Book Review: Seven Roads to Moscow

March 26, 2022

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By Francis Lee

Seven Roads to Moscow is an intriguing book written by that strange animal, a British soldier intellectual.

Lieutenant-Colonel W.G.F.Jackson

MC, BA, R.E.

Instructor, Royal Military Academy,

Sandhurst, 1950-53

I read this book when I was only 17 and at the time it made a great impression on me. The stories of the seven invasions of Russia have now passed into history. In order of invasions Russia’s uninvited guests were the Vikings, Huns, Swedes, French, and Germans. Each in their turn marched through forest, marsh, and Steppe into the heart of the Russian lands. The impression which these invaders left behind, however, is one of abject failure. All the invaders sooner or later had to succumb to the vastness of the Russian lands and the fortitude and genius of the Russian people.

The only partial success was with Rurik in the rise and fall of Kiev Russia, 862-1228. Rurik is said to have arrived in Novgorod in 862 and gradually established his sovereignty over the native Slavs. From the military point of view Rurik’s invasion is unique in Russian history. It was the first and only invasion which has been largely successful. The tactical methods of Rurik lie shrouded in the mists of early Russian history. For the invaders the military problems of invading Russia do not appear in tangible form until the days of the Swedish King Charles’ XII ill-fated (1707-1709) invasion and no more successful than the much larger and later expeditions by Napoleon and Hitler.

The sole aim of these armies who marched eastwards all had the same objective: to destroy the Russian armies. Moreover, each was faced with the same military problems: namely how could they defeat the Russian armies before they withdrew into the vastness of the Russian interior. If they failed to defeat the Russian armies in the early period of the campaign, how could they prevent the Russians recruiting new levies and returning to counter-attack with overwhelming strength? And how could the invaders manage to keep their armies supplied and reinforced once they had advanced deep into the Russian lands?

Charles XII had the simplest method of all – namely to outmarch and outfight his opponent. He relied on the superior marching and tactical skills of his soldiers to achieve results. But Tsar Peter the Great was a wily old fox who was determined to outwit his opponent and avoid a decisive action. The policy of scorched earth and withdrawal found the Swedes weak, ill-nourished and a long way from home. Charles had failed because he turned away from his primary objective and allowed himself to be cut-off from his base for the uncertain advantage of rallying the somewhat unstable Cossacks of the Ukraine to his banner. He was unable to stem the steady wastage of his best Swedish soldiers. The Cossacks and Kalmuks and other peoples of southern Russia whom he was forced to recruit as reinforcements, were no better than Peter’s reinforcements. The Battle of Poltava (8 July 1709) was the decisive victory for Peter the Great of Russia over Charles XII of Sweden in the Great Northern War. The battle ended Sweden’s status as a major power and marked the beginning of Russian supremacy in eastern Europe. This was the inevitable defeat of trying to achieve too much with too little.

Napoleon did not fare any better. The Grand Army some 600,000 strong marched into Russia in 1812. When the French Revolution had broken out (1789) there was little to indicate that within 23 years a Napoleonic Army would be treading the French Road to Moscow. In what was to become inevitable the West moved East. Thus, the die was cast. Napoleon obviously believed that he was invincible, and the Grand Army outmatched any other fighting force in Europe. But as the Scottish poet Robbie Burns reminds us – ‘’The best laid plans of mice and men oft gang aglay.’’ (Translation from the Scottish Celtic – ‘go awry’)

Napoleon tried 3 methods to bring Tsar Alexander to terms. His first plan was to win a quick military victory in these western lands by breaking through the Russian front using overwhelming force at the point of attack. He then hoped in crushing in turn each half of his opponent’s army. This plan failed because the Russians withdrew too soon.

When Napoleon appreciated that his first plan had failed, he reoriented his strategy. His next step was to lure the Russian forces in attempting to give battle, but the Russians made a tactical retreat further and further into the inhospitable wilderness of marshes and forests of the older Russian lands. If the Russians would only stand and fight, he might well crush them. After all no enemy had ever survived Napoleons military and tactical genius in his set-piece battles. Be that as it may he was unable to persuade the Russians too accept such a battle until it was too late.

From his arrival until the fall of Moscow Napoleon tried every stratagem to entice the Russians to give battle. In threatening the city of Smolensk and eventually Moscow the Russians did stand and fight in the Battle of Borodino in front of Moscow, but the unexpected toughness of the Russian armies prevented an outright victory for Napoleon.

Moreover, things were now beginning to move against the Grand Army; they were no longer possessed of sufficient numerical superiority, and Napoleon was now too far from home to use the Imperial Guard, his last reserve, to snatch a victory. The Russian army remained intact, but Moscow, Russia’s ancient capital, fell into French hands.

Now the problems for the French military began to mount as had the Swedish during their earlier debacle. In front of the Grand Army villagers abandoned their villages and set them ablaze, burning or hiding their supplies. Marauders and guerilla bands started to take a toll of all that passed along the slender French supply routes. The French needed to leave garrisons in every town along the Moscow highway, and the necessity of providing guards for all convoys sapped at the morale, sickness and fatigue caused by constant disease, dust, and intolerable heat. By the time that Kutuzov, the Russian commander-in-chief, offered battle at Borodino, it was too late for Napoleon to win a decisive victory. However, it was too early to stop the Russians to prevent the French capture of Moscow – the Russian army was not yet strong enough, but the wind was getting into their sails. So, all was not over for Napoleon yet.

However, the fall of Moscow was not the be all and end-all of Napoleon’s campaign. In all his previous campaigns the fall of the enemy’s capital had brought about a decision – that is, a surrender. But the Russians were, however, playing from a different game-plan and did not react in the way that other European nations generally reacted, and they were quite prepared to withstand the loss of Moscow. The great conflagration which followed the French entry into the city only served to harden the will of every Russian to resist. The fall of Moscow was in fact the decisive finish to Napoleon’s campaign.

The invasion and defeat of Russia was predicated on three main approaches. 1. Initially a quick victory in the opening stages of the campaign using overwhelming force. 2 A deliberate set-piece pitched battle, 3. And finally the capture of Moscow.

In the first two methods he was defeated by the immense space of the Russian landscape and by the rugged determination of the Russian soldier, and in the third method by his failure to appreciate the determination of the Russian people.

Now Napoleon’s options had come to naught there was only the long retreat from Moscow for the Grand Army which piece by piece was to fall apart in a rendezvous with its total demise.

In 1941 Hitler and the German General Staff launched the invasion of the USSR which had been meticulously planned and prepared. Hitler was fully aware of the reasons for Charles’ and Napoleon’s failures. This was above all a political/ideological war and Hitler was filled with contempt for the Russian Army and the Russian population that his predecessors possessed in abundance.

In the replay of Napoleon’s tactical demise and the rout of the Grand Army, Hitler’s Wehrmacht had defeated the Western European armies, with ruthless efficiency – the French and the low countries were forced to surrender, and the British chased out of the European continent only because they had a bigger navy than Germany as well as the Royal Air Force with the Spitfire being the most advanced fighter plane. Like Napoleon before him Hitler realized the key to success lay in the destruction of Stalin’s frontier armies before its slow mobilization could be completed. The German military concept of Blitzkreig i.e. ‘lightning war’ was a very different animal to the pitched battles of WW1 which in military terms had become archaic in this new approach to warfare.

Now new technologies had mobilized warfare with the advent of railways, motor transport and aircraft. The wireless would make possible the efficient control of vast armies across the whole breadth of the Soviet Union (as it then was).

Hitler’s initial strategy was both military and political. He needed firstly to destroy the Red Army and Communism, so that the military and political objectives were coordinated. The next step was the seizure of the unlimited Russian abundance of economic resources. But in purely military terms there was a certain sense of Déjà vu. In this context with the Soviet Army, Hitler, like Napoleon before, him made significant inroads into Russian space very quickly, but despite capturing large numbers of Russian POWs he failed to trap and destroy the main body before it was reinforced by the slowly mobilizing reserves from deep inside of Russia beyond the Urals. In addition, his endeavour to capture the centres of Soviet resistance was no more successful. Only Kiev and Kharkov fell into his hands, but Moscow, Leningrad and Stalingrad never succumbed.

In this earlier period of the war the Wehrmacht was seemingly irresistible; but it became like Napoleon’s initial success, only to be locked into what was to become the usual pattern of invasion into Russia. In his drive for the acquisition of Russia’s economic resources Hitler did seize the industrial and grain producing areas of Ukraine, but by his efforts to seize the oil of the Caucasus he lay himself open to the first counter offensive by the fully mobilized Red Army.

Hitler’s solution to this strategic problem showed a characteristic under-estimate of the strength of the Russian Army and an overestimation of his own resources. ‘’He decided to hold the Army groups North and Centre on the defensive whilst he deployed all his strength in the sector of Army Group South. Using the great bend of the Don to protect his northern flank between the Don and the Volga near Stalingrad. From here he could either attack southwards into the Caucasus, and possibly into the middle east to join hands with Rommel.’’ (Seven Roads to Moscow – p.290) But this was rather wishful thinking since by this time the Anglo-American forces were in North Africa as well as their navies in the Atlantic and Pacific this in addition to the US/UK bombing offensive which had started in earnest against German cities.

The German 6th Army, in triumphalist mode, Paris – 1940

The German 6^th Army had advanced in the southern part of the Ukraine and had crossed 3 rivers, the Dnieper, the Don, and the Volga, it had arrived in Stalingrad in the shape of the 6^th Army, in the same way as it had when it entered Paris in 1940. But the outcome was rather different. By 1942 the German offensive had stalled in Stalingrad.

In the bitter fighting in the city, the Wehrmacht was halted in its tracks and unable to move forward but its flanks were exposed and vulnerable to a Russian counterattack. The line of defence was manned by Romanian and Hungarian forces of dubious quality and loyalty. The Russian counterattack became inevitable and so it worked out when the Russians broke through the Romanian defences and completed the encirclement (or Cauldron) as the Russians now call them.

This changed the whole character of WW2. The Red Army battled all the way to Berlin as well as hooking up with British and American forces coming from the other direction. The war was, apart from the American Japanese conflict in the Pacific and the British-Japanese conflict in Malaya and Burma, was effectively over.

‘’Post-war vital economic objectives for Russia were equally hard to choose, since Russia’s bitter experiences of invasions from the West had taught her to move and develop her industries further and further eastwards as the ranges of western European Armies had increased. The gradual move to the East started with Five Year Plans before the German invasion. Hitler’s attack only accelerated this process. Industrial plants in areas which were overrun by the Nazis, were often dismantled before the Germans could capture them. The dismantled machinery was then to be re-erected beyond the Urals.’’ (Seven Roads to Moscow p.315)

Conclusion

The only lasting road to Moscow was the Viking Road of Rurik that provided the constructive services which the Russian people themselves wanted and for which they themselves asked.

‘’Let us hope that no-one will ever be tempted to emulate Charles, Napoleon, and Hitler in imposing a military solution of a kind of which history has shown must fail, and which will bring nuclear annihilation to mankind.’’ (Jackson – Seven Roads to Moscow – p.319)

In the Greek fable of Pandora’s Box, Pandora could not resist opening the box, but she opened the box, and several evil entities started flying out of it. These included hatred, envy, greed, disease, poverty, pain, death, and war. All these miseries of human life escaped the box and entered the real world. By the time Pandora slammed back the box’s lid, all the evils had escaped except for ‘hope’.

I begin to wonder if we have in fact opened the box?

Book Review: The Russian Army on Parade

October 07, 2021

Today, I want to quickly review a truly superb two volume book called “The Russian Army on Parade” and “The Russian Commemoration Parade at the 75th Anniversary of Victory in World War Two” both written by Jim Kinnear (and Andrey Akesenow for the 2nd volume).  Here are the links to publisher from whom you can order both books:

https://canfora.se/product/the-russian-army-on-parade-1992-2017/

https://canfora.se/product/the-75th-commemoration-parade-pre-order/

These two books are absolutely unique and, in my opinion, invaluable.

First, let’s talk about the parades themselves.

Both in the Soviet times and in the post 1991 Russia, the Victory Day parades have had a very special meaning to both the Russian people and for their enemies.  These were not just “patriotic shows” (which they definitely are), but also a way to show to the Russian people and their enemies the latest achievements of the Russian military industry.  Furthermore, for military specialists, what might look like a boring parade of military hardware to a civilian can yield extremely valuable information not only about the hardware itself, but also about the Russian military thinking.  One example:

Russian tanks tend to be very different from their western counterparts.  They are all the product of compromises: the ideal tank is light, can cross rivers or even float, small, indestructible, fast and has unstoppable weapons – but in reality such a tank cannot be built as these criteria, and many many more, are mutually exclusive.  For example, tank building countries can put so much armor on their tanks that they would be close to impossible to breach (at least in theory), but the weight and size of the tank will make them huge which, in turns, limit the kind of bridges they can cross, what kind of river banks they can climb or how big they will look in the targeting systems of the enemy.  Then there is the issue of costs.  Would you rather have one (purely theoretically) “perfect” tank costing X or 10 “somewhat less than perfect” tanks for the same price (or even less!)?

So, as most weapons systems, tanks are the results of very complex compromises and a trained eye will even see what kind of terrain and tactics one tank has been designed for, as opposed to another tank.  Furthermore, if you look “deeper” inside the tank (even by its external features) you can make some good guesses on the kind of sensors or communication systems these tanks probably have.  Of course, the Soviets and the Russians always knew that, so they carefully decide what they do want to show or don’t want to show.  They can even deliberately try to hide the real capabilities of any weapons system/platform from “unfriendly eyes”.

I mention all of the above to explain that these two superb volumes (filled with hundreds of excellent color photographs!) are not just for hardware geeks and technology fanboys, they are a voyage through Russian military thinking!

The first volume covers the Russian military parades in the 1990s, then those in the 2000s and then those in the 2010s.  It concludes with an commented index of all the hardware shown between 1992-2019.

The second volume covers “only” the truly amazing parade in 2020 for the 75th commemoration of the defeat of Nazi Germany.

One might wonder, what about the Soviet, pre-1991 parades?

Here you have to remember that the development cycle for a weapons system/platform can take years or even decades, so almost all the current Russian military technologies have deep roots in Soviet military thinking.  Furthermore, the design philosophy of a complex weapons system can change over time, but often rather slowly.  This is simply an issue of common sense: why re-invent the wheel when it already works?  Of course, if the geostrategic environment changes dramatically, and instead of being deployed in eastern Europe the Russians now have NATO literally right across their border, things will change, and they have changed, often dramatically.

These two volumes focus on post-Soviet, Russian, military parades, they will give the reader an superb insight into Soviet military thinking (as opposed to the crap western propaganda like to spew about it during the Cold War).  Of course, the fall (or, more accurately, the dismembering by the Party elites) of the Soviet Union in 1991 had a major impact on Russian military thinking and while much of the superb Soviet military and scientific capabilities still lies at the root of modern Russian weapon systems/platforms, a new generation of (often much younger) engineers and scientists has produced (quasi) purely ‘Russian’ technologies (such as the Su-57 or the “Armata” series).

Thus, these volumes are also a extremely interesting way to look not at hardware, but at the evolution of Russian designs and their underlying force planning philosophy.

I highly recommend these two volumes to all those who want to understand why Soviet/Russian designs are so different from their western equivalents.  And no, it is not true to say that Russians like cheap and sturdy while westerners prefer high tech (that is purely propaganda). But I think that it is true to say that Russian designs are by and for soldiers and war whereas western designs are mostly by and for engineers and for big, juicy, military contracts.

If you want to see what kind of designs result from about 1000 years of existential, survival, warfare, then you can’t do better than getting these two volumes.  You will not be disappointed.

Andrei

Raging Twenties Book Review – Pepe Escobar – the philosopher, the court jester, the mystic, the historian.

April 08, 2021

By Larchmonter445 for the Saker Blog

Early on in the introduction to “Raging Twenties”, Pepe Escobar points to the change, the disruption that confronts the Established Elites who for 30 years ruled the globe with a free hand: “The Empire we have been taught to accept as a fact of life is irretrievably losing its leadership position—and will have to deal with much pain implicit in the acceptance of an increasingly multipolar world.”

Escobar’s concept from “Raging Twenties” that impressed is: “We are all being carried forward through the tides by a harpooned whale, with no idea how, where, or when our journey ends. Like Melville’s Ishmael, we’ve got to stay cool as we relentlessly fight the winds of fallacy, fiction, fraud and farce that the expiring system manipulates non-stop.”

This is the vision of Pepe’s book “Raging Twenties”, a volume of works dedicated to the Covid-19 pandemic’s impact on people, governments and world affairs, especially the macro world economy.

Escobar is a man of many journeys, an adventurer, explorer, mapper and story-teller. For decades he has traveled the capitals of the globe and trekked the backroads of the third and fourth worlds more than any writer in our lifetime.

His professional vocation is understanding the human condition and transmitting via his writings that understanding of facts, people, events and situations. He has a unique quality to absorb information he personally gathers, demonstrating his grasp of geopolitical, philosophical and historical context, from ancient to modern.

Focusing on this decade, the “Raging Twenties”, a collection of Pepe’s definitive prose, is a “voice-over” that narrates the change in our world from a single-polar hegemon to a multi-polar world order in the time of a pandemic. He teases apart the complexities that often are unknown, misunderstood or misconstrued. His “voice” is pleasing though authoritative, yet instantly familiar. Writing that talks, as if it were an audio track, is his style.

“For the first time in two millennia, China is able to combine the dynamism of political and economic expansion both on the continental and maritime realms, something that the civilization-state did not experience since the short expeditionary stretch led by Admiral Zheng He in the Indian Ocean in the early 15th century. Eurasia, in the recent past, was under Western and Soviet colonization. Now it’s going all-out multipolar—a series of complex, evolving permutations led by Russia-China-Iran-Turkey-India-Pakistan-Kazakhstan.”

Escobar is a man comfortable in any of the five civilizations on Earth. He moves easily in the West, China, Russia, India or Iran, and most parts neighboring these giant cultures. He presents his narratives, tales of his travels and meetings in differing performances. Escobar has mastered four story-telling voices–philosopher, court jester, mystic, historian. He moves through these presenters seamlessly, embellishing his writing with intellectual depth and artful illumination.

In Chapter 8, “How the Riddler may teach us to fight a disease”, we perceive the Philosopher investigating the nature of our universe through the eyes of Heraclitus, the Riddler. “In his heart of hearts a contemptuous aristocrat, this master of paradox despised all so-called wise men and the mobs that adored them. Heraclitus was the definitive precursor of social distancing.”

“Heraclitus was a Taoist and a Buddhist. If opposites are ultimately the same, this implies the unity of all things. Heraclitus even foresaw the reaction we should have towards COVID-19: ‘It is disease that makes health sweet and good, hunger satiety, weariness rest.’ The Tao would approve it. In the Heraclitus framework of serial cosmic recycling, disease gives health its full significance.”

The Court Jester authors Chapter 5, entitled “We are all Stoics now”. Imagine a Court Jester flowing with Stoicism as pop culture in Ancient Greece. Pepe brings it to you. Escobar marks the first punk in History, Diogenes the Cynic. “It’s enlightening to know that the upper classes of the Roman empire, their 1%, regarded Zeno’s insights as quite solid, while—predictably—deriding the first punk in History, Diogenes the Cynic, who masturbated in the public square and carried a lantern trying to find a real man.”

He follows the transition from Greece to Rome as the ideas of the Stoics migrate over the centuries and better suit the Roman minds of Seneca, Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius, the trio we view as role models of Stoicism.

“The Stoics were very big on ataraxia (freedom of disturbance) as the ideal state of our mind. The wise man cannot possibly be troubled because the key to wisdom is knowing what not to care about.”

Have you ever read such a ‘take’ on Stoics, Cynics, Epicureans, Humanists, and Skeptics? Pepe ties it into the impact of the pandemic.

“Perhaps the ultimate Stoic secret is the distinction by Epictetus between things that are under our control—our thoughts and desires—and what is not: our bodies, our families, our property, our lot in life, all elements that the expansion of COVID-19 now put in check.”

“What the postmodern world retains from the Stoics is the notion of resigned acceptance—which makes total sense if the world really works according to their insights. If Fate—once again, Zeus, not the Christian God—rules the world, and practically everything that happens is out of our hands, then realpolitik means to accept “everything to happen as it actually does happen”, in the immortal words of Epictetus. Thus, it’s pointless to get excited about stuff we cannot change. And it’s pointless to be attached to things that we will eventually lose. But try selling this notion to the Masters of the Universe of financial capitalism.” You can hear Pepe’s laughter.

“So, The Way—according to the Stoics—is to own only the essentials, and to travel light. Lao Tzu would approve it. After all, anything we may lose is more or less gone already—thus we are already protected from the worst blows in life.”

