he began well before it became popular for Russian arbiters of taste like Dmitry Kiselyov, director of all Russian state television news, to become a vineyard owner in Crimea. Gutzeit indulges in his gentleman farmer avocation in the south from late spring to autumn.

His most recent acquisition, agricultural land near the regional center Gatchina, brings together various interests. The location has its own logic: Paul 1 had his earliest palace in precisely Gatchina. On this farm, Gutzeit is now growing most of the fresh vegetables, herbs, fowl and dairy products that will be featured in Podvorye. With this latest accent on cooking mainly what you get from your surroundings and can personally control, Gutzeit’s restaurant is sure to vie for a star in the Michelin guide if and when sanctions are lifted.

That, in a nutshell, is my Exhibit Number 1 of a successful and wealthy benefactor of his society with outstanding vision who began, like Prigozhin, as ‘a waiter to Putin.’ When you care to scratch the surface, this country has a great many surprises that help you to better understand why it is now the fourth biggest economy in the world as measured by Purchasing Power Equivalency and likely has the number one army in the world.

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2024

Published by gilbertdoctorow

Gilbert Doctorow is an independent political analyst based in Brussels. He chose this third career of 'public intellectual' after finishing up a 25 year career as corporate executive and outside consultant to multinational corporations doing business in Russia and Eastern Europe which culminated in the position of Managing Director, Russia during the years 1995-2000. He has publishied his memoirs of his 25 years of doing business in and around the Soviet Union/Russia, 1975 - 2000. Memoirs of a Russianist, Volume I: From the Ground Up was published on 10 November 2020. Volume II: Russia in the Roaring 1990s was released in February 2021. A Russian language edition in a single 780 page volume was published by Liki Rossii in St Petersburg in November 2021: Россия в бурные 1990е: Дневники, воспоминания, документы. View all posts by gilbertdoctorow

The Post-Cold War Apotheosis of Liberal Managerialism

First Things has just put out an essay by

Nathan Pinkoski

, titled “Actually Existing Postliberalism,” that I think is one of the most intellectually important pieces to be published in some time, and which I’ll go out of my way to recommend here.  

It is essentially a detailed account of how and why the United States government decided it needed to surveil and control the bank accounts and financial transactions of the entire world in the name of fighting terrorism — and then authoritarianism… and then the hazy universal evil of “hate.” More generally, it’s the story of how Western liberalism’s former separation of public and private spheres of life was torn down, thrusting us into our current hellscape of technocratic “global governance,” in which dissidents are liable to find themselves debanked from the financial system in the name of inclusion.

With this account Pinkoski fills in some important gaps in the record by identifying and documenting some of the key figures and decisions-points that led us to where we are now. In particular, he expertly reveals just how bipartisan the scheme to transform national “government” into global “governance” was, with the twin “neoliberal” and “neoconservative” sides of American politics working hand-in-hand to advance the same ambitious revolution after the end of the Cold War.

This includes uncovering some rather spectacular facts and quotes that I at least was unaware of, such as an open declaration by Bill Clinton’s National Security Advisor that America’s post-Cold War strategy would be to “pursue our goals through an enlarged circle not only of government officials but also of private and non-governmental groups,” including “private firms” and “human rights groups,” in order to fight the “intolerant energies of racism” across the planet and isolate “backlash states” “diplomatically, militarily, economically, and technologically.” Which is exactly the foreign policy chimera we got and still labor under decades later.

Or the fact that it was not some shadowy cabal of Blackrock and the UN that first invented manipulative “environmental, social, and governance” (ESG) investing standards, but the George W. Bush administration’s national security staff, who noted that private finance “could drive the isolation of rogue entities more effectively than governments” and predicted that “the banks will fall into line” once “our campaigns leveraged the power of this kind of reputational risk.”

Or the timely reminder that in 1989 the supposedly conservative Wall Street Journal declared its commitment to achieving the following constitutional amendment: “there shall be open borders.”

Hence why we ought not be surprised that in 2021 G.W. Bush would stand beside his erstwhile establishment-left opponents on the 20th anniversary of 9/11 and declare that the real threat to America comes from “extremists at home,” from the populist Trump supporters who, “in their disdain for pluralism,” are “children of the same foul spirit” as foreign terrorists — and who therefore necessitate that the same regime of coordinated public and private coercive force be applied at home as abroad.

Overall, Pinkoski’s essay powerfully demonstrates just how dramatically different Western “liberal-democratic” countries are from a mere three decades ago. Its publication is also something I’ve been awaiting impatiently for half a year now, because this summer I was present at the romantically-clandestine underground meeting of dissident scholars (aka a First Things seminar) at which Pinkoski originally presented his argument, then in the form of a much longer academic paper.

I was asked to present my own response to Pinkoski’s paper at the gathering, which I did, and which I will publish here below in case it is of interest. (Note that many of the lines cited in my response will not match the shortened version published in First Things, but I’ve decided to leave them unaltered here anyway.) In it, I make two main arguments: that the revolution Pinkoski describes is best thought of as the expansionary process of totalitarian managerialism (as described in The China Convergence), and — more disagreeably — that what he describes as “postliberalism” is in fact the triumph of liberalism unbound.

Definitely read Pinkoski’s essay first though! I expect and very much hope that he will continue to expand on it in the future, and that it will become a much-cited work in the years ahead.

Response to Nathan Pinkoski (N.S. Lyons, Palo Alto, June 2024)

Nathan Pinkoski has produced a bold, detailed, and compelling case study illuminating what is perhaps the signal phenomenon of our era: the abandonment of any meaningful distinction between state and society, between public and private power, and between public and private spheres writ large. In recent decades we have experienced the rapid rise of Western regimes that transcend any such distinction, and which thus — to cut to the point — grow increasingly totalitarian in aspect.

Pinkoski describes this as the collapse of 20th century liberal civilization and its replacement by something new. He has examined this rupture through the history of recent transformations in international monetary policy and finance. This includes the relentless expansion of the EU as a monetary union and then as a federalist empire, accompanied by the swift intrusion of the state into private finance in the name of maintaining stability and security — a trend also pioneered by the U.S. government’s expansive efforts after 9/11 to use state power to freeze first terrorist groups and then entire countries out of the putatively neutral global financial system. In doing so he traces a direct line of evolution from the neoliberal enthusiasms of the post-Cold War era to what he describes as the West’s “actually existing postliberal” present, in which “the fusion of state and society, politics and economics” means political dissidents and cultural thought criminals can now regularly find themselves de-banked by putatively private institutions in the name of “safety” and “reputational risk.”

With this history I can offer no significant disagreement. But it is only a case study of a larger pattern. And if I have any productive criticism to offer, it is that, in prudently limiting his scope to merely the realms of finance, monetary policy, and foreign affairs, Pinkoski has perhaps not been quite bold enough. Without a fuller picture of the leviathan that menaces us, we risk mistaking but one part of the beast for the whole, mere consequences for causes. In fact, let me posit that searching for the source of our era’s public-private collapse among the shadowy decisions of bankers and national security spooks — as noteworthy and telling as these decisions are — is to risk potentially getting causality backwards and understating larger forces at work.

After all, throughout his paper Pinkoski repeatedly notes that various policy decisions defy explanation in terms of pragmatic national interests. The architects of Clinton’s foreign policy are cited themselves describing taking actions they knew were unnecessary but felt to be of alluring “historical consequence.” The opening of borders to mass migration is described as a “quasi-theological event,” a “repudiation of a core culture or a fixed set of national values,” and “a response to Western guilt.” While in general after 1989, as Pinkoski puts it, “On both sides of the Atlantic, the spiritual principle became a resolve to construct a new national, social, and cultural identity.” From my point of view, such language hints that deeper forces were indeed at work. And it might be most profitable for us to try to more clearly uncover and connect at least some of these forces.

A year or so ago I wrote a long essay titled “The China Convergence,” which I bring up here because I think its main themes are quite relevant. Namely, that the same specific form of oligarchic technocratic governance, described by James Burnham and others as “managerialism,” has today successfully taken over almost the whole developed world, West and East alike.

Managerialism is, in short, the instantiated belief that everything can and should be deliberately engineered and managed from the top down, and that this necessitates an expert class of professional managers whose business it is to do so. Rooted in the techniques of bureaucratic organization and “scientific management” that sprang from the revolution of mass and scale brought on by the Industrial Revolution, managerialism took off with the early Progressive movements and flourished following the bureaucratic explosions produced by the two world wars.

Now, the evolutionary genius, so to speak, of managerialism is that it functions constantly to justify its own perpetual expansion. The larger and more complex any organization or system grows, the exponentially more managers seem needed to manage that complexity and the inefficiencies it generates; managers therefore have a strong incentive to ensure that their organization continues to grow larger and more complex, resulting in greater relative power and resources for the managers as a group within the system; more growth means more managers must be hired, who then push for more expansion by rationalizing a need for their cancerous bureaucratic apparatus to take over an ever-larger range of functions; as more and more territory is surrendered to bureaucratic management, more managers must be trained and educated, which requires more managers… and on and on. I call this expansionary dialectic the managerial doom loop.

But this process works just the same at the level of a country, or even an entire civilization, as it does for a company, non-profit, or government agency. The result, in the case of our societies, has been the exponential growth of a “professional managerial class,” with a permanent interest in seeing the continual expansion of managerial control into every area of state, economy, culture, and even international affairs. In this it has wildly succeeded, producing a new kind of regime — the managerial regime — staffed by a constituent managerial class and dominated by a distinct managerial elite. These elites all behave with flock-like similarity, no matter what institution or part of the world they are located in, because they all have the same basic managerial interests and personality.

To begin connecting this back to Pinkoski’s study, these managerial interests have over time in the West congealed ideologically into what we can describe as a managerial consensus: a unifying system of moral and philosophical beliefs that just so happen to not only rationalize the interests of managerial elites, but also to elevate them to a position of moral superiority, serving to legitimize their right to rule. This ideology consists of a number of core tenets, including technocratic scientism, utopian progressivism, a devotion to the “liberation” of individuals from all former norms and constraints (whether of nature or tradition), and an incentive to flatten any particularity of people, nation, or culture so as to produce more “free” individuals — in other words more predictable and easily interchangeable “undifferentiated human material,” as Renaud Camus has put it. R.R. Reno has similarly described the post-WWII ideological complex as the “open society consensus,” which I think is also accurate and an appropriate name for the same thing.

Now, I’ve rehashed these points from my own essay because I would propose that most of the events and decisions that Pinkoski observes in his history can actually be best explained as products of the sweeping advance of managerialism after achieving victory in the Cold War — or rather the victory of one particular form of managerialism: liberal managerialism.

We might divide the ongoing managerial revolution into roughly three eras, the first running from the French Revolution’s Cult of Pure Reason through to WWII; the second through the “post-war” era until 1989; and the third dawning with the end of the Cold War, alongside the concurrent emergence of the digital revolution. The end of the Cold War proved a transformative moment because, with the collapse of the Soviet Union — but before the rise of China — the Western liberal managerial regime appeared to have triumphed over its last remaining major competitor. The world had once contained not one but three rival ideological forms managerialism: liberalism, communism, and fascism. Fascism was crushed in WWII, but for decades Soviet communism still remained a competitor to liberalism. With its fall, however, liberal managerialism was effectively liberated from all restraint, the last dam was broken and the way opened for it to rush into the global power vacuum and seek complete domination.

Pinkoski argues that “1989 unleashed the revolutionary impulse in Western elites.” I concur completely. But what was the nature of this revolutionary impulse, exactly? He writes this in the context of resurgent appetite for both a new European monetary order and a new American security order. Which, true enough, are among the things that Western elites rushed to achieve. But I think these were only expressions of the full revolutionary impulse unleashed within the managerial elite: a giddy urge to fulfill their manifest destiny by expanding the mandate of their managerial apparatus to an unprecedented, truly global scope.

Whereas once these managers’ drive for technocratic control, social engineering, and cultural bulldozing had been largely restricted to the national level, these impulses could now be advanced to their maximum extent — i.e. to the whole world. And so we see the managerial elite almost immediately declare the nation-state obsolete once grander supranational opportunities beckon. The objects of managerial ambition become “global problems” necessitating “global solutions” and indeed “global governance.” Suddenly issues like the flow of “human capital” (aka mass migration) become complexities to be managed at the level of a global system, removing them from the legitimate concern of mere nations. This is the true meaning of the “globalism” which happened to appear at this moment in history: not free trade or anything so utilitarian, per se, but the conceptual expansion of the managerial elite’s eager, grasping reach to the entire planet.

In this context, the American managerial regime’s compulsion to begin attempting to surveil and manage the bank accounts of the whole world is wholly unsurprising — indeed it was essentially inevitable, as was the EU’s thirst for imposing monetary, regulatory, and ideological unity across the whole of Europe (and now beyond, as Elon Musk and others have discovered); as was the reckless expansion of NATO; as was the near-universal transformation of representative democracy into “managed democracy,” and so on. These things happened for exactly the same reason that “diversity, equity, and inclusion” apparatchiks invented themselves and burrowed into all our institutions, and why we now face the emergence of a transnational “censorship industrial complex” determined to minutely manage every word uttered on the internet: managerialism is a cancer, and cancers metastasize, it’s just what they do.

Before I conclude, however, let me address what I expect is one key difference in perspective between Pinkoski and myself: that is, the question of whether or not this managerial regime should be described as “liberal.” Pinkoski calls our actually existing regime “postliberal” on the view that “the cornerstone commitment of liberalism is to a meaningful distinction between society and the state.” But from my perspective that isn’t really a particularly liberal commitment at all; rather, liberalism has always been first and foremost about “liberation” (which is, after all, right there in the name).

Now, I’ve already described liberationism as a key part of managerial ideology, but this is perhaps to understate its centrality. For any managerial regime there is no more important task, no higher calling, than to relentlessly seek to crush the only real threat such a regime can face: any other social force able to compete for the loyalty and obligation of citizens. Any independent social sphere — any guild, association, church, tribe, or family, and any home town, region, or today even nation — is an obstacle to universal management (and to the universal proliferation of managers). For managerialism, all such communities and attachments represent competing power centers, and thus all barriers must urgently be dissolved, all bonds broken, all distinctions homogenized. All bottom-up functions once performed by other social spheres, from insurance against the risks of life to the achievement of personal fulfillment, must be replaced by top-down bureaucratic management. The managerial ideal is the perfect frictionless mass of totally liberated (that is, totally deracinated and atomized) individuals, totally contained within the loving arms of the singular unity of the managerial state. To achieve its utopia of perfect liberty and equality, liberalism requires perfect control.

This ideal is, of course, the very essence of totalitarianism. Yet if we wonder why the distinction between public and private has everywhere collapsed into “the fusion of state and society, politics and economics,” this is the most fundamental reason why. Perhaps, for that matter, this is also why the U.S. and EU now habitually sponsor LGBT groups in Hungary or India, and finance human-trafficking “human rights” NGOs in Central America and the Mediterranean: because managerialism’s blind crusade to crush any competing spheres of social power has gone global.

Did liberalism ever really stand in opposition to this crusade for total liberation? I honestly can’t see a time that it ever did; in fact, it seems to have always served as precisely the universal acid employed to do the job. Dissolving traditional bonds and limits has always been the heart of the liberal project. Thus I’m not sure we can say that liberalism ever held back the invasion of the public into the private; the progressive collapse of that distinction was actually its inevitable outcome. And so I think it’s fair to argue that we don’t yet wander in a postliberal age, but at liberalism’s apogee.

If a new, truly alternative civilization is ever to arrive, it will only do so in the wake of liberal managerialism’s self-induced implosion, and will have to be deliberately constructed — or, rather, reconstructed — out of the very same kind of strong communal and spiritual ties and identities that liberal managerialism has always sought to tear apart and devour.

Twentieth-century civilization has collapsed. It rested on an essential tenet of liberalism: the state-society, public-private distinction. The state-society distinction reached its apogee in the mid-twentieth century, when the triumph and challenges of the postwar moment clarified the importance of defending social freedom from state power, while ensuring that the public realm was not taken over by private interests. Over the last few decades, this distinction has been eroded and finally abandoned altogether. Like it or not, the West is now postliberal.

This is not the same “postliberalism” that we are accustomed to hearing about. Postliberal thinkers from Patrick Deneen to Adrian Pabst have exposed the conceptual problems inherent in liberal theory. Liberals justify the separation of the public realm from the private sphere by appealing to value neutrality. This notion of separation involves a certain moral and metaphysical thinness. The commitment to neutrality is thought to prevent states’ coercing belief through law and force. It protects the private sphere, so that individuals and associations can live out their creeds. Yet by promoting civic neutrality, liberalism socializes us to moderate our ambitions for public life. Against this view, postliberal thinkers argue that the liberal state’s rejection of a substantive vision of the good hollows out politics and civil society. Liberalism produces a state bent on driving tradition and religion out of public life, an atomistic society in which money is the only universally acknowledged good. Postliberal intellectuals contend that if our ruling classes relinquished their liberal commitment to neutral institutions in favor of a substantive vision of the good, we could renew our civilization.

The Brexit referendum and Trump’s election in 2016 revealed the extent of the West’s malaise. Eight years ago, the postliberal critique seemed exciting and relevant, even as liberal intellectuals mounted impressive counterattacks. But these disputations have little to do with how we are actually governed. Governments long ago breached the barrier separating the public and private realms. Nor is the state the only danger, for the supposedly liberal institutions of civil society have given up on neutrality. Cancel culture is ­corporate and academic culture. The financial and tech giants pry into the private lives of ­citizens and punish them for their words and deeds. For quite some time, a substantive vision of the good has already been ruling over both state and society.

Leftist intellectuals were among the first to recognize the collapse of the old liberal separation between state and society. In their view, neoliberalism was to blame. Under Reagan and Thatcher, the private sector began to take over the public one; corporate power took control of the state, and economics captured politics. But this analysis gets ­reality backwards. The state has not been suborned by economic interests. Rather, political interests have come wholly to dominate economic and financial interests, fusing state and society together.

The triumph of the political is most evident in the way today’s debates about liberalism proceed. They are invariably concerned about connecting liberalism to international politics, the postwar liberal international order. To save liberalism, centrist stalwarts call for America to defend the “rules-based” order set up after World War II. It’s a familiar story: In the aftermath of the war, international institutions such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund were commissioned to establish the bases for an impartial system of economic competition. But because of communism, postwar liberalism had a limited reach. The fall of the Eastern bloc changed that. The end of the Soviet empire vindicated liberalism, and after 1989, liberal institutions could truly become international. Neutral, procedural mechanisms would coordinate divergent interests on a global scale. Now, however, Russia’s military aggression and China’s ascendancy are straining this globalized system. Populists undermine it at home. So laments the narrative.

Faced with recent events, liberal intellectuals allow that they were too optimistic about the prospects for global cooperation after 1989 and may have oversold the benefits of economic freedom. Many concede that the critics of neoliberalism are right, at least in part. Yet questioning the economic decisions of the past thirty years does nothing to undermine the mythology of a continuous postwar liberal international order. Accepting the neoliberal critique allows the stalwarts of the center to shield geopolitical ­decisions—­often their own decisions—from deeper criticism. Their modified narrative—­mistakes were made in implementing a universally acknowledged global good—conceals the fact that the liberal principles that centrist intellectuals urge us to defend had already been abandoned in the international realm.

The international situation tells the tale of postwar liberalism’s breakdown most clearly. Neutral institutions, particularly financial ones, have been weaponized to serve political ends. In this realm, the erosion of the distinction between state and society has been quiet and subtle, yet startlingly effective. The political transformation of world finance has driven domestic upheavals and reordered the way we are governed. It is the engine of the West’s great transformation from liberal modernity to something new—to actually existing postliberalism.

The first sign that we don’t live in the old postwar liberal international order is that the economic system underwriting it has long ceased to exist. In August 1971, Richard ­Nixon decided to suspend the convertibility of the dollar to gold. The change shattered the economic system established at Bretton Woods during the final stages of World War II. Nixon’s decision initially shocked the global financial system, but it laid the foundation for American financial ascendancy. The dollar replaced gold as the backstop of global finance. Thus, as the United States entered the first stages of de-industrialization in the 1980s, American economic and political power did not decline, as experts anticipated. Nor did anyone really comprehend the tremendous political advantages implicit in the transition from a gold standard to a global economy based on America’s fiat currency. The American political classes were, at least at that time, only dimly aware of their own capabilities. They were focused on other objectives.

On July 3, 1989, months before the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Wall Street Journal affirmed its commitment to the following constitutional amendment: “there shall be open borders.” The surprise events of the following November provided the opportunity to implement this vision of a truly global economy committed to the free movement of goods, capital, and labor. But just as the Wall Street Journal editorial had opined that more minorities were needed to help Americans “acquire a renewed view of our own difficult past,” so openness meant advancing the spirit of anti-discrimination further than ever before. This imperative set the transatlantic tone for the next few years. In 1990, Congress raised immigration to unprecedented levels to boost economic growth. It also abolished much of the English-language testing for naturalization and made it easier for homosexuals to immigrate to the United States. That same year, the Schengen Convention proposed the abolition of all border controls within Europe. In 1991, Congress passed new civil rights legislation that cemented in place the doctrine of disparate impact. To abolish discrimination on the basis of sex, the European Court of Justice overturned national laws that prohibited businesses from assigning women nighttime shift work. Open borders, free trade, and the open society: It seemed that neoliberalism’s triumph was complete.

From the vantage point of the 1990s, it looked like the Americans and Europeans were using the opportunity presented by the collapse of the Soviet Empire to construct a genuinely liberal global system. Economic affairs would be liberated from statist, political competition, the crude power contests of the past.

Utopianism of that sort may have animated commentators such as Thomas Friedman, and it’s still the way the stalwarts of the center recall the moment’s aspirations. But this account downplays the political and economic anxieties of the period. 1989 had set off a discreet but decisive geopolitical contest within the West. The Europeans were using the opportunity of 1989 to take continental integration to unprecedented levels, laying the groundwork for the Euro. Led by the French, they dreamed of building a new continental powerhouse that could challenge the United States. German unification was set to be the cornerstone of a single sovereign Europe. Yet George H. W. Bush made American support for German unification conditional on the French and West Germans’ preserving NATO and expanding it into East Germany. It was a cunning move. By keeping NATO alive, Bush forestalled European geopolitical independence. As the Cold War ended, the rationale for military and economic dependence on the United States receded. Yet the first Bush administration engineered events so that American political and economic power over the rest of the West became greater than ever before.

After 1989, the United States enjoyed supreme military power. In the coming years, it would occasionally attempt to exert its influence through these means. These efforts bore mixed results. Bush Sr. would preside over the swift success of the 1991 Gulf War; he would ­also set in motion the events that led to the disaster of Mogadishu in 1993. Yet military misadventures did little to alter America’s role as global hegemon. American financial power became the true engine of dominion. The United States took charge of the globalized economy and turned it into a powerful weapon.

When Bill Clinton took office, he continued the pursuit of openness. In 1993, he ratified NAFTA and relaxed the ban on homosexuals in the military. However, he made it clear that the old liberalism was not enough. Eager to extend the reach of democracy and confront foreign enemies who stood in its way, his administration developed new tools to advance America’s global power. In September, National Security Advisor Anthony Lake outlined a new paradigm. His speech, “From Containment to Enlargement,” bespeaks a political revolution. It provided the blueprint not only for the foreign policy agenda of nearly every U.S. president since then, but for the convictions of every right-thinking person. Lake’s speechwriter was Anthony Blinken.

