Economical Explanations: Reflection on the Aims of Past Wars and Wars to Come

Down at my grocer’s for half a dozen eggs and some melon, I answered the usual question about my well being openly as accustomed. My neighbour is a friend and his query is sincere. After recounting local concerns he expresses his frustration, one more people certainly share, that they can witness audio-visual depictions of the rampage in the Gaza concentration camp of occupied Palestine on television and hear the words of the ostensible leaders of the great states in the United Nations assembled say little and do less to stop the carnage. Of course neither of us is in a position to raise more than private outrage. I add, however, that this performance of mass murder has been escalating since the end of the Great War when the great states of British Empire, the French Republic and the United States agreed to the European colonization of a strategic prize from the defeat of the Ottoman Empire in 1918.

Neither of us was alive at the time. Nor were we contemporary with the declaration of statehood by those colonizers on 14 May 1948. The stories we were told to explain and justify European colonization at the same time when those states had proclaimed in San Francisco the universal rights to self-government even for brown people, were that the Europeans concerned had been so punished by the Great Powers through the centuries, especially most recently by the two-time loser among the Great Powers—Germany, that as an act of contrition the population of Palestine had been chosen for collective retribution. That is to say, the brown inhabitants of Palestine in the British Mandate were chosen as a people to be punished, deprived of life, liberty and property, as a penalty for the evils inflicted upon a mass of Europeans whose most important characteristic was that they had been identified as Jews. In the case of Germany under the NSDAP many of the Europeans in question had been deprived of their citizenship as Germans and defined as Jewish by nationality. Thus, under the NSDAP tyranny they were deprived of all their rights as citizens of the state in which they had been born and to whom they had owed allegiance, by operation of law and administrative procedure. One of the principles formalized in the conventions adopted with the United Nations Charter stipulated that no one could be deprived of their nationality against their will. Thus, it would seem the acts of the German regime were declared retroactively violations of human rights. Unfortunately, this principle, like so many others adopted by the Great Powers, was not taken very seriously when skin complexions or geographical locations differed from those of the charter members of the League of Nations successor club. Very little in the stories we were told addressed the obvious inconsistencies between the expressed prohibitions, e.g. collective punishment and deprivation of nationality, when applied to skin colours.

Moreover the stories we were told conflated the victims of the NSDAP regime, a tyranny that enjoyed massive financial and covert political support from the commanding heights of Western industry and finance, with an established settler-colonial movement about which so little was said as possible. While we were entertained by Hollywood productions—beginning with the show trials in Nuremberg and their later film adaptation cast with famous stars of American stage and screen— and continuing with the Leon Uris’s pulp fiction, also adapted for propaganda cinema—the settler-colonial movement was busy practicing what they had no doubt learned from seminars with experts like Adolf Eichmann behind a screen of genuine NSDAP victims and displaced persons manipulated to lend legitimacy to the crimes it continues to perpetrate, live on TV as this is being written. All of this was known to representatives, high and low, of the Great Powers that gave license to this invasion. Where reports of the crimes were not suppressed, the amazing control over mass media and brutal assassinations silenced them quickly.

It has often been said that those methodical Germans were so disciplined that they kept careful records, which could be used to incriminate them later. Thomas Suárez (State of Terror, 2016) found he could reconstruct enough of the criminal history of Zionist occupation of Palestine from the perpetrators records to suggest that not only the NSDAP regime was proud of its attention to detail. As we have seen over the past four years, one of the principal functions of mass media is to inoculate the population at large so as to make them resistant to facts. The details Suárez relates based on research in the National Archives (Kew, UK) cover the period until the declaration of statehood by the settler-colonial regime in Tel Aviv: in other words the behaviour of the founders before we were told that Tel Aviv was the only “democracy” in the Middle East with “the most moral army” on the planet. The book is worth reading if only as a corrective to the amnesiac shock suffered by millions who only discovered that there was “savage and relentless killing in Gaza” a year ago.

Suárez’s story is full of aid workers and UN officials being abused, attacked and murdered. The archives showed that meticulous account was taken of how many Palestinians the invaders were able to rape, torture, kill or otherwise violate and eliminate from the country in which they had been born. Deep intelligence operations throughout the West combined with well-funded and effective mass media campaigns in the US and Britain were as prevalent then as they are today. Innovations in lethality and terror accompanied every effort leading to statehood—and as can be seen beyond. Nobel Peace laureate Menachem Begin, a proud veteran of that era, could justifiably claim—as he indeed once did (in a January 1974 television interview when Russell Warren Howe asked Begin: “How does it feel, in the light of all that’s going on, to be the father of terrorism in the Middle East? “In the Middle East”, Begin bellowed, “in all the world”)—that they (Irgun et al.) had invented terrorism. Striking is the account of youth cadres, some as young as 13, who had been trained as terrorists within the trinity of Zionist paramilitary organisations (Hagana, Irgun and Lehi). Innumerable operations were performed by these highly indoctrinated cadres disguised in the attire typical of the natives (dressed as Arabs). Chronologically it becomes obvious that the methods of terrorism attributed in the West to Muslims were in fact all standard operating procedures for Zionist paramilitary death squads—long before there was any armed resistance to the Zionist invasion and occupation of Palestine.

None of this historical context was part of our history lessons. Nor is it part of the ranting that counts for reporting now. I have heard enough said about my compatriots and their supposed affinity for fascism or natural racism—all based on the interminable repetition of increasingly bizarre films about the NSDAP era in Germany. That all ended in 1945. The insinuations have not stopped, although their application in the past four years defies coherent explanation. However the same regime has been in power in Palestine, de facto since the establishment of the Jewish Agency and de jure since statehood was declared.

It is worth noting that settler-colonialism was still high fashion in 1948 since the Union of South Africa and Rhodesia (also under British rule with a close relationship to Cecil Rhodes’ principal financial advisor) also proclaimed their nationalist version of white supremacy, apartheid. Despite many predictions to the contrary, they have not survived as long as the regime in Tel Aviv. The Afrikaner nationalist attempt to establish a racial-ethnic state with its own language (Afrikaans) and culture also failed. (see also Church Clothes: Land, Mission and the End of Apartheid, 2024) Decades of National Party rule were predicated on the potential onslaught awaiting whites on the continent if a strong white government did not defend them. There was no onslaught. In 1991, the feared horror of Bantu/ Black/ African communism had disappeared. Even the Afrikaner nationalist attempt to support its racial-ethnic state with a “white African” language and culture failed. Although Afrikaans remains one of South Africa’s nine official languages, there is no longer a single Afrikaans-medium university in the country since the apartheid constitution was abolished. The “Cape Dutch” had been established in South Africa since the 1600s and within a mere decade the whole edifice was gone.

That leaves us with the question; especially if one dares to take the absurd woke ideology currently propagated in the West at its word, why settler-colonialism can prevail in Palestine in forms that even heads of state are now likening to those of the NSDAP tyranny? While all manner of institutions, monuments, and artefacts are being renamed, removed or vandalized because of their imputed relationship to racism, colonialism, slavery or some other grave injustice (mainly in Britain and the US), the uninterrupted century of settler-colonial terror in Palestine barely caused a ripple. Is it ignorance, hypocrisy, or plain stupidity? What seems long ago now, Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky (The Manufacturing of Consent: The Political Economy of Mass Media, 1988) nearly popularized the distinction between “worthy and unworthy victims”. In their propaganda model the mass media—and those who own it—decide which victims are worthy and hence treated as victims whose suffering is acknowledged and which victims are unworthy and whose suffering can be and is dismissed. This distinction is certainly helpful in calling attention to the silence and invisibility of a century of mass murder and terrorism, after 1948 state terrorism. In order to understand the source of silence, obfuscation, and mendacity, it is necessary to ask the questions how the “worthy victims” are chosen and also by whom?