As with each of the personas of Pepe we perceive in his collected work, he changes from one to another in mid-flight. The Court Jester can be seen and felt throughout “Raging Twenties”. Just take a tour of the Chapter Headings and the section sub-headings. Pepe does floor gymnastics, handstands and backflips, cartwheels and tumblesaults with terminology and labels. That big Escobar smile and hearty chest laugh abound: “Remember Pax Mongolica”, “The Sirens and La Dolce Vita”, “The Westlessness Myth”, “East is East, West is More”, “Barbarism With A Human Face”, “Enter The Triad”, “The City In A Time of Plague”, “Show Me Your Fragility”, “Barbarism Begins At Home”, “Flying Dragon, Crashing Eagle”, “Blake Meet Burroughs”.

The modern Mystic is with us in Chapter 10, “How Confucious, Buddha and The Tao Are Winning This War”, as well as the anchor chapter, “Eurasia, The Hegemon and the Three Sovereigns”. The Mystic appears most definitely in Chapter 25, a retrospective column Pepe chose to explore the digital ether that has wrapped around our brains. “Kim No-Vax Does Darpa” is a trip back into the early days of AI,3 research financed by Darpa, the teat that nearly all US computer scientists sought to suck. Reading this nostalgia spotlights the many dead-ends of US technology that generated the perverse present High-Tech Silicon Valley feudalism.

Travel with the Mystic to Venice, Chapter 3, “The Sirens and La Dolce Vita”. Pepe floats in Venice waterways to retrace selected steps with Ezra Pound. In “The Cantos”, we find The Sirens, sculptures that represent to Pound the beautiful culture, a time and place of the best which preceded a time (the present) of tawdry cheapness. The Mystic smoothly elides into “La Dolce Vita”, the Fellini film, that epitomizes the glitzy ugliness oncoming in the sixties. A period of trash culture that now envelopes the globe, foretold by Pound, embossed by Fellini and absorbed by us.

Pepe the Historian appears nearly everywhere in the pages of “Raging Twenties”. In a most clever Chapter 13, “Siren Call of A ‘System Leader’”, Pepe wends through the Mongol age of Genghis Khan, to the death of Kublai Khan and the end of that Empire right into the 21st Century where the USA Empire, like the last great Khan, faces China. However, China is a part of Eurasia, the vast resource of the multi-polar sovereigns China, Russia, Iran, India, their neighbors and friends, arrayed ready to construct a new world based on four civilizations, not an ideology like the failed Empire of the USA.

The Historian gathers from Thucydides and others regarding plagues. Pertinently, Escobar delivers the connection of the fall of empires and plagues as cause. “Predictably eyeing the Decline and Fall of the American Empire, a serious academic debate is raging around the working hypothesis of historian Kyle Harper, according to whom viruses and pandemics—especially the Justinian plague in the 6th century—led to the end of the Roman Empire.”

Escobar’s journalistic roots remain in real politic while consistently pointing out the gap between the twisted souls that feel the need to lie, cheat and murder to achieve their ends. With acerbic ink, he writes: “Those were the days when NATO, with full impunity, could bomb Serbia, miserably lose a war on Afghanistan, turn Libya into a militia hell and plot myriad interventions across the Global South. And of course, none of that had any connection whatsoever with the bombed and the invaded forced into becoming refugees in Europe.”

Pepe’s economic interest in Belt and Road and the China-Russia comprehensive strategic partnership of coordination for a new era opens our eyes to the real geo-political shifts. The pandemic has fractured world trade. “Soon we will be facing three major, interlocking debates: the management of the crisis, in many cases appalling; the search for future models; and the reconfiguration of the world-system.”

Peering over our Covid masks, we read Chapter 12, “How To Think Post-Planet Lockdown”. Pepe’s main insight remains valid: the state of exception has been completely normalized. And it gets worse: “A new despotism, which in terms of pervasive controls and cessation of every political activity, will be worse that the totalitarianisms we have known so far.”

“As dystopia and mass paranoia seem to be the law of the (bewildered) land, Michel Foucault’s analyses of biopolitics have never been so timely, as states across the world take over biopower—the control of people’s life and bodies.”

Pepe gives us, among many, Giorgio Agamben, who redoubles his analyses of science as the religion of our time: “The analogy with religion is taken literally; theologians declared that they could not clearly define what is God, but in his name they dictated rules of conduct to men and did not hesitate to burn heretics. Virologists admit they don’t know exactly what is a virus, but in its name they pretend to decide how human beings shall live.”

In the section, “Enter the triad”, Chapter 10, Pepe postulates: “I offer as a working hypothesis that the Asia triad of Confucius, Buddha and Lao Tzu has been absolutely essential in shaping the perception and serene response of hundreds of millions of people across various Asian nations to COVID-19—compared to the being is the greatest joy.” It also helps to know that “life is a series of natural and spontaneous choices. Don’t resist them—that only creates sorrow. Let reality be reality. Let things flow naturally forward in whatever way they like.” Buddhism runs in parallel to the Tao: “All conditioned things are impermanent—when one sees this with wisdom, one turns away from suffering.” And to keep our vicissitudes in perspective, it helps to know that, “better it is to live one day seeing the rise and fall of things than to live a hundred years without ever seeing the rise and fall of things.”

Quo Vadis. Where are you marching?

Pepe shows us the way, the paths we are on. He offers, too, a pantheon of “travelers” who opine from the high clouds of history, from books on dusty shelves of libraries, from blogs and videos on digital platforms, all snatched by his rapier mind to weave affirmation into his ideas and analysis. In sum, a feast awaits the reader, taken as a banquet or a serial read chapter by chapter. Enjoy.

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Where you can buy RAGING TWENTIES by Pepe Escobar

The Lion and the Eagle: The Interaction of the British and American Empires, 1783-1972 – Book Review

March 23, 2021

The Lion and the Eagle: The Interaction of the British and American Empires, 1783-1972 by Kathleen Burk. (Photo: Book Cover)

By Jim Miles

(The Lion and the Eagle – The Interaction of the British and American Empires 1783-1972.  Kathleen Burk.  Bloomsbury, London/New York, 2018)

The 200-year historical span of Kathleen Burk’s “The Lion and the Eagle” shows the changes in the interactions between the newly formed United States and its imperial drive and the ongoing imperial drive of the British. In general, the former overtook the latter with the United States momentarily being the single superpower, but still with strong ties to Britain and the remnants of empire and the Commonwealth. Along the way, there were agreements and disagreements as well as many commonalities that pervaded both empires.

North America’s Dividing Line – The US-Canada Border

The first two chapters cover the not-so-well-known minor conflict between Britain and the US over the border between Canada and the US as they spread across the continent. The only actual war, although there were other skirmishes – including one in which the only casualty was a pig – was the war of 1812 which ended with both sides able to claim some kind of victory.

Apart from these descriptions the overriding theme became that of both countries not really wanting to go to war with each other in spite of political rhetoric. Britain was preoccupied with France and other European countries all striving for a ‘balance’ in Europe from which to control all the different colonial enterprises overseas.  The United States remained financially tied to Britain through various loans and debts, while the US navy for much of the time could not match the power of the British navy’s ability to blockade their former colony.

By the time the border was fully resolved (1903) the power differential between the two empires had shifted.  The U.S had settled many of its internal problems, and its navy grew to a strong enough position to negate any possible British threat. Throughout most of this time, while technically independent, “the US was a developing country, an economic and financial colony of Britain.”  The US industrial production grew significantly but Britain “did maintain its overwhelming supreme position…in finance.”  The pound sterling was the world’s “only reserve currency and the City of London was the world’s financial center.”

A discussion that was not developed was the manner in which both empires looked at the ‘new world’ and how they treated the indigenous people and the resources of the land.  For all the talk of freedom and independence, control of the land and the people, and power and money ruled the empires. This becomes much more evident in Burk’s discussion concerning China and Japan.

Empirical parallels

The histories of the “opening” of China and Japan are – or should be – relatively well known.  What stands out in Burk’s discussion, much of it extracted from original journals and government records is the arrogance and self-aggrandizement of both empires in their self-righteous roles to control the resources and people of the world.   Underneath it all lies the largest factor – racism.

From the Chinese perspective, “Any relationship between the Celestial Empire and a foreign country must be as one between supreme ruler and vassal…the uncultured barbarian would recognize the superiority of Chinese civilization…by bringing tribute and taking part in full Court ritual” – kowtowing.  The British of course refused to kowtow and expected to be treated as an equal and indeed saw itself as the superior power.

“The Chinese saw Western Ocean barbarians as warlike and dangerous and the British as the most dangerous of all. The Emperor warned…that ‘England is stronger and fiercer than the other countries in the Western Ocean. Since things have not gone according to their wishes, it may cause them to stir up trouble.’”

As for British cultural superiority, the first British ambassador, Viscount Macartney, after presenting British presents to the Emperor, “was taken from the pavilion to pavilion and realized just how relatively unimpressive were the objects that he had brought from Britain.”

Burk’s discussion develops the history through the opium wars, the intrusions of the other European powers, and more importantly for this work, shows how the US adventures in China more or less rode along on the coat-tails of the other empires, in particular the British.

Japan was different in many aspects, but the same racial arrogance from both empires becomes obvious, and the use of military power – at least the threat of using it – is one of the main bargaining points of  US diplomacy.  Japan was a unified country but at the time of initial US interventions, a power struggle was developing between the Emperor and the Shogunate.  At this point, the US “remained an economic colony of Britain”  and used mainly threats to coerce the Japanese into accepting trade relations.

The British in Japan showed the same arrogance towards the Japanese as they did the Chinese and their actions “were largely conditioned by Britons’ experience in China…assuming there were few differences between Asian countries,” and that “Japan had no right to prevent other countries from sharing its riches.”  At the initial stages the US “had substantial economic interests in China, not least in the opium trade, but relatively little diplomatic or military influence,” and was “running behind the British.”   British negotiations with Japan came mostly as military threats.

The Japanese were in a different position than China, and between the two factions, the one that succeeded to power wished to acquire “scientific and engineering knowledge” in order to push out the barbarians after they had mastered the technology.

Empires Reversed…

The last chapter covers a large span from 1897 to 1972.  During that period two World Wars and several financial crises affected the relationship.  World War II was the final turning point as one of the US’ goals was “significant control over international finance.”  The Bretton Woods agreement which essentially established this formally is only mentioned in regards to the financial havoc created by the US’ Vietnam War. The Suez Crisis and the Israeli attack on its Arab neighbors combined with the financial demise of the British pound, brought the US empire to full dominance militarily and financially. The US became the prime supporter of the colonial-settler state of Israel militarily and financially, while Britain remained as a military empire in its own right with 145 bases around the world to complement those of the US.

…Current Events

In her very short epilogue “Envoi”, Burk ends on a confusing note.  She talks briefly about the US empire of bases and then mentions the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. Her next statement, her next to the last statement, reads, “As long as these countries can be protected without becoming protectorates, this American power will be welcomed, or at least tolerated.”  By the rules of grammatical sequencing, this refers to Afghanistan and Iraq, making the statement a rather sad wilfully ignorant ending as there is no way the US’ presence in either of these two countries is either welcomed or tolerated.

If it is an improper grammatical reference to 130 countries with military bases then its sentiment remains highly arguable.  The many countries with bases (which do include Afghanistan and Iraq) may have governments accepting US bribes, graft, and financial manipulation, but it is not likely the everyday citizen is as accepting of the US presence.

…And Beyond

That small point aside – and it is the only point in the book that I question marked – both empires have moved on.  The US is no longer the sole superpower, although it remains the most powerful military and financial empire. It uses both its military power (mostly – covertly and overtly) and financial power – sanctions mainly – vis a vis its control of the “Washington consensus” institutions (the IMF, World Bank, BIS, SWIFT, et al).

Britain remains within the US thrall, supporting the arrogance and imperial lies that sustain domestic support during the election cycles.  As a part of NATO, as a member of the “Five Eyes”, with veto power on the Security Council at the UN, and maintaining a recently renewed arsenal of 260 nuclear weapons, Britain is no slouch.

Concomitant with that is the residual power of the “City”, the London financial district.  The LIBOR, the London Interbank Offered Rate still powers much of the world’s financial interactions. Established much more recently, the LBMA, the London Bullion Market Association, comprises the largest gold and silver markets in the world. It would be unusual if these two organizations do not liaise with their US counterparts to maintain control of the current global financial position in which the US $ is now the world reserve currency.

Also important financially are the other polar elements of world power, China and Russia.  Both have mainly extricated themselves from direct US currency manipulations (it’s not all that easy) and both have accumulated large amounts of the “barbarous relic” – gold – which many of the world’s central banks are also accumulating or repatriating from New York and London.

With Brexit, with the COVID crisis, and with the US ‘recovering’ from four years of an overtly racist government, the entanglements between the two empires will continue with that racism and general arrogant outlook towards the rest of the world.  Kathleen Burk’s “The Lion and the Eagle” is an excellent history covering the events and attitudes of the politicians involved with this ongoing duet.

– Jim Miles is a Canadian educator and a regular contributor/columnist of opinion pieces and book reviews to Palestine Chronicles.  His interest in this topic stems originally from an environmental perspective, which encompasses the militarization and economic subjugation of the global community and its commodification by corporate governance and by the American government.

Book review: “Disintegration” by Andrei Martyanov

Indicators of the Coming American Collapse

THE SAKER • MARCH 1, 2021

This is the third book by Andrei Martyanov that I am reviewing, the first one was “Book Review – Losing Military Supremacy: the Myopia of American Strategic Planning by Andrei Martyanov”, while the second one was “Book Review: Andrei Martyanov’s The (Real) Revolution in Military Affairs”. I also interviewed Andrei about this second volume here. The book I am reviewing today, “Disintegration: Indicators of the Coming American Collapse” can be pre-ordered from Clarity Press here and from Amazon here.

If the first two volumes mostly focused on issues of force planning and military power, this third volume addresses the wider context and shows example after example that the United States is not only failing at its attempts to remain a world hegemon, but the US is, in fact, in a process we could call “full-spectrum collapse” or, like Martyanov, simply “disintegration”. Specifically, the book looks into the manifestation of disintegration in the following spheres:

1. Consumption
2. Affluenza
3. Geoeconomics
4. Energy
5. Making Things
6. Western Elites
7. Losing the Arms Race
8. Empire Über Alles – Including Americans
9. To Be or Not To Be
10. Conclusion: Not Exceptional, Not Free, Not Prosperous – Not America?

These are tantalizing subject headings which I will not further describe because I really want to really encourage as many people as possible to read this book. Why?

Mainly because while Martyanov’s first two books were dealing primarily with military and geostrategic issues, this one goes much wider and looks at the wider socio-cultural reasons which create the context for such a dramatic lack of real military capabilities.

A month ago I wrote an article I called “Zone B Exists, Thus There Is Hope, I Promise You!” in which I tried to show that the pseudo “reality” in which most people in the West are artificially kept in by the most effective (and insidious) propaganda machine in history is not the “real reality” at all! Not only that, but that most of the planet has been living in “Zone B” for quite a while. In fact, this “Zone B” has already moved on, even if the legacy ziomedia never reports about this.

Well, you can think of Martyanov’s books like the perfect example of a “Zone B book”: not only does Martyanov debunk most of the myths of the US propaganda machine, he contrasts these delusions with examples from the real world.

You could buy only one or two of Martyanov’s books, and each of them stands on its own, but I really think of them as a trilogy which should be read and discussed by as many people in the West as possible. In fact, you could think of them as each a kind of “crash course on debunking delusions and returning to reality”. The overarching message of all three volumes is this: “People of the United States, your ruling elites are lying to you just like the chamber orchestra on the Titanic that was playing music while the supposedly “unsinkable” Titanic was sinking!”.

Interestingly, Martyanov adds that, of all nations, Russians understand these processes better than anybody else because they they too suffered the same fate during the “democratic nightmare of the 1990s” (I would add that descendents of White Russians like myself also remember the “democratic nightmare” under Kerenskii in 1917). Martyanov writes:

“The collapse of the Soviet Union and the economic catastrophe which followed taught Russians a lot, and also left an aftertaste of the humiliation of losing power – a process the United States is going through right now”

Truth be told, Martyanov is hardly the first person to have mentioned the uncanny similarities between the Soviet Union of the late 80s, or the Russia of the 90s, with the US of the last two decades (or more). For example, Martyanov mentions Dmitry Orlov whose many books have looked into what he calls the “stages of collapse” (financial, economic, political, social, cultural and, later, he added ecological) and have became a precious analytical tool for many researchers. Many decades earlier, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, whom Martyanov intensely dislikes, also often mentioned that the West of the 80s reminded him of the Russia of the early 20th century. This is just to illustrate Martyanov’s point that,

“Speaking in layman’s terms, the Russians get it. They, unlike any other people in the world, can relate to what the United States is going through right now. Russians can read the signs extremely well, while the U.S. elite not only has no experience with it, but is completely insulated from understanding it. This is America’s tragedy unfolding before our very eyes. Not only is America’s crisis systemic, but its elites are uncultured, badly educated and mesmerized by decades of their own propaganda, which in the end, they accept as a reality”

I couldn’t agree more. I would also add that those Russians who write books and articles desperately trying to warn the people of the US of real catastrophe taking place do that not because they are hostile to the United States, but precisely because they are sympathetic to the people of the US. The flag-waving pseudo-patriots who accuse these Russians of being “anti-American” simply don’t understand the “evil Russians” they hate so much (mostly because modern Russia under Putin has been fantastically successful, in spite of sanctions, threats, subversion, etc., while the US is in agony – that is why these folks are willing to believe anything bad, no matter how self-evidently stupid, about Russia and/or Putin).

Yes, of course, Russians hate and despise the US ruling Nomenklatura, just as they despised their own, Soviet, Nomenklatura. But that in no way implies what many mistake for “anti-American” hostility.

In my almost 58 years of life I have been blessed with the chance to travel a lot and speak six or so languages, yet I have never come across what I would call “anti-Americanism”. Even in countries supposedly hostile to the US the actual focus of the anger and disgust of people are the actions of the AngloZionist Empire, the ugly parasite feeding off its US host. Take a country like, say, Brazil. Anti “yankee” feelings have always been strong there, yet Brazilian musicians are known to beautifully fuse US and Brazilian music (see this superb example). The same is true elsewhere: people hate US policies, but very rarely the people of the US. Right now, judging by the Runet and emails from friends, Russians mostly feel pity for the people of the US, not hate, and this is so because they “get it” as Martuyanov correctly states. Of course, there are stupid and/or bigoted people in all countries and I am sure that there are those who hate the United States as a country, but I am confident that this is a small minority. There is one interesting category left: those who become critical of the US society after having lived in the US; a famous example of that would be Sayyid Qutb

None of that is meant to whitewash all the violence and ugliness of the short but extremely violent US history. But violence and ugliness exist in the history of probably every country on the planet (there sure was plenty of violence and ugliness in the history of Russia!). True, the US was probably one of the most bloody and violent regimes in history, but that violence ought to be attributed to imperialism and capitalism and not to something unique to the US (the British Empire was possibly the most criminally violent in history). Even more important to the understanding of US history is that most of its violence had its roots not in national or racial causes, but in the many social or, better, class struggles which peppered the history of the US. Again, discussions of class issues have been comprehensively blotted out from all the school books in Zone A, depriving those who had the misfortune to be educated in the West from one of the most important tools of political and economic analysis.

The importance of the above cannot be overstated and this is why Martyanov comes back to the topic of the education of the western ruling classes over and over again. In the last pages of Disintegration Martyanov writes:

Thus, no viable ideas or solutions to the current unfolding economic, social and cultural catastrophe can originate within these elites, who see the world only through the Wall Street and New York Times lenses. Real intellect, courage and integrity are simply not there: they all have been traded for the perks and sinecures of what many correctly describe as the Washington D.C. blob, whose only purpose for existence is self-perpetuation.

I would only add that there is a karmic irony in the fact that it is precisely because these ruling classes have no other purpose in life than self-perpetuation (and consumption, I would add) that they are driving themselves, and the country which they exploit, into extinction.

Conclusion: these are “must read” books for all of Zone A! (and even Zone B!)

Finally, it is precisely because Martyanov’s books are like “messages from Zone B” that I urge every person living in the US or in the EU to read them. As I said, each of these books stands on its own, but together they reach a kind of intellectual critical mass which makes them truly “must read” books, especially for those who hate their ruling regime but love their country.

These books are all pretty short, very well written, they have decent (but not perfect) indexes and are an easy read. If you want to get a superb summation of what is really going on in the United States (as opposed to the frankly laughable AngloZionist propaganda or the inchoate and outright childish slogans of the flag-waving “Trump patriots”) – read these books. If you have brainwashed friends, give them any (or, better, all of) these books: they are like a “crash course in reality studies”. If you have family members who still believe all the nonsense about “American exceptionalism”, challenge them to read these books.

Folks living in Zone B would also immensely benefit from reading Martyanov’s books. Not because these books will tell them much they weren’t already at least vaguely aware of, but because these books are also a very truthful “state of the United States” kind of SITREP. In my experience, while most folks (at least the well-read ones) in Zone B do mostly understand that the Empire is dead (or very close to death) and while they also feel the US are undergoing a massive internal catastrophe, most of these folks in Zone B do not fully appreciate the magnitude and severity of these crises. For them too Martyanov’s books will be an eye opener. This is also why I hope that all three of Martyanov’s books will be quickly translated into Russian: they will become instant blockbusters and, what is even more important, they will be read in Russian academies and universities. French and Spanish are another two languages I hope that these books will be translated into.

