Biden is floundering, but not as grievously as his subordinate.

By Curt MILLS

As counterintuitive as it may seem, Americans have become accustomed to a strong vice president.

From neighboring Tennessee, Al Gore (veep from 1993-2001) was the Arkansan Bill Clinton’s Mississippi River brother of a sort… wonkish and weird, he was Gordon Brown to Clinton’s Tony Blair: It was one whole New Democrat package. It was enough to carry Al Jr. through Clinton’s impeachment (the president’s peccadillos offended the more buttoned-up Gore—though, who’s still married?)

When Gore narrowly and protractedly lost the presidency himself in 2000, it was the Democratic fringes who cried that an election was stolen. He was plausible presidential candidate through 2004 and 2008, and became the de facto Climate Man of the decade, in what may yet become the issue of the century, securing the quite arguably limp figure a true human legacy.

Dick Cheney (second chair from 2001-2009) was, of course, Dick Cheney.

Darth Vader himself, or so it’s said, was the anchoring force behind the cause of which this magazine was laudably founded to stand against: that is, the Iraq War. But, say what you will for the man, at least he got something done. From 2001 to 2006, the first year in which President George W. Bush was first delivered a Glenn Youngkin-sized humiliation of his own, Cheney was unassailable, if not essentially the president. Even after his W-delivered defrocking, Cheney was a leading candidate for the 2012 GOP nomination for a time, and his scion, Rep. Liz Cheney, remains perhaps former President Donald Trump’s pluckiest elected enemy. Cheney mattered. He was “BIG.”

His successor, some guy named Joe Biden, became the president. You know about him.

Even Mike Pence, much-maligned, deserves inclusion in the modern canon. Cut on as Mikey-one-note—Trump this, some Reaganite hit that—the Hoosier actually brought a lot to table, electorally and philosophically. As much as I’d like to flak for Chris Christie (Trump’s runner-up choice), it’s difficult to imagine that Trump weathers the Access Hollywood affair without Mr. Evangelical in his back pocket and at the bottom of the ticket.

In office, in terms of what Trump actually did, Pence’s fingerprints were all over it: a tax cut lusted over by House backbenchers like Pence for a generation, a criminal justice plan backed by Koch (a TAC supporter) and Pence’s canny caporegime Marc Short, to say nothing of the 45th president’s Iran policy, which Pence summed up in the final days of that White House: “They’re evil.” If Mike Pence was so unimportant, why would any ever propose hanging him?

Enter Madame Vice President.

Kamala Harris, first truly tipped for glory by Barack Obama in a bizarre retro read of a New Yorker article with David Remnick in the waning days of his presidency…big things were expected of her. From her days as San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown’s date to Frisco’s district attorney at the height of the tech boom, to the Golden State’s top law enforcement official, to its senator, to a presidential candidate with the politics and background that were a worthy, feminine successor to Obama’s own…it was supposed to be her.

When she became vice president, in the delirium of Covid-19 and Trump’s shambolic conclusion of a Washington tenure, her effectively 11th place showing in the 2019-2020 Democratic primary was supposed to be swept under the rug.

Nevermind how it all happened. Assailed as a racist by the California senator during the primary, future President Biden’s selection of a chief lieutenant was an unlikely one. But he boxed himself in. Biden made a pledge of a female (she/her…) vice president to seal the deal in the spring 2020 primary season. When George Floyd met his end, he had to eject his putative favorite, Sen. Amy Klobachur, for reasons both Minnesota and melanin. He needed a black woman—and stat. Biden considered Harris, Angelino Rep. Karen Bass, and Florida’s Congresswoman Val Demings (now prepping to run against Ron DeSantis).

But Biden, the seasoned pol, had a warranted phobia of anyone who had not run and won statewide. Resurfaced tales of Congresswoman Bass, her grandmotherly charm aside, hailing Fidel Castro were reminders of why Congresspeople from D+36 districts don’t usually wind up on national tickets (an interesting counterfactual: What would have happened if Barack Obama had defeated Black Panther Bobby Rush for Congress in 2000?). And Demmings was tossed aside, her career as a cop too outre for the spirit of 2020. Harris, the only female black Democratic senator, got the nod, at last, by default.

She arguably peaked there.

As we near Thanksgiving, Harris has little to thank her lucky stars over. She stands at Cheney-like notoriety, a 27.8 percent approval rating according to Suffolk University. Staff problems were clear, and whispers of frayed relations with The Boss abounded even before the White House’s sudden nosedive since summer. Or as Janan Ganesh puts forward in the Financial Times, arguing for a 2024 Democratic ejection of both Biden and Harris: “Harder to forget is the fact that she quit the party’s 2020 primaries early for lack of funds — some feat for a California senator. Among those who outlasted her was the mayor of Indiana’s fourth-largest city”… that is, perhaps Harris’ top rival, the crisp-as-a-chip, if deflating, Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg.

It’s not hard to conjure up the Harris buy low case: At this point even outright offending British royalty with American garishness, Biden bows out soon enough, and sets the stage for a Harris nomination and a “long and loud” 2024 campaign. The Democratic Party dares America: “Yeah, she’s not great, but are you really in for Trump, the sequel? Dear God.” 

So goes the pitch.

But it’s just as easy to dream up the opposite scenario: Both Harris and Biden are overwhelmed by events…Biden suffers the fate of the last most-experienced-guy ever to become president (George H.W. Bush) and somnolently loses re-election…and Harris goes as the elder Bush’s deputy, Dan Quayle, went. Biden has, thus far, done little to save her from this fate, giving the Californian the poison chalice portfolio of the U.S. Southern Border (especially given their party’s de facto open borders preference)… this is on top of the 46th president’s apparent passion for ejecting Harris to peripheral foreign theaters any time things get hot in Washington.

Come the 2024 season, it’s no longer unimaginable that Harris quietly suffers the fate of Quayle when he made his own White House volley in 1996 (this, after all, is what happened Harris the last time America got a full look).

“We were convinced that a winning campaign could have been accomplished and the necessary funds could have been raised,” Quayle, so convincingly, told the New York Times in 1995. Quayle’s legacy ended up being his radical staff, helmed by future Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol. One only wonders who a future Tucker Carlson (or Tucker Carlson) will be assailing as “some has-been functionary from the Kamala Harris offices in the 2020s” in the future, as Carlson blasted Kristol this week.

theamericanconservative.com

A scandal arose this week as President Putin took some time to denounce the Bolshevik Revolution at the Valdai Discussion Club saying:

“Just over a century ago, Russia objectively faced serious problems… Russia could have dealt with its problems gradually and in a civilised manner. But revolutionary shocks led to the collapse and disintegration of a great power… These examples from our history allow us to say that revolutions are not a way to settle a crisis but a way to aggravate it. No revolution was worth the damage it did to the human potential.”

How could a statesman so critical of the abuses of capitalism, and so masterful in combatting structures of modern imperialism, bemoan the Bolshevik revolution which gave rise to Soviet Russia? Doesn’t Putin respect Soviet Russian accomplishments including the sacrifices made to put down Hitler? How could Putin be a true anti-imperialist if he is an anti-revolutionary?

To do my part in resolving this paradox, let me begin by saying: it isn’t a paradox.

The fact is that Vladimir Putin is both an anti-imperialist, and also a revolutionary, just not in the way you might imagine. To understand what I mean, a certain lesson into recent history is in order.

Aborting a System of Win-Win Cooperation

The sad fact is that neither the Bolsheviks nor Mensheviks which emerged onto the stage of history at the turn of the 20th century were organically arising “peoples’ movements”.

Upon deeper analysis conducted by historians like Anthony Sutton, Kerry Bolton, and Robert Cowley, both organizations which eventually merged into a singular force, enjoyed vast financial patronage of western imperial powerhouses such as Paul Warburg, Jacob Schiff (head of Kuhn, Loeb & co.) and even Lord Alfred Milner- head of the newly formed Round Table Movement.

These characters bankrolled much of the Bolshevik movement as early as 1905 in order to destroy a truly revolutionary process that was spreading across much of the world in the wake of the Civil War.

One of the leading champions of this revolutionary process was Lincoln’s former bodyguard and the first Governor of Colorado William Gilpin. Governor Gilpin envisioned a world of sovereign nation states united by rail lines stretching through the Bering Strait and bringing all the continents and cultures into harmonious co-existence. In his famous 1890 ‘Cosmopolitan Railway’ Gilpin stated:

“The cosmopolitan railway will make the whole world one community. It will reduce the separate nations to families of our great nation… From extended intercommunication will arise a wider intercourse of human ideas and as the result, logical and philosophical reciprocities, which will become the germs for innumerable new developments; for in the track of intercommunication, enterprise and invention invariably follow and whatever facilitates one stimulates every other agency of progress.”

Describing the obvious brotherhood of Russia and the USA in spearheading this project, Gilpin wrote:

“It is a simple and plain proposition, that Russia and the United States, each having broad, uninhabited areas and limitless undeveloped resources, would by the expenditure of two or three hundred millions apiece for a highway of the nations through their now waste places, add a hundred fold to their wealth and power and influence. Nations which can spend in war their thousands of lives- the lives of the best and bravest of their sons and citizens- can surely afford a little of their surplus wealth and energy for such a work as this.” [p.35]

The American System Goes Global

Gilpin was not alone in this vision.

In fact, he represented a network of statesmen spread all across the globe who recognized that the only way to break out of the endless cycle of wars, usury and corruption which the Hobbesian structures of the British Empire maintained globally was through the adoption of an anti-Free Trade system known as “The American System of Political Economy”. This was a very different concept of “America” than the Pax Americana which has run roughshod over the world since WWII.

In Russia, this process found its champion in the figure of Sergei Witte (Finance Minister and Minister of Transportation from 1892-1903) who led a faction of the Russian intelligentsia in a struggle for progress and cooperation both internally and with allied nations against powerful forces committed to feudalism both within the Russian oligarchy and externally. The regressive forces which Witte had to contend with included powerful reactionary traditionalist forces who yearned for the good old days before Czar Alexander II freed the serfs and on the other extreme, the emergence of vast clusters of anarchist movements threatening to burn down the state in a replication of the Jacobin frenzy of the French revolution.

As Martin Sieff has demonstrated through his many writings on Prince Kropotkin, many of these anarchist networks enjoyed the patronage of powerful forces that cared little for the plight of the working class.

The international spread of the American System between 1876-1905 took the form of large-scale industrialisation and railroads. The funding mechanism was located in a practice that has fallen out of favor in the west (although has made a powerful comeback in China in recent years) called ‘dirigisme’- the emission of productive credit from state banks.

It was Witte who had spearheaded the Trans Siberian railway’s construction between 1890-1905 with plans to extend rail lines to China and beyond utilizing state directed capital and a blend of private enterprise. A fuller exposition of Witte’s fight will be unveiled in the next installment.

The British Empire which always relied on keeping nations divided, underdeveloped and dependent on the use of maritime shipping was not amused.