What we say we know about the past is a construct. Even in the course of a conversation develops as a construct by which the exchange continues on the assumptions of two speakers as to the appropriate way to respond to what was just uttered. Each of us is unwittingly a small scale amateur historian when confronted with utterances, like “what did you mean?” or “what I meant to say was.” There is no way to know definitively what someone was thinking in the past. One can only judge the utterance, either as memory (covertly) or as recording (written or audio), to have some chronological significance and respond to it as one deems appropriate. We have all heard people respond with statements like, “when I said that I did not mean what you think” or “the situation was different then” or “I can change my mind, can’t I? (When someone refuses or denies the interpretation of an utterance assigned to the past). We all know people whom we say are unreliable because in our judgement statements “in the past” do not permit predictions of future behaviour. “Oh he never comes on time” or “he always says one thing and does another”. In all these cases the purpose of our assessment is to control our own behaviour, our reaction to others. We can call it prediction if it means that it controls what we will do (it cannot control what we already have done.) At the same time we have certainly all heard “Oh you are being unfair. He is not always like that” or “He is never like that with me”. In other words the judgement that “he never does what he says he is going to do” is judged by someone else to be an inappropriate explanation and prediction for that person’s behaviour. At the same time it is certainly reasonable to reply, “maybe he does not behave that way with you but he does with me. I cannot rely on him.” At this point, one is acknowledging that although it may be inappropriate to claim that “he is universally unreliable”, it is reasonable to say that “he is unreliable for me”—and it is my interest in reliability that is important here. My interest is another way of saying, reliability is a category of personal conduct which I value and which controls my interaction with others.

Explanations are unavoidable. Whether they are good explanations or bad explanations depends on the judgement of someone and on the interests controlling that judgement. Those interests may also include rendering no judgement that deviates from those others consider appropriate. So in more explicitly historical research, reflection and debate, the interests of the investigator may be controlled by the desire to be treated as a “serious historian” or “serious scholar”, another way of saying that investigation will be governed not only by one’s personal judgement but by what one perceives as the judgement of others as to the appropriateness of one’s work. Academic institutions and other venues where history (often conflated with the past) are the focus of human activity are not only repositories of data but organizations for structuring the use of that data. Structuring the use is another way of saying controlling the way those who are engaged in historical research or study respond to the artefacts and the utterances of other investigators or members of the research institution. There is data, e.g. documents, and utterances and redundancies in response to the data. In that sense historical research is no different from the activity in a chemistry laboratory. It is impossible to separate the utterances and redundancies of response that form an institution from the research product. There is no pure objective fact in the test tube or the archive that is self-evident. Explanations arise from attempts to respond to data in meaningful ways, for instance to control or predict our responses to other data. Even the most abstract forms of research constitute controls on the researcher, what he sees; what he may discover; what he discards or ignores.

A historical explanation, regardless of the volume and nature of the data available (whether known or unknown in scope), will always be a selection of data and its organization. It will always be governed by interests of the researcher or of other researchers or those on whose behalf the research is selected and performed or even of those to whom the researcher addresses his work, e.g. readership, students, public policy, etc.

The armistice of 1918 ended the open hostilities between the regular forces of the alliance (the British Empire, the French Republic and the United States) against those of Austria-Hungary, the German Empire and the Ottoman Empire, the so-called Central Powers. However, it by no means ended the organized military operations on the Continent or the non-military warfare, as might have been expected by anyone who took the Wilsonian rhetoric at face value. War continued in Eastern Europe. The United States fought with Czech legions, Japanese troops and White Russians against the new Bolshevik government in the Soviet Union until 1922. Economic warfare continued throughout the interwar period despite negotiations and the conclusion of a plethora of treaties known under the rubric of Versailles. The Allies fought overtly or covertly to capture and allocate the extinguished empires among themselves while reinforcing their hold on the empires with which they began the war.

If war aims are not defined by what is announced in declarations but are ascertained by examining forensically the results, then such imputed war aims can be said to constitute a pattern. In other words, a sequence of distinguishable outcomes can form the basis for interpretation of belligerent conduct, specifying general aims or attitudes to explain present and future wars. Such patterns may be classified as instructions by which belligerents chose to wage war or analysis can identify the latent or implicit culture that drives the behaviour. The forensic examination serves to identify redundancies that must be practiced in order to sustain the institutional behaviour underlying the belligerence.

None of the foregoing would have been practically relevant in the 19th century. However, the adoption and ratification of the General Treaty for Renunciation of War as an Instrument of National Policy aka Kellogg – Briand Pact (1928) which declared war illegal as a means of resolving international disputes; a violation of international law also known as the law of nations. This pact has yet to be renounced by any of its principal signatories. Thus the prohibition stands. Therefore the determination of war aims and the causes attributed to such wars by those who wage them becomes highly relevant.

If the aims of a given war are not clearly understood, neither the appropriate defence nor a realistic negotiating position to end hostilities can be found, let alone pursued.

In battle, the assailing force seeks to magnify its impact by concealing the actual targets or objectives from the defender. In waging war itself the aggressor is obliged to justify the use of force within the rhetorical framework of the law of nations as commonly understood. Rhetorical legitimacy is no trivial weapon in the aggressor’s arsenal, especially under the League of Nations/ United Nations framework. The more intensely the claims are asserted, the more difficult it becomes to ascertain the effective aims. This is a peculiar aspect of modern ideological warfare. Silencing the defender in public opinion and international fora relies on domination of the totality of communications channels.

The history of modern warfare actually begins with the Crusades. These centuries of assaults against the declared enemies of Christendom always comprised both psychological and physical orders of battle. The papal-rabbinical infrastructure under the command of the Roman pontiff “preached” the Crusades. The military force unleashed through the vassals of the Latin Church wielded the swords and other instruments of death. The pulpit and ecclesiastical apparatus mustered the support needed to drain manpower and other resources for the campaigns of slaughter, demolition and plunder. Prospects of plunder and intangible wealth (salvation) have been essential to convince all those who sacrifice that they will be rewarded on Earth as it is in Heaven, or at least compensated for the material and bodily losses they have to bear.

This is no less true in the 21st century than it was in the 11th.

It is really quite remarkable that while the NSDAP era has been an almost obsessive target of historical research for as long as I can remember, the era in which the settler-colony in Palestine was established receives so little attention although its ostensible legitimation is derived from (retroactively) and enhanced by the very existence of the German fascist regime from 1936 until 1945. Although the ideological roots of Afrikaner nationalism and its close relationship to the doctrinal authors of German National Socialism have been investigated and publicly debated. The relationship between Zionism and Nazism has been given more muted attention. When Zionism and Nazism are discussed generally then there is a tendentious context, which fosters the conflation of Herzl’s ambitions with the campaign to funnel all displaced Jews from Europe into Mandatory Palestine under administration of the Jewish Agency. The implication is that Zionism anticipated the Nuremberg laws, the deprivation of Germans once classified as Jewish of their German nationality and their relocation – disposal, including enslavement and murder. However, any attempt to examine the practices of the Tel Aviv regime over the past century in historical context, including comparison of those practices with practices under other regimes, has been vigorously discouraged.

