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AnonymousFinish the damn book by hook or by crook! Starts without finishes are a wasted endeavor! Even if it doesn’t sell you gain the upper hand with follow through, when your ship does finally come in it will only be attributed to your long list of accomplishments and not a pile of abandoned starts that are automatic failures! The Wright brothers built bicycles then went on to build airplanes. How many bicycles did they build before Kitty Hawk?
Al-Saud’s Only Gamble Option
by Ghassan Kadi for The Saker
22nd May 2017
A lot has been said and speculated on about the “real” objectives of Trump’s visit to Saudi Arabia. Seasoned veteran British journalist/analyst and Middle East expert Robert Fisk sees it as an attempt to create a Sunni-style NATO to curb the Iranian expansion [2], and his speculation is on the money, but in realistic terms, what can this visit and its “aftermath” achieve?
Despite the slump on crude oil prices over the last 2-3 years, the Saudis are not short on cash, despite the huge and growing deficit they are running. Their reserve cash is estimated to be a whopping three quarters of a trillion American dollars, and the unit “trillion” has been chosen here because it is the millions of the 21st Century and billions have become too small to consider.
That said, the Saudis have recently pledged nearly a third of their stash on “investments” with the USA. The first allotment came in the form of an undertaking to invest over 100 billion dollars in the American housing sector less than a fortnight ago, and upon Trump’s historic Riyadh visit, the Saudis signed an excess of 100 billion dollar arms deal contract. This is a total of an excess of 200 billion American dollars to be injected into the American economy. But on the scale of trillions again, this huge figure amounts to only a mere 1% of America’s staggering official 20 trillion dollar debt.
A drop in the ocean perhaps if taken into the context of the American economy and debt, but there is little doubt that this Saudi money will create jobs in the USA, and if President Trump is still sticking by the promise of creating jobs, he’s on the money with this one too.
Thus far, and nearly four months after his inauguration, it can safely be said that the most predictable thing about President Trump thus far has been his unpredictability. But with all of his eccentricities and swings, what was it that made him swing in favour of Al-Saud? It may not be very difficult to solve this puzzle if we look at the chain of events.
Surely, the USA has a lot of strategic interests in the area, and these interests are multi-faceted. Among other things, the USA wants to protect the long-term wellbeing of Israel, curb the influence of Russia and Iran in the region, have a share in the decision making of the “War on Syria”, and last but not least, to keep a tight control on Saudi oil and cash wealth.
One of Trump’s election promises was to get America’s allies to pay their way, and he was very vocal about the Saudis saying on a number of occasions that protecting Saudi Arabia was costing the USA more than it should be paying for. Those subtle “threats” sent a wave of shivers down the spines of Saudi royals, especially that they were already in deep trouble financially and also bogged down in a protracted and highly expensive war in Yemen that seems unwinnable.
Given that the Saudis believed that former President Obama has let them down and did not invade Syria after the alleged East Ghouta chemical attack of August 2013, the unknown and rather unstable Trump looked like a wild card and they braced for the worst.
Knowing that they are in deep trouble and need America more than ever, feeling extremely nervous about the Iran nuclear deal, the Saudis realized that the only option they have with Trump was to appease him; “but how?”, they wondered. But when they put two and two together, and listened to Trump’s statements about Saudi Arabia, the Saudis realized that they can and will appease him with money; a quarter of a trillion dollars and counting.
Taking the big fat cheque book out is not a modus operandi that is alien to the Saudi psyche, because the Saudis have learned to solve their problems with money. And now, they believe that they are forging a new era of military and strategic alliance with the United States, and paying for this privilege with hard cash.
What they do not know is that whilst they were dreaming big, thinking that they are on the verge of becoming a regional superpower to be reckoned with signing an alliance with America, Donald Trump was signing a business deal, a sales contract; nothing more and nothing less.
The way Trump sees this is a win-win situation. If the Saudis do manage to get the upper military hand and curb the Iranians, he would have reached this zenith not only without having to fight Iran, but also whilst being paid for it.
On the other hand, if the Saudis take a gamble to go to war with Iran and lose, he would have received his quarter trillion in advance. So for Saudi Arabia to win or lose, the deal makes America a quarter of a trillion dollar richer; or rather a quarter of a trillion less in debt.
In reality however, what are the odds of Saudi Arabia winning an open war with Iran? Or will this war eventuate in the first place? Back to this question later on.
In a part of the world that is highly volatile, supplying a huge arsenal of highly lethal weapons to a regime that is known for its atrocities, war crimes, inciting regional tension and creating conflict is pouring oil on an already raging fire. Trump’s arms deal with the Saudis probably marks one of the lowest points in America’s history.
If anything, after the historic American-Iranian nuclear deal, America was in a position to play the role of an arbitrator and try to get the Saudis and the Iranians to reconcile; coerce them if needed. Instead, Trump turned his attack on Jihadi terrorism by supplying more support to the core and centre of terrorism (Saudi Arabia) and signed a huge arms deal that will only lead to further and much deadlier escalations.
With seemingly very powerful Sunni/Shiite animosities resurfacing after many centuries of dormancy, the pro-American axis happens to be predominantly Sunni and the pro-Russian resistance axis is seen to be Shiite; though it is not as such in reality.
That said, the strongest Sunni army in the region is undoubtedly Turkey’s, and Turkey could potentially play a key role in bolstering Fisk’s Sunni-”NATO”. However, the Kurdish issue is a bigger threat to Turkey than Iran has ever been, and Turkey will walk away from its Sunni brothers and “NATO” allies if they were to support Kurdish separatists and arm them; and the irony is that they are.
Without Turkey, a Sunni-”NATO” will be a toothless tiger, unless perhaps it receives enough support from Israel; a support America will not be prepared to offer. But apart from some possible airstrikes and intelligence sharing, how much support will Israel give if any at all?
And how much will Putin will be able to weigh in with his clout to keep Netanyahu’s nose out of it? Last but not least, how will the leaders of a so-called Sunni-”NATO” be able to “sell” the idea of getting into an alliance with Israel with its Sunni populace base?
There is little doubt that the Saudis now feel that Trump has given them a carte blanche to attack Iran, and if they swallow the bait fully, they may be foolish enough to take the gamble. But first, they have to finish off Yemen, and then look back and think how they miscalculated when they planned the so-called “Operation Decisive Storm”, and which was meant to be a swift and successful operation.
More than two years later, victory seems further than ever predicted all the while the Yemenis have been improving their missile manufacturing capabilities and have been able to hit targets in the capital Riyadh.
Whilst the Saudis were begging the Americans to sell them more advanced weapons to win the war in Yemen, the Yemenis were developing their own. But given that Saudis believe that all problems can be solved provided one is prepared to spend as much as needed, the bottom line for them will always be, “how much?”
The Saudis will not only have to re-evaluate the short-sighted military gamble they took in Yemen, but also the financial one. No one knows for certain what has thus far been the dollar cost that the Saudis had to cough up, but it is in the tens of billions of dollars.
With a country that is currently running a near 90 billion dollar budget deficit and diminishing returns, to gamble one third of the national savings on a new war aimed at Iran is tantamount to both, military and financial suicide.
If a war against Iran is at all winnable by the Saudis, what will be the dollar cost?
Larger Map
http://static4.businessinsider.com/image/568ed056c08a801c008b7bdf-1200-1344/carte-1-octobre-d.jpgIf the budget ceiling was broken, just like that of Operation Decisive Storm, and if the Saudis realize that the over 100 billion odd dollars they “invested” to buy state-of-the-art weaponry from the USA was not enough, by how much will they be prepared to lift the cost ceiling?
They will only need to break the ceiling 3-4 fold before they actually run out of cash reserves. Such a budget overblow is not unusual in wars, and Yemen and Syria are living proof for the Saudis to learn from; if they are capable of learning.
A war against Iran will perhaps be Al-Saud’s final gamble option, but unless the Saudi royals change their rhetoric and seek reconciliation with their Shiite neighbours, this war could well be Al-Saud’s only gamble option.