But, most of all, I hope (against any common sense or logic) that these books will be read by truly patriotic US officers, force planners, analysts, political decision-makers, etc. Right now, there is a real threat of these folks stumbling into a shooting war with Russia which the US will never survive (nor would Russia or much of the rest of the world, of course). But even if by some miracle this potential war remains non-nuclear, the US will still be destroyed, at least as a functioning country, by Russian conventional capabilities. This is the single biggest danger and possible disaster authors like Myartyanov are so desperately trying to prevent: a major war caused by a clueless ruling Nomenklatura involving a country (the US) which has never fought a defensive war in its history and which has never experienced real warfare, especially not against a competent adversary. I can only add that in case of a conventional war, Russia now has the means to defend not only her airspace, but a conceptual “Russian border proximity zone” of roughly 800km-1000km (and this range is steadily increasing). The US cannot. Neither can the EU or NATO. And for all the silly MIC+Pentagon promises of super-duper missiles, this is not something which will change in the short to medium time frame.

The more people in the US realize this, the better the chances avoid a terrible catastrophe. Hence the timely importance of Andrei Martyanov’s books.

Book Review: The Russian Peace Threat by Ron Ridenour

August 24, 2018

[This article was written for the Unz Review]

The Russian Peace Threat: Pentagon on Alert
by Ron Ridenour
Publisher: Punto Press, LLC
ISBN-10: 0996487069
Amazon link: https://www.amazon.com/Russian-Peace-Threat-Pentagon-Alert/dp/0996487069/

*******

Ron Ridenour’s latest book (this is his 10^th book on international relations and politics) takes a direct shot at one of the most prevailing myths in the western political discourse: the thesis that Russia, then the Soviet Union, and, since 1991, Russia again have been uniquely aggressive and generally bellicose states. At a time when rabid russophobia is the order of the day (again – chronic russophobia has been a regular feature of western political culture for many centuries now), this is a very timely and important book which I highly recommend to those interested in history.

The book is separated into three parts. In the first part of the book (The Great Capitalist Socialist Divide), Ridenour looks at the Cuban Missile Crisis in some detail and uses it to debunk the many myths which the “official” US historiography has been presenting as dogma for decades. In this first section, Ridenour also provides many fascinating details about Captain Vasili Arkhipov “the man who prevented WWIII”. He also recounts how the US propaganda machine tried, and still tries, to blame the murder of JFK on the Russians. The second part of the book (Peace, Land, Bread) goes back in history and looks into the ideological and political struggle between the collective West and the Soviet Union from the revolution of 1917 and well into the Cold War. The third part of the book (Russia At the Crossroads – the Putin Era) conclude with very recent events, including the western backed coup d’etat in the Ukraine and the Russian intervention in Syria.

The first and the third parts of the book are extremely well researched and offer a rock-solid, fact-based, and logical analysis of the Cuban Missile Crisis and its modern equivalent, the AngloZionist “crusade” against modern Russia. This is a very important and good choice because the two crises have a lot in common. I would even argue that the current crisis is much more dangerous than the Cuban Missile Crisis because of the extremely low personal and intellectual qualities of the current US ruling elites. Ridenour shows that in 1962 it was not the Soviets, but the US which pushed the world to the edge of a nuclear war, and in the third section of his book he shows how, yet again, the Empire is cornering Russia into a situation which, again, very much risks resulting in a nuclear conflict.

For those who would have a knee-jerk rejection of Ridenour’s crimethink, the book, on page 438-444, offers a list of governments the USA has overthrown since WWII (50), countries which the USA has bombed (30), foreign leaders it has murdered (50+), suppressed populist/nationalist movements (20), and subverted democratic elections (30). Ridenour then asks how it is that with a tally like that the US gets to moralize about Russia. He is absolutely right, of course. Compared to the USA, the Soviet Union was a peace-loving, non-interventionist and generally international law respecting country. Oh sure, the USSR had its share of horrors and evil deeds, but compared with the “land of the free and the home of the brave” these are minor, almost petty, transgressions.

The book is not without its faults. Sadly, in the second part of his book Ridenour repeats what I can only call the “standard list of western clichés” about the 1917 Revolution, it’s causes and effects. Truth be told, Ridenour is most certainly not to be singled out for making such a mistake: most of the books written in English and many of those written in Russian about this period of Russian history are basically worthless because they are all written by folks (from all sides of the political spectrum) with a vested ideological interest in presenting a completely counter-factual chronology of what actually took place (Russian author Ivan Solonevich wrote at length about this phenomenon in his books). Furthermore, such a process is inevitable: after decades of over-the-top demonization of everything and anything Soviet, there is now a “return of the pendulum” (both in Russia and outside) to whitewash the Soviet regime and explain away all its crimes and atrocities (of which there were plenty). For these reasons I would recommend that readers skip chapter 7 entirely (the description of the 1905 and 1917 revolutions are particularly bad and sound like a rehash of Soviet propaganda clichés of the early 1980s).

This weakness of this historical analysis of the two Russian revolutions is, of course, rather disappointing, but it in no way affects the pertinence of the fundamental thesis of this book: that, for all its very real faults, the “Evil Empire” was a gentle and timid regime when compared to the AngloZionist “Axis of Kindness” and its never-ending violent rampages all over the world (literally) and its orgy of subversion and violence in the name of democracy, freedom, human rights and all the rest of the western propaganda buzzwords.

The book’s afterworld begins with the following words “WAITING AND WAITING! Waiting for the end of the world! Waiting for Godot! Although, unlike in Samuel Beckett’s Theater of the Absurd play, in which Godot never arrives, the mad men and mad women leaders of the US, France and UK (and Israel) are bringing us their bombs”. Having been warning about the very risks of war for at least 4 years now, and having, along with others, posted a special “Russian Warning” to warn about this danger, I can only wholeheartedly welcome the publication of an entire book aimed at averting such a cataclysmic outcome.

My other big regret with this book is that it does not have an index. This is particularly frustrating since the book is packed with over 500 pages of very interesting information and can be used as a very good reference book.

Still, these criticisms should not distract from the very real value of this book. One of the most frightening phenomena today is that the Empire and Russia are currently headed directly for war and that, unlike what took place during the Cuban Missile Crisis, almost nobody today speaks about this. The western corporate media is especially guilty in this regard, as it encourages a constant escalation of rabid anti-Russian rhetoric (and actions) without ever mentioning that if brought to its logical conclusion such policies will result in a devastating war which the West cannot win (neither can Russia, of course, but that is hardly much of a consolation, is it?).

There have been courageous voices in the West trying to stop this crazy slide towards a nuclear apocalypse (I especially think of Professor Stephen Cohen and Paul Craig Roberts) but their’s were truly “cries in the wilderness”. And it doesn’t matter one bit whether somebody identifies himself as a conservative, liberal, progressive, libertarian, socialist, anarcho-capitalist or by another other (mostly meaningless) political label. What matters is as simple as it is crucial: preventing the Neocons from triggering a war with Russia or with China, or with Iran, or with the DPRK, or with Venezuela, or with… (fill in the blank). The list of countries the US is in conflict with is very long (just remember Nikki Haley berating and threatening the entire UN General Assembly because the vast majority of its members dared to disagree with the US position on Jerusalem), but Russia is (yet again) the designated arch-villian, the Evil Empire, Mordor – you name it! Russia is the country which wants to murder everybody with poison gas, from the Skripals in the UK, to the innocent children of Syria. Russia is the country which shoots down airliners and prepares to invade all her western neighbors. Finally, Russia is the place which hacks every computer in the “Free World” and interferes with every single election. The longer that list of idiotic accusations stretches, the bigger the risk of war becomes, because words have their weight and you cannot have normal, civilized relations with the Evil Empire of Mordor which is “highly likely” to invade, nuke or otherwise subvert the peace-loving peoples of the West.

Except that there never was any such thing as a “peace loving West” – that is truly a self-serving and 100% false myth. The historical record shows that in reality the collective West has engaged in a 1000 year long murderous rampage all over the planet and that each time it designated its victim as the culprit and itself as the defender of lofty ideals. Ridenour’s The Russian Peace Threat: Pentagon on Alert (alongside with Guy Mettan’s “Creating Russophobia: From the Great Religious Schism to Anti-Putin Hysteria”, whose original French edition I reviewed here) does a long way towards debunking this myth.

With the few caveats mentioned above, I highly recommend this book.

The Saker

In Memory of Philip Roth

May 26, 2018  /  Gilad Atzmon

Introduction by GA: I wrote the following  book review a decade ago. 10 years later, Israel and its subservient English Speaking Empire are still mounting pressure on Iran,  the Middle East is bleeding and peace looks like a remote fantasy. Pre TSD is the medium in which we operate and a prospect of a better future seems like a delusional dream. A decade ago I concluded this review wiring that “the current plot isn’t just against America. It is a plot against humanity and human dignity.” Sadly, nothing really changed.

The Plot Against America – a book report and a reality check

by Gilad Atzmon

…Roth is no doubt an astonishing writer but somehow he has always failed to convince me. I always had the feeling that Roth is just too aware of his enormous talent; something that made him slightly technical and pretentious at times. Being a prolific writer, Roth can be slightly impersonal to my taste and yet, in his latest book he is free from that. No literary imposed tactics or strategies can be traced. In his latest book, Roth is overwhelmingly personal. Astonishingly enough, the fictional reality he conveys is so convincing that I found myself totally captivated from beginning to end. So enthralled was I, that I even managed to forget how depressing the world is out there. I avoided the anti-Iranian media blitz. I switched it off for three days and let the international community attack the Iranian president in a single Judeified voice.

‘The Plot Against America’ is a fictional tale that unwinds like a historical document enriched with personal detail. Its theme is: what would have happened if ace pilot Charles Lindbergh, the man who made the first solo transatlantic flight in 1927, the man who later called Hitler ‘a great man’, and was decorated by the Führer for his services to the Reich, had run for the American presidency against Roosevelt in 1940 and managed to win? Lindbergh’s message to the American nation is a classic Republican isolationist one. ‘No more war! Never again will young Americans die on foreign soil’. The year is obviously 1940 and Lindbergh is referring to Europe and the Pacific rather than Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria or Iran. In Roth’s book, instead of Roosevelt being elected for an unprecedented third term, Lindbergh wins in a landslide victory. He then signs non-aggression treaties with Germany and Japan. Soon enough the charismatic Lindbergh is cheered by American society as a whole. Every American loves him except of course the Jews who are far from being happy with a ‘peace loving’ president who happens to make business with the enemies of the Jewish people. But in fact this isn’t entirely true, a single prominent liberal Rabbi named Bengelsdorf positions himself right behind the new president.

The narrator is Philip Roth himself, a seven-year-old Jewish Ghetto boy from Newark, New Jersey. He tells a story of a Jewish family encountering a major disastrous political shift. Young Phil is telling the story of father Herman, mother Bess and brother Sandy. It is a story of collective fear, a story of a Jewish family’s reaction to the rise of anti-Semitism. However, throughout the book it is very hard to determine whether anti-Semitism constitutes a real objective threat or rather something the Jews bring on themselves. This very confusion is in my opinion the greatest literary asset of the book.

Roth is sketching a very deep and complex narrative in which each family member responds differently to the ‘devastating’ historical circumstances. Once again, Roth managed to convey an interesting image of the difficult amalgam of the Jewish identity both psychologically and sociologically. Like most American Jews, Herman the father is overtly pessimistic from the very beginning. He wouldn’t give Lindbergh even a single day of mercy. However, he is a proud patriotic American. He demands his civil rights. Were he in our midst, he would criticise the emerging catastrophic reality applying to the American liberal ideology. The mother Bess is far more practical, she tries to maintain the family’s sanity, behaving as if life must go on. More than anything else, she must calm down her righteous husband. Phil’s brother Sandy is a gifted painter and assumes a very interesting role. In the summer he disappears for an “apprenticeship” with a tobacco farmer in Kentucky. In a way he makes it into the heart of America. Later he is joining a new assimilation scheme by encouraging Jewish city boys to follow his example. This program is put together by Rabbi Bengelsdorf, the devoted supporter of Lindbergh. Sandy is doing very well, eventually he is invited to a reception at the White House. This is obviously far more than Herman can take. For Herman, the democratically elected American president is nothing but an enemy of the Jews and he refuses to give his son permission to go to Washington. The tension between family members threatens the stability of the family itself, which is on the brink of falling apart. However, all that time,  America has been kept out of the war. American boys aren’t dying in a far away country. American people are very happy but somehow the Jewish Americans aren’t.

All the way through the book father Herman is portrayed as a paranoid Ghetto Jew. He is totally single minded in interpreting reality, he is overly tragic. But he isn’t alone in his obsession. Alongside his Newark Jewish Ghetto neighbours he draws a lot of support from the famous Jewish journalist and broadcaster Walter Winchell who is spreading his anti-Lindbergh poison to the nation. It doesn’t take long before Winchell is stripped of his positions as a journalist, first in the printed press and later in his prime time radio slot. But Winchell won’t surrender; once he loses his job, he decides to run for the presidency. Winchell, the Jew, decides to reshape the American future. In other words, he is determined to take America into war in Europe. Within a short time into his campaign, Winchell is assassinated. Again, the reader may wonder whether the assassination is an anti-Semitic act or rather a punishment Winchell and the Jews insist upon bringing on themselves.

All the way through most of the book I couldn’t make up my mind whether the plot against America is a Jewish or rather a Nazi one. Clearly most of America into war that may serve their cause or if it was Hitler who employs an agent in the very centre of the American administration as the mastermind behind the plot. When time is ripe, young Phil provides us with a shadow of an answer.

Towards the very end of the book Lindbergh disappears with his private fighter plane without leaving a trace. Mysteriously, the wreckage of his plane has never been found. No forensic evidence can suggest what happened to him. Foreign governments volunteer their versions: the Brits blame the Nazis for kidnapping the president, the Nazis suggest that it was ‘Roosevelt and his Jews’ who abducted the American hero. These suggestions are all highly charged, unfounded gossip that are there to serve an international political cause. However, Roth deliberately decides to leave us with a very personal account. We hear Rabbi Bengelsdorf’s account told by his wife Evelyn who happens to be Philip’s aunt. Brilliantly, Roth’s historical narrative takes the shape of modern ‘Jewish history’. History is then reduced to a mere personal account in the shape of gossip devoid of any factual or forensic reference.

Following Rabbi Bengelsdorf’s account, we are entitled to assume that Lindbergh was indeed a Nazi agent. Anyhow, this is the time to remind us that Roth’s President Lindbergh is a fictional character. In fact Lindbergh, the real man, was an American hero, a man who ended the Second World War as a P38 combat pilot at the age of 42. ‘The Plot Against America’ is a fictional tale, Lindbergh wasn’t a traitor, he was an American patriot who happened, like many others, to have admired Hitler for a while. Lindbergh was an American nationalist who loved his people and truly believed that his country should stay out of the ‘Jewish War’. Roth’s Lindbergh is indeed imaginary, but the Jewish collective paranoia isn’t. It is very real. Moreover, the Jewish intent upon shaping American reality is more than real.  Most importantly, while the Nazi plot to run America is totally fictional, the Jewish Plot to run America is now more vivid than ever. Nowadays, when the American army is acting as an Israeli mission force in the Middle East, when Syria and Iran are just about to be flattened by Anglo-American might, it is rather clear what the real meaning of the ‘Plot Against America’ may be.

I read Philip Roth’s book while the entire international community was standing shoulder to shoulder behind the war criminal Sharon. While in Roth’s book the Herman Roths and the Walter Wichells were expecting  America to sacrifice its best sons on the Jewish altar, we are now watching the entire world joining the Jewish war against Islam. It is rather depressing to see our Western politicians enthusiastically adopting the most corrupt version of Jewish morality: a totally blind worldview based on supremacist endorsement of the justice of the stronger. Clearly, there is no isolationist Lindbergh to save us all. Unfortunately, there is not even a single Rabbi Bengelsdorf to suggest an alternative friendly human Jewish morality.

By the time I put Roth’s book down, the storm around the Iranian president subsided somehow. The Jewish world and the Jewish state had another great victory to be cheerful about. The UN’s General Assembly has passed a resolution designating 27 January as the annual ‘Holocaust Memorial Day’ throughout the world.

Why the 27th of January? Because this is the day Auschwitz was liberated. The resolution also rejects any denial that the Holocaust was a historical event in which the mass murder of six million Jews and other victims by Nazi Germany during World War II took place. Seemingly, the UN has a new role, while for years it has been engaged in securing world peace, now it is mainly concerned with securing Jewish history.  No doubt, a very nice present for the Jewish state, a state that holds the highest record for failing to comply with UN resolutions.

By the time I put Roth’s book down I am more or less ready to learn my lesson. Once again I failed to acknowledge that suffering is an exclusive, internal Jewish affair. No one is allowed entry, neither the Palestinians of Gaza’s concentration camp, nor the massacred inhabitants of Fallujah and Tikrit. One million victims of Rwanda are obviously out, three million in Vietnam are out as well, so are the innocent civilians of Hamburg, Hiroshima, Dresden and Nagasaki and millions of others who were killed in the name of democracy. By the time Roth’s ‘Plot Against America’ finds its way onto my bookshelf, I agree with myself at least: A young Rabbi Begelsdorf is long overdue. If we are being Judeified, we may as well take the best of Judaism rather than its supremacist brutality, namely Zionism. By the time Roth’s tome is resting I realise as well that the current plot isn’t just against America. It is a plot against humanity and human dignity

NRHZ: Being in Time – a post-political manifesto, review by Clara S. (2018-01-26)

March 01, 2018  /  Gilad Atzmon

Being in Time – a post-political manifesto, review by Clara S. (2018-01-26)

http://www.nrhz.de/flyer/beitrag.php?id=24544

Ours is a post-political world and we, the people living in the US and Europe, have fallen out of time. We have neither answers to what is happening to us nor any strategy to be in time, again, anytime soon.

In today‘s dystopia the financial capital has taken over and the production of goods has been nearly abolished in the western world. Transformed into consumers living in debt, more and more people find themselves in the ’basket of deplorables‘  (H. Clinton) as victims of global capitalism. Democracy has become a farce and we, the citizens, have no real influence on political decisions.  This transformation has come about smoothly without big social protests or fundamental critique from academia and virtually no warning voices from art and culture.

This is the way Gilad Atzmon views the world and he questions why that is so. Searching for an answer he starts by reviewing the well-known right and left ideologies. Without any reservations he looks at their promises, examines the terms ‘national’ and ‘socialist’ and asks whether the combination of the two really are that bad.[1]  Furthermore, he writes about the appeal of these ideologies to the masses and whether or not they can provide solutions for our current situation. Without advocating any of these ideas himself, he provides quite unique and interesting insights. His results: for several decades the left-right tensions within our western societies (utopian/idealistic vs. nostalgic/realistic thinking) kept up a balance which brought about some security, well-being and the reliance of citizens to be able to influence politics. Those days are gone. The liberal western democracy Fukuyama saw as climax and end of our historical development is dead.

Meanwhile, the New Left has given up most of its social objectives and has split society into fragmented, infighting, biologically-oriented identity groups (according to ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation etc.).Thus, they have created a global regime of political correctness. Nobody can really speak their minds anymore, and everyone is ‘voluntarily’ restricting their freedom of speech and thought. The New Right answers by claiming to be accepted as a discriminated identity group of their own on the one hand, and on the other by vehemently rejecting identitarian politics and advocating not very consistent Judeo-Christian values. The popularity of right populist parties of Donald Trump and Brexit, as well as the huge success of Corbyn and Sanders are to be seen as a protest against this kind of ‘left’ thinking, as the wish to be rooted and to change reality, and not to stay caught in idealistic ideas of political correctness.

People today are onlookers and objects of politics they cannot influence in any way. The author claims that it is important to relate the human condition to the full range of political ideas, to find new topical explanations and answers and not to get stuck in restricted patterns of thought. This is only possible by giving up Jerusalem (the town of commandments and political correctness) and establishing Athens (the town of reason) as our ‘capital’ again. With this distinction he refers to the 2000-year old philosophic argument and strictly conservative philosophers like Leo Strauss and Martin Heidegger.