While it is understandable that the practitioners in the “only democracy” with the “most moral army” may be reluctant to discuss their conduct and utterances in comparative context, it ought to be asked why this reluctance is so widespread beyond the 1967 borders? The most obvious, if somewhat superficial, reason is that the regime in Tel Aviv is the state incarnation of “worthy victims” whose every suffering, real or imagined, must be smothered in sympathy and adoration. Whatever its misdeeds, these are the understandable errors of a distraught, somewhat paranoiac victim for whom at least pity but not punishment is appropriate. The traumatized maiden amidst the bearded, brown-skinned hordes must be forgiven for every act taken in defence of her purity. The mythological, cinematic clichés that can be applied are innumerable. Like cinema, they also distract from serious observation and assessment of the utterances current and past, i.e. the documentary evidence.

 (Americans do not realize) the extent to which partition was refused acceptance as a final settlement by the Zionists in Palestine, (nor the conviction among Zionists that) they cannot be satisfied with Palestine alone, that they must have not only all of Palestine but Trans-Jordan, parts of Syria and Lebanon, parts of Iraq and Egypt as well…” Kermit Roosevelt, Jr., CIA officer who led Operation Ajax (TPAJAX) to overthrow Iran’s elected prime minister in 1953. He was the grandson of Theodore Roosevelt. From a lecture to the US National War College in 1948.

Comparison of practices across countries and periods presents theoretical and methodological problems. These are in part due to the aforementioned institutional constraints. For example, there are material incentives and penalties within academic as well as general research that reward or punish investigation and publication according to the degree of conformity with official, i.e. establishment opinion. A scholar who is successful at promoting established views on any subject would be rewarded with grants, promotions, publication, lecture fees and other favourable attention to his works. The reverse applies. A well-rewarded scholar serves as a model for correct scholarship and indirectly a monitor against deviance. The capacity to reward, also known as patronage, is also the ability to propagate views, defined questions and types of research product desired. It implies the capacity to suppress other views, if only by the stampede for patronage, which a generous investor triggers. This is often called “soft power” in contrast to exile, imprisonment or assassination of dissidents—hard power.

Caroll Quigley argued forcefully (The Anglo-American Establishment From Rhodes to Cliveden, 1981) that one of the principal accomplishments of the Round Table/ Milner Group was to dominate the institutions that wrote and disseminated the history of the British Empire. From fellowships at All Souls and other Oxford colleges in their gift to ownership or control of the newspapers of record and the major publishing houses, members of what would become the Royal Institute for International Affairs (and its imperial franchises in the US — the Council on Foreign Relations — and Commonwealth), “legitimate” history could be propagated and alternative histories excluded. The revolving doors between government and academia also gave the mouthpieces of the Empire the additional credibility lent by access to decision-makers and the official record, both public and confidential. Herbert Hoover, in his capacity as head of the private-public partnership Commission for Relief in Belgium and later the US Food Administration, contributed to this effort after the Great War by confiscating untold volumes of government archives wherever he dispensed “aid” to the distressed countries after the war had ended. The Hoover Institution at Stanford received his loot by bequest thus assuring that this data remained in private hands. After World War II the occupation forces repeated the procedure by capturing the archives of the Axis wherever they went. Access to this treasure has remained subject to the control of friendly agents to this day. Hence the evidence of what conquered nations actually intended or did can be selectively disclosed in ways that are consistent with the established history. Alternative research is largely derived from either accidental discovery or inference. Such alternatives can always be attacked because they necessarily rely on interpretive methodologies at odds with the published record where no “smoking guns” are available. Moreover, the sheer volume of redundant accounts of the official history propagated by those same leading publishing houses and academic institutions effectively buries the alternative publication landscape.

No later than with the inception of the Manhattan Project, the leading sciences were captured by the national security state. The largesse expended to produce atomic weapons and other vile instruments of death created a scholarly and scientific cartel of enviable wealth. Those who did not benefit directly by participation in death and destruction science were induced to shape their work so that it would qualify for funding at the various troughs the national security state had built. The comprehensive focus of all scholarship and scientific research on classified development projects included the imposition of an extensive security system including loyalty tests and secrecy oaths. In short, participation in funded research required membership or at least submission to the rules of the national security cult, not unlike the induction practices for the infamous NSDAP paramilitary organisations.

Britain, as a monarchy, constitutionalism notwithstanding, retained a long tradition of regulated scholarship and research inherited from the Latin Church where the Crown assumed the authority of the Papacy and Episcopate. The extension of this system and practice to North America was a logical consequence of the Round Table project. Cecil Rhodes, and presumably his executor Lord Rothschild, was determined to modernize and thus preserve the British Empire, especially by “recovering” the United States as a member of the English-speaking commonwealth. The intention behind Winston Churchill’s propaganda, A History of English-speaking Peoples (started in 1937 and published in 1956-58 in four volumes), aside from earning money to redeem his chronic indebtedness, was to popularize the idea that America and the Empire (to be renamed more innocuously the Commonwealth) were one race destined to rule the world for the usual benefits its acolytes ascribed to it—democracy, free trade, etc. The meanwhile infamous CIA “Mockingbird” operation emerged from established British intelligence (covert action) practice.

The ability to wage psychological warfare or promote criminal enterprise was centralized in the US very early, despite the republican and federal structure of the State, because its ruling elite had the benefit of treating the country as terra nulla, exterminating the indigenous culture and brainwashing those it selectively admitted to its shores. Despite all claims to diversity today, the “melting pot” myth was a 20th century invention by its propagandists, i.e., the advertising and public relations industry. That machine grew from the massive economic concentration that accelerated after the 1893 depression. Although the Standard Oil trust was dissolved by enforcement of the Sherman Anti-Trust Act (1890), cartels continued to be formed. Rothschild agent JP Morgan negotiated the merger that resulted in US Steel. General Electric, General Motors and American Telephone and Telegraph (AT&T) and other conglomerates gained control over the US economy. The Federal Reserve Act of 1913 gave control over the country’s fiscal and economic policy to an Anglo-American banking cartel functioning through a parastatal “system” which preserved the illusion of a de-centralized economy while consolidating the foundations for the permanent war economy that the US became. The necessity to sell the output of these massive industrial enterprises promoted warmongering and consumerism. The advertising and public relations industry became the American version of the Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith.

After the Great War, the Volstead Act (1919) that enforced the 18th Amendment that introduced prohibition also made crime ripe for national organization. Prohibition of alcoholic beverages was depicted as an anti-drug measure when in fact it was part of a variety of anti-immigrant political legislation. Wine and beer consumption was common in the social venues of Germans (socialists) and Italians (anarchists) and other politically threatening working class elements. Their meeting places could be closed and social events circumscribed on the pretext that illegal alcoholic beverages were consumed, thus disrupting unwanted political activism. “Organized crime has traditionally made its profit from providing goods and services people are not supposed to want… Prohibition was responsible for the organization of crime on a national scale and it was the genius of Al Capone to realize that the way to proceed was to organize crime on the model of national business organizations or corporations.” Thus organized crime as “counter-business” is primarily concerned with control over people. (Peckham, 1995). In fact, contrary to the Hollywood history, organized crime owes its effectiveness not to Sicilians but to the crime cartel led discretely by Meyer Lansky. It was far more dramatic and politically advantageous to put Italians in the limelight, initiating a standing tradition by which the term “Mafia” is applied almost exclusively to undesirable immigrants. At no time was there a serious decrease in alcohol consumption. However the federal and state police forces together with their counter-enforcers could protect the development of the legal and illegal drug cartels.