But the bottom line to any military action is military pragmatism. How can the Saudis think that they can invade and subdue Iran when they haven’t been able to subdue a starved and besieged Yemen?
In the unlikely event that they will be able to serve Iran with a swift “shock-and-awe” strike and achieve prompt victory, what will add to their woes is Iran’s ability to close the Strait of Hormuz and to also hit oil production areas and ports. In simple terms, the Saudi war on Yemen is expensive enough, but a war with Iran will be much more expensive, and one that will cut off Saudi life-line; its income.
Larger Map https://southfront.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/Military-Comparison5.jpgDo the Saudis believe that expensive imported hardware is going to give the military edge they need? “Knowing” Trump, he will likely wait till the Saudis are down on their knees begging and then extort them by hiking the price of an elusive “super weapon”, perhaps even an A-Bomb, that will tip the war in Saudi favour.
But “knowing” the Saudis and Iranians, if the Saudis attack and start an all-out war on Iran, then this may indeed earn the name of decisive storm, but not on Saudi terms. Will Iran virtually walk into Saudi Arabia? Such a scenario cannot be overruled.
More than likely however, America will continue to feed the fire for as long as the Saudi cow (female camel in this instance) can be milked and for as long as there is money to be had. For as long as the infamous Al-Saud are on the throne, the kingdom will continue to be run by the same old rules of arrogance that will not stop until that evil legacy is down and vanquished.
<<Y
Firstly no one actually believes Trump will give Saudi a nuclear option so a conventional war will result in Saudi Arabia’s army being crushed by Iran, Iraq, Syria, Hamas and Hazebollah. Possibly Turkey too.
Secondly it is well known that Donald Trump has personal investments in Saudi Arabia that would profit from the current situation. His vested interests will provide further personal guarantees of US support for the Saud regime. A weakness which Riyadh is well aware of and possibly will exploit if necessary.
Y>>
Citations
[1] http://thesaker.is/al-sauds-only-gamble-option/
[2] http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/donald-trump-saudi-arabia-iran-iraq-kurdish-population-shia-muslims-a7742276.html
Anonymous
AnonymousTopic: Oldschool's intro…
Hello all, I’m glad to be here now. Any way i’ll lay it out for all to get to know me. I’m 44, daughter almost 14, good job, ex wife is 38. I got married at 26 and had pretty much a great 17 years. We never really fought and when we did it wasn’t bad. Our daughter was born and life changed for the better, we one big happy. The three of us were never separate, never wanted to be. I make good money so we decided she would stay at home and raise our girl no problem, all is well until this past February, the s~~~ show begins.. I go to work with a kiss and a I love you like I had everyday and come home to crying and “I can’t do this anymore”, WHAT!!! Ok so I go through everything in my head to save the marriage (counseling, time apart, a priest, I’ll quit my job and we can move etc.) nothing works, nothing. She just keeps digging in her heels the more I try and esculating her want of divorce. Ok, I know you are all thinking she was cheating on me but my brothers I can tell you she was not so I will not waste any more time on that. She wants out right NOW, talking asset separation, custody, alimony, child support, retirement funds, everything, my head is still spinning she has got me off balance. So I come to my senses and realize this is going to happen and I start circling the wagons to protect myself. We decide to use one lawyer to file and we work out all the financials and terms on our own but I will say she knew all the alimony and child support due to her by doing a quick online search and using the calculators provided by the state to use as her starting point in negotiations. This whole time I still love this girl, family and friends are stunned this is all happening, then comes the Oldschool awakening. She comes home one morning, the morning we were to sign the final divorce papers at the lawyers office and starts an argument… So here we are yelling at each other with my daughter hearing it all, since I have conceal carry I have my gun holstered on my hip like I usually do and she knows it, never a big deal until today. I put my hand on the holster to adjust it without thinking and she screams as loud as she can and runs out the back door (uh-oh). So I follow her and she is gone, I walk to the front in my driveway and see her four houses away cell phone to ear (uh-oh). So I go back into the house knowing what is in store for me in the next five minutes, I secure the gun go to my daughter tell her I think mom called the police on me and I love her. Then I see the first squad car creep up and stop a few houses away, then a second, third, fourth, fifth (OH-S~~~). So this is going to go one of two ways, I come out or they come in for me. My daughter is in the house because my soon to be ex left her there to protect herself first and ran, so I walk out and these officers are everywhere coming from the sides of my house, the front right at me with guns pointed at me hands up thinking I’m going to get shot. After they frisk me they tell me what I already figured and ask me what happened in an all to friendly manner, all I say over and over is “she’s lying” nothing else. After 10 min of this they call an all clear and tell me she says she may have over reacted and does not want to press any charges, seems she realized my paycheck, pension and all else would vanish if her ill conceived plan worked and mind you the whole time my 13 year old daughter was watching from inside the house. That is the day I fell out of love, thats the moment I realized I WILL NEVER be in this spot again, ever. I went from happily married to that in 6 weeks, I never saw it comming. So needless to say the divorce was uneventful and over with earlier this month, I got 50/50 custody and the money and assets split about 50/50 (I saved my pension!) It will be tight financially for the next 4 years but then I’ll kick ass. So thats it, my story, my heaven and hell and how I made it to MGTOW. I’m glad to be here and plan to participate as much as I can to these forums. Oldschool..
Get a vasectomy.
Yuri Bezmenov: A Lecture on Subversion (1983)
Yuri Alexandrovich Bezmenov (Russian: Юрий Александрович Безменов, also known as Tomas David Schuman; 1939 – 1993) was a journalist for RIA Novosti and a former PGU KGB informant from the Soviet Union who defected to Canada. [2]
After being assigned to a station in India, Bezmenov eventually grew to love the people and the culture of India, but at the same time, he began to resent the KGB-sanctioned oppression of intellectuals who dissented from Moscow’s policies. He decided to defect to the West. Bezmenov is best remembered for his anticommunist lectures and books from the 1980s.
In 1983, he gave this interview to G. Edward Griffin, who at that time was a member of the John Birch Society, an anticommunist group. In the interview, Bezmenov explained the methods used by the KGB for the gradual subversion of the political system of the United States.
Under the pen-name Tomas D. Schuman, Bezmenov authored the book Love Letter to America. The author’s biography of the book likens Bezmenov to Winston Smith, from George Orwell’s 1984.
There is a strong push from the Fourth International to remove Bezmenov’s works from the public domain. I hope this post detracts from that objective.
The lecture was made against Soviet subversion and the terms used reference that – but the vernacular should now be applied to the neocon-controlled Washington and its vassal states.
There are the twenty parts to the lecture. The parts can be viewed here:
https://cosmolearning.org/documentaries/yuri-bezmenov-lecture-on-subversion-1983/1/or the full Youtube version here (1h:24min)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y3qkf3bajd4The short version is here (15 mins)
Stages of Subversion by Yuri Bezmenov (a.k.a. Tomas Schuman)
YURI BEZMENOV:
- Ideological subversion is the process which is legitimate and open. You can see it with your own eyes…. It has nothing to do with espionage.
- I know that intelligence gathering looks more romantic…. That’s probably why your Hollywood producers are so crazy about James Bond types of films. But in reality the main emphasis of the KGB is NOT in the area of intelligence at all.
- According to my opinion, and the opinions of many defectors of my caliber, only about 15% of time, money, and manpower is spent on espionage as such. The other 85% is a slow process which we call either ideological subversion, active measures, or psychological warfare.
- What it basically means is: to change the perception of reality of every American that despite of the abundance of information no one is able to come to sensible conclusions in the interest of defending themselves, their families, their community, and their country.
- It’s a great brainwashing process which goes very slow and is divided into four basic stages. The first one being “demoralization”. It takes from 15 to 20 years to demoralize a nation. Why that many years? Because this is the minimum number of years required to educate one generation of students in the country of your enemy exposed to the ideology of [their] enemy.
- In other words, Marxism-Leninism ideology is being pumped into the soft heads of at least three generation of American students without being challenged or counterbalanced by the basic values of Americanism; American patriotism….
