There can be few leaders whose reputation at home differs so widely from his reputation abroad as the last leader of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Sergeevich Gorbachev, who died on Monday aged 91. Hailed as a hero in the West for ending the Cold War, liberating the people of Eastern Europe, and bringing democracy and freedom to the nations of the former Soviet Union, he is reviled in Russia as a man who inherited a superpower and then destroyed it, leaving it dismembered and impoverished.

Of peasant stock, Gorbachev grew up in the Stavropol region of Southern Russia and aged only 17 won the Order of the Red Banner of Labour for his success in harvesting grain with his father. A clever and hard working student, he won a place at Moscow State University where he studied law before taking up a career in the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU). He then rose rapidly up the party’s ranks until in 1985 he assumed the position of General Secretary and as such become the Soviet Union’s de facto leader.

In all these ways, he was a typical party functionary. He differed, though, from the generation of leaders who had gone before him, all of whom had had direct experience of the revolutions of 1917 and of the Second World War. Gorbachev was one of those who were called “Children of the Twentieth Party Congress”—that is to say, communists whose view of the world was shaped by the party congress of 1956 at which Nikita Khrushchev delivered his famous ‘Secret Speech’ denouncing Stalin.

The Children of the Twentieth Party Congress believed in communism—in state control of the means of production, in central economic planning, in the social guarantees granted by the Soviet constitution, in the Soviet Union as a genuine ‘brotherhood of nations,’ and so on. But at the same time, they felt that the system was not living up to its promise. They believed that Stalinism had over-centralized and over-bureaucratized Soviet society, stifling initiative, breeding corruption, and creating a severe disconnect between the claims of Soviet propaganda and the realities on the ground. The solution, they felt, was to return to “Leninist norms,” whatever those might be, and thereby put the USSR back on track to a bright communist future.

On reaching the pinnacle of Soviet power, Gorbachev thus sought not to dismantle the system but to make it function more efficiently. As he told the 27th Congress of the CPSU in 1986, “Our goal is to realize the full potential of socialism. Those in the West who expect us to renounce socialism will be disappointed. We’re not going to give up on socialism. On the contrary, we need more socialism.”

Gorbachev’s problem was that he had very little idea how to do this as well as a faulty understanding of the underlying causes of the USSR’s social and economic difficulties.

In particular, Gorbachev’s grasp of economics was sketchy. He firmly believed in the communist economic model, writing in his 1987 book Perestroika that “Socialism and public ownership, on which it is based, hold out virtually unlimited possibilities for progressive economic processes.” He was therefore unwilling to touch the fundamentals of the Soviet system – state ownership and central planning. Instead, he tinkered with the economy by attempting to meld state planning with certain attributes of free markets in accordance with the ideas of what was called “market socialism.” In this, state ownership and the plan were retained, but enterprises gained more autonomy to determine production and were allowed to keep and reinvest some of their profits.

Market socialism proved a disaster. Instead of making enterprises more efficient, the introduction of market elements simply undermined the few advantages that planning provided. Given the failure of this policy, there were two options left: give up and go back, or press on and move towards a free market economy, or at least some sort of mixed market system. Gorbachev did neither. Going backwards would have been an admission of failure. Moving forward was ideologically beyond him. Instead, he dithered while the economy gradually collapsed around him.

As this happened, Gorbachev looked for someone to blame and his gaze fell upon conservative members of the CPSU, who he believed were deliberately sabotaging his reforms. In typical Russian fashion, his solution to this was to centralize authority in his own hands. This he did by stripping the CPSU of its power and concentrating it in a newly created executive position, that of President of the USSR, a position that Gorbachev then occupied.

Arguably, Gorbachev’s attacks on the party made things worse rather than better, for the party was the primary mechanism that kept the Soviet system functioning more or less smoothly. The more Gorbachev bypassed and undermined the party, the more authority it lost, the less people did as the plan demanded, and the more the system unraveled into anarchy.

In all this, Gorbachev revealed a considerable naivety. To accompany political and economic reform, which went by the name perestroika, he declared a need for more openness (glasnost). Censorship was relaxed and eventually abolished. It would appear that Gorbachev sincerely believed that if given their freedom, the Soviet people would use it in a constructive way, helpfully pointing out problems so that they could be addressed, but not challenging the authorities in the process. This is not what happened. Instead of constructive suggestions, the Soviet people used their new found freedom to publish revelations of the past crimes of the communist state, to attack the country’s leaders, and to demand ever more radical change. The more people learnt about their country’s past and about enormous social problems it was experiencing in the present, the more the system lost its legitimacy. Rather than strengthening the state, glasnost fatally weakened it.

Another failing was that Gorbachev totally misread the mood of many of the minority nationalities within the Soviet Union. In a 1987 speech marking the 70th anniversary of the October Revolution, he declared the nationalities problem “solved.” Nothing was further from the truth. Soviet peoples used the freedom Gorbachev gave them to demand more national autonomy and in the case of the three Baltic states to demand independence. In other cases, minority nationalities sought to increase their own power and territory at the expense of other minorities. Visiting Armenia following a devastating earthquake in December 1988, Gorbachev was shocked to find that locals wanted to speak not about the earthquake but about the status of the disputed territory of Nagorno-Karabakh (under Azeri control, but claimed by the Armenians). By the time Gorbachev woke up to the seriousness of the Soviet Union’s ethno-national problems it was too late. As central authority collapsed, local elites decided that the best way of preserving their authority was to leap on the nationalist bandwagon. The rest, as they say, is history.

In the eyes of Westerners, Gorbachev’s greatest achievement was to bring an end to the Cold War. The Soviet leader believed that successful reform at home was impossible as long as the USSR was locked in an existential geopolitical struggle with the West. It was therefore necessary to make peace. To this end, he made it clear that the Soviet army would not intervene to prop up the communist regimes in Eastern Europe, each of which fell in turn in rapid succession in 1989. Beyond that, Gorbachev agreed to accept German reunification and to withdraw the Soviet army from Eastern Europe. With this, Soviet-Western relations quickly changed from mutual hostility to something akin to friendship.

More than anything else, this explains the adulation Gorbachev received in the West. Many Russians, though, view the matter very differently, asking themselves what Gorbachev got in exchange for surrendering the Soviet’s empire in Eastern Europe. Most importantly, they note that he failed to get a written guarantee that NATO would not expand eastwards. Historians disagree as to whether NATO leaders gave verbal promises in this regard, but it is certain that nothing was ever put on paper. Rarely has somebody given up so much and got so little in return. The sense of bitterness that resulted has soured Russian-Western relations ever since.

Here again, Gorbachev’s naivety reveals itself. Gorbachev spoke of “Europe from the Atlantic to the Urals,” and commented that “Europe is our common home.” But his vision was never that the Soviet Union, or later Russia, should be reduced to a subordinate status within a Europe dominated by NATO. Rather, he envisioned NATO and the Soviet-led Warsaw Pact disappearing and being replaced by a new security architecture in which the Soviet Union and Western states would be equal partners. Gorbachev seems to have imagined that if the Soviets dismantled their Cold War infrastructure, the West would do the same. But the West never had any intention of doing such a thing. In the eyes of Gorbachev’s Russian critics, he was, simply put, a dupe.

Mikhail Gorbachev meant well. An idealist, he believed in communism’s humanist potential. Realizing that communism’s practice fell short of its promise, he sought to do something about it. In the process, he unleashed hidden forces that destroyed the system he hoped to revive. For better or for worse, we are still living with the consequences today.

Paul Robinson is a professor in the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Ottawa and a Senior Fellow at the Institute for Peace and Diplomacy. He is the author of numerous works on Russian and Soviet history, including Russian Conservatism, published by Northern Illinois University Press in 2019.

Neurosis to a greater or lesser degree is the norm in western industrialized societies. Drawing on this fact is the key to effective propaganda. It is well known that neurotics always return to the place they are running away from. It’s a circle game of frustration in which being frustrated is actually the “solution,” because the real problems cannot be faced. The Donald Trump phenomenon is an example of this on a social level.

Everybody knows that Trump is loved or hated in equal measure. And everyone knows he dominates the minds of those who love or hate him, just as the media endlessly focuses on him in a way that only very obtuse people would fail to analyze. The media made Trump and he is their gold mine and the key to the effective propaganda they run for their masters in high finance and the intelligence agencies. Although his image seems big and bold and brazen, it is like an Impressionist painting that, as the art critic John Berger writes in “The Eyes of Claude Monet,” “… is painted in such a way that you are compelled to recognize that it is no longer there …. You cannot enter an Impressionist painting; instead it extracts your memories. In a sense it is more active than you – the passive viewer is being born; what you receive is taken from what happens between you and it. No more within it.”

Like Trump, the impression is fugitive, here and gone, vague and precise. It’s meaning is fleeting. Mutation and flux and the evanescence of appearances are its essence. As with Trump, nothing is really clear, although many claim it is. Monet was painting at a time (the late 19th and early 20th centuries) when, due to technological and economic changes, an old world was dissolving into the modern. Jump a century or more and we have Trump and the electronic media where vagueness and flux rule perceptions.

Celebrity Culture

For Trump is a product of celebrity culture that has come to dominate our world that reminds you that the world of the past has become a reality television show and all the talk about the good old days is an illusion and that we are now living in a society where experience has been reduced to meaningless and ephemeral gestures. The politicians of all stripes play ghosts.

America will never be great again, for it is corrupted to the core and the mass media present it in images that have no bearing on reality. This is something neurotics cannot face, so they still follow the circle game played by the media and fight political battles that are exercises in frustration. But it keeps them busy. Like a sports fan whose favorite team has just lost a game or had a losing season, there is always tomorrow, next season, or the upcoming election.

Before Donald Trump emerged on the national scene with his 2015 announcement that he was running for the presidency, he was known as a wealthy real estate operator who had often declared bankruptcy and a comical reality-television host with a strange hairdo. In short, he was a wealthy celebrity with huge mansions who cavorted with the rich and famous, including former President Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton, among many others.

How such a billionaire celebrity could ever have become president and have such a large following among the white working class – the “deplorables” in Hillary Clinton’s elitist lingo – has its roots in the transformation of American culture from the late 1950s to today when illusion and performance have replaced any semblance of reality.

