In recent weeks, this belligerence has taken the form of a new forward posture of 150 advanced U.S. fighter jets to be housed at the Eielson Airforce Base in Alaska including a mix of F22 Raptors and F35 Lighting II jets only 600 miles away from the Russia border. Each fighter plane carries the ability to launch strikes onto Russia after a brief flight across the 100 mile Bering Strait gap. Considering the entire American air force only has 187 F22s and 250 F35s, the proportions of this absurd build up can best be appreciated.

In the most recent DOD Arctic Strategy Report which has shaped this suicidal battle plan, Russia and China are defined as nothing but existential threats to the world order which must he stopped at all costs with the report’s authors stating: “In different ways, Russia and China are challenging the rules-based order in the Arctic. U.S. interests include limiting the ability of China and Russia to leverage the region as a corridor for competition that advances their strategic objectives through malign or coercive behavior.”

Describing this aggressive display that folds into the renewed threats of attack faced by dangerous NATO maneuvers across Europe in recent months, Russian Major General Vladimir Popov told Sputnik News:

“Alaska is remote from the U.S. mainland, but is an outpost in relation to Russia—we are separated only by a strait, and the border is literally within the line of sight. This is a strategic region for the U.S. Adding 150 more fighters would at least double the combat potential of the existing forces there.”

Continuity of Government and NORAD

What makes this dire situation ever more precarious is the fact that President Trump has found himself stuck in a COVID-19 quarantine.

What should be a mere hiccup in governmental procedures is quickly being turned into something much greater as renewed calls for enacting Continuity of Government procedures secretively written into law this past March 2020 arising by various leading figures of the deep state such as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. When MSNBC asked Pelosi (now second in line to take the mantle of presidency) if anyone reached out to her from the White House regarding Continuity of Government, Pelosi said: “No, they haven’t. But that is an ongoing, not with the White House but with the military, quite frankly, in terms of the — some officials in the government.”

That these calls are occurring amidst a heightened clamor for military coup to unseat the President, the general threat of civil war and the looming danger of economic meltdown, statements like those uttered by Pelosi to CNN and MSNBC this week should not be taken lightly.

In the updated March 2020 Continuity of Government protocols, General Terrance O’Shaunessy (head of both NORAD and NORTHCOM) would take the “temporary” reins of the presidency under crisis conditions of ungovernability which are not too difficult to imagine amidst the storms currently sweeping America. Military staff who would take up a parallel chain of command continue to be stationed 650 meters below Cheyenne Mountain in Colorado where they have been deployed since March 2020 following Mark Espers’ orders to NORTHCOM to “prepare to deploy”.

O’Shawnessy has repeatedly echoed the views of the Washington/NATO establishment that the greatest threats to the world stem from Russia and China directly referencing their supposedly nefarious intentions in the Arctic.

The Polar Silk Road: A Healthier Paradigm for the Arctic

Rather than bring the forces of war to the Arctic, Russia and China have together been demonstrating a far more efficient and moral approach which certain patriotic forces within North America tend to be in alignment with, including the current President.

Since January 2018, the Arctic has increasingly become dominated by the positive extension of the New Silk Road northward in the form of the maritime and land based “Polar Silk Road” which has united brilliantly with President Putin’s Far East development program. This program aims to increase arctic shipping five fold by 2024 and begin a bold program of infrastructure, rail, road, pipeline, mining and port building in order to begin accessing the vital raw materials desperately needed for the coming centuries of multipolar development.

On September 26, President Trump working alongside political allies in Alaska, Alberta and the private sector alike streamlined a project which taps into this spirit of genuine economic cooperation and long term thinking unseen in decades in the form of the Alaska-Canada Rail connection. Looking at the business models guiding this emerging project, it is important to note that the destructive thinking of globalization and zero sum logic are not to be found at all as the entire program is vectored on tying North America economic interests into China’s Belt and Road and growing Asian markets.

The Wallace Doctrine for the Arctic Must Be Revived

As I wrote in my recent report Trump’s A Revival of the Wallace Doctrine for the Post-War World, the last serious pro-development strategy to arise from a leading American politician took the form of President Franklin Roosevelt’s ardent anti-imperial Vice President Henry Wallace, who spent years with his Russian counterparts during WWII arranging the conditions of mutual development of both nations  during the post-War age with a strong focus on the long awaited Bering Strait Rail connection and obvious Alaska-Canada transport corridors. In his Two Peoples One Friendship, Wallace described his discussions with Foreign Minister Molotov in 1942 saying:

“Of all nations, Russia has the most powerful combination of a rapidly increasing population, great natural resources and immediate expansion in technological skills. Siberia and China will furnish the greatest frontier of tomorrow… When Molotov [Russia’s Foreign Minister] was in Washington in the spring of 1942 I spoke to him about the combined highway and airway which I hope someday will link Chicago and Moscow via Canada, Alaska and Siberia. Molotov, after observing that no one nation could do this job by itself, said that he and I would live to see the day of its accomplishment. It would mean much to the peace of the future if there could be some tangible link of this sort between the pioneer spirit of our own West and the frontier spirit of the Russian East.”

The Molotov/Wallace vision wasn’t something entirely new.

Earlier programs for building the Bering Strait rail connection were advanced by Russian Prime Minister Sergei Witte and Czar Nicholas II who in 1906 sponsored teams of American engineers to conduct feasibility studies of the project, then estimated to costs $200 million.

On the American side of the project, Lincoln’s trusted bodyguard William Gilpin (a man who was known as a leading spirit of America’s own Trans Continental Railway) and later Governor of Colorado promoted the work throughout his life saying of the Alaska Canada rail connection:

“It is sufficiently apparent that the building of a railroad by way of Alaska, Bering Strait and northeastern Siberia, connecting with the Canadian Pacific in British Columbia and in Siberia with the Russian line now being pushed forward to Vladivostok, is by no means an unpracticable undertaking”.

Gilpin’s global program was outlined thoroughly in his 1890 book the Cosmopolitan Railway.