Lake began by denouncing neo-isolationism on the left and right. Its source, he asserted, lies in misguided economic anxiety. The speech contained the usual promises that global free trade would bring prosperity for all. But the economic benefit to American citizens was an afterthought. The speech focused on America’s new global political program. With the elimination of the “big, red blob” of communism, the United States would focus on expanding the world’s “blue areas” of market democracies—on regime change.

Yet the policy of enlargement was not just about using American military might to expand liberal democracy. Enlargement, Lake argued, had a second meaning. It was about developing and enhancing state-society partnerships. The Clintonians were learning from domestic politics. In that sphere, they were launching a revolution from “government” to “governance,” what Christopher Caldwell describes as the “great innovation of the Clinton administration.”

Borrowing from management theory, the Clintonians wanted government to expand to involve social actors. These actors were not held to the same rules of conduct as state actors were, and therefore could act much more effectively. By leaning on social actors, leaders could bypass state actors responsible to the electorate and could get good results. Domestic lessons set the precedent; after all, the civil rights revolution was conducted as a state-­society project. Court decisions had established the significant liabilities facing private organizations should they fail to be vigilant agents of anti-­discrimination. And private organizations learned to become very effective agents of this new political project. They had their vision of justice and wanted to achieve it. It was too important to leave that task to slow-moving governments. By the early nineties, there were now legions of NGOs, corporations, philanthropic associations, academics, entrepreneurs, journalists, and bureaucrats who expected to have a say in politics. They did not see themselves as bound by national loyalties, restricted by certain borders, or subject to rigid accountability structures. In the new era of “governance,” this dispersion of control was something to celebrate. It’s no surprise that Lake’s speech targeted “centralized power” as the enemy hindering the spread of the “blue” hue. Globalization’s interpreters, wedded to narratives about the obsolescence or privatization of the state, passed over the true significance of these changes. What was really happening was the deformation of the state.

The Clinton administration saw that achieving their foreign policy revolution would require looking beyond the state, just as the civil rights revolution had done at home. “We should pursue our goals through an enlarged circle not only of government officials but also of private and non-­governmental groups,” Lake argued, naming a range of social actors, from “private firms” to “­human rights groups.”

The Clintonians were offering the first theory of global management directed to geopolitical and moral objectives: a substantive vision of the good. State and social actors would be coordinated to fight the “intolerant energies of racism” abroad. They would confront what Lake called “backlash states,” isolating them “diplomatically, militarily, economically, and technologically.” Although he didn’t go into detail, Lake also portrayed America’s “financial” resources as “national security resources.”

Those resources were quickly put into action. As Clinton adviser James Steinberg said, “We succeeded in something that had been tried ­ever since the early seventies, which was bringing the economics into the heart of national ­security decision-­making.” Over the next few decades, the Clintonians and their successors would devise increasingly ingenious ways to put economics at the service of politics. They used America’s financial super-eminence to project political power abroad, imposing American aims without risking ­American lives.

The critics of neoliberalism recall the nineties as a time of idealistic, even naive commitment to economic cooperation. That criticism describes the peculiar American submissiveness toward China, but not much else. By the end of 1994, the Clinton administration had decided that Russia must be treated as a political competitor. “Neo-containment” was not mentioned publicly, but it was mentioned privately. Capitalizing on Moscow’s economic weakness, the Americans used their financial power to achieve their vision of enlargement; in this case, the NATO expansion that Mikhail Gorbachev had been assured in 1990 would not happen. “I think Russia can be bought off,” Clinton told Dutch prime minister Willem Kok in 1995. Under Clinton, the ­United States became Russia’s largest foreign investor. Ostensibly neutral international economic institutions were brazenly altered to serve American strategic ends. Seeing Boris Yeltsin as more moderate than the alternatives and fearing he might lose the 1996 election, the Clinton administration persuaded the IMF to give him a $10.2 billion loan, with few of the usual conditions. Yeltsin spent his way to victory.

These measures employed the carrots that American financial hegemony made possible. The sticks were even more inventive. When Yugoslavia fell apart in 1992, ethnic cleansing began, and the Serbians became the chief international pariah. In his last year in office, Bush Sr. had implemented several rounds of state-based sanctions. Clinton changed the paradigm, employing a public-private partnership that would become the norm. In April 1993 the U.S. began its first experiment with “smart sanctions.” The Clinton administration pioneered the move away from targeting states to targeting the individuals who governed the states, hitting their economic and social networks. Sanctions were imposed on Slobodan Milosevic and his entourage, freezing them out of the dollar-based international economy—effectively “unpersoning” them as economic agents. The objective was not just to try to change Milosevic’s behavior or signal moral disapproval of his actions, but also to undermine his popular support and his position as head of government. Smart sanctions looked like regime change on the cheap, changing the leadership of a national government without sponsoring bloody military operations.

The use of “smart sanctions” set a powerful precedent. Targeting individuals and their supporting institutions created new opportunities and fresh justifications for American policymakers to project influence around the world. As these uses of American financial power expanded, however, the liberal foundations of twentieth-century civilization crumbled.

Defenders of the old paradigm intuited that the new state-society partnerships could undermine the neutral reputation of America’s global economic leadership. Because of the dollarization of global finance, the credibility of the global financial system depended on international confidence in the impartiality of the United States Treasury. In the face of pressures from the American foreign-policy and security bureaucracy to act otherwise, Treasury bureaucrats tried to adhere to the liberal principle of state neutrality with respect to economic affairs. In the 1990s, the US intelligence community wanted Treasury to use its knowledge of the financial system to help disrupt the bank accounts of a terrorist organization then operating through Sudan. Treasury said no: The risk to America’s liberal credibility would be too great. The terrorist organization was al-Qaeda.

When George W. Bush entered office in 2001, he did so as a liberal. His signature initiative was supposed to be implementing capital and labor mobility across the whole continent. The summer 2001 Summit of the Americas drafted plans for expanding NAFTA, launching a “Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA)” by 2005.

Bush may have dreamt of spreading liberalism more broadly than his father did. But his legacy is the opposite. Under his administration, the ­United States overturned the liberal financial system of impartial rules free of political manipulation. The apolitical neutrality of global finance slipped away. Financiers became willing instruments of U.S. foreign policy, reorienting themselves and their institutions to serve increasingly bellicose political objectives.

Globalization’s theorists often paint a picture of a global village, a decentralized community of relative equals. But globalization was always much more centralized and asymmetrical. Globalization is better understood as a hub-and-spokes arrangement, where emerging markets depend on established “hubs” to connect them to other markets. Because almost all transactions must pass through these hubs, they require the hubs’ approval. This is particularly true with respect to international finance. New York serves as the world’s most important financial hub, not just because of the size of its capital markets, but more importantly because the dominance of the U.S. dollar as the world’s reserve currency, making access to the American financial system critical. The essential role of American financial institutions in the weal and woe of very nearly every major economic actor in the world confers on the United States government a vast power. Previous officials at the Department of Treasury grasped that power, but they shunned it in the name of liberalism. Under Bush, that would change.

Building on the Clintonian experiments in smart sanctions, some innovative officials working in Treasury agreed that traditional state-to-state policy coordination was inadequate to achieve the desired results. They discerned that private institutions, especially money-center banks, which financed and processed commercial interactions, could achieve the ends of state policy far more effectively than the traditional tools of statecraft. If private sector financial institutions cooperated with U.S. government agencies, great results could be achieved.

After September 11, 2001, the innovators were provided with a unique opportunity to put their proposals into action. To strike back at al-Qaeda, they banished the old liberal mentality and its hesitations about weaponizing the private economy. One of the innovators, Juan Zarate, said: “We realized that private-sector ­actors—most importantly, the banks—could drive the isolation of rogue entities more effectively than governments—based principally on their own interests and desires to avoid unnecessary business and reputational risk.” State actors started this process, but private actors did the essential work. “When governments appear to be isolating rogue financial actors, the banks will fall into line . . . Our campaigns leveraged the power of this kind of reputational risk.”

On September 23, two weeks after the attacks, Bush signed Executive Order 13224. “We’re putting banks and financial institutions around the world on notice,” he declared. “If you do business with terrorists, if you support or sponsor them, you will not do business with the United States of ­America.” The emergency executive order was broad. It enabled the targeting of financial supporters of terrorism, terrorist-owned companies or businesses, and those “associated” with them. Any bank that permitted dubious accounts or transactions to go through it risked having its American assets frozen by the U.S. government. In effect, it would be expelled from the U.S.-based international system, destroying its reputation as a trustworthy financial institution. The order created an atmosphere of ­liability for global financial institutions, just as civil rights laws had done for domestic corporations. A failure to be vigilant brought penalties. The purpose was to encourage banks to be proactive about assessing the risks associated with certain clients. The government was deputizing key players in the private economy to become its enforcers.

As its advocates anticipated, this approach to choking off funding for terrorist organizations was transformative. No bank wanted to get cut off from the U.S. banking system. Moreover, the Bush administration provided a legal framework that invigorated nongovernmental entities to target banks deemed insufficiently proactive. Banks were closely scrutinized for breaches of sanctions.

The Treasury also turned its attention to inducing international institutions to fight terrorist financing. Early on, the G7, IMF, and World Bank were brought into the sanctions regime. These measures, however, did not go far enough. To cripple al-Qaeda’s finances, the U.S. government needed information about bank-to-bank transfers. But this information is held in the databases of a private, obscure organization that serves as the switchboard for most of the world’s financial system: the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT).

The U.S. had tried to get information from SWIFT in the past. Under Bush Sr., a team led by Robert Mueller tried to subpoena SWIFT’s messaging system. But they had no legal authority to do so. In accord with liberal principles, communications among market actors enjoy a presumptive right of privacy. The action produced no results. After 9/11, Treasury took a different approach. It simply asked SWIFT to cooperate and provide the U.S. government with access to its transactions. SWIFT’s CEO demurred. He stressed the organization’s need to remain apolitical and neutral. The system’s ­European clientele were particularly sensitive to invasions of privacy. But SWIFT and the U.S. government developed a workaround. In public SWIFT would proclaim its neutrality. In private it would collaborate, developing a clandestine program for sharing financial information with U.S. officials. To keep SWIFT on board, government officials had to concede to the organization a significant and ongoing role in the design and implementation of the program of monitoring all global transactions. This meant providing SWIFT with classified information about terrorist suspects and their supporting organizations. The public-private partnership became profound.

The Patriot Act provided the Treasury with another powerful tool. Section 311 gives the Treasury secretary the power to label an institution risky in view of suspected money-laundering. The vagueness was ideal for targeting financial institutions. The U.S. government did not need to freeze assets directly, something difficult to do when money-­laundering is only suspected, not proved. Private banks, by contrast, are not legally constrained in this way. They are free to cease doing business with whomever they choose. Section 311 provided a powerful incentive for banks to do exactly as the Treasury recommends, to offload any entity deemed an institutional risk.

New state-society partnerships, erected on a scaffold of post–9/11 legislation, executive orders, and secret SWIFT cooperation, enabled policy-makers in government to wage the wars that American soldiers couldn’t. Beginning in 2003, after the Bush administration had turned its attention to rogue regimes and had boots on the ground in Afghanistan and Iraq, the Treasury went much further. In the following years, banks in Syria, Belarus, Burma, and Ukraine would all be hit with the new publicly mandated, privately imposed sanctions. In 2005, a Section-311 action against a small bank in Macau that did business with North Korea, Banco Delta Asia (BDA), turned the institution into a financial pariah. By July 2006, even the Bank of China, concerned to protect its reputation, froze North Korean accounts related to BDA. The final years of the Bush administration saw similar tactics deployed against Iran. The U.S. cut dollarized transactions for Iranian oil out of New York; the European Union followed with similar actions designed for European banks.

In just a few years, the Treasury had moved beyond targeting terrorist suspects to going after financial institutions associated with national governments deemed enemies, to hitting the financial institutions of targeted governments themselves. The Bush administration marked the definitive end of the old liberal financial paradigm. The private sphere would never be the same. The tradition of bank secrecy has been a quiet but obvious casualty. Banks have changed the way they understand risk. Before, banks had given priority to client privacy. A bank that divulged information about its clients was deemed too risky to work with. How can you thrive in the marketplace when your competitors know all about your financial affairs? Now, banks were eager to expose their clients to scrutiny, at first only secretly in accord with demands by government officials, but soon also those of politically engaged organizations. This explains why “environmental, social, and governance” (ESG) norms, or “socially responsible investing,” took off during the Bush years. The major banks that helped launch ESG described it as risk management, with risk now defined in political terms: national security, environmental responsibility, and social justice. By encouraging companies to expand their definition of risk, the Treasury accelerated these trends. Compliance with the law was not enough; the objective was to create and expand a new notion of good corporate citizenship. Incentives and liabilities were put in place to encourage the market itself to enforce the new consensus on what risk meant. Private actors might occasionally resist the politicization of economic life, but most often they accepted the new terms and promoted them as “good for business.”

The direction of financial means toward political ends could be accomplished only with the ­cooperation of banks and other private entities. Private actors in civil society did not oppose this cooperation. Rather than check the power of the state, as liberal theorists stipulate, the private sphere of global finance collaborated with the state. Far from limiting the state, private economic actors have enhanced its powers and extended its reach, all the while changing their own understanding of their mission, the requirements of corporate citizenship, and the contours of citizenship itself.

Barack Obama took the new paradigm further. When he made gay rights a cornerstone of American foreign policy, the strategy to ensure their spread relied on state-society partnerships. Hillary Clinton’s signature 2011 speech on gay rights promised to “support the work of civil society organizations working on these issues around the world.” Breaking from prior U.S. practice, these organizations could conceal the source of their funds, hiding their connection to the U.S. government in order to pretend that gay rights was a grassroots movement.

Contrary to his hawkish critics, Obama wasn’t fixed only on “soft power.” In 2011, American conservatives were mocking Obama for “leading from behind” in the Libyan campaign, criticizing his reluctance to use American troops. This criticism was myopic. His administration was setting aggressive new precedents. Using the state-society partnership the Treasury had pioneered, the U.S. froze $37 billion of Libyan assets—at the time, the largest sequestration of assets in history. It marked the first time these financial sanctions had been used with the explicit intention of toppling a government. In January 2012, the Obama administration decided to strangle Iran. It invoked Section 311 against the country’s entire banking sector, including its central bank. This was the first time the measure had been used against another country’s central bank. Soon after, SWIFT crossed a rubicon from neutrality to partisanship in international relations. It sanctioned an entire country, expelling Iranian banks from its system. The Obama administration pivoted to negotiate with Iran about its nuclear program, and the Iranians, under intense financial pressure, were willing to talk.

These years were the high point of sanctions diplomacy. It was far less visible and militaristic than the British Empire’s gunboat diplomacy, but it seemed just as effective. At one administration holiday party in 2011, the director of Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control sang “Every little thing we do is sanctions,” to the tune of The Police’s “Every little thing she does is magic.” The approach seemed invincible. With an array of state-society partnerships, the United States could get whatever it wanted.

In 2014, Russia annexed Crimea. Stunned, the U.S. leveled up its sanction regime, striking for the first time at a great power. The scale of what was required demanded close cooperation among U.S. agencies and across the European and American financial sectors. It was, to say the least, a messy moment. The Obama administration itself hesitated, troubled by the old liberal voice of conscience. Toward the end of his term, Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew worried that the American politicization of the global financial system might turn more countries against it. Moreover, it was ­unclear whether sanctions were as effective as their enthusiasts thought. Though Russia’s economy weakened, this development probably had more to do with to the decline in oil prices. Russia certainly did not withdraw from Crimea.

From his use of tariffs to individual sanctions on International Criminal Court prosecutors ­going after American soldiers, Donald Trump’s foreign policy generated apoplectic commentary: He was destroying the liberal international order! Yet Trump did not invent these tools. His innovations were to use them extensively against China and bring the tools to bear as part of hard-edged diplomatic bargaining. Along the way, his administration was ready to treat hostile legal activists like corrupt oligarchs. That’s why more sophisticated critics of Trump didn’t reject the tools. They planned to use them better than he did.

After Biden was sworn in as president, his administration shelved a plan to overhaul sanctions policy. A consensus held that if the kinks of the past could be worked out, then the Americans and Europeans had all the weapons in place to launch a devastating financial first strike against their preferred targets. Planning began in the first year of the new administration, with Secretary Blinken’s State Department taking the lead. So by February 2022, just as the Russian invasion of Ukraine faltered, the arrangements were already in place. The strategic possibilities seemed limitless. Russia could be brought to its knees; Putin would follow in the ignominious footsteps of ­Milosevic and Gaddafi.

The execution of the strike was dazzling. The scale, especially the involvement of SWIFT and the targeting of Russia’s central bank, caught the Kremlin by surprise. It was ­Barbarossa for the twenty-­first century. Yet the first strike did not yield the promised results. Nor did the second, third, or fourth. Putin’s approval ratings soared, Russia’s industrial output increased, and its military continues to grind away at the Ukrainian army. Despite implementing nearly 6,000 sanctions in two-plus years, the euphoria of spring 2022 (let alone that of the holiday parties of 2011) is long gone. Although American policymakers have said again and again that they have mobilized a global coalition against Russia that has left the country isolated, that is not the case. The map of the countries that have imposed sanctions on Russia closely resembles the map of the countries that have legalized same-sex marriage. Economic warfare against Russia has exposed the limits of the global American empire.

Washington’s “geoeconomic,” sanctions-­driven strategy of “enlargement” failed, and the deep state knows it. In July, the Washington Post quoted a ­variety of active and former government officials who now criticize the excessive dependence on sanctions, including Obama’s deputy national security advisor Ben Rhodes. The Post also revealed that the state–society partnership is faltering. The business world has overwhelmed the federal bureaucracy with inquiries about how to implement sanctions and against whom. Corporations are thus forced to make many national security–­related decisions themselves. And the crisis is not just operational. American officials now realize that no reasonable observer believes the American-­led global financial system is still neutral. As a consequence, many countries are building alternatives. In the long run, the rise of alternative financial markets and intermediaries threatens the dollar’s status as a reserve currency and thus the financial foundation of American power.

Does the failure of sanctions against Russia mean a return to the old liberal tradition of public-private separation? Evidence suggests that the answer is “no.” Rhodes sees the foreign-policy problem, but he doesn’t grasp the effects of these changes in the domestic realm. The fusion of political power with economic power seems likely to increase, and as the political friend-enemy lines get redrawn, the application will become more ruthless. In his speech for the twentieth anniversary of 9/11, George W. Bush declared:

We have seen growing evidence that the dangers to our country can come not only across borders, but from violence that gathers within. There is little cultural overlap between violent extremists abroad and violent extremists at home. But in their disdain for pluralism, in their disregard for human life, in their determination to defile national symbols, they are children of the same foul spirit. And it is our continuing duty to confront them.

Whether the enemy is abroad or at home, whether they are al-Qaeda terrorists or domestic rioters, they are essentially the same, and must be confronted with the same security tools.

In February 2022, just before Russian tanks rolled into Ukraine, the Canadian government deployed the financial weapons of war against its own citizens. Canadians who had donated to the Truckers Convoy found themselves barred from accessing their bank accounts and savings. At least 76 bank accounts were frozen, assets totaling 3.2 million CAD. Many were aghast and placed the blame for “de-banking” on Canadian prime minister ­Justin Trudeau—guilty of a dictatorial misuse of the state of emergency, just like his father. But that is obsolete thinking. The measures the ­Canadian state invoked were successfully employed because they enjoyed the enthusiastic ­cooperation of Canadian banks. State and corporate goals had been fused together long before the 2022 Truckers Convoy. Like 9/11, Covid was an opportunity. It enabled states to perfect policies that they were experimenting with and which corporations were encouraging.

Actually existing postliberalism may have advanced furthest in Canada. Yet de-banking has become more and more common in the West. Tactics once employed against al-Qaeda are used against citizens deemed “children of the same foul spirit.” In 2022, the National Committee for Religious Freedom (NCRF) had its account with JP Morgan Chase closed. Chase said it might consider reopening it if NCRF divulged some of its donors’ names. Although Chase changed its story several times, the bank insists that it is complying with federal regulations on money laundering and terrorism. ­Fidelity Charitable has brought to bear similar pressures to break donor anonymity at the Alliance Defending Freedom. In June 2023, the UK bank Coutts and Co. suddenly closed Nigel Farage’s account. This decision was later exposed as politically motivated, as an internal dossier had concluded that Farage was “xenophobic and pandering to racists.” In the investigation that followed the scandal, the Financial Conduct Authority reports that UK banks are closing almost 1,000 accounts every day, a massive increase over prior years.

After the Farage de-banking scandal, British leftists observed that free speech isn’t the main issue; account closures disproportionately affect British Muslims. They have a point. De-banking is not new in Britain. It took off in 2014, when HSBC started shutting the accounts of well-known British Muslims without providing a reason. Just over a year before, in a deferred prosecution agreement with the U.S. government, HSBC had accepted internal monitoring to help the bank comply with money laundering and sanction laws.

Widely accepted changes in the domestic legal and financial order have banished liberal norms. As part of ever-­tightening anti-terrorist laws, governments require banks to monitor potential terrorist financing themselves. For banks, de-banking—the euphemism is “de-risking”—is necessary for responsible risk management and regulatory compliance, given present realities. Whether one strikes at conservatives, Muslims, those with ties to Brexit, or those with Russian names, there’s a pattern. Just as civil rights law allows corporations to enforce DEI ideology across the whole business world, so anti-terrorism law allows corporations to enforce political loyalty tests across the whole financial system. We are seeing in domestic life what has been happening at the global level since the 1990s. Civil society, especially its economic dimension, is being weaponized. Those who threaten the regime, or who give even the appearance of being the sort of person who might pose a threat, are at risk of being made non-persons.

As with so much in the era of actually existing postliberalism, the frankest description of its vision comes from Tony Blair. In 2006, then prime minister Blair said that the “traditional civil liberty arguments are not so much wrong, as just made for another age.” Soon after, his home secretary John Reid elaborated. The previous age—the postwar age—began in response to concerns about the threat the “fascist state” posed to individuals, Reid said. Today, the threat comes from “fascist individuals,” not fascist states. This new threat—that of bad actors among us—calls for a new state-society arrangement. “Effective security,” Reid argued, “now relies on the participation of a much wider range of ­actors—from governments and public bodies, to companies and people . . . networks of public and private organizations have a joint role in guaranteeing local, national and international security.” In short, liberalism was a product of the postwar moment. Its time has ended. After the conclusion of the Cold War, British elites traded on the glories of the postwar moment to purify the British people, removing the stains of xenophobia, ­Euroskepticism, and racism. But when pressed, these elites thought the postwar era offered little of lasting significance beyond antifascism. Indeed, according to the new Blairite standards, more enlightened Brits might come to conclude that the whole postwar era seemed like a rather dangerous time. How many fascist individuals had been walking about then? How much fan mail had Enoch Powell received? One shudders at the prospect. Better to trust Blair and his successors, all the way down to Keir Starmer, to lead us into a safer, purer age.

Some revolutionary epochs are beset by the illusion of change. As Alexis de Tocqueville saw, the architects of the French Revolution—the 1789ers—relied on the powerful tool of a centralized state and the freedom of action made possible by a hollowed-out civil society, both created by the old regime. By contrast, the epoch of actually existing postliberalism is beset by the illusion of continuity. Its architects—the 1989ers—came into positions of power and influence just as the Cold War was ending. They knew very little of the war itself and almost nothing of its beginning. But they justified their ambitious geopolitical projects by tracing a long line of continuity back through the Cold War to the Second World War. The West’s victories over communism, fascism, and racism could be stretched further and further afield, isolating and destroying “backward states” and “rogue actors.” On these terms, the ’89ers imagined that they were the next generation of defenders of a continuous liberal tradition. But their actions indicate otherwise. Their substantive vision of the good didn’t just run up against hard limits in the last few years. It devoured liberalism. The ’89ers reconfigured the whole international system away from the liberal principles they ostensibly cherished. In due course, the domestic sphere has been bent to this new order.