This natural and incestuous relationship was instrumentalized for the establishment of the US national security apparatus. (Douglas Valentine, The Strength of the Wolf, 2004; The Strength of the Pack, 2010)  National crime meant national law enforcement and international crime meant international (extra-territorial) policing. The Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Federal Bureau of Narcotics were the precursors to what is called euphemistically today the “Intelligence Community”.

National drug cartels needed national control over venues, points of sale as well as marketing vehicles. The wealth generated also had to be laundered. The most natural downstream extension of organized counter-business was the entertainment industry. Not only racetracks, gambling casinos where permitted, bars and houses of prostitution (with the attendant human trafficking) were used. Drug money (alcohol and narcotics profits) created the studio system in the film industry, i.e. Hollywood. The “lifestyle” of the famous and temporarily rich appearing on the silver screen was rightly criticised by the residues of Puritan America—if somewhat hypocritically—as a major source of corruption, both overt and covert. The social managers in Washington and more discrete locations recognized the magnificent power in the Hollywood cartel for instilling whatever tastes or opinions were needed among the entertained public. War Department money enriched Du Pont and other weapons manufacturers. It also filled the coffers of those who produced the thousands of films promoting war against whomever the ruling elite had designated as enemy. As Malcolm X once pointed out the American propaganda machine was able to turn Germans from friends to enemies and back to friends again in a space of time in which no effort was made to alter the perception of Blacks as inferior.

Just as in Britain, the Anglo-American Establishment controlled most of the print media directly. The entertainment industry and the drug system were managed at arm’s length. The cartel was assisted in its international mission by discriminatory legislation that placed Hollywood product in a highly competitive advantage capable of overwhelming the film industries of all other countries. Winning the Second World War meant that with the exception of France, American movie conglomerates were able to flood the world with the “American Way of Life” as defined by the moguls of Southern California and their financial backers, both licit and illicit.

The business corporation had evolved into the single most effective means of power projection. Its single-mindedness, reduced rhetorically to the pursuit of profit, made it efficient in regulating the “market” whether for goods, services or ideas. The legality of the business was irrelevant for the organizational form. Legality is merely a criterion for public appearances, not underlying purposes or methods.

It has been one of the singular deficiencies of common education that attention is devoted to formal rules and government that have little to do with the actual processes of rule. Even those who study the ecclesiastical tradition of business education from the late 19th century are only taught computation. Altogether the strict compartmentalization of what counts as socially relevant knowledge prevents all but a tiny few from ever recognizing how any significant decision is made or executed. Even those who devote their energy to exposing conspiracies, real or imagined, neglect the published and advertised rules and procedures by which Business, that is to say the business corporations, trusts and similar entities are constituted and governed. They do not analyse the principal-agent conflicts that comprise an important part of business litigation. The intricacies and complexities are indeed daunting. Yet even a rudimentary grasp of the allocation of power and authority and its operation would reveal more than a thousand books on political science.

In the US, millions of people occupy single-family dwellings, which they call their homes while they pay over their lifetimes two to three times the ostensible purchase price to a bank to redeem a mortgage bond before they die. This is called in the vernacular “home ownership”. Peter Drucker, a liberal among the Austro-fascists who came to rationalize modern economic exploitation, argued years ago that Americans were all shareholders since their deductions from their pay, essentially deferred compensation, was invested through pension funds in the nation’s economy. Hence, according to Drucker the mere voter had been elevated to the status of mass capitalist. What he did not say was that these pension funds would be held by cartels of asset managers. The most infamous of those hedge funds, better called plantation funds perhaps, are the big three, BlackRock, State Street and Vanguard. These corporations, owned and managed by a miniscule clique of financial magnates, control virtually all the economic assets of Drucker’s popular capitalists. John D Rockefeller did not control much of the world’s oil industry by prospecting for oil but by rendering it impossible to pump oil from the ground without paying him for the privilege. His Standard Oil controlled everything, directly or indirectly, before the well and after the well, upstream and downstream. This gave Standard Oil what the US Defense Department calls “full spectrum dominance”, which he shared with what were once six other “sisters”. Although as mentioned above, the trust was dissolved by court order, more than a century later the Standard Oil successors, Exxon and Mobil, are still in the top four worldwide. Most of the world’s media is owned by six corporations, National Amusements, Disney, TimeWarner, Comcast, News Corp, and Sony. Whatever one believes the purpose of “media” to be, it is not free and certainly not democratically organized.

Whatever one believes about the nature of the “market”, “democracy” or even something as banal as consumer choice, we live in a world in which three financial entities, six media corporations and four energy companies exercise effective control over fundamental instruments of power: money, information and fuel. Needless to say they control a lot more. So when the 0.1 or more accurately the 0.01% are mentioned there is no need to be abstract. We can talk about an almost microscopic portion of the human population that decides what is good for themselves and how they get it from us. They may be what Larry Fink and his friends like to call “passive investors”. However they own the State and therefore have the capabilities at their disposal to be exceptionally active to increase the value and power of their investments—value and power that can only come at our expense.

What we are told we know about the world (what constitutes accepted “knowledge”) and what is deemed important are matters decided under the foregoing conditions. If we do not understand the extent and depth of control we cannot imagine the full meaning of what Stuart Ewen called Captains of Consciousness (1976). He explored the invention of public relations (propaganda or public diplomacy) in his 1986 book PR! A Social History of Spin, which formed the basis of an Adam Curtis film, Century of the Self (2002). The economic concentration that began in the late 19th century continued unabated by war, war against the body, against populations and against the mind.

Consciousness became an industrial product first by training humans to identify with the consumer goods they did not need but were expected to buy with money they did not have. Thus like the home mortgage, the individual or family invested a lifetime of earnings in constant replacement of things designed to be obsolete or worn out almost as soon as the purchase price had been paid. Thus opportunities for long-term security were compulsively squandered. Excess wages paid to workers in an expanding empire were recovered through artificially high rates of consumption. Once this kind of extraction was exhausted—or in the case of the West rendered ideologically superfluous—the individual himself was converted into a self-consuming product.

The defeats inflicted upon the post-WWII independence movements, by primarily US wars, were also suffered by those in the industrialized West who had struggled to end historical racial oppression at home. This process was highly selective but no less brutal. The most influential leaders among Black Americans fighting to end racial discrimination and oppression were assassinated, imprisoned or driven into exile. This wave of murders occurred within a relatively short space of time at the end of the 1960s in the US and continued beyond its borders far longer, e.g. Guyana scholar and activist, Walter Rodney was murdered in 1980. Malcolm X was assassinated in 1965. Martin Luther King Jr. was murdered in 1968.