- The result? The result you can see … the people who graduated in the 60’s, dropouts or half-baked intellectuals, are now occupying the positions of power in the government, civil service, business, mass media, and educational systems. You are stuck with them. You can’t get through to them. They are contaminated.
- They are programmed to think and react to certain stimuli in a certain pattern [alluding to Pavlov]. You cannot change their mind even if you expose them to authentic information. Even if you prove that white is white and black is black, you still can not change the basic perception and the logic of behavior.
- In other words [for] these people the process of demoralization is complete and irreversible. To rid society of these people you need another 15 or 20 years to educate a new generation of patriotically minded and common sense people who would be acting in favor and in the interests of United States society.
- Here subversion goes on simultaneously on various “levels” of national and human activity: level of consciousness (ideology) level of authority (socio-political power and administration), and level of material wellbeing (economy).
- The demoralization process in the United States is basically completed already for the last 25 years. Actually, it’s over fulfilled because demoralization now reaches such areas where not even Comrade Andropov and all his experts would even dream of such tremendous success. Most of it is done by Americans to Americans thanks to lack of moral standards.
- As I mentioned before, exposure to true information does not matter anymore. A person who was demoralized is unable to assess true information. The facts tell nothing to him, even if I shower him with information, with authentic proof, with documents and pictures. …he will refuse to believe it…. That’s the tragedy of the situation of demoralization.
Notes from the lecture by Mr. Thomas, Schuman at the News Word International correspondent’s seminar Feb. 22 – 24 (1979?) [Thomas Schuman is an x-KBG officer]
Stage one: Demoralization. Preparatory period 10 to 30 years
Level of consciousness (ideology)
Infiltration into mass media, educational systems, organized religion and religious groups, cultural and professional groups and organizations. The main goal: psychological change of national and individual perception of reality to such an extent that majority of a nation does not perceive any danger emanating from totalitarianism, moreover the hostile system is ultimately accepted as non-belligerent and even in certain aspects desirable, in any case — functional as an alternative to the present one.
The most efficient methods of demoralization is semantic manipulation of population, or word pollution, whereby the normal true meaning of the words and traditionally accepted meanings are being gradually replaced by Orwellian type surrogates, partly or totally opposite to the reality.
Example: “Patriotic Front Guerillas” — Moscow trained and armed regular force, practicing mega-mass murders and terror against defenseless population of their own country. <<Y US-supported moderate rebels overseas, right or left wing radicals, feminists etc. at home. Y>>
Example: “United Nations” a forum for ideological war between lifetime bureaucratic representatives of various elites and Juntas, most of them not related to any nation at all (Belorussia, Ukraina, GDR etc. “ambassadors” to UN).
Example: “World Peace Council” — Soviet sponsored propaganda front, supporting localized military conflicts, as long as they are directed against the Western (USA) interests. <<Y US NGO’s and Aid Organisations Y>>
Example: “Free medical aid” (anything “free”) — a government-subsidized service, financed from taxation of the population, and extended to population disregarding the real needs, capabilities or merits of individuals. etc…
Level of authority
Subversion on this level requires infiltration into domestic institutions of a nation as well as into her foreign policymaking bodies. Domestically, the aim of the subverter is to weaken the home defenses, such as security services, police, army, civil service, other public services (transport, post office, hydro — if nationalized, etc).
The methods — discreditation of the administration of the most vital national services. Investigations of “wrong doings”; corruption affairs, sex scandals — implication of the national leaders and politicians in fraudulent or dubious affairs, smear tactics in media etc. Ridicule everything “patriotic” as psychotic.
Describe every effort to reveal the activity of subverter (KGB et al) – as “paranoid”. Discredit everyone, who can testify to public, media and parliament the true nature of subversion (immigrants from Communist regimes are shown to a nation as “emotionally unbalanced”. Solzhenytsin “arrogant prophet and a profiteer” etc).
Internationally, the demoralization process concerns mainly with relations with other extensions of the subverter’s regime. To corner the nation in question into fraudulent “Disarmament Campaigns” fictional and unverifiable SALT agreements. Isolate the “capitalist” countries from each other and split their blocks, while drawing the ragments into “deals” with totalitarian camp.
Force USA to betray her allies (Taiwan, Vietnam, South Korea, South Africa). Make leaders of the target nations sign all sorts of fake “joint communiqués” giving the subverter much needed appearance of decency and acceptance.
Level of economy
Forcing the West into unequal, beneficial only to the subverter deals (with idealized, if, preferential trade status “deal”, sea-fishing “deals”. etc). Dumping policies (sale of “Ladall cars in Canada half-price of its replica – “Fiat-12811).
There are about 20 Soviet-owned companies in Canada, such as Tractorexport Ltd. in Toronto; Emec Trading Ltd. in Vancouver; Socan aircraft in Calgary, churning yearly 7 digit profits. The goal is double-barreled: to undermine similar Canadian and US businesses and to consolidate huge “liquid” assets to subsidize other forms of subversion in the target area.
Stage Two: Destabilization (2 Years To 5 Months)
Encouragement and provoking of labor unrest by infiltrating. and “ideologisation” of the unions; provoking unnecessary strikes, creating inflation, lowering productivity with simultaneous propaganda of increased demands; propaganda of “strong government” and necessity of “controls” — militarisation of the “grass roots” movements and minority groups (gays, coloreds, womenlib, prisonlib, kidlib, fartlib) and sidetracking of the public attention to the non-issues (dogs dropping on the sidewalks etc).
Propaganda of gun control for the law-abiding population with simultaneous relaxation of attitude towards recidivist criminals. Thus, rendering a nation helpless and defenseless in the future event of political terrorism; breaking down of democratic institutions (parliaments to city halls) and replacing them with a number of centralized govt. appointed bodies, people can not re-elect or get rid of otherwise; breaking down of national unity (ethnic, racial, religious linguistic etc); sabotage and arrangement of accidents on transport, power stations etc. to create an atmosphere of insecurity and panic.
Stage Three: Collapce, Explosion ( 2 Weeks To A Month)
Interrelations between parts of economy break down; general strike; growth of terrorism and crime; total discontent; currency crisis (gold rush); collapse of the government and import of an alternative “exile” government; power concentrates in the hands of the militant “revolutionary” group, who will be disposed off later on. The nation is ripe for the final act of subversion: “invitation of a communist occupational army (Cuban, Soviet etc).
What to do about it? Is it possible do prevent subversion?
Yes. It takes a unified national effort. Any democratic nation should cultivate such attitudes as devotion to one’s country, patriotism, moral strength, working ethics, resurrection of all national traditional values.
Among other drastic measures: restriction of liberties of self proclaimed anti-democratic, militant, radical and amoral groups. Re-elections. Chose responsible, not “charismatic” leaders. Reform your currency and cancel (not “freeze”‘) all the assets of the subverter country. Expel all the agents of the subverter without any apology or explanation.
Reestablish friendly relations with the moderate and non-aggressive dictatorships as long as they are anti-communist. Preach self-restraint and moderation to the population. Explain to the people, that the situation is serious, and that some small liberties have to be sacrificed for the sake of survival and basic freedom, but when and if it comes to the worst and your nation is invaded or “liberated” by internal “revolutionary” forces? Well, you still have a chance.
Remember every “progressive Marxist economy” immediately results in a disastrous shortage of everything needed for survival;
Learn firearms; befriend a policeman or an army officer long before the war starts — that means now;
Study survival techniques, learn how to grow food, hunt, build shelter and keep warm.
Learn professions essential for emergency situation: mechanic, radio-operator, doctor, pilot, electrician etc;
Learn the languages of ‘potential aggressors (Russian, Spanish, Chinese);
Learn to cooperate, but be ready to expect no help from anyone;
Learn to be self-sufficient;
Try to stay informed whatever happens, Remember every “progressive revolutionary” regime immediately establishes a blanket censorship over all mass communication media.
Have a small short-wave radio and a CB transmitter — you may need the latter for underground communications.