The fearless analysis above was reason enough for his opponents to discredit Gilad Atzmon as fascist.  His explanations for the current situation have provoked his being called an anti-Semite. This is because he argues that one of the main causes for these problems can be seen in the huge influence of Jewish culture and ideology in connection with Jewish elites having gained more and more powerful positions in politics, finance, culture and media throughout the ‘Jewish’ 20th century. The reasons he provides are, again, unique. Without ideological blinkers he, for example, refers to Henry Ford, who is generally viewed as an anti-Semite for his criticism of Jewish influence in international banking. He describes how Jewish elites succeeded in combining high intellectual levels with practical efficacy. Furthermore, he vividly describes how our society was split into privileged, gifted elites, manipulated less gifted ‘deplorables’, how this is related to Jewish culture and what the consequences are. These ideas are quite thought-provoking as he uses the results of an extremely disputed scientist for his argument. The inventor of the Bell-Curve, Richard J. Herrnstein, has been called a rabid racist for his findings. I have never heard anything about this in Germany but read about it in American blogs. He tested the intelligence of different ethnic groups within the American society and found that Afro-Americans are, on average, less intelligent than Caucasians. Atzmon’s conclusions, however, are not racist but they call for accepting reality and finding practical solutions. As a former teacher I know from experience the daily struggle to overcome the motivational and intellectual barriers of youths from educationally deprived backgrounds, the difficulties of showing them that you care and convincing them that better education means the promise for a better life while, at the same time, you know that this is not really true.

Whereas the influence of Jewish elites cannot be underestimated, this group of people is successful in maintaining their status as potential victims. Here, according to the author, lies the core of their power to prevent people from criticising them. Another way of achieving that is controlled opposition. In a humorous way Atzmon explains how nearly every relevant debate today is transferred into an inner-Jewish controversy and thus loses its bite. He stresses that most of the time this is not a result of manipulation, although this also can be the case, but that many of the critical voices we adore, i.e. Chomsky, are completely honest but caught in their cultural bubble.

It would be rewarding for the author and all of us if the interested public, historians and sociologists didn’t allow themselves to be threatened away by the gatekeepers of political correctness and instead compared his findings with their own experience, checked them for consistency, provided scientific back up or even proved them wrong. Gilad Atzmon sees himself as a philosopher; his book is about introspection and not scientific proof. It is full of inspiring thoughts. Instead of answers you will find questions (some are from Atzmon himself, some are my own):

·       What can society do to make sure that its ‘deplorables’ can get by in dignity?

·       Could  equality within borders be an alternative to global capitalism?

·       How far does the social super-structure he describes really comply with the material basis of global financial capitalism?

·       Is the fact that Jews play such an important role a critical component when we are talking about certain capitalist structures?

·       What are the chances and risks of returning to the Athenian tradition of reason?

Some might want to compare Gilad Atzmon with the snake who challenges us to taste the forbidden fruit.  Why not?

If they want to burn it , you want to read it..

Being in Time – A Post Political Manifesto

Amazon.co.uk  ,  Amazon.com  and   here  (gilad.co.uk)

[1] This is where I began to get cold feet.  Klaus Hartmann, secretary of the German Freidenkerverband, has rightly pointed out that Hitler’s fascism was neither ’national‘ nor socialist‘ – these terms were chosen for propaganda purposes (http://www.nrhz.de/flyer/beitrag.php?id=24504). But then I read an essay by Horst Mahler (a lawyer who used to be left and defended some of the German RAF terrorists; now he has changed his views to far right): “Cleansed of all traces of Jewish lies the spirit of the German People will shine in new glory. Freed from the cinders of Jewish thinking it will again intervene into world affairs and – with the irresistible power of reason – show the peoples that the idea of National Socialism provides the remedy for the Jewish-dominated world.” (https://de.scribd.com/doc/225655981/Das-Ende-der-Wanderschaft-Horst-Mahler-pdf#)

This quotation was taken from a piece in which Mahler uses Gilad Atzmon and his thoughts from ‘The Wandering Who’ as an example for a ‘good Jew’, who has succeeded in freeing himself from Jewishness and achieving true knowledge. German ‘being’ as remedy for the world instead of Jewish chosenness or the US-American ‘Shining City on the Hill’.  Applause from the ‘wrong side’ for Gilad Atzmon or would he agree? In our conversation he said that he was “not impressed by far right dogmatics with an agenda of their own”.

 

One Yellow Star – a glimpse into tribal psychosis by Elias Davidsson

February 08, 2018  /  Gilad Atzmon

“The surrender to a regime of correctness is a surrender to Jerusalem. It is a strict divergence from Athens and its spirit.”

 Introduction by Gilad Atzmon: Elias Davidsson wasn’t  happy with my recent expose of his tribal sabotage attempt of  the 9/11 truth movement and so  he took revenge: a one star Amazon book review. His review collects  Being in Time’s  most spectacular gems presumably with the hope that this pile of quotes will finish me off once and for all. Here is the bad news for Davidsson and his operators — I take  pride in each of these cherry picked quotes.  I plan to circulate them one by one in the coming weeks and monitor how they affect my Amazon ranking.  I will let others decide whether these quotes are “post-factual,” “presumptuous” or “deceptive” as Davidsson describes them. For the time being, I would like to thank the son of David for, once again, providing us with a window into the depths of tribal morbidity and delusional detachment. 

If they want to burn it, you want to read it …

Being in Time – A Post Political Manifesto

Amazon.co.uk  ,  Amazon.com  and   here  (gilad.co.uk). 

Gilad Atzmon and Islam

January 14, 2018  /  Gilad Atzmon

Introduction GA: In the following book review Jay Knott suggests that  Being in Time scores a very high mark on many fronts, however, the text fails to attack Muslims and Islam. In the last two decades I have been accused of many things but this is the first time I am criticised  for ‘not being an Islamophobe.’ I have met Knott before and I think that regardless of the peculiar premise of this text,  it deserves attention. 

Gilad Atzmon And Islam

Book Review by Jay Knott

A review of Being In Time – a post-political manifesto, Gilad Atzmon, Skyscraper Publications, 2017

“There is just one point where I have encountered a difficulty” – Russell to Frege, 1902.

I introduced a talk by Gilad Atzmon, and organised a reading group to discuss his first book, “The Wandering Who?”, about Jewish identity politics. We had many criticisms of it.

The new book is much broader, and better. I have only one major criticism. This article is about that criticism, but though as a result it’s mostly negative, I actually think this book is a major contribution to understanding the times we live in. It explains Donald Trump, Brexit, the left, identity politics, political correctness, and especially, US support for Jewish supremacy in the Middle East. It is undogmatic, finding inputs from a wide range of sources. Atzmon even manages to get something useful out of the book “The Bell Curve” while rejecting its central premise, IQ. I mostly agreed with much of “Being in Time”.

But chapter four, “United Against Unity”, woke me up with a jolt.

But what about Hammed, a metal worker from Birmingham? Hammed identifies as a ‘Muslim’ – can he join a Left demonstration against the War in Syria? It’s a good question and the answer is not immediately obvious because it’s no secret that many of those who subscribe to ‘progressive’ and ‘liberal’ ideologies and especially activists, are rather troubled by religion in general and Islam in particular.

You could have fooled me. In 2003, I attended a large Palestine solidarity demonstration in London. There was a small group of Muslim extremists shouting “Hamas! Hamas! Jews to the gas!”. They were tolerated. Far milder expressions of white identity are violently excluded from left-wing events.

Shortly after criticising political correctness, Atzmon writes

What about Laura? She’s a Muslim convert who often hides her face behind a veil. Does she feel comfortable in ‘progressive’ or liberal gatherings? Not really.

“Feel comfortable”? This is political correctness!

The progressive left on both sides of the Atlantic is more than tolerant of Islam, the most regressive section of Western society.

The American women’s march against Donald Trump selected Muslim misogynist Linda Sarsour as one of its organisers,

and German feminists applauded Islam too.

Atzmon is right to say that a British patriot would not be welcome at an anti-war protest. But he’s completely wrong about the left and Islam.

One of the reasons Muslim men were allowed to get away with raping hundreds of underage girls for decades in Britain is that most of them live under Labour Party-controlled councils. Paralysed by political correctness, sending social workers who noticed that it was primarily “Asians” trafficking the girls, on “diversity” courses, they ignored the problem, or suppressed attempts to expose it, for fear of being called “racist”.

When Labour’s left-wing leader Jeremy Corbyn spoke in the House of Commons about the Grenfell tower disaster, he rightly pointed to Orgreave and Hillsborough as examples of police malfeasance, then he mentioned the Rotherham child-trafficking scandal as another example, again rightly. But he didn’t mention the other major factor: the overwhelming overrepresentation of Muslims among Rotherham’s child traffickers, and the influence of political correctness on allowing them to rape children. Instead, he went out of his way to make a gratuitous remark about Muslims breaking from prayers to help their neighbours in the Grenfell fire:

A more extreme example of the leftist attitude to Islam is the Socialist Workers Party arguing against Islamic terrorism – on the grounds that it wouldn’t work: Socialists Stand With The Oppressed.

Atzmon’s book is pretty good about the connection between identity politics and Zionist power in the West. He’s also right about the overrepresentation of self-identified Jews in the origins of the most sophisticated variants of movements designed to take advantage of Western self-doubt – Franz Boas’s anthropology, Theodor Adorno’s psychology and sociology (the Frankfurt school), Freud, postmodernism and the “anti-racist” anti-science of Stephen Jay Gould. But it’s not only Jewish activists who exploit this loophole. Political correctness also undermines the West’s defence against the influence of Islam.

EXAMPLES

Page 48: “Jewish ethnocentrism and even Jewish racial exclusivity is fully accepted, while other forms of ethnocentrism are bluntly rejected.”

In fact, the left tolerates prejudice from black activists, usually against white people. “African-American Studies” is positive, whereas the study of “Whiteness” is invariably negative. One can easily find dozens of examples by checking out the sites “The College Fix”, “Campus Reform”, Sargon of Akkad’s videos on Youtube, or reading up on the 2006 Duke University Lacrosse rape case. I suspect that’s the main reason for the left’s support for the socially conservative ideology of Islam – most of its adherents have dark skin.

Page 81: Atzmon claims that the Guardian does not mind offending ‘Islamists’, on the basis of its broadcast of one televised debate between two Zionist Jews.

He’s right about the paper’s hostility to the white workers. When hackette Zoe Williams went to Rotherham to investigate Pakistani taxi drivers raping underage white girls, she dismissed the mostly-white English Defence League as “racist”, instead asking for the opinions of… Pakistani taxi drivers. Atzmon doesn’t realise that this is normal. Muslims usually get gold in the Oppression Olympics. Here are six examples of the Guardian’s Islamophilia:

Zoe Williams: “This brutal blame game pays little heed to justice in Rotherham”

Suzanne Moore: “Poor children are seen as worthless, as Rotherham’s abuse scandal shows”

Jonathan Freedland: “Rotherham inquiry: the ‘PC gone mad’ defence is itself a form of racism”

Nazir Afzal: ‘There is no religious basis for the abuse in Rotherham’

Chi Onwurah – “The grooming of girls in Newcastle is not an issue of race – it’s about misogyny”. In a way, she’s right. It’s not about race, and it is about misogyny. Muslim misogyny. But she doesn’t say that.

The Guardian ran a story “Muslim women ‘blocked from seeking office by male Labour councillors’”. Notice that the religion of the women is mentioned, but not the men. Can you guess why?

Page 125 – ID Politics – the belief that the personal is political unless you are Muslim or white. This reiterates the idea that the left encourages identity politics for all except Muslims and white Europeans. He’s fifty percent right.

Page 129 – Atzmon argues that Islam and Christianity are similar, but Judaism is different, because it’s based on “an obedience regulatory system”, in which “God-loving is not voluntary”. And again on page 197. He argues that Christianity and Islam are universalist, as opposed to the sectarian attitudes of Judaism – “the chosen few”. He’s right about Judaism, and the myth of “Judaeo-Christian”, but he substitutes the equally false “Islamo-Christian”. The only way Islam is universalist is that anyone can join it, and many had no choice. If you haven’t signed up, or especially if you leave it, it’s not a bit universal. Its God is close to the vengeful monster of the Old Testament, not at all like his son, the pacifist who founded Christianity. “Judaeo-Islamic” is a more accurate neologism.

Page 144 – “Real Jewish power is actually the power to silence criticism of Jewish power”. Right. But what is the power to silence the defence of a scientific view of gender differences inside Google? The need to fire a black diversity officer at Apple who said it’s ok to be white? The show-trial of student Lindsay Shepherd, for showing a video clip of a debate on “gender pronouns”? The fact that Nobel Prize-winning biologists can be fired for an opinion, or a joke … and dozens of similar examples, too numerous to mention, and no doubt hundreds which have never attracted the publicity of these cases. Some of them can be found here: “The Left-Wing Campaign Against Liberal Values”. This is political correctness. Jewish power is one of its results.

CONCLUSION

Social Justice has taken over, not just academic humanities departments, but large sections of the media, and, amazingly, the most important corporations in the world, such as Apple and Google. “Cultural Marxism” is not a paranoid right-wing conspiracy theory.

It’s my contention than Zionists use the same mechanisms as SJWs to manipulate Western societies to do things which are opposed to the interests of most of their inhabitants, rich and poor. Like professors of “African-American Studies”, they use false, or meaningless, allegations of racial prejudice to take advantage of our morality. We can kill both of these birds with one stone.

Support for Israel is a result of political correctness, the expression of a weakness in white European people and societies. The immigration of millions of Muslims, among them many who don’t accept Western values, is another. Atzmon dismisses concern about Islam altogether. But read “Being and Time”. Apart from its blind spot regarding ‘Islamists’, it’s damn good.

Balfour’s Shadow – A Century of British Support for Zionism and Israel

A review of the book authored by David Cronin

By Jim Miles GlobalResearch,

July 01, 2017

The Balfour Declaration, currently accepted by many as the founding legal statement for the establishment of Israel is really nothing more than a letter. It was a letter of policy between government personnel and became a major part of foreign policy then, and its shadow effects have continued on rather effectively to now. Balfour’s Shadow is a well written outline of the history of events after the letter: the immediate short term effects on British policy after WW I; the medium range policies that continued until after WW II; up to Britain’s current policy of advocating for and dealing with Israel. It is not a pretty story.

The letter was not necessarily well intended. Balfour himself was anti-Semitic. Yet the letter offered support to the Zionists for the creation of a Jewish national home in Palestine. Several factors accounted for this, one of them being this very anti-Semitism, as many British felt that Jews would never assimilate into their society.

Several other factors came into play: Jewish support in the war effort was considered necessary; the British wanted to protect the Suez Canal as the main route through to its then colonies of south Asia, mainly India; and natural resources, oil, became a major interest after oil was discovered in abundance in the Middle East. A colonial outpost would, Britain believed, help consolidate control of the region against Arab interests in an era when British racism ran rampant throughout its colonial networks.

From that beginning, Cronin highlights the major factors in the relationship between Zionists, Jews, and the British government. He deals specifically with events pertaining to the government, and does not detail all that transpired during Britain’s occupation via the Palestinian Mandate. But the general thread of the history is exposed throughout the work, accessible to both those with a strong background in the history and those just entering into the discovery process of Middle East history. For the latter, Balfour’s Shadow provides enough detail that a reader should be motivated to research more information through other works (of which there are many).

Author David Cronin

(Source: @dvcronin / Twitter)

In general, Cronin reveals that the methods used by the British to control the indigenous population of Palestine laid the foundation for the ethnic cleansing and later suppression of the Palestinian people. Much history has been written about the Haganah, Stern, and Irgun ‘gangs’ fighting against the British, but the general trend of British behaviour was to support the increasing settlement patterns, evictions, and land grabs of the Zionist settlers.

After the nakba, Britain continued to supply Israel with military support ranging from hundreds of tanks, many planes, up to and including nuclear systems, in particular the sale of heavy water through Norway. This period was a transition from British global power to U.S. global power: after the fake war for the Suez Canal and the later pre-emptive war of 1967, the U.S. had clearly taken the lead in supporting Israel. Britain however did not let go.

Indeed, Britain became one of the strongest voices in support of Israel as military trade and financial/corporate interests continued with mostly behind the scenes activities.

Additional information is provided showing how the British worked to sideline the PLO by effectively recruiting Arafat as leader of a recognized PLO ‘government’, leading to the false promises of the Oslo accords and the continued annexation, settlement, and dispossession of the Palestinians.

For contemporary events, Cronin highlights the bizarre career of Tony Blair. At this point in time Blair was truly a “loyal lieutenant” for the U.S., adopting and promulgating U.S. policy for Israel and the Middle East in general. Bringing the work up to current events, “Partners in Crime” outlines the corporate-military ties between Britain, Israel, and the U.S.. Most of the corporate interest is military procurement going both directions – hardware to Israel, spyware and security ware to Britain. As always, these corporations (Ferranti, Affinity, Elbit, Rafael, Rokar, Lockheed-Martin) changed British views – at least of the elites – from tentative support to solidarity. These friendly relations also helped tie Israel into the EU more strongly.

Today, official British policy remains as an ardent supporter of Israel, with a lasting pride in Israel’s founding. The British colonial heritage rages on in the Middle East.

This is an excellent work most specifically for its focus on British attitudes concerning the development of Zionism/Israel, a history of war crimes and apartheid. Kudos to Cronin for his extensive use of many personal diaries and notices and of official records from War and Colonial office files as well as Foreign and Commonwealth files for more recent materials. It is concise and direct, an accessible read that can serve as a prerequisite for Middle East studies/Zionist studies and as a general guide to British policy for Israel. [1]

***

Title: Balfour’s Shadow – A Century of British Support for Zionism and Israel

Author: David Cronin

Publisher: Pluto Press, London

Click here to order.

Notes

[1] Many books cover the development of Zionism and the creation of Israel. For a more highly detailed development of the historical situation preceding and leading up to the Balfour letter itself, the best I have read is: The Balfour Declaration – The Origins of the Arab-Israeli Conflict. Jonathan Schneer. Anchor (Random House), Canada. 2012.

This review was first published in Palestine Chronicle, June 29, 2017.

Featured image from Book Depository

The original source of this article is Global Research

Copyright © Jim Miles, Global Research, 2017

Athens versus Jerusalem-a book review by Taxi (Plato’s Guns)

June 24, 2017  /  Gilad Atzmon

GA: The following is an incredibly clever book review by one of my favourite political commentators. Taxi  sees in  Being in Time an expose of  the ‘Athens vs. Jerusalem struggle.’ Taxi is  absolutely right – this is a battle  for our survival. It is far from being an easy one, We are both infiltrated and run over.

PLATO’S GUNS

Athens versus Jerusalem

by Taxi

https://platosguns.com/2017/06/24/athens-versus-jerusalem/

A review of ‘Being in Time: A Post-Political Manifesto’ – by Gilad Atzmon/Skyscraper Publication

First, I must make stern objection to the subtitle of this book: “A Post-Political Manifesto“.  No, dearest reader, this is no manifesto at all.  A manifesto is usually instructive and Atzmon’s book is actually reflective.  A manifesto is imbibed with strict political dogma, whereas Atzmon’s book is charged with a free-flowing, philosophical energy.  The book is, in fact, an astute and remarkable comment on the metaphysics of our current political condition: using the age-old blueprint of Athens versus Jerusalem to unravel the dark and twisted marvels of our current political dystopia.

For over two thousand years, a war between rationalist Athens and messianic Jerusalem has ensued, but not to clear conclusion.  For several millennia, this epic war has vacillated and the victor’s scales have tipped hither in one era and dither in another.  The war between Athens and Jerusalem continues relentlessly into our present day, and this side of the 21st century, it is cultural philosopher and Jazz artist, Gilad Atzmon, who now updates us on this epic and raging battle where each side is struggling to occupy the very perception of humanity itself.  Both sides claim to be the saviors of mankind; and currently, the Jerusalem school of thought is leading, but only because its agents have successfully infiltrated to the core, the elite leadership and governments of the Western world.

 

Simultaneously, Athens is presently having its victories too, as evidenced by the growing popularity of Atzmon’s elegant Athenian book – a rare publishing phenomenon in itself indeed, indicating a growing market hungry for Athenian thought.  Moreover, this current Athenian awakening can also be measured by recent polls, and by the palpable bulging of an eclectic population on Social Media, unified in expressing its disgust, distrust and utter rejection of Jerusalemite rule.  You could say that the various chattering masses are currently seeking the humanism and order that Athens promises because they are so very dissatisfied and disillusioned by what Jerusalem has delivered them: division, intolerance, senseless wars and hopeless human misery with no end.

One observes that since the controversial establishment of the State of Israel, the Jerusalem school has had an accelerated progress.  Inside of 70 years, Jerusalemites, with feverish dedication have successfully installed their peculiar brand of anarchy through the aggressive spread of divisive Identitarian Politics, tyrannical Political Correctness, ruinous Predatory Economics, vampirical Controlled Opposition, as well as a most lethal form of warmongering Jewish Power – all simultaneously and insidiously injected into Western societies.  Jerusalem has evidently delivered us nothing but endless warfare overseas and palpable instability and dystopia in our Western societies.  It has brought us a non-humanistic world.  It has given us a lowering of citizen morale and an increase in barbaric immorality where might over right is normalized.  Jerusalem has steeped us in an absurd environment where decadent perversions are permitted, but freedom of speech is curtailed.  A world where freedom of thought is punished instead of promoted.

