TBR News July 28, 2019
The Voice of the White House Washington, D.C. July 28, 2019:
“Working in the White House as a junior staffer is an interesting experience.
When I was younger, I worked as a summer-time job in a clinic for people who had moderate to severe mental problems and the current work closely, at times, echos the earlier one.
I am not an intimate of the President but I have encountered him from time to time and I daily see manifestations of his growing psychological problems.
He insults people, uses foul language, is frantic to see his name mentioned on main-line television and pays absolutely no attention to any advice from his staff that runs counter to his strange ideas.
He lies like a rug to everyone, eats like a hog, makes lewd remarks to female staffers and flies into rages if anyone dares to contradict him.
His latest business is to re-institute a universal draft in America.
He wants to do this to remove tens of thousands of unemployed young Americans from the streets so they won’t come together and fight him.
Commentary for July 28:”There is a rumor that the Iranians are in the process of sticking a dirk into American economics but without violence. Trump will howl and bellow, jabber on Twitter and be able to do nothing. He started it and I have the distinct feeling that others will finish it. They will probably finish with him as well but that is just a beautiful dream at this point.”
The Table of Contents
- Encyclopedia of American Loons
- The CIA Confessions: The Crowley Conversations
- Western Media Losing Enthusiasm for Failing Coup in Venezuela
- An End Game in the Middle East
- The Rise of Russia and the ‘End of the World’
- Could Boris Johnson be the UK’s last prime minister?
Encyclopedia of American Loons
Terry Watkins.
If you think Jack Chick is on the crazy side, you may not be familiar with the glorious antics of Dial-the-truth ministries, run by Terry Watkins. No, seriously; this is pretty much as insane as the Internet gets. The organization started up in 1990 as a telephone ministry with “inspirational” recorded messages (mostly incoherent hatred) for the caller. The organization, based in Pinson, Alabama, is notable for their King James Onlyism, and possibly most famous for their hardline stance on rock music – it’s evil, pure and simple (“tools of Satan”), and due to the Biblical instruction “Be ye not unequally yoked with unbelievers” (II Corinthians 6:14), that verdict applies to Christian rock as much as mainstream rock (look at that webdesign! You can’t but take them seriously). Less surprisingly, the site criticizes Britney Spears as a “whorish woman” who provokes “youthful lusts” and parents who allow their children to listen to the Spice Girls as “co-conspirators in this cultural rape of their daughters.” No, they don’t really keep up with the “developments” in pop music, but I suppose that’s heartily unnecessary for their message. Lyndon Larouche associate Donald Phau’s classic The Satanic Roots of Rock makes an appearance on their site as well
Interestingly, they also believe that Hell is a physical place. No, it’s not just a place, but geographically located down there, in the core of the Earth. One of Satan’s forms on Earth is Santa (I suppose even a kid should be able to figure out that anagram). He uses that form because he preys on the weak, such as children … and others – Watkins draws our attention to “The great German Reformer, Martin Luther writ[ing] in his Table Talks: ‘The devil plagues and torments us in the place where we are most tender and weak. In Paradise, he fell not upon Adam, but upon Eve’.” Watkins actually claims to prove that Santa is Satan. And yes, the proof is in that anagram (anagrams are heathen word magic). But Watkins somehow manages to make the argument even sillier than it initially sounds: “An internet Google search on ‘Satan Claus’ [not Santa Claus – but SATAN Claus] found over 1,700 hits!” Can’t argue with that. In fairness, he provides references. To Constance Cumbey and Texe Marrs, Madame Blavatsky and Gail Riplinger. And to clinch it, “[i]s ‘Claus’ another anagram for ‘Lucas’? It’s no secret ‘Lucas’ and ‘Lucis’ is a new-age ‘code word’ for ‘Lucifer’” (actually, it’s the real name of the Evangelist Luke, but that fact doesn’t fit so we disregard it.) And, not content with these observations, he also pulls the Jack Skellington inference “‘Claus’ sounds a lot like ‘claws’.” You can’t top this. Actually, Watkins does arguably top this. I strongly recommend you to check out the article yourself. And don’t get him started on Halloween.
(One interesting detail is that Watkins swallows whole everything ever written by Silver Ravenwolf or any other New Age witch – not a critical question asked – and then takes it as proof of the workings of Satan.)
He didn’t like the Da Vinci code, either (“the most blatant mainstream attack on the Lord Jesus Christ in modern times! Nothing comes close”), nor Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ. Both verdicts are by all means understandable, but you sort of get the feeling that to Watkins hatred is a default reaction. I am unfamiliar with the movie “Saved!” but according to Watkins it is “[o]ne of the most hateful and blatant attacks on Bible Believing Christians […] This is beyond belief!”
Dial-the-Truth Ministries has also written engagingly on the purported link between the number “11”, 9/11, and – you guessed it – the Endtimes (at least the end of “America the great” – just look at the Muslim atheist in the White House). You really have to check it out, and no – it’s not a Poe. The article on Hurricane Katrina is not without its moments either. And here he tackles environmentalism, pointing out the “scientific ignorance” of environmentalism and urging us to pollute as much as possible, since there is plenty of evidence that this is what Jesus would have done. At least he admits that the goal is, indeed, to destroy the world, and that this is the main reason why environmentalism is unchristian.
He also has a nice, elegant little proof of the historical accuracy of the death and resurrection of Jesus. The only premise you have to commit to is the literal accuracy of the Bible.
Diagnosis: Absolutely hysterical, in every sense. Though an abysmally unappealing character, the world would have been much the poorer without Terry Watkins.
The CIA Confessions: The Crowley Conversations
July 28, 2019
by Dr. Peter Janney
On October 8th, 2000, Robert Trumbull Crowley, once a leader of the CIA’s Clandestine Operations Division, died in a Washington hospital of heart failure and the end effects of Alzheimer’s Disease. Before the late Assistant Director Crowley was cold, Joseph Trento, a writer of light-weight books on the CIA, descended on Crowley’s widow at her town house on Cathedral Hill Drive in Washington and hauled away over fifty boxes of Crowley’s CIA files.
Once Trento had his new find secure in his house in Front Royal, Virginia, he called a well-known Washington fix lawyer with the news of his success in securing what the CIA had always considered to be a potential major embarrassment.
Three months before, on July 20th of that year, retired Marine Corps colonel William R. Corson, and an associate of Crowley, died of emphysema and lung cancer at a hospital in Bethesda, Md.
After Corson’s death, Trento and the well-known Washington fix-lawyer went to Corson’s bank, got into his safe deposit box and removed a manuscript entitled ‘Zipper.’ This manuscript, which dealt with Crowley’s involvement in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, vanished into a CIA burn-bag and the matter was considered to be closed forever.
The small group of CIA officials gathered at Trento’s house to search through the Crowley papers, looking for documents that must not become public. A few were found but, to their consternation, a significant number of files Crowley was known to have had in his possession had simply vanished.
When published material concerning the CIA’s actions against Kennedy became public in 2002, it was discovered to the CIA’s horror, that the missing documents had been sent by an increasingly erratic Crowley to another person and these missing papers included devastating material on the CIA’s activities in South East Asia to include drug running, money laundering and the maintenance of the notorious ‘Regional Interrogation Centers’ in Viet Nam and, worse still, the Zipper files proving the CIA’s active organization of the assassination of President John Kennedy..