Study evacuation routes from your city to a nearest safe place: remember — industrial center is the most probable target both for Communist rockets and for urban terrorists, trained by Moscow or Havana.
Stage Four: “Normalization” (Indefinite Period)
Expulsion (or execution) of the previous national leaders and the top of the military and security establishment. Shocked population organize “resistance”. Too late: the resistance is announced to be an “imperialist plot” (CIA). Soviet (Cuban) aid is “requested.” Tanks and planes arrive in short order.
Then comes expulsion (or execution) of foreign correspondents and diplomats as “spies”, establishment of “revolutionary” censorship over all mass media, mass arrests of political opponents, rapid creation of concentration camps for the “enemies of the people”, regimentation of all national life, shortage of all the basic commodities, mass terror, etc.
This usually ends the circle of events and a “liberated” nation for an indefinite period becomes a satellite of a communist power. This is the least painful development. The other two alternatives are unmeasurably more tragic:
1. International (multinational) military conflict (Indochina), or
2. Civil war and mass terror against the civilian population.
Both alternatives imply that the “liberated” nation by this time is: totally defenseless internally (the Police and security destroyed) — defenseless individually (guns expropriated no civil-defense programs conducted for years, gangs of “revolutionaries” are absolutely free to do, whatever they imagine is good for the cause — defenseless internationally (army is in a state of atrophy after disarmament and SALTs) — friendless (all former allies betrayed, USA abused, UN packed with previously “liberated” countries).
Thus, no one in the whole world is going to help you and prevent the “normalization” of your nation. Least of all the remaining democratic (or autocratic, but non-aggressive) countries. Your governments and your media have been romancing with “socialism” and “détente” for so long, that establishment of the “peoples” power in your country would not seem tragic for them. Besides, what can they do? Move their troops?
Subversion is complete and successful. From now on the infected system will stabilize itself and grow, eventually replacing the normal healthy national body, than devouring the disintegrated remnants of it.
Citation
[1] https://cosmolearning.org/documentaries/yuri-bezmenov-lecture-on-subversion-1983/1/
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yuri_Bezmenovhttp://www.pennlive.com/news/2017/05/noted_pa_cardiologist_commits.html
Not long after he was ordered by a court to pay nearly half of his annual income to his ex-wife, Dr. Jan Nemec wrote a final letter to his daughter.
“I wish I had the opportunity to quit my job and be a gardener in Costa Rica,” the daughter, Katerina Nemcova, recounted to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. “But I can’t do that,” Nemec told her, “because I would go to jail and that’s terrifying.”
According to the paper, “Dr. Nemec refused to submit to what he saw as oppression and took his own life at his Swissvale [Pa.] home on May 8.” He was 54.
It’s not entirely clear why Nemec believed he would be jailed for changing careers or substantially lowering his income. This explainer of the circumstances under which alimony arrangements can be modified says voluntarily relinquishing a job can qualify, although not always.
But Nemec’s daughter said he was outraged by the ruling and believed he had only one option left. (PennLive was not immediately able to independently verify the terms of Nemec’s divorce and divorce settlement.)
Nemec, a native of Prague in what was then the communist eastern European state of Czechoslovakia, emigrated to the U.S. in 1993 as a fellow in cardiology and electrophysiology at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn. He was later recruited by UPMC in Pittsburgh as an expert in complicated heart procedures and moved to the Pittsburgh suburb of Swissvale to work for the organization as an academic physician beginning in 2006, his obituary explains.
His profile on UPMC’s website was no longer active as of Friday.
According to his daughter, “Freedom and liberty were all very important to him. He didn’t want to conform to the norm. He’d been planning this [his death] for at least three years — we now know this.”
In one final jab at the legal system he so resented, Nemec reportedly waited until his divorce had been finalized for exactly 30 days before ending his life and leaving the majority of his estate to the organization Doctors Without Borders.
“He was always very, very anti-communist. This was definitely about his moral principles,” his daughter told the Post-Gazette. “He thought this was a poorly designed system and just didn’t want to be a part of it and would rather give the money to a worthy cause.”
Nemec’s obituary says he is survived by his daughter, Katerina (Sydney, Australia); son, Jakub (Minneapolis, Minnesota); mother, Dr. Marcela Nemcova (Prague, Czech Republic); and “a legion of colleagues, devoted patients, and friends.”
A Short History of the Neocon Takeover of the United States
This article is the last part of a four-part series on Truthdig called “Universal Empire”—an examination of the current stage of the neocon takeover of American policy that began after World War II. The other parts are here : 1 2 3
By Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould
http://www.Truthdig.com
27th April 2017Part 4 : The Final Stage of the Machiavellian Elites’ Takeover of America
The Means to the End
The recent assertion by the Trump White House [2] that Damascus and Moscow released “false narratives” to mislead the world about the 4th April 2017 sarin gas attack in Khan Shaykhun, Syria, is a dangerous next step in the “fake news” propaganda war launched in the final days of the Obama administration.
It is a step whose deep roots in Communist Trotsky’s Fourth International must be understood before deciding whether American democracy can be reclaimed.
Muddying the waters of accountability in a way not seen since Sen. Joe McCarthy at the height of the Red Scare in the 1950s, the “Countering Disinformation and Propaganda Act” [3] signed into law without fanfare by Obama in December 2016 officially authorized a government censorship bureaucracy comparable only to George Orwell’s fictional Ministry of Truth in his novel “1984.”
Referred to as “the Global Engagement Center,” [4] the official purpose of this new bureaucracy is to “recognize, understand, expose, and counter foreign state and non-state propaganda and disinformation efforts aimed at undermining the United States’ national security interests.”
The real purpose of this Orwellian nightmare [5] is to cook the books on anything that challenges Washington’s neoconservative pro-war narrative and to intimidate, harass or jail anyone who tries. As has already been demonstrated by President Trump’s firing of Tomahawk missiles at a Syrian government airbase, it is a recipe for a world war, and like it or not, that war has already begun.
This latest attack on Russia’s supposed false narrative takes us right back to 1953 and the beginnings of the cultural war between East and West. Its roots are tied to the Congress for Cultural Freedom, to James Burnham’s pivot from Trotsky’s Fourth International to right-wing conservatism and to the rise of the neoconservative Machiavellians as a political force.
As Burnham’s “The Struggle for the World” [6] stressed, the Third World War had already begun with the 1944 Communist-led Greek sailors’ revolt. In Burnham’s Manichean thinking, the West was under siege. George Kennan’s Cold War policy of containment was no different than Neville Chamberlain’s policy of appeasement.
Détente with the Soviet Union amounted to surrender. Peace was only a disguise for war, and that war would be fought with politics, subversion, terrorism and psychological warfare. Soviet influence had to be rolled back wherever possible. That meant subverting the Soviet Union and its proxies and, when necessary, subverting Western democracies as well.
The true irony of today’s late-stage efforts by Washington to monopolize “truth” and attack alternate narratives isn’t just in its blatant contempt for genuine free speech. The real irony is that the entire “Freedom Manifesto” employed by the United States and Britain since World War II was never free at all, but a concoction of the CIA’s Psychological Strategy Board’s (PSB) [7] comprehensive psychological warfare program waged on friend and foe alike.
The CIA would come to view the entire program, beginning with the 1950 Berlin conference, to be a landmark in the Cold War, not just for solidifying the CIA’s control over the non-Communist left and the West’s “free” intellectuals, but for enabling the CIA to secretly disenfranchise Europeans and Americans from their own political culture in such a way they would never really know it.
As historian Christopher Lasch [8] wrote in 1969 of the CIA’s cooptation of the American left,
- “The modern state … is an engine of propaganda, alternately manufacturing crises and claiming to be the only instrument that can effectively deal with them.
- “This propaganda, in order to be successful, demands the cooperation of writers, teachers, and artists not as paid propagandists or state-censored time-servers but as ‘free’ intellectuals capable of policing their own jurisdictions and of enforcing acceptable standards of responsibility within the various intellectual professions.”