Exhibiting the stark raving fear of the renewal of this latent spirit of U.S.-Russian friendship in the build up to the November elections, Thomas Wright (senior Fellow at the Brookings Institute) wrote a panicky op ed in the Atlantic on September 30 called “What a Second Trump Term Would Mean for the World”. In this article, Wright echoes the broader fears of the deep state of a revival of the Henry Wallace doctrine which the author laments would have been just terrible had it not fortunately been sabotaged by the “great” figure of Harry Truman in January 1945. Wright says:

“Looking back on U.S. diplomatic history, one of the great counterfactuals is what would have happened if Franklin D. Roosevelt had not replaced his vice president Henry Wallace with Harry Truman in 1944. Wallace was sympathetic to the Soviet Union and became an ardent opponent of the Cold War. If he had become president when FDR died, in April 1945, the next half century could have gone very differently—likely no NATO, no Marshall Plan, no alliance with Japan, no overseas troop presence, and no European Union… The U.S. is now teetering on another historically important moment. With Trump, we would not only be deprived of our Truman. We would be saddled with our Wallace—a leader whose instincts and actions are diametrically opposed to what the moment requires. With few remaining constraints and a vulnerable world, a re-elected Trump could set the trajectory of world affairs for decades to come.”

It should be clear to all that the renewal of the Wallace-Gilpin spirit of development into North America’s Arctic is not only good business but also serves as a vital precondition to re-establishing a world order founded upon trust, win-win cooperation, and non-zero sum thinking. While it is fairly clear that Trump’s political instincts are vectored in this direction (giving rise to such frightful diatribes by emissaries of the Cold War at Brookings and the CFR), it still remains to be seen if sufficient political influence can be exerted to rein in the swamp before a hot war and military coup are unleashed.

The author can be reached at matt.ehret@tutamail.com

In his tweet Trump stated:

For those who are not aware, anyone wishing to take rail from the USA north, will only make it as far as British Columbia as a 1000 km gap separates any rail from Alaska. When looking at the post-WWII battles for continental development, it is somewhat incredible that this gap has remained in place for decades with the northernmost rail line extending as far as Dease Lake BC, built over 50 years ago by the great pro-development Premier W.A.C. Bennett. For decades the Dease Lake line was called “the railway to nowhere” and featured a price tag of only one dollar which in fact is today only a relic of a sabotaged northern vision which was always designed to connect Canada and the USA while opening up the north for development. That full story was told in Forgotten Battles Against the Deep State: W.A.C. Bennett vs the Malthusians.

When compared to the robust development of Russia’s Arctic and the new emerging Polar Silk Road paradigm which have united China and Russia ever closer into a long term Arctic growth program, the North American Arctic remains an underdeveloped barren tundra. Despite the bountiful resources in the Arctic, no roads, rail or other development have been permitted to extend northward for decades. Up until Trump’s announcement of Federal support for this new project, the only North American Arctic discussions of note in recent decades have centered on anti-Russian militarization and Anti-ballistic missiles.

Instead of that hoped-for era of prosperity and win-win development envisioned by Bennett, Kennedy or Diefenbaker, what arose in the wake of the 1971 floating of the U.S. dollar, was a 45 year slide into consumerism, speculation, and zero-technological growth at home and abroad which saw all of the frontier projects led by great statesmen during the post-WW2 decades increasingly grind to a halt.

While the Albertan and Alaskan governments have made several small efforts to encourage the plan over the years- very little headway occurred due to the monetarist-rules underpinning Globalization which place supposedly “free markets” on the throne, and nation states in the dungeon of economics. Ignoring the fact that top down national planning has driven all of the greatest bursts of prosperity in history including the periods of rail expansion in the 19th century and post-war period, Globalization’s architects have ensured that nations are to play no role whatsover, while “live in the moment” hedonism runs amok.

In the year 2000 the Alaskan government spent $6 million on a feasibility study followed in 2015 by a similar study funded by the Province of Alberta, desperately sitting upon the edge of total economic despair under the weight of decarbonization initiatives being pushed into law by Ottawa technocrats. It was here in 2015 that A2A was created as a private initiative to advance the plan which the federal government had committed to blocking for far too long. Standing for the Alaska-Alberta Railway Development Corporation, A2A’s CEO Sean McCoshen has stated:

“This is a world-class infrastructure project that will generate more than 18,000 jobs for Canadian workers at a time when they are most needed, provide a new, more efficient route for trans-Pacific shipping and thereby link Alberta to world markets.”

This last concept of linking North America into the Pacific now being increasingly shaped by the Belt and Road Initiative and Multipolar Alliance is vital. Any chance the west has to avoid a total meltdown under an emerging total economic blowout of the system and civil war is premised upon tying our economic destiny to the pro-growth win-win model of the east. The opportunities for war-avoidance both in the Arctic and in the Pacific should be obvious to all.

Although Trump’s announcement is a great first step towards the realization of the long-overdue project, there remains many obstacles that could yet derail it.

For one thing, the project must be vetted by Environmental Impact Assessments in both the USA and Canada. These organizations have developed a well-earned reputations as destroyers of all large scale infrastructure projects since the post-industrial paradigm shift occurred 4 decades ago. These nominally “environmental” organizations have operated since the early 1970s under the philosophical view that “natural ecosystems are fixed and static” while human activity is constantly changing. To the degree that human economic activity impacts the supposedly “natural static equilibriums of nature”, then that activity is “bad” and must be halted. “Good” infrastructure which is permitted to get approval by the Environmental Impact studies involve only such things as our found in things like the “Green New Deal” (ie: windmills, solar panels, and food-burning biofuel programs), or the Asian Green New Deal known as OSOWOG. The sorts of real infrastructure the west used to build during its pro-industrial growth paradigm or which China currently builds under the Belt and Road Initiative are verboten under this logic.