In the philosophical arena, Athens represents Truth and Jerusalem: the Dream.  Both appeal to the human condition but clearly, one is more grounded in reality than the other.  Today we witness how Jerusalem’s promised Dream (of the messiah) has delivered us a convoluted and godless nightmare.  It is the very sinews of this nightmare that Being In Time so meticulously and courageously explores, illuminating and dissecting the elite powers that be and the diabolical machinations behind our current socio-political catastrophe.

Atzmon’s book takes us on a most unique philosophical journey, deconstructing this ongoing nightmare with fascinating insight and intellectual rectitude and rigor.  His gripping chapters are impressively substantive: dissecting each of Jerusalem’s current Jew-centric poison tentacles with astounding clarity and moral cognizance.  Making sense of the maddening world we live in is what Atzmon’s book so assuredly delivers.  His thoughtful deliberations on Identity Politics and other Jerusalemite maladies are stunningly profound in their clarity and logic: simple, indisputable logic.  No other contemporary philosopher or political writer has ever so successfully exposed the most vital of Jerusalem’s grotesque operators: their uniquely deceptive Controlled Opposition agents.  For this alone, Atzmon’s book must be read.  All efforts at liberation from Jerusalem are lost without knowledge and understanding of the duplicitous nature and aims of Jerusalem’s Controlled Opposition.  Without the skulduggery of the Controlled Opposition, Jerusalem cannot advance from within; cannot lasso the support of the blindsided masses.  Controlled Opposition IS the enemy within, the most dangerous of all enemies.  Atzmon exposes the very character and workings of these Controlled Opposition agents: using insider knowledge, facts, and a sprinkle of his own brand of wry wit.

Truly, there are too many important chapters in Atzmon’s book to break down here one by one, but I sincerely urge people seeking a humanistic and truth-based world to read this incredible book: an important document on the contemporary moralities of our current political zeitgeist; a book written by a devout Athenian philosopher glued to the mathematics of reality and to the stellar principles of humanism.

And with such rich knowledge in hand, can change be that far behind?

 Gilad’s Being in Time can be ordered on Amazon.co.uk  & Amazon.com  and on Gilad’s site  here.

Thomas Surez’s State of Terror reviewed by Eve Mykytyn

June 16, 2017  /  Gilad Atzmon

Thomas Surez’s “State of Terror” is a meticulously documented history of Zionism from its early stages in Israel until 1956.  It is the story ofhow a number of secular Jews successfully installed a religious state located on the land of another nation.

The established myth is that after centuries of antisemitism culminating in the Holocaust, the Jews ‘deserved’ Israel, the ‘land without a people for people without a land.’  Historical accounts often deepen and are refined with time and study. Suarez’s book (along with a few others such as Alison Weir’s “Against Our Better Judgement”) convincingly refutes the generally accepted history entirely.

Suarez points out that in 1897 an early Zionist cabled the news to his coconspirators that Palestine was already densely populated. What followed was a terrorist conspiracy to take that land that is shocking in its scope and violence.

Starting around 1918, in what is now Israel, the Irgun, the Lehi (Stern Gang) the Hagana and the Jewish Agency operated at various times as competing and cooperating gangs of thugs. They raised money by robbery and extortion, extracting ‘tributes’ from local businesses, bombing those who failed to pay. The Zionist gangs assassinated Palestinians, police, the British, and Jews whose opinions diverged from theirs.

The war did not temper their violence. When the British consolidated three boats of refugees onto the ship Patria in Haifa with the intention of taking them to a displaced persons camp in Mauritus, the Hagana bombed the ship of refugees.  Over 267 people died, among them 200 Jews. Zionists spun the story as a reenactment of the biblical story of Masada, claiming that the passengers of the Patria heroically committed mass suicide by bombing their own ship when they failed to reach Israel.

During and after World War II, the Zionists demanded with remarkable if not complete success that Jews be segregated from other soldiers and then segregated within displaced persons camps. Suarez cites pro-Zionist Churchill’s discomfort with such segregation, Churchill wrote that nearly every race in Europe had been shipped to concentration camps and “there appears to be very little difference in the amount of torture they endured.” (page 120).  Jews who wanted to stay in their home lands or who successfully negotiated the resettlement of European Jews anywhere but Israel were denounced and thwarted.

How did the Zionists succeed in insisting that they spoke for all Jews when it is clear that they did not? What gave them the right, as murderers of Jewish refugees, to speak for displaced Jews after the war?

Zionists consistently claimed to speak for all Jews. No wonder the Zionists insisted on the use of Hebrew (a number of early German and Yiddish language newspapers were bombed). Suarez points out that the settlers spoke the language of the biblical era because they claimed to be its people (page 25).  Ben Gurian claimed that the “Bible is our mandate.”

Israeli’s official birth in 1948 purged a million Palestinians and destroyed 400 of their villages. The UN had established Israel’s borders, but Israel already stretched beyond the borders and claimed sovereignty over all the land it held. Both England and the United States knew that Israel would not give back any land.  Reuven Shiloah, thefirst director of the Mossad, not only told them so but declared Israel’s right to take more land as necessary (page 277).

Israel’s theft of Palestinian land and assets was not simply a result of claiming land Israel was granted by the UN.  Suarez makes the point that:  “economic analysis… illustrates that the Israeli state owes its very existence to its wholesale theft of Palestinians’ worldly possessions… Despite the massive infusion of foreign capital into Israel and its claims of modern efficiency, it was the end of the Palestinians [assets] that saved the Israeli state from stillbirth” (page 288).

Israel’s treatment of its Palestinian benefactors after 1948 was atrocious. It is painful to read through Suarez’s partial listing of atrocities: rape, torture, murder and robbery. Arab villages, Christian and Muslim, friendly and not, were destroyed.  In one instance, Arab villagers were murdered by being forced to stay in their homes as they were bombed. (page 309).

At the time, Israel itself was the site of “alarming proportions” of murder, rape and robbery within its own citizenship. One Israeli speculated that this arose from a   “general and contemptuous disregard for law” (page 298).  A British report stated: “intolerance explodes into violence with appalling ease in Israel.”

Israel reached into Iraq (with false flag operations against Iraqi Jews to prompt immigration) and into North Africa to obtain citizens for its new settler state. The Iraqi and North African Jews were kept in miserable conditions until they were deployed as place holders to live on newly acquired land.

In 1954 Israelis planted bombs in Egypt in a false flag operation intended to convey that Egypt was unstable. When the plan was exposed in 1955, the United States and the United Kingdom considered military action against Israel to stop its murderous seizure of land. In a cold war series of events detailed by Suarez, France and England ended up siding with Israel againstEgypt in the Suez Crisis, ending any chance that England and the United States wouldconduct any action against Israel.

So far in his book Suarez has delivered a careful, albeit painful, history.

And then Suarez delivers his indictment, “with the conclusion of Suez,… Israel had fully established its techniques of expansion and racial cleansing that continue to serve it today: its maintenance of an existential threat, both as a natural consequence of its aggression and of provocation for the purpose; its expropriation and squandering of the moral weight of historic anti-Semitism and the Holocaust; its dehumanization of the Palestinians; its presence as the prophet-state of the Jews; and its seduction of its Jewish population with the perks of blood privilege.”

Being and Politics – a Left oriented critical review by Kim Petersen

June 07, 2017  /  Gilad Atzmon

Introduction by GA: The following is a Left oriented critical review of Being in Time by Kim Petersen (Dissident Voice). I would like to thank Kim for his eloquent approach. However, in Being in Time I obviously refrain from following the orthodox definitions of Left and Right. I actually insist that Left and Right are not what they seem to appear or represent but instead are a mirroring of the human condition: a dialectical interplay between the dream and the real (or shall we say being and becoming).  Petersen writes in the end of his review, “it would be fruitful if the book erected a promising structure, rather than simply tear down structures with little left standing.” This point must be addressed. While activists tend to know who is right and what is wrong, I see myself as a philosopher. My task is to refine questions rather than produce answers.  I leave the domain of  ‘promising structures’ of the Jerusalemites.  I am, by far more excited by the Athenian approach, namely thinking things through. For me to teach, is to teach other to think for themselves. 

The book can be ordered on Amazon.co.uk & Amazon.com and on Gilad’s site here.

Being and Politics by Kim Petersen

http://dissidentvoice.org/

Gilad Atzmon has a new book just out titled Being in Time: A Post-Political Manifesto. The title probably is influenced from a book, Being and Time, written by the German philosopher Martin Heidegger.

Atzmon has put forward his manifesto that attempts to synthesize various political, cultural, psychological, linguistic strands to explain why the western world finds itself in its current state of unfettered capitalism, crushed communism, the continuing Jewish occupation of and oppression in Palestine, supremacism, the West fighting Israel’s wars, and the discourse being manipulated (even within purportedly independent media).

In Being in Time, Atzmon pulls on many threads, including sexuality, psychoanalysis, the Frankfurt school, cultural Marxism, cognitive partitioning, political correctness, language, identity politics, leftism, rightism, and more.

Identity Politics

I continue to dissent from how Atzmon characterizes the Left, which he divides into the Old and New Left. Fine, there are divisions in the Left. There are certain core principles that leftists adhere to: pro-human rights for all humans, accepting of diversity, anti-war, pro-worker, anti-exploitation, etc. But what must also be realized is that many persons may pose as Left but are not leftist in orientation. People who do not embrace core leftist principles are not leftist, they are faux-leftists. To criticize the entirety of the Left because a fifth column has undermined a segment of the Left speaks to the level of infiltration, the gullibility of certain leftists, or the fragility of social conviction among some leftists.

The Left is not a monolith, and neither is the Right a monolith. Hence any criticism leveled at the entirety of a political orientation is only valid when the entirety of a political orientation espouses an identical platform.

Atzmon considers that identity politics characterizes liberalism and progressivism. (p 8) He names, for example, LGBTQ, feminists, Latinos, Blacks, and Jews as forming exclusive political alliances. However, a major plank of the Left is solidarity as it is widely understood that to bring about some greater form of socialism the masses must unite. Ergo, strict allegiance to identity politics is contrary to leftist principles. Atzmon further notes that patriotism is secondary among leftists. Jingoistic nationalism is an enemy of the working class, and it is certainly anathema to anarchists. Therefore, insofar as patriotic sentiment prejudices one’s attachment with wider humanity, it serves to divide rather than unite peoples.

Yet rightists also engage in identity politics as Whites, militarists, religious sects, and anti-abortionists attest. In the case of the US politics, Amanda Marcotte of Salon writes, “Democrats are always accused of playing ‘identity politics.’ The reality is that Republicans do it far more.”

Left-Right

I wonder what exactly Atzmon means by post-politics. I assume this refers to the “fatigue” he points to in the Brexit vote and election of Donald Trump, as well as the discarding of Left and Right politics.

He sees Left and Right as “now indistinguishable and irrelevant.” (p 9)

According to Atzmon, the Left is focused on “what could be” and the Right on “what is.” (p 13) Atzmon argues, “The Right does not aim to change human social reality but rather to celebrate, and even to maximize it.” (p 13)

But the Right has engineered this “social reality” through neoliberalism, imperialism, and militaristic violence, and the only ones really benefiting from this so-called maximization are the capitalist class. That the Democratic Party in the US, the Labour Party in the UK, the Liberal Party in Canada are in step with this engineering of “social reality” adduces that they are rightist parties.

“The Left,” continues Atzmon, “yearns for equality, but for the Right, the human condition is diverse and multi-layered, with equality not just tolerated but accepted as part of the human condition, a natural part of our social, spiritual and material world.” (p 13)

The imprecision of what constitutes a chunk of Atzmon’s manifesto is annoying. The Left “yearns”? This might be written in a less biased manner as a “desire.” But it is not simply a desire for an undefined “equality.” The Left calls for an equality of conditions, opportunities, and access to resources. Why not? Should an inequality of conditions, opportunities, and access to resources be accepted? Should one class of people be accorded privileges over the rest of humanity? Is this not supremacism – which Atzmon deplores? And for most of the Left – most (and for anarchists, likeliest all), respect for diversity is a valued principle. Diversity is recognized by the Right, specifically, pecuniary diversity. But American society historically has been considered a melting pot rather than a celebration of diversity.

Atzmon sets up the parameters for discussion,such that the “post-political” author can diss both Left and Right. He does not discuss in the Left-Right context as to what constitutes “the human condition” and whether the rightist perspective is indeed “a natural part of our social, spiritual and material world.” I find such a statement ahistorical. The economist Karl Polanyi presented a compelling historical perspective in his book The Great Transformation that elucidates how communitarian human society was changed.

Atzmon writes, “For the Right ideologue, it is the ‘will to survive’ and even to attain power that makes social interactions exciting.” (p 13) The sentence strikes this reader as platitudinal. There is no example or substantiation provided. Which ideologue from whatever corner of the political continuum does not have a will to survive or seek exciting interactions?

Atzmon sums up the Left-Right schism as “the tension between equality and reality.” (p 13) If one cannot accept the definitions, and if the premises are faulty, then the logical structure collapses.

One flips the page and the Left is described as dreamy, illusory, unreal, phantasmal, utopian; thus, it did not appeal to the working class. Atzmon asserts, “Social justice, equality and even revolution may really be nothing but the addictive rush of effecting change and this is perhaps why hard-core Leftist agitators often find it difficult to wake from their social fantasy. They simply refuse to admit that reality has slipped from their grasp, preferring to remain in their phantasmal universe, shielded by ghetto walls built of archaic terminology and political correctness.” (p 14-15)

Atzmon is also abusive of the Right, seeing the Right ideologue as mired in biological determinism. (p 17)

Atzmon says he wants to push past political ideology. I am unaware of his professing any political leaning, so I guess he is, in a sense, already post-political. This strikes me as illusory since in western “democracies” the corporations still pull the strings of their politicians.

Atzmon applies the noun democracy recklessly. Without defining what is a democracy, through using the word (as so many people do), he inadvertently reifies something that does not exist in any meaningful sense.

Atzmon writes darkly, “Symptomatic of the liberal democratic era was the belief that people could alter their circumstances.” (p 19) Yet contemporary politicians still play on that sentiment, witness Barack Obama in the US and Justin Trudeau in Canada whose political campaigns appealed to such a belief. Does Atzmon think people cannot alter their circumstances?

Atzmon points to how the Labour Party under Blair became a neoliberal, warmongering party. He concludes, “The difference between Left and Right had become meaningless?” (p 24) I would describe this as the Left (to the extent the Labour Party was genuinely Left) being co-opted and disappeared by the Right — a political coup.

Atzmon says the political -isms and free markets are empty. He does not specifically target anarch-ism, however. Besides mentioning anarchist professor Noam Chomsky, one supposes anarchism is too fringe for Atzmon, but also it is beyond much of the criticism he levels at the Left. And as for the notion of a “free market,” there never has been one. Polanyi wrote in The Great Transformation: “The road to the free market was opened and kept open by an enormous increase in continuous, centrally organized and controlled interventionism.” (p 146)

Why has the genuine Left never attained power and brought its vision to fruition? Rampant capitalism has allowed 1% to profit grotesquely relative to the 99%. The 1%-ers have the money and the power that money buys: media, corporations, resources, and government. With the government controlled by the 1%-ers that puts the state security apparatus also under their control – and paid for the 99%-ers (because the rich all too often escape paying tax) to keep them in place. The police and military is, in essence, socialism exploited to protect capitalism. The few countries that have brought about Communism (Cuba, China, USSR, Viet Nam, etc) have found themselves under incessant militaristic and economic threat from capitalists who fear the example of successful socialism. This is missing from Atzmon’s analysis.

Atzmon even proposes that socialism can also be considered greedy because “… it promises that neither you nor anyone else will possess more than I.” (p 25) Really? Where is this stated and by who? Anarchist economics does not propose such a premise.1

Political correctness

Political correctness (PC). What is it? Atzmon calls it “a tyrannical project. The attempted elimination of essentialism, categorization and generalization… in opposition to human nature.” (p 38) Basically, it is the avoidance of language that stigmatizes other groups. Who wants to be stigmatized? Nobody. I can agree that PC has been pushed to extremes. PC also does not distinguish between intention and denotation. Should it? I confess when younger that I, close friends, and colleagues would call each other “gay.” It was actually a term of affection we used for each other. No negative sentiments were felt toward any sexual orientations; in fact, many of us were frequently in the company of LGBTQ. But we were not PC.

Atzmon finds that self-censorship is an outcome of PC: “Initially we don’t say what we think; eventually we learn to say what we don’t think.” (p 39) Perhaps. But sometimes it is better to bite one’s tongue and say nothing. I prefer to think of PC having encouraged a more respectful discourse, but PC should be criticized when it becomes excessive. There are plenty of non-PC examples among those who affiliate with the PC crowd, such as denigrating people who demonstrate for Palestinian human rights as “anti-Semites” – probably the most abused anti-PC term. PC becomes a tool of indoctrination when not practiced with equanimity and sincerity.

Is PC a freedom of speech issue? In some cases, yes. For instance, why is it okay to label someone a “holocaust denier” when questioning the veracity of certain aspects of WWII history? No serious person denies that Jews were among those targeted by Nazis; and no serious person denies that Jews were among those people transported to and having died in concentration camps.

An inordinate focus on PC can be vexing; there are much bigger issues in the world than a focus on whether to call a female “girl” or “woman.” It seems simple enough to raise awareness of inappropriate use of language. Most people will come around to a polite request to avoid words that may offend.

Miscellania

Being in Time finally begins to hit its stride when focusing on manipulations to grab and maintain power. The author is unafraid to point a finger and criticize identitarian groupings that create and exploit divisions.2 The stride is bumpy though, as Atzmon discusses sexuality, LGBTQ, feminism, Left abandonment of the working class, psychoanalysis and the scientific method, Athens and Jerusalem, severe criticism of Marxism, etc. The depth and breadth of the manifesto is beyond a book review.

The scope of Being in Time even looks at a 1970’s sitcom, All in the Family, which Atzmon sees as having “succeeded in pushing the liberal agenda into every American living room.” (p 109) Atzmon calls it a “sophisticated” “cultural manipulation.” (p 110)

Atzmon sees Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign as an institutional failure “embedded in progressive and liberal thought.” (p 120) Describing the ardent neoliberal Clinton or her supporters as liberal or progressive is classic mislabeling.

Atzmon is razor sharp when discussing aspects of Jewishness and what the different aspects mean for being a Jew. However, when discussing the political spectrum, political ideology, and society, his definitions too often seem contrived to support his thesis.

In the final pages of Being in Time, Atzmon speaks from deep familiarity with the subject matter: capitalism, Mammonism, and tribalism. With a closing flourish, Atzmon poignantly dares to ask, “And isn’t it correctness, pure and simple, that stops us from mentioning that the protagonist [in George Orwell’s novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four, Brotherhood leader Emmanuel] Goldstein is, himself, Jewish?” (p 208)

Final Comments

In the typical human perspective, Being proceeds in a linear fashion. But from a cultural, historical, linguistic, ethical, scientific perspective Being is clearly multi-faceted and not confined to linearity. Atzmon is fully aware of this, nonetheless his Being in Time tackles myriad issues in a rather binary fashion.

There are arguments presented in the book that I diverge from, but Being in Time presents points of view that deserve contemplation and a threshing out. Over all, it is a manifesto that I find unrefined; in dire need of definitions that are substantiated, not merely asserted; and (although I believe Atzmon would state this was beyond his remit) it would be fruitful if the book erected a promising structure, rather than simply tear down structures with little left standing. Being in Time comes across as an interesting foray to understanding and twining politics, power, and ontology that deserves deeper development. A dialectical approach might be most illuminating.

Alas, politics is not yet dead.

The Dream of a better world is not yet dead either. But one day the Dream must end because the Dream must be made a Reality. That is my simplistic two-sentence manifesto.

Being In Time: Gilad Atzmon’s journey through post-modern crises

May 22, 2017  /  Gilad Atzmon

By Adam Garrie, theduran.com/

In Being In Time, author and musician Gilad Atzmon explores the historical and psychological basis for the many crises gripping the western world.

Many of the same people lament the state of a broad, however amorphous western society that has succumbed to the trends of hyper-identity politics, political and economic sectarianism, brutal financial capitalism and the death of industry and censorship in societies that still preach the self-righteous yet vague cause of ‘freedom’.

In Being In Time, author Gilad Atzmon offers a philosophical explanation for how these divergent trends are actually systematic outgrowths of societies simultaneously bewitched and confused by the abject failures of the three domineering ideologies of the 20th century: communism, fascism and liberalism.

Atzmon approaches how an uneasy calm in mid-20th century western states has given way to a world where the dams of free speech, prosperity and political predictability have been burst open leading to a flood of insecurity, third world style poverty and perhaps most importantly for Atzmon, the poverty of ideas.

Atzmon who has previously written about his personal struggles with and opposition to Jewish identity politics in The Wandering Who, takes his dialectical approach further, subjecting many contemporary and post-modern trends to the same scrutiny.

Such trends include, post-modernism, Cultural Marxism, post-Freudian social theory, the sexual identity agenda, post-modern attitudes to race and religion and the so-called populist political phenomena of Brexit and Donald Trump.