Key to turning these “free” intellectuals against their own interests was the CIA’s doctrinal program for Western cultural transformation contained in the document PSB D-33/2. [9] PSB D-33/2 foretells of a “long-term intellectual movement, to: break down world-wide doctrinaire thought patterns” while “creating confusion, doubt and loss of confidence” in order to “weaken objectively the intellectual appeal of neutralism and to predispose its adherents towards the spirit of the West.”
The goal was to “predispose local elites to the philosophy held by the planners,” while employing local elites “would help to disguise the American origin of the effort so that it appears to be a native development.”
While declaring itself as an antidote to Communist totalitarianism, one internal critic of the program, PSB officer Charles Burton Marshall, viewed PSB D-33/2 itself as frighteningly totalitarian, interposing “a wide doctrinal system” that “accepts uniformity as a substitute for diversity,” embracing “all fields of human thought—all fields of intellectual interests, from anthropology and artistic creations to sociology and scientific methodology.”
He concluded: “That is just about as totalitarian as one can get.”
Burnham’s Machiavellian elitism lurks in every shadow of the document. As recounted in Frances Stoner Saunder’s “The Cultural Cold War,” “Marshall also took issue with the PSB’s reliance on ‘non-rational social theories’ which emphasized the role of an elite ‘in the manner reminiscent of Pareto, Sorel, Mussolini and so on.’ Weren’t these the models used by James Burnham in his book the Machiavellians? Perhaps there was a copy usefully to hand when PSB D-33/2 was being drafted. More likely, James Burnham himself was usefully to hand.”
Burnham was more than just at hand when it came to secretly implanting a fascist philosophy of extreme elitism into America’s Cold War orthodoxy. With “The Machiavellians,” Burnham had composed the manual that forged the old Trotskyist left together with a right-wing Anglo/American elite.
The political offspring of that volatile union would be called neoconservatism, whose overt mission would be to roll back Russian/Soviet influence everywhere. Its covert mission would be to reassert a British cultural dominance over the emerging Anglo/American Empire and maintain it through propaganda.
Hard at work on that task since 1946 was the secret Information Research Department of the British and Commonwealth Foreign Office known as the IRD.
Rarely spoken of in the context of CIA-funded secret operations, the IRD served as a covert anti-Communist propaganda unit from 1946 until 1977. According to Paul Lashmar and James Oliver, authors of “Britain’s Secret Propaganda War,” [10]
- “the vast IRD enterprise had one sole aim: To spread its ceaseless propaganda output (i.e. a mixture of outright lies and distorted facts) among top-ranking journalists who worked for major agencies and magazines, including Reuters and the BBC, as well as every other available channel. It worked abroad to discredit communist parties in Western Europe which might gain a share of power by entirely democratic means, and at home to discredit the British Left.”
IRD was to become a self-fulfilling disinformation machine for the far-right wing of the international intelligence elite, at once offering fabricated and distorted information to “independent” news outlets and then using the laundered story as “proof” of the false story’s validity.
One such front enterprise established with CIA money was Forum World Features, operated at one time by Burnham acolyte Brian Rossiter Crozier.[11] Described by Burnham’s biographer Daniel Kelly as a “British political analyst,” in reality, the legendary Brian Crozier functioned for over 50 years as one of Britain’s top propagandists and secret agents [12].
If anyone today is shocked by the biased, one-sided, xenophobic rush to judgment alleging Russian influence over the 2016 presidential election, they need look no further than to Brian Crozier’s closet for the blueprints. As we were told outright by an American military officer during the first war in Afghanistan in 1982, the U.S. didn’t need “proof the Soviets used poison gas” and they don’t need proof against Russia now. Crozier might best be described as a daydream believer, a dangerous imperialist who acts out his dreams [13] with open eyes.
From the beginning of the Cold War until his death in 2012, Crozier and his protégé Robert Moss [14] propagandized on behalf of military dictators Francisco Franco and Augusto Pinochet, organized private intelligence organizations to destabilize governments in the Middle East, Asia, Latin America and Africa and worked to delegitimize politicians in Europe and Britain viewed as insufficiently anti-Communist.
The mandate of his Institute for the Study of Conflict (ISC) set up in 1970 was to expose the supposed KGB campaign of worldwide subversion and put out stories smearing anyone who questioned it as a dupe, a traitor or Communist spy. Crozier regarded “The Machiavellians” as a major formative influence in his own intellectual development, and wrote in 1976 “indeed it was this book above all others that first taught me how [emphasis Crozier] to think about politics.” The key to Crozier’s thinking was Burnham’s distinction between the “formal” meaning of political speech and the “real,” a concept which was, of course, grasped only by elites.
In a 1976 article, Crozier marveled at how Burnham’s understanding of politics had spanned 600 years and how the use of “the formal” to conceal “the real” was no different today than when used by Dante Alighieri’s “presumably enlightened Medieval mind.” “The point is as valid now as it was in ancient times and in the Florentine Middle Ages, or in 1943. Overwhelmingly, political writers and speakers still use Dante’s method. Depending on the degree of obfuscation required (either by circumstances or the person’s character), the divorce between formal and real meaning is more of less absolute.”
But Crozier was more than just a strategic thinker. Crozier was a high-level covert political agent [15] who put Burnham’s talent for obfuscation and his Fourth International experience to use to undermine détente and set the stage for rolling back the Soviet Union.
In a secret meeting at a City of London bank in February 1977, he even patented a private-sector operational intelligence organization known at the Sixth International (6I) to pick up where Burnham left off: politicizing and privatizing many of the dirty tricks the CIA and other intelligence services could no longer be caught doing.
As he explained in his memoir “Free Agent,” the name 6I was chosen “because the Fourth International split. The Fourth International was the Trotskyist one, and when it split, this meant that, on paper, there were five Internationals. In the numbers game, we would constitute the Sixth International, or ‘6I.’ ”
Crozier’s cooperation with numerous “able and diligent Congressional staffers” as well as “the remarkable General Vernon (‘Dick’) Walters, [16] recently retired as Deputy Director of Central Intelligence,” cemented the rise of the neoconservatives.
When Carter caved in to the Team B and his neoconservative National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski’s plot to lure the Soviets into their own Vietnam in Afghanistan, it fulfilled Burnham’s mission and delivered the world to the Machiavellians without anyone being the wiser.
As George Orwell wrote in his “Second Thoughts on James Burnham”: “What Burnham is mainly concerned to show [in The Machiavellians] is that a democratic society has never existed and, so far as we can see, never will exist. Society is of its nature oligarchical, and the power of the oligarchy always rests upon force and fraud. … Power can sometimes be won and maintained without violence, but never without fraud.”
Today, Burnham’s use of Dante’s political treatise “De Monarchia” to explain his medieval understanding of politics might best be swapped for Dante’s “Divine Comedy,” a paranoid comedy of errors in which the door to Hell swings open to one and all, including the elites regardless of their status. Or as they say in Hell, “Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch’intrate.” (Abandon hope all ye who enter here.)
Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould are the authors of “Invisible History: Afghanistan’s Untold Story,” “Crossing Zero: The AfPak War at the Turning Point of American Empire” and “The Voice.” Visit their websites at invisiblehistory.com and grailwerk.com.