It must also be recalled that Canada’s federal government now dominated by Green New Dealers such as Mark Carney and Chrystia Freeland must still approve the project to the degree that it moves through the Northwest and Yukon territories (Provinces are endowed with vast sovereign powers to determine their own use of resources in the Canadian Constitution which does give Alberta the flexibility to evade SOME aspects of federal sabotage which one might expect to see unfold under a renewed pro-growth paradigm.

The author can be reached at matt.ehret@tutamail.com

Even though President Lincoln and Czar Alexander II were both known as great reformers and emancipators for their common commitment to free slaves and serfs, both leaders were assassinated before their grand visions could come to fruition.

In this article, I would like to present another chapter of this forgotten history: The creation of modern Canada in as a confederation designed explicitly to prevent the inevitable construction of a Russian-American rail connection through the Bering Strait in the wake of the Civil War.

The Strategic Value of the Bering Strait Tunnel in History

For those who are not aware, the Bering Strait Rail tunnel project is a 150 year idea which was formulated by allies of Lincoln and Alexander II after America’s Civil War. The original grand design was driven by a plan to connect telegraph lines between continents, followed soon thereafter by a connection of the Trans-Siberian Railway and America’s Trans Continental Railways through British Columbia, Alaska and into Eurasia, as laid out spectacularly by former Colorado Governor William Gilpin in his 1890 book the Cosmopolitan Railway.

Echoing today’s Belt and Road Initiative which is quickly growing to become a world land bridge, Gilpin described what this new paradigm of human civilization was destined to look like:

“The weapons of mutual slaughter are hurled away; the sanguinary passions find a check, a majority of the human family is found to accept the essential teachings of Christianity IN PRACTICE… Room is discovered for industrial virtue and industrial power. The civilized masses of the world meet; they are mutually enlightened, and fraternize to reconstitute human relations in harmony with nature and with God. The world ceases to be a military camp, incubated only by the military principles of arbitrary force and abject submission. A new and grand order in human affairs inaugurates itself out of these immense concurrent discoveries and events” [Cosmopolitan Railway p. 213]

The idea of the Bering Strait tunnel was supported by Czar Nicholas II who, in 1906 hired a team of American engineers to conduct feasibility studies on the initiative which then had an estimated cost of $350 million.

Sadly a couple of World Wars and disastrous revolution kept this project from blossoming as it was intended.

This idea was revived again by FDR’s great Vice President Henry Wallace who discussed the project at length with Russia’s Foreign Minister Molotov in 1942. In this meeting Wallace declared that “It would mean much to the peace of the future if there could be some tangible link of this sort between the pioneer spirit of our own West and the frontier spirit of the Russian East.”

Again, the Cold War derailed this project and it was only in 2007 that the Russian Government revived it once again with Putin even offering to pay 2/3rd of the $65 billion estimated cost to construct the 100 km tunnel across the Bering Strait. This project was offered to the west more loudly in 2011 and in May 2014, China unofficially gave their backing to the initiative. Sadly, unipolar technocrats and neocons controlling NATO foreign policy had not the eyes to see what benefits such projects offered those who joined in its construction, and instead continued onto their zero-sum game plan for full spectrum dominance.

With the 2018 unveiling of the Polar Silk Road extending the east-west development corridors into the Arctic, which have merged increasingly with Russia’s Eurasian Economic Union and Putin’s Northern Vision, the Bering Strait connection has again been given new life. If nations of the west find the courage to let go of the Titanic before the hellish chaos of the oncoming financial meltdown erupts, then the projects animating the new multi polar paradigm will undoubtedly look a lot like the World Land bridge concept illustrated by the Schiller Institute below.

Arctic development remains one of the best strategic points of alliance and cooperation needed to re-organize the collapsing world economic order around firm principles of multipolar cooperation and value and as such is not too different from the dynamic shaping the world when Lincoln took office in 1860.

The 19th century Clash of Two Systems

Lincoln’s economic advisor and leader of the international export of the American System of Political economy, Henry C. Carey, described this clash between two systems in his 1851 Harmony of Interests:

“Two systems are before the world; the one looks to increasing the proportion of persons and of capital engaged in trade and transportation, and therefore to diminishing the proportion engaged in producing commodities with which to trade, with necessarily diminished return to the labor of all; while the other looks to increasing the proportion engaged in the work of production, and diminishing that engaged in trade and transportation, with increased return to all, giving to the laborer good wages, and to the owner of capital good profits… One looks to pauperism, ignorance, depopulation, and barbarism; the other in increasing wealth, comfort, intelligence, combination of action, and civilization. One looks towards universal war; the other towards universal peace. One is the English system; the other we may be proud to call the American system, for it is the only one ever devised the tendency of which was that of elevating while equalizing the condition of man throughout the world.”

Carey, just like the British Empire’s Lord Palmerston, clearly recognized that America had not completed “the mission of 1776” since not one but TWO Americas existed within Washington: One positive America representing the anti-slavery/anti-colonial principles of the 1789 constitution vs. another hypocritical slave power that never believed that “all men were created equal”. Just as two antithetical impulses existed within America, so too did two opposing views of “Manifest Destiny” co-evolve since 1776: One hellish version driven by the ‘principle’ of spreading slavery and suppressing the weak while the other more noble impulse was represented by the spirits of Lincoln, Carey and Gilpin illustrated above.

This fatal contradiction within the republic was exploited fervently by Anglo-American intelligence for 80 years before the inevitable civil war finally broke out in 1861.

President Lincoln defined the terms of this contradiction and immanent war in an 1858 debate with the Slave Power’s champion Stephen Douglas saying:

“That is the issue that will continue in this country when these poor tongues of Judge Douglas and myself shall be silent. It is the eternal struggle between these two principles – right and wrong – throughout the world. They are the two principles that have stood face to face from the beginning of time, and will ever continue to struggle. The one is the common right of humanity and the other the divine right of kings.”