Boorstin, Postman, and Gabler

Daniel Boorstin described this transformation in its early days in his brilliant book, The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America (1962). He dissected the radical change taking place whereby images and manufactured pseudo-events – “however planned, contrived, or distorted – have become more vivid, more attractive, more impressive, and more persuasive than reality itself.” What I describe as neurotic circling, Boorstin called tautologies. In this new theatrical world of mirrors, people imitate themselves by looking into the mirror of themselves imitating the famous people of all stripes: actors, politicians (excuse the repetition), celebrities, et al. Boorstin writes:

Our very efforts to debunk celebrities, to prove (whether by critical journalistic biographies or by vulgar ‘confidential’ magazines) that they are unworthy of our admiration, are like efforts to get ‘behind the scenes’ in the making of other pseudo-events. They are self-defeating. They increase our interest in the fabrication …. The hat, the rabbit, and the magician are all equally news.

Thirty years after The Image, Neil Postman added to this critique by showing how the new computer technology was tyrannizing over all human values and ways of knowing. In Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology, he showed how the ecology of technology, wherein “One significant change generates total change,” creates a totally new world where cultural and personal coherence become nearly impossible. In a Technopoly where technology and technique rule over all life, any sense of truth dissolves like soap bubbles. “That it why it is possible to say almost anything without contradiction provided you begin your utterance with the words ‘A study has shown … ‘or “Scientists now tell us that … ‘” Scientism and gibberish blend with technological tricks to create an electronic digital society where, in Boorstin’s words, “the news behind the news” – or the creation of the illusions – becomes the most interesting news of all, even as its debunking is a tautology like the definition of a celebrity: Someone who is known for being known.

Finally, in 1998 Neal Gabler put the finishing touches on these developments with his book, Life: The Movie: How Entertainment Conquered Reality. Drawing on Boorstin and Postman, he argued that in the United States life itself had become an ongoing movie in which the manipulation of reality and real life melodramas, the movies and the new information technologies, had melded into a cultural transformation so profound that it marked the end of traditional values and/or the start of a brave new world. When fiction replaced facts and everything became entertainment in a technological kaleidoscope, “life itself was gradually becoming a medium all its own, like television, radio, print, and film, and that all of us were becoming at once performance artists in and audience for a grand, ongoing show…” The traditional media turned from some semblance of reporting actual news to become conveyors of “lifies” (a predecessor of “selfies”) – a flood of entertainments taken from soap-operatic events hyped to the teeth – while theatrical techniques were applied to politics, religion, war, etc., and everything became show business, including the presidency and the national sitcom of political reporting.

Political Theater and Propaganda

This is the context for Trump’s rise to prominence. It makes clear that he is not an aberration but part of a long development that gave us the acting president Ronald Reagan and all the presidential performers who have followed. One could say, if Trump never existed, he would have to be invented, which of course he has been, as was Bush, Clinton, Bush II, Obama, and Biden. Is it surprising that the Ukrainian president Zelensky is a comedic television and movie actor? Performers such as these follow their Director’s orders.

Furthermore, all these developments omit the crucial part played by government propaganda apparatuses in conjunction with the media and technology conglomerates. The growth of such massive propaganda is entwined with all these cultural changes, although it is not the primary focus of the three books mentioned. When all these threads are woven together, we arrive at our current situation – a vast tapestry of lies.

There are various schools of thought on the Trump phenomenon, and most say more about the thinkers than their thoughts. I am referring to Trump’s rise to prominence, his 2016 election, his presidency, and all that continues to transpire around him in 2022 and into the future. (And although Trump will be an old man in 2024 – the same age that Biden is today – you can be assured he will be garnering the headlines then.)

Monet Paints Trump

These diverse impressions of what it all means fall into at least four categories, which I will sketch as I see them.

Trump supporters seemingly came out of nowhere in 2016, but this is false. If anything, they have been smoldering for many decades and their complaints have been mounting for many good reasons. In 1969, Pete Hamill, the New York journalist, wrote an article for New York Magazine called “The Revolt of the White Lower Middle Class.” He said:

They call my people the White Lower Middle Class these days. It is an ugly, ice-cold phrase, the result, I suppose, of the missionary zeal of those sociologists who still think you can place human beings on charts. It most certainly does not sound like a description of people on the edge of open, sustained and possibly violent revolt. And yet, that is the case. All over New York tonight, in places like Inwood, South Brooklyn, Corona, East Flatbush, and Bay Ridge, men are standing around saloons talking of their grievances, and even more darkly about possible remedies. Their grievances are real and deep; their remedies could blow this city apart.

The White Lower Middle Class? Say that magic phrase at a cocktail party on the Upper East Side of Manhattan and monstrous images arise from the American demonology. Here comes the murderous rabble: fat, well-fed, bigoted, ignorant, an army of beer-soaked Irishmen, violence-loving Italians, hate-filled Poles. Lithuanians and Hungarians (they are never referred to as Americans) …. Sometimes these brutes are referred to as ‘the ethnics’ or ‘the blue-collar’ types. But the bureaucratic, sociological phrase is White Lower Middle Class. Nobody calls it the Working Class anymore.

He went on to quote various white working-class New Yorkers, their quiet bitterness, their ignorant racism fueled by a media that emphasizes “the politics of theatre, its seeming inability to ever explain what is happening behind the photographed image,” which results in a superficial understanding of what is really behind their frustrated complaints Neurosis to a greater or lesser degree is the norm in western industrialized societies. Drawing on this fact is the key to effective propaganda. It is well known that neurotics always return to the place they are running away from. It’s a circle game of frustration in which being frustrated is actually the “solution,” because the real problems cannot be faced. The Donald Trump phenomenon is an example of this on a social level.

Everybody knows that Trump is loved or hated in equal measure. And everyone knows he dominates the minds of those who love or hate him, just as the media endlessly focuses on him in a way that only very obtuse people would fail to analyze. The media made Trump and he is their gold mine and the key to the effective propaganda they run for their masters in high finance and the intelligence agencies. Although his image seems big and bold and brazen, it is like an Impressionist painting that, as the art critic John Berger writes in “The Eyes of Claude Monet,” “… is painted in such a way that you are compelled to recognize that it is no longer there …. You cannot enter an Impressionist painting; instead it extracts your memories. In a sense it is more active than you – the passive viewer is being born; what you receive is taken from what happens between you and it. No more within it.”

Like Trump, the impression is fugitive, here and gone, vague and precise. It’s meaning is fleeting. Mutation and flux and the evanescence of appearances are its essence. As with Trump, nothing is really clear, although many claim it is. Monet was painting at a time (the late 19th and early 20th centuries) when, due to technological and economic changes, an old world was dissolving into the modern. Jump a century or more and we have Trump and the electronic media where vagueness and flux rule perceptions.

Celebrity Culture

For Trump is a product of celebrity culture that has come to dominate our world that reminds you that the world of the past has become a reality television show and all the talk about the good old days is an illusion and that we are now living in a society where experience has been reduced to meaningless and ephemeral gestures. The politicians of all stripes play ghosts.

America will never be great again, for it is corrupted to the core and the mass media present it in images that have no bearing on reality. This is something neurotics cannot face, so they still follow the circle game played by the media and fight political battles that are exercises in frustration. But it keeps them busy. Like a sports fan whose favorite team has just lost a game or had a losing season, there is always tomorrow, next season, or the upcoming election.

Before Donald Trump emerged on the national scene with his 2015 announcement that he was running for the presidency, he was known as a wealthy real estate operator who had often declared bankruptcy and a comical reality-television host with a strange hairdo. In short, he was a wealthy celebrity with huge mansions who cavorted with the rich and famous, including former President Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton, among many others.

How such a billionaire celebrity could ever have become president and have such a large following among the white working class – the “deplorables” in Hillary Clinton’s elitist lingo – has its roots in the transformation of American culture from the late 1950s to today when illusion and performance have replaced any semblance of reality.

Boorstin, Postman, and Gabler

Daniel Boorstin described this transformation in its early days in his brilliant book, The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America (1962). He dissected the radical change taking place whereby images and manufactured pseudo-events – “however planned, contrived, or distorted – have become more vivid, more attractive, more impressive, and more persuasive than reality itself.” What I describe as neurotic circling, Boorstin called tautologies. In this new theatrical world of mirrors, people imitate themselves by looking into the mirror of themselves imitating the famous people of all stripes: actors, politicians (excuse the repetition), celebrities, et al. Boorstin writes:

Our very efforts to debunk celebrities, to prove (whether by critical journalistic biographies or by vulgar ‘confidential’ magazines) that they are unworthy of our admiration, are like efforts to get ‘behind the scenes’ in the making of other pseudo-events. They are self-defeating. They increase our interest in the fabrication …. The hat, the rabbit, and the magician are all equally news.

Thirty years after The Image, Neil Postman added to this critique by showing how the new computer technology was tyrannizing over all human values and ways of knowing. In Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology, he showed how the ecology of technology, wherein “One significant change generates total change,” creates a totally new world where cultural and personal coherence become nearly impossible. In a Technopoly where technology and technique rule over all life, any sense of truth dissolves like soap bubbles. “That it why it is possible to say almost anything without contradiction provided you begin your utterance with the words ‘A study has shown … ‘or “Scientists now tell us that … ‘” Scientism and gibberish blend with technological tricks to create an electronic digital society where, in Boorstin’s words, “the news behind the news” – or the creation of the illusions – becomes the most interesting news of all, even as its debunking is a tautology like the definition of a celebrity: Someone who is known for being known.

Finally, in 1998 Neal Gabler put the finishing touches on these developments with his book, Life: The Movie: How Entertainment Conquered Reality. Drawing on Boorstin and Postman, he argued that in the United States life itself had become an ongoing movie in which the manipulation of reality and real life melodramas, the movies and the new information technologies, had melded into a cultural transformation so profound that it marked the end of traditional values and/or the start of a brave new world. When fiction replaced facts and everything became entertainment in a technological kaleidoscope, “life itself was gradually becoming a medium all its own, like television, radio, print, and film, and that all of us were becoming at once performance artists in and audience for a grand, ongoing show…” The traditional media turned from some semblance of reporting actual news to become conveyors of “lifies” (a predecessor of “selfies”) – a flood of entertainments taken from soap-operatic events hyped to the teeth – while theatrical techniques were applied to politics, religion, war, etc., and everything became show business, including the presidency and the national sitcom of political reporting.

Political Theater and Propaganda

This is the context for Trump’s rise to prominence. It makes clear that he is not an aberration but part of a long development that gave us the acting president Ronald Reagan and all the presidential performers who have followed. One could say, if Trump never existed, he would have to be invented, which of course he has been, as was Bush, Clinton, Bush II, Obama, and Biden. Is it surprising that the Ukrainian president Zelensky is a comedic television and movie actor? Performers such as these follow their Director’s orders.