The central drama of the last three decades has been the fusion of state and society. The ’89ers ushered in actually existing postliberalism, a society in which governmental power, cultural power, and economic power are coordinated to buttress regime security and punish the impure. 1989 heralded not the triumph of liberalism but its downfall. However, many refuse to recognize—or cannot recognize—how profoundly the West has changed. Our task is to live in the world into which we are thrown, to see it accurately, and to push it in a better direction.

Nathan Pinkoski is research fellow at the Institute for Philosophy, Technology, and Politics.

Welcome to all new subscribers who found their way here via , who kindly recommended this Substack after my short piece about the whole Churchill blowout.

In this essay, I go into more detail on some of the philosophical points made there about our relationship with history — something that should be of interest to new and long-time readers alike.

Basically, what the Churchill debate and the screeching reactions show is that the political right needs to come to terms with where the historical consciousness is at in our age: we can’t go back to the ancient or medieval ways of dealing with history, because the experience of the scientific age makes this impossible. We want our myths to be provably true. But since history is not science, this can’t really be done, as the postmodernists understood. In the end, as I’ll argue, the only serious criterion for the quality of a historical story, a particular take, is the quality and level of the mind looking at history. Hence what kind of myth, what kind of story about our past we should tell, is not just relative to the power of this or that group enforcing it; there are better and worse stories. Good takes on history can only be brought forward by a mind coming at it with all it’s got: its experience and understanding of the deepest aspects of the human condition, paired with knowledge of every possible field and realm, looking at history from the inside, the world of thought and inner experience driving historical events. And since our minds exist in history themselves, it also needs to understand itself as part of history, conscious of how its own thinking came about historically. A good take produced by such a mind can only be recognized as such by another mind that has achieved a similar level of development. But there’s more to say about all that, as you’ll see, which may shine a new light on some of our political-historical controversies.

I took much inspiration from R.G. Collingwood’s work here. A few parts even follow his arguments quite closely. Check out his “The Idea of History” if you are interested in this sort of thing.

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“History does not presuppose mind; it is the life of mind itself, which is not mind except so far as it both lives in historical process and knows itself as so living.”

— R.G. Collingwood1

I.

The history of ideas can teach us a great deal about the world we inhabit and ourselves. By studying it, bare threads of thought running over long time stretches come to our attention, illuminating pathways that jump-start areas of our minds having laid dormant before. We make ourselves available to the great becoming of history itself: a version of which having always been there in potential; a version whose trajectory playing itself out is a necessary feature of the cosmos.

To trace the history of thought is to strengthen what makes us truly human: our capacity to step out of our minds, taking the position of an observer looking at our own thought processes. Such a jump-start can kick us out of the parthogenetic sauce our brains are habitually cooking up, enabling us to watch it, study it: notably its disastrous entanglement with an unconscious logic playing itself out mercilessly. For to a large degree, we are the product of our thoughts — so what could be more useful than discovering them, understanding them in their wider historical context, so that we may work with them instead of being worked by them?

One of those threads running through recent history is the decline, if not outright destruction, of our long tradition of valuing what we might call the art of truthful reasoning. It is the art of developing and cultivating a beautiful and sharp mind, one that cuts through the jungle in front of our mental eyes, able to conquer new lands in the vast expanse of wider reality; a mind that takes in the deeper fabric of the thoughtscape in stride, a fabric built of logical connections across time and space, therefore transcending what we moderns like to think of as material reality. This thought-structure underwriting reality can be discerned via a wholesome form of reason, a perception rooted not in empiricism, but in Experience unfolding over time, in time, as Being.

True thought, beautiful reasoning, is not aimed at stating true facts that you discover once and hammer in stone. What you gain isn’t a thing, a material price. Results of thought are just fossilized artifacts; you might hang them on the wall if you like, but try to take them as timeless truths from which to build a worldview, and you end up with a monster made of dead parts: twitch it will, perhaps, but not live. And like ideologies, which are just such monsters, it will eventually haunt you and everyone it touches.

True thought is a movement, a process. It’s a bold charge, fueled by the dialogue between soul, mind and the hidden nonverbal mindspace from whence our experience ultimately flows. While it expresses truth, its truth is only valuable in the very act of thinking or rethinking it. Hence the fruits of true thought are never the last word, but an achievement in a certain direction. Such thought, when told or written down, and when read or listened to, may open a connection to the ground of all truth for all who are equipped to do so. With each connection so established, the next connection may become easier. True thought breeds more true thought.

To understand the decline of this form of beautiful and truthful reasoning and how it relates to history, we must look at how the ideas have formed that got us there: ideas that are part of a thought complex playing out its inner logic in a sort of background program running in the collective mind. Such background programs can arrest our development in history towards self-awareness, towards mind understanding itself in an ongoing act of illuminating the wider thoughtscape.

II.

There is a long-standing battle in philosophy between the schools of realism and idealism. Realists, who (re)gained ground in the late 19th century particularly in Oxford and Cambridge and later went on to dominate Anglo philosophy entirely, emphasized the outside world, the reality that we see. In this picture, our mind’s purpose is to faithfully reproduce what’s out there, and it mostly does a decent job of it, to the point that we can safely ignore philosophical mind games for the most part. If this view seems to be entirely self-evident to you, this is because it is close to how science looks at the world, and as we know, we are in the near-total grip of a science-worshiping age: in fact, a big part of the realists’ motivation was to get rid of traditional philosophy as a competing sense-making framework and strengthen the scientific world view. This had been an ongoing process ever since Descartes and the dawn of the scientific age, fully actualizing itself in the positivist spirit of the 19th century. Figures like Bertrand Russell, G.E. Moore, and later the logical positivists sought to inoculate the high priests of the scientific age against those pesky philosophers threatening to undermine their grand ambitions to know the secrets of the universe using empirical facts and the scientific method alone. (A corollary to this program was their rejection of the traditional idea that ethics should be about helping people build character; instead, they proclaimed morality to be just another object of scientific study: let’s figure out how morality works, why humans behave morally or not, but let’s not be fooled by outdated notions such as that studying ethics can actually make us better men.)

But this downplaying of mind hadn’t been the standard view before. Difficult as it is to imagine these days, people at different times took the primacy of mind for granted. Their deepest background assumptions, their absolute presuppositions, formed a different constellation, as R.G. Collingwood put it. How exactly they went about it varies from recognizing a divine plan behind it all to assuming an inner logic not just to movements of objects, but to thoughts as well, this inner logic coming from a place more fundamental than the material world. Others assumed the world to be alive right down to the smallest part, not drawing the hard line between mind and nature that we take for granted these days.

The idealists came at it from many angles, ascribing to mind various roles in the process of knowing, understanding and perceiving the world that are very different from simply reproducing external reality. While we are somewhat used to thinking of our minds at least as a sort of “filter,” like colored glasses that may warp what’s really out there, the idealist tradition goes far beyond that. For Kant and Schopenhauer, for example, while reality most certainly exists (we don’t just make it up in our minds willy-nilly), what we actually experience is to a large degree conditioned by the make-up of our minds. Not just in the sense of those colored glasses, but much more deeply: even such fundamental categories as time, space and causality for those thinkers are not “out there” in the physical world, but are imposed on our perception by mind, thereby creating the world of appearances we experience. While this still implies a certain mind-matter duality, other approaches went beyond that and sought to give up such dualistic thinking entirely by looking at our experience more holistically, refusing the sharp distinction between life on the one side and dead matter on the other. But even such an approach tends to be misunderstood these days because of our scientific presuppositions: a philosophy centered on life that assumes the cosmos to be alive right down to the smallest material stuff invites us to think biologically about the world, and therefore ultimately scientifically, again losing sight of the role of thought and its place. You don’t have to diminish the intellectual achievements born of the scientific mindset that focuses on “nature out there” to ask the question: isn’t it weird to exclude thought itself as an object of study — not via experiment but, well, via thought?

You might say the battle between philosophical idealism and realism is pretty far-out stuff; and it’s easy to get lost in all those different positions and arguments. But the important thing to understand here is whether consciously or not, we all adhere to this or that philosophical school, the habitual way of thinking of our age. This creates sort of a hidden program running in the back of our minds, through which much of our perception of the world is directed. And since realism, and the connected thought complex of the materialist-reductionist program, has won the day not only in academia, but in the wider collective consciousness as the founding myth of the scientific age, it forms our standard assumption — the story we all “know” somehow, without us even noticing it. One of the implications of the realist mindset is that our attention is magnetically drawn to bottom-up materialist explanations and a view that treats everything, including history, as a sort of spectacle best viewed from the outside. In this light, it’s no wonder that we tend to forget about thought proper, as experienced from the inside, in our inquiries: our background assumptions, unnoticed by us, push us away from such an endeavor. This is especially relevant when it comes to our relationship with history.

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Famous anarchist theorist, revolutionary and a renowned explorer of Siberia, Peter Kropotkin’s memoirs were published in 1898, written in Russian but originally printed in English in The Atlantic Monthly. They were later slightly revised and expanded, and this final version is what we currently have and which I have just read.

It is a very clearly and, I think, objectively written book. Kropotkin begins with his privileged childhood.  He was born into the house of Prince Kropotkin, one of the most influential aristocrats, close to the emperor, living in a palace in Saint Petersburg. Kropotkin tends to underplay the privileged environment into which he was born, but he does not deny it. The book then moves chronologically: his years at the elite page academy of the Court, decision not to go into the expected military service but to move to Siberia which he explored and about which he wrote several seminal geological and geographical treatises; and then onto the political activity, prison in Russia, escape to western Europe, forty years of life in exile… Since the book ends much before the October Revolution and even before the split between social-democratic and communist wings, these issues are obviously not treated. But the schism between the Marx-dominated faction of the First International and Bakunin’s anarchist faction is discussed. And attacks on state socialism, propagated by Engels and Marx (this was written before the codification of Marxism, so the two famous names are written in an unusual order) are sustained and frequent.  

Kropotkin returned to Russia after the October revolution. The role of anarchists in the Revolution was not negligible but their later fate was not pleasant. Kropotkin however was too old, and died in Moscow in 1921, just days before the Kronstadt rebellion. He was buried in Moscow and it was the last time that anarchists’ black flags were freely unfurled in the Soviet Union. Today, one of Moscow’s metro stations bears Kropotkin’s name.

Politically, the most interesting period treated in The Memoirs is the one after the Crimean War and emancipation of serfs in 1861. He writes about the contradictory nature of Alexander II who oscillated between being the Tsar—liberator and the Tsar—reactionary, and whose very death at the hands of Russian revolutionaries exhibited the conflicting strivings of his soul. Alexander was killed when, after the initial assassination attempt failed, he, alone among all, jumped out of his car to help the injured guard; that provided an easy target for the second assassin, and he did not miss.

Kropotkin’s descriptions of the revolutionary life in the Russia of the 1860s are hyper-realistic. But to the reader today, the entire Russian existence seems to be that of a land of wonders. The relationship between political offenses and punishments meted out is not only a product of arbitrariness (for which a nice Russian word proizvol’ exists) but the outcome of an almost infinite randomness.

To visualize it, assume that your political sin (emancipation of labor, printing of non-authorized literature, attendance of anti-government rallies, violent attacks on police, assassination of the dignitaries) is written on a piece of paper which is then put into an enormous machine that produces the sentence. The machine is geared to produce harsh sentences; sentences that are often written before the crime is committed. Next, let this piece of paper with your crime move to a second, attached, machine which is managed by a capricious God. That second machine revises the sentence; the sentence of exile can become one of being hanged, or, differently, of immediate freedom; it can lead you to a decade in jail or to be released and feted by liberal intelligentsia today. The first machine was described by Kafka in his Penal Colony (inspired by Dostoyevsky); the second is from Borges’ short story in which every individual passes through all possible positions in life, from a ruler to a homeless, entirety at the will of capricious gambling chance. Thus, the Russia of the 1860s, and perhaps the one of today, appears as a blend of Kafka and Borges. 

For a rational mind, it is very difficult to see not only how such punishments help the government, but not to notice that the capriciousness, randomness, and indeed sloppiness  with which punishments are executed become entirely counterproductive from the point of view of the rulers’ own interests.

Take Kropotkin’s case. He was followed by the secret police for “going to the people”, i.e., organizing lectures on socialism and anarchism among workers in St. Petersburg and several other cities in Russia. He would move from his home (probably dressed in the fineries), change into mud-stained boots, short coat (that we learn distinguished the workers from the rich), rough shirt, and move through dark St Petersburg alleyways until he reached a badly-lit warehouse where twenty or thirty workers and a couple of young intellectuals (camouflaged like Kropotkin in people’s attire) would meet to discuss George Berkeley, David Hume, Chernyshevsky, Jesus Christ and human freedom in general. Kropotkin was eventually arrested—but even that arrest had several unusual moments, including being foretold to the potential prey which led Kropotkin to hide and destroy all incriminating evidence; and where the arrest, perhaps because of his family background, needed a clearance from the top powers. Kropotkin is thrown into the infamous Peter and Paul Fortress, in a tiny cell (whose sketch is provided in the memoirs) where he is held for a year in solitary confinement: able to make eight paces only and to see a tiny piece of St Petersburg translucent Nordic-blue or entirely dark sky. But in such a room, he is, after a while, allowed to have his family send him food daily and is visited by the Grand Duke (the brother of the Emperor) who, according to Kropotkin, tries, through apparent amicability, to extract confession from him.

Kropotkin is afterwards, because of his loss of weight and general weakness, sent to a prison hospital that is so poorly guarded that he is able to plot his daring escape with a dozen of revolutionaries, some of whom are also in jail and others free. The plans are made and remade almost daily as if the plotters had access to the modern internet and were totally free to write and then revise various escape scenarios. Finally, in a rocambolesque way, Kropotkin escapes, and while the Klondike-like police chases him, he and his accomplices decide to spend the evening in the plushest restaurant of St Petersburg where police does not do razzias.

What was the crime for which he and his comrades, among whom women played an extraordinary important and brave role (as Kropotkin repeatedly mentions), were accused of? Creating a cultural revolution in the Russian countryside by telling the liberated but indebted peasants that they are no different from the nobles, that they have the right to a free life, and that they should rebel, burn the aristocratic estates and disobey the Emperor. The young educated people of St Petersburg and Moscow who went “to the people” (similar to those sent by Mao into the peasant communes a century later) numbered, according to Kropotkin, only some 3,000 individuals. They gave up all comforts of their previous lives. Many moved to villages, working there as ordinary journeymen or toiling the land, with the goal of bringing Russian peasants out of their millennial turpitude and teaching them how to be free. They, and again particularly so the women, did it with an unbelievable self-abnegation, dedication, courage and seriousness.  

They did not shy of “direct action”. While Kropotkin does not explicitly endorse assassinations, he underlines the reasons that lead to them. The line between the tyrannicide and terrorism was always thin. Kropotkin approves of the assassination of his own relative who was governor of Kharkov and enacted some harsh measures against the revolutionaries.

The West European part of the memoirs is interesting even if less exciting. It takes place after the suppression of the Paris Commune, in an atmosphere of police persecution, hangings, semi-legal printing presses, contraband of revolutionary tracts from Switzerland into France.  Kropotkin is most of the time, living (like Lenin later) in Switzerland, working on political agitation with the famous Association des Horlogers Jurassiens. He criticizes state socialism of German social-democrats whom he accuses of  aiming only at political power while disregarding moral transformation, indeed the cultural revolution, needed to save humankind.

Kropotkin’s ideas regarding the societal organization that would be built in concentric circles from the lowest to the highest level, would abolish the state, and organize production among the publicly-owned cooperatives that would not compete with each other but labor in free association and self-help looks irremediably naïve. It is not surprising that Marxists, and later Leninists, thought it was a fairy tale.

But perhaps that humans, at times, need visionaries, the selfless individuals who produce fairy tales and reading Kropotkin may be a way to try, at least for a moment, to believe in them. A young friend to whom I mentioned reading Kropotkin’s memoirs, and not expecting she would know of him, immediately replied: “We are reading him now to fight climate change and to help self-organization of society.”

Youtube - How the U.S. Took Over the World: The End of International Law

NIMA ALKHORSHID: Today is Thursday, October 17th, and we’re having Richard Wolff and Michael Hudson with us to talk about U.S. foreign policy. And the title of this video today, Richard and Michael, is over the world, the end of international law. We know whenever they’re talking about the foreign policy of the United States, they’re talking about the rules-based international order. And Michael, let’s start with you. Why have they decided to put an end to international law?

MICHAEL HUDSON: Well, you’re right. That the build-up of this whole U.S.-sponsored aggression from Ukraine to Israel has caused a breakdown of international law. And just as important, what does international law mean when there’s no means of enforcement if there’s laws against genocide, laws against ongoing attacks on civilians? What can anyone do about it? There seems to be a global war, and all of the tactics now are different from all the wars that we’ve seen before, and we’ll get into that.

The basic political issues today in this new Cold War, very much like Europe’s Thirty Years’ War (from 1618 to 1648). That Thirty Years’ War ended with the Peace of Westphalia, and that led to the creation of international law that has ruled the world all the way from 1648 until the creation of the United Nations. Until just a few years ago, when the United States replaced it and said, ‘We are no longer following international law. We are following our own law. We call it the rules-based order, and it’s our rules, and our rules of order are the reverse of everything that international law has said before.’

It’s a radical change, and hardly anybody’s talked about this, because what do you do about the fact that you have the United States, Ukraine, Israel, NATO, all of a sudden reversing the principles that were considered to be the very basis of civilization for almost four centuries now? It’s very radical.

The United States has a unipolar drive for control over countries. The whole basis of international law after the Thirty Years’ War was to prevent future wars by saying no country can interfere with the political affairs of other countries. Every country has its own autonomy, and that’s what, essentially, the war was fought over. The Catholic countries were attacking the Protestant countries, and it was the largest and most devastating war that Europe had until World War I. But at the end they got together, and at the Peace of Westphalia they said, ‘How do we prevent this from happening again?

We’re going to recognize all nations are sovereign, and no country, as I said, permitted to interfere with other countries to bring about regime change.’ There was to be religious and political freedom, and the world was to be multipolar. They didn’t use that word, but that meant there wouldn’t be any single group dominating them, and they were referring specifically to the Catholic Church and the Habsburg monarchy. The Hapsburgs controlled Spain, that had all of the silver coming in from the New World, and was the big military power – as was France – and they were allied against Germany, Sweden, and the northern European Protestant countries.

A multipolar world was the whole basis of international law, and that was supposed to be the basis of the United Nations. And violation of these principles was viewed as if it was an attack on civilization itself. Emmanuel Kant and other German philosophers wrote about how this was finally a universal law, and you needed this universal law of individual freedom for persons, but also for nations.

Well, all this is now being rejected by the United States and its allies, and the proxy state of Israel in the Near East. The world is being separated into blocks between the East and West. In the conflict today, really, is whether the [?] nations, the BRICS – Russia, China, Iran, and the allies that they’ve been putting together – are going to be able to design their own destiny, or whether they’re going to have to be subject to whatever the United States does.

And you’ve seen in the last few days in Ukraine, the non-president Zelensky has just said, ‘We’re going to raise the money to buy arms and to bribe all of our officials to be loyal by selling off Ukraine’s titanium mines, to sell off the natural resources. So even if Russia takes over, the international law that America supports is going to say, wait a minute, we’ve already privatized all these resources.

Yes, you can take them over, Russia, but you won’t have any control over the land, or your ability to tax them, because we’ve privatized it all.’ That’s the kind of transformation of the way the world has organized that nobody could have expected before. So there’s a kind of ideological inquisition that’s taking place throughout the world by the United States that rejects the most basic principles of national sovereignty.

And what’s so remarkable in this is we’re seeing an economically shrinking and deindustrializing – the United States and Europe – trying to prevent the global majority from aiming at its own economic and political independence. The rest of the world has 85% of the world’s population, and it’s trying to recover from over a century of colonialism, and the financial neo-colonialism that the United States put in place after 1945.

The U.S.-centered rules of international trade and investment that sort of forced other countries to supply raw materials instead of industrializing and feeding their own population and their own economies and raising their own living standards. So you have this U.S.-NATO “Golden Billion” waging this new Cold War against most of the Western world, without an army, really, to enforce it.

Its policy makers have followed an entirely different track than was done before. They deem other countries and adversaries to be a different civilization altogether. And I’ll get to that shortly. It’s trying to dominate the world, but it no longer has the military dominance that it had in 1945. It’s lost its former ability to dominate the world monetary system, and by economic means. Its aim of retaining its former unipolar policy has been replaced by a whole different strategy, by escalating it all. We’re dealing with the end of civilization, and the end of civilization is supposed to be the United States taking control of the whole world, by imposing a neo-liberal privatization ethic, Thatcherizing and Reaganizing the whole world.

RICHARD WOLFF: Let me come at it. I appreciate very much Michael’s historical framework. I think it’s very helpful to keep that in mind. It avoids all kinds of mistakes. Let me add some comments to the story he’s told. In my view, what is going on is a desperate effort of a declining situation – a declining regime, if you like, a declining historical phase, that doesn’t want to give up, which I understand. They don’t usually go quietly, these empires, when they go down. I think the theory that you’re breaking all the customary rules that were in place – either explicitly or implicitly – for several centuries, is the right way to look at this. It’ll help us understand things that we might not see connected, but that are.

Number one, a level of horror in Gaza. I want to be clear. What was denied by people who could not face what was done to Jews in Europe in the Holocaust. We have the phenomena of people who have to deny it. That’s a way of recognizing how horrible that thing was that you can’t stand it. So you literally erase it.

It’s not the appropriate response – one should recognize it – but it helps you underscore just how horrible it was that people have to do that. It underscores in Gaza that the Israelis don’t want you to call this a genocide because if you do, then the victims of one Holocaust are busily perpetrating another one. This is horrible.

And you can’t have the United States quite deal with it, for a number of reasons. Number one, because Israel is the same settler colonialism that the United States is. We are a country of Europeans who come over to the Western hemisphere and ethnically cleanse the indigenous population out of existence, with the exception of the horrible condition the few remaining ones live out in the so-called reservations scattered across the United States, making their living from gambling, casinos, and so on. It’s this remarkable obliteration.

The United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa: These are horrible examples of settler colonialism, but they were accomplished at a time when that was historically possible. Israel has the unfortunate historical fact that it isn’t possible anymore and trying to do it now is self-destructive – although it might take them a while.

But let me show you some other ways to connect. The international rules were that countries could keep their reserves, the backing for their currency in foreign banks. Russia kept a good part of its dollar and gold holdings in foreign banks. Those were seized early on in this war. That’s a violation.

To this day, there are legal ramifications percolating in Europe, even in England, questioning. For example, they couldn’t, they decided, because they’re torn too, about obliterating existing law. So they didn’t take that money. They froze it, which is already not legal. But when it came to giving the money to Ukraine, they have decided just to give the interest earned by those stolen funds. This is a playing-with-giving-up the rule, the idea, of the sacrosanct private property of Russia. And then you take the interest from it. That’s stealing too. These are lawyerly games. What’s important here is, as Michael says, leaving it.

Then there’s the war in Ukraine itself. Okay. Ukraine says it needs to have security. Russia says it needs to have security. Ukraine is behaving badly towards its Russian minorities. The Russians want to protect their minority. Okay. This has to be worked out. This is not the first time you’ve had this kind of a conflict. There’s nothing unique about that conflict.