This quote is important as it addresses the fact that Lincoln recognized correctly the inextricable connection between the institution of slavery (even when it masqueraded under a republican veneer) and monarchical principles of colonialism which saw mankind’s right to rule defined not by morality, or merit but rather by “principles” of hereditary right.

The Stage is Set for a Forgotten Battle

By now most informed people are aware of Russia’s 1863 intervention into the Civil War as a turning point that blocked British and French imperialist forces from entering the war militarily on the side of the Southern rebels. What is not so well established is how Russian and American grand strategy to connect the continents by rail did not occur as it was intended after the sale of Alaska.

There are several convergent factors at play during the 1865-1867 period which presented a major challenge to the weakening British Empire strategists:

The need to confederate British territories in North America as possession of the Empire instead of allowing them to either become independent nations or annexing to Lincoln’s republic.

If this first task could be done by ousting pro-Lincoln forces in Canadian political power and killing Lincoln, then the next task involved transferring the vast private territories owned by the Hudson Bay Company separating eastern colonies from the lone western outpost of British Columbia on the Pacific. The majority of Canada during this pre-1867 period was private Hudson Bay land as it had been since it was chartered in 1670 by Prince Rupert.

If this transfer of Hudson Bay possessions into federal hands could be affected, then it would still be necessary to somehow persuade the fiercely independent British Columbian subjects to join Confederation. This was not a simple task as the vast majority were in favor of annexing to the USA due to the economic despair of their colony caused by the collapse of the Gold rush bubbles in 1858 and total isolation from the other British American colonies.

The Anti-Union Confederacy That Succeeded

On July 1, 1867, the British North America Act was enacted consolidating Britain’s “other” anti-American confederacy operation under a new constitution dedicating the new federation’s existence to be conducive “to the Welfare of the Provinces and promote the interests of the British Empire”.

It should be kept in mind that the project to confederate actually began during the Civil War in the form of a week-long booze-soaked orgy of the Charlottetown convention of 1864 which hammered out the resolutions later put into law in 1867.

Some have wondered why just days before the July 1, 1867 enactment, would-be confederate President Jefferson Davis gave a speech to cheering crowds in Lennoxville Quebec stating: “I hope that you will hold fast to [your] British principles and that you may ever strive to cultivate close and affectionate connections with the mother country”.

This pro-British gushing from a confederate traitor in Quebec shouldn’t be surprising at all if we take into account the fact that Montreal and Toronto served as Southern confederacy bases of operations used with the full support of the British Empire to run terrorist operations, raids, espionage and financing of the war against Lincoln’s forces from the North (while Canada “officially” maintained an air of neutrality). Even Lincoln’s assassin, John Wilkes Boothe was discovered to have been deployed from Montreal to kill Lincoln, with union officers discovering a $500 cheque amidst his possessions signed directly by none other than Ontario Bank President Henry Starnes (who would later become Mayor of Montreal).

As Barry Sheehy pointed out in Montreal: City of Secrets, during the Civil War, “the largest Confederate Secret Service base outside Richmond was located in Montreal” under the direct control of confederate Secretary of State Judah Benjamin- himself an asset of British Intelligence.

Much like the exiled Russian and Hong Kong oligarchs and traitors of the modern day, Jefferson Davis, Judah Benjamin and many other confederate rebels lived out their days in comfort in both Canada and Britain (Benjamin becoming an English Barrister in London from 1865 until his death in 1884).

The Sale of Alaska and the Rush for British Columbia

On March 30, 1867, the British Empire was caught off guard with the news that Russia’s Alaskan possessions had been sold to America for $7.2 million in a secretive diplomatic maneuver which Secretary of State William Seward described as the most important deal of his life.

The sale had suddenly made the isolated colony of British Columbia very hot real estate. During this 1867 purchase, Lincoln’s Trans Continental Railway, begun in 1863 at the height of the Civil War was a mere two years from completion, linking the Pacific to Atlantic for the first time in history and thus destroying the British monopoly over maritime shipping routes.

With students of Lincoln’s program to be found among the intelligentsia of Russia, led by Count Sergei Witte and Dimitri Mendeleyev, the American modeled (and largely American-built) Trans-Siberian Railway’s construction was not far away, and the linking of rail across the two continents was discussed as a real possibility by republican visionaries the world over.

The chances that British Columbia would join confederation were minute at this time as the broken colony had no ties of commerce to Britain or the east coast confederacy 3500 km away. In fact, on July 2, 1867 the first of several petitions was sent to Queen Victoria requesting that either the colony’s debt burdens and economic woes be alleviated by the Mother country or that the queen grant them permission to annex to the USA!

At this time, American consul to Victoria Allen Francis, wrote a letter to the president stating:

“Even the colonists claiming most loyalty to the queen, are now urging with great unanimity annexation to the United States as their only salvation- as the only means of retrieving the colonies from their present embarrassment and decline.”

BC’s Colonialist Newspaper described the situation in the following terms:

“Since no change would be for the worse, they (British Columbians) would welcome annexation to the United States to continuing in a state of poverty and wretchedness. In writing this we know we speak the mind of 9 out of every 10 men in the colony… the sentiment is heard at every gathering street corner- at social gatherings, in business circles- in all places”

On July 18, 1868 the Hudson Bay territories (aka: Rupert’s Land) were sold to Ottawa under an operation led by Sir Georges Etienne Cartier who stated “in this country we must have a distinct form of government in which the monarchical spirit will be found.”

Cartier’s monarchical spirit was reflected in Canada’s leading fathers of confederation such as Sir John A. Macdonald who famously stated “a Britisher I was born and a Britisher I will die” and who looked to the vast wilderness west of Toronto saying in 1867: “I would be quite willing, personally to leave the whole country a wilderness for the next half century, but I fear if Englishmen do not go there the Yankees will.”

