Very occasionally, a single anecdote can almost completely summate a moment in history. And this one did: In 2005, Zbig Brzezinski, the architect of Afghanistan as quagmire to the Soviet Union, and the author of The Grand Chessboard (which embedded the Mackinder dictum of ‘he who controls the Asian heartland controls the world’ into U.S. foreign policy), sat down in Washington with Alexander Dugin, Russian political philosopher and advocate for a ‘heartland’ cultural and geo-political renaissance.

Brzezinski had already written in his book that, absent Ukraine, Russia would never become the heartland power; but with it, Russia can and would. The meeting had been set with a photo-prop of a chessboard placed between Brzezinski and Dugin (to promote Brzezinski’s book). This arrangement with a chessboard prompted Dugin to ask whether Brzezinski considered Chess to be a game meant for two: “No, Zbig shot back: It is a game for one. Once a chess piece is moved; you turn the board around, and you move the other side’s chess pieces. There is ‘no other’ in this game”, Brzezinski insisted.

Of course, the single-handed chess game was implicit in Mackinder’s doctrine: ‘He who controls the heartland’ dictum was a message to the Anglo powers to never allow a united heartland. (This, of course, is precisely what is evolving at every moment).

And on Monday, Biden channelled Brzezinski out loud, whilst addressing the Business Roundtable in the U.S. His remarks came toward the end of his brief speech where he talked about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and America’s economic future:

“I think this presents us with some significant opportunities to make some real changes. You know, we are at an inflection point, I believe, in the world economy: [and] not just the world economy – in the world [which] occurs every three or four generations. As one of my, as the one of the top military people said to me in a secure meeting the other day, 60 million people died between 1900 and 1946; and since then we established a liberal world order and that hadn’t happened in a long while. A lot of people died, but nowhere near the chaos. And now’s the time when things are shifting. We’re going, there’s gonna be a new world order out there; and we’ve got to lead it and we’ve got to unite the rest of the free world in doing it.”

Again there is no ‘other’ at the board. When the moves are made, the board is turned around 180º to play from the other side.

The point here is that the carefully deliberated counter-attack on this Brzezinski zeitgeist was formally launched in Beijing with the joint-declaration that neither Russia nor China accept for America to play chess alone with no others at the board. This represents the defining issue of this coming era: The opening-up of geo-politics. It is an issue for which the excluded ‘others’ are prepared to go to war (they see no choice).

A second chess-player has stepped forward and insists to play – Russia. And a third stands ready: China. Others are silently lining up to witness how the first engagement in this geo-political war fares. It seems from Biden’s comments quoted above that the U.S. intends to use sanctions, and the full unprecedented extent of U.S. treasury measures, against Brzezinski dissidents. Russia is to be made an example of that which awaits any challengers demanding a seat at the board.

But it is an approach that is fundamentally flawed. It stems from Kissinger’s celebrated dictum that ‘he who controls money controls the world’. It was wrong from the ‘get go’: It was always ‘he who controls food, energy (human as well as fossil) and money can control the world. But Kissinger just ignored the first two required conditions – and the last has imprinted itself on the Washington mental circuits.

And here is the paradox: When Brzezinski wrote his book, it was a very different era. Today, whilst Europe and the U.S. never have been more closely aligned, the ‘West’ paradoxically has also never been more alone. Opposition to Russia may have seemed at the outset a slam dunk global unifier: That world opinion would so robustly oppose Moscow’s attack, that China would pay a high political price for failing to jump onto the anti-Russia bandwagon. But that is not how it is working out.

“While the U.S. rhetoric pillories Russia for “war crimes” and the humanitarian crisis in Ukraine, et al”, former Indian Ambassador Bhadrakumar notes, “the world capitals view this as a confrontation between America and Russia. Outside of the western camp, the world community refuses to impose sanctions against Russia or even to demonise that country”.

The Islamabad Declaration issued on Wednesday after the 45th meeting of the foreign ministers of the fifty-seven member Organisation of Islamic Conference refused to endorse sanctions against Russia. Not a single country in the African continent or West Asian, Central Asia, South and Southeast Asian region has imposed sanctions against Russia”.

There may well be a further factor at play here: For when these latter states hear phrases such as the ‘Ukrainians, through their heroism, have won the right to enter our “club of values”’, they scent a whiff of debilitated ‘white’ Europe clutching at the life-rafts.

The reality is that the sanctions to which Biden referred in his speech have already failed. Russia has not defaulted; the Moscow stock exchange is open; the Rouble is on the rebound; their current account is in rude good health and Russia is selling energy at windfall prices (even after discount).

In short, trade ‘will be diverted’, not destroyed (the benefit of being an exporter of goods almost fully produced locally – ie. a fortress economy).

The second oddity in Biden’s policy is that whilst Clausewitzian doctrine (to which Russia broadly adheres) argues for the dismantling of ‘the enemy’s centre of gravity, to achieve victory’, in this case presumably, the western control of the global reserve currency and payments systems. Today, however, it is Europe and the U.S. that have been dismantling it themselves: and further locking themselves into soaring inflation and contracting economic activity, in some unexplained fit of moral masochism.

As Ambrose Evans-Pritchard notes in the Telegraph, “What is clear is that western sanctions policy is the worst of all worlds. We are suffering an energy shock that is further inflating Russia’s war-fighting revenues … There is a pervasive fear of a gilets jaunes uprising across Europe, a suspicion that a fickle public will not tolerate the cost-of-living shock once the horrors of Ukraine lose their novelty on TV screens”.

Again, perhaps we can attribute this paradoxical behaviour to Kissinger’s obsession with the power of money, and his forgetfulness of other major factors.

All of this has led to a certain unease creeping into the corridors of power in some NATO capitals over the course that the Ukraine conflict is taking: NATO will not intervene; it will not implement a no-fly zone; and has pointedly ignored Zelensky’s new plea for additional military equipment. Ostensibly, this reflects the ‘selfless’ gesture by the West to avoid a nuclear war. In reality, however, the development of new weaponry can transform geopolitics in a moment (for example, Russia’s Kinzhal hypersonic smart bunker-buster). The fact is that across the board, NATO cannot prevail militarily against Russia in Ukraine.

It seems the Pentagon has – for now – won in the war with State Department and has begun the process of ‘correcting the narrative’.

Contrast these two U.S. narratives:

The State Department on Monday signalled that U.S. is discouraging Zelensky from making concessions to Russia in return for a ceasefire. The spokesman “made it very clear that he is open to a diplomatic solution that does not compromise the core principles at the heart of the Kremlin’s war against Ukraine. When asked to elaborate on his point, Price said that the war is “bigger” than Russia and Ukraine. “The key point is that there are principles that are at stake here that have universal applicability everywhere”. Price said Putin was trying to violate “core principles”.

But, the Pentagon “drop[ed] two truth bombs” in its battle with State and Congress to prevent confrontation with Russia: “Russia’s conduct in the brutal war tells a different story than the widely accepted view that Putin is intent on demolishing Ukraine and inflicting maximum civilian damage—and it reveals the Russian leader’s strategic balancing act”, reported Newsweek in an article entitled, “Putin’s Bombers Could Devastate Ukraine But He’s Holding Back. Here’s Why.”

One quotes an unnamed analyst at the Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) saying, “The heart of Kyiv has barely been touched. And almost all of the long-range strikes have been aimed at military targets. A retired U.S. Air Force officer now working as an analyst for a Pentagon contractor, added: “We need to understand Russia’s actual conduct. If we merely convince ourselves that Russia is bombing indiscriminately, or [that] it is failing to inflict more harm because its personnel are not up to the task or because it is technically inept, then we are not seeing the real conflict””.

The second ‘truth bomb’ directly undermines Biden’s dramatic warning about a false flag chemical attack. Reuters reported: “The United States has not yet seen any concrete indications of an imminent Russian chemical or biological weapons attack in Ukraine but is closely monitoring streams of intelligence for them, a senior U.S. defence official said.”

Biden is positioned in the middle, saying ‘Putin’s a war criminal’, but also that there will be no NATO fight with Russia. “The only end game now,” a senior administration official said at a private event earlier this month, “is the end of Putin regime. Until then, all the time Putin stays, [Russia] will be a pariah state that will never be welcomed back into the community of nations. China has made a huge error in thinking Putin will get away with it”.

There it is – the bottom line: Allow the carnage in Ukraine to continue; sit back and watch the ‘heroic Ukrainians bleed Russia dry’; do enough to sustain the conflict (by providing some weapons), but not enough to escalate it; and play it as the heroic struggle for democracy, in order to satisfy public opinion.

The point is that it isn’t working out that way. Putin may surprise all in DC by exiting Ukraine when Russia’s military operation is complete. (When Putin speaks of Ukraine, by the way, he usually discounts the western part added on by Stalin as Ukrainian).

And it isn’t working out with China. Blinken said in justification of new sanctions imposed on China last week: “We are committed to defending human rights around the world and will continue to use all diplomatic and economic measures to promote accountability”.

The sanctions were imposed because China had failed to repudiate Putin. Just that. The language of accountability and (of atonement) used however, can be understood only as an expression of woke contemporary culture. It is enough to present some aspect of Chinese culture as politically incorrect (as racist, repressive, misogynist, supremacist or offensive), and immediately it becomes politically incorrect. And that means that any aspect of it can be adduced at will by the Administration as meriting sanctioning.

The problem again reverts to the West’s refusal to accept ‘others’ at the chessboard. What can China do, but shrug at such nonsense.

Biden, in his speech to the Roundtable, fore-staged – yet again – a new world order; he suggested that a Great Re-set is coming.

But maybe a ‘Re-set Reckoning’ of a different order is on the cards; one that will return many things to that which, until relatively recently, had actually worked. Politics and geo-politics are metamorphosing at every moment.

In 1904, the British geographer, Halford Mackinder, read a paper named “The Geographical Pivot of History” at the Royal Geographical Society. In the paper he advanced a hypothesis on the influence of geographic reality on world power relationships. This is sometimes regarded as the founding moment of the study of geopolitics. Looking at the whole planet, he spoke of the “heartland” – the great landmass of Eurasia – and the Islands – the large islands of the Americas and Australia and the small islands of the United Kingdom and Japan. (Parenthetically, he does not seem to have much concerned himself with Africa or South America.) For most of history, Europe was an isolated and not very important appendage of this great world mass, subject to continual raids from the nomads of the Heartland, and the outer islands played no part in world events.

All this changed about five centuries ago when what he called the “Columbian Age” began. That is to say, the time when Europe discovered sea power. This gave the Islands a great dominance over the Heartland. In 1905, however, he saw the situation changing with the construction of railways which could connect the Heartland. In 1919 he produced his famous “triad”:

<<Who rules East Europe commands the Heartland.

Who rules the Heartland commands the World Island.

Who rules the World Island commands the world.>>

His fear then was Germany+East Europe=world dominance. But the triad was not intended to be true for all time – he would not agree thirty years later that the USSR’s rule over East Europe plus the World Island meant rule over the world; Mackinder adapted his theory to the realities as he saw them. And, after the Second World War, he believed that the Islands (USA+UK+allies) could control the Rimlands and therefore lock out the Heartland (USSR). The “Rimlands” were an later addendum to his 1904 theory: these were the territories subject to influence by sea power; that is the edges of the Heartland.

His theory has been in and out of favour – because it was taken up by some nazis (Germany must conquer the Heartland to gain world dominance) geopolitics became tainted for a time. Some think that it’s a textbook – Washington must maintain naval superiority; the Middle East is a key area of conflict because the Heartland can break the Rimlands in half there; Russia lusts after a warm water port and so on. This is an overstatement: Mackinder believed that he had elucidated an important driving factor in world power relationships – not some deterministic law but a important principle.