You know, there were Germans living in the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia. There were other examples. This could have been worked out as those others were, but it wasn’t. And that’s what’s interesting. The decision was made not to. Now, yes, it’s the United States flexing its muscle. But I see it a little bit less grandiosely, as – Michael put it – reshaping the world. It is that, but it comes out of a defensive posture. It comes out of desperation. It comes out of, ‘We are losing in the world and we will not tolerate losing again. You will not stop us from doing what we want to do in Ukraine. You will not stop us from having Israel as our secure outpost. You cannot attack it. We don’t care what your issue is. You are Palestinians, you were there, that’s not interesting for us.

For us, we need a reliable agent in the Middle East. Israel has been that, and we will protect it. And we have now controlled Ukraine. We rearranged their politics a few years earlier to make that the case. It’s ours. It’s part of our expansion of NATO.’ And the horror is that the Russians should resist. The Russians should say – and this has nothing to do with whether the Russians are right or wrong in any of this – ‘This is an empire,’ say, in the words of Lyndon Johnson, “So far and no further” (in good Texas English). So, I see the taking of the reserves from Russia, I see the misunderstanding of what’s going on, in terms of Russia’s allies, the power that the BRICS have. Forget, yes, that it takes time to replace the dollar.

The BRICS have made some moves in that direction, but they still have a long way to go. No question. No question. But the reality is the BRICS have made real moves. And one of the most important was supporting Russia against the United States and Europe in the Ukraine. That’s the reality. It’s not about right or wrong or anything else. This is about how you try to handle and understand what’s going on.

The United States is desperate. And, by the way, I want people to see it internally. If it were just external I wouldn’t be saying these things. But it’s internal too. The reason we have a character like Trump in a position to be president, there it is. That’s a symptom. People are so angry with what is happening to their lives here that they want something different and they don’t care who he has abused, or what he has said, or how many times he’s gone bankrupt. These are details.

He says he’s going to change everything and go back to when it was better. That is understood by people whose reality has decreased. When production leaves the United States, as it has. Manufacturing, in huge portion, has left the United States and moved overseas. It took the best jobs, it took the strongest unions, and decimated them by moving. UAW is a shadow of what it once was.

The same is true of the steelworkers, and all the rest of them. That’s a reality. That means jobs are not what they once were. That means the standard of living isn’t what it was, and the security of your job isn’t what it was. And what was done by the relocation of jobs to profit from overseas expansion will now be continued with another technological wave. This time not the computers and robots. This time artificial intelligence, which will be used for profit-making purposes at the expense of the quality and the quantity of jobs. People are correct. The empire that concentrated production and income growth here, is now not here anymore. It left. And the people understand that they are left behind. There is no mystery.

My last point. The media have been obsessing for several years now, with the Democrats, over the problem: The economy is doing well: Why do the mass of people answer every public poll with the statement, the economy is a disaster? The economy is a disaster. I’m in a disaster.

This is not because they are stupid. It’s not because they aren’t educated. None of those things. It’s a different experience. People question me: The stock market is doing well? Well, 85 to 90 percent of stocks are owned by 10 percent of the people. They’re doing well. But the other 90 percent are spectators about a process of prosperity from which they are excluded, and they identify with the shrinking American empire abroad.

For them, they’re losing their status as an American worker and they’re losing their status as an American. In short, they’re losing and they don’t want to continue to lose. No one addresses any of that. The Republicans say, ‘Let’s go backward.’ Okay, that’s a fantasy. That’s not a very good long-term proposal. That won’t go very far. He lost a good bit of the benefit of that the first time when he didn’t do shit (if you pardon my Spanish) to take us back to anything. He’s not going to do it in the second term either.

What you have is a declining situation and the spectacle of a politics that doesn’t either understand, or have any handle whatsoever on any of it. So you’re watching a dysfunctional system run by a dysfunctional government. I want to remind everyone of, what a great tactician once said are, the preconditions for revolution. They are two. Number one, that the people in charge don’t know how to govern anymore. Number two, that the mass of people feel that the people at the top can’t govern anymore. If you have those two conditions met, you’re going to have a revolution. We are getting real close in this country.

MICHAEL HUDSON: Well, Richard, you begin by discussing what’s unique in the situation we’re in today. You use the word “desperation.” What you’ve been describing is desperation right along. That indeed is what makes it unique. The United States and the West no longer can mount a war of military occupation. That’s another part of the by-product of what you’ve been describing economically. Ukraine showed that the United States can’t win a war and that NATO needs proxy armies because their own population would resist if there were a draft. So the U.S. and NATO forces have only one policy to use: They can only bomb and shoot missiles. The basic political fact remains that they are too weak to win on the battlefield, according to the rules of war that formerly guided international law, and that made genocide illegal.

I want to focus on the effect of all of what you’ve described on what it means for international law and the global fracture that we’re seeing today. I think the U.S. and NATO fight to control the world – from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and from the United States and England all the way to the China Sea – can only be won in a dirty way – in violation of international law – by focusing on killing civilians, bombing hospitals, schools, and other basic institutions. That’s what makes this war unique.

U.S. naval fighting concentrates on civilian, instead of military, targets. You’ve seen Ukraine, focusing on the Russian-speaking civilian population, hoping that the civilians will say, ‘Please don’t bomb us anymore. We want our own Boris Yeltsin, or some Pinochet or Zelensky, to take over. We’ll do anything for peace.’ But that’s not what they did. They rallied around Russia and say, ‘You know what, you killing us is wrong and we’re not going to submit to you, because if you’re killing us now, what are you going to do if there were peace?’ So this is genocide in Ukraine, just as it’s genocide in Palestine.

The other countries are seeing that it’s a moral evil and it’s an attack on the very principle of civilization and common humanity. So what is the U.S. and NATO to do?

They’re relying on Ukraine and Israel Nazis to uproot or destroy any population that resists its economic or financial and political control, or are simply in their way. It’s a war of extermination – not a military war against armies – but a war of extermination of people, in order to create a neo-colonialism. That’s what the U.S. and NATO are doing. They are trying to create a neo-colonialism to make one world. Not a group of different civilizations. One civilization, that is the U.S. neo-liberal civilization. And other countries in their way are not really an alternative civilization. There’s no plurality of civilizations where each country or region can make its choice. There’s only supposed to be one.

Now this is evil, but it’s historically a characteristic of religious wars and wars of hatred – ethnic, national and even racial hatred – in the case of Europe’s colonialism and America’s war in Asia. Soldiers, and even the domestic civilian population, are propagandized to view the enemy as being sub-human and therefore it can be treated in utterly different ways than the rules of war. That’s the character of Israel’s war against Islamic countries, and against any population that stands in the way of Israel expanding from the sea to the ocean.

That is, all the land, and oil, and natural resources, extending from the Mediterranean Sea to the Indian Ocean. That’s the aim. The broad West Asian area is to be turned into a land without a people. That’s what Netanyahu means. A land without a people, just as what Israel’s settlers did to the Palestinians who lived there for millennia. The occupants are held to be non-people, to be treated as the biblical Amalek whom the Lord directed his religionists to exterminate, along with all their cattle, trees and productive resources capable of sustaining life.

So when Israel goes into Gaza or the West Bank or now into Lebanon, they’re not fighting another army. They’re destroying the hospitals. They’re tearing up the olive trees that take 30 to 50 years to develop. They’re tearing up the infrastructure. They’re making it impossible to continue to live there. That’s what makes this unique, and even more destructive than the earlier wars, which at least left the civilization and the basic infrastructure in place. But it’s destructive because of what you said: Desperation of the West, and the U.S. and Europe, is the only kind of war they can fight.

RICHARD WOLFF: Let me tell you a story, even if I’ve done it once before, that I hope we’ll bring it home to an American audience. I once took some European visitors to a town in Massachusetts called Old Deerfield. It is a part of a little town called Deerfield located on the Deerfield River in Western Massachusetts. The town of Old Deerfield is a recreated community that has recreated all the houses in it to look like they did in colonial days, before the United States emerged as an independent country. If you visit this place and you start looking at these interesting old reconstituted houses, and you go inside and you see the colonial furniture and all that, you will be confronted with little plaques on the outside of each house that give you a little thumbnail description of life when this house was occupied by living family, etc.

I went and I looked at it, like my guests, and we all immediately reacted because of what it says on the plaques. To my knowledge, that’s what it says right now, as we’re speaking. It describes the family of John Jones and his wife and the children, and then on this difficult day back in 1691, the savages attacked. And then periodically it’s all about the savages who were then eventually beaten back. And the Europeans looked at each other, and I looked at them and they at me. The Europeans arrived here, killed these people, took their land, and called them savages; shot them like animals because the indigenous people didn’t have guns and gunpowder, and all the rest of that, whereas the Europeans did. So, it was quite easy to shoot them, and to deal with them as animals. They were savage.

When they resisted their land and their animals being taken from them, then they became more savage, and absolutely subject to extermination, which was considered a 100% acceptable social solution. The final solution to the Native American ‘problem,’ you might call it.

But you know, again, this is not about Europeans or Native Americans. It’s about settler colonialism that has a ‘problem.’ That’s why it has to imagine that the land is empty because otherwise it would be confronted with, ‘What are you doing if the land is full?’ Well, you are creating a Them versus Us. If you read the literature of those who support Netanyahu, that’s what they say every day. It’s them or us.

That’s what the colonial people in Old Deerfield felt. It was them or us, and they would celebrate the attack of the savages because it confirmed how savage they were. It didn’t confirm that settler colonialism might be questioned. That never occurred to them. I mean, it’s a study in what can happen to human beings when they trap themselves, or are trapped, in a dead end that they don’t want to confront. Well then, they rethink it, so it isn’t a dead end, it isn’t a problem. It is now [as] understandable as getting rid of these pesky animals that stand in the way of the noble Christian civilization we are constructing.

And in Israel simply substitute Jewish, or Zionist, or whatever word you want. But we do have to understand that this isn’t new. Michael is right. It is a particular historical conjuncture. That’s what’s fading. My fear is if we give it too much uniqueness, you’ll miss the fact that it is a rerun.

Look, the world looks back on those years 1933 to 1945. Twelve years, a long time. Twelve years. Mr. Hitler came to power in January of 1933 and he was finished in World War II. So from ’33 to ’45 – twelve years – he, the Nazis ruled, and the whole world has ever since looked back in horror at what they did, and what they were. For those twelve years it was scary, and people shook their heads and didn’t want to believe it, and turned away from it. But eventually – and it took 75 years for right-wing fascistic types to put their heads up above the sand – and we see them now again. But again, it took a long time.

The Israeli behavior will take a long time, and we will look back on it the way we look back on what the Nazis did in their part of Europe with the same horror, except we will have learned, maybe, something from this time more than we learned the first time.

MICHAEL HUDSON: Well, I think, Richard, what you’re describing is there is something unique today, and that is that there’s a whole ideology to support something that supports what the settlers did in America – and you’re quite right to draw that parallel – and what settler states are doing elsewhere, and what the United States and NATO are trying to expand other countries. It’s much more than a clash of civilizations, like between the English settlers and the domestic indigenous population here.

It’s an attack on the very principle of what people traditionally have considered to be civilization, and I think America’s policy makers have come to realize that their plan for world dictatorship that they celebrated in 1992 as the “End of History” by Francis Fukuyama, has been a failure. That their idea of civilization, as everyone will funnel Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher and will privatize the economy – and now that the Soviet Union is dead there is no alternative?

Well, Fukuyama’s book was very quickly replaced a year later by a book by his teacher at Harvard Samuel Huntington’s The Clash of Civilizations: Remaking of World Order. And Huntington described the real organization, civilization, is U.S. nationalism, a neo-liberalism and its doctrine of a unipolar world, that was his definition of civilization as a universal world. Other civilizations are basically how indigenous populations were treated, and Huntington warned that the United States faced future fights that were not simply a move from a different trade and monetary policy by countries seeking to escape from the legacy of colonialism and U.S. dominance.

He meant a clash of culture and that’s really the key: Not to accept U.S. dominance was deemed to be trying to create a new civilization. So it wasn’t just the fight of the English settlers of America or the Jewish settlers of Palestine to take land. It was a cultural civilizational fight. That’s what made it basically different for all this and the principle of national self-determination and personal religious and political freedom used to be considered the basis of civilization.

Obviously, even though it was during the time of the Thirty Years’ War that what you’re describing was occurring in the settlement of America, but the U.S. neo-cons treated the idea of policy independence of other countries as all of a sudden a new alien civilization that threatens the entire West. The idea that there could be an alternative and that way of framing international relations inverts the whole traditional universal morality.

Well, so did the English settlement of America do it, and the Spanish settlement of America, but it was almost not even discussed by the legal theorists. It seemed to be outside the realm of something that could be discussed in terms of international law. And that gap, that creation of a new international law justifying settler colonialism, justifying the right of one nation to take over and destroy another’s people and culture, as well as just taking their land, is essentially what World War II was fought against, the principle of Nazism.

RICHARD WOLFF: If I could add, the way this is spun nowadays, I think, illustrates what Michael is trying to get us to understand. Only let me show you the words. The clash of civilizations is a very convenient way, and here’s a second way that is being used to make the same point: that one civilization is in favor of, and is roughly the equivalent of democracy, whereas the other civilization is the equivalent or equal to authoritarianism.

This is a wonderful dichotomization because what it allows you to do is to look at China and no matter how many times the Chinese tell you, ‘We have two goals.’ By the way, they’ve been saying this for 50 years. Number one, to end a hundred years of humiliation by which they mean colonialism, because even though China as a whole never became a colony, parts of it did: The cities along the coast were taken over, some by the Germans, some by the British (it was horrible); and they fought the Boxer Rebellion and they were defeated, and all the rest.

The second goal of China was to raise its people out of the worst poverty the world has ever seen. Two goals: not to be humiliated by foreigners and to raise their standard of living, basically. That’s what they set out to do and they have been the most successful in doing that in the history of the world, if you measure the amount of improvement and the time it took to achieve it. By those standards they are a roaring success. Notice I’m not commenting on their internal civil liberties or a whole lot of other qualities that are another conversation. But for the United States, it cannot see what they’re doing or why they’re doing it. They don’t anymore have the lingo of a great struggle between Capitalism and Socialism because that really doesn’t fit anymore.

So they have it between Democracy and Authoritarianism, which has no more pull or power of analysis than the old Capitalism versus Socialism ever did. These are ways of handling the rationalization that the United States needs to achieve what, for it, has become security. If you become a world power, then security requires you to control the world. If you don’t want to be worried about the rest of the world then don’t be a world power. Be a real strong power where the hell you are. But the United States has its 700-800 bases around the [world]. That’s the aspirations of a world power. And now it has the problem: How do you rationalize wanting to be perpetually what no empire has achieved? Answer: Everybody else is a threat to all that is good in the world. It is either non-human, or a real bad civilization, or authoritarian.

Last point. The irony here which – either a Hegel as philosopher, or a Bertolt Brecht as a theater writer, or a George Carlin as a comedian – you need that level of brilliance to capture. The most authoritarian political structure exists inside every capitalist corporation. The CEO tells everybody else what to do. And the people he orders about, the employees have absolutely no recall over him whatsoever. They don’t vote for him. They don’t approve anything he does. If he doesn’t like them, they’re fired. Oh my god. Finding other societies authoritarian when this is your reality five out of seven days a week for the vast majority of, that takes extraordinary ideological discipline, because it’s hard to be so blind in one area that you can call another area bad names that apply to you.

This is an extremity and I don’t think these cultures can long sustain it. And if I’m right then that’s another reason for those who run the United States to be very, very worried about their situation.

MICHAEL HUDSON: Well then, the question is what are we going to do about it? What’s the outcome going to be? When the English attacked the Native Americans, they didn’t have an opportunity to create an alternative. All they could do is retreat further and further westward until they were backed into reservations, or what the Nazis called concentration camps.

Well, U.S. Presidents Biden and Donald Trump both have repeatedly tried to express their great fear that other countries will do what the Native Americans and the Palestinians couldn’t do, that they’d create an alternative. And that’s why they’ve designated China as America’s existential enemy, and to prepare the ground for conquering it, they’ve said, ‘well, that requires weakening Russia and Iran because they’re China’s two great military allies and suppliers of oil of the energy that it needs.’

However U.S. foreign policy suffers from the Hubris that it has always had. It assumes that foreign countries will have no active response. They’ll passively surrender like the Native Americans did to the settlers or, like the Palestinians did when they simply left the country or got killed.

China and Russia have taken the lead in moving to create an alternative world order that is going to defend their independence. And that’s what we’ve been talking about on this show for about a month now. They’ve created a set of alternative organizations to those of the West.

The Shanghai Cooperation Organization has become a defensive counterweight to NATO, and the BRICS are creating a full-spectrum alliance to achieve trade and financial self-reliance independent of the U.S. and NATO bloc. Well, NATO’s foray into Ukraine to try to end Russia’s ability to survive as a fiscal state has failed. Russia’s got even stronger and Ukraine’s NATO-backed troops are close to total defeat.

So, the United States has shifted its military support to its long-term aim of gaining control of the world’s oil trade. For instance, well, if we can’t win on the battlefield, let’s control the key organs of control. And its policy here is very similar to that which it followed in Ukraine. It’s backing Israel to conquer the entire Near East, starting with the domestic Palestinian population and extending territory to absorb Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, culminating in the long-expressed hope that they’re going to be able to defeat Iran and pull it into greater Israel and control, as I said, the whole swath of oil, lands, and geography from the Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean. And like Ukraine, Israel’s military is focused much more on the population that’s in its way than on military targets. It really doesn’t care about that.

If you can destroy a civilization’s hospitals, infrastructure, its culture, the basis that holds it together politically and culturally, then you don’t need to engage in a military war that you’re sure to lose. Well, it is this focus on attacking civilians and cultural genocide that violates the civilized world’s rules of warfare that I talked about at the beginning. The U.S.-NATO countries don’t have any troops of their own, so their target is extended to include entire populations: ‘Well, we can bomb them. We’re not going to fight them.

All we can do is bomb them, as long as they don’t have a bomb to fight back.’ And the Palestinians have no bombs, and they’re not being supported by other Islamic countries. There’s no religious or ideological support of the countries around the Near East and West Asian area that are willing to realize that they’re all under threat, that this drive for Lebensraum is not simply a Judaic Lebensraum, for its own population, it’s for the Western Lebensraum to control natural resources, sub-soil resources, oil, minerals, the land, infrastructure.

The concept of Lebensraum has morphed into great control of all of the pre-conditions of social survival. That’s why the Israeli soldiers concentrate on killing children and bombing hospitals and schools. If you kill the children, there won’t be any population you have to fight in the future. Netanyahu and the Israeli cabinet: Again, ‘that’s why we’re killing children. That’s why we’re bombing hospitals. We don’t want the population to survive.’

Well, that aim is genocide and it’s to prevent other peoples and countries from surviving and living to provide an alternative. Like Ukraine, Israel’s promoting racial hatred to justify its genocide against the Palestinians and Arabs. Just as it calls adversaries sub-human, just as the Ukrainians called the Russian speakers cockroaches, sub-human, the Israelis are treating the Arabs as that. That’s really what Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations means in progress, in practice: There’s really only one civilization in his view, and the other civilizations are the indigenous population in the way of the settlers. What’s this done? It’s reviving World War II Nazi ideology of hatred that was so shocking that it’s driving the whole world into an alliance to defend itself.

That’s what the United States, our planners, didn’t realize: that countries fear that the genocide in Gaza and Israel’s West Bank may be their own fate if the United States seeks to prevent them from following their own independence or achieving their own self-reliance, their own monetary system, their own trade, their ability to tax American corporations or to fine them if they’re polluting their land, if they deviate from the U.S. neoliberal policies. That is basically the U.S.-new religion. If other countries try to escape from their dollar debt or the incessant regime change consequences, they’re going to end up like the victims of the settlers.

So we can think of economic settlement of a country, economic settlement of taking over the rules of a country’s trade, its domestic laws, its ability to tax corporations to control its oil and mineral resources in its own natural interest, instead of letting American and European firms take them over and siphon off all of their output and the economic value of these resources for itself.

So we’re really in a fight for what kind of civilization we’re going to have. And there may be a global fracture, but if there is a global fracture between the 15% of the population that’s U.S.-NATO and the 85% of all the rest of the world, the part of the world that is industrialized, the part of the world that has the natural resources, well then, the fight that we’re seeing today, this new Cold War is really about what civilization’s all about, in contrast to the U.S.-NATO’s really anti-civilization.

RICHARD WOLFF: Let me add, if I could, because I think there’s another dimension. You get a different insight if you ask yourself, what comes next? Israel presumably is concerned about its security. That’s what it says all the time and I assume that that’s part of the story. Okay.

If you’re a nation worried about your security, here’s what you’re doing: You’re making yourself the absolute enemy of all Arabs and most Muslims by what you are doing, which, in case Americans don’t know, is widely advertised. The destruction in Palestine is front-page news in every Muslim country on this planet, every day. So, not like the United States, this is we, our people, our co-religionists, our brothers and sisters, being slaughtered.

Number one, Israel is going to have to deal with however this ends, whenever it ends, with a level of global isolation and enmity that is going to be expressed in a million big decisions, little decisions and medium decisions made by hundreds of millions, billions of people around the world, every chance they get. It’s not just the Houthis who figured out how they can strike a blow. Everybody else.

Number two and probably more important. This effort is destroying the Israeli economy. They will be dependent on the United States, totally, utterly, for many, many years, if not indefinitely. They will have no independence from the United States. It won’t just be a question of needing weapons all the time, but needing cash infusions, trade deals. You name it, they’re going to need it.

And the United States with whatever regimes come to power in the United States will hold all the strings. In short, Israel is creating by its war a level of insecurity, dependence, uncertainty that will haunt that society indefinitely into the future. This is not a strategy that gets them either security or independence. It is a joke. It’s not a funny joke. It’s a joke on them, by telling themselves it’s us or them, by refusing to try to find a way out. They are creating, they are painting themselves into an international, political, ideological corner. They’re going to be desperate for a long, long time.

MICHAEL HUDSON: I think that Israel is only one of the first arenas in this large international fight. The United States hasn’t said the Palestinians are an existential enemy. They noticed that the other Islamic countries are supporting Israel. Turkey is supporting Israel. Saudi Arabia is supporting Israel. Egypt is especially supporting Israel. They’re not fighting against it because the leaders are essentially bought off and are making money by supporting Israel, and they’re putting the benefit of their own leaders over their whole national destiny.

I’m more concerned about what other countries are going to do that will be able to mount a much stronger response than the Near Eastern countries are doing. Essentially, the response is going to be something that the Near Eastern oil countries haven’t done. The BRICS are moving to decouple from the West in order to create their own multipolar world, mutual benefit and development. This is the same issue that was fought over in the Thirty Years’ War.

The problem is that there seems little chance of the West accepting a Peace of Westphalia, permitting such a world, or at least a world that the United States, Europe, and Israel would want to be a part of. That’s the difference. At least at the end of the Thirty Years’ War, Europe did accept a common interest in ending war and establishing ‘We don’t want more to tear our civilization – if you can call it that – apart.’ That’s not the case today.

The United States’ policy is to tear other countries resisting American policy apart, saying they’re not only a different civilization, they’re actually different species. Each civilization is a species and, somehow, we’re back into the ethnic racial stereotyping that underlay the settler colonialism and the American wars in Asia, Vietnam, Korea, everywhere else. The problem is that they’re not interested in mutual gain. They’re not interested in a world where everybody can live peacefully together. That’s why there’s not going to be a two-state solution to Israel. All the U.S. wants is the ability to use its brute power to control, grab whatever resources and revenue it wants. The aim is conquest without regard for the economic costs and benefits.