Norman Finkelstein (The Holocaust Industry, 2000) who is possibly the first American scholar to openly criticize the American Jewish establishment and what has become the central consciousness myth in America and hence in the world of consciousness the US makes and shapes. In order to explain his position, he addresses the relationship of Jews to other groups in US society. The Holocaust is first and foremost an event portrayed as exemplary of Jewish victimhood. Hence Finkelstein asked how Jewish Americans stand as victims along with other victims in the US, in particular the “founding victims”, the African slaves who as James Baldwin said to the Cambridge Union (1965)—built America. The history books and Hollywood films portray American Jews as the allies of Black Americans in their struggle for human rights. (They do not talk about Jewish slave traders or plantation owners.) He observed (that) “the end of Jewish ‘solidarity’ in the US began in the 1960s when Blacks in the North began to challenge the class position of Jews rather than the racial status as in the South… American Jewish elites turned to the Right to defend their class interests—this coincided with increased support for the occupation and colonization of Israel.” Whitney Webb, in her One Nation under Blackmail (2022) documents the intimate personal and political links of organized crime, Jewish “philanthropy” and the espionage business that operates behind and in addition to the “Holocaust Industry”, with many of the same managers.

Is it a coincidence that between the murder of Malcolm X in 1965 and King’s 1968 assassination lay the Six Day War in 1967? During that war Israel attacked the USS Liberty, killing 34 and wounding another 171 of the crew in an attempt to sink the vessel. Malcolm X was vilified but only executed after returning from the Hajj, when he declared that Black Americans must abandon their “victim” status and join with the rest of the world’s oppressed in facing the class war. King was not murdered after his Riverside Church sermon against the war in Vietnam but while in Memphis to support striking workers.

If, as Finkelstein argues, organized Jewry saw reasons to support the civil rights movement in the 1950s because they comprehended them as “race” issues, was this a way of asserting the underlying Zionist argument that Jews constitute a race and also a victim race in a country where race was the most fundamental discriminatory category, e.g., the old “one drop” rule. Calling attention to Jewish race directly would have been counter-productive. However, magnifying the factor race as a trans-historical category for oppression, while ostensibly working to eliminate Blacks from the race of the oppressed could be seen as an intuitive strategy for reserving the race card as a positive political instrument. As explained above, there is no way to know how sincere or pure individual motives for supporting the civil rights movement were among American Jews. However, it is possible to observe the trajectory between 1965 and 1980 when Ronald Reagan was appointed POTUS.

There are those who assert that the key shift in US policy toward the settler-colonial regime was the assassination of John F. Kennedy, replaced by a POTUS notoriously pro-Israel. Laurent Guyénot and others argue that Kennedy’s determination to prevent the Tel Aviv regime from acquiring atomic weapons capability was a strong incentive for Mossad intervention. Johnson turned a blind eye to the Liberty attack and Dimona.  Taken as a whole one could argue that the wave of political murders that followed Kennedy’s assassination exemplifies the alignment of the ruling elite, which had been fighting decolonization tooth and nail, with the settler-colonial state in Palestine as a vehicle for de-centring the counter-revolution. The category of race oppression would have been cultivated, only to be hijacked by elites who needed a cast for their legitimation through victimhood.

Finkelstein shows that the great magnification of the Holocaust in American life, and hence in all the means by which it is psychologically and economically managed, coincided with the victory of the IDF in 1967. An event, which had been insignificant in mass American consciousness, along with all but the American participation in the Second World War, was rapidly transformed into something more average Americans could identify than landmarks in its own history. Like “recovered memory” Americans have been taught (as well as all those taught by American mass media) that they were culpable for crimes committed in places even US soldiers had never been during that war. At the same time the crimes actually committed by their own forefathers on American soil were barely mentioned. Thus it seems this magnification not only served the interests of the Jewish elite in concealing class conflict.

While there is no doubt that some twenty million or more people were killed in Eastern Europe and especially the Soviet Union by the Nazi regime’s war against the Soviet Union, it strains logic and plausibility to assert that the only mass murder was committed only against European Jews. Yet the story of the Holocaust that is taught and force fed everywhere in the West with the round number of six million, conspicuously omitting the elderly and disabled, communists, socialists, Roma and Sinti, and Slavs of every description. As details recorded not only by Finkelstein but also by many other historians show, the consciousness product Holocaust begins to corrode once one examines the claims for the numbers of survivors of the war and the camps. The 1961 film, Judgement at Nuremberg, dramatizes the discrepancy when the defence argument that no other war crimes were tried except the ones committed by the NSDAP regime is belittled rather than answered. Even Justice Jackson, for the prosecution, insinuated that the trials were problematic by warning that the manner in which they were held could be applied to others. The Soviet Union had insisted that war criminals be tried against the resistance of the British and Americans. As in many cases before and since, the Soviet Union was forced to accept the limitations of the trials in order to have any trials at all. Throughout the occupation, the Western allies conspired to prevent favoured persons from being arrested, let alone charged, hiding them or aiding their escape from jurisdiction. In the Asia-Pacific theatre they effectively prevented Soviet participation in war crimes trials against Japan. In other words, even the official proceedings against those accused of seeking to annihilate all Jews were tainted by serious irregularities. Yet this thoroughly corrupted official record has been used to support the claim that Jews were the paramount victims of World War II.

Though too many people were worked to death, murdered individually and through mass actions by so-called Einsatzkommandos of the regular and Waffen-SS in Eastern Europe. The rescue of whole Waffen-SS divisions from war crimes prosecutions, e.g. the Waffen-SS Division Galizia composed of Ukrainians, further demonstrates the insincerity of the Western Allies in their condemnations. The story, the foundational myth of unique Jewish victimhood, is so riddled with inconsistencies and corruption that its integrity ought to be questioned by any serious historian—not to mention all those in the world who had nothing to do with World War II. Is it possible that the reason is the same as that for the peculiar change in the policy/ attitude of organized Jewish elites with regard to race in the US (and elsewhere)? Could it be that when the US regime defended its leniency and clemency for whole divisions, without even the pretence of criminal investigation in the interest of opposing alleged Soviet communist expansionism, it was expressing the crucial priority of class over any other interest?

Suárez, Finkelstein, and Brenner (Zionism in the Age of Dictators, 1983 and 51 Documents: Zionist Collaboration with the Nazis, 2002) supply evidence from the Zionist leadership from the very beginning of the movement’s ascendancy to support such a hypothesis. When today’s regime in Kiev, supported by Zionists too, not only disregards the war crimes committed by Ukrainian Waffen-SS units, but has integrated military and paramilitary formations whose insignia are the same as those notorious divisions, e.g. SS-Leibstandart Adolf Hitler and Waffen-SS division Das Reich (the Azov Battalion) in its regular army in the continued war against Russia, it is hard to ignore the true war aims of the West—then and now. It was the foremost objective of Paul Hausser, one of the last commanders of these Waffen-SS forces (Das Reich, II SS Panzer Corps) after 1945 until his death to rehabilitate the Waffen-SS (which had been declared a criminal organization per se) as a brave, multi-national force defending European values, just like any other Western army. From the high official pronouncements throughout the EU, the Ukrainian Armed Forces with its Waffen-SS legacy fights Russia for everything the West holds dear. Just as do the armed forces of the settler-colonial state in occupied Palestine. Ukraine is a victim, as are those who invaded Palestine and declared their conquest to be the Jewish state of Israel in 1948.

The campaigns waged to generate the “victims’ immunity” claimed by these regimes are atrocious. They both rely on a patent of racial superiority but unlike that of classical “white supremacy”, this racial superiority is based on alleged victimhood. They are not superior because of their virtue. Instead their superiority derives from the blanket assertion that all others are perpetrators, latent or active, against whom any measure can be justified as pre-emptive and therefore defensive. Every high official must and does use all the power at his or her disposal to defend the aggression by these self-identified victims.