Furthermore, all these developments omit the crucial part played by government propaganda apparatuses in conjunction with the media and technology conglomerates. The growth of such massive propaganda is entwined with all these cultural changes, although it is not the primary focus of the three books mentioned. When all these threads are woven together, we arrive at our current situation – a vast tapestry of lies.

There are various schools of thought on the Trump phenomenon, and most say more about the thinkers than their thoughts. I am referring to Trump’s rise to prominence, his 2016 election, his presidency, and all that continues to transpire around him in 2022 and into the future. (And although Trump will be an old man in 2024 – the same age that Biden is today – you can be assured he will be garnering the headlines then.)

Monet Paints Trump

These diverse impressions of what it all means fall into at least four categories, which I will sketch as I see them.

Trump supporters seemingly came out of nowhere in 2016, but this is false. If anything, they have been smoldering for many decades and their complaints have been mounting for many good reasons. In 1969, Pete Hamill, the New York journalist, wrote an article for New York Magazine called “The Revolt of the White Lower Middle Class.” He said:

They call my people the White Lower Middle Class these days. It is an ugly, ice-cold phrase, the result, I suppose, of the missionary zeal of those sociologists who still think you can place human beings on charts. It most certainly does not sound like a description of people on the edge of open, sustained and possibly violent revolt. And yet, that is the case. All over New York tonight, in places like Inwood, South Brooklyn, Corona, East Flatbush, and Bay Ridge, men are standing around saloons talking of their grievances, and even more darkly about possible remedies. Their grievances are real and deep; their remedies could blow this city apart.

The White Lower Middle Class? Say that magic phrase at a cocktail party on the Upper East Side of Manhattan and monstrous images arise from the American demonology. Here comes the murderous rabble: fat, well-fed, bigoted, ignorant, an army of beer-soaked Irishmen, violence-loving Italians, hate-filled Poles. Lithuanians and Hungarians (they are never referred to as Americans) …. Sometimes these brutes are referred to as ‘the ethnics’ or ‘the blue-collar’ types. But the bureaucratic, sociological phrase is White Lower Middle Class. Nobody calls it the Working Class anymore.

He went on to quote various white working-class New Yorkers, their quiet bitterness, their ignorant racism fueled by a media that emphasizes “the politics of theatre, its seeming inability to ever explain what is happening behind the photographed image,” which results in a superficial understanding of what is really behind their frustrated complaints that they too are victims of the system and are not respected. In an article ostensibly about New Yorkers, Hamill explained where such anger came from, not to justify misdirected racism or ignorance of how things actually work in this country. Update his account, and you have a good portion of Trump’s followers today. His description is just as apt today: “The working-class white man is actually in revolt against taxes, joyless work, the double standards and short memories of professional politicians, hypocrisy and what he considers the debasement of the American dream.”

The perplexing thing, only explained by the rise of celebrity culture, the Internet, and the dumbing-down of the general public, is how Trump, a billionaire reality-TV buffoon could garner their devoted allegiance. A man so different from them, many of whom come from states with large rural populations and Trump a quintessential New Yorker who probably never got his hands in the earth. Of course he said many of the things they were desperate to hear about making the U.S.A. great again, no foreign entanglements, etc., many appealing things after they spent so many years hearing the politicians talk the same jive talk about invading this country and that and fighting Russia to the death. His message appealed to many. They bought his spiel as if he would save them; a claim that all politicians use, but he was touching the suppressed underbelly of the American delusion. An upper class politician talking about, among others things, class matters.

Then there is the liberal counterpoint to Trump, which is essentially the Democratic Party’s interpretation that Trump represents a shocking neo-fascist resurrection of the historically racist, isolationist strain in American history. This position is ironically consonant with the extremist 1950s claims of Senator Joseph McCarthy and his ilk – Nixon and Trump’s lawyer friend Roy Cohn, who represented McCarthy – who claimed there were communists under every bed and the Russians (U.S.S.R.) were coming to seize our liberties. The accusations against Trump, being led by The New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, etc., are that he is a Russian-connected operative, a stooge, and that he is intent on undermining American democracy and establishing an American totalitarianism; that he stole the 2016 election with the help of Russia; and that he always has been in cahoots with Vladimir Putin. The liberals who hold this assessment of Trump, what some critics call “Trump derangement syndrome,” are as devoted to their assessments as are Trump’s supporters. Both groups look to Trump as an angel or devil; he transfixes both in equal measure.

Aside from those who see Trump as a savior or Satan, there are various other opinions of him that cross ideological divides. Most are equivocal, at best. Some leftists admire him for his less belligerent stance toward Russia and understand the totally debunked Russia-gate accusations against him and the impeachment proceedings as confirmation of his sincerity, although they do not endorse some of his other positions. Others view him as the personification of the rise of neo-fascist, far-right Christian fundamentalism, while also seeing Biden and the Democrats as perfidious fools leading the country to disaster. Some conservatives like aspects of his agenda, as do a small number of libertarians, but they remain very wary. There are many variations on these opinions with most falling somewhere between a rock and a hard place. A sort of pox on both contestants in the electoral game, but most are based on the presupposition that the show must go on, even as both sides claim electoral fraud when their side loses. This is the frame within which impressions of Trump and his opponents are formed.

Rarely is it considered – and this is the take of a tiny minority – that with the rise of celebrity culture, pseudo-events, image-making, and the vast, sophisticated, electronic, intelligence, propaganda apparatus, that Donald Trump is not the impressions he gives off but a creation of hidden forces manipulating reality to an unimaginable extent. That Trump is not the arch-enemy of Biden or Clinton or any Democrat, but that he is a partner in a great game of deception in which the good guys and bad guys play their parts for the Great Director. It is worth remembering what Barbara Honegger, who was present in the West Wing of the White House in February 1981, overheard that day:

We’ll know our disinformation is complete when everything the American public believes is false. – William J. Casey, CIA Director

It is also worth considering a different version of the point the psychologist James Hillman and the writer Michael Ventura raised with their book We’ve Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy and the World’s Getting Worse. People might ask themselves if over the past fifty or five years their lives have gotten better or worse under all the American presidents, including Biden and Trump. The answer is obvious. Therefore, maybe it is time to imagine the most extreme possibility: That Casey’s statement has come to fruition.

It is not just painters and comedians who do impressions.that they too are victims of the system and are not respected. In an article ostensibly about New Yorkers, Hamill explained where such anger came from, not to justify misdirected racism or ignorance of how things actually work in this country. Update his account, and you have a good portion of Trump’s followers today. His description is just as apt today: “The working-class white man is actually in revolt against taxes, joyless work, the double standards and short memories of professional politicians, hypocrisy and what he considers the debasement of the American dream.”

The perplexing thing, only explained by the rise of celebrity culture, the Internet, and the dumbing-down of the general public, is how Trump, a billionaire reality-TV buffoon could garner their devoted allegiance. A man so different from them, many of whom come from states with large rural populations and Trump a quintessential New Yorker who probably never got his hands in the earth. Of course he said many of the things they were desperate to hear about making the U.S.A. great again, no foreign entanglements, etc., many appealing things after they spent so many years hearing the politicians talk the same jive talk about invading this country and that and fighting Russia to the death. His message appealed to many. They bought his spiel as if he would save them; a claim that all politicians use, but he was touching the suppressed underbelly of the American delusion. An upper class politician talking about, among others things, class matters.

Then there is the liberal counterpoint to Trump, which is essentially the Democratic Party’s interpretation that Trump represents a shocking neo-fascist resurrection of the historically racist, isolationist strain in American history. This position is ironically consonant with the extremist 1950s claims of Senator Joseph McCarthy and his ilk – Nixon and Trump’s lawyer friend Roy Cohn, who represented McCarthy – who claimed there were communists under every bed and the Russians (U.S.S.R.) were coming to seize our liberties. The accusations against Trump, being led by The New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, etc., are that he is a Russian-connected operative, a stooge, and that he is intent on undermining American democracy and establishing an American totalitarianism; that he stole the 2016 election with the help of Russia; and that he always has been in cahoots with Vladimir Putin. The liberals who hold this assessment of Trump, what some critics call “Trump derangement syndrome,” are as devoted to their assessments as are Trump’s supporters. Both groups look to Trump as an angel or devil; he transfixes both in equal measure.

Aside from those who see Trump as a savior or Satan, there are various other opinions of him that cross ideological divides. Most are equivocal, at best. Some leftists admire him for his less belligerent stance toward Russia and understand the totally debunked Russia-gate accusations against him and the impeachment proceedings as confirmation of his sincerity, although they do not endorse some of his other positions. Others view him as the personification of the rise of neo-fascist, far-right Christian fundamentalism, while also seeing Biden and the Democrats as perfidious fools leading the country to disaster. Some conservatives like aspects of his agenda, as do a small number of libertarians, but they remain very wary. There are many variations on these opinions with most falling somewhere between a rock and a hard place. A sort of pox on both contestants in the electoral game, but most are based on the presupposition that the show must go on, even as both sides claim electoral fraud when their side loses. This is the frame within which impressions of Trump and his opponents are formed.

Rarely is it considered – and this is the take of a tiny minority – that with the rise of celebrity culture, pseudo-events, image-making, and the vast, sophisticated, electronic, intelligence, propaganda apparatus, that Donald Trump is not the impressions he gives off but a creation of hidden forces manipulating reality to an unimaginable extent. That Trump is not the arch-enemy of Biden or Clinton or any Democrat, but that he is a partner in a great game of deception in which the good guys and bad guys play their parts for the Great Director. It is worth remembering what Barbara Honegger, who was present in the West Wing of the White House in February 1981, overheard that day:

We’ll know our disinformation is complete when everything the American public believes is false. – William J. Casey, CIA Director

It is also worth considering a different version of the point the psychologist James Hillman and the writer Michael Ventura raised with their book We’ve Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy and the World’s Getting Worse. People might ask themselves if over the past fifty or five years their lives have gotten better or worse under all the American presidents, including Biden and Trump. The answer is obvious. Therefore, maybe it is time to imagine the most extreme possibility: That Casey’s statement has come to fruition.

It is not just painters and comedians who do impressions.