Atzmon calls his book a post-political manifesto, but it could equally be called a post-dogma manifesto. Atzmon laments a western world that has forsaken the Socratic method of embracing wisdom based on a combination of logic and ethics. Instead, Atzmon sees a western society obsessed with legal minutiae that he traces to strict Talmudic jurisprudence.

The book is very much in the tradition of the great secular conservative leaning sceptics and metaphysicists of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Those who have read Nietzsche or Spengler will recognise familiar diagnosis to modern problems combined with Atzmon’s unique world view shaped by the rejection of the Zionist creeds of his Israeli place of birth.

One might be so bold as to say that a great deal of geo-political philosophical commentary in the 21st century is largely shaped by people trying to either debunk or revise the manifestly ludicrous hypothesis of Francis Fukuyama.

At the dawn of the 1990s, Fukuyama in The End of History and the Last Man stated that history had ceased to move forward and was comfortably numbed to the neo-liberal realities that everyone had accepted.

The problem is that not everyone accepted them and even those who did, have largely been failed by them both materially and spiritually.

Atzmon doesn’t merely lacerate the post-Fukuyama developments in the metaphysical crisis currently gripping an increasingly hysterical liberal western establishment, but instead explains the root of these problems from the perspective of an historic prism illuminated through a combination of late-modern cultural analysis and Atzmon’s own unique trials and tribulations with the crises inherent in intra-Zionist Jewish identity.

I personally rarely recommend such books. I highly recommend this one.

The book can be ordered on Amazon.co.uk  & Amazon.com

The book is now available here. 

 

The War on Syria: Exposing Media Distortions

Book review: Washington’s Long War on Syria, by Stephen Gowans

By Gregory Elich

Global Research, May 21, 2017

The war in Syria, mainstream media tell us, is a simple story, with a brutal dictator on one side and freedom-loving rebels on the other. Into this mix, the Islamic State has inserted itself, while the benevolent United States must intervene to rescue the Syrian people. U.S. involvement in Syria, motivated by altruism, the story goes, arose in direct response to events in 2011.

This view is as fanciful as it is notable for its myopic self-regard.

In Washington’s Long War on Syria, Stephen Gowans dismantles the official story, myth by myth, and provides the context without which it would be impossible to understand events.

Gowans relates the history of armed Islamist opposition to the secular government, reaching back decades. U.S. meddling in Syrian affairs also has a long history, as the author thoroughly covers.

Gowans quotes U.S. government documents that reveal a growing consensus on the desire to topple the Syrian government, which officials regarded as an impediment “to the achievement of U.S. goals in the region,” which included the spread of free market economies. The George W. Bush administration imposed a series of sanctions on Syria, which crippled the economy and wrought widespread suffering. “Sanctions of mass destruction” were visited on Syria “with grim humanitarian consequences,” Gowans writes.

By 2006, the U.S. began meeting with and providing support to Islamist groups, such as the Muslim Brotherhood-led National Salvation Front. Islamic extremists received funding to establish a satellite television station to broadcast anti-government programs into Syria. Millions of dollars were funneled to Islamist anti-government forces. Direct action was also mulled, and Bush Administration officials seriously considered the option of invading Syria.

The 2011 uprising in Syria is portrayed in mainstream media as entirely peaceful and dedicated to democratic ideals. Quoting from Western sources, Gowans shows that opposition groups in Daraa attacked police and burned down government buildings. In the weeks following the violence in Daraa, demonstrations throughout Syria typically numbered in the hundreds, far below levels seen elsewhere in the Arab world at that time. Contrary to Washington’s claims, protests in Syria tended to be led by the Muslim Brotherhood. The opposition quickly took up arms, and in a matter of months, had progressed from burning down buildings to waging armed guerrilla warfare.

Sensing opportunity in the armed uprising, Washington painted a very different picture of events so as to win public support for intervention. “When it became evident that the most prominent of the armed rebel groups were dyed-in-the-wool, head-chopping jihadists…U.S. propagandists created the concept of the ‘moderate’ rebel to assuage concerns that Washington was backing al-Qaeda and its clones,” Gowans reports.

Until its collapse, the opposition Syrian National Council was dominated by the Muslim Brotherhood and received $40 million a month from Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait, and the United Arab Emirates. Gowans observes: “Weren’t all these states presided over by princes, emirs, and kings, who preferred to govern by decree, eschewing any form of democratic input? What a curious set of allies for a so-called pro-democracy movement.”

The Free Syrian Army (FSA), much touted in the West, is hardly the moderate force of popular imagination, and Gowans thoroughly debunks such claims, showing how the FSA collaborates so closely with Al-Nusra that the two organizations share arms and ammunition and often fight side-by-side, in coordination with each other. CIA arms sent to the FSA can be expected to find their way to Al-Nusra.

In one of the book’s many examples demonstrating the ideology of the Free Syrian Army, the words of an FSA commander are referenced. “Those whose intentions are not for God had better stay home, whereas if your intention is for God, then you go for jihad and you gain an afterlife and heaven.” Gowans drily comments: “This was hardly the exhortation of a secularist.”

And who are the moderates of whom we hear so much? Gowans refers to the words of former director of national intelligence James Clapper: “Moderate these days is increasingly becoming anyone who’s not affiliated with Islamic State.” Gowans points out that “as far as Washington is concerned, every non-Islamic State armed group was moderate, including Al-Nusra, even though the al-Qaeda affiliate had been designated a terrorist organization by the United States itself.” In page after page, and with devastating logic, Gowans thoroughly demonstrates the absurdity of Washington’s claims to be aiding moderate forces.

Gowans demolishes the U.S. argument that its intervention in Syria is motivated by humanitarian concerns by contrasting it with U.S. silence on Saudi Arabia’s intervention in Bahrain to violently crush opposition. While Washington’s aid to Islamist rebels in Syria approached $1 billion a year, military and political support to Bahrain and Saudi Arabia continued unabated. Nor has Saudi intervention in Yemen proven an impediment to U.S. largesse. Recently, the Trump administration signed an agreement to provide Saudi Arabia with a staggering $110 billion in arms. The deal also called for as much as $350 billion to be added over the next decade.

“The Arab Spring had two components: its reality and its rhetoric,” Gowans explains.

“The Arab Gulf monarchies embraced the discourse of the Arab Spring in Libya and Syria, but crushed its reality at home. The monarchs’ patrons, officials of the United States, and the broader Western world, did the same.”

Washington’s Long War on Syria is a well-researched and deeply considered analysis of the tragedy that has befallen Syria. Stephen Gowans reveals the political and economic interests that are motivating Washington’s intervention in Syria. No praise is too high for this much-needed corrective to Western propaganda. This fascinating book is a must-read for anyone seeking a deeper understanding of the war in Syria.

To order:

 

Gregory Elich is on the Board of Directors of the Jasenovac Research Institute and the Advisory Board of the Korea Policy Institute.

He is a member of the Solidarity Committee for Democracy and Peace in Korea, a columnist for Voice of the People, and one of the co-authors of Killing Democracy: CIA and Pentagon Operations in the Post-Soviet Period, published in the Russian language.

He is also a member of the Task Force to Stop THAAD in Korea and Militarism in Asia and the Pacific.

His website is https://gregoryelich.org

Follow him on Twitter at @GregoryElich

 

 

 

 

 

The original source of this article is Global Research

Copyright © Gregory Elich, Global Research, 2017

“Towards a World War III Scenario” by Michel Chossudovsky

Bestselling book from Global Research

By Global Research

Global Research, April 14, 2017

“In a world where engineered, pre-emptive, or more fashionably “humanitarian” wars of aggression have become the norm, this challenging book may be our final wake-up call.” –Denis Halliday, Former Assistant Secretary General of the United Nations

Following the highly acclaimed 2012 release of the latest book by Prof. Michel Chossudovsky, “Towards a World War III Scenario: The Dangers of Nuclear War“, this title is now available for purchase through the Amazon Kindle program! Now you can take this bestselling title wherever you go and access it through your portable reader.

This highly reviewed title is available to purchase through the Global Research Online Store:

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The US has embarked on a military adventure, “a long war”, which threatens the future of humanity. US-NATO weapons of mass destruction are portrayed as instruments of peace. Mini-nukes are said to be “harmless to the surrounding civilian population”. Pre-emptive nuclear war is portrayed as a “humanitarian undertaking”.

While one can conceptualize the loss of life and destruction resulting from present-day wars including Iraq and Afghanistan, it is impossible to fully comprehend the devastation which might result from a Third World War, using “new technologies” and advanced weapons, until it occurs and becomes a reality. The international community has endorsed nuclear war in the name of world peace. “Making the world safer” is the justification for launching a military operation which could potentially result in a nuclear holocaust.

Nuclear war has become a multibillion dollar undertaking, which fills the pockets of US defense contractors. What is at stake is the outright “privatization of nuclear war”.

The Pentagon’s global military design is one of world conquest. The military deployment of US-NATO forces is occurring in several regions of the world simultaneously.

Central to an understanding of war, is the media campaign which grants it legitimacy in the eyes of public opinion. A good versus evil dichotomy prevails. The perpetrators of war are presented as the victims. Public opinion is misled.

Breaking the “big lie”, which upholds war as a humanitarian undertaking, means breaking a criminal project of global destruction, in which the quest for profit is the overriding force. This profit-driven military agenda destroys human values and transforms people into unconscious zombies.

The object of this book is to forcefully reverse the tide of war, challenge the war criminals in high office and the powerful corporate lobby groups which support them.

Editorial Reviews

Professor Chossudovsky’s hard-hitting and compelling book explains why and how we must immediately undertake a concerted and committed campaign to head off this impending cataclysmic demise of the human race and planet Earth. This book is required reading for everyone in the peace movement around the world.
–Francis A. Boyle, Professor of International Law at the University of Illinois College of Law

This book is a ‘must’ resource – a richly documented and systematic diagnosis of the supremely pathological geo-strategic planning of U.S. wars since 9-11 against non-nuclear countries to seize their oil fields and resources under cover of “freedom and democracy”.
–John McMurtry, Professor of Philosophy, Guelph University

About the Author

Michel Chossudovsky is an award-winning author, Professor of Economics (emeritus) at the University of Ottawa, Founder and Director of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG), Montreal, Editor of Global Research. He is the author of eleven books including The Globalization of Poverty and The New World Order (2003), America’s “War on Terrorism” (2005), The Global Economic Crisis, The Great Depression of the Twenty-first Century (2009) (Editor), Towards a World War III Scenario: The Dangers of Nuclear War (2011), The Globalization of War, America’s Long War against Humanity (2015). He is a contributor to the Encyclopaedia Britannica.  His writings have been published in more than twenty languages. In 2014, he was awarded the Gold Medal for Merit of the Republic of Serbia for his writings on NATO’s war of aggression against Yugoslavia.

The original source of this article is Global Research

Copyright © Global Research, Global Research, 2017

​Ernst Nolte-The Last German

August 21, 2016  /  Gilad Atzmon

An Obituary by Gilad Atzmon 

In his book Heidegger and the Jews, the French philosopher François Léotard contends that history may promise to narrate the past, but what it does instead is conceal our collective shame. American history conceals slavery and genocidal American militancy, Brits attempt to cover their imperial crimes and Jewish history covers the astonishing fact that Jews are uniquely skilled in bringing disasters on themselves. The real historian, according to Léotard, is the one who unveils the shame and exposes it to the light. The real historian is a philosopher – an essentialist who introduces logos to an epoch that initially conveys itself as ‘irrational.’  Like a psychoanalyst, the real historian removes layer after layer of repressed shame aspiring toward reason, coherence and the truth.

Professor Ernst Nolte, who died last Thursday (93), was a real historian. This makes sense, during the Second World War, Nolte was a student of the great Martin Heidegger.

Nolte was probably the first post war academic to break taboos against equating Nazism with Bolshevism. He was immediately denounced by the conventional academic institutions as an ‘apologist for Hitler’ and a ‘Holocaust denier.’ However, most of Nolte’s findings that were revolutionary in the 1960-80s are now accepted by most historians as a valid understanding of German National Socialism.

Nolte, found himself in a ferocious battle with the academic establishment in 1986 for suggesting that the Germans’ inclination towards National Socialism was a natural response to the ‘existential threat’ posed by Bolshevism.  He also compared Hitler’s brutality towards Jews and other minorities with Stalin’s mass killings. Nolte was correct that Stalin’s brutality towards mass populations predated Hitler’s oppressive measures towards people he identified as enemies of the state.  “Did the ‘Gulag Archipelago’ not exist before Auschwitz?”  Nolte asked in his 1986 Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ) article.

Nolte attempted to examine German shame in a search for logos in German modern history. In fact, that logos is more relevant now than ever. Nolte realised in the 1960s that fascism was the great anti-movement: it was anti-liberal, anti-communist, anti-capitalist, and anti-bourgeois. It opposed modernity. It is Nolte’s inclination towards logos in understanding fascism that helps us interpret the popularity of Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump.  Both men are regarded by their followers as a counter force to the mommonite/oligarch establishment.

Unlike Wilhelm Riech and the Frankfurt School enthusiasts who came to the ludicrous conclusion that Germans favoured National Socialism over Marxist revolution because they were ‘sexually repressed’ and inclined towards authoritarianism, Nolte bravely revisited the past and discovered that it made a lot more sense than most of us were willing to admit at the time.

As one might predict, being a real historian didn’t make Nolte’s life easy. Immediately after the publication of his FAZ article he became subject to an orchestrated onslaught led by Jewish academics and others.  One of Nolte’s bitterest enemies in Germany was the notorious Frankfurt School shabbos goy Jürgen Habermas who accused Nolte of “grossly apologetic tendencies.” If history were left to Habermas and his Frankfurt School idols we would still blame German sexual repression for WWII and the rise of Hitler.

Professor Nolte wasn’t an admirer of Hitler.  He consistently condemned Nazism. However, Nolte did react with interest to Fred Leuchter and Germar Rudolf ‘s reports that questioned the scientific possibility of the homicidal use of the gas chambers in Auschwitz.  If history is there to narrate the past, such a narrative must evolve and shift as time passes, more facts come to light and we can reconsider what happened and rewrite the past accordingly.

The real historian is a person who transcends temporality and introduces rationality where it has been lacking. Nolte replaced the absurd notion of ‘collective authoritarian psychosis’ with historicity. He did it all by essentialism. Thus, Nolte, the real German Historian was quicker than others to see Israel for what it is.  In his 1991 book “Historical Thinking in the 20th Century,” he referred to Israel as an“extraordinary state” and warned that it could become fascist and commit genocide against Palestinians.

To his last day Professor Nolte was unrepentant, he said what he believed to be true.

قراءة في كتاب تحت خط 48: عزمي بشارة وتخريب النخبة الثقافية

 

غلاف طبعة “منشورات مكتبة بيسان”، بيروت، لبنان 2016

السبت | 12-03-2016 – 09:00 صباحاً

كتب: خالد الفقيه

صدرت طبعتان من كتاب الدكتور عادل سمارة تحت خط 48 عزمي بشارة وتخريب دور “النخبة” الثقافية في أقل من شهر الأولى في بيروت عن مكتبة بيسان والثانية في أراضي العام 1948 عن منشورات شمس في جت بالمثلث في دلالة واضحة على مدى الاهتمام بالكتاب وما يحويه كونه خارج عن المألوف من كاتب إعتاد أن يكتب خارجاً عن النص وفق قناعاته التي لا تتبدل، جاء الكتاب بعد إصدار جهاد النكاح الذي لاقى صدىً على مستوى عربي وعالمي كونه نقش في المحرمات ووجه البوصلة وجهتها الحقيقية في حقل كان من المحرم ولوجه أو حتى الحراثة فيه.

في كتابه الجديد أرسى سمارة نموذجاً جديداً في الكتابة اللافتة للإنتباه من حيث الشكل والمضمون وربما متأثراً بصديقه الشهيد ناجي العلي الذي إستطاع في حياته المهنية أن يجذب القاريء للصحيفة التي تحمل على صفحتها الأخيرة رسوماتها فجعلها الأولى التي يبدأ قاريء الصحيفة بتناولها، وسمارة إختار صورة مقلوبة لعزمي بشارة عضو الكنيست الصهيوني السابق لدورات متعاقبة والمتواجد في أحضان أمراء قطر اليوم بالدوحة وبوقها الإعلامي “الجزيرة” الأخذ بالأفول بحسب إستطلاعات الرأي الفلسطينية والعربية حيث جاءت نسبة متابعتها عربياً وبحسب أخر إستطلاع للرأي مركز وطن للدراسات والبحوث في الربع الأول من العام الجاري 2016 بنسبة 5% في الضفة الغربية و5.3% في قطاع غزة، الصورة المقلوبة ووفق منهجية الإخراج الصحفي تعد من العناصر الفيزيائية والسيكولوجية الملفتة للإنتباه والدافعة للقراءة بعمق في طيات الكتاب لمعرفة ما يرمي إليه الكاتب وإن حاول تيسير المهمة على المتلقي من خلال العنوان البارز للكتاب أسفل الصورة: “تحت خط 48 عزمي بشارة وتخريب دور “النخبة” الثقافية”.

جاء في مقدمة الكتاب الواقع في 204 صفحات والمقسم على أربعة عشر فصلاً، أن عزمي بشارة إستطاع أن يبقي إسمه طبيعياً كمثقف وكاتب حزبي أبهر البعض لسنوات وعقود دون أن ينتبهوا بقصد أو بدون قصد أنه دخل البرلمان الصهيوني “الكنيست” مؤدياً يمين الولاء لدولة احتلال كولنيالي إحلالي متجاوزين أن ما يجري تطبيعاً يصل خارج حدود الوطن المحتل ويؤسس لمرحلة زمنية مقبلة تجتاح الوطن العربي وبنيته الثقافية القومية بدأت ملامحها تتبدى بعد ما بات يعرف “بالربيع العربي”، ويرى سمارة أن الإعتراف بالكيان الصهيوني من نظام حكم أو فكر أيدولوجي يفتح الباب أمام ثلاث ثغرات أولها غض الطرف عن عضوية العرب تحت الاحتلال في الكنيست وإظهار الأمر على أنه نضال وطني، وثانيها إغفال الطرف عن الإعتراف بهذا الاحتلال وكيانه كنقيض لحق العودة، وثالثها الخضوع للخطاب الدولي الإمبريالي بالتعاطي مع الكيان الصهيوني كبلد طبيعي. وكلها بحسب الكاتب تؤدي لإستدخال الهزيمة المصطلح الذي نحته في كتاب سابق له من باب الإستقواء بالضعف.

ويرى الكاتب أن بشارة إستطاع الاستمرار في تعمية وتغميم الحقائق عبر الترويج الهائل لطريقة خروجه من فلسطين المحتلة كمنفي أو هارب ليستقبل إستقبال الأبطال حتى في أحضان المقاومة والممانعة، ولكن الهجمة التي تعرضت لها سوريا ومن قبلها ليبيا والعراق وبعدها المقاومة في لبنان كشفت الكثير من الجيوب المتقيحة في السياسة والثقافة والأيدولوجيا وعرت دور دويلات ميكروسكوبية بحجم قطر وماكينتها الإعلامية.

ويطرح الكاتب التساؤل الكبير في مقدمته: هل بشارة عميل؟ بعد أن كان أطلق عليه في مقالة سابقة لقب فتى الموساد. ويجيب عليه بقراءة
تحليلية لمنحى العلاقة بالسلطة الحاكمة في الكيان والمنحى التاريخي ويقول: لأن بشارة بوزن كمال سليم (إيلي كوهين) وبوزن برنارد هنري ليفي ضد الأمة فالجواب يجب أن يشتقه القاريء بحصافته. فبشارة إلتقط الإنتماء القومي العربي للفلسطينيين داخل أراضي العام 1948 وإستثمره ونافس به جذوره في الحزب الشيوعي الإسرائيلي نحو قبة البرلمان الصهيوني ونجح في ذلك.

وفي تناوله للحزب السياسي الذي أسسه بشارة “التجمع الوطني الديمقراطي” كمنصة توصله للكنيست يؤكد الكاتب بأن الحزب مسجل بشكل رسمي لدى داخلية الكيان أي أنه معترف بهذا الكيان عدا عن أنه تنظيماً غير عقائدي.

بشارة بدأ بزيارت لدول عدوة كسوريا ولبنان بحسب التصنيفات الإسرائيلية وهو ما يعني أن الحكومات الإسرائيلية المتعاقبة كانت في الباطن تهيء للرجل الدور المناط به مستقبلاً ليقوم بدور الطابور السادس الثقافي.