Self-identification has become a primary instrument of psychological manipulation and warfare. The self-identified not only asserts a whim or personal predilection. He also demands that he is the sole judge of what evidence may be used to support or refute his claims. As a strategy however it must have a mass component. One person alone cannot maintain self-identification against a crowd or against a group with a genuinely recognizable set of features that can be generally classified. Therefore, it is necessary to spread the dogma of self-identification. This is a corollary to the conversion of the individual consumer into a consumed individual, the emergent consciousness strategy of what for want of a better term can be called finance capitalism. That finance capitalism it has been argued above is the contemporary formation of the ruling class, the 0.01%.

If we are experiencing the climax of a massive reaction in the West, one that has intensified since the French Revolution, then the process by which the latest manifestation of feudal empire, presents us with a kind of global feudalism. The doctrines promulgated for this restoration are studied and preached from such altitudes as the Swiss Alps. However, we can understand them better if we examine the history of the West’s paramount merger of power and consciousness, the Latin Church.

Before the Holocaust, the spectre of anti-Semitism (a misnomer if one is talking about European Jews) was first raised by the Latin Church. It is the Latin Church that created the legal and ecclesiastical regime by which Jews in Europe were subjected to special laws of all sorts. Practically speaking however the most intense application of these laws and the persecution they entailed coincided with the wars of Aragon (Spain) to conquer then entire Iberian peninsula and Christianize it. That meant expelling Muslims and Jews who together inhabited the southern half of the peninsula. These wars were called the “Reconquista” so as to imply that Christian Aragon was recovering for the Faith what had been lost to the infidels. Missing from that story is the fact that North Africa — from Egypt to Morocco and Iberia had indeed been “Christian” to the extent that the great landowners who ruled the region self-identified as Christians. It was the systematic oppression of the masses in these “Christian” territories that led them to join the armies of Islam to drive this Christian elite out of the country and restore decent living conditions for them. Islam was an organized force for liberation that would scarcely have taken root had the region’s Christians been civilized people with a sense of justice and equity. When Augustine of Hippo (in North Africa) went to Rome it was as a leader of a putsch driven by this Christian landowning class. Rome was established as the capital of a schismatic church, one that fundamentally contradicted the ecclesiastical plurality that had been characteristic of Christianity with its several centres, e.g. in Antioch and Constantinople. Augustine’s Roman Catholicism claimed to be the sole centre of Christianity. Moreover, it usurped the de-centralized episcopate and installed an absolutist monarchy. The papacy with its cardinalate rejected the Greek elements of Christianity and adopted a form of government that more closely resembled the Talmudic rabbinate. It was therefore hardly surprising that the Pentateuch would be merged with the New Testament and that later the idea of “Judeo-Christian” culture would emerge. If one examines closely the economic policies and political enforcement measures that evolved as pontifical power grew, the papal persecution of Christians who maintained belief in the real poverty preached by Jesus in the New Testament since this was entirely at odds with the class that had established the Latin rite. It was entirely at odds with the beliefs of the great landowners that Islam had driven from North Africa and Iberia. (Islam once extended all the way to the southern provinces of France.) Just as Christianity had grown out of opposition to the Jewish elite’s abuse of the masses, Islam gained its foothold in the most Christian part of the world because the Christian elite so viciously oppressed the common people (Deschner, Die Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums). The Roman support for Aragon was not for the restoration of Christianity of the common man. Those Christians continued to live along with Muslims and ordinary Jews throughout the two caliphates. The House of Aragon was fighting holy class war as the Latin Church has from its inception. The peoples who have traditionally inhabited North Africa were mainly nomadic except in those areas like the Nile Valley where intensive agriculture was established or in the cities from which crafts and trade were practiced. To call a group of people a diaspora—in some elevated, sacrificial form—is another incomplete depiction of population movements in the African continent. Christians and Muslims practicing their religion in other parts of the world are not considered a diaspora, although both religions originate in the same place as the religion of Jews. The myth of the Reconquista and the suppression of Judaism in Spain are facets of political expansion and territorial conquest, not serial universal anti-Semitism. The myth of the unique diaspora is ahistorical since it actually negates any other genuinely diasporic population, e.g., Africans transported throughout the world by slave traders.

Henry Lea, in his multi-volume studies of the Inquisition, made it very clear that the driving force behind the Holy and Universal Inquisition was economic enrichment and not matters of faith or heresy. Alexander Herculano, in his history of the Inquisition in Portugal, supplies ample evidence that the question of whether one was considered a “Jew” in the meaning of the act depended on how much one was able and willing to pay to the Portuguese crown or the Roman pontiff for protection. Certainly poor people were persecuted too. However, exile of Jews or heretics also provided the Portuguese crown with bonded labour for its colonial enterprises while selectively manipulating the domestic labour market, as well as for political ends. The historical monochrome by which the history of Europe is reduced to the persecution of Jews, creating an original sin for all Christians for which they must atone, is a serious distortion of a far more complex fabric of class conflict and struggles for power among the ruling elite.

This supposed blind and irrational persecution of Jews in Europe—there is no evidence to prove it occurred anywhere else—cannot be sustained once the political-economic conditions are seriously examined. What can be said is that ecclesiastical operations and canon law were applied in the same way that anti-communist legislation and repression have been applied—and for the same reasons. At the same time, the realities of political-economic confrontation between merchants, landowners, clergy and military require a sober appraisal of the intra-class conflicts waged just as perniciously and dishonestly then as today. During the US war against Vietnam, the unwritten rule was “if you do not do what you are told (by the Saigon government or any of its officers and beneficiaries), then you are VC (a communist). If you were declared VC, you were an outlaw. (Valentine, The Phoenix Program, 1990) So if someone unaware of this or disregarding this were to examine the National Police records of the era they would no doubt find innumerable “communists”, with no way of knowing if those in the files were communists in fact. Communists have not been able to attain universal victim status, even though the Nazis killed communists before they even thought of killing Jews.

Yet we still have to consider the question: how did this universal Jewish victimhood become established as a dogma in the West? Naturally it is helpful to consider who is served by it. Clearly it is not only Jews who profit from this status. It has been a source of unending contention whether the benefits that accrue to the settler-colonial state are primary or incidental to the institution of Jewish victimhood. I would argue that Jewish victimhood is not even primarily a benefit enjoyed by the regime in Tel Aviv. Finkelstein has shown how it benefits the organized Jewish elite as a running extortion racket. However, as I have tried to show above, that extortion racket is just one operation in a web of activity driven by the 0.01%, those nameable and unnamed who presently own and operate the world’s drug, weapons, money-laundering, and primary resource cartels. However, more than that the concept of Jewish victimhood stands really for class victimhood. The ruling class itself, from the moment it adopted the Latin rite, has endeavoured to present itself as the victims for whom salvation is intended. Jesus did not die to save the poor. He died to save the rich. That is the literal reading of the Passion and it is the only one that makes sense. Given that the Vulgate is largely a forgery over the ages, it is no wonder that the central document upon which Christianity is supposedly based was prohibited to the masses of the faithful upon pain of death until the Reformation. (Another interpretation of the Reformation is beyond the scope of this discussion.) The Roman Church has devoted centuries of effort proving that poverty and damnation are the wages of sin and that the poor deserve their lot. Every attempt, including the last major effort in Latin American liberation theology, to change this dogma and practice has been viciously suppressed by the hierarchy. The first pontiff to retire rather than die in office (Joseph Ratzinger, a child of the Hitler Youth and the close cooperation between the Vatican and the NSDAP) was the leader of that most recent wave of purges.