Both COVID-19 illness, caused by infection with the SARS-CoV-2 virus, and COVID-19 vaccination, ostensibly to prevent SARS-CoV-2 infection and serious COVID-19 morbidity, have been associated with the development of myopericarditis, i.e., inflammation of the heart muscle itself (myocarditis) or its suspending sack (pericarditis). This brief review demonstrates, first, the dubious association between SARS-CoV-2 infection and myopericarditis, and second, the robust association between COVID-19 vaccination, especially with mRNA vaccines, and myopericarditis, including, in particular, the study of fatal cases upon autopsy.

The direct relationship between SARS-CoV-2 infection and myocarditis remains tenuous at best. Recent ecological, controlled retrospective cohort and autopsy data do not support an association. The overall absence of support for a specific ‘SARS-CoV-2 myocarditis syndrome’ from focused autopsy studies of presumed myocarditis deaths is consistent with findings from general necropsy studies of COVID-19 deaths. These investigations have established SARS-CoV-2 infection leading to fatal COVID-19 is indeed, as the name implies, a respiratory illness. Wong et al., for example, described how, “No overt pathological findings attributable to SARS-CoV-2 infection could be recognised outside of the lung… [B]eyond the respiratory tract [SARS-CoV-2 infection] does not induce any major pathology… in fatal cases.”

A systematic review of primarily spontaneously reported data from the U.K., USA and European Union/European Economic Area (EU/EEA), beginning with vaccine launch through mid-March 2022, found 0.22% (n=30) of 13,571 Covid vaccine-associated myocarditis or pericarditis events were fatal. These data are complemented by a much smaller, but growing autopsy literature. The limited necropsy data characterising COVID-19 vaccine-associated deceased persons with myocarditis and myopericarditis repeatedly affirm heart-related pathologies directly attributable to very recent vaccination. Such findings contrast with the lack of definitive epidemiologic or autopsy evidence for a unique SARS-CoV-2 infection myocarditis, as Caforio et al. note:

Strong evidence for a SARS-CoV-2 role in direct infection of cardiac myocytes leading to virus induced myocarditis in patients is missing… [T]here is not yet definitive EMB [endomyocardial biopsy]/autopsy proof that SARS-CoV-2 causes direct cardiomyocyte damage in association with histological myocarditis.

Tables 1-3 detail the published autopsy findings from six fatal cases of post-Covid mRNA vaccine-associated myocarditis. The etiologies for cases 1 and 2 were most consistent with an epinephrine-mediated ‘toxic myocarditis’, whereas cases 3-6 evidenced hyperinflammatory myocarditis. Ultimately, after extensive investigation, each case was deemed a Covid vaccine-caused fatal myocarditis.

The heads of state and government present at the Minsk II Agreement.

For the past seven years, it has been the responsibility of the guarantor powers of the Minsk II Agreement (Germany, France, Ukraine and Russia) to enforce it. They had been endorsed and legalized by the United Nations Security Council on February 17, 2015. But none of these states have done so, despite the rhetoric about the need to protect citizens threatened by their own governments.

While there was talk of possible Russian military intervention, on January 31, 2022, the Secretary of the Ukrainian National Security and Defense Council, Oleksiy Danilov, defied Germany, France, Russia and the UN Security Council by stating, "Compliance with the Minsk agreements means the destruction of the country. When they were signed under the armed threat of the Russians - and under the eyes of the Germans and the French - it was already clear to all rational people that it was impossible to implement these documents" [[1](#nb1 ""Ukraine security chief: Minsk peace deal may create chaos, Yuras Karmanau, (...)")].

When, after seven years, the number of Ukrainians killed by the Kiev government amounted to more than 12,000 according to the Kiev government and more than 20,000 according to the Russian Investigative Committee, only then did Moscow launch a "special military operation" against the Ukrainian "integral nationalists" (as they claim), who were described as "neo-Nazis".

Russia declared from the start of its operation that it would stick to rescuing the populations and “denazifying” Ukraine, not occupying it. Yet the West accused it of trying to take Kiev, overthrow President Zelensky and annex Ukraine, which they obviously never did. It was only after the execution of one of the Ukrainian negotiators, Denis Kireev, by his own country’s security services (SBU) and the suspension of talks by President Volodymyr Zelensky that his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, announced that he was toughening his demands. From now on, the Federation claims Novorussia, that is to say all of southern Ukraine, historically Russian since Tsarina Catherine II, with the exception of thirty-three years.

It should be understood that if Russia did nothing for seven years, it was not because it was insensitive to the massacre of the Russian-speaking population of Donbass, but because it was preparing to face the predictable Western response. According to the classic quotation of the Minister of Foreign Affairs of Tsar Alexander II, Prince Alexander Gortchakov: "The Emperor is determined to devote, preferably, his solicitude to the well-being of his subjects and to concentrate, on the development of the internal resources of the country, an activity which would be poured outside only when the positive interests of Russia would require it absolutely. Russia is reproached for isolating itself and keeping silent in the presence of facts that are not in accordance with either law or equity. Russia is said to be sulking. Russia is not sulking. Russia is taking stock".

This police operation was called "aggression" by the West. One thing leading to another, Russia was portrayed as a "dictatorship" and its foreign policy as "imperialism". No one seems to have read the Minsk II Agreement, which was endorsed by the UN Security Council. In a telephone conversation between Presidents Putin and Macron, revealed by the Élysée Palace, the latter even expressed his lack of interest in the fate of the population of Donbass, i.e. his contempt for the Minsk II Agreement.

Today, the Western secret services are coming to the aid of the Ukrainian "integral nationalists" (the "neo-Nazis" in Russian terminology) and, instead of seeking a peaceful solution, are trying to destroy Russia from within [2].

In international law, Moscow has only implemented the 2015 Security Council resolution. It can be blamed for its brutality, but neither for rushing (seven years), nor for being illegitimate (resolution 2202). Presidents Petro Poroshenko, Francois Hollande, Vladimir Putin and Chancellor Angela Merkel had pledged, in a joint statement attached to the resolution, to do the same. If any of these powers had intervened earlier, they could have chosen other modalities of operation, but none did.

Antiochus I had the temple site at Nemrut Dag constructed on the anniversary of his coronation as king. But what else did he have in mind besides a celebration of his greatness? Perhaps there is a deeper mystery here – one handed down through the ages, hidden in plain sight, and one to which most of mankind is not privy.

Commagene – A Confluence of Persian, Babylonian and Macedonian Traditions

The Kingdom of Commagene was a Greco-Persian state which resided along the headwaters of the Euphrates River in modern-day Turkey, both during and before the times of the early Roman Empire. By 60 BCE Commagene had been a Greek vassal state since the collapse of The Neo-Assyrian Empire about 609 BCE and the rise of the Seleucid Empire around 312 BCE.1 2 Although the Seleuicid Empire was regarded as a Hellenistic State, it ruled under its own authority and controlled much of the former lands spanning Anatolia, Persia, the Levant, Mesopotamia, and Indus River region.3 After the Battle of Actium in 31 BCE, Commagene transferred authority to reside under the Roman Empire.4 Nonetheless, the Kingdom maintained its autonomy as a culture descended from the Uartu (Ararat) peoples of the Old Assyrian Empire (2600 BCE – 609 BCE), which included Sumer, Persia (Parthian Empire in the lower right quadrant of the map above), the Akkadian Empire, and Babylon. Its most ancient roots formed from the city-state of Ur, circa 3800 BCE. Commagene was situated in a sub-region of modern Turkey called Anatolia, a name which is derived from the Greek term ἀνατολῇ (anatolē), meaning ‘the East’.5 6

Nemrut Dağ

Located inside the eastern extent of the ancient state of Commagene is a tall mountain called by various names, including Nemrut Dag (which I will use herein). ‘Nemrut Dağ’ (Mount Nemrut/Nemrud), at 7000 ft is one of the highest peaks in the east of the Taurus Mountains (which range east through Cilicia on the map above). It maintains one of the best views of the eastern sky in the entire region. The mountain is located in modern day Turkey (see Exhibit 1 below), about 85 km directly north of another UNESCO World Heritage Site and site of the World’s first temple, Göbekli Tepe.7 8

Exhibit 1 – The Four Rivers Region – Nemrut Dag shown in relation to other geographic features of the ancient lore of the Levant and Fertile Crescent (the cradle of civilization as well as farming/animal domestication). As well, the image shows the birthplace of the Aramaic-speaking peoples called the Arameans. Paddan Aram – Field of (Aram) the Arameans (Aramaic-speaking common people of Lebanon, Jordan, and Israel). This group included the Biblical Abraham, his wife Sarah, and his nephew Lot.

Antiochus I Theos Epiphanes of Commagene

Basileus Megas was the title of the great king and inheritor of the sole rule handed down from the Seleucid Empire. Antiochus of Commagene (full title Theos Dikaios Epiphanes Philoromaios Philhellen, with ‘Theos’ signifying his divinity), was a Seleucid ruler and Basileus Megas from 69 (or, less probably, 64) to ca. 31 BCE, the son of Mithradates Callinicos and Laodice, the daughter of the Seleucid king Antiochus VIII Grypos. He reigned from the seat of the fomer Empire in Commagene.9 Antiochus, as ‘Theos Epiphanes’ was the ruling keeper of the ancient wisdom of the Magicians (Persian, Babylonian and Macedonian tradition ‘Magi’). Accordingly, Antiochus I had the Hierothesion (temple-observatory) site at Nemrut Dag constructed on the anniversary of his coronation as king (see Exhibit 2 below – click on image to enlarge in a separate window).

Specially designated days are the birthday of “the king’s body” and his coronation. Antiochus dedicated these two days, to the revelations of demons (daimones), which led him during the successful reign over the kingdom. At this point it is worth noting that in ancient times the term “demon” was ambivalent and defined both positive and negative superhuman beings – in this sense, demons often served as guardian spirits, to which role Antiochus clearly referred.

~ Turkish Archaeological News, Mount Nemrut, 5 Feb 201810

Exhibit 2 – The Nomos – Antiochus I explains the purpose of the temple and stellar observatory (Hierothesion) set up at Nemrut Dag. This was not simply a place to honor himself and act as a burial site, rather it was to house an ancient priesthood who made observations in accordance with the ancient Magi traditions.