So you can’t look at it and say, ‘Well, what’s in the economic interest of the United States and Europe? Isn’t their economic interest to join with Russia and China and all have a prosperous world for mutual gain?’ Its leaders say, ‘No, we don’t care.’ The German leaders are willing to sacrifice the German economy, to destroy its industry, to shrink its GDP, quarter after quarter after quarter, to reduce its living standards, all because that’s the price of preventing an alternative world order to what the United States – which supports us – is interested in.

Andrei Martyanov has suggested that the United States is fighting today the closing years of World War II, in the sense that it’s fighting over the principles, what all of that was about, about what kind of international relations are going to be established, and it’s a fight against all other peoples as if it were a struggle for survival between different species, a kind of Darwinian survival of the fittest.

And yet, the West is now the least economically fit, and the least militarily fit, except for its atomic weapons. And there it’s a tie, because both the U.S. and Russia and China all have the power to blow up the whole world and start again with the Neo-Paleolithic age. So this fight treats populations that seek their own policy independence as a species to be exterminated.

That’s the essence of Nazi ideology and it’s being repeated today. So if there is a clash of civilization, where does all this leave the United Nations? All the countries except the U.S.-NATO and Israel want peace. But the United Nations is powerless to exclude the most genocidal violators of international law.

When Israel blocks humanitarian United Nations emergency food from being delivered to the starving victims of Gaza, the United Nations has no military power to just overcome Israel’s blockage. It doesn’t have its own tanks to just say, ‘You want to let their trucks in, we’re going to send the trucks in behind the convoy of tanks and if your Israeli guards block us, we’re just going to shoot you down.’

It doesn’t have any power like that. Egypt has the power, but the Americans manipulated the Arab Spring to put in the chosen successor to Mubarak. The dictator was put in place by the entirely corrupt Egyptian ruling class. And the only question is whether the army somehow is going to have a memory of Abdul Nasser. It doesn’t have to be this way. So far there is no sign that Egypt will not be an applauder of Israel and a backer of Israel, as it’s been right now. It’s not going to help deliver food aid. It has put up just the opposite. It puts up blocks saying, ‘We don’t want any Palestinians here. We want them to be starved instead of coming into Egypt.’ That is utterly contemptible.

I don’t think that arenas further eastward around China, Russia, Central Asia, South Asia are going to be anywhere near as passive and corrupt as you’ve seen in the Islamic states. You can see that they are working very rapidly to create an alternative in which the Islamic countries basically have no interest at all in joining. They’re trying to play it both ways, just as Turkey is trying to say, ‘Well, we’re going to be part of NATO but at the same time going to be part of BRICS.’ As the Chinese say, a man who tries to take two roads at once is going to have a broken hip joint. That’s basically what we have there.

So, if the United States cannot even admit Palestine as a member, what will it do? It was the United Nations that created Israel and it itself bears the responsibility for recognizing Israel and endorsing its explicit aim of genocide against Palestinians from the new settler countries.

In 1948, the United Nations accepted the settler state, even as the Stern Gang was killing all the Palestinians to let its Zionist followers come in, and the United Nations was powerless to stop it. And the United Nations is powerless to act in the very way it’s constructed, with a Security Council that can be blocked by the United States, and where you can have votes to condemn Israel by the only two countries opposing the United States, Israel and a few Pacific Island countries. The whole rest of the world is against them and cannot do anything.

It’s obvious that if there is going to be any way of preventing what we’re describing, this attack on civilization, there has to be a new alternative to the United Nations, and that alternative has to have a military enforcement arm of international law, and it has to realize that this is an existential issue that requires its own ideological doctrine to be spelled out, what the principles are and how these principles are going to be defended. I don’t see any sign of that happening right now.

United Nations officials tend to paper over this problem by expressing the fantasy that somehow, ‘well, we really want a two-state solution but we’re not going to recognize Palestine and we’re not going to do anything at all about Israel’s genocide. We’re not going to order the arrest. We’re not going to isolate Israel. We’re going to let trade with Israel. We’re going to accept Israel genocide because it has its own freedom to do whatever it wants.’ So, the United Nations has essentially become an arm of the U.S. State Department and military, and that’s an impossible way to survive if there’s going to be an alternative to the U.S. kind of order that we’ve been talking about.

President Netanyahu claims that the essence of Judaism itself is to exterminate the non-Jewish population there and he says it to protest against genocide. To claim that the Palestinians are people and should not be killed is anti-Semitic because Israel is a Jewish state and its settlers may suffer retaliation if, as they kill the indigenous population, and because they’ve killed so many Palestinians, it’s only natural that the Palestinians and Arabs would want to fight back.

And it’s that reality that they want to defend themselves that, as you’ve just said, is an existential threat to Israel. And so, any country that fights back against the attacks by the bombs of the United States (they’re the United States’ bombs that Israel is dropping) is anti-Semitic. Germany and the United States then pass laws that any support of the Palestinians, any claim that they are human beings, any demonstrations on campus, any political demonstrations are legally breaking the law.

That’s what’s so contemptible, certainly about Germany, but also about the United States and the other NATO nations. We’re talking about an ideology that is anti-civilizational in principle. We don’t have to reinvent the wheel because the wheel was basically already invented, in many ways, after the Thirty Years’ War. That became, I think, the basis for German philosophy and the whole European philosophy of law. They’re trying to reinvent it, but international law needs a means of enforcement. As long as you have the United Nations subject to veto power, you can’t do anything.

So, the principles of the United Nations are pretty clear. The principles, the aims should be similar to those of 1648, aiming to end the opportunities by America’s neo-liberal inquisition to interfere with the policies of other nations. The nation of Georgia has recently made a positive start in all of this. They’ve closed down the NGOs that are being financed by the U.S. National Endowment for Democracy. That is fascism to promote regime change, and to meddle in the internal politics of countries in the hope of creating a local Boris Yeltsin or Zelensky or a Shah. The National Endowment for Democracy wants to make Georgia into another Ukraine fighting to the last Georgian, if they can put in some U.S. puppet to go to war with Russia.

So, here’s the problem that has to be addressed. The West has to go beyond the idea of a clash of civilizations. It’s going beyond this idea of a clash of civilization, it wants to be the only civilization left, in fact. But it’s uncivilized. So its ideology of destroying countries moving to resist its political and economic conquest is the opposition of civilization. It’s barbarism.

So, instead of having a clash of civilization for nations, as in Europe’s Thirty Years’ War, we’re experiencing a war against civilization itself, and the great question is whether the global majority of civilization is going to realize how truly existential America’s fight to reverse the principles of civilization is for these other countries. And the most immediate short-term test is going to be America’s sponsorship of Israel’s fight against Iran, I think.

What appeared in the 1990s to be the end of civilization is a war of survival for countries seeking to withdraw from the U.S.-NATO orbit and this U.S.-Israeli-Ukrainian policy of dehumanizing the enemy is a military tactic going way back to biblical times, as we’ve discussed – what Israel calls Amalek and U.S. diplomacy calls Autocracy or Socialism.

Russia’s President Putin regrets now how gullible he was in believing that the West would somehow act in a way to avoid war in Ukraine because that was in the West’s interest. It was in Europe’s interest to import Russian oil because that was the basis of its industry and yet it didn’t do that. U.S. officials never had any intention of keeping their promise not to expand NATO eastward.

Likewise, Iran’s newly elected president regrets how gullible he was in believing that if Iran refrained from defending its country against Israel bombing and assassinating its officials, the West would remove, or at least lighten, the trade and financial sanctions against Iran. That didn’t happen so now he’s hardened his position. So, the big question is, where does this leave Chinese foreign policy – since America says China is America’s existential enemy – based on offering a win-win agreement that would benefit both countries for international gain?

But the U.S. leaders have no intention in that kind of policy because it doesn’t want anyone else to have the gains that are to be made from technological and economic progress. They have only one goal: unipolar control of the entire planet and its governments, its economies, its natural resources, its land, and its water. As in a religious war, they’re willing to die for the ideal and to bring all the world down in an atomic war if they fail. That’s what’s being threatened in Ukraine today, and in Israel and Iran this week.

RICHARD WOLFF: One of the questions that a lot of people have about all of this is why governments, particularly in Europe, but also governments elsewhere, remain – most of them – unwilling to challenge what the United States is doing. You have the Houthis – they do – but they’re not even a government. They are a part of Yemen.

Yemen is one thing and the Houthis are a community within Yemen. But you have to look long and far, where else you get people willing to do stuff. I understand, much is done – hidden – that we don’t know about, or we can’t measure, or we can’t see. So, I want to address if I can, in the time we have, why it would be that Olaf Scholz in Germany, or Emmanuel Macron in France, or the E.U. leadership, and on and on and on and on, are willing – as Michael correctly says, and as many have pointed out – to go along with the United States in Ukraine.

And I mean go along: condemn Russia as the total evil here, supply weapons, supply money, all the rest of it, to the Ukrainians; why they basically go along with Israel in the Middle East, some more, some less, I understand, but why are they doing it? And then people ask, well, why would Sweden and Finland join NATO? Why is that happening? Why, even when Germany is in recession? I believe last quarter, and this quarter they came in below zero in GDP growth, so that qualifies (two quarters in a row below zero, you’re in an official recession, at least by the usual standard of that measure).

So here’s my answer. For the last 75 years of United States dominance coming out of World War II, any government that the United States found in power anywhere in the world, but particularly in Europe, that wasn’t aligned with American objectives was considered unacceptable. In the beginning, for example, coming out of World War II – just to remind people since the history of this is so poorly known – the first post-World War II government in France had several members of the French Communist Party in the cabinet of Charles de Gaulle. Okay.

That meant that the United States had to deal with a government of France, a member of the Security Council of the United Nations, which had a Communist Party (which at that time was very pro-Soviet), sitting in the cabinet. The second largest political party for 20 years after World War II was over in Italy, the Italian Communist Party, the largest Communist Party outside of Russia anywhere in the world. So, you developed in Europe, in places like Germany, France, Italy, everywhere, even Britain, you had a version of what in the United States was called McCarthyism. It wasn’t as bad as the United States. You couldn’t do to the Communist and Socialist Parties there what you were able to do in the United States.

That’s because of particular historical cultural differences between them. But you were able to shut them down. What you were able to do was to create a situation in which the heights of political power, the dominant role in the major political parties, was people who were acceptable to the United States. And this became so routine and so normal that you didn’t have to impose it anymore from the outside. It was understood inside. People who sided with the United States saw their careers much more smoothly upward bound than people who had the temerity not to go in that direction. And there’s one after another in every one of these countries that learned that. So now we get to the present.

What you have are dominant political structures overwhelmingly populated by people who have decided, from their own experience, that going with the United States is the way to go, and going against the United States is a recipe for defeat and for decline, for disaster. They’re not unaware of what the Russians and the Chinese are doing, but they’re not yet convinced that the United States won’t be able to impose on those others what they have so successfully imposed on the Europeans. Olaf Scholz can’t think outside that box, neither can Mr. Macron, neither can Jens Stoltenberg, or Josep Borrell, or any of the other leading figures in European politics. And that’s true from Scandinavia to Greece, and from England to the Central European countries. That’s how they see the world.

The effort of the Soviet Union, let’s remember, was shown not to be up to the task by the reversals of 1989, 1990, 1991, and the place where that hasn’t happened – the far east – is far away from Europe. So, here’s what’s going on. The European leadership has decided to go with the United States – that’s the horse they’re betting on to win the race because it always has – but they are very worried, more now than ever, that they may have bet on the wrong horse. Right below the surface in European politics is a movement, partly on the right – that’s the rise of all the quasi-fascists, you know, the government in Italy, Alternativ für Deutschland in Germany, Marine Le Pen in France – but also on the left with the arrival of Sarah Wagenknecht in Germany, very clear on her position against the war in Ukraine; Jean-Luc Mélanchon in France, who now is the head of the largest political party in the French Assemblée Nationale, is a Marxist. So is Sarah Wagenknecht on the left, they have been Marxists all of their political lives, and they’re known as such in their countries, very clearly.

Okay. I think you’re going to see, very disturbing to the United States in the months and years ahead, you’re going to see eruptions of difference. You’re going to see emergence of more governments like those of Mr. Orbán on the right in Hungary, the Czech government, and others, that are going to be even less and less sure.

That’s why the United States is desperate. That’s part of why Israel is desperate. They are now convinced that time is not on their side. They’re frightened. They won’t say so, and they’re right to be frightened, because their allies in Europe – the ones they still count on even though they’re disrespectful of them, but they’re convinced they need them – and they do.

It’s very important people understand: Europe is in a terrible, terrible situation and the Europeans kind of know it. They’re caught between the United States and China. It’s not clear what place for Europe will emerge in this new BRICS versus G7. In the G7, Europe is a footnote. In the G7 versus China, Europe is even more of a footnote.
Europe is not used to being a footnote.

Europe is used to being in charge. They have a hard row to hoe, how to manage all of this. It’s going to be tumult, it’s going to be turmoil inside Europe now for a long time, and it’s going to be rough and difficult. And one of the things that may emerge is an attempt, either to make a real third player in the world out of Europe – with its own army, its own nuclear, its own ‘all that’ – or to join with BRICS and China and go after a multipolarity in which the Europeans, by getting in on it, have a place they won’t have if they don’t get in on it.

These are real existential conditions that are going to be fought out over the next period, and the horror of much of it is that – and here I want to take off my hat to you, Nima, for making these conversations happen – this is what has to be talked about. If you believe, à la Aristotle and Plato, that the unexamined life is not worth living; if you think it’s better to understand what’s happening to you than not to; to want to know the good, the bad, the risks, the hopes; then these are the conversations that have to happen, and the mainstream media keeps as far away from them as it is possible to be.

People like you, and these programs, are therefore crucial. It’s not a question about agreeing with what I say, or with what Michael says, it’s not. It’s important to have these questions opened up, to have to contend with the history that Michael reviewed with us and for us today; to have to contend with what that points to, rather than living in a make-believe world in which a clash of civilizations is going on, so you don’t have to face the real issues that are going to shape what happens to us all.

MICHAEL HUDSON: Well, President Putin said a few months ago that someday Russia and Germany and Europe will trade again, but it may take 30 years.

RICHARD WOLFF: It might. Here’s my guess: From the little I know (and it isn’t much) but I speak German, I read German, you know, so I’m able to access what goes on in that country. I can assure you, whatever else, it will be less than 30 years. Inside Germany is an enormous conversation and debate going on about these issues, with much more blunt honesty than we imagine here in the United States. Just like you have to say inside Israel, there’s more opposition to what Netanyahu is doing than we have allowed here in the United States.

The irony: they have a newspaper, they had access, they can actually have (I’m not saying it’s adequate and I’m not denying what Israel is basically doing not for a minute), but there is an opposition that the Israelis have mounted to the policy of their government. We shouldn’t forget that, and that these political winds can change. Israel is not (let me say this to my American audience) winning in Gaza, is not winning in Lebanon. It may win.

I’m open, I understand, but not yet. And, wow, you know, a year into Hamas, and there’s still a Hamas? After what you’ve done? That’s amazing! I ask my fellow Americans if, in this country, one of our 50 states was subjected to the kind of destruction that Israel has done in Gaza, would there be a strong resistance? Don’t answer so quickly because the truth is we don’t know.

In Israel, we do know. There is a Hamas; they’re still fighting back. That’s amazing, and in the long run, that’s going to be just as important as it turned out after the end of World War II, when we all learned about the Norwegian resistance and the French resistance and the Italian partisans, turned out that there were opponents to the Nazis in every country, including Germany.

MICHAEL HUDSON: Well, I do write a monthly column for the German financial press auf deutsch. So you’re right, there is a resistance.

NIMA ALKHORSHID: I don’t know if you’ve learned that CNN reported that Joe Biden is going to be in Germany to receive Germany’s highest award.

RICHARD WOLFF: Yes, we see that’s Mr. Scholz trying to play ‘We are on your side, don’t worry, we are loyal, you help me get here, so I’m going to help you get there’. Absolutely. By the way, same relationship between Biden and Netanyahu.

NIMA ALKHORSHID: Yeah. Thank you so much for being with us today, Richard and Michael. See you soon.

The conflict between Israel and Iran is distinct from that between the Arab population of Palestine and Jewish immigrants. Contrary to popular belief, the Persians have never been the enemy of the Jews. In fact, in ancient times, it was Cyrus the Great who enabled the Jews to escape from Babylon, where they had been held in slavery.

After the Second World War, when the United States seized the remnants of the British Empire, US President Dwight Eisenhower reorganized the Middle East. To dominate it, he appointed two regional powers to represent him: Iran and Israel. The two countries were both friends and rivals.

Eisenhower sent his Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles (brother of CIA Director Alan Dulles), to Syria to organize an Iranian-Syrian alliance to contain Israeli ambitions. A mutual defense treaty was signed between Damascus and Teheran on May 24, 1953. At the time, the Syrian president, General Adil Chicakli, was pro-British and anti-French. This treaty still exists today [1].

At the same time, the UK came into conflict with Shah Reza Pahlevi’s Prime Minister, Mohammad Mossadegh, who wanted to nationalize oil production. With the help of the United States, London organized a coloured revolution ("Operation Ajax" [2]). MI6 and the CIA paid thousands of people to demonstrate and overthrow Mossadegh. Responding to the "call" of his people, the sovereign changed his Prime Minister to Nazi general Fazlollah Zahedi [3].

Cooperation between the Shah’s autocratic regime and Israel began in 1956 with the construction of the Elian-Ashkelon pipeline. Above all, in 1957, Mossad sent a team of "revisionist Zionists" [4], led by Yitzak Shamir, to set up the dreaded SAVAK political police [5].

In 1956, to seize the Suez Canal, which Egypt wanted to nationalize, the declining colonial powers, the United Kingdom and France, enlisted the help of the colonial state of Israel. After this operation, the France of socialist Guy Mollet thanked Israel by secretly sharing its atomic research with it. This research continued unbeknownst to the United States.

However, when the U.S. became convinced that Tel Aviv was heading for the bomb, it made sure to give it to Iran too. In 1974, French President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing brought Iran into the Eurodif consortium. It undertook to supply it with enriched uranium and to train its scientists. Two years later, US President Gerald Ford authorized Iran to pursue its own bomb.

While the Western media had always portrayed the Shah of Iran as a sovereign who respected human rights, they began to prepare public opinion for the revolution when Imam Khomeini took refuge in Paris. On December 19, 1978, TF1 suddenly discovered the practice of torture by the SAVAK.

In 1978, the United States took a dim view of Shah Reza Pahlevi’s military ambitions, which threatened Israeli power, and decided to impose a new Prime Minister with a new policy. Zbigniew Brzeziński, President Jimmy Carter’s security advisor, decided to rely on the Shiite clergy, some of whose assets had just been nationalized by the Shah (the "White Revolution"). In his view, Ayatollah Rouhollah Khomeini, whose preaching was circulated on audiocassettes throughout the country, had the authority to become the monarch’s Prime Minister. Despite the opposition of Secretary of State Cyrus Vance, he organized his exile to the Paris region, where he stayed for four months before being flown to Tehran by Air France on a special plane. The United States had persuaded the Shah that they were in control of the situation, and only intended to fight his opposition. They had even asked the Savak to assassinate the philosopher Ali Shariati (a personal friend of Frantz Fannon and Jean-Paul Sartre) in London, so that his ant colonialist ideas would not interfere with their scenario. The Shah had agreed to take a leave of absence while Washington sorted out the problem at home.

However, on the day of his return, February 1, 1979, a crowd of one million people acclaimed the Ayatollah. From the airport, he made his way to the cemetery where 800 Iranian victims of political repression had just been buried. To the astonishment of Westerners, he delivered a violently anti-imperialist speech. There was no longer any question of a revolution within the Persian Empire, but of the establishment of an Islamic Republic.

At the Behesht-e Zahra cemetery, Ayatollah Khomeini apostrophized the army, calling on them to liberate the country from the Anglo-Saxons. The man the CIA took for a doddering preacher was in reality a tribune who inflamed the crowds and convinced everyone that they each could change the world.

Israel immediately seized the Iranian half of the Eilat-Ashkelon pipeline. A long dispute ensued, which was only secretly settled much later.

Khomeini questioned the recognition of Israel as a colonial state, had the premises of its embassy seized and handed them over to the Palestine Liberation Organization.

In 1985, Robert McFarlane, Security Advisor to US President Ronald Reagan, planned to deliver arms to Nicaragua’s counter-revolutionaries, the Contras, without the knowledge of Congress. To this end, he first approached Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres. The two men agreed that it was not possible to involve a revolutionary Arab state like Libya, but perhaps Iran. Through the intermediary of MP Hassan Rohani (future President of Iran), they contacted the President of the Iranian Assembly, the hodjatoleslam Hashemi Rafsanjani. Rafsanjani agreed to buy weapons to fight the Iraqi aggression, and to transfer some of them to the Contras. Thanks to this deal, Rafsanjani, already a large landowner, became the richest man in his country [6].

In 1988, Iraq used chemical weapons of mass destruction against the Iranian army and population. The result was a huge number of cripples. Even today, the threshold of tolerance to air pollution is very low in Iran. Often, the state issues an alert and the city of Teheran has to be evacuated for several days. I remember my friend, the great journalist Nader Talebzadeh, who, interviewing me on television, suddenly left the set, coughed up his lungs and was hospitalized. Responding to the suffering of his people, Ayatollah Rouhollah Khomeini declared weapons of mass destruction in general to be contrary to his vision of Islam. Since then, Iran has ceased its nuclear, biological and chemical military research. This ethical decision made the war last a little longer.
In 1992, Hashemi Rafsanjani, now a professional arms dealer and President of Iran, organized secret exchanges with President Carlos Menem’s Argentina. Now publicly collaborating with the United States, he sent troops to fight under NATO orders in Bosnia-Herzegovina. He also supplied Argentine arms to the Bosnians. Officially, he did not question Khomeini’s anti-colonialist vision of the world, but supported the Bosnian president, Alija Izetbegović. Israeli military personnel also took part in the operations.

The Iran-Argentina arms trade was interrupted by Israel, which organized the attack on its own embassy in Buenos-Aires (1992), followed by the attack on AMIA (1994) [7] and finally the assassination of Argentine President Carlos Menem’s son, Carlitos (1995) . [8].

In 2001, Washington abandoned its policy of balance in the Middle East. Gone were the ties between Israel and Iran (1953-79), Israel and Iraq (1979-91) and Israel and Saudi Arabia (1991-2001). The Pentagon intended to sow chaos throughout the "wider Middle East" (excluding Israel), i.e. from Afghanistan to Morocco [9]. Those who had chosen this new strategy had pulled out all the stops to impose it: the September 11th attacks.

In 2003, a former Guardian of the Revolution, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, became President of Iran. He reversed the policies of his predecessors and returned to the ideals of Ayatollah Rouhollah Khomeini. He never ceased to clash with the religious authorities, and even with the Supreme Leader. He industrialized his country, built social housing and tried to help the Shiite populations of the Middle East to find their own independence. Questioning the unspoken alliance with Israel
in 2005, he explained that the State of Israel would disappear like Apartheid South Africa. Reuters falsified his words, crediting him with announcing the destruction of the Israeli people [10].
In 2006, he organized a conference on the Holocaust in Teheran. His aim was not to deny the truth, but on the contrary to show that the State of Israel was not reparation for Nazi crimes, but a British colonial project. Israel then asserted that it is anti-Semitic, which it absolutely is not.