And so he had. We take it for granted today, familiar as we all are with world maps and world globes, but the discovery of The Ocean was a hugely important event in world power relationships. By “The Ocean” I do not mean the trivial observation that, eventually, all land ends at the water’s edge, but the understanding that the water is all connected. Here is an interesting projection of the world map as seen from the perspective of fishes – the Spilhaus Projection. It’s all blue except for bits around the edges and the blue continues, round and round, through the Bering Strait. This connectedness was not obvious until about 500 years ago when Spanish and Portuguese navigators made it so. A good illustration of the connectedness of The Ocean is the career of the British Admiral Nelson: his career in the Royal Navy took him to the Caribbean, the Arctic, India, the North American Station, the Baltic and Mediterranean Seas and the Atlantic Ocean. All of them equally reachable from the principal base at Portsmouth. This was the great world-shattering discovery that made Europe ruler of the world – once you put out to sea, you can go anywhere. Or at least to anywhere in the Rimlands where most people live. With that discovery – and the accompanying technology – Europe ceased to be a minor isolated appendage at the edge of the world; it was able to surround the Heartland. And so we have the tremendous dominance of Europe over the world for the last five centuries. (Not just mastery of the Ocean of course: Europe’s greater killing skill and its ever-attending diseases were powerful aids to conquest too.)

There is a great weakness to the Heartland’s power. Mackinder began his 1904 paper by listing the difficulties with the Heartland. Its rivers flow the wrong way – either into the inaccessible Arctic or into internal lakes like the Caspian or Aral Seas. There are too many deserts and too many mountains. There isn’t enough rainfall. Much of its territory is too cold, too far north and too forested. Distances – from the perspective of muscle-powered transport – are immense. The Heartland is simply not hospitable and therefore, will never have much of a population. The Rimlands, on the other hand, are much more populated and always will be. In short, the Heartland can never have the population to dominate the Rimlands and, without sea power, it can’t get to the Islands. Perhaps the closest that the the Heartland peoples came to conquering the world was when Temujin unified the Mongols. But there, as history has many times shown, when the horse people arrive in the cities, the cities win in the end; only in the Russian lands did the khanates linger for much longer than three generations. Therefore – and it seems that Mackinder came to realise this – the Heartland is less of an actor in geopolitics than a subject: it is valuable if possessed by, say, Germany, or if its controlling power can break through and gather some of the Rimlands.

Mackinder’s theories are considered to have influenced Zbigniew Brzezinski who saw it as very important for Washington to control “continental bridgeheads” in the Rimlands. For example Afghanistan and the Middle East. (Mackinder saw the Isthmus of Suez as key position – “the weakest spot in the girdle of early civilisations”). From the perspective of 2021, enough said – the USA has received no benefit at all from its fiddling around in these areas. Indeed, when the history of the end of the Imperium Americanum is written, these two areas will occupy many pages of text: utter failure. On paper Afghanistan may look like a “bridgehead” but it is, in fact, impenetrable to outsiders. And the Middle East has too many people who are, as Putin put it: “more cunning, clever and strong than you, and if you play these games with them, you will always lose”. Some bridgeheads are best left to theory.

But time marches on. Mackinder in 1904 was very impressed by the completion of the Trans-Siberian Railway (then with a spur through Manchuria; the all-Russian route was only finished in 1916) and predicted

<<the century will not be old before all Asia is covered with railways… it is inevitable that a vast economic world, more or less apart, will there develop inaccessible to oceanic commerce.>>

The curse of the Heartland had always been the immense difficulty and slowness of movement – sea movement was always faster and easier – but railways could change all that and he saw this first trans-Heartland railway as a world-changing event. Today the line is double-tracked and electrified and its capacity is continually increasing. In fact, today it is theoretically possible to take passenger trains from Yakutsk – about as deep in the Heartland as one can imagine – to London and then a taxi to the Royal Geographical Society and contemplate a copy of Mackinder’s original paper.

As it happens, his prediction has come true, although not as soon as he expected. But it’s not Russia that’s building trains through the Heartland today: this video of high speed railway construction by country over time says it all. China first appears in March 2003; has the most rail in March 2009 and, when the video ends in December 2019, has well over half the world’s total. And it shows no signs of stopping – high speed railways are a vital component of its Belt and Road initiative and Laos was just connected. And China has just produced a 600 kph prototype maglev train, already having a 400 kph one in service.

And now, a century and a quarter later, we come to something that I’m sure Mackinder never envisaged and that is the Heartland plus population. Russia plus China: millions of well-educated, well-situated people, lots of science and technology, an enormous percentage of the world’s manufacturing capacity together with all the natural resources one could want. The Heartland plus population plus manufacturing plus resources. There’s still more: the Islands have relied on their sea power for centuries but Russia has a large and competent navy and China now has more ships than the U.S. Navy (and probably more than all of NATO too).

What a shame Zbigniew Brzezinski isn’t alive to enjoy the fruits of his efforts! In The Grand Chessboard he warned that the greatest danger to continued America primacy would be a Russia-China alliance. He was (idiotically?) confident that U.S. diplomacy could prevent that from happening. Quite the contrary – the arrogance of his “New American Century” followers have driven Moscow and Beijing together.

The Heartland plus population plus production plus sea power: that’s the end of the “Columbian Age”.

During the 76 session of the United Nations General Assembly on September 20, 2021, UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres lunged into a dire warning saying:

“I am here to sound the alarm.  The world must wake up.  We are on the edge of an abyss—and moving in the wrong direction.  Our world has never been more threatened or more divided.  We face the greatest cascade of crises in our lifetimes… A surplus in some countries.  Empty shelves in others.  This is a moral indictment of the state of our world.”

While these words appear very truthful on the surface, sitting as we are upon a systemic meltdown of the world economy and potential collapse of population levels unseen since the days of the 14^th century dark age, it is worth asking: What are the primary causes for the collapse into an abyss which Guterres is so concerned about?

Is it neocolonialism managed by a financier oligarchy which has kept the majority of the global south poor, indebted, starved, divided and at war?

Is he concerned about the drive for full spectrum first strike nuclear hegemony by Anglo-American unipolarists?

Or is it the immanent collapse of the $1.2 quadrillion financial bubble masquerading as the western economy?

It is in fact none of those things.

In Guterres’ mind, the existential crises which demands a total overhaul of all human collective behavior, thinking and traditions is shaped by the boiling of the earth caused by man-made global warming (which has less to do with anthropogenic CO2 than you might image) and a pandemic which has a 99.8% survival rate.

What sort of solution does Guterres envision?

The Great Reset Magic Wand

In June 2020, just months after the World Economic Forum signed a strategic partnership to merge its functions with the United Nations, Guterres laid out his vision stating:

“The Great Reset is a welcome recognition that this human tragedy must be a wake-up call. We must build more equal, inclusive and sustainable economies and societies that are more resilient in the face of pandemics, climate change and the many other global changes we face.”

This was merely a rehashing of the words of World Economic Forum President Klaus Schwab who just days earlier said:

“The world must act jointly and swiftly to revamp all aspects of our societies and economies, from education to social contracts and working conditions… Every country, from the United States to China, must participate, and every industry, from oil and gas to tech, must be transformed. In short, we need a ‘Great Reset’ of capitalism.”

Upon reading this, one might interject “but isn’t it true that capitalism has proven itself too corrupt to salvage and that a new system is needed that is driven by moral values?

Certainly, worshipping money is as bad as Guterres and Schwab frequently attest and additionally a new system driven by moral values is needed to bring us out of the abyss… but is the system now imploding referred to by Klaus actually “capitalism” or has a slight of hand occurred?

It is my contention that the thing labelled “capitalism” outlined by Schwab in his Great Reset speech above was never capitalism at all.

Self-Cannibalism by Another Name

Capitalism requires the creation of capital to merit the name.

Under nationalist statesmen like John Quincy Adams, Abraham Lincoln, Ulysses Grant, William McKinley, Franklin Roosevelt and JFK in America (and many like minded figures internationally) the past 250 years has seen amazing leaps of progress under the form of capitalism. Large scale, government directed credit, protective tariffs and social programs merged the needs of the nation with the liberty of the individual and free enterprise.

On the other hand, the consumer society cult created during the 1970s was never about creating anything at all… but only consuming what previous generations had created and leaving nothing durable for the future but unpayable debt, never-ending wars, addiction to cheap labor and atrophied infrastructure.

The global transformation unleashed with the 1971 destruction of the gold reserve standard was always driven by an intention to replace national systems of economic planning with a new anti-nation state system driven by myopic speculation.

In this new liberalized system, being a good citizen meant only being a good consumer where the worship of short-term gains blinded corrupt fools to the reality that a hive of oligarchs were taking control of all media, science, academia, corporate governance and the civil service of governments across the Trans Atlantic. What they called “capitalism” was merely a looting operation that emerged over the dead bodies of patriots such as Franklin Roosevelt, John F Kennedy, Bobby Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Enrico Mattei and many others.

The network which ran this systemic transformation within the USA was a powerful group called “the Trilateral Commission”.

Co-founded by Chase Manhattan bank president David Rockefeller, Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski, the manifesto for this group was outlined by Brzezinski in his 1970 book ‘Between Two Ages: America’s Role in the Technetronic Era’.

In this manifesto, Brezinski wrote:

“The technetronic era involves the gradual appearance of a more controlled society. Such a society would be dominated by an elite, unrestrained by traditional values. Soon it will be possible to assert almost continuous surveillance over every citizen and maintain up-to-date complete files containing even the most personal information about the citizen. These files will be subject to instantaneous retrieval by the authorities.”

The Bomb is Set

In order to get from one obsolete age of nationalism and the belief in scientific progress to a new age of post-nationalist world government, an intermediary period had to be created “in between two ages”. That intermediate age would call itself capitalism on the surface and America would be a Leviathan-like enforcer of this system of looting on a global stage.

During this time, supranational consortiums of international finance, corporate power and intelligence agencies beholden to no nation state would increasingly use the deregulation of the system under globalization to re-colonize western nations stripping them of all actual economic sovereignty and leaving them sovereign in name only.

The system that emerged under this new order was less capitalism and more an elaborate time bomb.

By virtue of its emphasis on the increased rates of fictitious capital accumulation, this new system of self-cannibalism would kill long term investments required to sustain society, and create a speculative bubble premised on ever increasing mountains of unpayable debt. This bomb would blow up like the early bubbles that had been set to pop in 1929 New York and even earlier in 1923 Germany with “scientifically managed” forms of fascist governance offered as solutions.

As the Trilateral Commission was taking control within the USA, a former student of Kissinger named Klaus Schwab was co-founding a new organization in Switzerland called the World Economic Forum (originally named the European Management Fund).

This new organization would serve in tandem to the Bilderberger Group established in 1956 by Dutch Prince (and World Wildlife Fund co-founder) Bernhardt and serve as an influential platform for the world’s elite to plan and coordinate a supranational game plan designed to nudge the world into a new utopia.

World Economic Forum co-founder (and later chairman) was a Canadian Rockefeller protégé named Maurice Strong who had leapt from mining executive to leading controller of Canada’s Liberal Party during the 1960s to become an international leader of the neo-Malthusian revival heading the United Nations’ first environmental conference in Stockholm in 1972. Described lovingly by Schwab as “my mentor”, it was at Davos that Maurice Strong began openly advocating world government and population control which became a loud theme throughout his life. It was in reference to the Davos group that Strong had mused in 1991:

”What if a small group of world leaders were to conclude that the principal risk to the Earth comes from the actions of the rich countries? And if the world is to survive, those rich countries would have to sign an agreement reducing their impact on the environment. Will they do it? The group’s conclusion is ‘no’. The rich countries won’t do it. They won’t change. So, in order to save the planet, the group decides: Isn’t the only hope for the planet that the industrialized civilizations collapse? Isn’t it our responsibility to bring that about?”

One frequent WEF guest was another Trilateral Commission member who had first coined the term “Davos man” in 2004. His name was Samuel P. Huntington, and in 1975, he took part in a Trilateral Commission study called “Crisis in Democracy” where he wrote:

 “We have come to recognize that there are potential desirable limits to economic growth. There are also potentially desirable limits to the indefinite extension of democracy… a government which lack authority will have little ability to impose on its people the sacrifices that will be necessary”.

Here a theme is raised which is characteristic of all techno-feudal thought: The nation state’s only purpose is to serve as an appendage for a supranational elite in order to enforce: 1) limits to growth onto civilization, and 2) draconian sacrifices that no democratic people would willfully permit being imposed onto themselves or their children.

On the Verge of a New Age

Today, the new age which golden collar elites of the Davos clique have made their religious mission to bring online as part of an anti-Christian scientific paganism, has been called “the fourth industrial revolution”.

To recap: The period of chaos launched in 1971 with the floating of the dollar was never capitalism.