Citations
[1] http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_final_stage_of_the_machiavellian_elites_takeover_of_america_20170427
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/11/world/middleeast/russia-syria-chemical-weapons-white-house.html
[3] http://www.zerohedge.com/print/582834
[4] https://www.state.gov/r/gec/
[5] https://www.thenewamerican.com/usnews/constitution/item/24841-critics-slam-congress-for-creating-an-orwellian-ministry-of-truth
[6] https://archive.org/details/struggleforworld00burn
[7] https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP80R01731R003400010025-1.pdf
[8] http://www.longpauses.com/the-agony-of-the-american-left/
[9] https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP80R01731R003200050006-0.pdf
[10] https://www.amazon.com/Britains-Secret-Propaganda-Paul-Lashmar/dp/0750916680?tag=viglink21672-20
[11] https://wikispooks.com/wiki/Brian_Crozier
[12] http://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/brian-crozier-intelligence-and-security-expert-who-fought-communism-and-founded-his-own-spy-network-8036652.html
[13] http://www.invisiblehistory.com/the-books/mystical-imperialism/
[14] https://wikispooks.com/wiki/Document:Robert_Moss,_extract_from_The_%22Terrorism%22_Industry
[15] https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2012/aug/09/brian-crozier
[16] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vernon_A._WaltersA Short History of the Neocon Takeover of the United States
This article is the third part of a four-part series on Truthdig called “Universal Empire”—an examination of the current stage of the neocon takeover of American policy that began after World War II. The other parts are here : 1 2 4
By Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould
http://www.Truthdig.com
26th April 2017Part 3 : How the CIA Created a Fake Western Reality for ‘Unconventional Warfare’
The odd, psychologically conflicted and politically divisive ideology referred to as neoconservatism [2] can claim many godfathers. Irving Kristol (father of William Kristol), Albert Wohlstetter, Daniel Bell, Norman Podhoretz and Sidney Hook come to mind. And there are many others. But in both theory and practice, the title of founding father for the neoconservative agenda of endless warfare that rules the thinking of America’s defense and foreign policies today might best be applied to James Burnham.
His writings in the 1930s provided a refined Oxford intellectual’s gloss to the Socialist Workers Party, and as a close adviser to Communist revolutionary Leon Trotsky and his Fourth International, he learned the tactics and strategies of infiltration and political subversion firsthand. Burnham reveled in his role as a “Trotskyist intellectual,” pulling dirty tricks on his political foes in competing Marxist movements by turning their loyalties and looting their best talent.
Burnham renounced his allegiance to Trotsky and Marxism in all its forms in 1940, but he would take their tactics and strategies for infiltration and subversion with him and would turn their method of dialectical materialism against them. His 1941 book, “The Managerial Revolution,” [3] would bring him fame and fortune and establish him as an astute, if not exactly accurate, political prophet chronicling the rise of a new class of technocratic elite. His next book, “The Machiavellians,” confirmed his movement away from Marxist idealism to a very cynical and often cruel realism with his belief in the inevitable failure of democracy and the rise of the oligarch. In 1943 he put it all to use in a memo for the U.S. Office of Strategic Services (the OSS) in which his Trotskyist anti-Stalinism would find its way into the agency’s thinking. And in his 1947 book, “The Struggle for the World,” Burnham expanded his confrontational/adversarial dialectic toward the Soviet Union into a permanent, apocalyptic policy of endless war.
By 1947 James Burnham’s transformation from Communist radical to New World Order American conservative was complete. His “Struggle for the World” had done a French Turn [4] on Trotsky’s permanent Communist revolution and turned it into a permanent battle plan for a global American empire. All that was needed to complete Burnham’s dialectic was a permanent enemy, and that would require a sophisticated psychological campaign to keep the hatred of Russia alive for generations
The Rise of the Machiavellians
In 1939 Sidney Hook, Burnham’s colleague at New York University and fellow Marxist philosopher, had helped to found an anti-Stalinist Committee for Cultural Freedom as part of a campaign against Moscow. During the war Hook, too, had abandoned Marxism and, like Burnham, somehow found himself in the warm embrace of the right wing of America’s intelligence community during and after World War II. Hook was viewed by the Communist Party as a traitor and “counter-revolutionary reptile” for his activities and by 1942 was informing on his fellow comrades to the FBI.
Selling impoverished and dispossessed European elites on the virtues of American culture was essential to building America’s empire after the war, and Burnham’s early writings proved the inspiration from which a new counterculture of “freedom” would be built. As veterans of internecine Trotskyist warfare, both Burnham and Hook were practiced at the arts of infiltration and subversion, and with Burnham’s “The Machiavellians: Defenders of Freedom” [5] as their blueprint, they set out to colour anything the Soviets did or said with dark intent.
As Burnham articulated clearly in “The Machiavellians,” his version of freedom meant anything but intellectual freedom or those freedoms defined by America’s Constitution. What it really meant was conformity and submission. Burnham’s freedom only applied to those intellectuals (the Machiavellians) willing to tell people the hard truth about the unpopular political realities they faced.
These were the realities that would usher in a brave new world of the managerial class, who would set about denying Americans the very democracy they thought they already owned. As Orwell observed about Burnham’s Machiavellian beliefs in his 1946 “Second Thoughts”: “Power can sometimes be won or maintained without violence, but never without fraud, because it is necessary to use the masses.”
By 1949 the CIA was actively in the business of defrauding the masses by secretly supporting the so-called non-Communist left and behaving as if it was just a spontaneous outgrowth of a free society. By turning the left to the service of its expanding empire, the CIA was applying a French Turn of its own by picking the best and the brightest, and the creation of the National Security Act of 1947 institutionalised it.
Assisted by Britain’s Information Research Department (the IRD), the CIA recruited key former Soviet disinformation agents trained before the war who had managed non-Communist front groups for Moscow and put them to work. As Frances Stoner Saunders writes in her book “The Cultural Cold War,” [6] “these former propagandists for the Soviets were recycled, bleached of the stain of Communism, embraced by government strategists who saw in their conversion an irresistible opportunity to sabotage the Soviet propaganda machine which they had once oiled.”
By its own admission, the CIA’s strategy of promoting the non-Communist left would become the theoretical foundation of the agency’s political operations against Communism for over the next two decades. But the no-holds-barred cultural war against Soviet Communism began in earnest in March 1949 when a group of 800 prominent literary and artistic figures gathered at New York’s Waldorf Astoria Hotel for a Soviet-sponsored “Cultural and Scientific” conference that would sue for peace.
Both Sidney Hook and James Burnham were already actively involved in enlisting recruits to counter the efforts of Moscow’s Communist Information Bureau (Cominform) to influence Western opinion. But the Waldorf conference gave them an opportunity for dirty tricks they could only have prayed for.
Demonstrators organized by a right-wing coalition of Catholic groups and the American Legion heckled the guests as they arrived. Catholic nuns knelt in prayer for the souls of the Communist atheists in attendance. Gathered upstairs in a 10-floor bridal suite, a gang of ex-Trotskyists and Communists led by Hook intercepted the conference’s mail, doctored official press releases and published pamphlets challenging speakers to admit their Communist past.
In the end the entire conference became a twisted theater of the absurd, and Hook and Burnham would use it to sell Frank Wisner [7] at the CIA’s Office of Policy Coordination on taking the show on the road.
The Congress for Cultural Freedom: By Hook or by Crook
Drawing on the untapped power of the Fourth International, the coming-out party came on June 26, 1950, at the Titania Palace in occupied Berlin. Named for Hook’s 1939 concept for a cultural committee, The Congress for Cultural Freedom’s [8] 14-point “Freedom Manifesto” was to identify the West with freedom. And since everything about the West was said to be free, free, free, then it went without saying that everything about the Soviet Union wasn’t.
Organized by Burnham and Hook, the American delegation represented a who’s who of America’s postwar intellectuals. Tickets to Berlin were paid for by Wisner’s Office of Policy Coordination through front organizations and the Department of State, which helped arrange travel, expenses and publicity. According to CIA historian Michael Warner, the conference sponsors considered it money well spent, with one Defense Department representative calling it “unconventional warfare at its best.”
Burnham functioned as a critical connection between Wisner’s office and the intelligentsia moving from the extreme left to the extreme right with ease. Burnham found the congress to be a place to inveigh not just against Communism but against the non-communist left as well and left many wondering whether his views weren’t as dangerous to liberal democracy as Communism. According to Frances Stoner Saunders, members of the British delegation found the rhetoric coming out of the congress to be a deeply troubling sign of things to come.