By controlling the international maritime choke points, the tiny island was able to exert its influence across the globe. Through the vigorous enforcement of laissez-faire doctrines of free trade, nations were blocked from protecting themselves from the financial warfare launched by the city of London against victim states (speculative volatility, usury, cheap dumping, cash cropping and drug running). Anyone wishing to engage in long term planning in the building up of the land-based transport corridors via rail, roads and industry would be easily sabotaged if the British System were shaping their world.

The international movement to break this system of evil was the only real revolutionary process animating the world during this time.

The Bolshevik Counter-Revolution: An Anglo-American Fraud

In 1905, Wall Street financier Jacob Schiff had given $200 million to the Japanese to assist their victory against the Russians during the 1904-05 Russo Japanese war. This generosity ultimately earned the banker the Medal of the Rising Sun in the in the Meiji Palace in 1907.

After crippling the Russian state and military (it’s navy was wiped out during the war), Schiff turned his attention to financing revolutionary activities within Russia itself. How money was spent by Schiff was difficult to say until 1949, when Schiff’s grandson John Schiff bragged to the New York Journal that his grandfather had given $20 million “for the triumph of communism in Russia.”

American journalist, and Schiff asset George Kennan played an instrumental role as perception manager of the revolution and bragged that he had converted 52,000 Russian soldiers imprisoned in Japan into Bolshevik revolutionaries. A March 24, 1917 interview recorded in the New York Times celebrating the revolution read:

“Mr. Kennan told of the work of the Friends of Russian Freedom in the revolution. He said that during the Russian-Japanese war he was in Tokyo, and that he was permitted to make visits among the 12,000 Russian prisoners in Japanese hands at the end of the first year of the war. He had conceived the idea of putting revolutionary propaganda into the hands of the Russian army.

The Japanese authorities favoured it and gave him permission. After which he sent to America for all the Russian revolutionary literature to be had…

‘The movement was financed by a New York banker you all know and love,’ he said, referring to Mr Schiff, ‘and soon we received a ton and a half of Russian revolutionary propaganda. At the end of the war 50,000 Russian officers and men went back to their country ardent revolutionists. The Friends of Russian Freedom had sowed 50,000 seeds of liberty in 100 Russian regiments. I do not know how many of these officers and men were in the Petrograd fortress last week, but we do know what part the army took in the revolution.’ “

Schiff himself jubilantly stated to the New York Times, March 18, 1917:

“May I through your columns give expression to my joy that the Russian nation, a great and good people, have at last effected their deliverance from centuries of autocratic oppression and through an almost bloodless revolution have now come into their own. Praised be God on high!”

Historian Kerry Bolton wrote of New York Federal Reserve director William Boyce Thompson who had been installed as head of the American Red Cross during the 1917 revolution and was largely recognized as the true U.S. ambassador to the government, saying:

“Thompson set himself up in royal manner in Petrograd reporting directly to Pres. Wilson and bypassing U.S. Ambassador Francis. Thompson provided funds from his own money, first to the Social Revolutionaries, to whom he gave one million rubles, and shortly after $1,000,000 to the Bolsheviks to spread their propaganda to Germany and Austria.”

Writing in 1962, historian Arsene de Goulevitch who experienced the events of 1917 firsthand wrote:

“In private interviews, I have been told that over 21 million rubles were spent by Lord Alfred Milner in financing the Russian Revolution… The financier just mentioned was by no means alone among the British to support the Russian revolution with large financial donations.” (1)

According to his own accounts, during the four months Leon Trotsky spent in New York in 1917, much of it was spent hobnobbing with the upper crust of Wall Street and being driven around in limousines (2).

Leon Trotsky’s Immortal Treachery

Leon Trotsky, who Lord Milner, Schiff, Paul Warburg etc always intended to be the leader of the movement that would take control over the dead bodies of the Romanovs, was fortunately ousted by the saner forces around Joseph Stalin in 1927.

As historian Grover Furr masterfully documents using recently declassified material, testimonies and other evidence from archives in the USA and Russia, Leon Trotsky made several attempts to return to power in Russia after his expulsion. He didn’t do this alone however, but largely with the help of fascist forces in Britain, Japan, Ukraine, and Germany all the way until the moment he met his untimely end in 1940. This will be the subject of a future review of Grover Furr’s work (3).

For all of Lenin’s many problems, he differed from Trotsky on two interconnected points of 1) a general belief in voluntarism and 2) a rejection of the theory of permanent revolution.

Where Lenin believed that productive labor could be channeled towards the improvement of productive forces of society, Trotsky believed that any such effort at peaceful productive improvement would lead only to decadence. Permanent revolution was thus needed to keep workers from falling into sloth amidst the eternal striving for global class struggle. In 1914, a frustrated Lenin spoke of Trotsky’s fetish saying: “he [Trotsky] deserted the Mensheviks and occupied a vacillating position, now co-operating with Martynov (the economist), now proclaiming his absurdly Left ‘permanent revolution’ theory.”

Another point of conflict between Lenin on the one side and Trotsky on the other centered on whether or not Russia should continue to participate in WWI.

Where Lenin wanted to bring Russia out of the insane conflict in the first moments of their coup in 1917, Trotsky and his close ally Bukharin demanded that Russia stay in the war with the aim of converting it into a total pan European (and ultimately global) revolution. Trotsky’s commitment to global socialist revolution vs Stalin’s commitment to “socialism in one country” was at the heart of an unbridgeable divide between the two revolutionaries throughout the years.

Parvus and the Pan-European Union

Trotsky’s close association with Alexander Israel Helphand (aka: Parvus) throughout the revolution of 1905 and beyond is also suspicious and should be considered in the context of a much broader imperial geopolitical strategy.

Parvus’ association with the Pan-European Union founded by Count Richard von Coudenhove-Kalergi in 1923 is another relevant anomaly that takes us into the deeper power structures lurking below the surface waves of history (4).

Other members of Coudenhove-Kalergi’s institution included likes of Benito Mussolini, Walter Lippman, Nazi finance minister Hjalmar Schacht and Nazi geopolitician Karl Haushofer, while financiers Max Warburg, Louis de Rothschild openly bankrolled the organization.

In 1932, Kalergi delivered a speech celebrating the great restoration of order that would emerge in the unified pan-European effort to put down Bolshevik anarchism saying: “This eternal war can end only with the constitution of a world republic…. The only way left to save the peace seems to be a politic of peaceful strength, on the model of the Roman Empire, that succeeded in having the longest period of peace in the west thanks to the supremacy of his legions.”

This group played a much greater role in history than many realize and set the stage for the European Union. Parvus’ close association with Vladimir Jabotinsky set the stage for the most fascist elements of Zionism to emerge in the wake of WWII, and Parvus’ work as propagandist and arms dealer for the leadership of the Young Turk movement (deployed to set a weakened Ottoman Empire on fire and provoke what became the Balkan Wars of 1912-13) can still be felt across the Turkish world to this day.

It is also noteworthy that none other than Otto von Hapsburg himself had run this organization for over 30 years and also created a sister organization called Dignitae Humanae Institute to ‘united the right of the world” under a gnostic Catholic veneer with a Clash of Civilizations rebranding for the alt right. As the ultra-liberalized dissolution of society proceeds expectedly apace under the moral mush of LBGTXYZ gobbledygook, pagan Gaia worship, and critical race theory, it is obvious that a knee jerk leap into radical conservativism will accelerate. Hence, a net has been cast to catch conservative fish.

Located in an 800 year old monastery in Trisulti, Otto Hapsburg’s organization has found a useful frontman in the form of a Jesuitical fascist right-wing priest of the American alt-right by the name of… Steve Bannon. (5)

Trotskyites Mutate into Neocons

I say this here and now just to draw a parallel in the reader’s mind to the strange transmogrification which leading Trotskyists took in the USA once their leader’s life was snuffed out in 1940. Trotsky’s body wasn’t even cold before such devotees as James Burnham, Max Schachtman, Albert Wohlsetter and Irving Kristol abandoned Trotskyite socialism and adopted a new rabidly right-wing paradigm, which came to be known as ‘neo-conservativism’.

This poisonous movement grew quickly throughout the Cold War and took over the USA over the dead bodies of JFK and his brother while unleashing a new global dis-order ‘clash of civilizations’ each-against-all logic onto the globe under the watch of the Trilateral Commission of Kissinger, Brzezinski and David Rockefeller.

I think we can intimate what Trotsky ultimately saw as the final destination for his aims of a global revolution of the masses, and willingness to collaborate with Nazis to achieve his ends by considering the writings of former Trotskyite James Burnham.

As Cynthia Chung pointed out in her recent article on the topic, Burnham, (Trotsky’s former personal assistant and a man known to many as the father of the neocons), saw the resolution to the Manichean problem of class struggle and Cold War in a one world fascist government. Right before Trotsky’s 1940 death, Burnham wrote an essay renouncing Dialectic Materialism in favor of the superior philosophy of Bertrand Russell as outlined in the 1913 Principia Scientifica, and hence his rebirth as a neocon was ensured (6).

The question now sits before us: Was Burnham’s conversion to Russell’s worldview inconsistent with the actual goals and mission of Leon Trotsky?

It is too often forgotten that Leon Trotsky, acting as chairman Of the technical and scientific board of industry, quite literally controlled all science policy of Russia from 1924-25. During this time, he wrote a 1924 pamphlet outlining his pro-eugenics vision of the future global order that would be brought into existence through the forces of Darwinian natural selection saying:

“The human species will once more enter into a state of radical transformation, and in his own hands, will become an object of the most complicated methods of artificial selection and mass psycho-physical training. This is entirely in accord with evolution… man will make his purpose to master his own feelings, to raise his instincts to a higher consciousness… to create a higher social biological type, or if you please, a superman.”

Whether we consider Trotsky’s relentless efforts to integrate Darwinism with Marxist Dialectic Materialism or the Neoconservative commitment to a Darwinian survival of the fittest ethic merged with a gnostic Christian end times doctrine, the effects are largely identical: Global chaos with a supposed point of rapture/synthesis to resolve the chaos of the material world. Getting to this destination, whereby a new order and new Nietzschean human being were to emerge, simply required a cleansing experience.

In this sense, Trotsky could be compared to a Russian version of his contemporary Jesuit Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. Where Chardin was tasked with merging Darwin’s theory of natural selection into Christianity, Trotsky was tasked with merging Darwin’s theory into the state religion of Marxist dialectic materialism in Russia. The end result in either case was identical.

The Frankfurt School Global Revolution

That cleansing experience would take the form of ritualistic climax of purgative violence which would usher in a state of total despair and thus a new scientific priesthood managing the slaves of the other under a renewed form of technocratic feudalism. But how would society be brought to such a state of despair such that the masses would clamor for a new age to be imposed upon them in the form of a one world technocratic government?

When Christianity, nationalism, and respect for family values still governed society, such a state of nihilistic despair requisite to achieve this breaking point was more than a little difficult to achieve.

Here the role of Trotsky’s associates Georg Lukacs, and Willi Munzenberg play an important role.