It was always just a temporary social Darwinist age of pillage and hedonism masquerading as capitalism which could do nothing but collapse by its very nature.

Over fifty years into this age of chaos, nation states of the trans Atlantic community have been systematically stripped down of anything which rendered them economically sovereign.

Yes, there are still certain confused sparks of life from republican forces in piecemeal form within parts of the USA, and Europe which still value freedom, but the sort of political or economic sovereignty once enjoyed during the times of Kennedy and de Gaulle are long gone. Privatizations, outsourcing of industry and atrophy of infrastructure has resulted in a transfer of power to the hands of an immensely wealthy oligarchical class.

The defenders of humanity today are found among the Multipolar Alliance led by Russia, China and a growing array of nations who want to have a future.

These are nations which are being led by statesmen who recognize the existential value of real economic growth, nationalism, long term planning, and scientific progress which are needed to bring humanity out of the fire sweeping across the world and into a future worth living in.

It is this emerging new paradigm which a frightened Guterres referred to when he said:

“I fear our world is creeping towards two different sets of economic, trade, financial, and technology rules, two divergent approaches in the development of artificial intelligence—and ultimately two different military and geo-political strategies.  This is a recipe for trouble.  It would be far less predictable and far more dangerous than the Cold War.”

In a future report we will dig more deeply into the question of “HOW did this oligarchical clique embed itself within the United States during the Cold War and induce an emerging baby boomer generation to democratically de-construct Judeo Christian civilization?”

The author can be reached at matthewehret.substack.com

As a journalist, it is necessary to do my best not only to stay up-to-date on as many of the cutting edge developments as possible, but to also keep a flexible mind so that the buzzing myriad of facts emerging every day can be imbued with value such that my analysis can be useful to readers.

Over the past weeks, my mind processed such a dizzying array of information pertaining to the evolving situation surrounding Afghanistan that I ultimately had to shut myself off of reading any breaking news for a few days. It was during this short break that I took great pleasure reviewing the pre-release of a new novelized memoir entitled Valediction: Three Nights of Desmond, published by Trine Day Press and written by the husband and wife team of Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould.

Just when I was beginning to think that nothing new could be offered to the topic, I was happily surprised that this book provided an invaluable dimension to Afghanistan’s story within the context of world history from the first-hand account of the only two American journalists permitted to enter the war-torn nation in 1981 and again in 1983. The two documentaries produced by the duo during that period went far to shatter the carefully-constructed narrative of a “Russian Vietnam” that had been built up for years by a western deep state.

Paul Fitzgerald’s story begins with a chance encounter with Presidential-nominee Edward (Ted) Kennedy’s chief of staff Al Lowenstein in the lead-up to the 1980 elections. In their brief exchange, Lowenstein described his and Kennedy’s intention to shed light on the CIA’s involvement in the murder of the two Kennedy brothers. When Lowenstein ended up shot dead in his office by a former colleague two weeks later, Paul and his wife began to realize that they were pressing on something much larger than themselves.

Taking the reader through their journey of discovery, the couple artfully relay how they grappled with the startling discovery that there wasn’t one USA, but rather two opposing factions of U.S. intelligence at war with each other.

The journey began with the discovery that Lowenstein had been the founder and president of the National Students Association launched in 1951 which operated as a CIA front group designed to recruit both talented young Americans and foreign students alike who would later be propped up in various governments during the Cold War. It was obvious that Al was sick of playing a part in this machine and had found his last years emersed in organizing for Bobby Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr and when they fell, made the surviving Kennedy brother’s presidential election his governing passion. (1)

The broader clash of two intelligence agencies touched upon the question of whether or not the USA would operate on the basis of a foreign policy doctrine that presupposed an honest intention on the part of the Soviet Union to adhere to detente and the 1972 SALT treaty or whether U.S. security doctrine would operate on the assumption that the Soviets were liars intent on imposing their own global world government onto humanity.

Paul and Liz document the rise of a new think tank named Team B formed in 1976 which revived the earlier Committee on Present Danger led by financier Paul Nitze who in 1950, used this organization to spearhead the passage of NSC-68 that first justified the notion that the USA should maximize its build up of nuclear warheads on the supposition that the USA was in a moral equivalent of war with Russia. Throughout the 1960s, saner forces pushed back against Nitze’s Committee resulting in the nuclear test ban treaty, Open Skies Treaty, Space Treaty, and other trust building measures. The 1972 SALT was an extension of those mechanisms and limited the growth of U.S. nuclear warheads while operating on a presumption that Russia would do the same while respecting each others’ spheres of influences.

In the minds of Nitze, Brzezinski and the growing hive of neoconservative right wingers like Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Pipes, Richard Perle and Bush Sr. growing in power and prestige amidst the presidencies of Ford, Carter and Reagan, this push towards trust and cooperation had to stop.

Hence this cast of characters was grouped together to promote a counter-argument to the “official” National Intelligence Estimate (referred to as “Team A”) which was assigned the role of proving the Soviets to be honest in their promises to respect their fields of influence and limit their nuclear warheads.

Where the NIE at the time was still maintaining the view that the threat posed by Russia would decrease if it’s sense of security and stability were increased, Team B asserted the opposite view promoting the fictious idea of an evil empire committed to becoming a global Soviet hegemon.

As one can imagine, the debates set up between the two teams were highly tilted in Team B’s favor as the champions selected to represent the Team A assessment was staffed by incompetent second rate minds completely out of their depths and totally incapable of refuting the vast data crunching sophistry of powerhouses like Nitze and his neocon team. Though history has demonstrated Team B’s thesis to be an artificial construction, the propaganda was successful and by 1978, the Trilateral-run coup of U.S. intelligence was nearly complete. At this time, a newly re-organized system of international clandestine operations were launched to conduct asymmetric warfare against not only Russia, but any other force in either the east or west that didn’t fit with Brzezinski’s ‘technetronic age’ then coming into being.

The Trotskyist Roots of the Neoconservative Takeover

In evaluating this strange cabal of right wingers, Paul and Liz astutely observe: “developed by an inbred class of former Trotskyist intellectuals, the Team B approach represented a radical transformation of America’s national security bureaucracy into a new kind of elitist cult.”

Tracing out the roots of these new neocons that dovetailed with the emergence of a new “end times” Christian-Zionist movement, the authors hit upon the Trotskyist common denominator which Cynthia Chung has also elaborated upon in her new series here and here.

It was no coincidence that this network of devotees of Trotsky’s particular brand of socialism with permanent revolution characteristics became a driving nexus of devotees among the imperial intelligentsia of the west like James Burnham, Alfred Wohlsetter, Richard Perle and Irving Kristol. These ideologues simply didn’t find the switch to neo-conservativism very difficult after Trotsky’s plans to take control of Russia failed by 1940. Trotsky’s fifth column in Russia had no trouble working with fascist Japanese, German, British or Wall Street powers in their fanatical aims to end Stalin’s “Socialism in one country” doctrine and impose global revolution which has been documented elsewhere and will be the topic of a future study.

The Murder of a U.S. Ambassador

This background helped set the duo up for the next series of discoveries they were to make preparing the groundwork for a journey with a camera team into Afghanistan in 1981. This preparation work involved Paul and Liz interfacing with a network of highly placed agents in dominant positions within the State Department and media industrial complex whose incredible overlap with the murder and coverup of president Kennedy, and management of the earlier Vietnam war is shocking.

Upon their arrival in Afghanistan in 1981, the duo also pieces together the mysterious anomalies of the assassination of American Ambassador to Kabul, Adolph Dubs on February 14, 1979. It didn’t take long before the couple discovered that Ambassador Dubs had been working covertly on an agenda that ran in total opposition to the Trilateral Commission plans for the region and if successful, threatened to disrupt all of Brzezinski’s designs.

It was Dubs after all, who had headed the Study Mission on International Controls of Narcotics Trafficking and Production for the Senate Select Committee on Narcotics Abuse and Control only six months prior to his station in Kabul and understood better than anyone else where and how the global drug production complex functioned.

During dozens of meetings and interviews conducted with Afghanistan officials, Paul learned that Ambassador Dubs had at least 14 secret meetings with President Hafizullah Amin who was clearly not the sort of individual which western media portrayed. Not only was Amin not Marxist, he wasn’t in any way pro-Soviet or even a serious Muslim. Evidence piled up increasingly that Amin was little more than an opportunistic CIA tool interfacing closely with his nominal enemy Gulbuddin Hekmatyar (another CIA asset) in an effort to bring global heroin production into Afghanistan. As Paul and Liz discover, both men were in truth united as members of the same Ghilzai tribe which had long sought to assert dominance over Kabul.

This goal went part in parcel with Amin’s objective of undermining the nationalistic forces associated with King Daoud within the PRPD during the April 1978 Saur revolution that deposed the King.

However, when Dubs began negotiating a plan that kept the Soviets from falling into an Afghan trap while still enriching Amin, something had to be done to save Zbigniew’s script.

As Paul and Liz discover in the course of time, this CIA connection ultimately proved Amin’s own undoing and also resolved the paradoxical fact that despite being a nominally pro-Soviet Afghan president, Soviet forces wasted no time killing him on December 27, 1979 when Russia’s military entry officially began.

While official records still blame the death of Ambassador Dubs to a combination of Soviet and Afghan military forces to this very day, the authors demonstrate that bountiful evidence points to the hand of western intelligence that shaped the shootout that killed all three kidnappers and the Ambassador in room 117 of the Kabul Hotel. Chief among this evidence are the presence of CIA and DEA agents on the scene of the crime, evidence of Dubs’ having been alive after the famous shootout and his body having been 1) moved after his murder to make it seem as though bullets from the window might possibly have killed him, 2) shot several times by a .22 calibre pistol at close range… most likely by a sociopathic Kabul police chief Mohammed Lal who also turned up dead months later.

Russia Falls for the Trap

The murder of Dubs provided Zbigniew the propaganda needed to fuel the fires of anti-Russian hysteria among credulous Americans on the one hand, while also justifying the creation of a new clandestine asymmetric warfare policy that forever changed the fate of world history.

The only sacrifice needed on Brzezinski’s’ part was the murder of a pesky diplomat who wanted to avoid a world war, and the sacrifice of a highly placed CIA asset [President Amin] who would play the role of an Afghan Lee Harvey Oswald, taking the primary blame for the chaos that would erupt under Russia’s soft underbelly.

Additionally, the event that triggered so-called “Russia’s Vietnam”, provided the living proof which Team B’s fictitious thesis needed by demonstrating that Russia truly had a desire to dominate the world.

This, in turn fueled the money pit known as Operation Cyclone which poured billions of dollars into sponsoring terrorist movements that would soon morph into Al-Qaeda and the emergence of the world’s largest heroin production zone right in the heart of Mackinder’s World Island. It additionally justified Zbigniew’s push for “flexible response” limited nuclear war doctrine of 1980 which went on to shape the Full Spectrum Dominance program now encircling Russia and China.

When asked in a 1998 interview if he regretted having played a driving role in the creation of Al Qaeda, Zbigniew Brzezinski responded:

“Regret what? That secret operation was an excellent idea. It had the effect of drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap and you want me to regret it? The day that the Soviets officially crossed the border, I wrote to President Carter: We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam war. Indeed, for almost 10 years, Moscow had to carry on a war unsupportable by the government, a conflict that brought about the demoralization and finally the breakup of the Soviet empire.”

A year before this interview, Brzezinski wrote a poisonous book called “The Grand Chessboard” that became the guiding light for the neocon Project for a New American Century led by the same neo cons that emerged into power under his sponsorship in the 1970s like Donald Rumsfeld, Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Helms and Dick Cheney where he stated:

“In brief, for the United States, Eurasian geostrategy involves the purposeful management of geo-strategically dynamic states and the careful handling of geopolitically catalytic states, in keeping with the twin interests of America in the short-term preservation of its unique global power and in the long-run transformation of it into increasingly institutionalized global cooperation. To put it in a terminology that hearkens back to the more brutal age of ancient empires, the three grand imperatives of imperial geostrategy are to prevent collusion and maintain security dependence among the vassals, to keep tributaries pliant and protected, and to keep the barbarians from coming together.”