Antiochus I Observatory at Mount Nimrut (Nimrod)

The Hierothesion at Nemrut, also called in various languages ‘Nimrud/Nimrut/Nemrud/Nemrut Dag/Dagh’ or ‘Nemrut Dağ/Daği’ as an historical site (distinct from the Turkish dormant volcano named Mount Nemrut) comes replete with its own mountain of crushed stone (the Tumulus), backing the observatory itself. The reader should note that the observatory is built to observe the morning eastern sky in the late summer (August) time frame of each year, and is as a result, aligned at 65° to 70° azimuth from true north (as outlined in Figure B later in this article).11 This is the average azimuth of the rising celestial ecliptic (the average path of the sun moon and planets across the sky) during that time of the year. The persons who built this observatory, apparently knew a little something about what they were looking for. It is also constructed so as to observe the western sky as that same yearly time frame’s ecliptic sets below the horizon.12 (The reader should note that the ecliptic, is the pathway which the Sun takes through our sky. All the planets and our Moon loosely follow this line as they make their journey from east to west each day and night. Throughout this article, you will notice the ecliptic as a thin line placed below Leo’s paws.)

Exhibit 3 – An artificial mound of crushed rock (The Tumulus) backs the observatory’s East Terrace and set of five kings statues.

Exhibit 6 – The east horizon view from the observation platform. Nemrut Dag’s elevation is around 7000 ft. The temple site was the go-to location for stellar observations at sunrise and sunset. The three priests (Persian, Babylonian, and Macedonian) would have likely taken 8-hour watches each, in order to maintain the observatory each day, keep the time, and wake the others for their watch rotation. They might have even ‘dogged’ (shortened) a watch, to ensure that each received an even rotation in daily duties, as well as the monitoring of both a sunrise and a sunset on a regular basis. These Magi would have been rich from the ‘gifts of herbs and spices’ (see Exhibit 2) which were custom in the day – and more importantly, were mandated by Antiochus I. (Source: Google Earth)

The Horoscope of the Lion (Leo)

During my investigation into the site and the features of the Hierothesion it became clear to me that, while Nemrut Dag was a relatively new religious construction during this time of Roman ascendancy, the wisdoms upon which it was founded, were not new at all. They were ancient Uruk-Bablylonian in their heritage. Whether boast, shell game, or reality, nonetheless Antiochus I had set his mind and resources to the task of preserving, or acting upon those mystery school teachings. Thus, by means of mostly Exhibit 2 (and other resources which are not the focus of this article), we were able established four things regarding the very straightforward history of this relatively noteworthy UNESCO World Heritage Site.

1. The site was commissioned to celebrate the anniversary of the crowning of Antiochus I,
2. The site was to be used to monitor and commission festivals and celestial events,
3. The site was declared to be the burial site for Antiochus I, and finally
4. The site was observing a tradition which called for the attending (and wealthy) Magi Priests to monitor for a future event.

But what future event was that?
But is this Assumed Horoscope Indeed Correct?

Read the whole article here ...

Renewing the strategies of Germany during the First World War and of the United States and the Ukrainian integral nationalists during the Cold War, the Westerners have just created a Forum of the free peoples of Russia. The aim is to prolong the break-up of the USSR, to create separatist movements and, ultimately, to proclaim the independence of twenty regions of the country.

The German Empire of William II versus the Russian Empire of Nicholas II

At the beginning of the 20th century, before the world wars, Central Europe was deeply unstable. Two powers clashed in this great plain: in the West, the German and Austro-Hungarian Empires, in the East, the Russian Empire. The populations were invited to choose their protector, knowing that the borders had been modified many times and that none seemed definitive.

The Russian Empire had remained blocked for several centuries, leaving its subjects in a situation of ignorance and complete misery, while the German Empire had become the main scientific center of the world and was developing at great speed. Therefore, most Central European intellectuals chose to support Germany rather than Russia.

During the First World War, the German and Austro-Hungarian foreign ministries launched a joint secret operation: the creation of the League of Allogenic Peoples of Russia (Liga der Fremdvölker Rußlands - LFR) [1]. They recruited many high-level intellectuals to lead it. The aim was to implode the Russian Empire by creating separatist movements. The League called on the United States (which did not enter the war until 1917) to liberate the enslaved peoples.

Dmytro Dontsov, the future founder of "Ukrainian integral nationalism" [[2](#nb2 "In previous articles, I have used the term "Nazi" to describe this school (...)")], supported this movement and even became its employee. He shamelessly directed the Bern branch and edited the monthly Bulletin des nationalités de Russie in French.

The World League for Freedom and Democracy held its last annual congress on January 22, 2022 in Taiwan.

The United States against the Soviet Union

In addition, at the end of World War II, the OSS, and later the CIA, organized the transfer of anti-communist leaders from the Axis to the Third World and recycled them into various governments. They created an Asian Peoples’ Anti-Communist League around the Chinese Chiang Kai-shek, then a World Anti-Communist League (WACL), with the support of the former Ukrainian full nationalist Prime Minister, the Nazi Yaroslav Stetsko [3]. This secret organization, whose headquarters are still in Taiwan, was renamed the World League for Freedom and Democracy in 1990.

It is no coincidence that the war in Ukraine is followed by provocations in Taiwan, but the logical extension of this strategy. The League is always financed by the Taiwanese secret service and its actions are covered by the defense secret.

Dmytro Yarosh, the current advisor to the Commander-in-Chief of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, founded the Anti-Imperialist Front against the Russian Federation with the Emir of Itchkeria.

Ukrainian integral nationalists against the Russian Federation

Ukrainian integral nationalist Dmytro Yarosh created in Ternopol (Western Ukraine) in 2007 - that is, under the presidency of Viktor Yushchenko - an "Anti-Imperialist Front", an organization aimed at blowing up the Russian Federation. But whereas the attempts of the 1910s were based on the appeal of the German Empire and those of the Cold War on anti-communism, this third operation relied on jihadists [4].

The first Islamic emir of Itchkeria (Chechnya), Doku Umarov, should have participated, but he was wanted worldwide and could not get out of Russia. He sent a message of support and was elected co-chairman of the organization. In addition to the above-mentioned, he was elected co-chairman of the organization. Jihadists from Crimea, Adygea, Dagestan, Ingushetia, Kabardino-Balkaria, Karachaevo-Cherkessia and Ossetia came to the meeting.

Dmytro Yarosh and many Ukrainian integral nationalists fought in Chechnya on the side of the Islamic Emirate of Itchkeria. At the time, the Western press spoke of a national liberation movement and ignored the imposition of Sharia law by Doku Umarov.

The Forum of Free Peoples of Russia has distributed this map of the dismantling of the Russian Federation.

The Forum of Free Peoples of Russia

Today, when Dontsov’s works are required reading for the 120,000 soldiers of the Ukrainian integral nationalist militias and Dmytro Yarosh has become an advisor to the commander-in-chief of the Ukrainian armies, an unidentified sponsor - presumably the German BND, the U.S. CIA and the Ukrainian SBU - organized a Forum of Free Nations of Russia in Prague on July 23-24, 2022 [5].

It seems that the SBU was reluctant to participate and that this was one of the reasons that led the US to recommend to President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to dismiss its director.

The term "Free Peoples" is the one used by Ukrainian integral nationalists, including the Ukrainian economist Lev Dobriansky. Dobriansky founded the National Captive Nations Committee with President Dwight Eisenhower and Yaroslav Stetsko, and later helped found the World Anti-Communist League. His daughter, Paula Dobriansky, played a central role in the propaganda apparatus of the State Department and the Thomson Reuters news agency. She served as Under Secretary of State for Global Affairs during the presidency of George W. Bush. President Donald Trump opposed her appointment as Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs.

The Free Peoples’ Forum of Russia uses the argument of peoples’ self-determination to justify a partition of Russia. When the USSR was dissolved, fifteen separate states were freed, including the Russian Federation. The idea is to extend this partition, this time creating twenty more states. This would not only create new states in the Caucasus, but also completely change the map of Siberia, that is, the marches of China.

However, if there is a real problem of development in some regions of Russia, it is being solved with the creation of new communication routes, first East-West, then for the last ten years, North-South. The peoples that the BND, the CIA and the SBU wish to "liberate" have never expressed their desire to leave the Russian Federation, with the exception of Chechnya, which is now at peace.

Again, it is no coincidence that the Russian army is emphasizing the place of its Chechen units in its special military operation against the Ukrainian "Nazis" in Donbass [I prefer the term "Ukrainian integral nationalists"]. This is a way for her to remind that she has satisfied the Chechen demands after two terrible wars. Similarly, the President of the Chechen Republic, Ramzan Kadyrov, calls on his people to take revenge for the abuses committed in his country by Ukrainian integral nationalists.

On August 15, 2022, President Vladimir Putin, who is acutely aware of this Western strategy, announced the convening of a world anti-Nazi conference in Moscow.

[1] _Liga der Fremdvölker Russlands 1916–1918. Ein Beitrag zu Deutschlands antirussischem Propagandakrieg unter den Fremdvölkern Russlands im Ersten Weltkrieg_, Seppo Zetterberg, Akateeminen Kirjakauppa (1978).

[2] In previous articles, I have used the term "Nazi" to describe this school of thought. However, this term is incorrect insofar as these are two distinct ideologies. Then, I used the term “banderists”. But it is not more adequate insofar as it refers to the context of the Second World War. I therefore now use the expression "integral nationalists" that those who lay claim to be so claim. It refers to the writings of the Frenchman Charles Maurras and especially to those of the Ukrainian Dmytro Dontsov. However, the first was Germanophobe while the second was Germanophile.

[3] “The World Anti-Communist League: the Internationale of Crime”, by Thierry Meyssan, Translation Anoosha Boralessa, Voltaire Network, 12 May 2004.

[4] “The CIA Coordinates Nazis and Jihadists”, by Thierry Meyssan, Translation Roger Lagassé, Al-Watan (Syria) , Voltaire Network, 19 May 2014.

[5] “Declaration about the decolonization of Russia”, Voltaire Network, 24 July 2022.

When I received a call this morning from Turkish public television TRT asking that I comment on the death of Mikhail Gorbachev in a live broadcast, the first thought which came to mind was the ironic remark of Soviet intellectuals on the place of leading personalities in history:  “there is nothing as changeable and unpredictable as the past.”

Of course, this notion is applicable everywhere, not just to Soviet history and personalities. Indeed, history is always being reinterpreted in light of current developments. As I commented in my interview, the achievements and failures of Gorbachev in power must now be reevaluated in light of the ongoing Russia-Ukraine war, which is the largest and most dangerous military conflict on the European continent since 1945.