Both men were not only radical Bolsheviks but also founders of a new organization founded in 1923 known as the Institute for Social research founded in Frankfurt Germany, otherwise known as “The Frankfurt School”.

This group and their role in steering mass education, and culture over the ensuing century will be the topic of a future report.

Post-Script: A Final Word from Putin

In the midst of Putin’s Valdai Club speech, the Russian leader (who is a revolutionary although he is certainly no Marxist-Leninist) called out the social engineers masquerading as revolutionaries and social reformers today driving a parallel to the destructive ideology of the Bolsheviks of 1917:

“The advocates of so-called ‘social progress’ believe they are introducing humanity to some kind of a new and better consciousness. Godspeed, hoist the flags as we say, go right ahead. The only thing that I want to say now is that their prescriptions are not new at all. It may come as a surprise to some people, but Russia has been there already. After the 1917 revolution, the Bolsheviks, relying on the dogmas of Marx and Engels, also said that they would change existing ways and customs and not just political and economic ones, but the very notion of human morality and the foundations of a healthy society. The destruction of age-old values, religion and relations between people, up to and including the total rejection of family (we had that, too), encouragement to inform on loved ones – all this was proclaimed progress and, by the way, was widely supported around the world back then and was quite fashionable, same as today. By the way, the Bolsheviks were absolutely intolerant of opinions other than theirs.”

In the next article, we will explore the fight of Sergei Witte, Dimitry Mendeleyev and compare their vision for a world of win-win cooperation against the perversion of science and culture envisioned by Trotsky and his international imperial co-thinkers.

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

Notes

(1) Czarism and Revolution, published by Omni Publications in Hawthorne, 1962 French edition, pp. 224, 230)
(2) Leon Trotsky: My Life, New York publisher: Scribner’s, 1930, p. 277
(3) One of the best and more recent among Furr’s pioneering writing on this topic can be found in his New Evidence of Trotsky’s Conspiracy, Erythos Press, 2020. Furr’s website is also an invaluable resource.
(4) Parvus’s association with the Pan European Union and broader fascist operations across Turkey and the Middle East is laid out in Jeffrey Steinberg’s 2005 report “Cheney Revives Parvus’ Permanent War Madness”
(5) This fact gives new meaning to Bannon’s self-characterization as a Leninist. In an August 22, 2016 Daily Beast article, journalist Ronald Radosh described a conversation he had with Bannon two years earlier saying “we had a long talk about his approach to politics. He never called himself a “populist” or an “American nationalist,” as so many think of him today. “I’m a Leninist,” Bannon proudly proclaimed. Shocked, I asked him what he meant.
“Lenin,” he answered, “wanted to destroy the state, and that’s my goal too. I want to bring everything crashing down, and destroy all of today’s establishment.”
(6) In his Feb 1940 ‘Science and Style’, Burnham wrote: “Do you wish me to prepare a reading list, Comrade Trotsky? It would be long, ranging from the work of the brilliant mathematicians and logicians of the middle of the last century to one climax in the monumental Principia Mathematica of Russell and Whitehead (the historic turning point in modern logic), and then spreading out in many directions – one of the most fruitful represented by the scientists, mathematicians and logicians now cooperating in the new Encyclopedia of Unified Science.”

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.

Klaus Schwab, the architect of the World Economic Forum (f. 1971), a leading, if not the leading, influencer and funder for what will set the course for world economic policy outside of government, has been the cause of much concern and suspicion since his announcement of “The Great Reset” agenda at the 50^th annual meeting of the WEF in June 2020.

The Great Reset initiative is a somewhat vague call for the need for global stakeholders to coordinate a simultaneous “management” of the effects of COVID-19 on the global economy, which they have eerily named as “pandenomics.” This, we are told will be the new normal, the new reality that we will have to adjust ourselves to for the foreseeable future.

It should be known that at nearly its inception, the World Economic Forum had aligned itself with the Club of Rome, a think tank with an elite membership, founded in 1968, to address the problems of mankind. It was concluded by the Club of Rome in their extremely influential “Limits to Growth,” published in 1972, that such problems could not be solved on their own terms and that all were interrelated. In 1991, Club of Rome co-founder Sir Alexander King stated in the “The First Global Revolution” (an assessment of the first 30 years of the Club of Rome) that:

“In searching for a common enemy against whom we can unite, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like, would fit the bill. In their totality and their interactions these phenomena do constitute a common threat which must be confronted by everyone together. But in designating these dangers as the enemy, we fall into the trap, which we have already warned readers about, namely mistaking symptoms for causes. All these dangers are caused by human intervention in natural processes, and it is only through changed attitudes and behaviour that they can be overcome. The real enemy then is humanity itself.” [emphasis added]

It is no surprise that with such a conclusion, part of the solution prescribed was the need for population control.

However, what forms of population control was Klaus Schwab in particular thinking of?

In the late 1960s, Schwab attended Harvard and among his teachers was Sir Henry Kissinger, whom he has described as among the top figures who have most influenced his thinking over the course of his life.

[Henry Kissinger and his former pupil, Klaus Schwab, welcome former- UK PM Ted Heath at the 1980 WEF annual meeting. Source: World Economic Forum]

To get a better idea of the kinds of influences Sir Henry Kissinger had on young Klaus Schwab, we should take a look at Kissinger’s infamous NSSM-200 report: Implications of Worldwide Population Growth for US Security and Overseas Interests, otherwise known as “The Kissinger Report,” published in 1974. This report, declassified in 1989, was instrumental in transforming US foreign policy from pro-development/pro-industry to the promotion of under-development through totalitarian methods in support of population control. Kissinger states in the report:

“… if future numbers are to be kept within reasonable bounds, it is urgent that measures to reduce fertility be started and made effective in the 1970s and 1980s …[Financial] assistance will be given to other countries, considering such factors as population growth … Food and agricultural assistance is vital for any population sensitive development strategy … Allocation of scarce resources should take account of what steps a country is taking in population control … There is an alternative view that mandatory programs may be needed ..” [emphasis added]

For Kissinger, the US foreign policy orientation was mistaken on its emphasis of ending hunger by providing the means of industrial and scientific development to poor nations, according to Kissinger, such an initiative would only lead to further global disequilibrium as the new middle classes would consume more, and waste strategic resources.

In Thomas Malthus’ “Essay on the Principle of Population” (1799), he wrote:

“We should facilitate, instead of foolishly and vainly endeavoring to impede, the operations of nature in producing this mortality; and if we dread the too frequent visitation of the horrid form of famine, we should sedulously encourage the other forms of destruction, which we compel nature to use. In our towns we should make the streets narrower, crowd more people into the houses, and court the return of the plague.” [emphasis added]

As a staunch Malthusian, Kissinger believed that “nature” had provided the means to cull the herd, and by using economic policies that utilised the courting of the plague, famine and so forth, they were simply enforcing a natural hierarchy which was required for global stability.

In addition to this extremely worrisome ideology that is only a stone’s throw away from eugenics, there has also been a great deal of disturbance over the 2016 World Economic Forum video that goes through their 8 “predictions” for how the world will change by 2030, with the slogan “You’ll own nothing, and you’ll be happy.”

It is this slogan in particular that has probably caused the most panic amongst the average person questioning what the outcome of the Great Reset will truly look like. It has also caused much confusion as to who or what is at the root in shaping this very eerie, Orwellian prediction of the future?

Many have come to think that this root is the Communist Party of China. However, whatever your thoughts may be on the Chinese government and the intentions of President Xi, the roots of the Great Reset agenda can very clearly be traced back to 80 years ago, when an American, former Trotskyist who later joined the OSS, followed by the CIA, and went on to become the founding father of neo-conservatism, James Burnham, wrote a book on his vision for “The Managerial Revolution.”

In fact, it was the ideologies of Burnham’s “The Managerial Revolution” that triggered Orwell to write his “1984”.

The Strange Case and Many Faces of James Burnham

“[James Burnham is] the real intellectual founder of the neoconservative movement and the original proselytizer, in America, of the theory of ‘totalitarianism.’”

– Christopher Hitchens, “For the Sake of Argument: Essay and Minority Reports”

It is understandably the source of some confusion as to how a former high level Trotskyist became the founder of the neo-conservative movement; with the Trotskyists calling him a traitor to his kind, and the neo-conservatives describing it as an almost road to Damascus conversion in ideology.

However, the truth of the matter is that it is neither.

That is, James Burnham never changed his beliefs and convictions at any point during his journey through Trotskyism, OSS/CIA intelligence to neo-conservatism, although he may have back-stabbed many along the way, and this two-part series will go through why this is the case.

James Burnham was born in 1905 in Chicago, Illinois, raised as a Roman Catholic, later rejecting Catholicism while studying at Princeton and professing atheism for the rest of his life until shortly before his death whereby he reportedly returned to the church. (1) He would graduate from Princeton followed by the Balliol College, Oxford University and in 1929 would become a professor in philosophy at the New York University.

It was during this period that Burnham met Sidney Hook, who was also a professor in philosophy at the New York University, and who professed to have converted Burnham to Marxism in his autobiography. In 1933, along with Sidney Hook, Burnham helped to organize the socialist organization, the American Workers Party (AWP).

It would not be long before Burnham found Trotsky’s use of “dialectical materialism” to explain the interplay between the human and the historical forces in his “History of the Russian Revolution” to be brilliant. As founder of the Red Army, Trotsky had dedicated his life to the spread of a worldwide Communist revolution, to which Stalin opposed in the form of Trotsky’s “Permanent Revolution” ideology. In this ideology, Trotskyists were tactically trained to be militant experts at infighting, infiltration and disruption.

Among these tactics was “entryism,” in which an organisation encourages its members to join another, often larger organization, in an attempt to take over said organization or convert a large portion of its membership with its own ideology and directive.

The most well-known example of this technique was named the French Turn, when French Trotskyists in 1934 infiltrated the Section Francaise de l’International Ouvriere (SFIO, French Socialist Party) with the intention of winning over the more militant elements to their side.

That same year, Trotskyists in the Communist League of America (CLA) did a French turn on the American Workers Party, in a move that elevated the AWP’s James Burnham into the role of a Trotsky lieutenant and chief adviser.

Burnham would continue the tactics of infiltrating and subverting other leftist parties and in 1935 attempted to do a French Turn on the much larger Socialist Party (SP), however, by 1937, the Trotskyists were expelled from the Socialist Party which led to the formation of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) at the end of the year. He would resign from the SWP in April 1940, and form the Workers Party only to resign less than two months later.

Burnham remained a “Trotskyist intellectual” from 1934 until 1940, using militant Trotskyist tactics against competing Marxist movements by turning their loyalties and ransacking their best talent. Although Burnham worked six years for the Trotskyists, as the new decade began, he renounced both Trotsky and “the ‘philosophy of Marxism’ dialectical materialism” altogether.

Perhaps Burnham was aware that the walls were closing in on Trotsky, and that it would only be a matter of six months from Burnham’s first renouncement that Trotsky would be assassinated by August 1940, at his compound outside Mexico City.