While the small space allocated for this review cannot do justice to the scope of this story which lead the reader up to the highest echelons of Europe’s old nobility and even a few under-appreciated secret societies, the lessons that are communicated have as much, if not more applicability now, forty years later as the USA departs from its own Afghan debauchery and mutant strains of Western/Saudi-sponsored radical Islam continue to plague the world in the form of ISIS-K, H. The only difference between 2021 and 1981 is that today, a Multipolar Alliance led by the Russia, China and joined by a growing array of great nations and many others have created a new paradigm founded upon a coherent alternative security, cultural and financial architecture capable of challenging the dystopic unipolar hegemon that Zbigniew Brzezinski believed should govern the New World Order.

A roundtable discussion showcasing Paul and Liz’s upcoming book is available here:

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

(1) Based on his policy performance from this point forward, one can only assume that Ted Kennedy finally learned his lesson and decided it was infinitely easier to become a creature of the system.

Back in the later Middle Ages, the Roman Catholic Church and its aristocracies had used religious fervor in order to motivate very conservative and devout people to invade foreign countries so as to spread their empire and to not need to rely only on taxes in order to fund these invasions, but also to highly motivate them by their faith in a heavenly reward. It was far cheaper this way, because these invading forces wouldn’t need to be paid so much; the reason why they’d be far cheaper is that their pay would chiefly come to them in their afterlife (if at all). That’s why people of strong faith were used. (Aristocracies always rule by deceiving the public, and faith is the way.) Those invaders were Roman Catholic Crusaders, and they went out on Crusades to spread their faith and so ‘converted’ and slaughtered millions of Muslims and Jews, so as to expand actually the aristocracies’ and preachers’ empire, which is the reason why they had been sent out on those missions (to win ‘converts’). This was charity, after all. (Today’s large tax-exempt non-profits are no different — consistently promoting their aristocracy’s invasions, out of ‘humanitarian’ concern for the ‘welfare’, or else ‘souls’, of the people they are invading — and, if need be, to kill ‘bad people’. This has been the reality. And it still is. It’s the way to sell imperialism to individuals who won’t benefit from imperialism — make mental slaves of them.)

The original Islamic version of the Christian Crusades, Islamic Holy War or “jihad,” started on 14 November 1914 in Constantinople (today’s Istanbul) when the Sheikh Hayri Bey, the supreme religious authority in the Ottoman Empire, along with the Ottoman Emperor, Mehmed V, declared a Holy War for their Muslim followers to take up arms against Britain, France, Russia, Serbia and Montenegro in World War I. They were on Germany’s side, and lost. (That’s the reason why the Ottoman Empire ended.) Both the Sheikh and the Emperor had actually been selected — and then forced — by Turkey’s aristocracy, for them to declare Islamic Holy War at that time. In fact, the sitting Sheikh, Mehmet Cemaleddin Efendi, in 1913, was actually an opponent of the pro-German and war-oriented policy of the Union and Progress Party, which represented Turkey’s aristocrats, and so that Sheikh was replaced by them, in order to enable a declaration of Islamic Holy War. Jihad actually had its origin in Turkey’s aristocracy — not in the Muslim masses, and not even in the Muslim clergy. It resulted from an overly ambitious Turkish aristocracy, hoping to extend their empire. It did not result from the public. And, at that time, relatively few Muslims followed this ‘Holy’ command, which is one reason why the Ottoman Empire soon thereafter ended.

Incidentally, so as to clarify how Turkey’s aristocracy ran the show, at that time, Taner Akçam’s September 2006 “The Ottoman Documents and the Genocidal Policies of the Committee for Union and Progress … toward the Armenians in 1915” reported that:

The fact that the decision about the Armenians was made after a great deal of thought, based on extensive debate and discussion by the Central Committee of the CUP [Committee for Union and Progress], can be understood by looking at other sources of information as well. The indictment of the Main Trial states as follows: ‘‘The murder and annihilation of the Armenians was a decision taken by the Central Committee of the Union and Progress Party.’’ These decisions were the result of ‘‘long and extensive discussions.’’ In the indictment are the statements of Dr. Nazım to the effect that ‘‘it was a matter taken by the Central Committee after thinking through all sides of the issue’’ and that it was ‘‘an attempt to reach a final solution to the Eastern Question.’’54 In his memoirs, which were published in the newspaper Vakit, Celal, the governor of Aleppo, describes the same words being spoken to him by a deputy of the Ottoman Parliament from Konya, coming as a ‘‘greeting of a member of the Central Committee.’’ This deputy told Celal that if he had ‘‘expressed an opinion that opposed the point of view of the others, [he would] have been expelled.’’55

(And, consequently, when Hitler allegedly — on 22 August 1939, right before his invasion of Poland which started WW II, and it is on page 2 here, but the sincerity and even the authenticity of that alleged private ‘speech’ by him should be questioned and not accepted outright by historians — cited Turkey’s genocide against Armenian Christians as being proof that genocide is acceptable, Hitler would actually have been citing there not only a Muslim proponent of genocide, but an ally of Germany who had actually done it, because the Ottoman Empire’s aristocracy had been both Muslim and German-allied. Hitler would, in that ‘speech’, if he actually said it, have been citing that earlier ally of Germany, which had actually genocided Christians. The genocide happened, even if that speech mentioning it was concocted by some propagandist during WW II.)

The new jihad, or Islamic version of the Crusades, is, however, very different from the one that had started on 14 November 1914. It wasn’t Turkish, it instead came straight from Turkey’s top competitor to lead the world’s Muslims, the royal family who owned Saudi Arabia, the Sauds. But they partnered with America’s aristocracy, in creating it.

Today’s jihadism started in 1979, when U.S. President Jimmy Carter’s national security advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski (a born Polish nobleman), and his colleague Prince Bandar bin Sultan al Saud, re-created jihad or Islamic Holy War, in order to produce a dirt-cheap army of Pakistani fundamentalist Sunni students or “mujahideen,” soon to be renamed Taliban (Pashto & Persian ṭālibān, plural of ṭālib student, seeker, from Arabic) so as to invade and conquer next door to the Soviet Union the newly Soviet-allied Afghanistan, and to turn it ‘pro-Western’, now meaning both anti-Soviet, and anti-Shiite. (The Saud family hate Shiites, and so do America’s aristocrats, whose CIA had conquered Shiite Iran in 1953, and who became outraged when Shiites retook Iran in 1979. And, from then on, America’s aristocracy, too, have hated Shiites and have craved to re-conquer Iran. By contrast, the Sauds had started in 1744 to hate Shiites.) So, modern Islamic Holy War started amongst fundamentalist Sunnis in Pakistan in 1979, against both the Soviets and the Iranians (and now against both Russia and Iran). Here is a video of Brzezinski actually doing that — starting the “mujahideen” (subsequently to become the Taliban) onto this ‘Holy War’:

Brzezinski, incidentally, had been born a Roman Catholic Polish aristocrat whose parents hated and despised Russians, and this hostility went back to the ancient conflicts between the Roman Catholic and the Russian Orthodox Churches.

So: whereas on the American end this was mainly a Roman Catholic versus Orthodox operation, it was mainly a Sunni versus Shiite operation on the Saudi end.

Here’s more of the personal background regarding the co-creation, by the aristocracies of America and of Saudi Arabia, of today’s jihadism, or “radical Islamic terrorism”:

Whereas Nelson Rockefeller in the Republican Party sponsored Harvard’s Henry Kissinger as the geostrategist and National Security Advisor, David Rockefeller in the Democratic Party sponsored Harvard’s and then Columbia’s Zbigniew Brzezinski as the geostrategist and National Security Advisor. The Rockefeller family was centrally involved in controlling the U.S. Government.

According to pages 41-44 of David B. Ottaway’s 2008 The King’s Messenger: Prince Bandar, U.S. President Jimmy Carter, whose National Security Advisor was Brzezinski, personally requested and received advice from a certain graduate student at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), Saudi Prince Bandar bin Sultan al Saud, regarding geostrategy. At the time, Brzezinski commented favorably on Bandar’s graduate thesis. But that’s not all. “Secretly, Carter had already turned to the kingdom for help, calling in Bandar and asking him to deliver a message to [King] Fahd pleading for an increase in Saudi [oil] production. Fahd’s reply, according to Bandar, was ‘Tell my friend, the president of the United States of America, when they need our help, they will not be disappointed.’13 The king was true to his world.” However, Bandar’s advice went beyond oil. And the re-creation, of the fundamentalist-Sunni movement (amongst only fundamentalist Sunni Muslims, both in 1914 and in 1979), that now is called “jihadism,” was a joint idea, from both Brzezinski and Bandar.

On 2 July 2014, Akbar Ganji headlined at Huffington Post, “U.S.-Jihadist Relations (Part 1): Creating the Mujahedin in Afghanistan”, and he noted that:

It was the United States that, together with Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, and Pakistan, dispatched the jihadists to Afghanistan. Prince Bandar bin Sultan of Saudi Arabia played a key role in those operations, with Saudi Arabia providing the key financial, military and human support for them. The kingdom encouraged its citizens to go to Afghanistan to fight the Soviet army. One such citizen was Osama bin Laden. Saudi Arabia agreed to match, dollar for dollar, any funds that the CIA could raise for the operations. The U.S. provided Pakistan with $3.2 billion, and Saudi Arabia bought weapons from everywhere, including international black markets, and sent them to Afghanistan through Pakistan’s ISI.

That was then, and this is now, but it is merely an extension of that same operation, even after the Soviet Union and its communism and its Warsaw Pact military alliance all ended in 1991, and Russia ended its side of the Cold War but the United States secretly continued its side, as is shown here, by an example. This example, of America’s continuing its Cold War, is America’s longstanding effort, after the death of FDR in 1945, to overthrow and replace Syria’s pro-Russian Government and install instead a Syrian Government that will be controlled by the Sauds:

U.S. President Barack Obama was warned in 2012 by U.S. DOD intelligence that if he would try to overthrow and replace Syria’s secular, non-sectarian (and predominantly Shiite) Government (as the Sauds had been urging every U.S. President ever since Truman to do — to replace those secular Shiites by fundamentalist Sunnis), he would be able to do it only with the support of Syria’s minority of fanatically Sunni fundamentalists, who were especially concentrated in Syria’s northwestern province of Idlib, bordering Turkey. Obama went for the idea, and promoted it as being his attempt to ‘liberate’ Syria, from being led by the “barbaric” secular, non-sectarian, Shiite, Bashar al-Assad. As far back as 2009, Obama had been informed that an intense drought was ripening Syria for overthrow (regime-change), but Obama wanted to wait for his second term before he’d go all-out for this conquest. Obama didn’t want his re-election chances to be clouded by possible accusations that he would be arming Al Qaeda. But, anyway, he needed to do it that way because only as late as December 2012 did Syria’s domestic jihadists make clear to him that they’d go along with his plan to wage war against Assad only if they would be led by Syria’s Al Qaeda, called “Al Nusra.” So, this invasion began only in his second term, starting in January 2013. But the planning for the ‘rebellion’ — the “Arab Spring” in Syria — actually began in 2009, and the U.S. State Department, under Hillary Clinton, was centrally involved. Turkey “began operations in April-May 2011” to overthrow Assad, but Obama had actually started it, Erdogan didn’t. Turkey merely cooperated with it. Altogether, throughout the U.S.-initiated war in Syria, something on the order of around a hundred thousand jihadists have come into Syria from around the world so as to overthrow Bashar al-Assad. Virtually all of them entered through Turkey, to its north. The influx was a trickle as late as 2013, escalated in 2014, approximately doubled in 2015, and continued escalating, but no reliable count of the incoming jihadists exists. Though Turkey was the pathway, this invasion started actually in Washington.

So, in this new ‘Islamic holy war’, to overthrow Syria’s non-sectarian Government, the fighters entered Syria through Turkey, and they were welcomed mainly in Syria’s province of Idlib, which adjoins Turkey.

On 13 March 2012, the Al Jazeera TV station, of the pro-jihad Thani royal family of Qatar, headlined “Inside Idlib: Saving Syria”, and opened

The Syrian government crackdown on the dissenting northern city of Idlib has continued for a third day, with casualties from random shelling and sniper fire mounting, and growing concerns for many citizens detained by government forces. “I can’t tell you what an unequal contest this is …. The phrase that we felt yesterday applied to it was ‘Shooting fish in a barrel’ – these people can’t escape, they can’t help themselves, they have very little weaponry, what can they do but sit there and take it?”