This war follows directly from the break-up of the Soviet Union, which Gorbachev failed to prevent, though he did his best. Indeed, in the spring of 1991 he oversaw a referendum on the issue and won support from the population for continuation of the USSR. However, his playing off the right and left forces within the Politburo and within the Party at large over a number of years, the deceptions he practiced to get his way, finally caught up with him and laid the way in the summer of 1991 for the Putsch by rightists intent on restoring Soviet orthodoxy, which in turn so weakened Gorbachev that he was easily pushed aside by Boris Yeltsin. Destruction of the Union was Yeltsin’s instrument for achieving the complete removal of Gorbachev from power and setting out on a course of economic reform and de-Communization that was anathema to the leaders of the more conservative Soviet republics.

As we now know, the break-up of the USSR released pent-up animosities within and between the successor states, which had in each substantial ethnic minorities, in particular Russian-speakers, who numbered more than 25 million outside the boundaries of the Russian Federation in 1991. This was the largest such dispossessed ethnic community from the disintegration of empire in history, and its existence did not augur well for tranquility in Eurasia, from the Baltics, to the Caucasus, to Central Asia.

The collapse of the Soviet Union also touched off a very unhealthy wave of national excitement in the United States. It was now the sole surviving superpower, unchecked by any rivals. Fueled by hubris, Washington elites set course on remaking the world through a succession of military interventions and full-fledged wars abroad that has gone on for close to 30 years.  Failures in these military missions led to ever greater concern to “contain” any and all possible competitors on the world stage.  In practice, this meant containment first and foremost of Russia as it recovered economically and politically in the first decade of the new millennium. And this, expressed in terms of NATO expansion, is what brought us to the present conflict over Ukraine.

In that regard, I direct attention to Gorbachev’s greatest failure which resulted not from the conspiracies of his compatriots but from his own peculiar naivete in his dealings with the United States, meaning with Reagan, with Bush and their minions. The man who had shown such cunning in outfoxing his Politburo colleagues was completely outfoxed by his American and European interlocutors.  Had he been more cautious to protect Soviet-Russian interests, he would have demanded and likely received much better terms of compensation for the withdrawal of Soviet forces from all of Eastern Europe and disbanding the Warsaw Pact. Had he been less gullible and more realistic, he would have demanded  written treaties setting in concrete the prohibition of NATO expansion to the East and, or, he would have left Soviet garrisons in each of these states to ensure compliance. As it was, the Americans who gave him verbal assurances knew full well that they were meaningless and were perplexed at the Kremlin’s failure to defend strategic national interests.

These are the sins which patriotic Russians hold against Gorbachev today, even as they acknowledge his astonishing feats in freeing Soviet citizens from the totalitarian yoke of the past through glasnost and perestroika.

Of course, it is an open question whether a democratic Soviet Union could have long survived. The economy was hopelessly mismanaged and the entire legacy of Soviet legislation rendered it virtually impossible to escape from violence or the threat of violence to make things work.  This is a point over which historical debate will continue for many decades to come.

For today’s interview, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NVz4QGouoFQ

The World Economic Forum’s Young Global Leaders (YGL) initiative has been responsible for seeding many of the ruling elite into positions of power and influence within the worlds of business, civil society and, most importantly, politics. The fall of the Soviet Union soon became the apparent catalyst for the creation of the Global Leaders for Tomorrow program, which was the precursor to the Young Global Leaders initiative over a decade later.

However, the supposed mastermind of the project, the WEF’s lifetime leader Klaus Schwab, had himself already been helped into his own influential position by a very similar program run out of Harvard University that was heavily funded by the American Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). The Harvard initiative in question, often referred to as Henry Kissinger’s International Seminar, was one of several programs set up by senior members of organizations such as the Council on Foreign Relations and the newly created CIA. In fact, during the post-World War II era, the United States was proactively creating many such programs with the intention of grooming potential young foreign leaders and installing them into positions of power. The main motive behind the establishment of these programs was ostensibly to combat and prevent communist infiltration of foreign states while also assuring that future global leaders would be amenable to US interests.

Originally, the United States created these secretive youth organizations with the aim of targetting potential future European leadership candidates. Yet, soon, no country in the world would be safe from possible CIA-sponsored political infiltration. In this article, we will examine one of the front organizations which used vast amounts of CIA money to fund various Harvard projects including Kissinger’s International Seminar. We will learn who the people were who created these funding platforms, and we’ll also look at other such educational initiatives, some still in existence today, which have helped American intelligence infiltrate governments worldwide.

The American Friends of the Middle East

In 1967, it was Harvard’s own Humphrey Doermann who exposed that certain Harvard Summer School courses and initiatives were actually being funded via CIA conduits. Even though almost a decade of funding throughout the 1950s remained undeclared, it was revealed that, between 1960 and 1966, Kissinger’s International Seminar received funding from three CIA conduits: The Asian Foundation, The Farfield Foundation, and The American Friend’s of the Middle East, the latter being one of the more well-known, influential and successful CIA conduits of the era.

The CIA funded Harvard-based International Seminar, and the conduits which the Central Intelligence Agency used to supply the forum with the necessary funds to run the program, are of great historical significance.

The American Friends of the Middle East (AFME) was not just a simple front organization used to funnel secret CIA money into their various projects, in fact, there were some very big names attached to this prominent post-war organization. The AFME was considered to be an “international educational organization” and was formed the same year that Henry Kissinger launched the International Seminar at Harvard, in 1951. There were 27 men and women who made up the AFME, which was led by Kermit “Kim” Roosevelt, Jr., the grandson of former-American President Theodore Roosevelt. The CIA had been formed in 1947 from what was originally the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) and Kermit Roosevelt Jr. was extremely influential in the early years of both organizations.

Kermit Roosevelt had been recruited by the mastermind behind the OSS, General William Joseph “Wild Bill” Donovan, in 1941 and he was soon placed into the newly-created Office of the Co-ordinator of Information— the precursor to the OSS—as a special assistant to Dean Acheson. Working out of the State Department, Acheson, who was then Assistant Secretary of State, had been tasked during World War II with implementing President Franklin Roosevelt’s policy of undermining Axis powers while at the same time supplying economic aid to Great Britain. Kermit Roosevelt, who was distantly related to the president, had had an affinity with the Middle East from a very young age with the Daily Mail of Hagerstown in Maryland reporting in September 1948 that: “Mr. [Kermit] Roosevelt’s career as a writer began when he was a child with the composing of a prophetic poem, ‘The Lure of the East,’ for the ‘American Boy’ magazine. He was eleven at the time.” Kermit’s father, also named Kermit, had been in the “shipping business,” as mentioned in the latter article. This had meant that Kermit Jr. had travelled around the world at an early age.

A 1950 photo of Kermit Roosevelt Jr., grandson of US President Theodore Roosevelt, and a former Central Intelligence Agency official, Source: National Security Archive, GWU

Kermit spent the war years serving in the Middle East and Italy, travelling extensively throughout the war and was reported to have toured Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Palestine, Iran and Ethiopia. His father, had spent the war fighting mainly in Norway and Finland, but also served briefly in Egypt, and died tragically in Alaska in 1943. The Abilene Reporter newspaper reported on Sunday 6 June 1943 that Kermit Sr. had passed away in Alaska the day before the article was published, with the paper noting: “Ordinarily, the phrase ‘killed in action’ is used to report a death in combat.” It was later confirmed that he had actually committed suicide. By this time, Kermit Jr. had already been recruited by the OSS. Kermit Jr. continued to work for the OSS as a Middle East expert once the war had ended and he also began writing and editing the history of the secretive organization. By 1947, the OSS had become the CIA and Kermit was on the forefront of designing projects and programs for the newly-founded intelligence agency. He also seemed genuinely concerned for the situation in the Middle East, and soon took part in a lecture tour. That tour, whether sponsored by the CIA or not, saw Kermit argue passionately on behalf of those who were suffering in Palestine.

In December 1947, Kermit began a lecture tour on a paper he had written concerning the Middle East, entitled, “The Arabs Live There Too,” which discussed the “Palestinian problem” and looked at the basic issues between the Arabs and Jews who inhabited the region. The report, which was published in the Evening Post, warned that the situation deserves “more than a cursory glance from Americans.” Kermit described Palestine as “the UN’s baby” and stated that America had taken over the job as “nurse and governess” of the region. The lecture tour was advertised in the Waukesha Daily Freeman on 22 December 1947, with Roosevelt stating within the articles: “Applying the principle of one of their proverbs, ‘My enemy’s enemy is my friend,’ the Arabs might move into closer alignment with the Soviet Union,” going on to warn that “Arabs will not blame Russia (who voted for partition in the UN) half as much as they will blame Britain and the United States.” Kermit Roosevelt believed that the Arab league would stop short of all out war, describing an official declaration of war by any of the seven Arab nations as being “extremely unlikely.”

Roosevelt was eventually proved correct about the Arab nations not declaring war immediately and predicted instead that: “Any time the Arabs felt themselves strong enough, they would surely try to recover Palestine.” Before Kermit began his first covert operation in an Arabic country, he had been initially sent to Tibet by then-President Harry Truman to help ward off communist influence. The Delta Democrat Times of Mississippi reported on 9 April 1950 that: “Kermit Roosevelt, son of a G.O.P. President, is also being used on a confidential mission to block Communism in Tibet.”

Kermit Roosevelt believed that forming alliances with Arab countries as they emerged from British and French rule would pay dividends for America while also preventing Soviet infiltration of Arabic nations. However, that strategy would rely on the Western powers’ ability to keep Arab nationalism at bay, whether by diplomacy or subterfuge.

During 1943, Kermit worked for the State Department in Cairo and this was one of the first Middle East countries in the post-war years to experience a CIA-backed coup d’etat. At the same time as Kissinger was commencing the pilot of the Harvard International Seminar in the early 1950s, Kermit Roosevelt was deeply involved in overthrowing the ruling Egyptian regime, running a special covert operation which was gingerly named “Operation Fat Fucker”, normally referred to as simply “Operation FF.”

Egypt, at the turn of the 50s, was ruled by King Farouk, a notorious ruler who was already seen as corrupt in the eyes of most Egyptians. The project to depose him was led by the CIA’s then-director Allen Dulles, alongside CIA Station Chief in Cairo, Miles Copeland, Jr.; Secretary of State, Dean Acheson; and Kermit Roosevelt, Jr.—who was officially a CIA Operative at that time—with the original aim of applying pressure on Farouk to enact certain political reforms within his country. When the initial “pressure” phase had failed, resulting in Farouk rejecting the American proposals, Kermit Roosevelt came up with an idea of how to orchestrate a peaceful revolution which would see both the required reforms enacted and the country more open to “American control,” as historian Matthew F. Holland puts it.