The portion of the world’s population with the most relative wealth to plunder is still concentrated in North America and Western Europe. They have long ceased to pay their tithes or even go to mass or prayers. The Latin Church and its semi-autonomous Protestant sisters are sustained mainly by the unaccounted wealth accumulated in the past or state subsidies. Although the current pontiff still enjoys the professional media attention and due respect among the faithful in all the poor and populous nations, there is no growth potential where there is still cash to be had. The short-lived Soviet Union and with it the Red threat also lost its salvific attraction. Only the professional killers and sadists were willing to drive through desert sands in search of Muslims for the sake of their souls. A return to the 11th century requires the kind of crusades that enriched the Church then. Quo vadis?

The ruling elite has always been cutthroat and vicious. A major function of their charity is to pay for a better image or assuage opposition when it is impossible or inopportune to exterminate it. So we are constantly served performances that suggest that either there is no ruling elite with shared interests and purposes or that that elite is incapable of overcoming its internal conflicts, thus depriving it of the vast plenitude of power needed to rule us. In fact, the ruling elite constitutes a critical mass of individuals who are born and die but who also reproduce. They reproduce organically like other mammals. However, they also create structures capable of cultivating future members and preserving the class cohesion needed to dominate the rest of us who have no class cohesion, despite regular efforts to instil it. While tyrannicide has its obvious attractions, the hydra-like character of class power means that no sooner is a Rockefeller, Gates or Soros gone, either naturally or assisted, someone else grows into his place. Like the birth and death cycle to which we are all subject, the struggle to deal with the ruling class never ends. There is no salvific moment in which the heavens open to deliver a shower of love, happiness and justice. What class cohesion offers the members of the ruling class are simplifications. With few exceptions if they have to choose between us or one of their own, we will lose. And yet they are also biological individuals whose personal tastes and styles need to be satisfied. The stronger eat the weaker in their homes too.

That means there are different goals for different members of the ruling class. They harmonize to the extent that class interests prevail. However, the impact of their actions is rarely uniform. The problem is generally solved by betting on both sides of any risk. Thus, the hedge fund is the most natural form for the retrograde process of neo-feudalism. When someone like Klaus Schwab repeats the dogma, “you will own nothing and be happy”, he is as ambiguous as a true oracle can be. The hedge fund “owns” nothing and therefore has no risks of loss, but controls all the essential cash flow and therefore can be happy. The rest of us own nothing because all forms of material title are to be converted to various types of lease or rental agreements where possession is merely a transitional status but payment a permanent obligation. Feudalism in the 11th century was not a popularly chosen societal form. It was the sanctification of theft and extortion, which the Roman pontiff tried to monopolize. It was sustained by the active policing of the feudal gangs led by barons and princes. It was justified by the ideological propaganda operations of the clergy in the Latin Church. Sometimes the priest/ missionary came first and then the armed brigands, sometimes the brigands came first. In the end the indigenous culture was absorbed or destroyed and the people subjugated. Taking their land and whatever religions they may have had were both necessary if the theft was to remain permanent.

Since the defeat of the Soviet Union, after the decolonization process had been stopped dead in its tracks, the crusade to steal back everything that had been accumulated by ordinary people over the past two centuries began in earnest. There is no longer a cohesive ecclesiastical instrument and sufficient blind faith in traditional modes of belief. Ironically the traditional modes of belief have become a threat to those charged with organizing the restoration. Whether in the Orthodox Church or the conservative Latin congregations, the ruling class finds resistance built around preservation of family and old-fashioned morality. It is no wonder then that these traditional religious communities are under attack from the armed propaganda gangs of Wokism and transhumanism. These ideologies were developed from what could be called cultural reverse engineering.

When the real social movements were decapitated, they were only partially destroyed. Instead, academically trained cadres were promoted to replace the dead or neutralized activists. They brought with them synthetic ideologies that were made by a kind of recombinant intellectual process, like gene editing. The basic liberation language was dismantled and the dangerous parts replaced with narcissistic code. Self-identification became an individual choice not the recognition of one’s consciousness in a community of real human beings sharing the same material and spiritual conditions. The identity itself becomes the consumable product. In order for this identity to be fully commodified it also had to “perform” like a commodity, i.e. subject to unlimited power of the market. Previously the dissatisfaction or fear induced by the propaganda apparatus was to be satisfied through purchase and consumption of goods and services. Since the body itself—the consumer—is that which is to be consumed a contradiction arises. This contradiction has to be expressed in some material threat or fear. Thus, Wokism achieves its insidious purpose by turning the “woke” person into an individual victim. The model for this chimeric victimhood is the universal Jewish victimhood fuelled by the Holocaust story machine. The total victim is threatened and persecuted by everything and by everyone who does not actively nurture the narcissism upon which this permanent immanent victimhood is based. That is the meaning of all this rhetoric about “safe environments”, “affirming care” and the hysterical chanting of whatever political slogans have been conceived to fuel the internal threat machine. One wears senseless face masks, accepts toxic injections, applauds the injuries to female athletes by male pugilists in skirts, and cheers institutional child abuse and medical mutilation as “affirming care”, while engaged in constant panic reactions to the latest bogus CO2 or pandemic scare. The woke person has established the right to be protected from unpleasant or dissenting utterances or experiences, especially if they could erode the carefully engineered edifice of narcissism. Liberty has been replaced by libertinism. Unwittingly – for most—they are adopting the archaic entertainments of the ruling class, offered as a sensuous reward for all the material well being they will surrender as a result of toxic substances or poisonous propaganda. The traditionalists are attacked for rejecting those poisons and because they support everything these new narcissists have been taught to despise. The woke are constantly threatened by the traditionalists who deprive them of their “safe environment”. On the other hand this gives them another opportunity to exercise victimhood.

By now the social management strategy ought to be clear. Whereas the medieval crusades offered the poor salvation if they would take the cross and die to conquer the Holy Land, the Woke faith is based on salvation offered to those who take the cross and crucify themselves, surrendering everything to those who not only have taken the Holy Land but are taking everyone else’s land too.

In order to place the present conflict, most visible in the radical expansion of the mass murder perpetrated by the settler-colonial regime in Palestine as I write, in cultural historical context, I have argued that it is entirely legitimate to deduce the aims of an action, like a war, from the consequences of that action. In fact, such a studied conclusion is the only type of assessment we can ever make since the past is irretrievable. The character of any conclusion is inseparable from the kind of questions that are asked and the actions contemplated depending on the response to those questions. There is a significant relationship between the organized, sustained mass murder by the Tel Aviv regime and wider social-political-economic aims. Naturally there are inconsistencies and deficits in the information, which, were, they resolved, might permit more precise prediction of what can be found in the near or long-term future.  Yet there is a preponderance of consistency between the war waged in Palestine and the aims of those supporting the war in Ukraine against Russia. This consistency can be found on the one hand by examining the facts. On the other hand it can be found by recognising the “overlapping directorates” at work.