The UK Government had given Qatar to the Thanis in 1868. On 12 September 1868, Mohammed Bin Thani signed “an agreement with the British Political Resident Col. Lewis Pelly, which was considered as the first international recognition of the sovereignty of Qatar”; so, on that precise day, Britain’s Queen Victoria gave Qatar to his family, which owns it, to the present day. The Thanis are the leading financial backers of the Muslim Brotherhood, which spreads Thani influence to foreign countries. (At least up till 9/11, the Saud family have been the main financial backers of Al Qaeda.) The Thanis have been, along with the Sauds, the main financial backers of replacing the non-sectarian Syrian Government by a fundamentalist-Sunni Syrian Government. Whereas the Sauds want to control that new government, also the Thanis do, and this is one reason for the recent falling-out between those two families. America’s aristocracy prefers that Syria’s rulers will be selected by the Saud family, because they buy more weapons from the U.S. than does any other country. However, everything is transactional between aristocracies, and, so, international alliances can change. It’s always a jostling, everyone grabbing for whatever they can get: aristocracies operate no differently than crime-families do, because FDR’s dream of an anti-imperialistic U.N., which would set and enforce international laws, died when he did; we live instead in an internationally lawless world — he died far too soon. In a sense (at least ideologically), Hitler won, but, actually, Churchill did (he was as much an imperialist as Hitler and Mussolini were).

Anyway, uncounted tens of thousands of jihadists from all over the world descended upon Syria, funded by the Sauds and the Thanis, and armed and trained by the United States, to conquer Syria. At the Syrian Government’s request, Russia started bombing the jihadists on 30 September 2015. That air-support for the Syrian Army turned the war around. By the time of 4 May 2018, Britain’s Financial Times headlined “Idlib offers uncertain sanctuary to Syria’s defeated rebels” (“rebels” being the U.S. and UK Governments’ term for jihadists who were serving as the U.S., Saud and Thani, proxy-forces or mercenaries to conquer Syria) and reported (stenographically transmitting what the CIA and MI6 told them to say) that, “more than 70,000 rebels and civilians” — meaning jihadists and their families — who were “fleeing … the last rebel holdout near the capital,” had been given a choice, and this “choice was die in Ghouta, or leave for Idlib,” and chose to get onto the Government-supplied buses taking them to Idlib. So, perhaps unnumbered hundreds of thousands of jihadists did that, from all over Syria, and collecting them in Idlib.

As I reported on 10 May 2018:

On May 8th, Syria’s Government bannered, “6th batch of terrorists leave southern Damascus for northern Syria” and reported that “During the past five days, 218 buses carrying … terrorists with their families exited from the three towns to Jarablos and Idleb under the supervision of the Syrian Arab Red Crescent.” Jarablos (or “Jarabulus”) is a town or “District” in the Aleppo Governate; and Idleb (or “Idlib”) is the capital District in the adjoining Governate of Idlib, which Governate is immediately to the west of Aleppo Governate; and both Jarabulus and Idlib border on Turkey to the north. Those two towns in Syria’s far northwest are where captured jihadists are now being sent.

The Government is doing that because at this final stage in the 7-year-long war, it wants civilian deaths and additional destruction of buildings to be kept to a minimum, and so is offering jihadists the option of surviving instead of being forced to fight to the death (which would then require Syria’s Government to destroy the entire area that’s occupied by the terrorists); this way, these final clean-up operations against the terrorists won’t necessarily require bombing whole neighborhoods — surrenders thus become likelier, so as to end the war as soon as possible, and to keep destruction and civilian casualties at a minimum.

The Syrian and Russian Governments had planned to finish them off there in Idlib, so that none of them could escape back into their home countries to continue their jihad. However, the U.S. and its allies raised ‘humanitarian’ screams at the U.N. and other international organizations, in order to protect the ‘rebels’ against the ‘barbarous dictator’ of Syria, its President, Bashar al-Assad — just in order to create more anti-Assad (and anti-Russian, and anti-Iranian) propaganda. And, so, on 9 and 10 September 2018, Putin and Erdogan and Rouhani met in Rouhani’s Tehran to decide what to do. By that time, Erdogan was riding the fence between Washington and Moscow. On 17 September 2018, I headlined “Putin and Erdogan Plan Syria-Idlib DMZ as I Recommended” and reported that Putin and Rouhani entrusted Idlib to Erdogan, with the expectation that Erdogan would keep the jihadists penned-up there, so that Putin and Assad would be able to bomb them to hell after the ‘humanitarian crisis’ in Idlib would be no longer on front pages.

As things turned out, Erdogan double-crossed Putin and Rouhani, and just grabbed the territory.

The role of the United Nations in this has been to stand aside and pretend that it’s a ‘humanitarian crisis’ (as the U.S. regime wanted it to be called) instead of a U.S.-and-allied invasion, aggressive war, and consequently a vast war-crime such as Hitler’s top leaders were prosecuted and executed for at Nuremberg. As Miri Wood wrote, at Syria News, on 28 February 2018:

Members of the General Assembly must be in good financial standing to vote. Dues are on a sliding scale but do not factor in draconian sanctions against targeted members, nor crimes of war involved in their destruction. As such, CAR, Libya, Venezuela and Yemen have been stripped of their voting rights. The non-permanent SC members function as obedient House Servants to the P3 bullies, ever mindful of placing self-preservation above moral integrity.

So Truman’s U.N. turns out to be on the side of the new Nazism, against its victims.

Erdogan wants to be with the winners. He evidently believes that whatever empire he’ll be able to have will be just a vassal nation within the U.S. Empire. He had been extremely reluctant to accept this viewpoint, but, apparently, he now does. And so, now, Erdogan has become so confident that he has the backing of Christian-majority America and of Christian-majority Europe, so that Turkey’s Hagia Sophia, which had been “the world’s largest cathedral for nearly a thousand years, until Seville Cathedral was completed in 1520,” has finally become officially declared by the Turkish Government to be, instead, a mosque. He feels safe enough to insult the publics in the other NATO countries so as to be able now to assert publicly his support for Islam against Christianity, because he knows that NATO’s other aristocracies — all of them majority-Christian, and all of these aristocrats ruling their respective Christian-majority countries — don’t really give a damn about that. Amongst themselves, the concern for ‘heaven’ is all just for show, because they are far more interested to buy Paradise in the here-and-now, for themselves and for their families. As for any possible ‘afterlife’, it will be reflected in the big buildings and charities that will bear their names, after they’re gone. Erdogan feels safe, knowing that they’re all psychopaths. And, as for the publics anywhere — Syria, Libya, even in Turkey itself — they don’t matter, to him, any more than they do to the leaders of those other NATO countries.

Consequently, too, on July 18th, the American Herald Tribune headlined “As It Did in Libya, Turkey Recruits Syrian Militants to Fight in Azerbaijan”, and Khaled Iskef, a journalist for Beirut’s Almaydeen TV, reported, based on unnamed “private sources in the northern countryside of Aleppo,” that

Turkish forces started recruiting numbers of its armed fighters to send them to Azerbaijan in order to assist the Azerbaijani forces in confronting the Armenian army.

According to sources, Turkey opened special promotion offices in different parts of Afrin northern Aleppo, to attract the militants and encourage them to sign contracts by which they would move to fight in Azerbaijan for a period of six months, renewable in case they wanted to.

According to the contract, the militants receive a monthly salary of $2500, while the advantage of granting Turkish citizenship to the families of the militants in case they died is absent, contrary to the contracts that Turkey had signed with the armed men who wanted to move to Libya.

The sources said that Turkey has designated centers for registering militants wishing to fight in Azerbaijan within the towns of Genderes and Raju, along with Afrin city, and these centers have already started receiving requests by the militants.

Armenia is virtually 100% Christian, and, according to Wikipedia:

The Armenian Genocide^[c] (also known as the Armenian Holocaust)^[13] was the systematic mass murder and expulsion of 1.5 million^[b] ethnic Armenians carried out in Turkey and adjoining regions by the Ottoman government between 1914 and 1923.^[14][15] The starting date is conventionally held to be 24 April 1915, the day that Ottoman authorities rounded up, arrested, and deported from Constantinople (now Istanbul) to the region of Angora (Ankara), 235 to 270 Armenian intellectuals and community leaders, the majority of whom were eventually murdered.

So, the recruitment of fundamentalist-Sunni mercenaries in the areas of Syria that Turkey has captured, and sending those men “to assist the Azerbaijani forces in confronting the Armenian army,” is likewise consistent with the NATO member-country Turkey’s restoration of its former Ottoman Empire. Using these jihadist proxy-soldiers, NATO is now invading Christian Armenia.

However, Iskef was reporting without paying any attention to the aristocratic interests which were actually very much involved in what Erdogan was doing here. On July 19th, Cyril Widdershoven at the “Oil Price” site bannered “The Forgotten Conflict That Is Threatening Energy Markets” and he reported the economic geostrategic factors which were at stake in this now-emerging likely hot war, which is yet another “pipeline war,” and which pits Turkey against Russia. In this particular matter, Turkey has an authentic economic reason to become engaged in a possible hot war allied with Muslim Azerbaijan against Christian Armenia. Russia, yet again, would be backing Christian soldiers. Of course, NATO, also yet again, would be on the Muslim side, against the Christians. But, this time, NATO would be backing Azerbaijan, which is 85% Shiite. Consequently, in such a conflict, the U.S. could end up on the same side as Iran, and against Russia.

If history is any guide, aristocratic interests will take precedence over theocratic interests, but democratic interests — the interests of the publics that are involved — will be entirely ignored. The sheer hypocrisy of the U.S. regime exceeds anything in human history.

How can anybody not loathe the U.S. regime and its allies? Only by getting one’s ‘news’ from its ‘news’-media — especially (but not only) its mainstream ones.

For 12 years Brzezinski was my colleague at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, where I occupied the William E. Simon Chair in Political Economy. When I was elected to that chair, CSIS was a part of Georgetown University. However, the president of Georgetown University was one of those liberals who hated Henry Kissinger, who was also our colleague, and the university president also hated Ronald Reagan for his rhetoric, not for his deeds about which the Georgetown president was uninformed. So I also was unwelcome. Whatever I was worth to CSIS, Kissinger was worth more, and CSIS was not going to give up Henry Kissinger.

Therefore the strategic research institute split from Georgetown University. Brzezinski stayed with CSIS.

When my 1971 book, Alienation and the Soviet Economy, which had circulated clandestinely inside the Economic Institute of the Soviet Academy of Sciences in mimeographed form for years, was republished in 1990 with an introduction by University of California, Berkeley, Professor Aaron Wildavsky, Brzezinski, along with Robert Conquest and two members of the USSR Academy of Sciences provided cover endorsements for my book. Brzezinski wrote: «Professor Roberts’ explanation of Soviet economic development is timely, and it fills a noticeable void in the existing literature. The book is beneficial reading for experts and non-experts alike who wish to understand the theoretical Marxian framework within which the Soviet economy grew and declined». 

I quote his endorsement for two reasons. One is to show upfront that I might be biased in my account of Brzezinski. The other is to establish that both Brzezinski and I did not regard the Soviet Union as a long-term threat. I expected the Soviet economy to fail, which it did, and Brzezinski expected the Soviet Union to breakup along nationality lines, which it did under Washington’s supervision. Although we were both Cold Warriors—I was a member of the Committee on the Present Danger—both of us favored a peaceful, not a war or conflict resolution of the Cold War. Brzezinski was most certainly not a Neoconservative determined to remove Russia as a constraint on American unilateralism. Brzezinski, as National Security Advisor to President Carter, did not prevent SALT 2, which the Carter Administration honored despite the refusal of the US Senate to ratify it.

Brzezinski was born in Warsaw, Poland in 1928. His father was a Polish diplomat posted to Germany and the Soviet Union. In 1938 Brzezinski’s father was posted to Montreal, Canada, as Consul General. The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and the Yalta Conference in which Churchill and FDR assigned Poland to the «Soviet sphere of influence» resulted in Brzezinski growing up in Canada where he was educated. Subsequently he obtained a Ph.D. from Harvard University and became a professor at that university. Brzezinski has all the conspiracy marks against him. He was a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Bilderberg Group. Fortunately for me, when I was nominated for membership in the Council on Foreign Relations, I was blackballed.