In February 1940 Burnham wrote “Science and Style: A Reply to Comrade Trotsky,” in which he broke with dialectical materialism, stressing the importance of the work of Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead’s approach:

“Do you wish me to prepare a reading list, Comrade Trotsky? It would be long, ranging from the work of the brilliant mathematicians and logicians of the middle of the last century to one climax in the monumental Principia Mathematica of Russell and Whitehead (the historic turning point in modern logic), and then spreading out in many directions – one of the most fruitful represented by the scientists, mathematicians and logicians now cooperating in the new Encyclopedia of Unified Science.” [emphasis added]

He summed up his feelings in a letter of resignation from the Workers Party on May 21, 1940:

“I reject, as you know, the “philosophy of Marxism,” dialectical materialism. …

The general Marxian theory of “universal history”, to the extent that it has any empirical content, seems to me disproved by modern historical and anthropological investigation.

Marxian economics seems to me for the most part either false or obsolete or meaningless in application to contemporary economic phenomena. Those aspects of Marxian economics which retain validity do not seem to me to justify the theoretical structure of the economics.

Not only do I believe it meaningless to say that “socialism is inevitable” and false that socialism is “the only alternative to capitalism”; I consider that on the basis of the evidence now available to us a new form of exploitive society (which I call “managerial society”) is not only possible but is a more probable outcome of the present than socialism. …

On no ideological, theoretic or political ground, then, can I recognize, or do I feel, any bond or allegiance to the Workers Party (or to any other Marxist party). That is simply the case, and I can no longer pretend about it, either to myself or to others.” [emphasis added]

In 1941, Burnham would publish “The Managerial Revolution: What is Happening in the World,” bringing him fame and fortune, listed by Henry Luce’s Life magazine as one of the top 100 outstanding books of 1924-1944. (2)

The Managerial Revolution

“We cannot understand the revolution by restricting our analysis to the war [WWII]; we must understand the war as a phase in the development of the revolution.”

– James Burnham “The Managerial Revolution”

In Burnham’s “The Managerial Revolution,” he makes the case that if socialism were possible, it would have occurred as an outcome of the Bolshevik Revolution, but what happened instead was neither a reversion back to a capitalist system nor a transition to a socialist system, but rather a formation of a new organizational structure made up of an elite managerial class, the type of society he believed was in the process of replacing capitalism on a world scale.

He goes on to make the case that as seen with the transition from a feudal to a capitalist state being inevitable, so too will the transition from a capitalist to managerial state occur. And that ownership rights of production capabilities will no longer be owned by individuals but rather the state or institutions, he writes:

“Effective class domination and privilege does, it is true, require control over the instruments of production; but this need not be exercised through individual private property rights. It can be done through what might be called corporate rights, possessed not by individuals as such but by institutions: as was the case conspicuously with many societies in which a priestly class was dominant…”

Burnham proceeds to write:

“If, in a managerial society, no individuals are to hold comparable property rights, how can any group of individuals constitute a ruling class?

The answer is comparatively simple and, as already noted, not without historical analogues. The managers will exercise their control over the instruments of production and gain preference in the distribution of the products, not directly, through property rights vested in them as individuals, but indirectly, through their control of the state which in turn will own and control the instruments of production. The state – that is, the institutions which comprise the state – will, if we wish to put it that way, be the ‘property’ of the managers. And that will be quite enough to place them in the position of the ruling class.”

Burnham concedes that the ideologies required to facilitate this transition have not yet been fully worked out but goes on to say that they can be approximated:

“from several different but similar directions, by, for example: Leninism-Stalinism; fascism-nazism; and, at a more primitive level, by New Dealism and such less influential [at the time] American ideologies as ‘technocracy’. This, then, is the skeleton of the theory, expressed in the language of the struggle for power.”

This is to be sure, a rather confusing paragraph but becomes clearer when we understand it from the specific viewpoint of Burnham. As Burnham sees it, all these different avenues are methods in which to achieve his vision of a managerial society because each form stresses the importance of the state as the central coordinating power, and that such a state will be governed by his “managers”. Burnham considers the different moral implications in each scenario irrelevant, as he makes clear early on in his book, he has chosen to detach himself from such questions.

Burnham goes to explain that the support of the masses is necessary for the success of any revolution, this is why the masses must be led to believe that they will benefit from such a revolution, when in fact it is only to replace one ruling class with another and nothing changes for the underdog. He explains that this is the case with the dream of a socialist state, that the universal equality promised by socialism is just a fairy tale told to the people so that they fight for the establishment of a new ruling class, then they are told that achieving a socialist state will take many decades, and that essentially, a managerial system must be put in place in the meantime.

Burnham makes the case that this is what happened in both Nazi Germany and Bolshevik Russia:

“Nevertheless, it may still turn out that the new form of economy will be called ‘socialist.’ In those nations – Russia and Germany – which have advanced furthest toward the new [managerial] economy, ‘socialism’ or ‘national socialism’ is the term ordinarily used. The motivation for this terminology is not, naturally, the wish for scientific clarity but just the opposite. The word ‘socialism’ is used for ideological purposes in order to manipulate the favourable mass emotions attached to the historic socialist ideal of a free, classless, and international society and to hide the fact that the managerial economy is in actuality the basis for a new kind of exploiting, class society.”

Burnham continues:

“Those Nations – [Bolshevik] Russia, [Nazi] Germany and [Fascist] Italy – which have advanced furthest toward the managerial social structure are all of them, at present, totalitarian dictatorships…what distinguishes totalitarian dictatorship is the number of facets of life subject to the impact of the dictatorial rule. It is not merely political actions, in the narrower sense, that are involved; nearly every side of life, business and art and science and education and religion and recreation and morality are not merely influenced by but directly subjected to the totalitarian regime.

It should be noted that a totalitarian type of dictatorship would not have been possible in any age previous to our own. Totalitarianism presupposes the development of modern technology, especially of rapid communication and transportation. Without these latter, no government, no matter what its intentions, would have had at its disposal the physical means for coordinating so intimately so many of the aspects of life. Without rapid transportation and communication it was comparatively easy for men to keep many of their lives, out of reach of the government. This is no longer possible, or possible only to a much smaller degree, when governments today make deliberate use of the possibilities of modern technology.”

Orwell’s Second Thoughts on Burnham

Burnham would go on to state in his “The Managerial Revolution” that the Russian Revolution, WWI and its aftermath, the Versailles Treaty gave final proof that capitalist world politics could no longer work and had come to an end. He described WWI as the last war of the capitalists and WWII as the first, but not last war, of the managerial society. Burnham made it clear that many more wars would have to be fought after WWII before a managerial society could finally fully take hold.

This ongoing war would lead to the destruction of sovereign nation states, such that only a small number of great nations would survive, culminating into the nuclei of three “super-states”, which Burnham predicted would be centered around the United States, Germany and Japan. He goes on to predict that these super-states will never be able to conquer the other and will be engaged in permanent war until some unforeseeable time. He predicts that Russia would be broken in two, with the west being incorporated into the German sphere and the east into the Japanese sphere. (Note that this book was published in 1941, such that Burnham was clearly of the view that Nazi Germany and fascist Japan would be the victors of WWII.)

Burnham states that “sovereignty will be restricted to the few super-states.”

In fact, he goes so far as to state early on in his book that the managerial revolution is not a prediction of something that will occur in the future, it is something that has already begun and is in fact, in its final stages of becoming, that it has already successfully implemented itself worldwide and that the battle is essentially over.

The National Review, founded by James Burnham and William F. Buckley (more on this in part two), would like to put the veneer that although Orwell was critical of Burnham’s views that he was ultimately creatively inspired to write about it in his “1984” novel. Yes, inspired is one way to put it, or more aptly put, that he was horrified by Burnham’s vision and wrote his novel as a stark warning as to what would ultimately be the outcome of such monstrous theorizations, which he would to this day organise the zeitgeist of thought to be suspicious of anything resembling his neologisms such as “Big Brother”, “Thought Police”, “Two Minutes Hate”, “Room 101”, “memory hole”, “Newspeak”, “doublethink”, “unperson”,”thoughtcrime”, and “groupthink”.

George Orwell, (real name Eric Arthur Blair), first published his “Second Thoughts on James Burnham” in May 1946. The novel “1984” would be published in 1949.

In his essay he dissects Burnham’s proposed ideology that he outlines in his “The Managerial Revolution” and “The Machiavellians” subtitled “Defenders of Freedom.”

Orwell writes:

“It is clear that Burnham is fascinated by the spectacle of power, and that his sympathies were with Germany so long as Germany appeared to be winning the war…curiously enough, when one examines the predictions which Burnham has based on his general theory, one finds that in so far as they are verifiable, they have been falsified…It will be seen that Burnham’s predictions have not merely, when they were verifiable, turned out to be wrong, but that they have sometimes contradicted one another in a sensational way…Political predictions are usually wrong, because they are usually based on wish-thinking…Often the revealing factor is the date at which they are made…It will be seen that at each point Burnham is predicting a continuation of the thing that is happening…the tendency to do this is not simply a bad habit, like inaccuracy or exaggeration…It is a major mental disease, and its roots lie partly in cowardice and partly in the worship of power, which is not fully separable from cowardice…

Power worship blurs political judgement because it leads, almost unavoidably, to the belief that present trends will continue. Whoever is winning at the moment will always seem to be invincible. If the Japanese have conquered south Asia, then they will keep south Asia for ever, if the Germans have captured Tobruk, they will infallibly capture Cairo…The rise and fall of empires, the disappearance of cultures and religions, are expected to happen with earthquake suddenness, and processes which have barely started are talked about as though they were already at an end. Burnham’s writings are full of apocalyptic visions…Within the space of five years Burnham foretold the domination of Russia by Germany and of Germany by Russia. In each case he was obeying the same instinct: the instinct to bow down before the conqueror of the moment, to accept the existing trend as irreversible.”

Interestingly, and happily we hear, George Orwell does not take Burnham’s predictions of a managerial revolution as set in stone, but rather, has shown itself within a short period of time to be a little too full of wishful thinking and bent on worshipping the power of the moment. However, this does not mean we must not take heed to the orchestrations of such mad men.

In Part two of this series, I will discuss Burnham’s entry into the OSS then CIA, how he became the founder of the neo-conservative movement and what are the implications for today’s world, especially concerning the Great Reset initiative.

The author can be reached at https://cynthiachung.substack.com/

(1) Priscilla Buckley, “James Burnham 1905–1987.” National Review, July 11, 1987, p. 35.
(2) Canby, Henry Seidel. “The 100 Outstanding Books of 1924–1944”. Life, 14 August 1944. Chosen in collaboration with the magazine’s editors.

Who should we blame for losing Afghanistan? Why blame anyone?

Did anyone expect the U.S. war in Afghanistan to end cleanly? If so, you bought the lies all along and the cold water now is hitting sharp. While the actual ending is particularly harsh and clearly spliced together from old clips of Saigon 1975, those are simply details.