At the same time, Israel launched a worldwide press campaign claiming that Iran had resumed its military nuclear program. This was based on the fact that President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had launched a vast civilian nuclear program. Indeed, he intended to discover another way of producing energy, through nuclear fusion rather than fission as in atomic bombs. At the time, Iran was planning to help the Third World develop by escaping Western control of hydrocarbons. A very long battle in international institutions began for Iran [11].. In addition to Iran’s pseudo-military nuclear program, Israel began to denounce Iran’s pseudo-imperialism in Iraq.

The agreement concluded in secret on March 2, 2008 in Baghdad between Admiral William Fallon, Commander of U.S. Forces for the Middle East (CentCom), and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was broken by U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney. The US military intended to pacify Iraq with Iran, not against it [12]. But Dick Cheney, who had been involved in the September 11th attacks, would not budge from the Rumsfeld/Cebrowski doctrine. That’s why he launched a colour revolution during Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s second election [13].

On September 23, 2010, at the United Nations, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad called for an international inquiry into the attacks of September 11, 2001, causing panic in the White House.

The situation changed again in 2013. U.S. President Barack Obama wanted to put an end to the Rumsfeld/Cebrowski doctrine, which would require decades and millions of deaths before there would be any hope of a return on investment. He therefore planned to renew ties with the Iranian personalities who took part in the Iran-Contra affair, in other words, with Hashemi Rafsanjani’s team.
He began secret contacts in Oman [14]. In the end, his interlocutors [15] promised to prevent Ahmaninedjad’s team from fielding a candidate in the next presidential election, so that Hassan Rohani could win. Simultaneously, in August, Barack Obama withdrew from Syria, where he claimed to have drawn a red line, leaving his French partner, François Hollande, alone with his warmongering.

As soon as he was elected, Hassan Rohani once again abandoned the ideals of Imam Rouhollah Khomeiny and began negotiating the sale of Iranian oil to the Europeans. Bribes were paid by Austria. On the other hand, the Islamic judiciary arrested and sentenced, one after the other, all the collaborators of former president Ahmadinejad. His vice-president, Hamid Beghaie, was arrested on a secret charge, tried behind closed doors and sentenced to 15 years’ imprisonment [16].
President Rohani’s cabinet then proposed the creation of a Shiite federation with the various Shiite communities in Yemen, Iraq, Syria and Lebanon, in short, the restoration of the Persian Empire. At the same time, the 5+1 negotiations began in Geneva. Within a few days, an agreement was reached. A first document was presented on November 24, 2013. The Chinese and Russian ministers, Wang Yi and Sergey Lavrov, declared that the agreement was easy to draft because all parties knew that Iran does not have, nor seek to have, an atomic bomb. A long year of silence followed, with the initial text not signed until July 14, 2015.

A little later, in 2016, Hassan Rohani concluded a discreet agreement with Israel to settle the Eifat-Ashkelon pipeline dispute. In 2018, the Knesset discreetly passed a law punishing any publication about the pipeline’s owners with 15 years’ imprisonment.

General Qassem Soleimani, symbol of Iran’s anti-imperialist revolution.

The new American president, Donald Trump, realized that he could not be cordial with his counterpart, Hassan Rohani. In the eyes of everyone, and especially the Iranians, their country is the unwavering enemy of the United States. So, on May 8, 2018, he tore up the nuclear agreement without warning. Washington and Tehran played this comedy as they did with Reagan and Rafsanjani: officially, they hate each other, in private, they do business. The Iranians, who continue to tighten their belts, discovered with amazement on social networks the incredible standard of living of their leaders and their families.

The two groups that have been at loggerheads for half a century in Iran - international businessmen and anti-imperialist fighters - are now crystallizing around President Hassan Rohani and General Qassem Soleimani. The latter promoted an alternative: the "Axis of Resistance". In the name of the Revolutionary Guards Corps, he armed and trained foreign Shiite groups, not to federate them, but to give them the means to achieve independence. From Ansar Allah (Yemen) to Hezbollah (Lebanon), each group would be responsible for itself, coordinating with others but refusing orders from Tehran. The men trained by Soleimani won victories against Daesh, against some of their own governments and against the West. He himself became the most popular man in the Middle East. Officially, he is not involved in politics, but his speeches inflame the Arab and Persian populations. If he stood for election, he would surely be elected president. The veterans of the Iran-Contra affair then decided to eliminate him. On January 3, 2020, he was assassinated at Baghdad airport by a US guided missile strike. President Donald Trump claimed responsibility for the operation, but the local consensus was that it had been conceived in Tel Aviv. The Iranian president, Ebrahim Raissi, could be elected without difficulty.

The Israeli attack on the Iranian consulate in Damascus should not be interpreted as directed against President Ebrahim Raissi’s team, but against the Revolutionary Guards.

Although the massacres in Sudan and Congo are far more deadly than those in Palestine, it’s the latter that I’m going to talk about today. Indeed, this is the first time we’ve witnessed ethnic cleansing live on our cell phones. I’d like to come back to some information that I’ve already covered in various articles, but which some media obviously don’t want to include in their analyses. I would like to tell you that there is no community fatality: this conflict was not provoked by the people of Palestine, be they Jews, Christians or Muslims, but by outside powers who, for a century, have wanted them never to know peace.

Behind the screens, the Prince of Wales (protector of the Muslim Brotherhood) sees God and becomes King Charles III.

The British creation of Israel

To make myself clear, I’ll start by telling you about the United Kingdom. You attended the coronation of King Charles III. You’ll remember that, in the middle of the ceremony, he took off his rich clothes and dressed in linen. His pages set up screens to prevent the audience from being dazzled. When the screens were removed, he had become king. He was then presented with the symbols of his power, the sceptre and globe. What had happened in those few moments out of public view? The Prince of Wales had seen God, like Moses before the burning bush [1]. This explanation probably sounds far-fetched to you, and you wonder how his subjects could believe such a tall tale. In fact, since James VI in the 16th century, British sovereigns have declared themselves kings of Israel [2]. It was against his conception of divine right that Oliver Cromwell overthrew his son Charles and proclaimed the Commonwealth. However, the Lord Protector was equally enlightened, professing that all Jews should be regrouped in Palestine and Solomon’s Temple rebuilt there [3]. In the end, successive dynasties kept this myth alive. They adopted various rites and imposed others on their subjects, such as Jewish circumcision, which was performed in maternity wards on all newborn males in the Kingdom at birth, during the XIX century.

Two years before the Balfour Declaration (1917), which announced the creation of a Jewish national home in Palestine, a Jewish diplomat and future Foreign Minister, Lord Herbert Samuel, wrote a memorandum on the Future of Palestine (1915). In it, he argued for a Jewish state that would place the entire Diaspora at the service of the Empire. A little later, he specified that this new state should never be able to ensure its own security, so as to be eternally dependent on the English Crown. This is exactly what we are witnessing today. This is the fate that has cursed the people of Palestine.

Lord Arthur Balfour’s declaration was followed by U.S. President Woodrow Wilson’s 14 points. In them, he describes the objectives achieved by his country during the First World War. Point 12 is strangely worded, but at the Paris Conference that drafted the Treaty of Versailles, he specified in writing what was to be understood: the creation of the State of Israel in Palestine (and Kurdistan in Turkey). The World War had brought about a rebalancing of forces, so that Washington was now working alongside London in the defense of common interests.

During the interwar period, Jewish immigration to Mandatory Palestine went smoothly. Arab landowners readily sold some of their land to Jews. However, as early as 1920, Arab terrorists began murdering Jews. Among the murderers was Mohammed Amin al-Husseini, who was sentenced by the British to 10 years in prison, but never executed. On the contrary, Lord Herbert Samuel (the man who had written that there should never be security in Palestine), who had become the British High Commissioner in Palestine, pardoned him and appointed him Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, ostensibly to maintain a balance between the two great local families.

Then came a Salafist (i.e. a Muslim wishing to live like the Prophet’s companions in the 7th century), Izz al-Din al-Qassam, who had already organized a revolt against the French in Syria and became imam in Haifa. He decided to wage jihad, not against the British occupiers, but against Jewish immigrants. Various attacks and pogroms against Jews followed. To maintain civil peace, the British killed al-Qassam, after whom the current Hamas al-Qassam Brigades are named.

The death of al-Qassam had solved nothing. The British, true to their colonial technique of "divide and rule", have always developed with one hand what they fought with the other. In 1936, Lord Willam Peel, at the head of an official commission, assured us that peace could only be restored by separating the Arab and Jewish populations into two distinct states. This is what is known today as the "two-state solution".

During the Second World War, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem became an ally of Chancellor Adolf Hitler. In particular, he rallied the Muslims of the Balkans to join the SS and supported the "Final Solution of the Jewish Question". For their part, the Jewish fascists (the "revisionist Zionists") of Ukrainian Vladimir Jabotinsky fought alongside the Axis against the British. The Zionists, for their part, fought on the side of the Allies, while challenging the limits that the British theoretically imposed on Jewish immigration - only theoretically.

Fascist historian Benzion Netanyahu and his son, Benjamin Netanyahu.

Source: Prime Minister’s Office

They met in May 1942 at the Baltimore Hotel in New York, under the chairmanship of David Ben Gurion. They laid down the principles of the future State of Israel. Until now, we have been assured that Ben Gourion was a man of good will. However, he had been Jabotinsky’s companion during the inter-war years, and had spoken out in favor of the ethnic cleansing of Palestine. A book, released in Hebrew in Israel two weeks ago and published by a major publishing house, assures that he was kept abreast of the Hungarian Rezső Kasztner’s negotiations with Heinrich Himmler and Adolf Eichmann that lasted until the fall of the Reich. Kasztner claimed to buy the escape of a million Hungarian Jews. In reality, he saved only his family and friends. Above all, he extorted 8.5 million Swiss francs in gold (a colossal sum at the time) from wealthy Jewish families in Hungary, making them believe in a possible escape [4]. If the documents quoted in this book are accurate, David Ben Gurion would also be a swindler, having deceived his own people.

The United Nations proposed
• not to divide Palestine (not the "Peel two-state solution") ;
• to establish a republican, democratic and representative regime;
• to guarantee the cultures of the various minorities;
• guarantee religious freedom for Jews, Christians and Muslims.

Conferences and negotiations followed in vain. On November 29, 1947, the United Nations General Assembly (which then comprised only 56 member states) approved the partition plan drawn up by a special commission [5]. It was immediately rejected by all Arab countries.

On May 14, 1948 (two and a half months before the end of the British mandate), David Ben Gurion cut short the discussions and unilaterally proclaimed the independence of the State of Israel. The day after the coup, as the 100,000 British troops began to withdraw, Egypt, Jordan, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia and North Yemen sent their troops to defend the Arabs of Palestine. The Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood also sent a group of fighters, under the command of Saïd Ramadan (son-in-law of founder Hassan el-Banna and father of Tariq Ramadan), to join them. At the time, however, none of these countries had an army worthy of the name. They were quickly defeated. The myth of the invincibility of Tsahal was born.

However, as my Lebanese friend Hassan Hamade told me, this narrative is a lie. In reality, the Arab heads of state were already committed to Israel, and the Jews were no more valiant than the Arabs.
In this way, Emir Majid Arslan, the Lebanese Minister of Defense, led his troops without encountering much resistance to Bethlehem, which he liberated. The Lebanese President, Bechara el-Khoury, immediately ordered him to abandon the battlefield, which he refused to do. He dismissed him, but he continued the war as a mere officer. In the end, his troops were not defeated by the Jews of Palestine, but by the "Jordanian" army commanded by a British general, John Bagot Glubb (known as "Glubb Pasha") and a hundred or so British officers. In reality, Jordan had no soldiers, but the Arab Legion, formed by the British during the Second World War, had changed its name to the "Jordanian Army" on the first day of the war, while retaining its British officers. It was the British and Jordanians who saved Israel from the start, just as they saved it again when Iran attacked last month. This war was not an attempt to crush Israel, but the first manifestation of Arab Zionism.

The United Nations, worried by these developments, dispatched a special envoy, the Swede Folke Bernadotte, to recuperate the situation after the Israeli coup and the Arab-Israeli war. As soon as he arrived, he realized that the Special Commission that had drawn up the partition plan was ignoring demographic realities: the Israelis were claiming a territory disproportionate to their numbers, and enjoying the support of Arab Zionist governments that had first pretended to play the role of good offices and then to wage war.

On September 17, 1948, "revisionist Zionists" (i.e. Jewish fascists) assassinated Folke Bernadotte and the head of the UN observers, French colonel André Serot. My maternal grandfather, Pierre Gaïsset, was in the next car. He was unharmed and replaced Colonel Serot in his duties. The assassin, Yehoshua Cohen, was never arrested. Two years later, he became the official bodyguard of Prime Minister David Ben Gourion. The leader of the "revisionist Zionists", Yitzhak Shamir, was immediately appointed head of a Mossad department. He carried out secret actions on behalf of the United Kingdom and the United States throughout the Cold War, from Guatemala to the Congo, and later became Prime Minister (1983-84 and 1986-92).

On November 29, 1948, the Ben-Gurion government, which claimed to be searching for the assassins of Folke Bernadotte and André Serot, submitted an application for membership of the United Nations, accompanied by a letter declaring "that the State of Israel hereby accepts, without any reservation whatsoever, the obligations arising from the Charter of the United Nations, and undertakes to observe them from the day it becomes a Member of the United Nations". Convinced, on May 11 1949, the United Nations General Assembly accepted [6]. Today, in view of Israel’s systematic failure to respect its commitments, several states are calling for its membership to be "suspended".

Operation "al-Aqsa Flood”

Let’s move on to the present day. On October 7, 2022, the Palestinian Resistance, on the initiative of Hamas, launched a vast operation against an Israeli military base and also against civilians. Under international law, the Arabs of Palestine are an "occupied population" within the meaning of the Geneva Conventions. However, they can only attack military targets, not Kibbutz or raves. The aim of the operation was to take military prisoners, and possibly civilian hostages too, in order to negotiate the release of Palestinian hostages in Israel, i.e. administrative prisoners. It is not known how many prisoners and hostages they have taken, let alone how many are civilians and how many are military personnel. According to Hamas, more than 30 officers are being held.

This operation, " al-Aqsa Flood”, has been prepared over the last three years in full view of everyone [7]. Hundreds of kilometers of tunnels were dug using tunnel-boring machines, which could only enter Gaza with the approval of Israeli customs. At least 1 million cubic meters of earth and rubble had to be evacuated under the eyes of the Israeli security services. Several training camps were built and hang-glider training was carried out. Not only did the Israeli intelligence services observe all this, but so did other powers such as Egypt and the USA. Numerous reports were sent to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Yet he did not react. Worse still, he dismissed his Defense Minister, General Yoav Galland, in August 2023, because Galland complained about this lack of reaction in the cabinet. However, given the public reaction to this dismissal, he preferred to reinstate him rather than have to explain the reason.

Israel accused the journalist who published the photographs of October 7, long before the security services intervened, of being a member of Hamas.

The various Palestinian factions (Islamic Jihad, PFLP and National Initiative) were awakened by Hamas at 4.30 a.m. to take part in an operation starting at 6.30 a.m. (i.e. before sunrise). It began with the destruction of all the robots monitoring the Separation Wall. So, from 6.30 am, the alarm was sounded. By 8:00, news agencies around the world were broadcasting images of the attack [8]. However, the Israeli security forces did not intervene until 9.45 am.

From the outset of their intervention, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) applied the "Hannibal directive"; an instruction that orders one to kill one’s own soldiers rather than see them taken prisoner by the adversary. The Israeli government’s casualty figures do not distinguish between attackers and defenders. Similarly, the Israeli government has reported exactions that fighters do not normally have time to perpetrate during a surprise attack. The Mauritian Pramila Patten, UN Special Rapporteur on sexual violence, interviewed victims and witnesses of Operation Flood of al-Aqsa. She concluded that some sexual exactions may have been committed, but that the most serious accusations (notably the castration of soldiers) were not credible [9]. Reports of the beheading of babies were withdrawn after an investigation by Al-Jazeera.

For the moment, the Israeli opposition refuses to address the question of the Prime Minister’s possible role in the organization of this operation. But it must be asked: Benjamin Netanyahu is the son of the fascist Benzion Netanyahu, private secretary to Vladimir Jabotinsky (Benito Mussolini’s ally, who died at the start of the Second World War). He has always expressed his admiration for both men.

Benjamin Netanyahu has always supported Hamas as a tactical ally in the fight against Yasser Arafat’s Fateh. However, until 2017, Hamas referred to itself as the "Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood". This organization was restructured in 1949 by the British secret services on the model of the United Grand Lodge of England [10]. In 1950, it became part of the Anglo-Saxon Cold War apparatus. That’s when Sayyed Qutob, the jihad theorist, became its star. Admittedly, in 2017, Gazans who wanted to defend their country joined it, but they demanded that Hamas break with the Muslim Brotherhood and the British. In the end, the two currents coexisted [11]. On October 19, 2022, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad received Khalil Hayya, leader of Hamas’s revolutionary current. But he refused to receive Ismaël Haniyeh and Khaled Mechaal, leaders of the Hamas Brotherhood [12]. From an Arab point of view, then, there is not one Hamas, but two. Indeed, throughout the Syrian war, Hamas fought alongside al-Nosra (the Syrian branch of al-Qaeda), the IDF and Nato Special Forces, against the Syrian Arab Republic. On December 9, 2012, Hamas elements came to the Damascus suburb of Yarmouk to assassinate leaders of the Palestine Liberation Front (PFLP), including a friend of mine [13].

Not only is it wrong to attribute the October 7 attack to Hamas alone, but it is also wrong to ignore the fact that there are two Hamas. These lies make it possible to present the "Deluge of al-Aqsa" operation as a vast anti-Semitic pogrom, in the words of President Emmanuel Macron, when in fact it was an act of Resistance, as pointed out by Francesca Albanese, UN Rapporteur on Human Rights in the Occupied Palestinian Territory.

The massacre of Gazans with the Anglo-Saxons

We have witnessed the massacre of 35,000 people, the disappearance under the rubble of 13,000 others, and the serious physical injuries of a further 120,000. Anyone with human feelings can only be horrified. This has nothing to do with the identity of the victims; it’s just a question of humanity.

According to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, this is just a police operation to arrest the assailants of October 7, but everyone has understood that there is no connection between this attack and the current Israeli operation. It’s all about making life unbearable for the Gazans until they leave of their own accord. This was the program of Vladimir Jabotinsky and his secretary, Benzion Netanyahu. It had been validated by the Nazi negotiator and founder of Israel, David Ben-Gurion.

Throughout the massacre, and even today, the Anglo-Saxons provide Israel with weapons to carry it out.

However, just as demonstrations against the bloodshed have begun in American universities and are spreading across the country and then to France, the Biden Administration has considered dismissing Benjamin Netanyahu in favour of General Benny Gantz. Admittedly, the decision is not legally his to make, but Washington has a long history of coups d’état and color revolutions. Secretary of State Antony Blinken therefore invited him to "discuss the situation". Benny Gantz accepted, while arranging a meeting with the Sunak Administration during his return trip. But things didn’t go well [14]: Benny Gantz understood perfectly well that Washington was asking him to stop the massacre, which he approved of, but he insisted on informing his interlocutors of his desire to protect his country by destroying Hamas. His interlocutors were taken aback and realized that he was not "a son of a bitch, but our son of a bitch", in the words of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. They immediately notified the British Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak. When Benny Gantz arrived in London to meet the Special Security Advisor, Sunak invited himself to their meeting. He tried to explain to a bewildered Benny Gantz that the Hamas "sons of bitches" should not be touched, because some of them are "our sons of bitches". So the Anglo-Saxons didn’t overthrow Benjamin Netanyahu.

The British Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak, has come to tell Benny Gantz not to touch our Hamas.

Seen from London and Washington, the massacres of civilians are deplorable, but are merely adjustment variables. As it stands, Israel is an indispensable state. If it were to be pacified and become normal, it would no longer serve any purpose. Like the Republic of Corsairs in the 18th century, Israel enables the most extensive money-laundering operations and serves as a haven for some of the world’s greatest criminals.

An official of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) told me that he was a waiter in the bar of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem. One day, he witnessed the arrival of a group of diamond dealers, who had arrived without passing through customs and were being escorted by the military. These men and a few customers exchanged diamonds and cash, then left incognito. This kind of deal could not take place in any other state.

The Industrial Revolution in North-Western Europe, studied in innumerable papers and books, happened largely “endogenously” by building upon the Commercial Revolution of the Middle Ages, putting science to direct economic use and creating new technologies. The Industrial Revolution in one corner of the world had been however accompanied, or perhaps even accelerated, by the four “bad” developments elsewhere.

The first was colonization of many non-European parts of the world. European nations imposed political control over most of Africa, Asia, and Oceania, and employed it to exploit natural resources and cheap (or forced) domestic labor. This is the so-called “unrequited transfers” whose extent is widely debated although there is no doubt that it was substantial. Angus Maddison puts it, from India to the UK, and from Java to the Netherlands, between 1 and 10 percent of the colonies’ GDP per year. Utsa Patnaik thinks that it was much larger and that it contributed significantly to the British take-off by funding up to 1/3 of funds used for investment.

The second “bad” was trans-Atlantic slavery that added to the profits of those who controlled the trade (mostly merchants in Europe and the US), and those who used the transported slaves in plantations in Barbados, Haiti, Southern United States, Brazil etc. This was clearly another huge “unrequited” transfer of value.

The third “bad”, as argued by Paul Bairoch and Angus Maddison among others, was that Northern countries discouraged technological advances elsewhere by imposing rules favoring themselves (bans on production of processed goods, Acts of Navigation, monopsony power, control of internal trade and national finances etc.). They are summarized in the term “colonial contract” coined by Paul Bairoch. Countries as diverse as India, China, Egypt and Madagascar come under this heading. “Deindustrialization and the fact that profits from exports have probably been appropriated by the foreign intermediaries have caused a catastrophic decline in the standard of living of the Indian masses.” (Paul Bairoch, De Jericho à Mexico , p. 514)

These “bads” have been, and continue to be, debated and while learning about each of them is to be encouraged, they do not have direct political or financial consequences on today’s world. The ideas, floated from time to time, for monetary compensation for such ills are far-fetched and unrealizable. Nor is there any ability to clearly identify the “culprits” and the “victims”.

However this is not the case with the fourth “bad”, the accumulation of CO2 in the atmosphere, and thus climate change, which is largely the product of industrial development. The fourth “bad” is today’s problem. It is not a simple past injustice that can be studied and debated, but regarding which nothing else can be done. The reason is that fresh industrial production continues to add to the problem of climate change. To the extent that the former Third World nations are now in the process of catching up with the “old” rich world, it is the fast-industrializing countries in Asia, as well as those who have recently discovered large deposits of oil (like Guyana), who may be significantly adding to the stock of CO2. Certainly, much more than they have done in the past. China, for example, is today the largest emitter of CO2. (It is not at all obvious that countries should be the main “parties” to this problem because it is the rich people who are the most important emitters. This is an issue I discussed here , and that for now, I leave out.)

If newly developing countries are then held responsible for their share of annual emissions (that is, for their share in the annual “flow” of emissions) as if the responsibility for the previous “stock” of emissions does not matter, this would slow the growth of the new industrializing countries and impose unjust costs on them. The emissions that exist are a “stock” problem. It is because in the past, the world, i.e. the currently rich countries, have made so many emissions that we face the problem today. In other words, climate change cannot be treated as a “flow” problem alone, and not even primarily so.