- “Hugh Trevor-Roper [9] was appalled by the provocative tone….There was a speech by Franz Borkenau [10] which was very violent and indeed almost hysterical. He spoke in German and I regret to say that as I listened and I heard the baying voices of approval from the huge audiences, I felt, well, these are the same people who seven years ago were probably baying in the same way to similar German denunciations of Communism coming from Dr. Goebbels in the Sports Palast. And I felt, well, what sort of people are we identifying with? That was the greatest shock to me. There was a moment during the Congress when I felt that we were being invited to summon up Beelzebub in order to defeat Stalin.”
The Congress for Cultural Freedom didn’t need Beelzebub. It already had him in the form of Burnham, Hook and Wisner, and by 1952, the party was just getting started. Burnham worked overtime for Wisner legitimizing the congress as a platform for the Machiavellians alongside ex-Communists and even Nazis, including SS Gen. Reinhard Gehlen [11] and his German army intelligence unit, which had been brought into the CIA after the war intact. E. Howard Hunt, Watergate “plumber” [12] and famous CIA dirty trickster, remembered Burnham in his memoirs: “Burnham was a consultant to OPC on virtually every subject of interest to our organization. … He had extensive contacts in Europe and, by virtue of his Trotskyite background, was something of an authority on domestic and foreign Communist parties and front organizations.”
In 1953 Burnham was called upon again by Wisner to reach beyond Communism to help overthrow the democratically elected Mohammed Mossadegh in Tehran, Iran, apparently because Wisner thought the plan needed “a touch of Machiavelli.” But Burnham’s greatest contribution as a Machiavellian was yet to come. His book, “The Machiavellians: Defenders of Freedom,” would become the CIA’s manual for displacing Western culture with an alternative doctrine for endless conflict in a world of oligarchs. In the end, it opened the gates to an Inferno from which there would be no return.
End of Part 3
Part 4 of “Universal Empire” will look beyond Soviet Communism into the creation of the sophisticated doctrinal campaign that led to the final stage of the Machiavellian elites’ takeover of America.
Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould are the authors of “Invisible History: Afghanistan’s Untold Story,” “Crossing Zero: The AfPak War at the Turning Point of American Empire” and “The Voice.” Visit their websites at invisiblehistory.com and grailwerk.com.
Citations
[1]http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/how_neocons_created_fake_western_reality_cultural_displacement_20170426
[2] http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-12-22/russia-did-it-last-stand-neoconservatism
[3] https://www.amazon.com/Managerial-Revolution-What-Happening-World/dp/0837156785?tag=viglink21672-20
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Turn
[5] https://archive.org/details/TheMachiavellians
[6] http://www.thedivineconspiracy.org/Z5286U.pdf
[7] http://spartacus-educational.com/JFKwisner.htm
[8] https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/csi-publications/csi-studies/studies/95unclass/Warner.html
[9] http://www.oxfordtoday.ox.ac.uk/culture/poetry-creative-writing/hugh-trevor-roper-portrait-historian
[10] http://spartacus-educational.com/SPborkenau.htm
[11] http://nsarchive.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB146/
[12] https://www.maryferrell.org/pages/Confession_of_Howard_Hunt.htmlGreece Update : Interview with Professor Michael Hudson
- Professor Michael Hudson, born March 14, 1939, is an American economist, professor of economics at the University of Missouri in Kansas City and a researcher at the Levy Economics Institute at Bard College, former Wall Street analyst, political consultant, commentator and journalist.
- Hudson devoted his entire scientific career to the study of debts: both domestic (loans, mortgages, interest payments) and external. In his works he consistently advocates the idea that loans and exponentially growing debts that outstrip profits from the economy of the “real” sphere are disastrous for both the government and the people of the borrowing state.
- The current article is his interview with Sharmini Peries of The Real New Network, 6th May 2017 on his view that bond holders, banks, and IMF bear responsibility for having made irresponsible loans to Greece, so it is not right for them to force yet more austerity on Greece.
Background to the Greek Debit Crisis
The Greek government-debt crisis (also known as the Greek Depression) is the sovereign debt crisis faced by Greece in the aftermath of the financial crisis of 2007–08. The Greek crisis started in late 2009, triggered by the turmoil of the Great Recession, structural weaknesses in the Greek economy, and revelations that previous data on government debt levels and deficits had been undercounted by the Greek government.
As the Great Recession spread to Europe, the amount funds lent from the European core countries (e.g. Germany) to the peripheral countries such as Greece began to decline. Reports in 2009 of Greek fiscal mismanagement and deception increased borrowing costs; the combination meant Greece could no longer borrow to finance its trade and budget deficits at an affordable cost
This led to a crisis of confidence, indicated by a widening of bond yield spreads (Greek bonds compared to other EU bonds) and rising cost of risk insurance on credit default swaps compared to the other Eurozone countries, particularly Germany. (Credit default swaps are a financial contract whereby a buyer of corporate or sovereign debt in the form of bonds attempts to eliminate possible loss arising from default by the issuer of the bonds. This is achieved by the issuer of the bonds insuring the buyer’s potential losses as part of the agreement)
Greece’s large deficit was created by running a large foreign financial investment surplus to fund its government debt. As the inflow of money stopped during the crisis, reducing the foreign financial surplus, Greece was forced to reduce its budget deficit substantially. Countries facing such a sudden reversal in capital flows typically devalue their currencies to resume the inflow of capital; however, Greece was unable to do this, and so has instead suffered significant income (GDP) reduction, another form of devaluation.
Watch the video here (15min) or read the transcript
Sharmini Peries:
“It’s the Real News Network. I am Sharmini Peries coming to you from Baltimore. The European Commission announced on 2nd May 2017, that an agreement on Greek pension and income tax reforms would pave the way for further discussions on debt release for Greece.“The European Commission described this as good news for Greece. The Greek government described the situation in similar terms. However, little attention has been given as to how the wider Greek population are experiencing the consequences of the policies of the Troika.
“On May Day thousands of Greeks marked International Workers Day with anti-austerity protests. One of the protester’s a 32-year-old lawyer perhaps summed the mood, the best when she said …”
Speaker 2:
“The current Greek government, like all the ones before it, have implemented measures that has only one goal, the crushing of the workers, the working class and everyone who works themselves to the bone. We are fighting for the survival of the poorest who need help the most.”Sharmini Peries:
“To discuss the most recent negotiations underway between Greece and the TROIKA, which is the European Central Bank, the EU and the IMF, here’s Michael Hudson. Michael is a distinguished research professor of Economics at the University of Missouri, Kansas City.“He is the author of many books including, “Killing the Host: How Financial Parasites and Debt Bondage the Global Economy” and most recently “J is for Junk Economics: A Survivor’s Guide to Economic Vocabulary in the Age of Deception”. Michael it’s been a while, good to have you back.
Michael Hudson:
“Good to be here.”Sharmini Peries: ”
“Michael, let’s start with what’s being negotiated at the moment.”Michael Hudson:
“I wouldn’t call it a negotiation. Greece is simply being dictated to. There is no negotiation at all. It’s been told that its economy has shrunk so far by 20%, but has to shrink another 5% making it even worse than the depression.“Its wages have fallen and must be cut by another 10%. Its pensions have to be cut back. Probably 5 to 10% of its population of working age will have to immigrate.
“The intention is to cut the domestic tax revenues (not raise them), because labor won’t be paying taxes and businesses are going out of business. So we have to assume that the deliberate intention is to lower the government’s revenues by so much that Greece will have to sell off even more of its public domain to foreign creditors.
“Basically it’s a smash and grab exercise, and the role of Tsipras is not to represent the Greeks because the Troika have said, “The election doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter what the people vote for. Either you do what we say or we will smash your banking system.”
“Tsipras’s job is to say, “Yes I will do whatever you want. I want to stay in power rather than falling in election.”Sharmini Peries:
“Right. Michael you dedicated almost three chapters in your book “Killing the Host” to how the IMF economists actually knew that Greece will not be able to pay back its foreign debt, but yet it went ahead and made these huge loans to Greece.“It’s starting to sound like the mortgage fraud scandal where banks were lending people money to buy houses when they knew they couldn’t pay it back. Is it similar?