Roosevelt met in secret with the Free Officers Movement, a nationalist revolutionary group, which was led by Gamal Abdel Nasser and Mohamed Naguib, and which was already planning to overthrow the government. On 23 July 1952, the coup d’etat, which had been the brainchild of Roosevelt, saw Farouk forced into abdicating power and he was sent into exile in Italy. The CIA-led coup had successfully installed a new government, which they believed would be more amenable to further American infiltration. The CIA would then help the newly installed Egyptian government to establish the General Intelligence Agency, Egypt’s own CIA clone organization.

The following year, in March 1953, the then Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, directed the CIA, which was still headed by his brother, Allen Dulles, to begin preparing a similar coup in Iran. The same people who had successfully installed Nasser in Egypt were given $1 million in funds—equivalent to $12,128,464.73 in 2022—which were to be used to bring about the fall of the Iranian leader Mohammed Mosaddegh. Mosaddegh was successfully deposed on 19 August 1953 in a coup orchestrated by both the CIA and MI6, again led by AFME’s Kermit Roosevelt Jr., in a project entitled “Operation Ajax.” The successful coups in Egypt and Iran were not spontaneous events but were instead well executed and intricately planned operations. However, the Americans were soon to learn that, if they were to continue to overthrow governments, they would first need to have effective American-aligned leaders already trained-up and ready to install into their target countries.

Before the newly-created CIA had begun to enact the aforementioned coups in Egypt and Iran, Roosevelt had founded the Committee for Justice and Peace in the Holy Land with many of the same people who would later make up the American Friends of the Middle East. The Committee for Justice and Peace in the Holy Land was formed in February 1948 by Roosevelt and a woman named Virginia Gildersleeve whose sympathies, according to historian Robert Moats Miller, “were indeed overwhelmingly with the Arabs,” and was a leading figure in the Christian opposition to the creation of the Israeli state.

Gildersleeve had been the long-term dean of Barnard College, but—in 1947—she had stepped down from her position to concentrate on other activities. In February 1948, the New York Times reported that she led a group opposed to the creation of a UN police force in Palestine. The article, entitled 7 Leaders Propose Truce in Palestine, also stated that the group’s members were: “Terming the present conflict in Palestine far more dangerous to world peace than most Americans realize,” with the group stating: “We feel a moral and civic obligation to urge that the most serious attention be given to our national policy with respect to Palestine,” with that statement also being cosigned by Kermit Roosevelt. Also prominent alongside Gildersleeve and Roosevelt in the creation of the AFME was Harry Emerson Fosdick, an American pastor described as an “active anti-Zionist” and who later became a major influence to Martin Luther King Jr.

Another notable member of the AFME was the controversial Dorothy Thompson. Thompson was an American journalist and radio broadcaster who had the honour of being the first American journalist to be expelled from Nazi Germany in 1934. Thompson was described in a 1939 Time magazine piece as being equal in influence to Eleanor Roosevelt and was often referred to as the “First Lady of American Journalism.” However, Thompson also held extreme views concerning America’s black voting population, describing them as: “Notoriously venal. Ignorant and illiterate, the vast mass of Negroes are like the lower strata of the early industrial immigrants, and like them are ‘bossed’ and ‘delivered’ in blocs by venal leaders, white and black.”

Thompson was a vocal anti-Zionist, coming to the conclusion that Zionism was a recipe for perpetual war. But, even though Roosevelt, Gildersleeve and Thompson all publicly opposed Zionism, the CIA in general would reap many benefits by creating a world which, if not in a state of perpetual war, was nearly always on the brink of perpetual war. The AFME included some of the key people who were moulding and influencing the post-war intelligence push. Even though we could find many interesting facts in studying all 27 members of the AFME, we now know that their interests focused on education and eventually resulted in the funding of a specific Harvard project that would create cadres of future international leaders who were amenable to America’s political interests and desires, including Klaus Schwab.

Just after World War II, there were many differing opinions within the American political establishment concerning what should be done about the “Palestinian problem.” Although many of the members of the AFME may have been publicly anti-Zionist, an upsurge in Arab nationalism had been triggered by the Nakba, the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians following the creation of Israel in 1948. This initially resulted in a divide in public opinion, with many Americans eventually siding with the newly founded Israeli state and their occupying force.

Popular opinion among the Arabic countries was much less divided. The Arab League closed their offices in Washington DC—referred to as the Arab Office—in 1947, stating publicly that the United States had shown a “complete and arrogant disregard for Arab rights, Arab interests, and Arab feelings.” At this time, the United States were still heavily dependant on Arab oil and the supply of this oil also relied on America having good relations with the Arabic world. The US oil consortium ARAMCO could only continue benefiting from Arab petroleum if the US stayed on good terms with the Saudi king, Ibn Saud, who was an extreme anti-Zionist. ARAMCO soon setup an office in Washington so as to lobby government on behalf of the Arabs while also putting funds into educational institutions such as the Middle East Institute. Yet, it wasn’t only the Arab contingent of the American population who were concerned about the rise of Zionism, with the American Council for Judaism (ACJ) objecting to Zionism because they believed that it conflated religion and nationality. Rabbi Elmer Berger of Michigan, who was an ACJ leader at the time, campaigned for American Jews to stop supporting the creation of the state of Israel. At the time, the State Department had also been worried about throwing their lot in with the Zionists. They were mainly concerned with the potential for the growth of communist influence in Arab countries if the US showed too much support for the newly created state of Israel.

According to historian Hugh Wilford, it was to be the Cairo-based former-OSS members who acted as “the nexus of the network that would become the American Friends of the Middle East” as he makes note of in his paper entitled, American Friends of the Middle East: The CIA, US Citizens, and the Secret Battle for Public Opinion in the Arab-Israeli Conflict, 1947-1967. Wilford also points out that Kermit Roosevelt associated with many anti-Zionists of the period. For example, he was actually under the command of an anti-Zionist descendent of missionaries named Stephen B. L. Penrose Jr. Roosevelt had also shared a room with George L. Levison, a State Department officer of Jewish descent who later introduced Roosevelt to such leaders as the aforementioned Elmer Berger. Roosevelt, Levison and Berger all became close friends, with Levison eventually being godparent to one of Roosevelt’s children.

Roosevelt was not only vital in setting up the original iteration of the AFME, the Committee for Justice and Peace in the Holy Land, he also ran the organization out of his Washington home alongside the organization’s secretary, Garland Evans Hopkins. Eventually the anti-Zionist activists within the government failed in their efforts to prevent the creation of the state of Israel when President Harry Truman officially recognized Israel’s sovereignty. Roosevelt continued to undermine future support for Israel and, a year after Truman’s recognition of the country, Roosevelt and others formed the Holy Land Emergency Liaison Program (HELP), which was to coordinate aid for displaced Arabs in the region while also working to, as Hugh Wilford puts it: “Reduce US support for Israel.” It is also around this time where Dorothy Thompson and others began to raise the profile of Roosevelt’s organization.

The Battle for the Hearts, Minds and Souls of the Future Global Leaders

The Harvard Summer School had been running for over 75 years by the time Henry Kissinger was finishing his studies at the university. In 1950, Kissinger achieved his Bachelor of Arts degree in political science and, during his studies, he received much attention from some very powerful Harvard grandees. In 1951, Kissinger launched the Harvard magazine entitled “Confluence,” which was to run alongside the International Seminar, and became the publication’s editor. This quarterly magazine was funded by the Rockefeller Foundation and received contributions from others who were described as “various luminaries who had previously been lecturers or students at the Summer School.”

The International Seminar was later boosted by extra funding totalling at least $135,000—$1,637,342.74 in 2022—by the Central Intelligence Agency between 1960 and 1966 alone, with any previous CIA funding since the seminar’s creation in 1950 being left undeclared. Harvard Summer School’s International Seminar Forum had originally been the brainchild of William Yandell Elliott, an important mentor of Kissinger who took a back seat and remained out of the public eye. After the pilot event for the International Seminar Forum in 1951, the young Kissinger wrote to William Yandell Elliott, saying: “I was very much embarrassed to hear myself described as the guiding genius of the Seminar,” going on to say: “I, for one, have no illusions on this score.” Subsequently, the majority of participants would recall the influence of Kissinger rather than Elliott, with the forum eventually being commonly referred to as “Kissinger’s International Seminar.”

The CIA money for what was described as the “foreign seminar” came via a known CIA conduit, the aforementioned Kermit Roosevelt’s American Friends of the Middle East. Kissinger and his biographers would claim that he was unaware of the organization’s intelligence ties, describing Kissinger as “flying into a rage” upon learning that the AFME was actually a front for the CIA. However, Kissinger’s letters to H. Gates Lloyd during this period told a different story. They show that Kissinger had carefully itemized the expenses of the Summer School. Other documents within William Yandell Elliott’s papers also revealed that Kissinger may have even acted as a contract consultant for the Office for Policy Coordination (OPC) which was the covert operation wing of the Central Intelligence Agency. In fact, Elliott had written a letter to Lloyd on 15 November 1950, which urged progress with the Summer School proposal and the creation of Kissinger’s International Seminar. With that letter came certain papers directed to Kissinger himself which showed he had discussed the proposals with Cleveland Cram, an infamous and powerful early member of the Central Intelligence Agency. Cram had originally sought a career in academia but was recruited by the CIA in 1949. He was soon liaising with Yandell Elliott and Kissinger concerning the Harvard Summer School project and, after it was up-and-running, Cram was sent to London to become the Deputy Station Chief and the official liaison between the CIA, MI5 and MI6. In this CIA/Harvard nexus of the late 1940s and early 1950s, came the formation of what would, a generation later, evolve into the World Economic Forum’s Young Global Leader initiative.

One of the original reasons for the creation of the CIA had been to counter Soviet influence in foreign countries and they used multi-pronged attack strategies to achieve their aims. While Allen Dulles, Kermit Roosevelt Jr., and their secret army, were organizing and enacting coup d’etats in country after country, other CIA-linked organizers and contributors were beginning to create the infrastructure that would allow them to recruit, train and install young European leaders into positions of power, leaders who they believed were unlikely to be susceptible to potential Soviet influence. Harvard was not alone in its funding of such projects. In fact, as Hugh Wilford noted in his fascinating and informative book The Mighty Wurlitzer, Yale was: “The single most fertile recruiting ground for the Agency in its first years, yielding among others Cord Meyer and two of the brightest stars of the ‘Golden Age’ of covert operations, Richard Bissell and Tracy Barnes.” Also noted by Wilford are Yale’s James J. Angleton and Norman Holmes Pearson. The latter, Wilford notes, had graduated from Yale before serving in the OSS and returned to the university after the war in order to set up his “American Studies” program. The CIA were essentially trying to win the hearts and minds of young foreigners in direct competition with the Soviet Union.