وتتبع الكاتب بشذرات قصيرة حياة بشارة من المولد وحتى اليوم مروراً بعضوية الحزب الشيوعي فتأسيس التجمع وعضوية الكنيست وتمكنه من إختراق حركة أبناء البلد التي ترفض تسجيلها كحركة سياسية في داخلية الاحتلال مستقطباً بعض أنصارها، وينقد الكاتب الاستقبال الذي حظي به بشارة من الرئيس السوري حافظ الأسد ومن حزب الله وهو عضو في الكنيست واصفاً الأمر بالإنبهار بتسطيحات بشارة الثقافية وعنترياته السياسية ويستطرد قائلاً: “أو عرفوا أنهم يلتقون عميلاً للكيان لا بد من إستجلابه”. تاركاً لمستقبليه الإجابة. مستشهداً بما قاله الصحفي أمنون أبراموفيتش للقناة العبرية الأولى عام 2001،

” إن بشارة يقوم بتنفيذ مهمات لصالح الحكومة عند زيارته لسوريا، عزمي بشارة كان يلتقي مع رئيس الوزراء إيهود باراك قبل كل زيارة لدمشق، وكذلك مع رئيس جهاز الموساد داني ياتوم، وقد تعود أن يقوم بتقديم تقارير لياتوم عند كل زيارة لسوريا”.

بشارة وبحسب سمارة فتح علاقات مع قوى فلسطينية ومنها حركة فتح والسلطة الفلسطينية وحركة حماس والجبهة الشعبية منذ كان في الكنيست وحاول إستخدامها لدفع فلسطينيي العام 1948 للإنخراط في عمليات الانتخابات للكنيست وخاصةً عندما رشح نفسه لرئاسة كيان الاحتلال وهو ذاته حاول بعد خروجه من فلسطين المحتلة إيجاد بديل لمنظمة التحرير الفلسطينية ولكنه فشل في مسعاه.

فكرياً يرى الكاتب بأن ما ذهب إليه بشارة يعود لجذوره في الحزب الشيوعي الإسرائيلي الذي لا يرى بالكيان الصهيوني عدواً قومياً وبالتالي فإن قسم الولاء في الكنيست

“أفسم أن يكون ولائي فقط لدولة إسرائيل وأن أخدم وبولاء الكنيست الإسرائيلي، أقسم أن يكون إنتمائي وبكل أمانة لدولة إسرائيل وأن أقوم وبكل أمانة بواجباتي في الكنيست الإسرائيلي”

لم يكن مشكلةً أمام عزمي أو المهام الموكله إليه.

لماذا قطر؟

سؤال يطرحه الكاتب ويجيب عليه بأن إستقرار بشارة في قطر ليس بالأمر الصدفي رغم أن كل عوامل الجذب الثقافي لمثقف ليست موجودة فيها مثل النقابات والحياة البرلمانية وحتى الإعلام، فقطر مرتبطة بعلاقات سرية مع إسرائيل منذ زمن عبر مكتب تجاري وعلاقات أمنية أعطته الكثير من المرونة في الحركة وحتى القدرة على تحدي وزير خارجية الدوحة السابق حمد بن جاسم في بعض القرارات والمواقف والتي تبناها الأمير، ويبقى السؤال ماذا لو أراد الموساد رأس عزمي وهو الذي وصل إلى من هم أكثر تحصيناً وأمناً منه ويحتاطون في حركاتهم وسكناتهم؟

الفصل الأول من كتاب تحت خط 48 عزمي بشارة وتخريب دور “النخبة” الثقافية والذي عنونه الدكتور سمارة ب: إنتخابات سيادية…لا سياسية يقول بأن بشارة إستفاد من عجز إستراتيجية الكفاح المسلح ليبرر مخطط التسوية، عبر القبول بأشكال متعددة كالمساواة والمواطنة، وفي الفصل الثاني المعنون ب”محاورة إنتقادية مع التجمع الوطني الديمقراطي في مناطق 1948″، فالتجمع كان يسوق لفلسفة المساواة على أرضية التكيف مع المجتمع الصهيوني مع تأكيد الكاتب بأن إسرائيل غير مرشحة بحكم بنيتها لأن تكون دولةً لكل مواطنيها، أو أن تتخلى عن جوهرها اليهودي كدولة وهو ما ذهبت إليه إسرائيل علانيةً بعد خروج بشارة نفسه فباتت تطالب المفاوض الفلسطيني والعرب الإعتراف بيهوديتها، ولكن أخطر ما جاء في أسس وبنية حزب بشارة هو سلخ فلسطينيي العام 1948 عن إمتدادهم الفلسطيني وعمقهم العروبي من خلال إستخدام مفردات كالأقلية القومية وهو أمر سعى له الاحتلال منذ بدايته في تفسيخ العرب إلى أقليات وتجمعات (بدوية، درزية، عربية،…) فالقول وبحسب الكاتب أن فلسطينيي العام 1948 قد باتوا أقلية لا ينفي أن يصبحوا قادرين على الاستقلال.

قومية أبو الطاهر الجنابي قومية مؤسرلة، الفصل الثالث من الكتاب وفيه يتساءل الكاتب عن الرابط بين الذي يجمع بين المثقف الفلسطيني وقد أصبح عضواً في الكنيست وثقافة الطبقات الشعبية العربية الرافضة للتطبيع والمصرة على المقاطعة. وفي نقاشه لثنانئية القومية والحكم الذاتي ودولة لكل مواطنيها يؤشر الكاتب إلى توجهات من إسرائيليين نحو هذا الإتجاه حتى ما قبل طرح بشارة لذلك ولكن وفق رؤية الفصل لانه لا يوجد جوامع أخلاقية أو حتى عرقية أو عقلية، فبشارة ذاته كما يورد الكاتب اكد لصحيفة جيروزاليم بوست بتاريخ 28/2/1997 قال”إن هدفي دولة لكل مواطنيها. استقلال ذاتي ثقافي، وبدون هذا فإن الأمور سوف تؤول إلى المطالبة بتحرير المقاطعات ودمجها في وحدة طبيعية ستقود إلى صراعات..” وهذا يعني من وجهة نظر أخرى أن بشارة تطوع للحكام الإسرائيليين بتقديم المشورة والنصح والتحذير من إنفجار الأمور مؤكداً رفضه لكل أشكال الإنفصال الجغرافي للعرب الفلسطينيين داخل 1948.

كما أن بشارة وفي حديثه للصحيفة المذكورة يسقط عن نفسه قناع الديمقراطية والعلمانية فينقل عنه لاري ديرفنر مراسل الصحيفة ما نصه

” إن مشروع الدولة الديمقراطية العلمانية لا تأخذ بالاعتبار وجود أمة يهودية هنا ذات ثقافة عبرية شكلت كيانها. هذه الأمة ليست حقيقة وحسب، إنها أمة لها حق الكيانية وتقرير المصير”

. فما يريده بشارة وبشر له حكم ذاتي ثقافي ليس إلا ولم تعد الصهيونية حركة رجعية إستعمارية في تحريفاته ويساريته الطفولية فبات مدافعاً عن تقرير مصير اليهود فقط مع شعوره بالنقص تجاه تفوق اليهودي الإشكنازي.

بشارة يفصل القومية لفلسطينيي 48 وفق مقاسات ضيقة تقطعهم عن تواصلهم ففي نقده للسلطة الفلسطينية يقول: “نقد السلطة الفلسطينية مسألة مبدأية لشخص يساري. وأيضاً لأننا نتحث هنا عن ديكتاتورية لها تأثير سياسي على الشعب المجاور، إن لها تأثيرها علينا أيضاً”. وهذا يدلل على مدى تعلقه بإسرائيليته مسقطاً كل حقوق الشعب الفلسطيني في محاولة لكي وطي الوعي الجمعي لأبناء شعبه ولا سيما عند مناداته اليهود لنسيان حساسيات الماضي،

“أريد من اليهود الذين يشاركونني الإعتقاد، ومن أصدقائي من اليهود، وحتى أولئك الذين لن يكونوا أصدقاء لي… أن ننسى حساسيات الماضي …. وعندما يفهمون ذلك سيشعرون أن ما يوحدنا أكثر بكثير مما يباعد بيننا”.

الفصل الخامس تناول فيه الدكتور سمارة إستثماره حزب الله وسوريا في حملاته الإنتخابية للكنيست وكيف قدمه الراحل محمد حسنين هيكل للرئيس حافظ الأسد ليتعرف الأسد من خلاله على المجتمع الصهيوني وذهاب بشارة لإستثمار صوره مع الأسد الأب والإبن والسيد نصر الله في تضليل الفلسطينيين والعرب ليقدم نفسه ثورياً معادياً للصهيونية في مفارقة قومية تجمع الممانعة مع الولاء للكيان عبر البرلمان.

مصالحة الاستعمار دون خروجه الفصل السابع من الكتاب تناول تسويق بشارة للحركة الصهيونية كحركة تحرر وطني مسوقاً ذلك بعد خروجه إلى الحضن القطري الذي وفر له الإطلالة عبر الجزيرة للجمهور العربي وبمباركة رجال الدين هناك وتغطيتهم له وحتى بعد إستقالته من الكنيست فإنه قدمها للسفير الصهيوني في القاهرة ما يدلل على أنه لم يقطع التواصل عبر الحبل السري مع حاضنته الطبيعية ولم يتحرر من قسم ولائه للكيان، وحاول من خلال مشيخة قطر أن يوسع قاعدة من يتزعمهم بعد إصابته بجنون العظمة فسوق ذاته مفكراً للعرب أجمعين من على منبر الجزيرة التي خاض من على شاشتها علناً حوارات مع عسكر وسياسيي الكيان.

تضليل الشباب 2010

الفصل السابع مما جاد به سماره وتطرق فيه إلى تواصله مع القوى الفلسطينية الرافضةلإتفاق أوسلو لإقناعها بخوض الإنتخابات التشريعية عام 2006 وتضليله لشباب أراضي العام 48 ومطالبتهم بقبول المساواة مع اليهود هناك مقابل دولة للفلسطينيين في أراضي العام 1967 مسلماً بما أحتل من فلسطين عام 1948 “… والأفق الوحيد لأي تحرر يحمله جيلنا والجيل القادم هو أن يعيش السكان في فلسطين كلها مواطنين متساوي الحقوق في دولة واحدة”.
وجاء الفصل الثامن من الكتاب مراجعة لملف الهيئة الوطنية وقراءة في مشروع الدفاع عن الحقوق الثابتة ومناهضة التطبيع.

فتى الموساد

يرى الدكتور عادل سمارة أن المذبحة والمؤامرة التي تتعرض لها سوريا ورغم وجعها إلا أنها عرت بشارة وسرعت في كشف مهامه وبينت حقيقة تموضعه في الفصل التاسع من كتابه فهو إمتطى القومية في تسويق بضاعته وتحالف مع قوى الدين المتوافقه معه وهو الذي كان يناصبها العداء، فبشارة وكما ينحو الكاتب تم تجنيده مخابراتياً بالإستفادة من درس إيلي كوهين فخرج “بمجده” فتم إختيار قطر له للإقامة في مكان مأمون وبحماية القواعد الأمريكية الحليف الوثيق والاستراتيجي للاحتلال الإسرائيلي ليواصل دوره التخريبي على نطاق أوسع ولكن تحت الملاحظة اللصيقة، فبقائه في لبنان أو سوريا كان سيعني إفتضاح أمره وربما وصوله لمصير كوهين نفسه،

وفي قطر حيث المال والإعلام والتوجيه متاح له تجنيد المثقفين وأشباههم لتفتيت الدولة السورية وتخريب لبنان وفلسطين وربما لاحقاً الجزائر  من خلال المؤتمرات التي يديرها أو الإستضافات المرئية التي يرتبها عبر الجزيرة، – وقد يكون التسريب الذي نقل عن إجتماعه مع كادر الفضائية التي أسسها في لندن بالمال القطري “العربي الجديد” لتكون وريثاً للجزيرة التي تشير العديد من الملاحظات والتحليلات أنها ستغلق قريباً لتحلل نظام الإمارة القطرية من متاعبها، ومطالبته بشراء الذمم لمواطنين في مصر وسوريا وفلسطين مؤشر على نياته القادمة.

هل روسيا والصين إمبرياليتان؟

عنوان الفصل العاشر يلخصه الكاتب بتساؤل بشاره نفسه ومثقفوا الناتو والنفط، ويرى به سؤالاً خبيثاً.

مرحلة الأوغاد وأوغاد المرحلة- عزمي وحمد- وصف إستعاره الكاتب من الشاعر أحمد حسين ومستشهداً بكتاب فرنسي “ما خفي من صفقات وعمولات “حمد بن جاسم” أغنى رجل في قطر، ليبدأ فصل كتابه الحادي عشر وفيه يوضح كيف بات عزمي مقرراً في شؤون الإدارة لإمارة لطالما تعاملت مع الفلسطينيين والوافدين على أنهم طبقات دونية تخدم فقط، فقد جاء في الكتاب الفرنسي:

” وكما حدث في ليبيا، فإن رجلاً واحداً لعب دوراً محورياً في هذا التحرك، هذا الرجل هو عزمي بشارة،…. إن عزمي بشارة المقرب من الأمير تميم، منخرط مع المعارضة السورية

منذ بداية الأزمة، لكنه إضطر لاحقاً إلى أن يتراجع أمام رئيس الوزراء حمد بن جاسم الذي إنتزع ملف الأزمة السورية وأحكم قبضته عليها”. ولكن بعد فشل إسقاط الدولة السورية كما كان مبرمجاً دفع ببشارة لتكثير الأميبيات حوله بإغداق المال عليها.

الفصول الثلاثة الأخيرة من كتاب سمارة حاول فيها الكاتب أن يوضح الدور الذي قام به بشارة في تونس وإفتتاحه لمركز دراسات بمباركة حركة النهضة الذي جرم محاربة التطبيع مع إسرائيل، ومن ثم يتسائل عن مصير التجمع الذي أسسه بشارة وبات يشرف عليه من الخارج وهل من الممكن أن يعود عناصره لقواعدهم وقيمهم الرافضة للكيان الصهيوني قبل أن يوضح العلاقة بين المشروع التصفوي للقومية العربية من احتلال الإسلام العربي إلى إحتلال العروبة.

وبعد القراءة المتأنية للكتاب نجد أن فيه من العمق والجرأة ما لم يعهد من قبل في كاتب عودنا أن يركب الصعاب ولا يجعل من قلمه يراعاً للإيجار وقد يكون في إعادة طباعة الكتاب بعد فترة وجيزة من صدوره للمرة الثانية دلالة واضحة على التعطش لدى المتلقين في جلاء الحقائق وسقوط الأقنعة.

تحت خط 48: عزمي بشارة وتخريب النخبة الثقافية

تأليف: د. عادل سمارة

بقلم: مريم الأشعل

طالبة ماجستير، الجامعة اللبنانية، بيروت

غلاف طبعة الأرض المحتلة 48

منشورات شمس (بلدة جت منطقة المثلث)، 2016.

قراءة في كتاب: تحت خط 48: عزمي بشارة وتخريب النخبة الثقافية

تأليف: د. عادل سمارة

منشورات مكتبة بيسان، بيروت، لبنان 2016

بقلم: مريم الأشعل

لقد جاء كتاب “تحت خط 48 عزمي بشارة وتخريب دور النخبة الثقافية ” لمؤلفه الدكتور عادل سماره , من أجل إزالة الغشاوة عن أعيننا وإظهار الحقيقة أمام الراي العام العربي، بأن عزمي بشارة عميل لصالح الكيان الصهيوني . والمغزى ليس في شخص السيد بشارة بل بما هو أعمق من  هذا أي بدوره في “استدخال الهزيمة ” و نشر ثقافة  الاستسلام أمام العدو الصهيوني بين العرب .

والهدف من الكتاب هو إنارة الطريق امام أصحاب الحق والارض في العودة الى وطنهم فلسطين –كل فلسطين. وهذه العودة لن تكون الا بالمقاومة المسلحة وليس بالمساومة والحفاظ على الوضع الراهن كما فعل ويفعل السيد بشارة ومن على  شاكلته .

واذا كان الشارع العربي غير مهتم أو ملم بالاحداث السياسية لانشغاله في توفير لقمة عيشه من جهة وإخضاعه لقمع يطال العقل والموقفمعا من جهة ثانية، فماذا عن الساسة و المثقفين القوميين وحركات المقاومة ؟ لماذا ظل عزمي بشارة اسما طبيعيا وهو عضو في الكنسيت منذ عام 1996 ! علما بان عضوية الكنيست هي قسم الولاء للدولة اليهودية.  لكن يبدو للبعض ان الوصول الى عضو كنيست هو  نضال، هو تكتيك للوصول الى مركز يمكن فيه تحسين شروط حياة الفلسطينيين.

  ولكن كيف لهذا أن يحصل ويكون مقنعاً؟  فاذا كان اعضاء البرلمانات في البلدان الطبيعية، أي التي ليست تحت الاستعمار لا يخدمون مصالح شعبهم، فكيف لعضو عربي داخل برلمان  مؤسسة الكيان الصهيونية أن يحقق لشعبه شيئاً بالمعنى القومي وليس الفردي او الفئوي، علماً بأن من يراجع تاريخها يعرف بانها “تسمح لاعضاء الكنيست العرب  أن يكسبوا فرديا ، لا أن يدافعوا عن وطنهم  ويحققوا مكاسب قومية “.

إن مناخ تحقيق اي شعب لحقوقه من سلطته او من الاستعمار يقول الدكتور عادل “يتم بمراكمة مختلف انواع النضال والتي ليست البرلمانية الا جانبها السلبي  والمخصي”.

 ”بدأ عزمي بشارة حياته السياسية بعضويته في الحزب الشيوعي راكاح الذي تشرب منه أفكاره بأن الكيان الصهيوني كيان طبيعي وليس  حتى مجرد امر واقع, وهذا ما دفع لتبرير الترشح لعضوية الكنيست الصهيوني، وتمهيدا لذلك زار الاردن ثلاث مرات قبل اتفاقية وادي عربه، التي يرفضها الشعب العربي في الأردن يومياً ويكرسها النظام التابع يومياً بالمقابل، بمعنى أنه اندرج في سياق العلاقات القديمة جدا بين النظام الأردني والكيان الصهيوني وكرسها بما هو فلسطيني.  ثم غادر الحزب الشيوعي ليصبح “قومياً ناصرياً” في الشكل ولكنه ضد الامة العربية عمليا. بل كان تبنيه للفكر القومي من اجل كسب دعم الشارع الفلسطيني في المحتل 48 لدخول الكنيست. لقد استثمر الشعور القومي لفلسطينيي المحتل 48 ليدخل الكنيست، ومن ثم استخدم تلك العضوية لتسويق نفسه لدى سوريا وحزب الله .

في سياق إعداده صهيونيا، شغل بشارة منصب نائب رئيس معهد فان لير ( في القدس من سنة 1990 حتى سنة 1996) وهو معهد متخصص في الواقع الصهيوني . لقد ورد في ديباجة المعهد ما يلي :

“  العمل على زرع ونشر التطرف الديني والطائفي والعرفي , والقضاء  على فكرتي القومية العربية والتضامن الاسلامي , واحلالهما بفكرة التعاون الاقليمي الشرق اوسطي , وتوظيف الاصولية الاسلامية وايديولوجيات الاقليات في المنطقة لصالح اسرائيل “.

غني عن الشرح بأن توظيف الأصولية الإسلامية هو اليوم على أشُده من جهة وبأن بشارة في مقدمة من يقومون بتكريس هذه الاصولية ضد الأمة العربية عبر دوره في قطر. بل إن التطبيق العملي لأفكار معهد فان لير كان من جانب بشارة على خطوتين:

الأولى: إدعاء تبني الفكر القومي والمقاوِم للدخول إلى سوريا ولبنان

والثانية: الارتداد بالمطلق ضد سوريا وحزب الله فورا مع بدء المؤامرةعلى سوريا حيث اصبح في مقدمة داعمي الإرهاب التكفيري ضد سوريا.

في فترة وجوده في هذا المعهد طرح فكرة “الحكم الذاتي الثقافي ” لفلسطيني 48  . وهي فكرة تقوم على حق الاقلية الفلسطينية في المحتل 48 في حكم ذاتي ثقافي لا يقاتل ولا ينازع على الارض . اذاً الصراع بحسب هذا المنظِّر ليس على الوطن بل في نطاق الحقوق المدنية وبالتالي فهو يسلم ان فلسطين  هي ارض الكيان الصهيوني .

–        أقام عزمي بشارة حزب برلماني جديد هو ” التجمع الوطني الديمقراطي ” الذي خرج من تحت ابط “عقلية راكاح” . يطرح هذا الحزب ان” الفلسطينيين في منطقة “48 هم “أقلية قومية “  فينظِّر لهم بحكم ذاتي “ثقافي “! كحل  نهائي لهم عازلا حقيقة كونهم جزء من الشعب الفلسطيني ولا يعتبر مطالب هذا الشعب قومية حقيقية ولا سيما في نطاق حق تقرير المصير والاستقلال والسيادة على الارض . كما انه تجاهل تماما حق عودة اللاجئين الفلسطينيين متناغما بذلك مع الموقف الاسرائيلي . والحكم الذاتي طلب ملطف للاجواء لا يطمح الى   الاستقلال او الانفصال . بل بقاء الفلسطينيين  تابعين للحكومة المركزية , التي تحتكر بيدها كل وسائل القوة وبالتالي تقود الشعب الفلسطيني  الى الاندامج السلبي وجعل اقتصاده مجرد اقتصاد تحت الطلب  .