Michael Hudson:
“The basic principle is indeed the same. If a creditor makes a loan to a country or a home buyer knowing that there’s no way in which the person can pay, who should bear the responsibility for this? Should the bad lender or irresponsible bondholder have to pay, or should the Greek people have to pay?“IMF economists said that Greece can’t pay, and under the IMF rules it is not allowed to make loans to countries that have no chance of repaying in the foreseeable future. The then-head of the IMF, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, introduced a new rule – the “systemic problem” rule.
“It said that if Greece doesn’t repay, this will cause problems for the economic system – defined as the international bankers, bondholder’s and European Union budget – then the IMF can make the loan.
“This poses a question on international law. If the problem is systemic, not Greek, and if it’s the system that’s being rescued, why should Greek workers have to dismantle their economy?
“Why should Greece, a sovereign nation, have to dismantle its economy in order to rescue a banking system that is guaranteed to continue to cause more and more austerity, guaranteed to turn the Eurozone into a dead zone? Why should Greece be blamed for the bad malstructured European rules? That’s the moral principle that’s at stake in all this.”
Sharmini Peries:
“Michael, The New York Times has recently published an article titled, “IMF torn over whether to bail out Greece again.” [2]“It essentially describes the IMF as being sympathetic towards Greece in spite of the fact as you say, they knew that Greece could not pay back this money when it first lent it the money with the Troika. Right now, the IMF sounds rational and thoughtful about the Greek people. Is this the case?”
Michael Hudson:
“Well, Yanis Varoufakis, the finance minister under Syriza, said that every time he talked to the IMF’s Christine Lagarde and others two years ago, they were sympathetic.“They said, ‘I am terribly sorry we have to destroy your economy. I feel your pain, but we are indeed going to destroy your economy. There is nothing we can do about it. We are only following orders.‘
“The orders were coming from Wall Street, from the Eurozone and from investors who bought or guaranteed Greek bonds.
“Being sympathetic, feeling their pain doesn’t really mean anything if the IMF says, “Oh, we know it is a disaster. We are going to screw you anyway, because that’s our job. We are the IMF, after all. Our job is to impose austerity. Our job is to shrink economies, not help them grow. Our constituency is the bondholders and banks.”
“Somebody’s going to suffer. Should it the wealthy billionaires and the bankers, or should it be the Greek workers? Well, the Greek workers are not the IMF’s constituency. It says: “We feel your pain, but we’d rather you suffer than our constituency.”
“So what you read is simply the usual New York Times hypocrisy, pretending that the IMF really is feeling bad about what it’s doing. If its economists felt bad, they would have done what the IMF European staff did a few years ago after the first loan: They resigned in protest.
“They would write about it and go public and say, ‘This system is corrupt. The IMF is working for the bankers against the interest of its member countries.’ If they don’t do that, they are not really sympathetic at all. They are just hypocritical.”
Sharmini Peries:
“Right. I know that the European Commission is holding up Greece as an example in order to discourage other member nations in the periphery of Europe so that they won’t default on their loans. Explain to me why Greece is being held up as an example.”Michael Hudson:
“It’s being made an example for the same reason the United States went into Libya and bombed Syria: It’s to show that we can destroy you if you don’t do what we say. If Spain or Italy or Portugal seeks not to pay its debts, it will meet the same fate. Its banking system will be destroyed, and its currency system will be destroyed.“The basic principle at work is that finance is the new form of warfare. You can now destroy a country’s economy not merely by invading it. You don’t even have to bomb it, as you’ve done in the Near East. All you have to do is withdraw all credit to the banking system, isolate it economically from making payments to foreign countries so that you essentially put sanctions on it. You’ll treat Greece like they’ve treated Iran or other countries.
“We have life and death power over you.” The demonstration effect is not only to stop Greece, but to stop countries from doing what Marine Le Pen is trying to do in France: withdraw from the Eurozone.
“The class war is back in business – the class war of finance against labor, imposing austerity and shrinking living standards, lowering wages and cutting back social spending. It’s demonstrating who’s the winner in this economic warfare that’s taking place.”
Sharmini Peries:
“Then why is the Greek population still supportive of Syriza in spite of all of this? I mean, literally not only have they, as a population, been cut to no social safety net, no social security, yet the Syriza government keeps getting supported, elected in referendums, and they seem to be able to maintain power in spite of these austerity measures. Why is that happening?”Michael Hudson:
“Well, that’s the great tragedy. They initially supported Syriza because it promised not to surrender in this economic war. They said they would fight back. The plan was not pay the debts even if this led Europe to force Greece out of the European Union.”“In order to do this however, what Yanis Varoufakis and his advisors such as James Galbraith wanted to do was say, “If we are going not to pay the debt, we are going to be expelled from the Euro Zone. We have to have our own currency. We have to have our own banking system.” But it takes almost a year to put in place your own physical currency, your own means of reprogramming the ATM machines so that people can use it, and reprogramming the banking system.
“You also need a contingency plan for when the European Union wrecks the Greek banks, which basically have been the tool of the oligarchy in Greece. The government is going to have to take over these banks and socialize them, and use them for public purposes.
“Unfortunately, Tsipras never gave Varoufakis and his staff the go ahead. In effect, he ended up double crossing them after the referendum two years ago that said not to surrender. That lead to Varoufakis resigning from the government.
“Tsipras decided that he wanted to be re-elected, and turned out to be just a politician, realizing that in order to he had to represent the invader and act as a client politician. His clientele is now the European Union, the IMF and the bondholders, not the Greeks. What that means is that if there is an election in Greece, people are not going to vote for him again. He knows that. He is trying to prevent an election. But later this month (May 2017) the Greek parliament is going to have to vote on whether or not to shrink the economy further and cut pensions even more.
“If there are defections from Tsipras’s Syriza party, there will be an election and he will be voted out of office. I won’t say out of power, because he has no power except to surrender to the Troika. But he’d be out of office.
“There will probably have to be a new party created if there’s going to be hope of withstanding the threats that the European Union is making to destroy Greece’s economy if it doesn’t succumb to the austerity program and step up its privatization and sell off even more assets to the bondholders”
Sharmini Peries:
“Finally, Michael, why did the Greek government remove the option of Grexit from the table in order to move forward?”
Michael Hudson:
“In order to accept the Eurozone you’re using its currency, but Greece needs to have its own currency. The reason it agreed to stay in was that it had made no preparation for withdrawing. Imagine if you are a state in the United States and you want to withdraw: you have to have your own currency. You have to have your own banking system. You have to have your own constitution. There was no attempt to put real thought behind what their political program was.“They were not prepared and still have not taken steps to prepare for what they are doing. They haven’t made any attempt to justify non-payment of the debt under International Law: the law of odious debt, or give a reason why they are not paying.”
“The Greek government has not said that no country should be obliged to disregard its democratic voting, dismantle its public sector and give up its sovereignty to bondholders. No country should be obliged to pay foreign creditors if the price of that is shrinking and self destruction of that economy.”
“They haven’t translated this political program of not paying into what this means in practice to cede sovereignty to the Brussels bureaucracy, meaning the European Central Bank on behalf of its bondholders.”
Sharmini Peries:
“All right Michael, we will keep an eye on this. It looks like it’s going to get more heated in Greece. At least the people and the movements are planning to protest this new deal. I thank you so much for joining us and I hope you can join us again. I understand you are on your way to Greece in a few weeks and we’ll be expecting a report back from you about what you find there. Thank You.”
Michael Hudson:
“Thanks for having me on.”Sharmini Peries:
“Thank you for joining us here on the Real News Network”- In international law, odious debt, also known as illegitimate debt, is a legal doctrine that holds that the national debt incurred by a regime for purposes that do not serve the best interests of the nation, should not be enforceable.
Citations
[1] http://michael-hudson.com/2017/05/imf-to-greece-sorry-well-destroy-you/
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/21/business/dealbook/international-monetary-fund-greece-bailout.html?_r=0
[3] https://mises.org/library/will-imf-bail-out-greece-again
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