On May 22, 1867, Father of Confederation Sir Alexander Galt stated British policy for western expansion (to block the connection between Russia and the USA) saying: “If the United States desire to outflank us on the west, we must accept the situation and lay our hand on British Columbia and the Pacific Ocean. This country cannot be surrounded by the Unites States- We are gone if we allow it… ‘From the Atlantic to the Pacific’ must be the cry in British America as much as it has ever been in the United States”

The last serious effort by British Columbians to join America was made with the Annexation petition of 1869 listing BC’s desperate grievances with the empire and appealing to President Grant:

“The only remedy for the evils which beset us, we believe to be in a close union with the adjoining States and Territories, we are already bound to them by a unity of object and interest; nearly all our commercial relations are with them; They furnish the Chief Markets we have for the products of our mines, lands and waters; They supply the Colony with most of the necessities of life; They furnish us the only means of communication with the outer world… For these reasons we earnestly desire the ACQUISITION of this Colony by the United States.”

The Alabama Claims

The last great hope for extending Lincoln’s rail through BC into Alaska at this time arose amidst the 1869-1871 Alabama Claims affair which saw the world’s first international trial in Geneva address the matter of Britain’s military support for the confederacy during the Civil War (reflecting the irony of America’s recent covert support for Syrian rebels). Britain’s air of neutrality was betrayed by her construction of Confederate war ships that unleashed havoc on Lincoln’s Navy. The court ruled in favor of America and soon Britain came close to loosing it’s Canadian possessions as payment for their sin (Senator Charles Sumner and Secretary Seward both advocated this course), although weaker figures in America ended up agreeing to a measly $15 million settlement in 1872 while all wrongs were forgotten.

With these failures to capture the pregnant moment, the effort to assimilate BC into London’s northern confederacy was accelerated.

Ottawa negotiations began on June 7, 1870 and within weeks nearly all resolutions and clauses were agreed upon. The two biggest impediments to B.C.’s entry into the Confederacy were dealt with by the payment of all of the colony’s debts by Ottawa and the promise made by Sir Macdonald to construct a rail line linking the new province with Montreal and Quebec “within ten years”. This promised rail line was necessary in order to sabotage the intention of the American Manifest Destiny policy.

The Empire Strikes Back

With these arrangements agreed upon (paralleling similar arrangements in the former Red River Settlement in today’s Manitoba), British Columbia was admitted into Confederation as the 6th Canadian Province. Within the coming decades, as Canada was opened up to form a British-controlled Northern Confederacy blockade against the civilizing progress of the sovereign nation state intention of the United States, Saskatchewan and Alberta were formed as provinces where there had formerly been only Hudson’s Bay land. The lack of progress on Canada’s rail by 1878 had resulted in renewed disenchantment on the part of British Columbians who demanded once more for annexation into the USA resulting in Sir John A. Macdonald’s “National Policy of 1878-1885” which forced the construction of Canada’s own trans continental rail (with the inaugural train cars arriving in BC’s Port Moody from Montreal on the 4th of July, 1885).

By the time of the 1876 Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia, the American System of Political Economy had resulted in the greatest explosion of wealth in the United States and became a model for the whole civilized world seeking to break free of British colonial hegemony.

Converts to the American System were made by all lovers of progress from around the world who came to the Convention. Germany under Chancellor Otto von Bismarck vigorously applied American System practices of high protective tariffs and vast internal improvements under his Zollverein. Czars Alexander II and III and their close circle of Russian advisors applied the American model for the vast modernization of Russia vectored around the Trans-Siberian Rail. Even Japan under the Meiji Restoration applied the American model to escape feudalism and enter the modern age.

Sadly, an age of London-financed revolutions, assassinations and wars mis-shaped the 1880s, 1890s, and 20th century, preventing this system of win-win cooperation from evolving as it was destined.

Today the world is again pulled by two opposing systems represented by Lincoln’s international allies on the one hand and British Intelligence on the other… although today’s champions of the multi polar world of cooperation have names like Xi Jinping and Putin. These Eurasian statesmen have ushered in a new system of credit, diplomacy, security, economic and science policy governed by the best principles displayed by the American System of the 19th century and occasionally revived albeit only briefly under such 20th century leaders like Franklin Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy.

Whether the western nations have the moral fitness to recover their lost traditions and join in this new paradigm or not yet remains to be seen…

The author delivered a lecture on this topic which can be viewed here:

In 2007, the Russian government first voiced its support for the construction of the Bering Strait rail tunnel connecting the Americas with the Eurasian continent- a policy which has taken on new life in 2020 as Putin’s Great Arctic Development strategy has wedded itself to the northern extension of the Belt and Road Initiative (dubbed the Polar Silk Road). In 2011, the Russian government re-stated its pledge to build the $64 billion project.

On the Stone Age side of things, deep state neocons have also looked upon the arctic as a strategic zone of global importance, but with a very different mental filter from their Russian counterparts. NORAD chief Terrance O’Shaughnessy, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and a vast array of NATO-philes have repeatedly called upon the Arctic as a domain of militarization and confrontation with their primary “strategic nemeses” Russia and China.

So let’s assume the Dark Age nut jobs infesting the USA don’t win the day, and a new system emerges from the rubble of the currently collapsing world order premised around certain principles of long term cooperation, infrastructure and science investments, rather than the worship of money and debt slavery. Even the most cynical among us must admit that this is at least possible. After all, Russia Gate has increasingly collapsed, General Flynn has been exonerated, and Putin has called repeatedly for an emergency meeting of the five nuclear powers of the UN Security Council to discuss the creation of a new system.

So if this new system occurs and if saner forces amongst the western nations go with the Putin Plan for Arctic Development rather than the neocon WWIII agenda, then this happier outcome would not exactly be an unprecedented event. It is after all the case that the same historic American-Russian brotherhood which saved America during the Civil War would finally realize that great intention of leading statesmen in Lincoln’s America and Czar Alexander II’s Russia from the very moment Russia sold Alaska to America.

The Civil War and the Alaska Purchase

The sale of Alaska stands out as an incomprehensible historical anomaly for many who choose to see history merely as a sequence of linear events determined by “practical decision making”. The failure to recognize higher organizing principles shaping humanity’s collective experience as a universal process has blinded many historians from recognizing the true dynamic from which such a decision sprung and which could only be recognized from a top down perspective.