Why blame Biden? He played his part as a Senator and VP keeping the war going, but his role today is just being the last guy in a long line of people to blame, a pawn in the game. That Biden is willing to be the “president who lost Afghanistan” is all the proof you need he does not intend to run again for anything. Kind of an ironic version of a young John Kerry’s take on Vietnam “how do you ask the last man to die for a mistake?” Turns out, it’s easy: call Joe.

Blame Trump for the deal? One of the saddest things about the brutal ending of the U.S.-Afghan war is we would have gotten the same deal — just leave it to the Taliban and go home — at basically any point during the last 20 years. That makes every death and every dollar a waste. Afghanistan is simply reverting, quickly, to more or less status quo 9/10/01 and everything between then and now, including lost opportunities, will have been wasted.

Blame the NeoCons? No one in Washington who supported this war was ever called out, with the possible exception of Donald Rumsfeld who, if there is a hell, now cleans truck stop toilets there. Dick Cheney walks free. The generals and diplomats who ran the war have nice think tank or university jobs, if they are not still in government making equally bad decisions. No one has been legally, financially, or professionally disadvantaged by the blood on their hands. Some of the era’s senior leaders — Blinken, Rice, Power, Nuland — are now working in better jobs for Biden. I’d like to hope they have trouble sleeping at night, but I doubt it.

George Bush is a cuddly grandpa today, not the man who drove the United States into building a global prison archipelago to torture people. Barack Obama, who kept much of that system in place and added the drone killing of American citizens to his resume, remains a Democratic rock god. Neither man nor any of his significant underlings has expressed any regret or remorse.

For example, I just listened to Ryan Crocker, our former ambassador to Iraq and Afghanistan, on CNN. Making myself listen to him was about as fun as sticking my tongue in a wood chipper. Same for former general David Petraeus and the usual gang of idiots. None of them, the ones who made the decisions, accept any blame. Instead. they seem settled on blaming Trump because, well, everything bad is Trump’s fault even if he came into all this in the middle of the movie.

In the end the only people punished were the whistleblowers.

No one in the who is to blame community seems willing to take the story back to its beginning, at least the beginning for America’s latest round in the Graveyard of Empires (talk about missing an early clue.) This is what makes Blame Trump and Blame Biden so absurd. America’s modern involvement in this war began in 1979 when Jimmy Carter, overreacting to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan to prop up what was already a pro-Soviet puppet government, began arming and organizing Islamic warriors we now collectively know as “The Taliban.”

People who want to only see trees they can chop down and purposely want to miss the vastness of the forest ahead at this point try to sideline things by claiming there never was a single entity called “The Taliban” and the young Saudis who flocked to jihad to kill Russians technically weren’t funded by the U.S. (it was indirectly through Pakistan) or that the turning point was the 1991 Gulf War, etc. Quibbles and distractions.

If Carter’s baby steps to pay for Islamic warriors to fight the Red Army was playing with matches, Ronald Reagan poured gas, then jet fuel, on the fire. Under the Reagan administration the U.S. funded the warriors (called mujaheddin if not freedom fighters back then), armed them, invited their ilk to the White House, helped lead them, worked with the Saudis to send in even more money, and fanned the flames of jihad to ensure a steady stream of new recruits.

When we “won” it was hailed as the beginning of the real end of the Evil Empire. The U.S. defeated the mighty Red Army by sending over some covert operators to fight alongside stooge Islam warriors for whom a washing machine was high technology. Pundits saw it as a new low-cost model for executing American imperial will.

We paid little attention to events as we broke up the band and cut off the warriors post-Soviet withdrawal (soon enough some bozo at the State Department declared “the end of history.” He teaches at Stanford now) until the blowback from this all nipped us in the largely unsuccessful World Trade Center bombing of 1993, followed by the very successful World Trade Center bombing on September 11, 2001. Seems like there was still some history left to go.

How did U.S. intelligence know who the 9/11 culprits were so quickly? Several of them had been on our payroll, or received financing via proxies in Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, or were inspired by what had happened in Afghanistan, the defeat of the infidels (again; check Alexander the Great, Genghis Khan, the Mughal Empire, various Persian Empires, the Sikhs, the British, et al.)

If post-9/11 the U.S. had limited itself to a vengeful hissy fit in Afghanistan, ending with Bush’s 2003 declaration of “Mission Accomplished,” things would have been different. If the U.S. had used the assassination of Osama bin Laden, living “undiscovered” in the shadow of Pakistan’s military academy, as an excuse of sorts to call it a day in Afghanistan, things would have been different.

Instead Afghanistan became a petri dish to try out the worst NeoCon wet dream, nation-building across the Middle East. Our best and brightest would not just bomb Afghanistan into the stone age, they would then phoenix-it from the rubble as a functioning democracy. There was something for everyone: a military task to displace post-Cold War budget cuts, a pork-laden reconstruction program for contractors and diplomats, even a plan to empower Afghan women to placate the left.

Though many claim Bush pulling resources away from Afghanistan for Iraq doomed the big plans, it was never just a matter of not enough resources. Afghanistan was never a country in any modern sense to begin with, just an association of tribal entities who hated each other almost as much as they hated the west. The underpinnings of the society were a virulent strain of Islam, about as far away from any western political and social ideas as possible. Absent a few turbaned Uncle Toms, nobody in Afghanistan was asking to be freed by the United States anyway.

Pakistan, America’s “ally” in all this, was a principal funder and friend of the Taliban, always more focused on the perceived threat from India, seeing a failed state in Afghanistan as a buffer zone. Afghanistan was a narco-state with its only real export heroin. Not only did this mean the U.S. wanted to build a modern economy on a base of crime, the U.S. in different periods actually encouraged/ignored the drug trade into American cities in favor of the cash flow.

The Afghan puppet government and military the U.S. formed were uniformly corrupt, and encouraged by the endless inflow of American money to get more corrupt all the time. They had no support from the people and could care less. The Afghans in general and the Afghan military in particular did not fail to hold up their end of the fighting; they never signed up for the fight in the first place. No Afghan wanted to be the last man to die in service to American foreign policy.

There was no way to win. The “turning point” was starting the war at all. Afghanistan had to fail. There was no other path for it, other than being propped up at ever-higher costs. That was American policy for two decades: prop up things and hope something might change. It was like sending more money to a Nigerian cyber-scammer hoping to recoup your original loss.

Everything significant our government, the military, and the MSM told us about Afghanistan was a lie. They filled and refilled the bag with bullhockey and Americans bought it every time expecting candy canes. Keep that in mind when you decide who to listen to next time, because of course there will be a next time. Who has not by now realized that? We just passively watched 20 years of Vietnam all over again, including the sad ending. So really, who’s to blame?

wemeantwell.com

Friends,

The Internet and television news are awash in stories about our debacle in Afghanistan. Just yesterday I counted upwards of forty news accounts and reports in my inbox, and they are only the ones I noticed. Among the so-called “conservative” commentariat, Fox News continues to beat the drum of how “America has been unnecessarily defeated and shamed,” and, indeed, somehow if we had just stayed and finished the goal of “nation-building” (militarily and socially), we might have avoided this humiliating and embarrassing disaster.

In other words, despite the past twenty years with boots on the ground and several thousand American lives lost, and over one trillion dollars in American (taxpayer) funding—and nothing accomplished, if only we would have stayed a little longer, everything would have come out right. Thus, a full-fledged liberal democracy, complete with the full panoply of women’s rights, abortion, protection of LGBTX rights and social advancement, same sex marriage for all, immense welfare programs, diversity and equity programs in those to-be-built Afghani schools, the fruits of American television programs like “The Bachelorette” –all that and more, plus the wonders of American-style elections (a model of probity and honesty!), would have transformed that woebegotten country.

How foolish, how fatal!

Our foreign policy elites, the State Department, the Pentagon, and most of our national political class apparently have learned nothing. Not with Vietnam, not with Bosnia, not with Somalia, nor with Iraq, Syria, and now Afghanistan. With each disaster it is simply on to the next involvement, the next venture which puts Americans on the ground, dying in some remote desert or forlorn oasis, with the major corporate suppliers of military hardware and weaponry continuing to amass fortunes, while our boys perish, lose limbs, and suffer conditions that will mark them—and their families—for life. And all in the name of “democracy” and “human rights.”

Since the end of World War II our foreign policy has been dominated by a resolve globally to deter perceived enemies. At first there was some real urgency and rationale for that: we were facing an insatiable and dangerous enemy, Soviet communism. And at times it looked like we might succumb. But after 1991 and the ignominious fall of the Soviets and the advent of a new Russian government intent on recovering its pre-revolutionary traditions and religious heritage, that threat disappeared.

Yet our foreign policy elites, now emboldened by the rise and influence of the Neoconservatives, those former Marxist internationalists who had made the long pilgrimage to the conservative Right, continued to look for ways to assert American hegemony in the world. With a fervor inherited from their days militating as Trotskyites (as many of them had been in the 1930s and ‘40s), the Neocons deployed the linguistic template and ideas associated with “American exceptionalism” to signify the universal superiority of their conception of the American experience over all other cultures. A Neoconservative-favored political thinker Allan Bloom summed this view up succinctly in his The Closing of the American Mind: “And when we Americans speak seriously about politics we mean that our principles of freedom and equality and the rights based on them are rational and everywhere applicable.” Americans must engage in “an educational experiment undertaken to force those who do not accept these principles to do so.”

Thus, each time we fail in a foreign venture, as we have done consistently over the past fifty years, our foreign policy wonks and Neocon experts and publicists push forward: there must be some other backward country that needs American guidance and just maybe some troops on the ground, and millions of dollars of American aid and military equipment?

But the real issues related to Afghanistan, Islam and various remote locations on the map of the world get lost, essentially ignored by Foggy Bottom. And there are indeed major issues and questions that we should examine, especially pertaining to Afghanistan and particularly to the Middle East.

There is a fascinating movie, “Day of the Siege: September 11, 1683,” which portrays in some detail the Muslim siege of Vienna in 1683, specifically making reference to the final climactic battle on September 11 (!), when the Polish Lancers of the Christian hero, King Jan Sobieski defeated the forces of Islam. But there is the prophecy of the Muslim Grand Vizier, Kara Mustapha, that even if the Muslims did not take Vienna then, that a future generation would “water their horses in the Tiber River” and “convert Notre Dame Cathedral into a mosque.” Is that not happening now?

There is a DVD of the movie (also a much longer version). Apparently it is out of print but can be obtained in decent used copies.

I think the essential point here is that unlike the Crusaders and the Christian defenders of Christendom at the Battle of Lepanto or at the two sieges of Vienna, we now face the Islamic threat for the wrong reasons. We seek to impose “liberal democracy” and (secular) “human rights” on essentially primitive countries  that are far more in tune with the orthodoxy of Islam than to LGBT rights and women’s “liberation” (which is about all I hear being spouted by the likes of anti-Confederate Brian Kilmeade on Fox).