Brzezinski being Polish and his wife also being Eastern European is enough to explain his animosity toward Russia. However, Brzezinski was not a warmonger. He was an advisor to Hubert Humphrey’s presidential campaign, advocated de-escalation of US involvement in the Vietnam war and resigned from a US State Department position in protest to Washington’s expansion of the Vietnam war. 

Simultaneously, he opposed George McGovern’s pacifism.

In my opinion, for what it is worth, Brzezinski wanted to make sure that America held on long enough for the Soviet Union to collapse from its internal contradictions. Brzezinski did not seek to impose American world hegemony. This is a neoconservative goal, not a Cold Warrior’s goal. As President Reagan emphasized, the point of «winning» the Cold War was to end it, not to achieve hegemony over the other party. Brzezinski’s strategy as National Security Advisor toward luring the Soviets into Afghanistan was to weaken the Soviet Union and, thereby, hasten an end to the Cold War.

These are the facts as I experienced them. If I am correct, the truth is different from what we are hearing both from the Russian and Western media, both of which portray Brzezinski as not only evil in wanting to destroy the Soviet Union, but also as the Cold Warrior who created the Cold War, a war that had begun three decades prior to Brzezinski’s rise as National Security Advisor.

It is ironic that Brzezinski’s approach to the Soviet Union is identical to Russia’s approach to the West today. Brzezinski preferred in place of Nixon/Kissinger detente to emphasize international law and human rights. This is Putin’s approach today toward Washington and Washington’s NATO vassals.

As I recall, Brzezinski wanted to use ideas, like V in V for Vendetta, against the Soviets and not military force. This, if memory serves, was the difference between Brzezinski and the military/security complex, which preferred force, and Secretary of State Cyrus Vance, who preferred arms control.

I was born into The Matrix. It took many decades, insider experience, and fortuitous experiences for me to escape. Brzezinski might have been one of the fortuitous events. I remember him telling me that as National Security Advisor he was awakened in the middle of the night with the message that a couple hundred Soviet ICBMs were on their way to America. Before he could clear his mind, he was told that it was severtal thousand ICBMs on their way to destroy America. As the futility of a response hit him, a third message reached him that it was all a mistake from a training exercise somehow being transferred into the early warning network.

In other words, Brzezinski understood how easy it was for mistakes to launch a nuclear holocaust. He wanted to end the Cold War for the same reason that Ronald Reagan wanted to end the Cold War. To make Brzezinski and Reagan the villains, as the left-wing does, when the real villains are the Clinton, George W. Bush, and Obama regimes that have convinced Russia that Washington is preparing a nuclear first strike on Russia, is a form of ideological idiocy.

But idiocy in the West is what we live with. The question is: how much longer can we survive our idiocy?

I think that the «Soviet Threat», the basis for the Cold War, was a hoax. It was created by the military/security complex, about which President Eisenhower warned us to no effect. The patriotic war movies, the patriotic Memorial Days and July 4ths with emotional thanks to those who died «saving our freedoms», which were never in danger from the Japanese and Germans, only from our own government, succeeded in brainwashing even National Security Advisors. Little wonder the insouciance of the American population today.

The Cold War was an orchestration of the military/security complex, and there are many victims. Brzezinski was a victim as the Cold War was his life. JFK was a victim as he lost his life to it. The Vietnamese, who died in the millions, were victims The photo of the naked young Vietnamese girl fleeing down the road in terror from the American napalm behind her made us aware that the Cold War had many innocent victims. The Soviet troops sent to Afghanistan were victims as were the Afghans themselves.

The Soviet Threat removed itself when hardline communists arrested Soviet President Gorbachev. This ill-conceived intervention collapsed the Soviet Union. With the Soviet Threat removed, the US military/security complex no longer had a justification for its massive budget. 

Treading water while looking for a new justification for bleeding the American taxpayer, the military/security complex had President Clinton declare the US to be the World Policeman and to destroy Yugoslavia in the name of «human rights». With Israeli and neoconservative input, the military/security complex used 9/11 to create the «Muslin Terrorist Threat». This hoax has now murdered, maimed, dispossessed, and displaced millions of Muslims in seven countries.

Despite 16 years of Washington’s wars against countries ranging from North Africa to Iraq, Syria, Yemen and Afghanistan, the «Muslim threat» does not suffice to justify the $1.1 trillion US military/security annual budget. Consequently, the Russian Threat has been resurrected. 

The Muslim Threat was never a danger to the US. It is only a danger to Washington’s European vassal states, who had to accept millions of Muslim refugees from Washington’s wars. However, the newly created Russian Threat is a threat to every American as well as to every European. 

Russia can bite back. For a quarter century Russia has watched Washington prepare for a paralyzing nuclear strike on Russia. Recently, the Russian High Command announced that the Russian military has concluded that Washington does intend a surprise nuclear strike against Russia.

This dire Russian announcement received no western press coverage. No high official of any Western government, Trump included, called Putin to give reassurances that no such attack on Russia was being planned.

So, what happens next time when a false alarm, such as the one Brzezinski received, is received by his counterpart in Moscow or the National Security Council. Will the animosities resurrected by the evil US military/security complex result in the Russians or the US believing the false signal?

The insouciant populations of the West, including the members of the governments, do not appreciate that they are living on the edge of nuclear destruction.

The very few of us who alert you are dismissed as «Russian agents», «anti-Semites», and «conspiracy theorists». When you hear a source called a «Russian agent», an «anti-Semite», or a «conspiracy theorist», you had better listen to them. These are those in the know who accept arrow slings in order to tell you the truth.

You will never, ever, get the truth from the Western media or from any Western government.

The most important truth of our time is that the world lives on the knife-edge of the American military/security complex’s need for an enemy in order to keep profits flowing. The brutal fact is this: For the sake of its profits, the American military/security complex has subjected the entire world to the risk of nuclear Armageddon. 

The main architect of Washington’s plan to rule the world has abandoned the scheme and called for the forging of ties with Russia and China. While Zbigniew Brzezinski’s article in The American Interest titled “Towards a Global Realignment” has largely been ignored by the media, it shows that powerful members of the policymaking establishment no longer believe that Washington will prevail in its quest to extent US hegemony across the Middle East and Asia.

Brzezinski, who was the main proponent of this idea and who drew up the blueprint for imperial expansion in his 1997 book The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives, has done an about-face and called for a dramatic revising of the strategy. Here’s an excerpt from the article in the AI:

“As its era of global dominance ends, the United States needs to take the lead in realigning the global power architecture.

Five basic verities regarding the emerging redistribution of global political power and the violent political awakening in the Middle East are signaling the coming of a new global realignment.

The first of these verities is that the United States is still the world’s politically, economically, and militarily most powerful entity but, given complex geopolitical shifts in regional balances, it is no longer the globally imperial power.” (Toward a Global Realignment, Zbigniew Brzezinski, The American Interest)

Repeat: The US is “no longer the globally imperial power.” Compare this assessment to a statement Brzezinski made years earlier in Chessboard when he claimed the US was ” the world’s paramount power.”

“…The last decade of the twentieth century has witnessed a tectonic shift in world affairs. For the first time ever, a non-Eurasian power has emerged not only as a key arbiter of Eurasian power relations but also as the world’s paramount power. The defeat and collapse of the Soviet Union was the final step in the rapid ascendance of a Western Hemisphere power, the United States, as the sole and, indeed, the first truly global power.” (“The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy And Its Geostrategic Imperatives,” Zbigniew Brzezinski, Basic Books, 1997, p. xiii)

Here’s more from the article in the AI:

“The fact is that there has never been a truly “dominant” global power until the emergence of America on the world scene….. The decisive new global reality was the appearance on the world scene of America as simultaneously the richest and militarily the most powerful player. During the latter part of the 20th century no other power even came close. That era is now ending.” (AI)

But why is “that era is now ending”? What’s changed since 1997 when Brzezinski referred to the US as the “world’s paramount power”?

Brzezinski points to the rise of Russia and China, the weakness of Europe and the “violent political awakening among post-colonial Muslims” as the proximate causes of this sudden reversal. His comments on Islam are particularly instructive in that he provides a rational explanation for terrorism rather than the typical government boilerplate about “hating our freedoms.”

To his credit, Brzezinski sees the outbreak of terror as the “welling up of historical grievances” (from “deeply felt sense of injustice”) not as the mindless violence of fanatical psychopaths.

Naturally, in a short 1,500-word article, Brzezniski can’t cover all the challenges (or threats) the US might face in the future. But it’s clear that what he’s most worried about is the strengthening of economic, political and military ties between Russia, China, Iran, Turkey and the other Central Asian states. This is his main area of concern, in fact, he even anticipated this problem in 1997 when he wrote Chessboard. Here’s what he said:

“Henceforth, the United States may have to determine how to cope with regional coalitions that seek to push America out of Eurasia, thereby threatening America’s status as a global power.” (p.55)

“…To put it in a terminology that harkens back to the more brutal age of ancient empires, the three grand imperatives of imperial geostrategy are to prevent collusion and maintain security dependence among the vassals, to keep tributaries pliant and protected, and to keep the barbarians from coming together.” (p.40)

“…prevent collusion…among the vassals.” That says it all, doesn’t it?

The Obama administration’s reckless foreign policy, particularly the toppling of governments in Libya and Ukraine, has greatly accelerated the rate at which these anti-American coalitions have formed. In other words, Washington’s enemies have emerged in response to Washington’s behavior. Obama can only blame himself.

Russian Federation President Vladimir Putin has responded to the growing threat of regional instability and the placing of NATO forces on Russia’s borders by strengthening alliances with countries on Russia’s perimeter and across the Middle East.

At the same time, Putin and his colleagues in the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) countries have established an alternate banking system (BRICS Bank and AIIB) that will eventually challenge the dollar-dominated system that is the source of US global power.

This is why Brzezinski has done a quick 180 and abandoned the plan for US hegemony; it is because he is concerned about the dangers of a non-dollar-based system arising among the developing and unaligned countries that would replace the western Central Bank oligopoly.

If that happens, then the US will lose its stranglehold on the global economy and the extortionist system whereby fishwrap greenbacks are exchanged for valuable goods and services will come to an end.

Unfortunately, Brzezinski’s more cautious approach is not likely to be followed by presidential-favorite Hillary Clinton who is a firm believer in imperial expansion through force of arms. It was Clinton who first introduced “pivot” to the strategic lexicon in a speech she gave in 2010 titled “America’s Pacific Century”. Here’s an excerpt from the speech that appeared in Foreign Policymagazine:

“As the war in Iraq winds down and America begins to withdraw its forces from Afghanistan, the United States stands at a pivot point. Over the last 10 years, we have allocated immense resources to those two theaters. In the next 10 years, we need to be smart and systematic about where we invest time and energy, so that we put ourselves in the best position to sustain our leadership, secure our interests, and advance our values. One of the most important tasks of American statecraft over the next decade will therefore be to lock in a substantially increased investment — diplomatic, economic, strategic, and otherwise — in the Asia-Pacific region…

Harnessing Asia’s growth and dynamism is central to American economic and strategic interests and a key priority for President Obama. Open markets in Asia provide the United States with unprecedented opportunities for investment, trade, and access to cutting-edge technology…..American firms (need) to tap into the vast and growing consumer base of Asia…

The region already generates more than half of global output and nearly half of global trade. As we strive to meet President Obama’s goal of doubling exports by 2015, we are looking for opportunities to do even more business in Asia…and our investment opportunities in Asia’s dynamic markets.”

(“America’s Pacific Century”, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton”, Foreign Policy Magazine, 2011)

Compare Clinton’s speech to comments Brzezinski made in Chessboard 14 years earlier:

“For America, the chief geopolitical prize is Eurasia… (p.30)… Eurasia is the globe’s largest continent and is geopolitically axial. A power that dominates Eurasia would control two of the world’s three most advanced and economically productive regions… About 75 per cent of the world’s people live in Eurasia, and most of the world’s physical wealth is there as well, both in its enterprises and underneath its soil. Eurasia accounts for 60 per cent of the world’s GNP and about three-fourths of the world’s known energy resources.” (p.31)

The strategic objectives are identical, the only difference is that Brzezinski has made a course correction based on changing circumstances and the growing resistance to US bullying, domination and sanctions. We have not yet reached the tipping point for US primacy, but that day is fast approaching and Brzezinski knows it.