Just as 19th century America suffered from an internal struggle between factions who interpreted the Constitution in diametrically opposing ways, so too did the Russian state feature a similar battle between forces who saw Russia’s destiny likened to a 3rd Roman Empire in opposition to forces who saw Russia’s destiny as a sovereign nation state meant to exemplify the highest moral and intellectual powers that human society had attained. These figures, of whom several will shortly be showcased, represented the best traditions set into motion by the Leibnizian reforms of Peter the Great (Czar from 1682 until 1725).

As Russian expansionism was promoted by opportunist forces dominating the government of Czar Nicholas I (Czar from 1825-1855) who chased after Ottoman possessions in their obsession to expand Russian influence in Central Asia, the seeds of Russia’s self-destruction were being sown. While Russian expansionists were expecting the easy capture of territories long held by a failing Ottoman empire, what they found was a spiders’ web of Anglo-French intrigue and traps which nearly destroyed the proud nation during the bloody Crimean War (October 1853 to February 1856). The war’s outcome saw Russia humiliated, indebted and crippled morally and physically.

In response to this failure, a new breed of statecraft arose as an enlightened Czar (Alexander II) took the reins from the deceased Nicholas in 1854. With his leadership, statesmen such as the Grand Duke Constantine (Alexander’s brother), General Nikolai Muraviev, Foreign Minister Gorchakov and the great Russian Ambassador to America Eduard de Stoeckl gained a new level of influence and a new foreign policy doctrine was created. This doctrine was exemplified by an enhanced appreciation of the destructive role of the British Empire’s global strategy and the importance of America as a collaborator and partner.

Alexander II quickly began tackling endemic corruption, and worked to transform Russia by freeing the serfs in 1861 earning him the namesake “the Great Liberator”.

Although America had fallen into a Civil War by 1861, the British Empire which had done so much to keep the world subdued during the Crimean War, Opium Wars, and suppression of vast Indian uprisings was petrified that a Russian-American friendship would set into motion a great power alliance capable of undoing its global hegemony.

One of the few means Britain had to keep these two historic allies from uniting remained its territories of Canada and especially the colony of British Columbia. This colony was then an isolated and bankrupt outpost on the west coast separated by 3000 km of undeveloped wilderness privately owned by the Hudson’s Bay Company. British Columbia’s primary economic connection was not Britain, but rather California and a large movement of colonists had been calling for separation from the Empire in order to annex to the then-prosperous USA.

In 1860, Ambassador Stoeckl wrote to the Czar: “If the United States should win mastery of our possessions then British Oregon (British Columbia) would be squeezed together by the Americans from the north and south and would hardly be able to escape”. (1)

Grand Duke Constantine echoed Stoeckl saying: “the United States of North America should in the course of events be eager to conquer all of North America and will therefore meet us sooner or later and there is not the slightest doubt that it will seize our colonies without great effort and we shall be in no possession to retain them” (2)

As early as 1853, General Muraviev had already promoted Russia’s sale to Alaska in a letter to the Czar stating: “Due to the present amazing development of railroads, the United States will soon spread over all North America. We must face the fact that we will have to cede our North American possessions to them.” (3)

The Civil War and Russia

By 1862 the Civil War had begun in full force and with British corporations and Foreign Office supporting of the Confederacy (and banks launching financial warfare launched against the Union), tides had quickly turned against Lincoln. The British possessions of Toronto and Montreal served as Confederate bases from which dozens of terrorist attacks were launched against Lincoln’s Union from the North (including the President’s eventual assassination from Montreal) while British-sponsored battles were being waged from the South.

As the world watched with bated breath Ambassador Stoeckl wrote to Gorchakov:

“The disintegration of the United States as a nation would from our point of view be something to be deplored. The American confederation has acted as a counterpoise to British power and in this sense, its continued existence constitutes an important element in the balance of power.” He continued that he desired “the preservation of the American Union as an indivisible nation.” (4)

Surely the outcome of the Civil War would have been much darker had it not been for Czar Alexander II’s deployment of the Russian navy to California and Atlantic coasts of America in 1863 which kept British and French forces from assisting the confederacy in open warfare against Lincoln.

Later describing his motive, Czar Alexander II said:

“In the Autumn of 1862, the governments of France and Great Britain proposed to Russia, in a formal but not in an official way, the joint recognition by European powers of the independence of the Confederate States of America. My immediate answer was: `I will not cooperate in such action; and I will not acquiesce. On the contrary, I shall accept the recognition of the independence of the Confederate States by France and Great Britain as a casus belli for Russia. And in order that the governments of France and Great Britain may understand that this is no idle threat; I will send a Pacific fleet to San Francisco and an Atlantic fleet to New York…All this I did because of love for my own dear Russia… I acted thus because I understood that Russia would have a more serious task to perform if the American Republic, with advanced industrial development were broken up and Great Britain should be left in control of most branches of modern industrial development.” (5)

By December 26, 1864 as the outcome of the war in favor of the union was blossoming, Secretary of State William Seward encouraged the Grand Duke Constantine to come to America with the following words “I think it would be beneficial to us, and by no means unprofitable to Russia. I forebear from specifying my reasons- They will readily occur to you, as they would to his imperial highness if his thoughts were turned in that direction.” (6)

The Sale of Alaska Consummated

In 1866, Stoeckl was called back to Russia and after a lengthy meeting with Czar Alexander II, the Grand Duke Constantine, the Foreign Ministers and Finance Minister, was given approval to initiate the sale of Alaska to America.

On the evening of March 29, 1867, Ambassador Stoeckl delivered the news to William Seward at his private residence in Washington D.C. When asked if Seward wished to convene a meeting the following day, the Secretary of State asked why wait until tomorrow what could be done that very evening?