This holds especially true for countries that are poor today and that have not contributed to the emissions in the past. Shaming them means slowing their growth and undermining poverty reduction in the world. A poor country that is emitting 100 units of CO2 this year cannot be treated as a rich country that is emitting 100 units of CO2 this year. The rich country is more responsible because of its past emissions. (Whether the net accumulated stock of its emissions is directly proportional to its today’s GDP I do not know—but that it is positively correlated is acknowledged by all.) Thus, by any concept of fairness, the rich country would either have to commit to much lower absolute annual emissions than a poor country (which by itself would reduce income of the rich country) or to compensate poor country for all the income that it would have made through oil production or industrial output that it forgoes in order to reduce emissions.

Rich countries would either have to emit (on per capita basis) much less than poor or developing countries –ideally, in proportion to which they are responsible for the “stock” of emissions—or to compensate poor countries for any loss of income that comes from voluntary reduction of production.

This means that rich countries must either reduce their income levels, or transfer significant resources to the developing countries. Neither is politically feasible. The first scenario would imply GDP per capita reductions of a third or more. No political party in the West can win votes by suggesting income declines that exceed several times those experienced during the 2007-08 recession. The second scenario is likewise unlikely since it would involve open-ended transfers of billions if not trillions of dollars.

As rich countries cannot do either of these two things, and wish to maintain some moral high ground by speaking about the problem, we are treated to the spectacles like the recent interview on BBC where the President of Guyana was lectured about the possibility of Guyana emitting millions of tons of CO2 into atmosphere if its new oil deposits are exploited. Before the recent discovery of oil, Guyana’s per capita GDP was some $6,000 or in PPP terms about $12,000; the first number is one-eighth of that for the United Kingdom, the second, a fourth. Guyana’s life expectancy is 10 years less than that of the UK and the average number of years of schooling 8.5 vs. 12.9 in the UK .

The conclusion is thus: if rich countries are unwilling to do anything meaningful to address climate change and their responsibility for it, they should not use moral grand-standing to stop others from developing. Otherwise, one’s seeming concern with the “world” is just a way to shift the conversation and to maintain many people in abject poverty. It is logically impossible to (a) hold moral high ground, (b) to do nothing in response to past responsibilities; and (c) to claim to be in favor of global poverty reduction.

A comment on this article:

Since developmentalism is rooted in equality, justice and independence, the US painted it as the first step towards godless communism, forever tarnishing it in Americans minds. Then, in 1953, President Eisenhower launched the war on development by appointing the Dulles brothers – who had represented the Cuban Sugar Cane Co. and United Fruit Co. – as Secretary of State and CIA Director. When Iran elected a fervent developmentalist President, Mohammad Mossadegh, the Dulles brothers set out to destroy him and his country, a project that remains a White House priority.
Ike’s anti-development policy was called Capitalist Modernization Theory: Western societies are inherently progressive in ways older civilizations can never be, and the wealth they generate is distributed unevenly because some people work harder than others. But the only road to economic evolution and social modernization leads through free trade, individual effort and capitalism, and those who stray from the path will be destroyed.
So thorough was the anti-developmentalist campaign that the US carried its attack to the UN, where it blocked all resolutions recognizing food, shelter and national development as human rights. Learning of this a horrified Harold Pinter wrote, "The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them. You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It’s a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis. "U.S. foreign policy is best defined as follows: kiss my arse or I’ll kick your head in. It is as simple and as crude as that. What is interesting about it is that it’s so incredibly successful. It possesses the structures of disinformation, use of rhetoric, distortion of language, which are very persuasive, but are actually a pack of lies. It is very successful propaganda. They have the money, they have the technology, they have all the means to get away with it, and they do.” – Nobel Prize lecture, 1958.

[The following is a chapter from Dr. Julie Ponesse’s book, Our Last Innocent Moment.]

The greatest griefs are those we cause ourselves.

Sophocles, Oedipus Rex

My experience has been that one of the most heart-wrenching things in life is to watch someone make decisions that lead to their own destruction. It’s not just watching a person suffer that is hard but watching them make the very choices that create their suffering. And, maybe even worse, realizing that we do this ourselves.

Sophocles’ play, Oedipus Rex, puts this phenomenon on the stage. It tells the story of Oedipus, a man prophesied from birth to murder his father and marry his mother despite his sincerest attempts to avoid doing either. Sophocles shows us that it is precisely because of these attempts that Oedipus is propelled towards his unfortunate end. At the end of the play, Oedipus realizes that his suffering is due to his own choices but, by that point, it is too late to change his course. So ashamed of what he has done, he blinds himself and flees into exile.

In the last essay, I considered whether our civilization is on the verge of collapse. That idea may have struck you as a bit extreme, but even just a cursory look at how we are faring, individually and collectively, suggests that the threads that hold us together are unraveling at a rate outpacing our ability to restitch them. In public and in private, online and in real life, our civil and moral deterioration is affecting how we view persons, how we raise and educate children, to what degree we are willing to sacrifice each other, and how inclined we are even to rewrite history.

In September, 2022, Trish Wood published a disturbingly diagnostic article called, “We Are Living the Fall of Rome (and it’s being forced on us as a virtue)” in which she describes us as “a doomed culture pretending not to see its own demise.” Wood cites “the normalization of abhorrent behaviour, the race-baiting and censorship, the cruelty and banishment of anyone who objects to the bizarre carnival unfolding in our streets” as evidence of our self-destructive behaviour. Our greed, our collectivism, our relativism, and our nihilism have created fault lines across every facet of life. And Covid seemed only to punctuate our destruction, leaving us with the deep wounds of “pandemic trauma.”

Wood isn’t wrong. Well beyond anything Covid did to us, or made salient, our society seems to be at a tipping point and it isn’t clear that we could shift back to where we were even if we tried. We are a broken people who seem to be breaking a little more every day. 

Here, I want to take the thesis of the last essay a step further and explore what might be causing our collapse. Is it a coincidence that we are suffering in so many different areas of life right now? Is it a little misstep on an otherwise progressive path? If we are on the verge of collapse, is it part of the arc of all great civilizations? Or, like Oedipus, do we suffer from some tragic flaw — a collective destructive character trait that we all share — that is responsible for bringing us to this place at this moment in history? 

What Ails Us?

All tragedies, classical and modern, follow a very specific pattern. There is some central character, the tragic hero, who is reasonably like us but who suffers terribly because of his tragic flaw, the internal imperfection that causes him to damage himself or others. Oedipus’ flaw is his excessive pride (or hubris) in thinking not only that he could escape his fate but that he alone can save Thebes from the plague placed upon it. It’s his pride that drives him to flee his adoptive parents and his pride that causes him to get angry enough to unknowingly kill the man (who turns out to be his father) at the crossroads who will not let him pass. His story moves us because, as Sigmund Freud wrote, “It might have been ours.”

One risk of searching for a (collective) tragic flaw to explain our destruction is that it presumes that we are protagonists living out a drama instead of people living in the real world. But our words aren’t crafted by playwrights, and our movements aren’t staged by directors. We envision our own futures, make our own choices, and act on those choices (or so it seems). And so a question is whether real people, and not just literary characters, can have tragic flaws. 

An interesting place to look for an answer is past moments of crisis in which we saw ourselves as, or made ourselves into, protagonists. WWII Britain is a good example, in part because it is relatively recent, and in part because it shares many of the experiences — of fear, social isolation, and an uncertain future — that we are experiencing now. When you read about how the British people rallied together, you can clearly see a sense of agency and moral purpose, and how some of the language used to describe this coming together straddled reality and fiction. A good example is a comment made by John Martin, Winston Churchill’s private secretary, to describe how the British people transformed themselves from victims to protagonists: “Brits came to see themselves as protagonists on a vaster scene and as champions of a high and invincible cause, for which the stars in their courses were fighting.”

It is also helpful to remember why the Ancient Greeks wrote tragedies in the first place. In the 5th century BC, the Athenians were reeling from decades of war and a deadly plague that killed one quarter of their population. Their lives were framed with uncertainty, loss, and grief, and the magnitude of the realization that life is fragile and largely beyond our control. The tragic playwrights — Sophocles, Euripides, and Aeschylus — dramatized the experiences of war and death in order to make some sense of the chaos they caused, to create a semblance of order and reason. Tragic characters were not so much literary inventions as they were reflections of the actual experience of suffering that was all too common in the ancient world. And so, even though the fantastical battles between superhuman and the Olympian gods might seem a long leap from our more mundane lives, the lessons contained within the tragedies might still offer us something relevant and useful.

So I take it as a live and interesting question; are we suffering from a collective tragic flaw? And if so, what could it be? Taking a cue from the tragic playwrights — the Greeks, Shakespeare and even Arthur Miller — the candidates include hubris or excessive pride (Oedipus, Achilles, and The Crucible’s John Proctor), greed (Macbeth), jealousy (Othello), willful blindness (Gloucester in King Lear), and even extreme hesitancy (Hamlet).

In a way, I think we are suffering from all of these, from a complex web of tragic flaws. Our scientism predisposes us to unchecked ambition, our greed makes us excessively self-focused, and our blindness makes us numb to the suffering of others. But when I consider what might be the nexus at which all these flaws intersect, nothing seems to define us at this point in history more than our arrogance; arrogance in thinking we can write perfect essays and curate perfect homes; arrogance in thinking we can eradicate disease and malfunction, and even escape death; arrogance in thinking we can go to the limits of outer space and the depths of the sea without incident. 

But our arrogance is precise. It’s not just that we think we are better than others, or better than we have ever been. We think we can be superhuman. We think we can become perfect. 

The Perfect Storm

In an earlier essay, I argued that scientism has captured all sectors of society, powerfully shaping our response to Covid and, quite likely, to future crises. But why did we become doting followers of scientism in the first place?

As a starting point, let’s take a look at what was going on in academia in the years leading up to 2020. 

For a long time, the implicitly accepted value theories in medical ethics were hedonism (the pursuit of pleasure) and eudaimonism (the pursuit of flourishing via a life of virtue). But, at some point, these theories gradually began to be supplanted by a third contender: moral perfectionism.  

You are undoubtedly familiar with perfectionism as a character trait, the pursuit of excessively high personal standards of performance. But moral perfectionism adds the normative component that, to attain the good life, humans ought to become perfect in these ways. (Implied is the assumption that it is possible to do so.) 

Moral perfectionism is hardly new. In the 4th century BC, Aristotle’s moral perfectionism took the form of a virtue theory, claiming that humans have a telos (a purpose or goal), which is to attain a state of flourishing or well-being (eudaemonia). In simple terms, we need first to develop virtues like courage, justice, and generosity if we are to be capable of living well. Moral perfectionism took on a slightly different form in the 19th century with the utilitarian philosopher John Stuart Mill for whom a fulfilled, virtuous life is cultivated by developing what he called “higher pleasures” (mental pleasures versus pleasures of the body). 

But, by the time we got to the 21st century, moral perfectionism had morphed so completely it became unrecognizable. Originally meaning that we could actualize our potential by improving our natures, perfectionism now sets the unattainable goal of literally becoming free of defects. The perfectionism of today is the inhuman expectation that our lives are picture-perfect and reel-ready, that we must be superhuman in our physiology, our psychology, our immunity, and even our morality. We curate and style. We prescribe, vaccinate, shame, blame and surgically alter. And we expect as much, or more, from others.

One reason I think our culture was so keen to embrace mass Covid vaccination is that medical intervention, more generally, has taken on an odd sort of social currency. We rack up specialist visits, prescriptions, and surgeries like desirable partners on a dance card. This is a reflection, I think, of the influence of scientism and perfectionism in our lives; it means we are ‘on board’ with the idea of rooting out and eliminating every last personal flaw and using the latest technology to do so.

This is reflected, I think, in the lack of patience and grace we seem to have for those who choose to forgo whatever medical intervention is deemed able to ‘fix’ what ails them. I know of a woman who has suffered from depression for as long as anyone can remember. She refuses to take medication or even get a diagnosis. Most of her immediate family has diminishing grace for her simply because they believe she isn’t taking advantage of the proposed solutions. She won’t do the protocol, so she can “suffer the consequences.” 

The same intolerance exists for those who resist Covid vaccination. The common response from the devout pro-vaxxers is that we should refuse medical care to those who won’t take advantage of the solution offered to them. They won’t do the protocol, so they can “suffer the consequences.” (“Let them die,” as Canada’s largest national newspaper recommended.) 

It’s all so simple. Or is it? 

Perfectionism, when it comes to addressing our physical or mental infirmities, is the presumption that leaves no room for questions, nuance, individual differences, reflection, apology, or revision. And it didn’t emerge ex nihilo in 2020; it started to gain traction decades earlier, as it needed to if it was to mold our Covid response. 

Punctuated Perfectionism

There is evidence that this literal and extreme form of perfectionism started to settle into our personalities over 40 years ago. According to a 2019 study, unprecedented numbers of people began to experience self-oriented perfectionism (setting excessively high expectations for oneself), other-oriented perfectionism (doing the same for others), and socially-prescribed perfectionism (believing that one is held to extremely high standards by society) as early as the 1980s. In 2012, the UK Association for Physician Health found that perfectionism is a growing trait among doctors, in particular, who tend to be overly critical of their behaviour, leading to deleterious mental and physical effects.    

In his recent book, _The Perfection Trap,_ Thomas Curran writes that a perfect storm of globalization and wider environmental factors, including the increased presence of social media in our lives, created favourable conditions for socially-prescribed perfectionism. He writes, 

I found that our world has become increasingly globalised over the last 25 years, with the opening up of borders to trade and employment, and much higher levels of travel,… In the past we were judged more on a local scale, but with the opening of economies what we are seeing is that people are being exposed to these additional global ideals of perfection.

While we might have expected globalization to increase our awareness of others, and therefore our tolerance for diversity, it also provides greater opportunities for comparison. Whether you are making dinner or building a stock portfolio, globalism widened the lens of comparison at a dizzying rate, creating endless opportunities to be made aware of our flaws.

The highly edited and curated aspect of social media exacerbates this effect. Images of strangers at carefully selected moments of their lives distorts our perceptions of what real life is and what it can be. The ability to take 50 photos of a single moment and then delete all but the best creates a false impression of what life is really like. And the very idea of curation — the process of editing our lives as though they are to be part of a museum exhibit — angles us towards perfectionism.

Political Perfectionism

Another unfortunate effect of perfectionism is that it lends itself to a certain kind of political organization in which the state has substantial centralized control over people’s lives: statism. 

The Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant presciently argued that a perfectionist society requires government to regulate human coexistence. This, I suspect, is precisely why we saw so little resistance to the increasingly rigid Covid regulations which framed every part of our lives. During Covid, there was no thought that humans could be left to conscientiously manage their own interactions, or even that individual physicians could responsibly guide them. Free choice is irreducibly individualistic, and therefore messy. It allows that different people with different values will make different, and therefore non-perfecting, choices. And so free choice was among the first things to be sacrificed as perfectionism gained ground in early 2020.

Perfectionism is precisely the value theory one would expect to predominate in a culture captured by scientism, and it is the one we find framing every facet of our lives today. Willingly and with pride, we laid informed consent on the altar of perfectionism not to protect ourselves, but to perfect ourselves. Individual freedom became the naive idea that we thought 21st century civilization had matured beyond.

If our tragic flaw is perfectionism, it would explain a lot. It would explain our comfort with conformity and compliance, since perfectionism requires us to eliminate the anomalies that detract from the goal of self-perfection. It would explain our obsession with Artificial Intelligence, pharmaceutical enhancement, cryogenics, and MAID, and with the general desire to transcend our limitations. It would explain why we thought Zero-Covid — the perfect eradication of the virus — was possible. It would explain our interest in curation and our intolerance of the weak, messy parts of life. And it would explain why we favour closure and judgment and the desire to cut people out of our lives with surgical precision rather than working through the tricky parts of a relationship. For better or worse (far worse, I think), our myopic obsession with perfectionism became the monotheism of the 21st century.

Perfectionism and Pandemic Psychology

So, how did the rise of perfectionism in society, generally, culminate in our hyper-perfectionist tendencies during COVID? 

A recent study explored the effect of perfectionism on our psychological states during Covid. It showed that perfectionism increased not only the likelihood of experiencing Covid-related stress but also the tendency to conceal health problems in order to be seen by others as perfect. For perfectionists, the possibility of getting sick can be interpreted as an obstacle to achieving flawlessness in various domains of life such as physical appearance, work, or parenting. For the “self-critical perfectionist” and the “narcissist,” in particular, personal value is determined largely by external validation, and so virtue-signaling became unsurprisingly prominent during Covid. Covid pushed so unrelentingly on our perfectionist buttons that we tragically drove ourselves into a state of social and personal destruction. 

And herein lies the problem. Perfectionism is not just vain or misguided ambition. It reflects a false perception of who we are, a failure to properly “know thyself.” It shows that we give ourselves — our strengths and our weaknesses — as little attention as we give others. In setting our sights on perfection, we forget that we aren’t capable of it and, more importantly, that the beauty in life doesn’t consist of it.  

This is one of the greatest lessons the Greek tragedies teach us: that we must accept, and ultimately embrace, the basic uncertainties and imperfections of life. The contemporary philosopher Martha Nussbaum draws on lessons from the Greek play Hecuba to make this point:

The condition of being good is that it should always be possible for you to be morally destroyed by something you couldn’t prevent. To be a good human being is to have a kind of openness to the world, an ability to trust uncertain things beyond your own control, that can lead you to be shattered in very extreme circumstances for which you were not to blame. That says something very important about the human condition of the ethical life: that it is based on a trust in the uncertain and on a willingness to be exposed; it’s based on being more like a plant than like a jewel, something rather fragile, but whose very particular beauty is inseparable from its fragility.

For Nussbaum, and no doubt for Hecuba herself, the paradox of life is that, while our imperfections are what expose us to suffering, the worst tragedy of all is to try to safeguard ourselves to the point that we can no longer live as the beings we are. 

So much of our perfectionism is tied up with hyper-confidence in technology and its ability to suppress the contingencies of life that cause us pain and suffering. Two thousand years ago we invented ploughs, bridles, and hammers to gain some control over the untamed wilderness around us; today, we invent passwords, security systems, and vaccines. But we forget that using technology to improve our lives requires more than mere technical accomplishment; it requires the practical wisdom needed to keep it working for us rather than us becoming enslaved to it.

The very possibility of relationships exposes us to risk. It requires that we trust and accept promises from other people, and even just that they continue living in a state of good health. The other day, I ran into a woman from our local grocery store with whom I have come to be friendly. I remarked on how I hadn’t seen her in a while. She said her sister passed away unexpectedly, 2 months after a cancer diagnosis. She also said that, in the midst of mourning this loss, she was also trying to figure out who she was without a sister, without her best friend, navigating a chaotic world as a new and lonely person.

The response to these losses is often to recoil to protect ourselves. When people die, break promises, or in other ways become unreliable, it’s natural to want to retreat into the thought “I’ll just live on my own, for myself.” You see this everywhere today: people severing relationships that become a bit too burdensome, diving into a world of screens in which the characters are more reliable, even if ultimately less fulfilling.

On top of turning away from relationships, we use certainty as an extra layer of protection from risk and uncertainty. The novelist Iris Murdoch hypothesizes that we deal with the uncomfortable uncertainty of life by feigning surety and confidence. Unwilling to fully live into what we are — anxious and uncertain creatures, tender and terrified and fragile throughout so much of life — we train ourselves into being consumed in false certitudes. 

Isn’t this what we are doing today? We feign certainty about the origins of Covid, the true causes of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and the intentions of global political actors. But, when we decide to live this way — perfectly certain and full of pride — we aren’t just losing the value that relationships bring to life; we’re making a choice to live less humanly since these are the things that make life meaningful.

What it is to have a tragic flaw is not just to make poor life choices. Oedipus didn’t just choose poorly; instead, every particular thing he decided to do was ironically and essentially linked to his downfall. It was the self-righteous thought that he was single-handedly ridding Thebes of the source of its plague that propelled him towards his own destruction. Seeing himself as its saviour made him its destroyer. 

In a similar way, I believe our obsession with perfectionism is ironically and essentially tied to the fateful choices we made with respect to Covid-19 and in so many other areas of our lives. We are not, it seems, so unlike the tragic characters of literature. By using technology unguided by wisdom to try to control the world around us, we are becoming its slaves. By cancelling others, we are making it impossible to live well, ourselves. And it is our pretence of unity — “We’re all in this together,” “Do your part” — that is dividing us more than ever. Our tragic flaw, it seems, is ironically and powerfully creating our own destruction. 

Catharsis

How do we cure ourselves of this tragic flaw? 

In literature, tragic flaws get worked out by a specific process called catharsis, a process of cleansing or purification in which the tragic emotions — pity and fear — are aroused and then eliminated from the reader’s (or viewer’s) psyche. Catharsis gets worked out in the theatre much like therapy does in real life; by giving the audience an opportunity to vicariously work through intense emotions and their tragic consequences in the lives of literary characters, emerging somehow rebalanced.

It is not by coincidence that the experience of catharsis is visceral in the way that a good cry takes it out of you, physically. And the origins of the term certainly reflect its connection with physical purgation.

Aristotle typically used catharsis in a medical sense, referring to the evacuation of katamenia — menstrual fluid — from the body. The Greek word “Kathairein” appears even earlier than this, in the works of Homer who used the Semitic word “Qatar” (for “fumigate”) to refer to purification rituals. And, of course, the Greeks had the idea of miasma, or “blood guilt,” which could only be cured by spiritually purifying acts. (The classical example is Orestes whose soul is purified when Apollo douses him with the blood of a suckling pig.) In the Christian tradition, the ritual of drinking Christ’s symbolic blood during the communion sacrament helps us to remember his sacrificial death which cleansed us of unrighteousness. The general idea is that our emotions can be whipped up and then released just as we might hydrate, fast, and sweat to purge ourselves of physical toxins.

Catharsis is an integral part of the healing process. Its purpose is to create an awakening, a process of seeing what you have done, who you are, and how your choices impact yourself and others. That awakening is often painful, like the first moments of opening your eyes in the morning or like the prisoners who are blinded by the light as they emerge from Plato’s metaphorical cave. 

It is not a coincidence, I think, that so many people describe their falling away from the Covid narrative as a kind of “waking up.” It’s a matter of seeing things in a new light, seeing ducks where you once only saw rabbits. There is a discomfort to it. But there is also eventual relief in that discomfort as the truth starts to come into view.

If we have a tragic flaw, and if it is perfectionism, then what sort of catharsis might cure us of it? What underlying emotions are involved and how can we whip them up so we can purge ourselves of them?

A good place to start is to think about how collectives — groups of people — tend to respond to emergency or trauma events. September 11 comes easily to mind. Though it was over 20 years ago now, I remember the days following 9/11 with crystal clarity. I especially remember the way it arrested and solidified us, socially. I was standing in line at a coffee shop on my way to class when I first heard the news. Well before the era of smartphones, everyone stopped to gather in the corner of the shop around a television set that was covering the event. You could hear people breathing, it was so still and quiet. People were looking for some explanation in each other’s eyes. Some held each other, most cried. 

I was a graduate student at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario at the time and I remember everyone talking about it when I got to campus. Classes were cancelled, “Closed” signs appeared in store windows. It became the topic of seminars for weeks to come. News coverage overtook regularly scheduled programming for days. I was riveted but exhausted. The media images — of soot-covered firefighters, personal items protruding from the rubble, waves of dust billowing through the streets, stories of children whose parents would never come home and, of course, the searing image of Father Mychal Judge’s body being carried out of the rubble. 

These images, the ongoing media coverage, the endless conversations and tears and hugs all exhausted us. We were talked out, hugged out, and cried out. In the days, weeks and even months afterwards, I remember feeling physically weak from it all. Maybe we did more than we needed to do but all the sharing was our cathartic release. It was painful but it somehow cleansed us and drew us together.