In contrast, Clinton is still fully-committed to expanding US hegemony across Asia. She doesn’t understand the risks this poses for the country or the world. She’s going to persist with the interventions until the US war-making juggernaut is stopped dead-in-its-tracks which, judging by her hyperbolic rhetoric, will probably happen some time in her first term.

Brzezinski presents a rational but self-serving plan to climb-down, minimize future conflicts, avoid a nuclear conflagration and preserve the global order. (aka–The “dollar system”) But will bloodthirsty Hillary follow his advice?

Not a chance.

4thmedia.org

In the US Presidential contest this year, the big foreign-affairs issue that separates Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump on one side, and all of the other candidates on the other, is whether to prioritize killing jihadists, above defeating Assad and any other ally of Russia.

Both Sanders and Trump say that killing jihadists is definitely the top priority. Hillary Clinton and the other Republicans say that both priorities are equal and must be pursued with equal vigor, even though that will mean helping the jihadists whenever they’re causing damage to Russia or to Russia’s allies – such as to Assad in Syria. Judging Obama by his actions not his (lying) words, he’s on the side of Clinton and the other (the self-acknowledged) Republicans. The reality is that anyone (such as Clinton, Cruz, and Kasich) who says that both priorities are equal, is really in favor of placing the defeat of Russia as being a higher priority than killing jihadists – but for political reasons can’t afford to admit it publicly. Those candidates are actually the candidates who (like the Bushes and the Clintons) represent the Saud family, who financed al-Qaeda before 9/11, and who continued doing it after 9/11, and whose friends the other Arab royal families, are financing the other jihadist organizations.

On the one side in this ongoing international war are Russia and its few allies, which include the Shiites, both the secular Assad in Syria, and the fundamentalist Khamenei in Iran; and, on the other side are the United States and its many allies, which include the fundamentalist Sunni royal families, which own Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait, UAE, Bahrain, and Oman, but which also include the fundamentalist Sunni, Tayyip Erdogan, in Turkey, who is the Saud family’s agent in the US-led NATO anti-Russian military club. And, of course, NATO and Japan are also on the American team. And so is Israel.

This is geopolitics, the contest for power between the two blocs of aristocracies – the US-Saudi-led bloc on the one side, versus the much smaller Russia-led bloc on the other.

Here is how Brzezinski put it, on page 46 of his classic 1997 statement of the position of the US-Saudi-led bloc, in his book The Grand Chessboard, where he was discussing specifically Ukraine, and also explaining why the West must support the fundamentalist Sunni, or jihadist, groups that threaten to break up and thus weaken or destroy Russia:

«Ukraine, a new and important space on the Eurasian chessboard, is a geopolitical pivot because its very existence as an independent country helps to transform Russia. Without Ukraine, Russia ceases to be a Eurasian empire. Russia without Ukraine can still strive for imperial status, but it would then become a predominantly Asian imperial state, more likely to be drawn into debilitating conflicts with aroused Central Asians, who would then be resentful of the loss of their recent independence and would be supported by their fellow Islamic states to the south … However, if Moscow regains control over Ukraine, with its 52 million people and major resources as well as its access to the Black Sea, Russia automatically again regains the wherewithal to become a powerful imperial state, spanning Europe and Asia».

Brzezinski was born a Polish nobleman, to a family who were dispossessed by Russians, and he never lost his hatred of Russians. In 1973, he and his friend David Rockefeller (like the Arab royals a hereditary oil-billionaire) founded the Trilateral Commission, to coordinate America and Europe and Japan, so as to conquer Russia by breaking it up – classic divide-and-conquer aristocratic thinking. That’s what his Grand Chessboard is all about: conquest, for global dominance. To understand not only Obama but the Bushes, and the Clintons, that book is the classic. And the reason why the American aristocracy loathes both Sanders and Trump – different though those two candidates are – is that both candidates present the first possibility since the end of the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact in 1991 to end the purely aristocratic war that has continued on since then (with the public financing it via their taxes, and providing the corpses for it in Libya, Ukraine, Syria, and a few other places) to conquer Russia.

Obama is an extraordinarily gifted politician, notwithstanding any deficiencies he has as a national leader, and so here was from his brief exchange (and there was no follow-up on this question) dealing with his biggest achievement and his biggest error as President, speaking with Chris Wallace of Fox News and telecast on April 10^th:

«WALLACE: Worst mistake?

OBAMA: Probably failing to plan for the day after what I think was the right thing to do in intervening in Libya».

But, even without any follow-up question, that actually says a lot: it says that, though Obama didn’t even «plan for the day after» (a shocking admission, which really shows the abysmal caliber of the man), his bombing Libya till Muammar Gaddafi was killed «was the right thing to do». (George W Bush feels the same about his having gotten rid of another Russia-ally, Saddam Hussein.) And, of course, the unasked question there was: Why? Why was it «the right thing to do»? But, if his foreign policy is driven obsessively by the goal of taking down the leader of any nation who is friendly toward Russia, then it does make sense, after all – the same sense as what Obama also did to Yanukovych in Ukraine, and is still so persistently trying to do to Assad in Syria. (And Chris Wallace’s having not even noticed that he had, just then, elicited from Obama the most shocking statement in Obama’s entire Presidency, showed that that TV network of psychopaths was functioning true-to-form – the interviewer didn’t even care that the US President had perpetrated a huge bombing campaign without even concerning himself about what the consequences would be – other than to get rid of a leader who was friendly to Russia.)

And, as regards America’s future international relations, the continuance (or not) of this psychopathic goal, is the top issue in the current US Presidential campaign. Whereas the American public don’t even think much about it, America’s billionaires certainly do, which is why they’re pouring billions into the campaigns of Hillary Clinton, Ted Cruz, and the other candidates who want to continue that goal (taking control of Russia), but with even more intensity than Obama has been doing.

Properly understood, history isn’t only about the past; it is, far more importantly, about the future. That’s why the aristocracy don’t finance the careers of truthful historians: the public is supposed to believe the myths, which have been shaped by the aristocracy in the past. Truthful history would endanger the aristocracy. And that’s why the public isn’t supposed to know such things as, «Why Obama Prioritizes Ousting Assad Over Defeating Syria’s Jihadists», nor even to know that he does. But, he does; and here has been provided an explanation as to why he does (and understanding why, will pose an even greater threat to the aristocracy – which is why few media will publish this).

The con isn’t supposed to be known; or, if it’s known, it’s not supposed to be noticed.

«OBAMA: Probably failing to plan for the day after what I think was the right thing to do in intervening in Libya».

And that’s also the reason «Why Obama Prioritizes Ousting Assad Over Defeating Syria’s Jihadists». He says: doing it in Libya was his «worst mistake». But he cares so little, that he’s trying to do it again, in Syria. He’s true-to-form, for a psychopath.

And this answers the question, as well as it can be answered. It’s not a matter of corpses, and bloodshed, and immiserated nations, to him; it’s «The Grand Chessboard». He simply wants to be the person at the mountaintop, even if it’s a mountain of corpses. Or, maybe, especially if it’s a mountain of corpses. This has been the way of aristocracies for thousands of years, and he’s a natural at it. Just a natural. Especially because the CIA has been aiming since at least 1957 to overthrow the Ba’ath Party as Syria’s leadership, and to replace them with a partitioned Syria, whose key oil-and-gas pipeline route would be controlled by a fundamentalist-Sunni ally of the Sauds.

After all, the Grand Chessboard may be just a game, but it can be a very profitable one, for the right people.

Reports say some American-backed jihadi groups are being equipped with US-made MANPADS. Indications are they’re obtaining these advanced weapons either directly or indirectly from the US or its Mideast allies in connection with a recent escalation in the fighting in Syria.

On April 2, fighting broke out between western-backed al-Qaeda affiliates and the Syrian army, ending the Syrian ceasefire. The groups that broke the ceasefire included al-Qaeda in Syria (al-Nusra), the Chinese Uyghur Turkistan Islamic Party (TIP), The Levant Brigade, the Freemen of Syria (Ahrar ash-Sham), Division 13, and other jihadi groups. According to AP, the US-trained and armed Division 13 is now fighting alongside al-Nusra and Ahrar al-Sham. The latter two are part of the Turkey/Saudi/Qatar-backed Army of Conquest».

That report goes on to document, essentially, that US President Barack Obama is continuing his efforts to replace the the only secular, non-sectarian government in the Middle East, that of the Ba’athist Party, which has always been the only non-religious political party in the Arab world – everything else in Arabia has been fundamentalist-Sunni, to at least some extent. (Think of it: after 9/11, the US government aiding al-Qaeda! The US government is more against Russia than it’s against jihadists – though Russia never invaded the US, and communism is gone!)

Dr Lin quotes a Saudi official as saying (in Germany’s Spiegel), «We believe that introducing surface-to-air missiles in Syria is going to change the balance of power on the ground… just like surface-to-air missiles in Afghanistan were able to change the balance of power there». He was referring there to this in 1979, where Obama’s friend Zbigniew Brzezinski explained why the Americans and the Saudis were supplying SAMs to the mujahideen who became al-Qaeda, and he was also referring to this in 1998, where Brzezinski, when asked whether he thought that arming those fundamentalist Sunnis had been a mistake, said that it certainly was not. Obama is continuing in that vein. Brzezinski still was talking there as if Russia equals the USSR, equals «the enemy». Obama acts from that same viewpoint – the viewpoint that will end either in WW III, or in Russia’s capitulation to the US aristocracy.

In their view, the end of communism, and the end of the Soviet Union, and the end of the Soviets’ Warsaw Pact (which was their counterpart to America’s NATO alliance), made and make no difference, and Syria should be ruled by jihadist groups, because its current government is allied with Russia, and Russia always tries to kill jihadists, never allies with them (as the US does).

Obama overthrew the Russia-friendly government of Ukraine and replaced it with an anti-Russian government; he also led the NATO bombing campaign that overthrew the Russia-friendly leader of Libya, Muammar Gaddafi; and he has since been trying to do the same thing in Syria, to Assad.

Dr Lin continues:

«Now, if it turns out that al-Qaeda affiliates in Syria are indeed armed with MANPADS, it would amount to what former CIA director David Petraeus called ‘our worst nightmare’. The missile would do far more than improve terrorist groups’ military capabilities to conduct future attacks.

A 2005 RAND study also concluded that Jihadists shooting down a civilian airliner would put a temporary freeze on worldwide air travel, causing a $15 billion loss to the world economy. More than a decade after this study, the present-day economic loss would be substantially higher than $15 billion».

Dr Lin’s calling this a «blunder» from Obama is based upon an assumption that Obama isn’t aware of the harms that he’s causing by what he’s doing; but, on the same day, a report, including shocking documentation from Jane’s (the specialist site about military matters), makes clear that Obama is determined to overthrow Assad no matter what the consequences.

The anonymous «Moon of Alabama» blogger posted at Global Research on April 8^th, «US Delivers 3,000 Tons Of Weapons And Ammo To Al-Qaeda and Co. in Syria». Shown there is the «Simplified packing list for December 2015 arms» that were sent. The anonymous blogger explained:

«One ship with nearly one thousand tons of weapons and ammo left Constanta in Romania on December 5. The weapons are from Bulgaria, Croatia and Romania. It sailed to Agalar in Turkey which has a military pier and then to Aqaba in Jordan. Another ship with more than two-thousand tons of weapons and ammo left in late March, followed the same route and was last recorded on its way to Aqaba on April 4.

We already knew that the ‘rebels’ in Syria received plenty of weapons during the official ceasefire. We also know that these ‘rebels’ regularly deliver half of their weapon hauls from Turkey and Jordan to al-Qaeda in Syria (aka Jabhat al-Nusra):

Hard-core Islamists in the Nusra Front have long outgunned the more secular, nationalist, Western-supported rebels. According to FSA officers, Nusra routinely harvests up to half the weapons supplied by the Friends of Syria, a collection of countries opposed to Assad…

US and Turkey supported ‘rebels’ took part in the recent attack on Tal al-Eis against Syrian government forces which was launched with three suicide bombs by al-Qaeda in Syria. This was an indisputable breaking of the ceasefire agreement between Russia and the US. It is very likely that some of the weapons and ammunition the US delivered in December were used in this attack».