A massive, preemptive disinformation campaign was readied, using government-friendly bloggers, CIA-paid “historians” and others, in the event that anything from this file ever surfaced. The best-laid plans often go astray and in this case, one of the compliant historians, a former government librarian who fancied himself a serious writer, began to tell his friends about the CIA plan to kill Kennedy and eventually, word of this began to leak out into the outside world.
The originals had vanished and an extensive search was conducted by the FBI and CIA operatives but without success. Crowley’s survivors, his aged wife and son, were interviewed extensively by the FBI and instructed to minimize any discussion of highly damaging CIA files that Crowley had, illegally, removed from Langley when he retired. Crowley had been a close friend of James Jesus Angleton, the CIA’s notorious head of Counterintelligence. When Angleton was sacked by DCI William Colby in December of 1974, Crowley and Angleton conspired to secretly remove Angleton’s most sensitive secret files out of the agency. Crowley did the same thing right before his own retirement, secretly removing thousands of pages of classified information that covered his entire agency career.
Known as “The Crow” within the agency, Robert T. Crowley joined the CIA at its inception and spent his entire career in the Directorate of Plans, also know as the “Department of Dirty Tricks. ”
Crowley was one of the tallest man ever to work at the CIA. Born in 1924 and raised in Chicago, Crowley grew to six and a half feet when he entered the U.S. Military Academy at West Point in N.Y. as a cadet in 1943 in the class of 1946. He never graduated, having enlisted in the Army, serving in the Pacific during World War II. He retired from the Army Reserve in 1986 as a lieutenant colonel. According to a book he authored with his friend and colleague, William Corson, Crowley’s career included service in Military Intelligence and Naval Intelligence, before joining the CIA at its inception in 1947. His entire career at the agency was spent within the Directorate of Plans in covert operations. Before his retirement, Bob Crowley became assistant deputy director for operations, the second-in-command in the Clandestine Directorate of Operations.
Bob Crowley first contacted Gregory Douglas in 1993 when he found out from John Costello that Douglas was about to publish his first book on Heinrich Mueller, the former head of the Gestapo who had become a secret, long-time asset to the CIA. Crowley contacted Douglas and they began a series of long and often very informative telephone conversations that lasted for four years. In 1996, Crowley told Douglas that he believed him to be the person that should ultimately tell Crowley’s story but only after Crowley’s death. Douglas, for his part, became so entranced with some of the material that Crowley began to share with him that he secretly began to record their conversations, later transcribing them word for word, planning to incorporate some, or all, of the material in later publication.
Conversation No. 23
Date: Monday, July 8, 1996
Commenced: 1:40 PM CST
Concluded: 1:55 PM CST
GD: Am I disturbing anything there? I hear conversations in the background.
RTC: My son was just leaving. See you later…yes, I will…sorry.
GD: I can call back later if you wish.
RTC: No, everyone has gone. Anything new?
GD: Yes. Talking about the Swiss, I just discovered that the Swiss minister, Bruggmann, was a brother-in-law of Henry Wallace. Married his sister Mary. Anyway, old Henry used to tell Bruggmann everything he knew and the Swiss fellow sent long reports to Bern. Unfortunately, the Germans were listening in and knew all kinds of things. Did you know about this?
RTC: Yes, we did. We found it out later. Henry was somewhat left of center and in ’44, tried to nail down the nomination for President. The party told FDR that they would not hold still for that so Franklin, who had more or less supported Henry as Vice President, dumped him for Truman. I think everyone, including Roosevelt, knew he was not long for this world and the VP would be our next President. Henry had the full support of Stalin and, through him, the Communist labor movement here. We missed having a red flag over the Capitol by very little. Henry drifted into obscurity and then vanished off the stage.
GD: I found out the same thing. Roosevelt pretended to be a liberal just as Hitler pretended to be a revolutionary. Got more votes. Hitler was a conservative but he posed as a radical. Remember the blood purge in ’34. He got rid of the real revolutionaries then and went over to the side of the professional military and the banking houses.
RTC: If Roosevelt had put Wallace in, there would have been serious trouble, believe me. Henry would have had a car accident as I was told.
GD: That’s what usually happens. Or the heart attack. That’s not as messy and much easier to arrange, isn’t it?
RTC: Yes, generally.
GD: Stalin said it was easy to plan a murder but a suicide was more difficult.
RTC: I recall that after Roosevelt passed to Valhalla with his stamp albums, there was a reaction to all his Commie friends and you recall the savage persecutions, don’t you?
GD: I was younger then but I recall McCarthy and the rest of it.
RTC: The Catholic church was behind him. Your friend Müller was also involved there. They did clean house of the lefties all right.
GD: I suppose in the process, they ruined quite a few perfectly innocent people.
RTC: Talleyrand said that you couldn’t make an omelet without the breaking of eggs.
GD: The innocent always suffer, Robert. That’s what they’re there for. By the way, I was reading about the surge of AIDS in Africa. What a tragedy. Once the evil white colonists were kicked out, taking all the skilled technicians with them, the gloriously freed natives surged forward. Of course all the countries there are falling apart. I suppose in a few years, spears will be back in fashion and at some meeting of the heads of state, one of them arrives late and asks another if he missed much and was told that everyone’s eaten.
RTC: Gregory…
GD: And did you hear the one about Desmond Tutu passing his brother in the forest?
RTC: Now that’s actually funny.
GD: Yes, the evil masters leave and the countries descend into poverty and are all infected with AIDS. In America, we all know that AIDS is the exclusive property of the homosexual and drug communities and since the average African makes about five dollars a month and can’t afford a box of Aspirin, I think they must all be gay. Instead of enlightened ethnic freedom, we have mass buggery and protracted death.
RTC: Well, Africa is very rich in natural resources. If we all wait long enough, the indigenous population will all die off and the rest of us will have free pickings.
GD: A rational observation, Robert. Unkind but rational. I get so tired of people who reject reality and bleat like sheep. Why? Reality terrifies them and bleating along with other sheep makes them feel mighty and meaningful.
RTC: You speak ill of sheep, Gregory. You are not a sheep, are you?
GD: No, I am a wolf. I eat sheep on a regular basis. I am a civilized wolf, however, and prefer them roasted with mint sauce and new potatoes.
RTC: I seem to have heard that you have lived by your wits and the money of other people.
GD: Robert, surely you realize that a fool and his money are soon parted?
RTC: Yes, so it would seem.
GD: I do love the crooked rich. They’re the easiest to prey on. I recall once when a friend of mine became enamored of the sculpting of Frederic Remington. He was a sculptor and made a small bust of an Indian warrior. I suggested he sign the wax with Remington’s signature and then put in the name of the Roman Bronze people. Then I took the finished product up to Butterfield and Butterfield in ‘Frisco and the greedy Bernie Osher bought it from me for a lot of money. Now, mark you, Robert, I never told Bernie that it was original. In fact, I told him I knew nothing about it and got it from my Grandmother’s attic after she died. The dumb schmuck actually signed the receipt ‘As Is.’ Which speaks for itself of course. Then he tried to sue me and lost. Lots of very bad publicity for him. In the meantime, Bernie and his co-religionists resold the same piece to a sucker in New York as genuine. And they sued me! I beat them.