Instead of crusades for our historic faith and Western Christian civilization, we offer the venomous infection of “American exceptionalism,” which is now an olio of the secularist globalist virus which is destroying us here at home.

Thus what we have seen in Kabul, or in Iraq, or in Somalia, or in Bosnia, or in Syria, when our nation has attempted to impose a secularist framework, and is opposed by a concerted and fanatical religious opposition which has popular support.

In effect, we have become an agent of modernist destruction. Oftentimes we may indeed be opposing an evil, but for the wrong reasons, and thus opposing one evil with one, in some ways, even more evil and fearsome.

After World War II we imposed the very worst features of “liberal democracy” on what was left of traditional Europe via the Marshall Plan. Anything that smacked of “traditional” was either disauthorized or discredited (as “fascist” or pro-Nazi). We sent our agents to infiltrate and control new, liberal democratic political parties…and very soon they controlled and dominated Europe. And, yes, we see what the result of that has been. Now we wish to do that in Hungary and Russia.

Cardinal Pedro Segura in Spain, back in 1953, sternly warned General Franco NOT to open the door to “the panoply of novel and noxious American secularist culture”–that Spain would absorb it and eventually “lose its soul.” That indeed happened, as I observed first hand while completing my doctoral dissertation in Pamplona (1972-1975). The tawdry worst of America was injected into Spanish society, and eventually it destroyed much of historic Spanish tradition, like a virulent cancer.

And we continue to seek that in regard to Hungary and Russia. Why? Because they limit and prohibit LGBT “human rights” and favor the traditional family over what now prevails here in the USA, that they formally oppose “Coca-Cola Culture.” Most establishment conservatives now accept–even defend–same sex marriage and transgenderism (did you see Turning Point USA’s Charlie Kirk dancing with a “conservative” drag queen? Fox touts its openly gay and same sex married pundits, such as Guy Benson and Tammy Bruce).

Our conservative and Republican leadership takes pains and great effort to protest how much they love Martin Luther King (and his radical views), the Civil Rights revolution, Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, and how much they loathe the “traitors” Robert E. Lee, John C. Calhoun and Nathan Bedford Forrest. Oh, yes, they call a halt when it comes to maybe Washington or Lincoln, but only because they can use them ideologically in their own form of “conservative” progressivism.

So, I am happy we are getting out of Afghanistan; we shouldn’t have been there, just like my cousin-by-marriage wondered why we were in Bosnia fighting Christian Serbs, and allied to Muslim extremists in Kosovo. We are either in such places for the wrong reasons, or we are in the wrong places to begin with. Period.

The one thing that is tragic is, of course, the bungling by the Biden administration getting us and our citizens out. That is worthy of sharp criticism. That should make us re-examine our wrongheaded foreign policy of the past 50 or 75 years.  But I doubt strongly that it will…as we are no longer a truly Christian nation and our leaders are in no way like King Jan Sobieski or Don Juan of Austria at Lepanto….far from it. How in the hell can we compare a witless Joe Biden or the empty-suit Kamala Harris to them?

Until we have leaders leading a nation committed to our traditional and Christian principles, what happened in Afghanistan will continue to happen.

More likely, what we behold is a continuation of the sputtering end of the “American empire,” and, in the long run, maybe that is a good thing?

boydcatheyreviewofbooks.blogspot.com

If you’re like me and spend entirely too much time on Political Twitter you may have recently observed a bunch of people saying you shouldn’t post your opinion about the Afghanistan situation unless you’re an expert who has studied the nation’s dynamics in depth. Like an empire invading a nation and murdering a bunch of people for decades is some super complicated and esoteric matter that you need a PhD to have an opinion about.

You see fairly simple abuses framed as highly complicated issues all the time by people who defend those abuses. War. Israeli apartheid. My abusive ex used to go around telling people what happened between us was more complicated than I was making it sound.

Before he became Trump’s National Security Advisor in 2018 John Bolton faced a contentious interview on Fox News where he was criticized for his role in Bush’s invasion of Iraq, and he responded that “the point I think you need to understand is, life is complicated in the Middle East. When you say ‘the overthrow of Saddam Hussein was a mistake,’ it’s simplistic.”

Bolton is now among the “experts” on Afghanistan doing mainstream media tours on CNN and NPR explaining to the public that the decision to end the 20-year military occupation was a mistake.

Yeah, don’t you worry your pretty little heads about war. It will just confuse you, because it’s far too complicated to understand. These important matters should be left to men like John Bolton, who are consistently wrong about every foreign policy issue.

This carefully promoted idea serves only the powerful, and entirely too many people buy into it. You’ll even see dedicated leftists shying away from commentary on western imperialism in favor of domestic policy because they don’t feel confident talking about something they’ve been trained to believe is very difficult and complex.

Which is silly, because war is actually the easiest aspect of the oligarchic empire to understand. Murdering people with military explosives for power and profit is plainly wrong. You don’t need to be an Ivy League university graduate to understand this, and given the track record of Ivy League university graduates on this matter it’s probably better if you are not. A globe-spanning power structure loosely centralized around the United States orchestrates murder at mass scale to ensure perpetual domination of the planet. It really is that simple.

Now, you can spend the rest of your life studying the details of precisely how this is the case, but they’re just that: details about how this dynamic is taking place. You can learn all about the various ways the oligarchic empire advances its geostrategic agendas using wars, proxy conflicts, coups, sanctions, special ops, cold war brinkmanship and the so-called “war on terror”, but you will only be discovering further details about this simple overarching truth.

the politico reporters snapping off tweets about how “if you haven’t really studied afghanistan, please, you don’t have to tweet about it” are the exact same people who will sell you the next war

— Nathan Bernhardt (@jonbernhardt) August 17, 2021

And the same is true of the other aspects of the status quo power structure: they’re meant to look complicated, but what you actually need to know about them to orient yourself in our world is fairly simple.

The systems of capitalism are very complex by design, and a tremendous amount of thievery happens in those mysterious knowledge gaps on financial and economic matters where only the cleverest manipulators understand what’s going on. But the basics of our problem are quite simple: money rewards and uplifts sociopathy. The more willing you are to do whatever it takes to become wealthy, the wealthier you will be. Those who rise to the top are those who are sufficiently lacking in human empathy to step on whoever they need to step on to get ahead.

As a result we’ve had many generations of wealthy sociopaths using their fortunes and clout to influence governmental, media, financial and economic systems in a way that advantages them more and more with each passing year. This is why we are ruled by sociopaths who understand that money is power and power is relative, which means the less money everyone else has the more power they get to have over everyone else. They’ve been widening the wealth gap further and further over the years, a trend they seek to continue with the so-called “Great Reset” you’ve been hearing so much about lately.

You can spend the rest of your life learning to follow the money, studying the dynamics of currency, banking and economics, but what you’ll be learning is more and more details about the way the dynamic I just described is taking place.

Sociopaths rise to the top, the most powerful of whom understand that things like money, governments and the lines drawn between nations are all collective narrative constructs which can be altered in whatever way benefits them and ignored whenever it’s convenient. For this reason controlling the stories the public tell themselves about what’s going on in their world is of paramount importance, which is why so much wealth gets poured into buying up media and media influence in the form of advertising, funding think tanks and NGOs, and buying up politicians with campaign contributions and corporate lobbying.

Society Is Made Of Narrative. Realizing This Is Awakening From The Matrix.

Life in our society is like the movie The Matrix, except instead of AI keeping us asleep in an illusory world, it’s psychopathic oligarchs. And instead of code, it’s narrative.https://t.co/mkk41xhtZK

— Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) July 13, 2021

These powerful sociopaths tend to form loose alliances with each other and with the heads of government agencies as often as possible since it’s always easier to move with power than against it. So what you get is an alliance of depraved oligarchs with no loyalty to any nation using powerful governments as tools to bomb, bully and plunder the rest of the world for their own power and profit, and using mass-scale media psyops to keep the public from rising up and stopping them.

And that’s it, really. So simple it can be summed up in a few paragraphs. Don’t let elitists use the illusion of complexity to cow you out of talking about what’s going on in your world. You can see what’s going on well enough to begin speaking out, and the more you learn the more detailed the picture will become.

Speak. You are infinitely more qualified to comment on the way power is moving in the world than the people who’ve been consistently wrong about everything throughout their entire careers yet remain widely platformed by the oligarchic media. If John Bolton gets a voice, so do you.

caityjohnstone.medium.com

California Representative Ro Khanna announced on Monday that he’d just hung out with Iraq war architect Bill Kristol and had a wonderful exchange of ideas, fully discrediting the myth of the progressive Democrat with a single tweet.

“Bill Kristol is one of the most thoughtful voices in defending liberalism and democratic institutions in our country,” Khanna tweeted. “Learned a lot in our conversation about shaping also an inclusive narrative around American patriotism.”

When Khanna’s Twitter followers began reacting with shock and disgust at a congressman who is generally regarded as one of the most progressive elected officials on Capitol Hill saying sweet things about a murderous arch-neocon, he added:

“I was a strong and early critic of the war in Iraq, and Kristol and I have very different worldviews on foreign policy. But to have a discussion about strengthening liberalism and liberal institutions with people you disagree is in my view needed in a pluralistic democracy.”

“I’m back in the office after a stimulating lunch with Ro Khanna and see he’s tweeted about it,” Kristol posted on Twitter. “Which is fine! But not with some on the Left! I’m sure Ro can take the heat. As for me, I benefited from our talk, and admire Ro’s willingness to argue — and occasionally (gasp!) agree.”

I’m back in the office after a stimulating lunch with @RoKhanna and see he’s tweeted about it. Which is fine! But not with some on the Left! I’m sure Ro can take the heat. As for me, I benefited from our talk, and admire Ro’s willingness to argue—and occasionally (gasp!) agree. https://t.co/YmvQZeidWI

— Bill Kristol (@BillKristol) July 19, 2021

It’s really odious how they’re framing this get-together as two men from differing ideological backgrounds overcoming their little disagreements to find common ground. We’re talking about someone who has pushed for psychopathic acts of military violence at every opportunity throughout his entire career, and has had an ungodly amount of success in doing so. As the co-founder of the influential neoconservative think tank Project for the New American Century and major Bush administration thought leader, Kristol played a key role in manufacturing support for the invasion of Iraq and ushering in an unprecedented new era of US military expansionism, a fact for which he remains completely unapologetic.

The invasion killed at least a million Iraqis, and arguably more than twice that. We’re not talking about two people setting aside their disagreements about farming subsidies or net neutrality here, we’re talking about fucking murder. Murder at a scale so massive it’s impossible to fully wrap your mind around it. Mass murder is not a difference of opinion, it’s mass murder. It’s no more an ideological position than stomping on kittens is an ideological position.

Saying you disagree with Bill Kristol’s engineering the Iraq war but found plenty of common ground on liberalism and patriotism is the same as saying you disagree with Jared Fogle on his raping children but found plenty of common ground on his fondness for Subway sandwiches.