At midnight, the office of the state department was opened with a select group of Senator Charles Sumner, Seward and a few trusted members from the Russian consulate alongside Stoeckl.

As the sun rose on March 30, the treaty was written finalizing the sale for $7.2 million and before the ink was dry, it was presented to a shocked Congress who passed it in the following weeks.

Seward himself described the treaty as the most important diplomatic maneuver of his life saying “this treaty stands alone in the history of diplomacy, as an important treaty conceived, initiated and prosecuted and completed without being preceded or attended by protocols or dispatches”. (7)

Events Move Fast in the Post-Civil War Years

In order to prevent pro-American forces in Canada from declaring independence from a weakened Empire, the 1867 British North America Act was signed establishing a northern Monarchy on Deep State principles for the next 160 years and which this author developed in a 2014 lecture “Prometheus and Canada 1774-1874”.

The British hand behind the Civil War was exposed for all the world to see in the Alabama Claims of 1872 (the world’s first international trial) finding the British government guilty of militarily supporting the confederacy. In recompense for this crime, Sumner and Seward wanted the British to cede all of their remaining possessions in North America. Such an act would certainly have given great fuel to the connection of the Trans Continental Railway begun during the height of the Civil War and completed in 1869- with Eurasia.

Desperate to keep its independently-minded colony from annexing to America, the British Foreign office offered a bribe its Pacific colony. A desperate Britain purchased the private Hudson Bay lands in 1870, cancelled the colony’s debts and promised to build a railroad from Ontario to the Pacific under a program which I outlined in my 2013 report ‘The Imperial Myth of Canada’s National Policy’.

Russia had by this time positioned itself to begin construction of its own trans-continental railroad with the help of American engineers which was finally completed 1905 under the leadership of “American System” follower count Sergei Witte. On its maiden voyage the Trans-Siberian rail saw Philadelphia-made train cars run across the Russian heartland, and it is no accident that all of the key players involved in the Alaska purchase were also involved in the Russian continental rail program on both sides of the ocean.

The China Connection

Both Charles Sumner and William Seward were also strong advocates of uniting America’s destiny with China. Seward and U.S. Consul to Beijing, General Anson Burlingham, worked in tandem with Seward’s son George Frederick Seward (U.S. Consul to Shanghai) to organize the Seward-Burlingham Treaty of 1868 with China, giving China free emigration and travel in America, reciprocal access to education for citizens living in the others’ country, and favored nation status with the United States on trade. While treacherous politicians later annulled this treaty, its existence brought a new generation of Chinese revolutionaries to America including a young student named Sun Yat-sen who would later lead a revolution in 1911, establishing a new Chinese republic upon the Three Principles elaborated first by Abraham Lincoln!

Senator Sumner expressed his understanding of America’s connection with China and the Trans-continental railroad during his 1867 speech in defense of the Alaska Purchase:

“To unite the East of Asia with the West of America is the aspiration of commerce now as when the English navigator (Meares) recorded his voyage. Of course, whatever helps this result is an advantage. The Pacific railroad is such an advantage; for, though running westward, it will be, when completed, a new highway to the East.”

When President Ulysses Grant came to power in 1869, he gave much support to this internationalization of the American system while also fighting valiantly to advance Lincoln’s plans for reconstruction and reconciliation with an emancipated America.

Gilpin’s World Land-Bridge

Lincoln’s former body guard and first Governor of Colorado William Gilpin was not least among this group. Gilpin had been known as one of the earliest champions of America’s Trans Continental Railroad from as early as 1846 and his hundreds of speeches, published maps and writings went further than any other statesman to concretize what those international public works would look like.

Describing his grand design for international public works, Gilpin wrote in his widely read 1890 magnum opus ‘The Cosmopolitan Railway’:

“Railways continue to extend themselves, soon to become a universal system over all the lands of the globe. We have seen the energies of the American people, bringing into line and into use these new powers, span their continent with the Pacific railways… they will continue to expand their work to Bering Straits, where all the continents are united. This will extend itself along similarly propitious thermal selvage of the oriental Russian coasts into China. To prolong this unbroken line of cosmopolitan railways along the latitudinal plateau of Asia, to Moscow and to London, will not have long delay. The less significant and isolated continents of the southern hemisphere- South America, Africa, and Australasia- will be reached by feeders through Panama, Suez and the chain of Oriental peninsulas and islands. The whole area and all the populations of the globe will be thus united and fused by land travel and railway.”

Gilpin re-iterated his view that it was only by embracing its promethean heritage and fully committing to develop Alaska that America could avoid falling back under British manipulation. As applicable then as it is to today’s emerging Four Power alliance and expanding Belt and Road Initiative, Gilpin knew that national institutions must stay in the driver’s seat when he said:

“Twenty four years have already elapsed since we first assumed the responsibility of ownership, and since then what have we done? What improvement have we made upon the condition of life, the stolid, animal existence of the half civilized Russians and Aleuts! None whatsoever…. Place Alaska on the line of a world-encircling railway, give her a special code of laws befitting her requirements, and men of enterprise and capital to develop her resources, and she would pay for the road five times over. There is every reason to believe that Russia would hail the opening of her great eastern interior with joy. She would have everything to gain by it and nothing to lose… Since the time of Peter the Great, the ambition of Russian rulers has been not only to extend their possessions, but to improve the conditions of those who inhabit them.”

Within his 1890 book, Gilpin again continuously emphasized his long held belief that the inevitable awakening of China would be the basis for renewal and salvation of the west:

“In Asia, a civilization resting on a basis of remote antiquity has had, indeed, a long pause but a certain civilization- although hitherto hermetically sealed up from European influence- has continued to exist. The ancient Asiatic colossus, in a certain sense, needed only to be awakened to new life, and European Culture finds a basis there on which it can build future reforms”.