RTC: How much did you get out of that?
GD: All together?
RTC: Yes. All together.
GD: Fifty thousand.
RTC: My, my, Gregory how comforting.
GD: No, beating old Bernie in court was comforting.
GD: How much did your lawyer get?
GD: I was in pro per. I was my own lawyer. I could easily pass any bar exam, Robert, but I never bother to inform people of that when contracting with them. I always get the long end of the stick and they get the squishy shit on the other end.
RTC: You set them up, don’t you?
GD: Always and they always assume I am a fool.
RTC: No, you are not. A wolf in sheep’s clothing?
GD: Very often, Robert.
(Concluded at 1:55 PM CST)
Western Media Losing Enthusiasm for Failing Coup in Venezuela
July 23, 2019
By Lucas Koerner and Ricardo Vaz
Fair
When previously unknown Venezuelan opposition politician Juan Guaidó stood up in an East Caracas plaza and declared himself “interim president” of the South American country, Western corporate media were ebullient.
In those heady early days, corporate journalists could scarcely conceal their love affair with the 35-year-old politician, whom they likened to Barack Obama (CNN, 2/7/19) and described as a “freedom fighter” (Fox Business, 1/29/19) and Venezuela’s “only democratically elected figure” (MSNBC, 1/24/19), who had “captured the heart of the nation” (New York Times, 3/4/19).
Nearly six months later, with Guaidó no closer to ousting Venezuela’s elected president, Nicolás Maduro, from Miraflores Presidential Palace, the enthusiasm has dampened. Now that the honeymoon is over, it would appear that corporate journalists have been compelled to reckon with some uncomfortable truths about Guaidó, US sanctions and the coup they had been vigorously endorsing.
A dying romance
Disappointed Venezuelans Lose Patience With Guaidó,” writes Reuters (7/1/19), in what might be read as a projection of its journalists’ own frustration with Washington’s failing coup.
After Guaidó’s self-proclamation in January, the corporate outlet (1/23/19) gushingly described him as a “salsa-loving baseball fan,” who posed “the boldest challenge to socialist President Nicolas Maduro’s rule in years.”
Similarly, the CBC in January (1/23/19) labeled hard-right Popular Will party leader Guaidó a long-time “activist” at the head of a “centrist social-democratic party.” Most recently, the state network (6/29/19) declared that the opposition leader, depicted in a gloomy headshot, “has few cards to play—and not long to play them.”
There is no clearer indication of the Western media’s growing disillusionment than the gradual demotion of Guaidó from “interim president” to “National Assembly president” or “opposition leader.” For example, ABC News was referring to Guaidó as “interim president” (often without the “self-proclaimed” prefix) as recently as May (5/3/19, 5/5/19). Fast forward two months, and the title is just “opposition leader” (6/26/19, 7/5/19).
In yet another sign that the US-backed coup is running on empty, corporate journalists’ triumphalist tone that followed Guaidó’s self-proclamation has given way to reports that he “remains defiant” (CNBC, 5/2/19), “soldiers on” (Bloomberg, 6/7/19) or is “under pressure” (Telegraph, 6/19/19).
The growing doubts from the media establishment mirror those in DC, with rumors circulating that Trump is “losing patience and interest” in Venezuela (Washington Post, 6/19/19). Having gone all in on a horse falling rapidly behind in the regime-change race, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and “special representative” Elliott Abrams are now forced to take turns publicly reiterating US support for Guaidó.
The opposition leader’s fading luster has not been helped by a corruption scandal that accused his appointed envoys to Colombia of embezzling “humanitarian aid” money. The story was unveiled by the Miami-based and rabidly anti-government outlet PanamPost (6/18/19), and was too big to ignore. All the media could do was try to spin it as “Guaidó Calls for Probe” (Reuters, 6/15/19), but the damage was done.
Cracks in sanctions denial
Guaidó’s failing coup has even led to a few cracks in the refusal of corporate outlets to acknowledge the devastating humanitarian toll of US sanctions on Venezuela since 2017, which were escalated in January when the Trump administration imposed an oil embargo, cutting the country off from its No. 1 cash buyer.
As Joe Emersberger reported for FAIR (6/14/19), on June 9 Reuters finally mentioned a study by economists Mark Weisbrot and Jeffrey Sachs that found US sanctions responsible for as many as 40,000 Venezuelan deaths in 2017–18.
Reuters had buried the report for over a month, and has since reverted to its standard practice of framing the humanitarian impact of US sanctions as a mere allegation by the Maduro administration.
A few exceptions notwithstanding (Financial Times, 7/7/19; Independent, 7/7/19, 4/26/19), the corporate press has all but suppressed the Weisbrot/Sachs report (FAIR.org, 6/26/19), with most outlets portraying Venezuela’s economic destruction as a condition preceding US sanctions, imposed first under Obama in 2014–15 and ratcheted up by Trump in 2017.
The New York Times (7/6/19) elevates this mystification into an art form, presenting the collapse of Venezuelan agriculture, largely due to sanctions-induced fuel shortages, as the culmination of “six years of economic crisis under President Nicolás Maduro, whose policies of price controls, expropriations and state-sanctioned embezzlement have wiped out the country’s private sector”—which sanctions have merely “worsened.” Even more remarkably, the paper of record published an article (5/17/19) interviewing economists on the scale of Venezuela’s crisis that managed to avoid quoting any anti-government economists critical of sanctions, such as Francisco Rodriguez, let alone mentioning the Weisbrot/Sachs study.
On the op-ed pages, some corporate outlets have been more candid about the danger that US sanctions could cause “famine” in Venezuela (Financial Times, 7/3/19; New York Times, 7/10/19, 2/28/19).
However, only in the Times op-ed by economist Francisco Rodriguez (7/10/19) does the public encounter an acknowledgement of the 2017 sanctions’ role in Venezuela’s current economic devastation. In other cases, corporate journalists continue to deny or downplay the existence of broad-ranging US economic sanctions all-together, pretending they only affect government officials.
The Guardian (5/21/19) went the farthest, referring to coercive US measures that have hit multiple sectors of the Venezuelan economy and resulted in thousands of deaths as “financial sanctions on Venezuela’s president.”
Old habits die hard
Disappointed by Guaidó’s fading star, Western reporters have labored to mint new pro-Washington heroes worthy of their regime change fantasies. In the wake of Guaidó and Leopoldo Lopez’s botched April 30 putsch, corporate media discovered a new champion in former Venezuelan intelligence chief Manuel Cristopher Figuera, who aided in the coup attempt.
In an exclusive interview, the Washington Post (6/24/19) glowingly described Figuera as “a muscular 55-year-old [who] was one of the revolution’s true believers.” Despite defecting from his country to collaborate with a hostile foreign power, the ex-top spy is heralded as a source of indisputable veracity, whose unsubstantiated claims about Cuban capture of Venezuelan politics (FAIR.org, 3/26/19) or Hezbollah activity in the country (FAIR.org, 5/24/19) are to be taken at face value.