The communists had already been busy targetting the impressionable youth for over 25 years before the end of WWII with Wilhelm “Willi” Münzenberg, a German-born communist activist, being the first leader of the Young Communist International (Comintern) as early as 1919. In 1945, a conference took place in London which saw the launch of the anti-imperialist World Federation of Democratic Youth (WFDY). The following year saw the founding of other groups with some members sympathetic to communist ideals such as the World Federation of Trade Unions (WFTU) and the International Union of Students (IUS). The latter had been created in Prague and saw a 25 member intelligence-linked US delegation attend.

As these entities were created, they each became virtual battlegrounds for East vs West ideology and the clash of Rhodesian Imperialist Capitalism and Soviet Communism. In fact, the World Federation of Democratic Youth saw Cold War rifts in their organizations soon fester and, by 1949, the non-communists had publicly withdrawn from the group, going on to create the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions instead. These sorts of organizations were valuable instruments for spreading communist propaganda and had been defined by Lenin as “levers” or “transmission belts” because of the way they can connect the Communist Party with the masses and were often referred to as “democratic” or “mass” organizations in Communist Jargon, as a pamphlet entitled, Facts About International Communist Front Organisations described in April 1957. In that particular pamphlet a quote from Lenin, which also appeared in Lawrence and Wishart’s 1947 book, The Essentials of Lenin, volume II, states: “Every sacrifice must be made, the greatest obstacles must be overcome, in order to carry on agitation and propaganda systematically, perseveringly and patiently, precisely in those institutions, societies and associations—even the most reactionary—to which proletarian or semi-proletarian masses belong.” In essence, the CIA’s creation and funding of youth organizations and their wider infiltration of American universities was a strategy that essentially came straight out of Lenin’s own play book.

Before the CIA’s involvement, the British had been the ones taking the initiative by targetting the youth of Europe with the aim of countering Communist Party infiltration. The Cultural Relations Department was tasked with developing strategies relevant to Western-aligned youth groups, organizations and conferences. The first of such groups was the World Assembly of Youth (WAY) which had been given a draft charter in England in February 1949. All youth related member organizations of the United Nations were invited to attend an international conference held at Westminster Hall in August the same year. Here, they officially established WAY and elected their first president, Mr. Maurice Sauvé of Canada. It was around this time that the Americans first began organising their own efforts to “educate the youth,” which eventually led to such initiatives as Henry Kissinger’s International Seminar. At Harvard, the International Affairs Committee (HIACOM) began gathering a group of young veterans who had worked within intelligence during World War II, in an effort to rival the much more advanced communist propaganda efforts.

In December 1946, HIACOM officers were involved in organising a meeting in Chicago which discussed the idea of creating a national body to represent American students, as well as wider American interests, at international events. As a result, by the summer of 1947, the United States National Student Association was born. For the two years prior to the launch of Kissinger’s International Seminar, Harvard students had conducted surveys of international student opinion in order to identify potential anti-communist allies overseas while also poaching potential members from rival organizations such as the International Union of Students.

The National Student Association had their second survey funded by two very interesting private donors via the Office for Policy Coordination. The Chicago lawyer and President of the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations, Laird Bell, and a Wilmington industrialist named Thomas Brittingham, each provided the princely sum of $6000 to the organization specifically to carry out the survey. Laird Bell was an extremely influential and well-connected lawyer who had found himself frequently visiting Nazi Germany just before World War II in order to represent the interests of US bondholders who had lost more than $1 billion to the German Reichsbank. Bell would not be alone while working in pre-war Nazi Germany, as his co-counsel for these cases was John Foster Dulles, who was representing the law firm Sullivan & Cromwell. By 1945, Bell was officially serving in post-war occupied Germany, and Eisenhower soon appointed him as a delegate to the United Nations. In 1948, Laird Bell became an “Overseer” of Harvard College, where he stayed until 1954, throughout the creation of the International Seminar.

Thomas Brittingham was extremely important in the development of America’s effort to win over sceptical foreign youth, especially in Northern Europe. Setting up “The Brittingham Scholarships” just after the war, he targeted the youth in Scandinavian countries. Also referred to as the “Viking students,” he would attract young men to his collection of scholarship programs which would eventually become named the “Brittingham Viking Scholarships” and which were run out of the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Many of “Tom’s Vikings”—as they were also called—would become successful in organizations that the program’s current website describes as: “their various industries, academic fields, and politics.”

Although there were many different youth groups throughout the various educational establishments across the United States, Kissinger’s International Seminar at Harvard’s Summer School was a very unique project. It was a focused event with a limited number of participants who were carefully chosen by a select few. The Harvard Crimson reported on 1 February 1956 that: “A group of approximately 50 men and a few women from the Orient, Middle East, and Europe, including members of various parliaments, editors, artists, writers, and other cultural leaders will once more come together to form the International Seminar, a regular feature of the Summer School.” This was a special elite group, selected, groomed and trained for powerful positions, with their allegiances forever tied to the interests of the United States government, and those interests would soon begin to fluctuate wildly over the following decades.

The Kissinger Continuum

By 1992, the Berlin Wall had fallen and the education of Schwab’s specially selected globalist politicians of the future was just about to begin. During this time of great political change, Schwab’s World Economic Forum had become a powerful globalist entity and Schwab was ready to begin following the model first established by Kissinger’s CIA-funded International Seminar. As Herman Kahn and his Hudson Institute colleagues had mapped out in a 1967 document entitled, _Ancillary Pilot Study for the Educational Policy Research Center Program. Final Report,_ training a comprehensive future leadership group outside of the normal educational frameworks was of the highest priority. As previously reported, Kahn was yet another mentor to Klaus Schwab.

The first iteration of the WEF’s Young Global Leader program, called “Global Leaders for Tomorrow,” was launched in 1992 and was described as “a new community” which saw its first gathering of future leadership candidates take place in 1993. Some of the people who attended this first event were soon placed into top positions of power in their respective countries. For example, Tony Blair was a participant in the first event and, only 4 years later, he began his decade long rule of the UK. Gordon Brown also attended in 1993 and then served alongside Tony Blair, eventually becoming Prime Minister directly afterwards. This initial group was full to the brim with other future leaders with many members who were destined to soon become heads of states in their respective countries. Well-known leaders who attended include Angela Merkel [Germany], Victor Orban [Hungary], Nicholas Sarkozy [France], Guy Verhofstadt [Belgium], Lee Hsien Loong [Singapore], Cyril Ramaphosa [South Africa] and José Maria Aznar [Spain]. Alongside the politicians in this first group, there were also notable business leaders in attendance, such as Bill Gates, Richard Branson, Larry Summers and Edgar Bronfman. In total, the first year of the Global Leaders for Tomorrow program was comprised of 200 potential candidates who were all under 43 years-old at the time. For over a decade, the Global Leaders for Tomorrow program trained various leaders who often found themselves subsequently installed into various positions of power, including many elected officials. In 2004, the Global Leaders for Tomorrow program was rebranded as the Forum of Young Global Leaders and was re-launched after Schwab found funding from an old friend.

The Harvard Kennedy Magazine of Summer 2009 starts their lead article by stating: “Through Alumni and Teaching Harvard Kennedy School plays a central role in the Forum of Young Global Leaders Program,” with the author, Steve Nadis writing: “In 2004, Klaus Schwab MC/MPA 1967, a Harvard Kennedy School graduate who founded the World Economic Forum (WEF), won a $1 million prize from the Dan David Foundation and tried to think of the best use to which he could put that money. Schwab decided to start a WEF-affiliated program called the Forum of Young Global Leaders (YGL), which, as the name implies, would bring together a new generation of leaders from across the globe and turn them loose on the biggest problems of the day.” Astoundingly, the Tel Aviv-based Dan David Foundation that awarded Schwab the $1 million which was directly used to create the Young Global Leaders program had one extremely significant member of note on their board, Henry A. Kissinger.

Harvard’s International Seminar and the World Economic Forum’s Young Global Leaders initiative were created to be extremely powerful vehicles for training and installing world leaders who would be sympathetic to a Kissinger-style globalist government. They were also both made possible by organizing assistance and funding from Kissinger himself. It isn’t a surprise that Schwab’s links with Kissinger prevailed throughout both their lifetimes, Schwab was a student of Henry Kissinger and the two men also appeared to share many similar views.

Yet, what is really notable about Harvard’s Summer School, and Kissinger’s International Seminar in particular, is that the programs, conferences and the basic elements involved were very similar to what the World Economic Forum still presents to their members annually to this day. They are extremely similar projects aimed at achieving similar agendas. When the World Economic Forum began their Global Leaders for Tomorrow initiative in the early 1990s, Klaus Schwab’s organization implemented a program of recruitment and training for global leaders which was almost indistinguishable from Kissinger’s CIA-funded International Seminar. Schwab was treading in the footsteps of his mentor, Henry Kissinger, and it was the Dan David Foundation, while Kissinger was seated on their board, which eventually awarded Schwab with the initial funding required to create the current iteration of the program, the Forum for Young Global Leaders.

Klaus Schwab and others board a flight to Ukraine for the 1993 World Economic Forum annual meeting, Source: WEF

The World Economic Forum has spawned many globalist-aligned heads of states, cabinet ministers, business leaders, entrepreneurs and other powerful actors, through their Global Leaders for Tomorrow and Young Global Leaders initiatives. Schwab has even spoken openly on how his organization has gone on to “penetrate the cabinets” of supposedly sovereign states, and we should not be naive, as he has been planning on doing exactly this for at least three decades. However, it isn’t the thousands of participants who have completed these programs who we should be most concerned about. Our real concern should be with the billions of democratic voters who have been tricked into believing that any of the leaders produced by either Schwab or Kissinger have their best interests at heart.

Klaus Schwab became the heir to Henry Kissinger’s most important project, the infiltration of individuals and organizations in countries around the world with the aim of creating globalist-aligned governments built within the framework of an outdated and soulless conceptualization of American imperialism. Klaus Schwab’s activities since his time at Harvard can be seen as simply a direct continuation of Kissinger’s work during the 1950s and 1960s, and it would be naive of us to believe that there is not someone else, already groomed and trained, who is ready and willing to pick up Kissinger’s political baton from Schwab and continue in their joint mission towards globalist governance.