By 1906, Czar Nicholas II of Russia supported the plan for the American-Russian Bering Strait tunnel, officially approving a team of American engineers to conduct a feasibility study. A New York Times article reported on March 27, 1906:

“The Czar of Russia has issued an order authorizing the American syndicate, represented by Baron Loicq de Lobel, to begin work on the Trans-Siberian-Alaska railroad project. The plan is to build a railroad from Siberia to Alaska by bridging and tunneling the Bering Strait. It is said that the enterprise will be capitalized at from $250 to $300 million and that the money centers of Russia, France and the United States will be asked to take bonds.”

While the Anglo-American financed revolution deposed of the Czar and his family by 1917, the Russian government under the guidance of Vladimir Putin, working in tandem with Xi Jinping’s China have put the project back onto the agenda, and with the first American System President in decades at the helms of the USA government who has repeated stated his desire to unite America’s interests with those of Eurasia, the vision of Gilpin’s New Paradigm is being given a new chance at life.

The author can be reached at matt.ehret@tutamail.com

Notes

(1) S.B. Okun, The Russian-American Company, 1951 p.251
(2) Okun, p. 242
(3) Pacific Historical Review vol. 3, 1934 p. 30
(4) Okun, p. 259-260
(5) Published in The Independent March 24, 1904
(6) American Relations 1815-1867, N.Y. DaCapo Press, 1970, p.148
(7) Congressional Globe, Volume 40, by USA Congress, 2nd Session, p. 1339

The story of Japanese internment is more or less known in the United States. In the 1940s Japan was the main enemy in the Pacific. Though the combat actions took place many miles away from the continental USA, 120000 Japanese were forcibly relocated from the West Coast and interned. Over 60% of them were US citizens. 

Anti-Japanese sentiments were at the height. No wonder: at the beginning of the 1990s the legislation in some states forbade Asia – White intermarriage. The Japanese were moved over and compared to vermin. More extreme depictions of Japanese included picturing them as a bloodthirsty and mean people. I emphasize the story is related to the Americans of Japanese origin, not the Japanese who lived in Japan. Even orphans who had more than 1/16 of Japanese blood were rounded up! The Japanese were taken away from the West Coast deeper into the continent and relocated to live in barracks unfit for accommodating many people and standing up to harsh winters. Whoever dared outside risked to get a bullet fired by guard. 

After the Japanese bombing of Dutch Harbor in Unalaska in 1942, the Alaska’s Aleuts followed the fate of Japanese Americans. The U.S. government required anyone with one-eighth of Aleut blood or more to be evacuated from the islands. Nobody told them where they were taken to. They were just forcibly moved to ships and taken to special camps (in all there were four of such locations). The living conditions were terrible: hunger, cold, deceases, death…

L.C. McMillin, agent and caretaker of the Pribilof evacuation camp at Funter Bay, sent a letter to the superiors expressing indignation over the natives’ living conditions. It was returned and the agent was reprimanded. The authorities had no wish to know about the suffering the Aleuts were going through. 

It was no better at Kilisnoo. The interned had to drink muddy water and brave the Alaska colds in unheated barracks. It was not the federal government but rather the Tlingit Indians, who came to their help. They shared blankets, salt and medicine. The attempts to render any large scale humanitarian aid were stopped by authorities, the petitions sent by Aleut women begging for a chance to warm up and feed their children were left without reply. Kilisnoo was notorious for the highest death rate among the interned. In Burnett Inlet, the Aleuts were made live in the houses, abandoned by workers of the canning factory, that was deserted many years ago. The factory functioned only during warm seasons so there was no heating in the houses. There were decayed walls, no beds, water supply, electricity and flocks of hungry wolves hanging right around the walls by night. 

In three weeks after the relocation, William Zakharov (!), head of Aleut community, sent a complaint to local authorities asking to improve living conditions. There were many more complaints to follow, but it was only in 1945 the Barnett Inlet inmates could return to find their cozy homes in Unalaska pillaged by US soldiers. 

The Ward Lake camp was notorious. It was surrounded by impassable brushwood, the nearest town was only about eight miles away, but the Aleuts couldn’t get there. The living conditions were no better than in other internment camps, a couple of barracks humid inside, no light, no water, a few sheds in the yard and a tiny latrine, one for all, close to the place destined for taking meals. 

In all four camps there was mass infection of tuberculosis, pneumonia, and skin deceases. Everyone was affected – adults and children. The food supply was only 20% of what was required. People were dying of hunger and lack of medical care (1). 

No matter weak, men were coerced to work at sea fisheries. They became slaves, in case of refusal they were threatened to remain in the camps forever with their families (2). The Aleuts tried to find additional income, some place where they would not have to work for nothing, but federal authorities were vigilant enough to make them stay where they were. The mass requests for permission to work, so that men could feed their families, were refused. The authorities used everything sparingly: food, construction materials, medicine. The Aleuts paid with their lives. 

The US soldiers pillaged not only homes, but churches as well. They were predominantly Greek Orthodox ones. Historically the Aleuts have come under Russia’s cultural influence, they have stalwart faith in their church. Peter the Aleut is venerated as saint being tortured and killed by Spaniards in 1815 for refusing to convert into Catholic faith. The story became known to the world thanks to testimony of Ivan Kiglay, an Aleut port worker from Kadiak, who managed to free himself from captivity. It strikes an eye how many Aleuts, interned by Americans, had Russian names, like: Lestenkov, Prokopiev, and Zakharov, for instance. 

Today some of Aleuts today visit the graves of their predecessors who couldn’t live through the internment. The witnesses of those distant events are sure the cruel treatment of American Aleuts, the same way as in the case of American Japanese, was not explained by exigency of wartime, but rather racial prejudice. 

The Aleut story is a narrative of forced internment, of the fact, that even after dozens of years have passed, those who have suffered, can’t get any compensation, or even apologies, from the US powers that be. Talking about public response to the film, looks it mainly touched those, who have direct relation to the events, those who study the local history and a bunch of media men who have written about it. The fact, that it was not the Japanese only, but the Aleuts as well, who suffered from internment, has not become the knowledge of public at large. The Aleut story got lost in the ocean of US film industry production.