It’s like announcing you just had lunch with serial killer Edmund Kemper and, while you disagree with his policy of murdering women and copulating with their severed heads, you really respect his opinions on immigration.

I’m actually being charitable here. There’s not a pedophile or serial killer on earth who has contributed as much death and suffering to our world as William Kristol.

War crimes aren’t “disagreements” and he isn’t just a “liberal”. He’s a neocon imperialist thug and if he isn’t accurately portrayed as such you’re helping to wash the blood off his hands https://t.co/tbh3Z3sEpX

— Secular Talk (@KyleKulinski) July 19, 2021

It’s not okay to be a warmonger. Pouring your mental energy into the slaughter of human beings is not some petty ideological quibble that can be looked past in search of common ground. Announcing you’ve just had lunch with a death merchant like Kristol and found plenty to admire about him should carry at least as much stigma as a lunchtime bromance with a genocide-promoting white supremacist, and probably more so given that Kristol has actually succeeded in manifesting his heinous vision for the world.

These monsters should not be accepted in our society. They should be as reviled as serial killers, child molesters and Nazis, not respected pundits who stroll around having casual lunch breaks with elected officials. They should be afraid to show themselves in public.

Instead, Kristol and his fellow neocons have been rehabilitated in the fugue of Trump hysteria and are now seen frequently on liberal media panels and viewed favorably by centrist Democrats, even while continuing to promote the annexation of Cuba, regime change in Iran, regime change in China, and keeping US troops in Afghanistan. Such creatures should be expelled from society and chased away until they’re forced to live under a mountain eating cave fish like Smeagol; instead they’re being accepted further and further into what passes for the American “left” today.

Ro Khanna is catching so much flak for his Kristol cuddle fest because Americans are told very forcefully that they need to support the Democratic Party if they want to advance leftward movement, yet even the very most progressive among them who are operating on the national stage consistently expose themselves as unprincipled imperialist swamp monsters. This is a problem, and it needs to be treated as such.

Anti-imperialism should be the most obvious, basic, bare-minimum agenda for anyone who cares about peace, truth and justice in our world. Instead, in a globe-spanning empire made of lies, it’s been turned by propaganda into a freakish fringe position that no elected officials are allowed to espouse, while monsters like Kristol are embraced and uplifted.

caityjohnstone.medium.com

By Alan MACLEOD

Saagar Enjeti and Krystal Ball are the new king and queen of alternative media. After having just quit The Hill to go fully independent, their new show “Breaking Points” immediately debuted at number one in the global politics podcast charts, comfortably overtaking well-established brands like “Pod Save America” and “The Ben Shapiro Show.” They even received the ultimate plug with an appearance on and an endorsement from Joe Rogan, a veritable blessing from the pope of pop culture.

“Breaking Points” is effectively a copy of “Rising,” Enjeti and Ball’s show on The Hill. “Rising” had the look and tone of a cable news show, with two well-presented and attractive hosts chatting to guests in a brightly lit studio. But it had far more substance, featuring stories and  points of view that are completely ignored in the rest of corporate media. The two invited on a range of informative guests the caliber of whom is simply not found on cable news. Thus, it had a jarringly subversive quality that appealed to viewers, as if the two were smuggling forbidden but increasingly popular ideas all while maintaining a polished, corporate feel.

1/ It’s been 1 month since @krystalball and I announced Breaking Points. In that month we have nearly half a million subscribers on Youtube, became the number 1 political podcast in the country, and routinely trash cable news primetime in overall/key demo numbers pic.twitter.com/K7R7lpAUTJ

— Saagar Enjeti (@esaagar) July 1, 2021

Ball is a progressive while Enjeti is a conservative. Nevertheless, both present themselves as populists who have a lot in common, something that was the central message of their bestselling book, “The Populist’s Guide to 2020: A New Right and Left are Rising.” While Ball’s political outlook could be described as relatively standard, Bernie Sanders-style populism, Enjeti is more of an enigma. While he identifies as a conservative Republican, he also labels himself a pro-worker, pro-union populist.

Key to his appeal is convincing progressive audiences that, although a conservative, he is still a political outsider with views not too dissimilar from their own. Yet a look into Enjeti’s background and professional career suggests otherwise — that he is very much an insider and is pulling a similar trick to so many Republicans of late who are rebranding as anti-elite, anti-deep state warriors, all the while mainstreaming some highly problematic viewpoints to his audience.

A neocon in the making

Before becoming a populist media personality, Enjeti appeared to be training for the role of deep state official, pursuing an undergraduate degree at George Washington University and a master’s degree in security studies at Georgetown University, both D.C.-area colleges well known for their connections to the national security state. Enjeti also decided to study counter-terrorism studies at Israeli university IDC Herzliya. Situated on a former military base, the university’s board boasts a former head of Mossad and ex-Prime Minister Ehud Barak. Meanwhile, its international advisory board is replete with U.S. national security leaders, such as Robert Hutchings, former chairman of the National Intelligence Council; Stephen Peter Rosen, one time director of political-military affairs at the White House National Security Council; and ex-CIA Chief R. James Woolsey.

Enjeti, right, poses with the pope of pop culture Joe Rogan and his co-host Krystal Ball. Photo | Twitter

The master’s program in counter-terrorism studies features modules in profiling terrorists, strategy and deterrence, Arab language, Iranian studies, and a course called “Hezbollah: a hybrid terrorist organization.” This is an institution that trains Israeli and American intelligence officials, not radical populist outsiders.

The counter-terrorism studies department is headed by Dr. Boaz Ganor, an Israeli government advisor. During the latest Israeli assault on Gaza, IDC Herzliya’s president sent out a message to students condemning the Gazans’ supposed wanton aggressiveness. “These rockets were fired at a civilian population with the intent to kill,” he seethed. Luckily, he said, with the help of Dr. Ganor and coordination with the Israeli American Council and the use of ACT.IL — an Israeli government-funded app, which, as MintPress reported in May, helps Zionists artificially infiltrate online conversations and flood them with pro-Israel messages — public opinion was holding firm.

Gonna study war some more

While still in university, Enjeti landed a job at the Institute for the Study of War (ISW), writing policy briefs about the conflict in Afghanistan and analyzing the moves and strength of the Taliban. The ISW is a notoriously hawkish think tank funded by weapons contractors like Raytheon, General Dynamics and DynCorp, its board filled with retired generals and infamous neoconservative warmongers like Bill Kristol.

Robbie Martin, a filmmaker whose movie series “A Very Heavy Agenda” deals with the rise of neoconservatism, told MintPress about his misgivings:

The Institute for the Study of War is one of the most enmeshed D.C. think tanks in terms of active military policy with the U.S. government. It is probably the most influential military-centric think tank in Washington. It is always encouraging war, which should be obvious by its name.”

ISW officials were at the wheel in the drive towards war in Iraq and have since called for more aggressive actions in Syria and other nations. The organization also served as embedded advisors for Gen. David Petraeus while he was commander in Afghanistan. The ISW was created by the Kagan family, a group of the most influential hawks in Washington. As Martin explained, Donald Kagan is a neocon patriarch, helping to craft the infamous Project for a New American Century document “Rebuilding America’s Defenses” which called for a “new Pearl Harbor” and set out the neocon imperial agenda for the Bush administration. His son, Fred, was the brains behind the 2007 Iraq “surge” — the dramatic increase in U.S. troop numbers in the country. Fred’s wife, Kim, a military officer and historian, founded the ISW. Meanwhile, Donald’s other son, Robert is a media pundit most noted for being the driving force falsely linking Saddam Hussein to the 9/11 attacks, an assertion that helped grease the skids for the Iraq invasion.

Robert’s wife, Victoria Nuland, is arguably the most powerful neocon of the clan. Having held a host of high government positions — including Ambassador to NATO, Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs, and Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs — Nuland has been involved in virtually every U.S. intervention in the last 30 years, and was previously crowned “Queen of the Chicken Hawks” by writer Rick Sterling.

From the ISW, Enjeti later moved to the Hudson Institute, an equally neoconservative and pro-Iraq War think tank, where he worked as a media fellow until last year. Like the ISW, Hudson takes money from a cavalcade of weapons manufacturers, including Raytheon, Northrop Grumman and Lockheed Martin.

The Hudson Institute is a standard-bearer for establishment Republicanism, as can be seen by a mere glance at its senior figures. Hudson’s president and CEO, John P. Walters, is a longtime Republican official, serving, among other roles, as George W. Bush’s drugs czar. Its senior vice president is Scooter Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff. As soon as he left office earlier this year, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo also walked into a senior position at the organization.

Enjeti, left, talks coronavirus and the CCP with anti-China hawk, Sen. Tom Cotton for his Hudson Institute podcast. Photo | Hudson

Until recently, Enjeti’s second podcast, “The Realignment,” was an official Hudson publication. Hosted with fellow Hudson employee Marshall Kosloff, the two lob softball questions to reactionary guests like Mike Pompeo, Niall Ferguson and Douglas Murray. The concept of the show is that there is a profound political realignment happening in America right now, as old political demarcations are broken down and new ones form. In this sense, it is a similar notion to “Rising” and “Breaking Points,” except that it is being pushed by one of the most establishment-conservative organizations in America, raising questions about how genuine this realignment really is.

Fellow Hudson employee Kosloff is perhaps best known to progressive audiences for making an unwanted appearance in the documentary film, “The Lobby”, which exposed Israeli government interference in domestic U.S. politics. Kosloff is seen being paid to attend astroturfed protests against the Students for Justice in Palestine Movement. At one point he jokes to an undercover reporter that all it took was “$50,000 plus benefits” for him to sell out to Israel, a reference to his salary another conservative foundation which pays him to be, in his colleague’s words, a “foot soldier in the conservative movement.” To be fair to him, Kosloff appeared to have serious concerns about the stunt, not because of ethics, but in case he was caught on camera doing so. “This is bad for my political career” he worries. Considering where he is now, his fears were perhaps unfounded.

In Martin’s view:

Before Saagar was the co-host of ‘Rising’ with Krystal, ‘Rising’ was not a populist-themed political show at all. It was not really that progressive. And when Saagar got there it almost seemed like it became a TV-show version of this podcast.”

Enjeti presents himself as an anti-war populist. “The entire reason I am interested in politics is because of 9/11 and opposition to the war in Iraq. It is my North Star and always will be,” he said in a recent episode of “Rising.” But this is difficult to square with the fact that he chose to study counter-terrorism in Israel and to work for two of the most hawkish neoconservative think tanks in America — the very same think tanks whose principals laid the groundwork for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that Enjeti claims so vociferously to oppose. That an anti-war outsider could choose to work for the likes of the Kagan family does not compute.

A Hudson obsession

On foreign policy, Enjeti seems to have been at least partially influenced by the Hudson Institute’s stances. If there is one issue the think tank concentrates on most, it is China. In recent years, they have become almost obsessed with opposing it. The word “China” and its derivatives appear 137 times in the organization’s most recent annual report, featuring on virtually every page.