We engaged in what psychologists call “social sharing” — the tendency to recount and share emotional experiences with others — and it was powerfully cathartic. Psychologist Bernard Rimé found that 80-95% of emotional episodes are shared and that we typically socially share negative emotions after a tragic event in order to understand, to vent, to bond, to seek meaning, or to combat feelings of loneliness. 

Sociologist Émile Durkheim explains that it is through sharing that we achieve a reciprocal stimulation of emotions which leads to the strengthening of beliefs, a renewal of trust, strength, and self-confidence, and even increased social integration. It’s in sharing that we build a community of those experiencing the same trauma. Research shows that sharing not just the facts of our experiences, but our feelings about them, improves recovery after traumatic events. A 1986 study assigned participants to one of four groups, including a “trauma-combo group,” in which participants wrote about not just the facts of their trauma but the emotions surrounding them. Those in the trauma-combo group showed the most emotional healing but also the greatest objective health improvements, including reduction in illness-related doctor’s visits. 

Now that we’ve gained some distance from the intensity of the Covid crisis, I am realizing just how radically different our collective response was compared with what I remember about 9/11. 

As a traumatic event, shouldn’t we have expected a similar pattern of sharing? Where was the deluge of conversations, the emotional meltdowns, the personal stories? Where were all the public hugs and tears? 

None of this happened during Covid. We shared the facts but not the experiences. We focused on the statistics, not the stories. There was no Covid “trauma-combo group,” no sharing of what it felt like to be terrified of the virus or the government response to it, no coming together over the grief of loved ones dying alone, no sorrow over what it was like to be hated by your fellow citizens or cast out of meaningful social interactions. 

In comparison to 9/11, our natural trauma response to Covid was stunted by our deep culture of silence, censorship, and cancellation. The sharing happened in small, isolated groups, and the media coverage was fringe and outlying. But the acknowledged, shared experiences of people living through a global, traumatic event were absent… or silenced.

The fact that we didn’t do the emotional work needed for trauma recovery in the natural course of things means we are still saddled with pent-up, tragic emotions. And they aren’t likely to dissolve by the mere passage of time. The work will still need to be done, whether it is by us now, or by our children or grandchildren at some point in the future. 

So, what do we need to do now? We need families and friends to talk about how the last three years changed them. We need sisters to share their pain and uncertainties. We need Substacks and op-eds and feature articles on the totality of the costs — physical, emotional, economic, and existential — of the pandemic and the pandemic response. We need testimonies and interviews and books of poetry and history to flood the Amazon and New York Times bestseller lists. We need all of this to help us make sense of what happened to us. Stories are a balm to our wounds. We need them for our recovery as much as to create an accurate historical record. And until we have them, our emotions will fester a little more each day, with us floating in a kind of Covid purgatory.

Last Thoughts

It’s hard to imagine that we are a civilization on the verge of collapse and perhaps even harder still to imagine that we could be the cause of our own destruction. But it’s useful to remember that civilizations are not as invincible as we might think. According to British scholar Sir John Bagot Glubb, the average lifespan of civilizations is a mere 336 years. By this measure, we have done quite well, our civilization — with roots in Ancient Greece and the Roman Empire — having lasted much longer than most. It’s a sobering fact that every civilization but our own has collapsed. And, for better or for worse, it was the destruction of every prior civilization that allowed for the creation of our own. 

But what perplexes me so much about our potential collapse is that we seem to have all the resources to resist it. We have a robust written historical record to show us how perverted leaders, greed, civil war, and the loss of culture and communication destroy us. We are more literate (in a sense) and more technologically advanced than ever, which should have insulated us from some of the common causes of destruction: disease, economic collapse, and global war. You would think that the lessons of history, alone, would have helped us to swerve to avoid our destruction. And yet here we are.

All these resources, yes, but we have little character, little practical wisdom with which to manage them. In the end, we are here because of a tragic flaw that makes us believe in the possibility of living perfectly rather than living well, all the while making us blind to the paradox at the heart of the idea.

Is there an author to our Covid experience, and to our more general destruction? I don’t know and I don’t think it ultimately matters. 

What matters is how we, as individuals, respond. What matters is how much attention we give ourselves and others, whether we ask ourselves the hard questions and root out the character flaws lurking in the darkest corners of our souls. What matters is not that we are characters but that we have characters, that we are able to accept responsibility for lives and the choices we make.

It’s interesting to me that, even amidst the ‘We-don’t-need-history’ arrogance of the 21st century, the tragic stories of Shakespeare and of Ancient Greece have managed to survive. That, in itself, should give us reason to pause and pay attention. I wonder, why have their themes stood the test of time? Why do they resonate so profoundly? And, most importantly, what are we attempting to teach ourselves through the telling and retelling? 

Tragedies are not just stories that help us to make sense of the chaos of the world around us; they are also warnings for the future generations. They are scratchings on the walls of the caves and letters from the past to teach us how to avoid future self-destruction.  

Unfortunately, history shows us that we aren’t very good at heeding these warnings. It’s as though our tragic flaw is standing in the way of seeing the truth about ourselves. We are still lurking in the shadow of Oedipus. And, like Oedipus, it’s the things we do to try to avoid our destruction that fate us to play it out. Perhaps we think we are special, or somehow immune. Perhaps we believe we have evolved past the tragic flaws of our ancestors; but we don’t see that we are just as weak and willfully blind. Like Oedipus, we are refusing to see and will one day no longer be able to look at ourselves.

I hope I haven’t given the impression that working our tragic flaw out of ourselves will be easy or that it will make all of our troubles dissolve in a moment. There’s a reason why so many choose willful blindness; it’s not sticky. You can go through your day, even a whole life, without raising eyebrows or ringing any socially alarming bells. But confronting our mistakes and working through them is the only possible way forward.

Our lives are framed largely by the stories we tell ourselves. And perfectionism is the story we are currently telling. But it’s a dangerous and destructive story because it creates “blind spots” that make us unable to see the harm we do. If it’s destroying us, then shouldn’t we try to write a different story?

A story in which our lives are messy, the future uncertain, and our lives finite. 

A story in which we are imperfect beings who listen to each others’ stories and offer grace for each other’s imperfections. 

A story we need to learn to write with new characters we need to learn to be. 

A story in which the things that destroy us in one moment can teach and heal us in the next. 

In every tragedy, just before climax, there is an eerie calm. The calm of Fall 2023 is deafening. People aren’t speaking. Stories aren’t being shared. Self-adulation and revisionism abound. 

I can’t help but wonder, are we experiencing the “falling action” after the climax of our story, or is it still to come? How would we know? Does the tragic hero ever know? The falling action in a play usually includes the character’s reaction to the climax, how he copes with the obstacles that brought him to that point, and how he plans to carry on. 

How do we plan to carry on? Will we look our mistakes in the face or will we continue to feed the beast that is our obsession with perfectionism? Will we start telling our stories? Will we listen to the stories of others? And, maybe most importantly, will future generations heed our warnings?

Time will tell us. Or, as the tragic playwright Euripides advised, “Time will explain it all.”

The group that murdered 25,000 Palestinians in Gaza is not representative of Jews in general. It is the heir to an ideology that has been committing such crimes for a century. Thierry Meyssan traces the history of the "revisionist Zionists" from Vladimyr Ze’ev Jabotinsky to Benjamin Netanyahu.

Voltaire Network | Paris (France) | 25 January 2024

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Josep Borrell denounces the links between Benjamin Netanyahu and Hamas.

Josep Borrell, the European Union’s High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, receiving an honorary doctorate in Valadolid, declared: "We believe that a two-state solution [Israeli and Palestinian] must be imposed from outside to bring about peace. Even if, and I insist, Israel reaffirms its refusal [of this solution] and, to prevent it, has gone so far as to create Hamas itself (...) Hamas has been financed by the Israeli government in an attempt to weaken the Fatah Palestinian Authority. But if we don’t intervene firmly, the spiral of hatred and violence will continue from generation to generation, from funeral to funeral".

In so doing, Josep Borrell broke with the official Western line that Hamas is the enemy of Israel, which it attacked by surprise on October 7, justifying the current Israeli response and the massacre of 25,000 Palestinian civilians. He asserted that enemies of Jews can be supported by other Jews, Benjamin Netanyahu in particular. He rejected the communitarian reading of history and examined personal responsibilities.

This narrative shift was made possible by the UK’s exit from the European Union four years ago. Josep Borrell knows that the European Union has financed Hamas since its 2006 coup, yet today he is free to say what’s on his mind. He didn’t mention Hamas’s links with the Muslim Brotherhood, whose "Palestinian branch" the organization claims to be, or with MI6, the British secret service. He simply suggested withdrawing from the mess.

Gradually, the veil is being torn away. A historical reminder is in order here. The facts are known, but never linked, nor listed in sequence. They have an illuminating cumulative effect. They take place mainly during the Cold War, when the West turned a blind eye to the crimes it needed, but they actually began twenty years earlier.

In 1915, the British Jewish Home Secretary, Herbert Samuel, wrote a memorandum on the Future of Palestine. He wanted to create a Jewish state, but a small one so that it "could not be large enough to defend itself". In this way, the Jewish diaspora would serve the long-term interests of the British Empire.

He tried unsuccessfully to convince the Prime Minister, the then Liberal H. H. Asquith, to create a Jewish state in Palestine at the end of the World War. However, following Herbert Samuel’s meeting with Mark Sykes, just after the conclusion of the Sykes-Picot-Sazonov Agreements on the colonial division of the Middle East, the two men pursued the project, gaining the support of "Protestant Nonconformists" (today we would say "Christian Zionists"), including the new Prime Minister, David Lloyd George. He and his cabinet issued the famous Balfour Declaration, clarifying one of the points of the Sykes-Picot Sazonov Accords by announcing a "Jewish national home".

At the same time, Protestant Nonconformists, through U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, persuaded President Woodrow Wilson to support their project.

Also during the First World War, during the Russian Revolution, Herbert Samuel proposed integrating Jews from the former Russian Empire fleeing the new regime into a special unit, the Jewish Legion. This proposal was taken up by a Ukrainian Jew, Vladimir Ze’ev Jabotinsky, who imagined that a Jewish state in Palestine could be his post-war reward. Herbert Samuel entrusted him with recruiting soldiers from among Russian émigrés. Among them was the Pole David ben Gourion (then a Marxist), who was joined by the Briton Edwin Samuel, Herbert Samuel’s own son. They distinguished themselves in the lost battle against the Ottomans at Gallipoli.

At the end of the war, the fascist Jabotinsky demanded a state as his due, but the British had no desire to part with their Palestinian colony. So they stuck to their commitment to a "national home", and nothing more. In 1920, a section of Palestinians led by Izz al-Din al-Qassam (the tutelary figure of the armed wing of today’s Hamas, the al-Qassam brigades) rose up and savagely massacred Jewish immigrants, while a Jewish militia responded. This was the beginning of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. London restored order by arresting fanatics, jihadists and Jews alike. Jabotinsky, at whose home an arsenal was discovered, was sentenced to 15 years in prison.

However, David Lloyd George’s "Protestant Nonconformist" government appointed Herbert Samuel governor of Palestine. Upon his arrival in Jerusalem, he pardoned and released his friend Jabotinsky. He then appointed the anti-Semite and future Reich collaborator Mohammad Amin al-Husayni as Grand Mufti of Jerusalem.

Fresco in homage to Vladimir Jabotinsky in Odessa (Ukraine).

Jabotinsky was elected director of the World Zionist Organization (WZO). But he returned to the former Russian Empire, where Symon Petliura had just created a Ukrainian People’s Republic. Jabotinsky and Petlioura signed a secret agreement to carve out a place for themselves in the lands of the Bolsheviks in the East and Nestor Makhno’s anarchists in the South (present-day Novorossia). Petliura was a fierce anti-Semite, and his men were used to massacring Jewish families and villages in their own country. Petlioura was the protector of the Ukrainian "integral nationalists" and their mentor, Dmytro Dontsov, who later became administrator of the Reinhard Heydrich Institute responsible for carrying out the "Final Solution of the Jewish Question" [1].

When word spread that Jabotinsky had formed an alliance with "Jew-killers", the World Zionist Organization summoned him for an explanation. But he preferred to resign his community office rather than answer questions. He then founded the Alliance of "Revisionist Zionists" (mainly present in the Polish and Latvian diaspora) and its militia, Betar. He turned away from the British Empire and became enthusiastic about Fascist Italy. He set up a military academy for the Betar near Rome, with the support of duce Benito Mussolini.

Betar honor guard in front of Jabotinsky’s portrait at the Ze’ev citadel.

In 1936, Jabotinsky devised an "evacuation plan" for Jews from Central and Eastern Europe to Palestine. He won the support of the Polish head of state, Marshal Józef Piłsudski, and his foreign minister, Józef Beck. But also that of the Hungarian regent, Admiral Miklós Horthy, not forgetting that of the Romanian prime minister, Gheorghe Tătărescu. The plan never came to fruition, however, because the Jews of Central and Eastern Europe were frightened by Jabotinsky’s allies, and because the British Empire opposed mass emigration to Palestine. In the end, Chaim Weizmann, then president of the World Zionist Organization, assured that Jabotinsky was involved in the Franco-Polonian-Nazi plan to deport the Jews to Madagascar.

It was during this period that Vladimir Jabotinsky prophesied the Holocaust to astonished Jewish audiences. According to him, by refusing his evacuation plan, the Diaspora would provoke a surge of violence against it. To everyone’s surprise, this is what his friends actually carried out: the extermination of millions of Jews.

Vladimir Jabotinsky (right) and Menachem Begin (left), at a Betar meeting in Warsaw.

In 1939, Jabotinsky drew up a plan for an uprising of the Jews of Palestine against the British Empire, which he sent to the local section of the "Revisionist Zionists", the Irgun. World War II postponed this project. Jabotinsky did not settle in Fascist Italy, but in the then-neutral United States, where one of his disciples joined him to become his private secretary. He was Benzion Netanyahu, father of Benjamin Netanyahu.

During the war, Vladimir Jabotinsky and Benzion Netanyahu were visited by a Chicago philosophy professor, Leo Strauss. He was also a Jewish fascist. He had been forced to leave Germany because of Nazi anti-Semitism, but remained a staunch fascist. Leo Strauss went on to become the standard-bearer for "neo-conservatives" in the USA. He created his own school of thought, assuring his few disciples after the Second World War that the only way for Jews to prevent another Shoah was to create their own dictatorship. His pupils included Paul Wolfowitz and Elliott Abrams, the man who today stands behind Benjamin Netanyahu and financed his "reform of institutions" this summer.
Vladimir Jabotinsky died in New York in 1940. David ben Gourion opposed the transfer of his ashes to Israel, but in 1964, Israel’s Prime Minister, the Ukrainian Levi Eshkol, authorized it.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu pays tribute to his hero, Vladimir Ze’ev Jabotinsky.

After World War II, the "revisionist Zionists" of the Irgun declared war on the British Empire for restricting Jewish emigration to Palestine. Under the command of the future Prime Minister, the Byelorussian Menachem Beguin, they organized a series of attacks, including one on the King David Hotel, which killed 91 people, and the Deir Yassin massacre, which claimed at least a hundred victims.

In November 1947, the United Nations General Assembly adopted a plan to divide Palestine into two zones, Jewish and Arab, in order to form a bi-national state. Taking advantage of the slowness of the intergovernmental organization, David ben Gourion unilaterally proclaimed the State of Israel on May 14, 1948. The Arab states reacted by taking up arms, while Jewish militias began the Nakba, the expulsion of 750,000 Palestinians. Concerned by these rapid developments, the General Assembly sent a Swedish emissary, Count Folke Bernadotte, to demarcate the two federated states. But on September 17, 1948, other "revisionist Zionists" belonging to the Lehi (known as the "Stern Group"), under the command of another future prime minister, the Byelorussian Yitzhak Shamir, assassinated him. They were all convicted by an Israeli court. The Ukrainian Foreign Minister, Moshe Shertok (or Sharett), wrote to the General Assembly requesting Israel’s membership of the United Nations. He "declared that the State of Israel hereby accepts, without any reservation whatsoever, the obligations arising from the Charter of the United Nations, and undertakes to observe them from the day it becomes a Member of the United Nations". Under these express conditions, Israel became a member of the UN on May 11, 1949. In the days that followed, Yehoshua Cohen, Count Bernadotte’s assassin, was discreetly released. He became the bodyguard of Prime Minister David ben Gourion.

Benjamin Netanyahu as a young man and Yitzhak Shamir.

From 1955 to 1965, Yitzhak Shamir headed a department of Mossad, the foreign secret service of the new state. Without informing his superiors, he organized the secret police of the Shah of Iran, the Savak. Some two hundred of his men came to teach torture alongside former Nazis [2].
Then, in 1979, while negotiating the Camp David Accords with Egypt, he moved the men he had sent to Iran to the Congo. Probably with the support of the US CIA, they now supervised Mobotu Sese Seko’s secret police. He went there to check them out.

As part of the Cold War, Yitzhak Shamir also helped the Taiwanese dictatorship [3].

This time, unbeknownst to the United States, he set up a terrorist group in New York, Rabbi Meir Kahane’s Jewish Defense League [4]. He supervised a campaign for the emigration of Soviet Jews to Israel, attacks on the Soviet delegation to the UN and, finally, on the legation of the Palestine Liberation Organization.

He forged alliances with South Africa [5]. He took part in the creation of "Bantustans", false African states that enabled South Africa to treat its black population not as nationals, but as emigrants; a model that "revisionist Zionists" would later apply to the Palestinians.

In this vein, he had Israel finance the research of President Pieter Botha’s personal physician, Dr. Wouter Basson. Basson, at the head of 200 scientists, intended to create diseases that would affect only blacks and Arabs (Project Coast [6]) [7].

One crime leading to another, he also supported Rhodesia [8] and the fight against the independence of the Portuguese colonies of Mozambique and Angola.

In Guatemala, Yitzhak Shamir became close to the dictatorship of General Rios Montt. He not only supplied him with weapons, but also supervised his secret police. He set up a computer institute to monitor water and electricity consumption, enabling him to detect and locate clandestine activities. He organized the Mayan population into kibbutzim so as to make them work and keep an eye on them without having to carry out agrarian reform. Thus protected, Rios Montt murdered 250,000 people. [9]; a model that revisionist Zionists wish to apply to the Palestinians. Relations between Israel and the United States regarding the Guatemalan experiment were channeled through the Straussian Elliott Abrams.

Throughout the Cold War, the "revisionist Zionists" did not act in the interests of the Western camp; they used the opportunities presented to them to do what Vladimir Ze’ev Jabotinsky had always done: exercise power by force with no regard for anyone else.

Towards the end of the Madrid Conference, the Israeli delegation brought out this old poster from the British police in Mandatory Palestine: it asks for information on the Lehi terrorist group. Top left: Menachem Beguin.

At the end of the Cold War, President Bush Sr. convened the Madrid Conference to finally resolve the Israeli-Palestinian question. During the conference, the Israeli delegation, chaired by Yitzhak Shamir, now Prime Minister, demanded the repeal of UN General Assembly resolution 3379 [10] before any further discussions could take place. This states that "Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination". "With an open heart, we call on Arab leaders to take the courageous step and respond to our outstretched hand in peace", declaims Shamir, grandiloquently. Anxious to reach an agreement, the General Assembly complied. But, deceiving its interlocutors, Israel made no commitments and even did everything in its power to defeat George H. Bush’s bid for a second term.

Before concluding, I’d like to say a few words about today’s personalities.

Ukrainian Jewish President Volodymyr Zelenski and "white führer" Andriy Biletsky

The alliance of Ukrainian "revisionist Zionists" and "integral nationalists" was reformed with the dissolution of the Soviet Union. A mafia oligarch, the Jew Ihor Kolomoïsky, propelled a young Jewish humorist, Volodymyr Zelensky, into politics, while financing the integral nationalist militias that besieged and bombarded the Russian-speaking Ukrainian populations of the Donbass. Refuznik Natan Sharansky, a former minister under Ariel Sharon, organized meetings between Jewish world figures and the Ukrainian president’s cabinet. While Voldymyr Zelensky entrusted the command of the two major battles of Marioupol and Bakhmout to Andriy Biletsky, the "white führer".

On July 19, 2018, on the initiative of "revisionist Zionists", the Knesset passed a law proclaiming Israel as a "Jewish state", with Hebrew as its sole official language and unified Jerusalem as its capital. Jewish settlements in Palestinian territory were deemed to be in the "national interest".
Four years later, Benjamin Netanyahu formed a government with a coalition of followers of Rabbi Kahane. In 2022, Itamar Ben-Gvir, chairman of Otzma Yehudit (Jewish Power Party), declared that he would expel the Arabs from Palestine. Members of his party launched an attack on the West Bank village of Huwara in February 2023, seven months before the Palestinian attack of October 7. In the space of a few hours, they set fire to hundreds of cars and 36 houses. They attacked the inhabitants, injuring 400 people and killing one man before the eyes of the Israeli army, which surrounded the village without intervening in the face of their exactions.

This brief historical summary shows us that there is no Arab-Israeli problem any more than there is a Ukrainian-Russian problem, but a huge problem of all of us with an ideology which, in different places and times, has done nothing but sow suffering and death. We must open our eyes and no longer accept to mobilize with false-flag actions and other lies.

Thierry Meyssan

Translation
Roger Lagassé

[1] “Who are the Ukrainian integral nationalists ?”, by Thierry Meyssan, Translation Roger Lagassé, Voltaire Network, 15 November 2022.

[2] «SAVAK: A Feared and Pervasive Force», Richard T. Sale, Washington Post, May 9, 1977. Debacle: The American Failure in Iran. Michael Ledeen, Vintage (1982).

[3] תמכור נשק." ש’ פרנקל, העולם הזה, 31 באוגוסט 1983.".Israel: Foreign Intelligence and Security Services. CIA, March 1979.

[4] The False Prophet: Rabbi Meir Kahane, From FBI Informant to Knesset Member, Robert I. Friedman, Lawrence Hill Books (1990).

[5] The Unspoken Alliance: Israel’s Secret Relationship with Apartheid South Africa, Sasha Polakow-Suransky, Vintage (2011). The Unnatural Alliance: Israel and South Africa, James Adams, Quartet Books (1984).

[6] Project Coast: Apartheid’s Chemical and Biological Warfare Programme, Chandré Gould & Peter Folb, United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research, UNIDIR/2002/12. The Rollback of South Africa’s Chemical and Biological Warfare Program, Dr. Stephen F. Burgess & Dr. Helen E. Purkitt, USAF Counterproliferation Center (2001).

[7] “South Africa, a former secret biological terrorism lab for a few “democratic” countries”, Voltaire Network, 28 October 2002. Dr la Mort, enquête sur un bio-terrorisme d’État en Afrique du Sud, Tristan Mendès France, Favre (2002).

[8] «The Rhodesian Army: Counter-insurgency 1972-1979» in Armed forces and modern counter-insurgency, Ian F.W. Beckett and John Pimlott, Croom Helm (1985).

[9] «Israeli Connection Not Just Guns for Guatemala», George Black, NACLA Report on the Americas, 17:3, pp. 43-45, DOI: 10.1080/10714839.1983.11723592

[10] « Qualification du sionisme », ONU (Assemblée générale) , Réseau Voltaire, 10 novembre 1975.

Thierry Meyssan

Political consultant, President-founder of the Réseau Voltaire (Voltaire Network).
Latest work in English – Before Our Very Eyes, Fake Wars and Big Lies: From 9/11 to Donald Trump, Progressive Press, 2019.