As in the case of former intelligence czar Hugo “El Pollo” Carvajal (New York Times, 2/21/19), currently facing extradition to the US on drug charges, no effort is made to interrogate defectors’ incentives to fabricate “information” that just happens to legitimate Washington’s casus belli. The ultimate goal is not to prove any nefarious activity, which is highly implausible, but to provide moral justification for regime-change efforts.
In its quest for new anti-Maduro stalwarts, the corporate press does not draw the line at rehabilitating rogue spies “accused of arbitrary detentions and torture.” In a remarkable feat of historical revisionism, AP’s Joshua Goodman (6/25/19) exalts the “bravery” of former Caracas security chief Ivan Simonovis, who escaped house arrest and fled to the US last month.
Simonovis had been handed a 30-year sentence in 2009 for the death of two people when snipers opened fire at the Llaguno Bridge on April 11, 2002. A total of 19 pro- and anti-government demonstrators were killed in a massacre that Goodman falsely terms a “gunfight,” setting the stage for a coup that temporarily ousted President Hugo Chávez.
Goodman ignores that “supercop” Simonovis’ Metropolitan Police was notorious for its brutality, with even former chief Jhonny Campos casting doubt on the force’s human rights record.
“Venezuela’s Metropolitan Police was, without a doubt, the security force most reviled by the poorest members of society,” observes George Ciccariello-Maher, an expert on Venezuelan popular movements:
Associated with political repression, drug dealing, kidnapping and rape, the Metropolitan Police was so loathed that residents of working-class barrios often demanded the army be sent in to replace them.
Goodman went on to approvingly cite Simonovis’ contracting of former New York Police Commissioner William Bratton, himself accused of criminalizing poor communities with “broken windows” policing.
Western media’s newfound doubts about Guaidó and reluctant admissions of the deadly effects of sanctions are not a case of journalistic standards starting to take over. Rather, this cognitive dissonance reflects the utter disorientation that has come to characterize Guaidó and his US handlers’ operation. The end result is journalists, attempting to stay the US regime-change course tainted by Guaidó’s serial failures, laundering the reputations of the foulest of anti-government figures in the process.
An End Game in the Middle East
Trump loves to use sanctions to threaten or punish perceived disobedient individials or countries. These do have an effect but in the long run, they create so much animosity against the United States that they are proving to be a weapon with double edges.
There is more to economic warfare than sanctions and Trump does not realize that while a country like Iran cannot sanction the United States, they do have the ability to wreak economic havoc in retaliation to Trump’s damaging sanctions.
Emulating the German ‘Operation Bernhard’ and that business in ’69 in Vancouver, Canada, the Iranians are about to dump in American cities, very good fake $20 counterfeit bills.
Not pass but dump.
They have used twenty-two sets of serial numbers on their fake money. Target cities are: New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Dallas, Denver, Boston, Miami and St. Louis.
This would for a certainty result in chaos as retail business, and even banks, would refuse to accept any $20 bill.
This is Iran’s payback for the sanctions.
Also, the Iranians have a method to interfere with the NYSE board.
If they dropped, say, ten leading stocks on the board, the bots would take over and we would have a reprise of ’29.
No shooting, understand, but devastation.
And if a recently prepared false flag were put in motion, Hezbollah, a Shiite Iranian ally, would blanket Israel with a flood of surface-to-surface missiles (mostly Russian and at least one type that is in a silo.) A significant number of these missiles are GPS directed and can pinpoint any target with considerable accuracy.
Israel’s vaunted ‘Iron Dome’ missile protection would only be able to interdict a very small portion of this apocalyptic flood.
That is why Fat Bibi the Crossdresser is, and has been, begging Fat Donald the Drug Money Launderer to carpet-bomb all of southern Lebanon.
If Fat Donald agrees, someone in the Pentagon will alert their Russian opposite numbers and the games will start at once.
The Rise of Russia and the ‘End of the World’
by Joe Quinn
“What the darkness cannot possess, it seeks to destroy”
You’ve probably read all sorts of theories that seek to explain the causes of the ‘new cold war’ in which we find ourselves. From the embarrassingly simplistic “Putin’s a Hitler” offered by the Western press to the more nuanced idea of an ‘energy war’ between US-Europe-Russia. The truth about why we are where we are right now, as a species, however, is actually fairly simple. But to understand it you’ll have to ditch the idea of a ‘new cold war’ and replace it with ‘the 120-year-old war that never ended’.
Over 100 years ago, in 1904, one of the founding fathers of both geopolitics and geostrategy, Oxford University graduate and co-founder of the London School of Economics, Sir Halford Mackinder, proposed a theory that expanded geopolitical analysis from the local or regional level to a global level. Geopolitics is the study (by people in positions of power) of the effects of geography (human and physical) on international politics and international relations. In layman’s terms, this means the study of how best to control as much of the world – its resources, human and natural – as possible. When you or I think about the world, we think of a big, complicated place with billions of people. When the ‘elite’ think of the world, they think of a globe, or a map, with nation states on it that can, and should, according to them, be shaped and changed en masse.
Mackinder separated the world into just a few regions.
The ‘world Island’, and area roughly comprising the interlinked continents of Europe, Asia, and Africa.
The offshore islands, including the British Isles and the islands of Japan.
The outlying islands, including the continents of North America, South America, and Australia.
The most important of these, by far, was the ‘world island’ and in particular what he called the ‘heartland’, which basically means Russia. Mackinder said that whoever controls the ‘heartland’ (Russia) controls the ‘world island’ (Eurasia and Africa), and whoever controls that, controls the world. It’s a fairly self-evident analysis of the situation because the great majority of the world’s population and resources are on the Eurasian continent, and holding a vast northern position on that landmass – with your rearguard protected by an impassable frozen ocean – gives you the prime vantage point, or ‘higher ground’ if you will.
Mackinder’s geostrategic map of the world
Mackinder probably arrived at this conclusion as a result of the British experience of Empire. The British had a large empire on which ‘the sun never set’ (and the blood never dried), and while the British elite made a lot of money, and caused a lot of suffering, by expropriating the resources of other peoples, they were never able to truly ‘rule the world’ because the ‘heartland’ (Russia) was not conquered and made a subservient state of Western powers, largely due to its massive size and the fact that Russia had long since been an Empire itself.
In 1904, Mackinder’s ideas (shared by his contemporaries) were already common currency among the anglo-American elite of the day, who sought global domination by way of the prevention of any competitor to the United States. Russia was that natural potential competitor, again due its size, resources and imperial history. So even before the turn of the 20th century, the US elite, in league with their British co-ideologues, were busying themselves with the task of ‘neutralizing’ Russia as a threat to their plans for global hegemony. As Mackinder published his ideas, US and British political, industrialist and banker types had already embarked on the process of ‘regime change’ in Russia by way of one of the ‘offshore islands’, specifically, Japan.
In 1898, Russia had agreed a convention with China that leased the Chinese port of ‘Port Arthur’ to Russia. At the time this was Russia’s only warm water Pacific seaport (and it was as strategically important as Crimea is to Russia today). Both the British and Americans were concerned about the close relationship between Russia and Germany (Tsar Nicholas II and Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany were cousins) and the possibility that France might join them in a triple anti-British alliance. To the British and Americans this was a clear “threat to the international order”.1 To thwart Russian intentions in Asia, in 1902 Great Britain and Japan signed the ‘Anglo-Japanese alliance’ which stipulated that if either Japan or Great Britain were attacked by more than one enemy they would support each other militarily. This was effectively a green light from the British for Japan to go to war with Russia if necessary, safe in the knowledge that neither France nor Germany (Russia’s allies) would intervene and risk war with Britain. From this point on, Japan effectively acted as a protector of British interests in East Asia.