–        ان الحكم الذاتي وحتى اعلان دولة فلسطينية , لن تكون مستقلة حقيقة ولا باي حال من الاحوال , انما هو طبعة اولية من الدولة ثنائية القومية التي تعني ان يعيش الفلسطينيون في دولة اليهود كأقلية قومية إلى جانب أكثرية استيطانية تزعم أنها قومية رغم انها تجميع من العديد من الأمم والقوميات! وبالطبع حتى هذه الدولة الثنائية هي للفلسطينيين الموجودين داخل فلسطين  اي لا تشمل اللاجئين وهم الأكثرية من الشعب الفلسطيني.

–         المثير للغثيان ايضا هو اهتمام السيد بشارة بالمطلب الثقافي للفلسطينيين ,وهذا المعيار في بلدان التبعية والفقر والتخلف يعني ويهدف اساسا الى تغييب صورة التبعية والتخلف والاستغلال .تغييب الاقتصادي والطبقي ليتورط البلد في التكيف مع النظام العالمي . والمعيار الثقافي يفصل بين الطبقات الشعبية التي تؤمن بالوحدة العربية وبين الطبقات الحاكمة التي تربط مصالحها بالاجنبي وتاليا تعمل له ولمصالحه .

–        يطرح الحزب الجديد الذي انحدر جزء منه من حركة” ابناء البلد ” التي كانت ترفض الاعتراف “بدولة اسرائيل” على أرضية انها طردت الشعب الفلسطيني من بلاده وان له حق العودة . ( وهذا الحق ليس هبة من الكيان او وعد من  الأمم المتحدة التي اشترطت بل ربطت قبول الكيان كعضو فيها بعودة اللاجئين الفلسطيننين منذ 1948 وهي لم تفعل شيء سوى خدمة الكيان  .

فكيف نصدق أن يوافق كيان إجلائي على حق العودة وهم الذين طردونا، لو كان ذلك كذلك لما طردونا من الاساس .

حق العودة حق وكل السبل مشروعة امام تحقيقه . وعليه،  فإن ما هو قائم اما المقاومة واما التسوية , اما التطبيع واما التفريط)  .

اما وبعد ان اغوى عزمي بشارة حركة ابناء البلد تخلت هذه الاخيرة عن مبادئها وقلصت المشكلة لتصبح مسالة مساواة و دولة لكل مواطنيها وهذا ما يريده عزمي بشارة لان فيه فرصا واسعة للمناورة واللعب السياسي. إلا أن حركة ابناء البلد عادت ونقدت نفسها وتوقفت عن المشاركة في انتخابات برلمان الكيان.

 لكن ما معنى “مساواة ” ودولة لكل مواطنيها” ؟ يتساءل الدكتور عادل سماره، بل وحتى بعيدا عن كون الكيان دولة استيطانية، هل هناك أية دولة راسمالية لكل مواطنيها ؟

–        المساواة بين المستعمرين المغتصبين وبين اهل البلاد أمر  لم يكن له نظير في التاريخ ! كيف تكون المساواة هذه طالما الارض لا تزال بيد اليهود والجيش والقمم الاقتصادية ؟

–        ان عزمي بشارة يرى من خلال معايشته للكيان انه يشكل نهضة تحررية وانه هو صاحب الارض وما على الفلسطيني سوى التكيف والاندماج وهو يكتفي بالمطالبة بالحقوق المدنية لفسطينيي 48 فقط. وحسب تصريحاته للصحف العبرية، يعارض السيد بشارة الكفاح المسلح بشدة،  لا بل يتسهزىء بالمقاومة ويرى فيها  “كالنملة التي تصارع فيل ”لذلك فهو يستقوي بالضعف باستدخال الهزيمة ولا يحتفظ بهذا لنفسه فقط بل اخذ يدور في ارجاء الوطن العربي ناشرا افكاره   الصهيونية امام الاجيال الشابة التي  يعرف كيف يغسل ادمغتها.

–        لقد قام الكيان بخداع العرب ببطل وهمي و اوهمنا انه معارض للحكومة الاسرائيلية حيث زعمت المؤسسة الصهيونية انها ستحاكمه واستجوبه الشاباك مرات عديدة  “كما زعم هو وهم ” ولكن لم تتم المحاكمة وبقى الامر بين شد وجذب اعلامي الى ان هرب الرجل.

–         ‍في فترة الزعم بمحاكمته كان يتنقل عزمي بشارة بين عمان والشام وتل ابيب ورام الله وهو عضو كنيست .  لقد تحدثت  الصحف الاسرائلية ان عزمي بشارة   كان يلتقي مع رئيس الوزراء الاسرائيلي ايهود باراك  قبل كل زيارة الى دمشق .  ومع الجنرال الاحتياطي داني ياتوم رئيس جهاز الموساد السابق . وتعود على تقديم تقارير الى ياتوم عن زياراته الى سوريا .لقد كثرت زياراته الى هناك وهو حسب مصادر اسرائيلية يعتبر مبعوثا اسرائيليا غير رسمي الى سوريا .  ولتكتمل المسرحية خرج عزمي بشارة من اسرائيل وهو في مجده   مدعيا انه منفي او هارب من الكيان . وهذا كذب عالمكشوف . فالكيان الضالع في الجاسوسية وضبط حدود الارض المحتلة الكترونيا يحول دون هروب الفيروسات. فما بالك بالحجم المحترم لعزمي بشارة الذي ذهب بموقف احتفالي علني ليسلم جواز سفره الصهيوني  الى سفارة الكيان في مصر كامب ديفيد . وهي خطوة لا يفعلها هارب ولا منفي .بل  شخص يحفظ خط الرجعة ذات يوم بعد انتهاء مهمته. لو كانت حدود فلسطين سهلة بما يسمح لجثة بشارة بالتسلل غير المرئي لتمكن الفدائيون من الدخول !!  في الحقيقة خرج من اجل مهمة تطبيعية بهدف ان يعود بعدها وقد ساهم في تطبيع الكثير من العرب تمهيدا لتطبيعهم جميعا . اختار قطر بالذات بلد مامون المناخ الثقافي والسياسي والفكري  وهي  محمية اميركية حيث لن يطوله احد ..وهذا المكان الطبيعي ليواصل دوره في تخريب الوعي السياسي للشارع العربي باسم القومية .

–          كانت صداقة عزمي بشارة مع سوريا صداقة مسمومة .اتضح انها لقراءة البيت السوري من داخله وتفجيره. وهذا ما اتضح فور بدء المؤامرة على سوريا.

•    فتى الموساد في تونس… وأسئلة أخرى 

«المفكر العربي» الموظف الجوّال ـ الرحالة، يتنقل من بلدٍ إلى آخر وفق الأجندة الصهيونية، فحيثما تكون مصلحة هذه الأجندة تراه يظهر في قطر أم في تونس. لا يظهر وحيداً بل محاطاً بألوان مختلفة منها الأخواني ومنها الليبرالي ومنها اليساري ومنها القومي… ولكن الجميع في المحصلة يتحرك وفق خطة واحدة عُهِدَ «المفكر العربي» العربي بتنفيذها.

في هذا العدد يتكلم الدكتور سمارة عن دور عزمي بشارة في تخريب المثقفين وشرائهم بالمال القطري والخليجي بشكل عام. وكذلك عن مسعى العقل المافياوي الصهيو ـ إنغلوسكسوني في خلق التناقضات والتوترات والصراعات بين أتباع الولايات المتحدة وذلك لتسهيل قيادتها لهم.

في علاقات الثورة المضادة لا توجد رفاقية لأن جوهرها البحث عن مال لا محدود وهذا عقل مافيوي صهيو-أنجلو ساكسون بروتستانت. لذا، ورغم علاقة التبعية من أنظمة الخليج للولايات المتحدة فهي حريصة على أن يتناكف هؤلاء في ما بينهم لتبقى قيادتهم أسهل. وعليه، لا غرابة أن تدور الاشتباكات السياسية بين داعش مكة وداعش الدوحة وقاعدة الإمارات ولكن هذه المرة في أرض الجزيرة.

ولكن غبار الاشتباك لا يحول دون رؤية أميركا والكيان ما يريدان. فلديهما نظارات الرؤية الليلية في الحرب والرؤية في الغبار السياسي والدبلوماسي. بالمناسبة النرويج وهي حكومة غير حكومية زودت الجيش الأميركي بنظارات رؤية ليلية أثناء احتلال العراق ومولت منحاً «أكاديمية» لدراسة سوريا من الداخل وخاصة مخيم اليرموك!

في خضم هذا الغبار قررت الولايات المتحدة إخضاع العدوان القطري ضد سوريا للعدوان السعودي بمعزل عن طي عنق بندر مؤخراً وإبراز نايف.

لكن المناكفات والمناوشات بين التوابع لا تعني ضياع الرؤية الأميركية ودقة توزيع أدوار هؤلاء. فقد كتبت في هذه الصفحة مرات بأن قطر يتم تحويلها لتقود حرب تخريب الثقافة القومية العربية. وآمل أن لا يتخيل أحد أن هذا الدور بسيط التأثير. فالثورة المضادة بمجموعها تعتبر القومية العربية هي العدو الرئيسي وربما الوحيد في الوطن العربي. ولذا، فالدور القطري في هذا الاتجاه شديد الخطورة والأهمية. وهو دور شراء المثقفين بالمال.

تصوروا مثلاً وضع مليار دولار تحت تصرف عزمي بشارة للتخريب الثقافي! كم مركز أبحاث سوف يتمفصل عن ذلك؟ وكم جامعة؟ وكم جريدة؟ بالمناسبة هناك مشروع شراء صحافيين في رام الله لجريدة لبشارة والمعروض عليهم ذلك يتنافسون على الثمن وكم صحافي وكم مثقف؟!…الخ.

ضمن هذا المخطط كان مؤتمر الدوحة عن فلسطين في قطر في 13 ديسمبر 2013، حيث جرى الحديث فيه عن كافة السيناريوهات لحل الصراع العربي ـ الصهيوني طبعاً تقزم إلى فلسطيني ـ إسرائيلي بينما السيناريو الوحيد الذي أُغفل هو تحرير فلسطين، مما يعني أن الكيان الصهيوني الأشكنازي طبيعي وعلى «أرضه».

كان على رأس قائمة حضور هذا المؤتمر رئيس وزراء تونس حمادي الجبالي.

ومؤخراً، كان عزمي بشارة يفتتح مقراً لمركز دراسات في العاصمة تونس بتبريك حزب النهضة ورئيس تونس المنصف المرزوقي. اللافت طبعاً أن المرزوقي كان يعيش في فرنسا وكان على علاقة حميمة بالحكم الفرنسي وهو من قادة منظمات الأنجزة قبل سقوط بن علي، وهو مع النهضة، مع عدم إدراج مناهضة التطبيع في تونس، وفي حكومة بلاده اليوم وزيرة السياحة التي تفاخرت بالتطبيع وبقيت في منصبها رغم معارضة القوى الوطنية والقومية في تونس. أما اليسار المهذب بقيادة حمة الهمامي فلم يعترض على التطبيع.

… في تبرير حزب النهضة للتطبيع : «… ادعى أحد قادة الإخوان في تونس أن حماس طلبت منهم عدم إدراج تجريم التطبيع في الدستور» الصحبي عتيق، رئيس كتلة نواب «النهضة» تشرين الثاني/اكتوبر 2012 .

كشف هذا مرهون بما تقوله حماس بالطبع.

«…وتتالت في عهد الإسلام السياسي خطوات التطبيع في الميدان الثقافي والرياضي والسياحي والاقتصادي، ما يغني الصهاينة، حالياً، عن التطبيع المعلن أو عن فتح سفارة… وللمفارقة، منعت حكومة تونس الإخوانية في بداية سنة 2014 مناضلين فلسطينيين ولبنانيين وعرباً من دخول البلاد، لحضور مؤتمر عن مقاومة الصهيونية، رغم حصول بعضهم على تأشيرات من سفارات تونس في بلدانهم عن صحيفة «الخليج» 17/01/2014 ، كما منعت وفوداً عربية من المشاركة في نشاط تضامني للمحامين التونسيين مع فلسطين في ذكرى يوم الأرض 2013 ، رغم الحصول على تأشيرة مسبقة من السفارات التونسية…».

«…وزير حكومة الإخوان طارق ذياب ، أصبح مدافعاً عنيداً عن التطبيع وأعلن أن الحكومة تقبل المساعدة «الإسرائيلية» إذا عرض عليها الكيان الصهيوني ذلك نيسان/أبريل 2012 ».

«…أما في حزب «نداء تونس»، الذي يترأسه «الباجي قايد السبسي»، أحد أقطاب نظام بورقيبة وبن علي، فقد دافع أحد اقطابه، وهو رجل أعمال، عن زيارة وفد من اتحاد رجال ونساء الأعمال في تونس إلى فلسطين المحتلة، وكانت أخته ضمن الوفد، وهي عضوة قيادية في الحزب المذكور قناة «حنبعل» 09/03/2013 ».

ملاحظة: جميع المقتطفات من مقالة الرفيق الطاهر المعز 20/03/2014 في باريس. هل يمكن عدم رؤية الخيط بل الحبل الناظم بين تورط حكومة الإخوان المسلين في تونس وعلى هامشها ليبراليون ويسار لا قومي وبين نشاطات مركز عزمي بشارة هناك؟ وهل تمكن رؤية هذه الأدوار خارج خدمتها للكيان الصهيوني؟

فتى الموساد في تونس فنزويلا… مصر وسوريا وأحفاد تروتسكي

اشتهر التروتسكيون بالجملة الثورية، من المحال أن تجد حزباً أو نظاماً أو حتى شخصاً يسارياً من خارج أُطرهم لم يهاجموه بكل الأسلحة. أما تهمة ستاليني فجاهزة على الدوام. منذ أن بدأ الحراك في سوريا، وبالمناسبة الأيام تُثبت أكثر وأكثر أن الحراك كان مخروقاً بالسلاح وحتى تم تحريكه بمسلحين وقناصة يطلقون على الناس والأمن معاً. منذ أن بدأ الحرك اصطف التروتسكيون في سوريا مع الثورة المضادة. ولا أقصد هنا تروتسكيي سوريا بل كل العالم. وقفوا مع أميركا والإخوان والوهابيين. وليس هذا بغريب إذا ما عرفنا حدود تغلغل الصهيونية في منظماتهم. وحينما انشقت مصر بين الإخوان والخليط وقف التروتسكيون مع الإخوان. وقد تكون فكرة الأصابع الأربعة مأخوذة من «الأممية الرابعة» وليس من ميدان رابعة العدوية. ولكن، دعنا نقول بأن التروتسكيين بما هم مخروقون بتمفصلات صهيونية، ولا شك أن للدين اليهودي دوره في تلوينهم أيضاً، فما الذي دفعهم للتصدي للدولة الفنزويلية؟ لنقل هنا يخدمون الكيان الصهيوني الأشكنازي. فمن يخدمون في فنزويلا؟ أليسوا في خدمة الولايات المتحدة؟ في المقتطف أدناه يبين الصحافي المعروف تيري ميسان، أن التروتسكيين من أبناء العائلات الثرية المحاطين بعصابات البلطجية هم الذين يتصدرون العمل التخريبي ضد الرئيس مادورو في فنزويلا معللين بذلك أنه ستاليني. مكررين ومرددين الخطاب الرأسمالي الغربي الممرور ضد ستالين، وتفجعاتهم على الشيخ القتيل ليون تروتسكي في معزوفة اقرب إلى ثأر البداوة. وقد يكون هذا الشعور هو ما يقربهم من حكام الخليج.

معرفة المواقف من اليرموك وسوريا

كل هذا شديد الأهمية لأنه يعبر عن مواقف وتعبئة لا قومية منذ عقود، وها نحن ندفع الثمن ليكون هذا أو ذاك قائداً يعيش على كرهه الشخصي لقادة آخرين. لعل أخطر ما حصل هو ذلك الالتباس بين «أمجاد» شكلانية شخصية وحماية سوريا. هنا نضع الإصبع على المسألة الأساس: في الأصل أن تبدأ وطنياً. هناك كثير من قيادات اليسار التي تكلست لتصبح أمراء طوائف وربما أمراء حرب. تورطوا ضد سوريا منذ البداية ليقينهم أنها ستنهار. وحينما صمدت سوريا وقعوا في المنطقة الرمادية. طبعاً الآن يقضمون أظافرهم . المهم لا شك أنهم يرون الآن بأن أدوات الثورة المضادة كانت ستحصد أعناقهم. كيف لا وداعش حتى تقتل بعضها. أعتقد أن كتابة معمقة عن مسألة مهمة جداً وهي: الوقوف مع سوريا منذ البداية رغم الاعتقاد بأنها قد لا تنتصر. هذا أمر مهم لفرز المواقف والانتماءات. أعتقد أن الانتماء العروبي القومي الأصلاني هو المعيار بغض النظر عن النتائج. هذا ما يجب أن يُبرز الآن في مواجهة مخاليط الدين السياسي والكمبرادور واللبراليين والتروتسكيين الحاقدين كالبدو والمرتبطين بالصهيونية، ويسار أيتام التحريفية الموسكوفية وليس أيتام لينين. وأيتام القُطريات وليس أيتام عبد الناصر.

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“البناء”

The Dirty War on Syria: New E-Book by Prof. Tim Anderson

By Global Research

Global Research, February 09, 2016

Global Research Publishers has launched Professor Tim Anderson’s timely and important book on Syria. 

The E-book is available for purchase from Global Research 

Reviews:

Tim Anderson  has written the best systematic critique of western fabrications justifying the war against the Assad government. 

No other text brings together all the major accusations and their effective refutation.

This text is essential reading for all peace and justice activists.  -James Petras, Author and Bartle Professor (Emeritus) of Sociology at Binghamton University, New York, Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization.

Tim Anderson’s important new book, titled “The Dirty War on Syria” discusses US naked aggression – “rely(ing) on a level of mass disinformation not seen in living memory,” he explains.

ISIS is the pretext for endless war without mercy, Assad the target, regime change the objective, wanting pro-Western puppet governance replacing Syrian sovereign independence.

There’s nothing civil about war in Syria, raped by US imperialism, partnered with rogue allies. Anderson’s book is essential reading to understand what’s going on. –Stephen Lendman, Distinguished Author and Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG), Host of the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network.

Professor Anderson demonstrates unequivocally through carefully documented research that America’s “Moderate Opposition” are bona fide Al Qaeda affiliated terrorists created and protected by the US and its allies, recruited  and trained by Saudi Arabia, Turkey, in liaison with Washington and Brussels.

Through careful analysis, professor Anderson reveals the “unspoken truth”: the “war on terrorism” is fake, the United States is a “State sponsor of terrorism” involved in a criminal undertaking. Michel Chossudovsky, Director of the Centre for Research on Globalization, Professor of Economics (Emeritus), University of Ottawa.

Click here to purchase Tim Anderson’s Book (pdf) 

Synopsis:

The Dirty War on Syria has relied on a level of mass disinformation not seen in living memory. In seeking ‘regime change’ the big powers sought to hide their hand, using proxy armies of ‘Islamists’, demonising the Syrian Government and constantly accusing it of atrocities. In this way Syrian President Bashar al Assad, a mild-mannered eye doctor, became the new evil in the world.

The popular myths of this dirty war – that it is a ‘civil war’, a ‘popular revolt’ or a sectarian conflict – hide a murderous spree of ‘regime change’ across the region. The attack on Syria was a necessary consequence of Washington’s ambition, stated openly in 2006, to create a ‘New Middle East’. After the destruction of Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya, Syria was next in line.

Click image to purchase Tim Anderson’s Book (pdf) 

Five years into this war the evidence is quite clear and must be set out in detail. The terrible massacres were mostly committed by the western backed jihadists, then blamed on the Syrian Army. The western media and many western NGOs parroted the official line. Their sources were almost invariably those allied to the ‘jihadists’. Contrary to the myth that the big powers now have their own ‘war on terror’, those same powers have backed every single anti-government armed group in Syria, ‘terrorists’ in any other context, adding thousands of ‘jihadis’ from dozens of countries.

Yet in Syria this dirty war has confronted a disciplined national army which did not disintegrate along sectarian lines. Despite terrible destruction and loss of life, Syria has survived, deepening its alliance with Russia, Iran, the Lebanese Resistance, the secular Palestinians and, more recently, with Iraq. The tide has turned against Washington, and that will have implications beyond Syria.

As western peoples we have been particularly deceived by this dirty war, reverting to our worst traditions of intervention, racial prejudice and poor reflection on our own histories. This book tries to tell its story while rescuing some of the better western traditions: the use of reason, ethical principle and the search for independent evidence.

Click here to purchase Tim Anderson’s Book PDF

The original source of this article is Global Research

Copyright © Global Research, Global Research, 2016