In a recent interview with Fox News, Hudson Senior Fellow and China expert David Asher demanded that the U.S. bring the country “to heel,” as if it were a dog. Treating the lab leak hypothesis as an “undisputed fact,” Asher railed, “we’ve got to hold the Chinese accountable.” We have to “fix what the Communist Chinese did to try to undermine our country and the world system, with COVID,” he explained. The friendly Fox News anchor asked if sanctioning the country and relocating the 2022 Winter Olympic Games would be enough punishment. “Probably not,” Asher replied, leaving the possibility open for war.

Left unstated in all this is that Hudson has flourished and rapidly expanded thanks in no small part to huge donations from the independence-minded government of Taiwan. Between 2015 and 2019, the organization’s revenue more than quadrupled to $57.1 million.

Hudson does not disclose how much Taiwan is giving them, except to say that the island has been on its list of highest-tier donors every year since they began divulging their sponsors in 2015. Not coincidentally, Hudson is among the most vociferous supporters of greater Taiwanese independence.

Hudson appears, however, to accept even more money from bitter China enemy Japan. In 2020, the organization’s then-CEO Kenneth Weinstein was chosen as U.S. ambassador to Japan, although the appointment later fell through. Hudson also takes money from other China-hostile countries like South Korea.

The populist’s guide to hating China

Many critics have argued that true economic populism cannot be conservative and that right-wing populist variants attempt to unite a majority around issues of religion (as in Modi’s India) or race (as in Nazi Germany), deflecting popular frustration downwards and using minorities as scapegoats for the country’s problems.

Enjeti has tried to square the circle of raging against the elites while leaving the system in place by blaming so many of America’s failings on China, combining populist rhetoric with Hudson-style foreign policy. In “A Populist’s Guide to 2020,” he claims that the malaise the country is in can be explained as in no small part due to “China’s economic warfare.”

The bad guys in Enjeti’s story of American corporations relocating eastwards to use hyper-exploited Asian workers are not the corporations themselves, nor the U.S. government, but the Chinese Communist Party, deviously convincing businesses to do so — a classic bait-and-switch maneuver.

“Corporations and the billionaire class sold us all out a very long time ago,” he states, sounding like Bernie Sanders, before claiming that doing business with China is akin to “American monopolies’ tacit cooperation with the Nazi regime before the outbreak of World War II.” He concludes:

The people who control our banks, who control what we see, what we laugh at, who we watch play sports, are all now beholden to some very bad people in Beijing. And Beijing isn’t shy about using its economic entanglements with us to try and force American citizens to behave however they’d like.”

Enjeti, right, poses with his former boss during a 2020 appearance on Fox News. Photo | Twitter

In this, he is borrowing a tactic often used by his former boss at The Daily Caller, Tucker Carlson:

Working-class people of all colors have a lot more in common, infinitely more in common with each other than they do with some overpaid MSNBC anchor. And if you were allowed to think about that for long enough, you might start to get unauthorized ideas about economics, and that would be disruptive to a very lucrative status quo.”

No, that was not Bernie Sanders or even Noam Chomsky. It was indeed Tucker Carlson, who often fills his audience with populist-sounding rhetoric, only to redirect legitimate anger away from capitalism and towards woke college students, gypsies or Latino immigrants. For decades, however, Carlson was a preppy, bow-tie-wearing “out-of-the-closet elitist” who described ordinary Americans as “peasants.” The stepson of the heir of the Swanson food empire and the son of Dick Carlson, the head of Voice of America and a U.S. ambassador, Tucker reveled in how “extraordinarily loaded” his family was, condemning Bill O’Reilly’s faux populism as phony, only to switch to exactly the same schtick when he replaced O’Reilly on Fox News in 2017.

While “Rising” has a distinctly progressive audience, Enjeti has been pushing the Hudson’s neoconservative talking points on foreign policy. Enjeti is an unabashed imperialist who wants the United States to control the planet. As he stated himself on “The Realignment:”

I am not for a multipolar world…I want to be the only blue water navy, I don’t want the Chinese ruling the Straits of Malacca and the South China Sea.”

In early 2020, Enjeti delighted in using the racist term “the China Virus” for COVID-19, telling “Rising” viewers that it is “the height of cynical political correctness” to get outraged at it.

In a long soliloquy about wrestler John Cena correcting his (inaccurate) statement that Taiwan is an independent country, Enjeti again tried to launder aggression against China as a progressive position. “The elites of this country do not work for us, do not really like us and are completely for sale,” he roared. For sale to whom? Not to the likes of Jeff Bezos, the government, or giant corporate interests, but to the “authoritarian and cultish” Chinese Communist Party. “The Chinese have achieved total victory,” he exclaimed; “They are able to control the very speech that comes out of the most powerful people in America’s mouths.” That Cena, an American, would apologize for such a huge faux pas — akin to traveling to Kiev to announce “Ukraine is forever Russia” — is seen only as more proof that the U.S. is secretly under Chinese control.

Undisclosed in all this is the gigantic conflict of interest inherent in the fact that Enjeti’s salary at the Hudson Institute came courtesy of piles of cash donated by the Taiwanese Foreign Ministry.

RISING now going all in on lab leak theory. You almost have to see it to believe how depraved this is. Indistinguishable from Fox and Friends. pic.twitter.com/QIQ6hFOnvo

— Sam Sacks (@SamSacks) May 26, 2021

As soon as Joe Biden won the election, Enjeti was warning that he was secretly a Chinese asset, and using faux populist language to do so. “Big business is wholly in bed with the Chinese Communist Party,” he explained, warning that “China will use Wall Street to control Joe Biden,” as if the president of the United States, the most powerful man in the world, is a mere puppet of a foreign country halfway around the globe. He also praised Donald Trump for “changing the conversation around China.”

Earlier, Enjeti had tarred Democratic presidential candidate Michael Bloomberg with the same brush. In a segment entitled “Is Mike Bloomberg a Chinese Asset?” he condemned Bloomberg News for supposedly “kowtowing to the Chinese regime” and “covering up the crimes of the Chinese elite.”

If this sort of rhetoric were used against a country like Israel, it would rightly be challenged and regarded as highly suspect. Indeed, when a guest attempted to smear Bloomberg’s opponent Tulsi Gabbard as a tool of Russia, both Ball and Enjeti quickly jumped in to shut it down. Yet Ball, whose strong suit may not be foreign policy, generally stays silent or even agrees with Enjeti’s anti-China tirades.

Unsurprisingly, Enjeti has also been one of the loudest proponents of the lab-leak theory of the origin of the COVID-19 pandemic, recording long monologues about the media’s failure to take it seriously for over a year while inviting neoconservative warmongers like Josh Rogin to discuss China’s guilt. Describing the lab leak as “the most likely explanation for the origin of COVID-19,” Enjeti told viewers that we should be “ten times more skeptical of the Chinese government.”  If only we had this knowledge earlier, he laments, American foreign policy would be far different. “The Chinese are expanding all across South East Asia!” he exclaims, implicitly suggesting that some sort of confrontation is an appropriate response, echoing the Hudson line.

While he is undeniably a charismatic and confident host, Enjeti’s schtick is remarkably similar to that of his former employer Tucker Carlson, who also rails against elites while being one of them. Other establishment hawks like General Michael Flynn and General Robert Spalding (another Hudson employee) have also attempted to sell themselves as anti-establishment populist outsiders, but with far less success. Enjeti has been more successful partly because he is a more likable figure and partly because the others have decades-long histories in the heart of the swamp. Yet a deep dive into his background — from a counter-terrorism student in Israel to a Kagan family think tank to the Hudson Institute — shows Enjeti is also far more likely to be a run-of-the-mill conservative cosplaying as a populist than a genuine ally of anti-establishment movements. Unfortunately, people are so desperate for genuine populism that they are willing to swallow anything.

mintpressnews.com

Career neocon and warmongering monster Donald Rumsfeld is dead at the age of 88, the news media has reported. Rumsfeld was kind of the Fauci of the early 2000’s, a relatively faceless bureaucrat who circumstance selected to serve in a glamorous role as a symbol of the zeitgeist of his time. Rumsfeld became the rock star of George W. Bush’s 2003 Iraq war.

He warmed to the camera, after spending many years in relative obscurity in the revolving-door world between highly-paid positions in the “private sector” and battery-recharges back in senior government positions.

To keep your value to the weapons manufacturers you must constantly re-steep yourself into the world of the bureaucracy and also the world of the Congressional-military-industrial complex. You have to dip your beak into the endless river of military appropriations and the (deep state) people who grease the skids of billions of dollars to the war industry.

Otherwise you do not know what buttons to push to deliver billion dollar contracts in exchange for million dollar salaries.

In this endeavor, Rumsfeld was not the worst offender, it must be said. He was, unlike our current Defense Secretary, never on the board of missile-maker and death-dealer Raytheon. In fact his credentials in the war industry were paltry compared to the new breed of “public servant” in Pentagon leadership.

Nevertheless, Rumsfeld took on the job of selling the monstrous and unnecessary invasion of Iraq as “the good war” and he made sure he was the face of the marketing campaign.

The one thing the US mainstream media agrees on is the promotion of the US global military empire, and thus Rumsfeld’s follies in front of the camera were for the most part presented to Red and Blue America as wholesome evening entertainment.

Known unknowns and unknown knowns and etc. It was all gobblygook but Rumsfeld delivered it with a smile and bravado and it sure beat having to watch video clips of innocent children slaughtered by America’s “shock and awe” bombing orgy against a country that did not threaten us and could not have threatened us if it wanted to do so.

Yes, much more enjoyable to watch the Rumsfeld follies than to watch Iraqi children burning to death and fatally radiated under the terrorism of US bombs.

So, many antiwar allies are tonight dancing on the perhaps sulfuric-smelling grave of Donald Rumsfeld, but I will not be joining them.

Rumsfeld was all-powerful for a brief time, when the machine had selected him for the role. He was the face of the “good war” against the “demon of the day,” Saddam Hussein. And there is no doubt that he relished his emergence from the bowels of the war apparatus to the poetry of the Pentagon daily briefing.

But in the end, Rumsfeld was just another tool of the bigger beast. In that way his death is pathetic. Just another traveling salesman of a product that had already been bought and sold many times over: Death.

God have mercy on Donald Rumsfeld’s soul. Let’s pray he converted to actual Christianity and thus saved himself from eternal horror. To hope for less is to descend to the level of the neocon demons themselves.

At the end of the day, yes Rumsfeld helped sell a war that killed a million people and did not in any measurable way make us more safe. But he’s a mere piker in our current far more murky world of deep state murderers like Austin, Nuland, Powers, Blinken, and so many others who will never appear before the camera because they are too busy manning the killing machine.

Rumsfeld was a monster 20 years ago. Today compared to his competition for neocon monster murderer he is a mere footnote in the book of US foreign policy murder history.

Rest in Peace Donald Rumsfeld. May God have mercy on your soul (and on all of our equally sinful souls). Amen.

ronpaulinstitute.org