From February 8th 1904 to September 5th 1905 the first ‘great war’ of the 20th century was fought between Japan and Tsarist Russia, largely over access to ‘Port Arthur’. The British government supplied the Japanese navy with war ships and during the war itself passed intelligence to the Japanese. Perhaps the most significant aid to the Japanese government came in the form of loans from British and American banks and financial institutions that totaled $5billion at today’s value, including a $200 million ‘loan’ from prominent Wall St. banker Jacob Schiff.2 During World War I, Schiff and other Wall Street bankers would also extend loans to the Central Powers, despite officially being enemies of their adopted homeland, the USA.
Russia fielded over one million soldiers and sailors against Japan’s 500,000, but Russia still lost the war, largely due to support from the British and the Americans. The decisive battle occurred on 27-28 May 1905 when the Russian and Japanese navies met at the Tsushima strait. Two thirds of the Russian fleet was destroyed. Russia’s defeat was underlined by the Treaty of Portsmouth, which confirmed Japan’s emergence as the pre-eminent power in East Asia and forced Russia to abandon its plans to develop the Siberia-Pacific region and launch Far East trade routes. Japan also became the sixth-most powerful naval force and the war costs dealt a significant blow to the Russian economy.
Even before the war officially ended, it was Russia’s dire financial straits, the defeat at Tsushima, and pressure from the British that led the Tsar to ultimately back away from the 1905 Treaty of Bjorko he had signed with Kaiser Wilhelm (and, by implication, France). As soon as the British government and their network of anglophiles in Russia found out about the secret deal signed on the Kaiser’s yacht in the Baltic sea – a deal that would have threatened ‘world order’ by aligning Russia with Germany – they threatened to cut off funding to Russia and marshaled the Russian press, which they apparently controlled, to launch an anti-German propaganda campaign. The Kaiser wrote to the Tsar: “The whole of your influential press, have since a fortnight become violently anti-German and pro-British. Partly they are bought by the heavy sums of British money, no doubt”.3
With Russia isolated and economically broken, and the threat of Eurasian integration removed, the next logical step was to get rid of the Tsar altogether and transform Russia into a controlled, retarded and ‘captive’ market for Western finance. But to achieve that goal, Kaiser Wilhelm’s Germany would first have to be decisively dealt with, and that meant war. To prepare the ground for that war, the British signed the Anglo-Russian entente in 1907 and then later added France to the ‘triple entente’, allying the world’s most powerful militaries against Germany.
Between 1903 and 1914, the British public was gradually whipped into an anti-German frenzy and assaulted with countless newspaper articles, books and pamphlets (falsely) warning of Germany’s aggressive rearmament and intentions to invade Britain and take over the world. British newspaper and publishing magnate at the time Alfred Harmsworth, who was intricately linked with the British political and banking elite, exerted enormous influence over the British public through his newspapers. In an interview with the French newspaper Le Matin, Harmsworth said: “The Germans make themselves odious to the whole of Europe. I will not allow my paper to publish anything which might in any way hurt the feelings of the French, but I would not like to print anything which might be agreeable to the Germans”.3
The anti-German hysteria culminated in the passage of the UK’s Official Secrets Act of 1911, which effectively established the British intelligence agencies MI5 and MI6. It is fitting that these agencies, tasked today with manufacturing terrorist threats to scare the British – and global – public into supporting war, had their foundation in a manufactured threat from Germany.
The chosen ‘flash point’ for an Anglo-American war to destroy Germany, weaken the European powers and make the whole of Europe subservient to Western banking interests was the Balkans. In November 1912, a telegram from the Russian ambassador in Bulgaria to the Russian foreign minister (Isvolsky) identified a representative of the British newspaper The Times who claimed that “very many people in England are working towards accentuating the complication in the Balkans to bring about the war that would result in the destruction of the German fleet and German trade”.4
This Times journalist was most likely James David Bourchier, a member of the English aristocracy who was deeply involved in the Balkan League, an organisation set up in 1912 by the Russian ambassador in Belgrade, Nicholas Hartwig, to lobby for the independence of Balkan states from the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian Empires. Nicholas Hartwig was an agent of the English monarch, Edward VII, and, thereby, of the British elite5. Independence for the Balkan states was fully in line with the British elite’s aim of dismantling competing empires.
The assassination of arch-duke Franz Ferdinand in 1914 is recorded as the spark that ignited the First World War. But this is a distortion of the facts. As mentioned, British plans for war against Germany were at least a decade old by that point. In any case, assassinations of royalty and nobility were fairly common at that time in Europe, and the death of Ferdinand was not something that would necessarily have provoked a world war. Certainly, the Austro-Hungarian Empire was only interested in quieting the Serbs, and Germany, Austria-Hungary’s ally, was decidedly against the crisis spiraling out of control.
After the assassination, the British government deceptively announced to Austria-Hungary and Germany that they accepted Austria-Hungary’s right to compensation from Serbia. When Austria delivered its July Ultimatum on July 23rd to the Serbs – a series of demands that were intentionally made unacceptable – it expected a local war to result, but Russian foreign minister Sazonov (another British agent)6 responded by mobilizing Russian forces on July 28th against the wishes of the Tsar. The British also quietly mobilized their own troops in anticipation of a German move against Belgium, which occurred on August 4th.
What neither Germany nor Austria-Hungary realised was that the assassination – the casus belli – had been orchestrated by the Serbs with the encouragement of British agents in the Russian government. In the 1917 court case on the assassination, Serbian colonel Dragutin Dimitrijević confessed that he hired Ferdinand’s assassins and that the murder was planned with the knowledge and approval of the Russian ambassador in Belgrade – Nicholas Hartwig – and the Russian military attaché in Belgrade, Viktor Artamonov. Both Hartwig and Artamonov were effectively in the pay of the British government. If it had been widely revealed at the time that the Russians were directly involved in the assassination, the British government could not have justified the war to the British public, who held strong anti-Tsarist opinions, thanks to being systematically fed anti-Russian propaganda during the ‘Great Game’ of the 19th century. If anything, they would have called for war against Russia.
Even as the Russian and German armies were marching out of their barracks on July 1st, the Tsar and the Kaiser were exchanging telegrams in a futile attempt to avert disaster. In a note he wrote later that day, the Kaiser finally understood the depth of British perfidy: “I have no doubt about it: England, Russia and France have agreed among themselves to take the Austro-Serbian conflict for an excuse for waging a war of extermination against us… the stupidity and ineptitude of our ally is turned into a snare for us … the net has been suddenly thrown over our head, and England sneeringly reaps the most brilliant success of her persistently prosecuted purely anti-German world policy against which we have proved ourselves helpless. We are brought into a situation which offers England the desired pretext for annihilating us under the hypocritical cloak of justice.” 7 It should come as no surprise that during this ‘great’ war to protect the free world, British and American arms manufacturers, many with links to City of London and Wall Street banks, were arming all sides in the conflict. For just one example, the British-owned Armstrong-Pozzuoli Company, headquartered on the bay of Naples, employed 4,000 men and was the chief naval supplier to Britain’s enemy, Italy, and a high-level English naval officer, Rear Admiral Ottley, was a director!8 During the war, Labour MP Philip Snowden angrily told the House of Commons that “submarines and all the torpedoes used in the Austrian navy are made by the Whitehead Torpedo works in Hungary… they are making torpedoes with British capital in order to destroy British ships.”9 The same torpedoes were being used by German U-boats to sink British, and later American, ships.
Talk about a revolution
The disastrous effects to Russia of the British-inspired Russo-Japanese war provoked the 1905 Russian ‘revolution’ that lasted until 1907. That revolution paved the way for the overthrow of the Tsar and the coming to power of the nihilistic Bolsheviks in the October revolution of 1917. The event would define Russia’s history for the next 70 years. Far from being an impediment, the fact that Tsarist Russia was a British ally in the middle of WW1 appears, at the time, to have been seen by the British and American governments as an opportunity to stab the Tsar in the back when, and from where, he least expected it.
Like the First World War, the plan for the overthrow of the Tsar and revolution in Russia was years in the making. In fact, it seems that the 1905 Russo-Japanese war was used by the aforementioned Jacob Schiff and Co. to sow the seeds of that 1917 revolution 12 years in advance. In her book, ‘Jacob H. Schiff: A Study in American Jewish Leadership’, prolific Jewish-American author Naomi Wiener Cohen states: “The Russo-Japanese war allied Schiff with George Kennan in a venture to spread revolutionary propaganda among Russian prisoners of war held by Japan (Kennan had access to these). The operation was a carefully guarded secret and not until the revolution of March 1917 was it publicly disclosed by Kennan. He then told how he had secured Japanese permission to visit the camps and how the prisoners had asked him for something to read. Arranging for the ‘Friends of Russian Freedom’ to ship over a ton of revolutionary material, he secured Schiff’s financial backing. As Kennan told it, fifty thousand officers and men returned to Russia [as] ardent revolutionists. There they became fifty thousand “seeds of liberty” in one hundred regiments that contributed to the overthrow of the Tsar.” While Schiff was a strident opponent of the Russian Tsar for his treatment of Russian Jews, it’s difficult to tell if sympathy for his co-religionists in Russia was the motivation for Schiff, and other Jewish Wall Street bankers and industrialists, to finance the Bolshevik revolution. After all, they all also reaped massive financial rewards as a result.
Russian General Arsene de Goulevitch, who witnessed the Bolshevik Revolution firsthand, stated: “The main purveyors of funds for the revolution were neither the crackpot Russian millionaires nor the armed bandits of Lenin. The ‘real’ money primarily came from certain British and American circles which for a long time past had lent their support to the Russian revolutionary cause… I have been told that over 21 million rubles were spent by Lord [Alfred] Milner in financing the Russian Revolution”.10 Milner was perhaps the preeminent agent of the British Empire at that time. As High Commissioner for Southern Africa, German-born Milner pioneered concentration camps and ethnic cleansing during the Boer War to expand British control of Africa. Milner was also the chief author of the Balfour Declaration, despite it being published in Arthur Balfour’s name. In his book on Milner, Edward Crankshaw summed up Milner’s ‘ideology’: “Some of the passages [in Milner’s books] on industry and society… are passages which any socialist would be proud to have written. But they were not written by a socialist. They were written by “the man who made the Boer War.” Some of the passages on Imperialism and the white man’s burden might have been written by a Tory diehard. They were written by the student of Karl Marx.” 11 Milner’s ideological bi-partisanship – and utter indifference to his German roots – mirrored that of the Wall Street bankers. Speaking to the League for Industrial Democracy in New York on 30th December 1924, Otto H. Kahn, who was Jacob Schiff and Felix Warburg’s partner in Kuhn, Loeb & Co. and director of American International Corp., said: “what you radicals, and we who hold opposing views differ about, is not so much the end as the means, not so much what should be brought about, as how it should, and can, be brought about”.
De Goulevitch cites reports from local observers and journalists in Petrograd in 1917 of British and American agents handing out 25-rouble notes to soldiers of the Pavlovski regiment just before they mutinied and joined the revolution.5 De Goulevitch also named Sir George Buchanan, the British Ambassador to Russia at the time, as one of the main players in financing what was effectively an early ‘color revolution’ in Russia.
As Jennings C. Wise has written, “Historians must never forget that Woodrow Wilson… made it possible for Leon Trotsky to enter Russia with an American passport.”12
With the Tsar gone and the Western-backed Bolsheviks in power, US and other Western governments and corporations had succeeded not only in destroying Russia’s economy and industry, but breaking off parts of the Russian empire.The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk is a testament to the fecklessness of the Bolsheviks in that, in order to withdraw Russia from the war, they were forced cede territory to Germany and Austria-Hungary. The first round of negotiations stalled because the mad-cap revolutionaries believed that Germany and Austria-Hungary were on the brink of revolution themselves. When Lenin and Co. finally came to their senses, they were forced to sign an even more punitive agreement with the Central Powers. While Russia regained much of this lost territory after WWII, it lost it all again in 1991. In fact, Russia’s post-1991 western border bears a marked similarity to that imposed by the Brest-Litovsk treaty.
Under Lenin and Trotsky, the Bolshevik ‘revolution’ had effectively shut down the Russian economy and its industry, allowing Western bankers to step in to ‘rebuild’. Consider the words of American journalist, labor organizer, and publicist, Albert Rhys Williams, who was both a witness to – and participant in – the October revolution, as he testified at the Senate Overman Committee: Mr. Williams: […] it is probably true that under the Soviet government industrial life will perhaps be much slower in development than under the usual capitalistic system. But why should a great industrial country like America desire the creation and consequent competition of another great industrial rival? Are not the interests of America in this regard in line with the slow tempo of development which Soviet Russia projects for herself?
Senator Wolcott: So you are presenting an argument here which you think might appeal to the American people, your point being this; that if we recognize the Soviet government of Russia as it is constituted, we will be recognizing a government that cannot compete with us in industry for a great many years?
Mr. Williams: That is a fact.
Senator Wolcott: That is an argument that, under the Soviet government, Russia is in no position, for a great many years at least, to approach America industrially?
Mr. Williams: Absolutely. When the Bolsheviks started their first bank, Ruskombank, in 1922, one of its directors was Max May of Guaranty Trust. Guaranty Trust was a J.P. Morgan company. On joining Ruskombank, May stated: “The United States, being a rich country with well developed industries, does not need to import anything from foreign countries, but… it is greatly interested in exporting its products to other countries, and considers Russia the most suitable market for that purpose, taking into consideration the vast requirements of Russia in all lines of its economic life.”13 J.P. Morgan’s Guaranty Trust also raised loans for the German war effort while simultaneously funding the British and French against the Germans, and also the Russians, both under the Tsar against Germany, and then the Bolsheviks against the Tsar and for the “revolution”.14
Two world wars, courtesy of the anglo-American elite.
Via Wall Street bankers, the US government under Woodrow Wilson broke with international convention after WWI and refused to forgive debts from the massive war loans it pumped to its allies, primarily Britain and France.15 Germany was in an even worse position because of the reparations demanded by the extremely harsh Treaty of Versailles. None of these countries were in a position to pay back the money owed, so the ‘Dawes Plan’ was enacted whereby the US government would loan money to Germany so that it could pay reparations to France and Britain, who would then give the money back to the US to pay off their war debt. That’s how ‘funny money’ works. Nevertheless, World War I was a boon for the USA. It went from owing foreigners $4.5 billion in 1914 to being owed $25 billion by foreigners in 1928, including Europe’s war debt. As a result, much of Europe’s gold also ended up in Fort Knox. Professor of economics Michael Hudson claims that the motivation for massive US government financial claims on Europe was political rather than economic.
Germany paid off the final tranche of its debt to the US government in 2010. The UK is still paying. The debt to the US and allies from WWI was the primary cause of the collapse of the German economy in the early 1930s that gave rise to Hitler and the Nazis… who were also financed by the same cabal of Wall Street bankers.16
In 1925, a European theorist of imperialism, Gerhart Von Schulze-Gaevernitz, suggested that history would show that the most important result of World War I was not “the destruction of the royal dynasties that ruled Germany, Russia, Austria and Italy”, but the “shift in the world’s center of gravity from Europe, where it had existed since the days of Marathon, to America”. This new era of ‘superimperialism’, he said, had turned traditional imperialism on its head because now “finance capital mediates political power internationally to acquire monopolistic control and profits from natural resources, raw material and the power of labor, with the tendency towards autarky by controlling all regions, the entire world’s raw materials.”17
During the 1920s Russian industry was effectively rebuilt by US corporations, with several of Lenin’s five-year plans financed by Wall Street banks. The aim was to prepare Russia for WWII, where it effectively won the war for the allies but was largely ruined (again) in the process and, like the other European powers, incurred massive debt to Wall Street and London bankers. As revealed by Antony Sutton, the extent of Western influence and control inside Soviet Russia is exemplified by the fact that, during the Vietnam war, the military vehicles being used by the North Vietnamese military to fight American soldiers were produced in a Soviet factory, the Kama River Truck Plant, owned by the US Ford corporation.
By imposing the Bolshevik Revolution on Russia, Wall Street ensured that it could not compete with the USA. For the next 70 years, the ‘managers of the world’ in the US and Western Europe expanded their global domination through the use of a bogus “Communist threat” (which they created). In the late 1980s, the Western banking elite decided that their global power was sufficient to allow them to pull back the ‘iron curtain’ and, once again, open Russia up, but this time for some ‘free market’, ‘open society’ neo-liberal plunder. All was going to plan for most of the 1990s until Vladimir Putin arrived on the scene and began to spoil the Western elites’ ‘we rule the world’ party.
So what’s the point of this little history lesson? I hope it serves to highlight two things. That over 100 years ago the Western banking/corporate/political elite – the type of people who think, and say, things like… “To think of these stars that you see overhead at night, these vast worlds which we can never reach. I would annexe the planets if I could; I often think of that. It makes me sad to see them so clear and yet so far.”
“I contend that we are the first race in the world, and that the more of the world we inhabit the better it is for the human race.”
~ Cecil Rhodes …understood clearly that the only way they were going rule the world was to ensure that Russia never emerged as a competitor to their center of operations – London, and then the USA. From a practical perspective, to achieve that goal they were going to have to perpetually marginalize Russia on the Eurasian continent and prevent European nations, in particular Western European nations, from ever forming an alliance with Russia. That task began in earnest in the late 1890s. It continues to this day, but it is failing.
Since coming to power Putin has made moves to do to Russia precisely that which the Western banking elite spent over 100 years trying to prevent: make it a strong independent country, free (to the greatest extent possible) of the Western bankers’ toxic influence. Even worse, Putin’s plan does not seem to be limited merely to freeing Russia, but includes the idea of using Russia’s influence to establish a new ‘new world order’, based not on the hegemony of the few, but on multipolarity, real national sovereignty, mutual respect, and genuinely fair trade among nations. In their 15 short years at the helm in Russia, Putin and his friends have gone a long way towards achieving their goals. The response from the Western elite has been interesting to watch. From NATO’s attempts to encircle Russia in Eastern Europe, to economic sanctions imposed on the basis of trumped-up charges, to sabotaging Russia-EU economic relations, to staging a coup in Ukraine in 2014, to manipulating the price of oil and assassinating ‘opposition figures’ inside and outside Russia; the anglo-American elite are resorting to increasingly desperate and hysterical measures to maintain the global imbalance they worked so hard to achieve. But nothing they do seems to phase Russia or divert it from the path it has chosen.
So what can we expect next from the Western elites? Short of all-out nuclear war with Russia (which is not and never was an option, contrary to Cold War propaganda) what scurrilously duplicitous maneuvers are left to be made? Not many, to be sure. Perhaps the only weapon left in their arsenal is the one that, more than any other, has allowed them to dominate the globe for so long: the almighty US dollar, its position as the world’s reserve currency, and the ‘petrodollar’.
For decades, these two financial ‘instruments’ have forced all other countries to hold large reserves of the American currency, thereby providing the US economy with a ‘free ride’ and securing its position as the world’s largest economy. If the US dollar were, for some reason, to collapse, it would create massive panic in the world economic system, and result, quite possibly, in the collapse of governments around the world. This is likely the reason that both Russia and China are wasting no time in establishing the basis for a new economic order that is not dollar-based. If that initiative progresses far enough, there may come a time in the near future when the dollar can be safely ‘ditched’ and replaced with another reserve currency, or basket of currencies, thereby avoiding or mitigating the systemic threat to the global economy (if not the US economy) of a dollar collapse, and forcing the Western elite, with their base of operations in the USA, to accept a more humble and justified position among the nations.
Fat cat feeding time almost over?
Anyone who has investigated and understood the nature of these “elites” of which I speak, knows that they are not the type of people who simply accept defeat, even when it is staring them in the face. They’re like a highly narcissistic chess player who, seeing that ‘check mate’ is almost upon him, opts to knock all the pieces of the board (and maybe burn it… and the room) rather than suffer the ignominy of defeat. It can then be claimed, ‘see, you didn’t win, we’ll have to start again’. The chess analogy is appropriate given that one of the main exponents of Mackinder’s theories of Eurasian strategy is Zbigniew Brzezinski, author of The Grand Chessboard, where he wrote “it is imperative that no Eurasian challenger emerges, capable of dominating Eurasia and thus of also challenging America.”
With the US debt currently running at over 104% to GDP (and rising), and the US unable or unwilling to reduce that debt or to increase GDP, the USA is effectively insolvent, a ‘failed state’ in all but name. The only thing preventing its economic collapse is the dependency, for now, of so many other nations on the US not collapsing. Is it possible that, facing the almost certain end to their reign as rulers of the world, the Western psycho-elite will chose the ‘financial nuclear option’ of ‘doing an Enron’ and collapsing the American dollar in a last, insane and futile effort to avert defeat by bringing the whole house of cards down… so they can ‘rebuild’ from scratch?
As my opening quote asserts: “what the darkness cannot possess, it seeks to destroy.”
Notes
1 Chapman, John W. M. Russia, Germany and the Anglo-Japanese Intelligence Collaboration
2 Schiff organised the purchase by US investors of $200 million in Japanese bonds
3 Farrer, England Under Edward VII p. 143
4 Stieve, Isvolsky and the First World War p. 116
5 Durham, Twenty years of Balkan Tangle ch 19 pp 2-3 and Docherty and Macgregor, Hidden History: The secret origins of the First World war Ch.18
6 See; Docherty and Macgregor, Hidden History: The secret origins of the First World war Ch.16
7 Barnes, Genesis of the World War, pp. 268-9
8 Perris, The War Traders: an Exposure
9 Murray, Krupps and the International Armaments Ring: the scandal of modern civilization p.3
10 De Goulevitch,: Czarism and Revolution, Omni Publications, California, pp. 224, 230
11 Crankshaw, The Forsaken Idea: A Study of Viscount Milner (London: Longmans Green, 1952), p. 269.
12 Wise, Woodrow Wilson: Disciple of Revolution (New York: Paisley Press, 1938), p.45
13 Sutton, A. Wall Street and the Bolsheviks Ch. 4
14 ibid
15 Hudson, M. Super Imperialism: The Origin and Fundamentals of U.S. World Dominance p. 50
16 Sutton, A. Wall Street and the Rise of Hitler
17 ibid
Could Boris Johnson be the UK’s last prime minister?
Johnson’s rise to the top has put the Scottish independence debate firmly back on the British political agenda.
July 28, 2019
by Alasdair Soussiby
AlJazeera
Glasgow, Scotland – He once called for Scots to be barred from becoming British prime minister because “government by a Scot is just not conceivable.” And while editor of The Spectator magazine, he republished a poem by James Michie which called Scottish people “vermin” who should be placed in “ghettos
Boris Johnson, who assumed the UK premiership on July 24 following the resignation of Theresa May, will find that Britain’s protracted departure from the European Union (EU) is not the only source of simmering political tension as he begins his new role in the top job.
After Johnson’s election to Conservative Party leader, and before he officially secured the mantle of prime minister, Scotland’s pro-independence first minister, Nicola Sturgeon, reiterated nationalist calls for her UK constituent nation to be given the right to hold a second referendum on Scottish statehood.
“Scotland did not vote for Brexit, or for the current [Conservative] Government – and certainly not for Boris Johnson as prime minister,” said Sturgeon, leader of the Scottish National Party (SNP) government at the devolved Scottish Parliament in Edinburgh, to the media. “All of this underlines the need for Scotland to have the right to determine our own future, in line with the democratic wishes of all those who live here.”
In 2014, Scotland voted against leaving the three centuries-old union with England by 55-45 percent, but two years later opted overwhelmingly to remain in the EU in the Brexit referendum, as votes from England and Wales propelled the UK as a whole towards the European exit door.
Prior to his assumption of office last Wednesday, opinion polls indicated that Scots would vote to leave Britain faced with a Johnson premiership.
Combined with the prospect of the UK leaving the EU without a deal — which the prime minister has not ruled out and which, say reports, could plunge the country into economic turmoil — Johnson’s rise to the top has put the Scottish independence debate firmly back on the British political agenda.
“Boris Johnson moves the independence debate into a completely new phase, partly because of the implications of his premiership for Brexit, and partly because of who he is,” said prominent pro-Scottish independence blogger, James Kelly, in an interview with Al Jazeera.
The editor of the Scot Goes Pop blog added: “He’s one of the British prime ministers who occasionally come along just to remind the people of Scotland that they really do live in a different country.”
While Johnson’s supporters say he brings unfiltered honesty, flair and authenticity to politics, his detractors say he is a buffoon and, given his Islamophobic comments last year when he described women wearing the full veil as “letterboxes”, an unapologetic racist. Questions have also been raised about his competence for frontline politics, such as his two-year term as foreign secretary under May which saw him make a diplomatic blunder concerning imprisoned Briton Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, who remains in an Iranian jail.
But defenders of the four-nation union, which was described by Johnson as the “awesome foursome” in his first speech as prime minister, are urging him to keep Scotland on his radar as he attempts to lead Britain out of the EU by the October 31 deadline.
Such is the concern emanating from unionist circles about Johnson’s impact on Scotland, that the former Scottish prime minister of Britain, Gordon Brown, warned that the privileged, Eton-educated, Leave-voting Englishman — all attributes seen as an anathema to Scottish sensibilities — “could be the UK’s last prime minister”.
“Scots are utterly bewildered as to how people in England, and particularly in the south of England, could ever choose such an obviously unsuitable national leader,” said Kelly of the Conservative Party membership, which voted for Johnson to replace May.
Mark Unsworth, who voted “no” to independence in 2014, largely agrees.
The photographer, based on the island of Islay, off Scotland’s west coast, tells Al Jazeera that the former London mayor’s rise to British premier, together with Brexit, has led him to consider opting for Scottish independence in any future sovereignty poll.
“The pendulum is swinging in my mind,” said the pro-EU owner of Islay Studios, who has clients in the European bloc.
With the SNP advocating for independent Scottish membership of the EU should Scotland secede from the UK in the future, Unsworth said he is minded to back an independent Scottish state inside the EU rather than a UK on the outside.
The 60 year old, originally from England, is unconvinced by Johnson’s willingness to pay heed to Scotland’s needs.
“I don’t think Boris Johnson is a friend of Scotland — or will look after the interests of Scotland as other prime ministers have done in the past,” he said.
‘He needs to listen’
But Scottish party colleagues of the new prime minister are imploring voters in Scotland to give him a chance.
“If you listen to the broad rhetoric from some of the politicians, mostly from the nationalist movement in Scotland, you would get the impression that [Johnson] is going to set fire to himself and the country pretty much [at the outset],” said Ian Duncan, UK government minister for business, energy and industrial strategy (BEIS) and Northern Ireland.
Duncan believes that Johnson has the best interests of the union.
He told Al Jazeera that “a change in the wind is enough reason for [the SNP to call] for another independence referendum”, let alone the appointment of Johnson to PM.
To keep Scotland on side, Duncan’s advice to his new boss is to listen.
“He needs to listen and respond to concerns — and get a feeling for what’s going on,” he said of Johnson, who has faced past criticism from Ruth Davidson, his party’s leader in Scotland, over his commitment to the union.
With Johnson planning to make a charm offensive visit to Scotland, the Scottish nationalist community senses an opportunity to realise their long-awaited dream, despite large swaths of opposition to their cause.
The SNP’s new online portal for the independence campaign, Yes.scot, has already garnered some 260,000 signatures of a 300,000 target pledging support for independence — and marches in support of Scottish statehood have been taking place right across Scotland. In May, tens of thousands of people took part in a pro-independence parade through Glasgow, which voted “yes” to going it alone back in the 2014 independence poll.
As the new PM begins his tenure promising to abide by the Brexit deadline of Halloween — deal or no-deal — Kelly said it is “likely… that Johnson will find a way of bringing about some form of hard Brexit.
“The SNP will then be able to convincingly say that Brexit Britain with Boris at the helm is a nightmare scenario that Scotland needs to escape from as soon as possible.”