Were the war waged to create Greater Israel the project of a fanatical sect in Tel Aviv, it would be apparent that such mild measures as removing the offending persons to another place, dead or alive, might suffice at least to diffuse the situation. But there is more at stake. Even though Arthur Koestler, who was no enemy of the settler-colonial regime, has been challenged on many points, his The Thirteenth Tribe (1976), draws conclusions from the historical conversion of the Khazars (a people who inhabited the much of the area of today’s Eastern Ukraine) to Judaism. The Soviet era, Russian historian, geographer and ethnologist, Lev Gumilev called it “chimeric”.  By that he meant that a parasitical relationship. He argued that a fanatical Jewish sect, the Radhanites, essentially infiltrated the Khazar ruling class and converted them by decree to Rabbinical Judaism. This turned Khazaria into a “merchant octopus” which extended its commercial power both to the East and West. The power they enjoyed straddled the East-West land routes of international trade at the time. This empire collapsed in 965 after wars with Kieven Rus. If there was any diaspora it was not dispersal from the grounds of a mythical Solomon’s temple but the real dispersal of an empire in Central Eurasia (Guyénot, 2022, From Yahweh to Zion, 2018).

When Benjamin Netanyahu told the UN General Assembly that his regime was going to join with its partners to create some channel parallel to China’s new Silk Road and BRI, for which Iran had to be neutralized, could he have meant a restoration of the Khazar Empire and not just the expansion of the settler-colonial regime to the territories Kermit Roosevelt identified as the regime’s ambitions in 1948? In A Jewish State (1904), Theodor Herzl emphasized that Zionism aimed to create what in essence was a commercial empire not unlike Rhodes British South Africa Company (originally seeking to conquer from the Cape to Cairo), religion was the pretext but not the aim. (In fact, contrary to mass media depictions, the pious Jew has traditionally been viewed as a threat to the Zionist colonial project.) Could the man in Kiev who said once that he saw the Tel Aviv regime as a model for Ukraine have been uttering a vision intuitively or instructively underlying the verbosity between bomb explosions in occupied Palestine? Did he mean that Russians in the Donbass were “his Palestinians”? Tel Aviv officials were once routinely cited as telling Americans that the Palestinians are “our Indian problem”.

If we imagine that the war aims are not those declared but quite different ones, then a cultural historical examination might offer another comprehensive interpretation. Namely, the class of people who really own important stuff, like the mass media, the oil channels, the money supply, are closely connected in every way. In a world that has seen the return of manufacturing and much of the world’s productive economy return to Asia, while the West has been de-industrialized and its population reduced to varying degrees of indebtedness and penury, why would not those owners, the great captains of finance capital, see their future power as the foot on the hoses that China and Russia would want between their productive economies and those countries where there is a demand for that output? Wouldn’t it be practical to be the troll at the bridge charging everyone to go across? Isn’t this kind of business something for specialists, like the one banks control? It should not be forgotten that while the outcome of the war with Russia remains uncertain, for many in the West forced to take one of the COVID injections it is their personal future that is uncertain.

Whether this mass murder eliminates enough or all of the Palestinians the Tel Aviv regime has been trying to destroy for the past century, the flow of refugees of all sorts from this region has been uninterrupted since the US launched its first assault on Iraq in 1991. The secret recruitment of mercenary terrorists under cover of religious radicalism has also continued unchecked since Zbigniew Brzezinski conceived the terrorist war in Afghanistan at the end of the 1970s.  Thus, the IMO will be assured of a continuous flow of displaced persons. These displaced persons are the true “human shields” behind which organized crime and state terrorism are waged. The war against Russia or China, just as Orwell’s 1984 described is first and foremost a war against the civilian populations of the world. These they will transfer to wherever labour is needed at the expense of the indigenous populations where these refugees are injected. As the indigenous of the Ukraine, Middle East and other attractive zones for exploitation are evacuated or eliminated, the underlying land and resources are confiscated by those who have been funding the wars and the migration in the first place. As I have argued elsewhere, global cash flow is to be matched by globally managed human trafficking. These are realities. This business is being conducted in just this manner. Does it mean that the intent of the actions is to create this system of extraction flows? That is the wrong question. We cannot change intent. What we can change is action and the kinds of consequences agreed by the righteous to be inimical to the welfare of real human beings. It helps if we have a grasp of the enormous cultural historical context in which the assessments must be made and courses of response found.

The same organized criminality that formed the financial and managerial base of the world’s biggest propaganda industry shares power with those who build the weapons of mass depopulation, i.e., the guns and pharmaceuticals sectors. Needless to say interlocking directorates and socialization through exclusive institutions from birth until bodily demise instill the shared values that lead Schwab to preach without the least embarrassment that the World (as property of the elite for whom he speaks) is threatened by the rest of us. When the prelates of the World Economic Forum preach that the “Planet” must be saved, what they really mean is that their world is a victim of popular persecution. By calling this feigned victimhood the threat to the Planet, the mass of ordinary inhabitants is implicated, in fact, vociferously accused, of destroying their world. Their answer to this threat is to destroy us. However, it is more efficient if we can be persuaded to destroy ourselves. So we are commanded to self-identify as threats to “the Planet”. Those who see the Planet as their property also take George Carlin seriously. “The Planet is not going anywhere, we are…” The Zionist war against Palestinians is the ostentatious crucifixion that exemplifies unambiguously the depth of viciousness with which the universal victims represented on Swiss ski slopes and spas wage class war. The evil of communism was used to deny genuine independence and self-government to millions in Africa, East Asia and Latin America. Now the evil of carbon dioxide, a gas essential for human life as well as plant life on Earth as a pretext for continuing to deny and obstruct human development in all those same countries. Their populations are excessive and can only be supplied with energy and food at the expense of “the Planet”—i.e. those victims represented by the annual councils in Davos (and the less publicized or secret meetings). Morse Peckham wrote, “Man does not live by bread alone, but mainly by platitudes.” Victimhood is a part of the rhetoric of power. It has to be repeated in every conceivable form as a means of controlling the range of mass behaviour. The ideology of victimhood does not veil the terrorism and mass murder in Palestine perpetrated by the Tel Aviv regime. Instead it sanctifies it, converts it into a holy sacrifice. It is the logical extension of the pectoral cross worn by the Roman pontiff and other prelates who preached the original crusades against the inhabitants of the critical interface between the centre of the world economy and population and the real victims of Western tyranny in Africa.

The Portuguese and Spanish were the first of the barbarian kingdoms that went to sea to circumvent the bottleneck of the Middle East and the land routes linking a sparsely populated peninsula of the Eurasian continent, impoverished and oppressed by its feudal lords, temporal and spiritual. The recovery of China and the core of human population have meant that the seas are no longer the only channels of communications among the peoples of the world. Captain Mahan’s (The Influence of Sea Power upon History, 1890) doctrine is now seriously challenged by the BRI, which could easily link China to Africa as it once was before the Portuguese pirate fleets disrupted the Indian Ocean trade five centuries ago (Gunder Frank, ReOrient: Global Economy in the Asian Age, 1998). This strategic transformation cannot be blocked by direct confrontation; only by annihilation (atomic war) or perpetual war waged by the masters of espionage, covert action, and psychological warfare, in the service of the oligarchic cult of finance capital in the West and their vassals throughout the world. Armed propaganda is the tradition of the Church militant and its descendants in London, Brussels, and New York. The success of the COVID campaign in paralysing the world’s commerce demonstrates the power still held by that 0.01%. This war has only really begun.

T.P. Wilkinson, Dr. rer. pol. writes, teaches History and English, directs theatre and coaches cricket between the cradles of Heine and Saramago. He is author of Unbecoming American: A War Memoir and also Church Clothes, Land, Mission and the End of Apartheid in South Africa. Read other articles by T.P..