Consequently, Obama is clearly determined to supply weapons to the jihadists until they win. This is no «blunder». It’s a determination to beat Putin, no matter what. It has consequences not only for the US and for Russia, but for the countries that America invades or whose governments America overthrows. Here are those consequences.

The «2016 Global Emotions Report» by Gallup, surveying over a thousand people in each one of 140 different nations, found that, by far, the people in Syria had «the lowest positive experiences worldwide», the people there were far more miserable than in any other nation. The score was 36 (on a scale to 100). Second and third worst were tied at 51: Turkey because of the tightening dictatorship there as Turkey has become one of Obama’s key allies in toppling Assad; Nepal, on account of the earthquake. Then tied at 54, were three countries, the fourth, fifth, and sixth, most-miserable places to live: Georgia, which still hasn’t recovered from the US-backed wars against Abkhazia and South Ossetia, where the majority want to be part of Russia; Serbia, where the majority are opposed to the government’s move to enter NATO; and Iraq, which still hasn’t recovered from Bush’s 2003 invasion. Then tied at 55, are five countries, the seventh-through-eleventh-most-miserable nations: Yemen, where America’s ally the Sauds are dropping American bombs onto Shiite neighborhoods; Bosnia and Herzegovina, which still hasn’t recovered from the civil war and the US bombing; Lithuania, which became impoverished by IMF-imposition of economic austerity, which has prevented economic recovery; Belarus, which will probably be the last country in the world to break away from Marxism; and, finally, the 11th-worst, Ukraine, which prior to the US coup, was less miserable than 29 countries and had a score of 60, which was 5 points higher than today’s – Obama’s coup there has definitely immiserated the Ukrainian people (not to mention displaced millions and slaughtered thousands by the ethnic-cleansing campaign against residents of the former Donbass region of Ukraine).

To what extent would it be sincere, or even honest, then, for the US President to say this?:

«America’s willingness to apply force around the world is the ultimate safeguard against chaos, and America’s failure to act in the face of Syrian brutality or Russian provocations not only violates our conscience, but invites escalating aggression in the future… In Ukraine, Russia’s recent actions recall the days when Soviet tanks rolled into Eastern Europe. But this isn’t the Cold War. Our ability to shape world opinion helped isolate Russia right away. Because of American leadership, the world immediately condemned Russian actions; Europe and the G7 joined us to impose sanctions; NATO reinforced our commitment to Eastern European allies; the IMF is helping to stabilize Ukraine’s economy; OSCE monitors brought the eyes of the world to unstable parts of Ukraine. And this mobilization of world opinion and international institutions served as a counterweight to Russian propaganda and Russian troops on the border and armed militias in ski masks».

Those «armed militias in ski masks», incidentally, were US-CIA-hired mercenaries. He had to know that; he simply lied.

(to be continued)

First, here’s what the origin of jihadism isn’t: It’s not the «Arab-Israeli conflict», nor is jihadism a response to the West’s support of the barbarous way that Israel’s apartheid government (and the vast majority of Israel’s Jews) treat, and historically have treated, Palestinians. Even without that Israeli-Jewish barbarism and its support by Western countries, jihadism would exist, not much different than it today is.

In order to understand where jihadism really comes from, what’s necessary first is to understand the relationship that the Sauds, who are the royal family of Saudi Arabia, have with their clergy, who are the Wahhabist Islamic preachers, a relationship between the aristocracy and clergy in that area, which began in 1744, and which was subsequently combined with the oil-for-weapons trade and an alliance with the United States, that began in 1945, and that then was ignited by the petrodollar after Richard Nixon’s de-dollarization of gold in 1973. That’s what laid the ground for it.

And then, US President Jimmy Carter’s National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, a born Polish nobleman whose family hailed from the most anti-Russian part of Poland, and who was also a protégée of the oil-and-banking baron David Rockefeller, advised Carter in 1978 to import pro-Saudi fighters or «mujahedeen» (later called «Taliban») into the then-Soviet-allied Afghanistan, in order to create there a wave of terrorism that would drain Soviet resources necessary to preserve the Soviets’ Afghan ally, and thus help to bring down the Soviet Union.

It is, in short, an anti-Soviet operation that the West subsequently continued as an anti-Russian operation (especially in Chechnya but also in other predominantly Muslim parts of Russia), but that got out of control, and now bites the hands that fed and that continue to feed it.

Here is a video of Brzezinski, in 1979, in Pakistan, telling the Wahhabist Taliban encamped there, who had recently been driven out from Afghanistan by the new secular and Soviet-allied government there, to go back into Afghanistan, this time with US weapons and support, to fight again as mujahedeen there, because «God is on your side».

Here is Brzezinski, in 1998, bragging that he had done that, and saying: «Regret what? That secret operation was an excellent idea. It had the effect of drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap and you want me to regret it? The day that the Soviets officially crossed the border [into Afghanistan, to defend the new secular government in that land], I wrote to President Carter: We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam war.» The interview continued:

Q: And neither do you regret having supported the Islamic fundamentalism, having given arms and advice to future terrorists?

B: What is most important to the history of the world? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some stirred-up Moslems or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the cold war?

Q: Some stirred-up Moslems? But it has been said and repeated Islamic fundamentalism represents a world menace today.

B: Nonsense!»

It wouldn’t exist without the ideology, which is distinctly Wahhabist, known as «Salafist» outside of Saudi Arabia. But whatever it’s called, this Sunni branch of Islam is the religion that is held by all jihadists. The US built upon that Saudi base (and the very term «Al-Qaeda» means «the base»). And so, this ideology must be understood, because it is significant not only within Saudi Arabia, but wherever jihadists carry out their war against «the infidels» – against anyone who fails to adhere to all of the rituals and commands of this very severe faith.

Here is from the US Library of Congress’s 1992 book Saudi Arabia: A Country Study, by Helen Chapin Metz:

The Saud Family and Wahhabi Islam

The Al Saud [dynasty] originated in Ad Diriyah, in the center of Najd, close to the modern capital of Riyadh. Around 1500 ancestors of Saud ibn Muhammad took over some date groves, one of the few forms of agriculture the region could support, and settled there. Over time the area developed into a small town, and the clan that would become the Al Saud came to be recognized as its leaders.

The rise of Al Saud is closely linked with Muhammad ibn Abd al Wahhab (died 1792), a Muslim scholar whose ideas form the basis of the Wahhabi movement. He grew up in Uyaynah, an oasis in southern Najd, where he studied with his grandfather Hanbali Islamic law, one of the strictest Muslim legal schools. While still a young man, he left Uyaynah to study with other teachers, the usual way to pursue higher education in the Islamic world. He studied in Medina and then went to Iraq and to Iran.

To understand the significance of Muhammad ibn Abd al Wahhab's ideas, they must be considered in the context of Islamic practice. There was a difference between the established rituals clearly defined in religious texts that all Muslims perform and popular Islam. The latter refers to local practice that is not universal.

The Shia practice of visiting shrines is an example of a popular practice. The Shia continued to revere the Imams even after their death and so visited their graves to ask favors of the Imams buried there. Over time, Shia scholars rationalized the practice and it became established.

Some of the Arabian tribes came to attribute the same sort of power that the Shia recognized in the tomb of an Imam to natural objects such as trees and rocks. Such beliefs were particularly disturbing to Muhammad ibn Abd al Wahhab. In the late 1730s he returned to the Najdi town of Huraymila and began to write and preach against both Shia and local popular practices. He focused on the Muslim principle that there is only one God, and that God does not share his power with anyone – not Imams, and certainly not trees or rocks. From this unitarian principle, his students began to refer to themselves as muwahhidun (unitarians). Their detractors referred to them as «Wahhabis» – or followers of Muhammad ibn Abd al Wahhab», which had a pejorative connotation.

The idea of a unitary god was not new. Muhammad ibn Abd al Wahhab, however, attached political importance to it. He directed his attack against the Shia. He also sought out local leaders, trying to convince them that this was an Islamic issue. He expanded his message to include strict adherence to the principles of Islamic law. He referred to himself as a «reformer» and looked for a political figure who might give his ideas a wider audience.

Lacking political support in Huraymila, Muhammad ibn Abd al Wahhab returned to Uyaynah where he won over some local leaders. Uyaynah, however, was close to Al Hufuf, one of the Twelver Shia centers in eastern Arabia, and its leaders were understandably alarmed at the anti-Shia tone of the Wahhabi message. Partly as a result of their influence, Muhammad ibn Abd al Wahhab was obliged to leave Uyaynah, and headed for Ad Diriyah. He had earlier made contact with Muhammad ibn Saud, the leader in Ad Diriyah at the time, and two of Muhammad's brothers had accompanied him when he destroyed tomb shrines around Uyaynah.

Accordingly, when Muhammad ibn Abd al Wahhab arrived in Ad Diriyah, the Al Saud was ready to support him. In 1744 Muhammad ibn Saud and Muhammad ibn Abd al Wahhab swore a traditional Muslim oath in which they promised to work together to establish a state run according to Islamic principles. Until that time the Al Saud had been accepted as conventional tribal leaders whose rule was based on longstanding but vaguely defined authority.

Muhammad ibn Abd al Wahhab offered the Al Saud a clearly defined religious mission to which to contribute their leadership and upon which they might base their political authority. This sense of religious purpose remained evident in the political ideology of Saudi Arabia in the 1990s.

Muhammad ibn Saud began by leading armies into Najdi towns and villages to eradicate various popular and Shia practices. The movement helped to rally the towns and tribes of Najd to the Al Saud-Wahhabi standard. By 1765 Muhammad ibn Saud's forces had established Wahhabism – and with it the Al Saud political authority – over most of Najd.

After Muhammad ibn Saud died in 1765, his son, Abd al Aziz, continued the Wahhabi advance. In 1801 the Al Saud-Wahhabi armies attacked and sacked Karbala, the Shia shrine in eastern Iraq that commemorates the death of Husayn. In 1803 they moved to take control of Sunni towns in the Hijaz. Although the Wahhabis spared Mecca and Medina the destruction they visited upon Karbala, they destroyed monuments and grave markers that were being used for prayer to Muslim saints and for votive rituals, which the Wahhabis consider acts of polytheism. In destroying the objects that were the focus of these rituals, the Wahhabis sought to imitate Muhammad's destruction of pagan idols when he reentered Mecca in 628.

If the Al Saud had remained in Najd, the world would have paid them scant attention. But capturing the Hijaz brought the Al Saud empire into conflict with the rest of the Islamic world. The popular and Shia practices to which the Wahhabis objected were important to other Muslims, the majority of whom were alarmed that shrines were destroyed and access to the holy cities restricted.

Moreover, rule over the Hijaz was an important symbol. The Ottoman Turks, the most important political force in the Islamic world at the time, refused to concede rule over the Hijaz to local leaders. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the Ottomans were not in a position to recover the Hijaz, because the empire had been in decline for more than two centuries, and its forces were weak and overextended. Accordingly, the Ottomans delegated the recapture of the Hijaz to their most ambitious client, Muhammad Ali, the semi-independent commander of their garrison in Egypt. Muhammad Ali, in turn, handed the job to his son Tursun, who led a force to the Hijaz in 1816; Muhammad Ali later joined his son to command the force in person.

Meanwhile, Muhammad ibn Abd al Wahhab had died in 1792, and Abd al Aziz died shortly before the capture of Mecca. The movement had continued, however, to recognize the leadership of the Al Saud and so followed Abd al Aziz's son, Saud, until 1814; after Saud died in 1814, his son, Abd Allah, ruled. Accordingly, it was Abd Allah ibn Saud ibn Abd al Aziz who faced the invading Egyptian army [on behalf of Turkey’s Muslim ruler].

Tursun's forces took Mecca and Medina almost immediately. Abd Allah chose this time to retreat to the family's strongholds in Najd. Muhammad Ali decided to pursue him there, sending out another army under the command of his other son, Ibrahim. The Wahhabis made their stand at the traditional Al Saud capital of Ad Diriyah, where they managed to hold out for two years against superior Egyptian forces and weaponry. In the end, however, the Wahhabis proved no match for a modern army, and Ad Diriyah – and Abd Allah with it – fell in 1818.

(to be continued)

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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of They’re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity.