Deep Politics Forum

What's interesting here is that Churchill (correctly) believed that bombing would get the general public behind the war, not against it. Even to the point of secretly beginning air attacks on German civilian targets during the so called 'quiet war', so that natural retaliation would appear as outright Nazi aggression and cause outrage. There's still a complete lack of awareness in the UK about the extent of German civilian casualties and how ours are, by comparison, small-fry.

Not defending Hitler there, or intending to diminish people who did suffer here. Just commenting on how mendacious and oblivious to public safety the ruling classes are and were.

Matthew Hewitt Wrote:What's interesting here is that Churchill (correctly) believed that bombing would get the general public behind the war, not against it. Even to the point of secretly beginning air attacks on German civilian targets during the so called 'quiet war', so that natural retaliation would appear as outright Nazi aggression and cause outrage. There's still a complete lack of awareness in the UK about the extent of German civilian casualties and how ours are, by comparison, small-fry.

Not defending Hitler there, or intending to diminish people who did suffer here. Just commenting on how mendacious and oblivious to public safety the ruling classes are and were.

One, or a very small number of Luftwaffe bombers seem to have dropped their loads on London by genuine error (never read anything to suggest otherwise) and very much against Hitler's orders. Churchill responded by throwing something like 70 Brit bombers at Berlin. Hitler retaliated, and the Luftwaffe stopped bombing Fighter Command fields, and started the Blitz, which seems to have been what Churchill wanted, the 'theory' being that Fighter Command were on the back foot due to GAF (German air force) attacks, but as I gather it, just one field was out of action for 24hrs.

Hajo Hermann was involved in a raid against industry on the Tyne; houses were hit, and he had to answer to Hitler in person for the screw-up.

Michael Barwell Wrote:

Matthew Hewitt Wrote:What's interesting here is that Churchill (correctly) believed that bombing would get the general public behind the war, not against it. Even to the point of secretly beginning air attacks on German civilian targets during the so called 'quiet war', so that natural retaliation would appear as outright Nazi aggression and cause outrage. There's still a complete lack of awareness in the UK about the extent of German civilian casualties and how ours are, by comparison, small-fry.

Not defending Hitler there, or intending to diminish people who did suffer here. Just commenting on how mendacious and oblivious to public safety the ruling classes are and were.

One, or a very small number of Luftwaffe bombers seem to have dropped their loads on London by genuine error (never read anything to suggest otherwise) and very much against Hitler's orders. Churchill responded by throwing something like 70 Brit bombers at Berlin. Hitler retaliated, and the Luftwaffe stopped bombing Fighter Command fields, and started the Blitz, which seems to have been what Churchill wanted, the 'theory' being that Fighter Command were on the back foot due to GAF (German air force) attacks, but as I gather it, just one field was out of action for 24hrs.

Hajo Hermann was involved in a raid against industry on the Tyne; houses were hit, and he had to answer to Hitler in person for the screw-up.

That wasn't idle speculation on my part, I'm basing it on war cabinet minutes and witness statements.

Tomgram: Alfred McCoy, Washington's Great Game and Why It's Failing

Posted by Alfred McCoy at 4:30pm, June 7, 2015.

http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176007/

It might have been the most influential single sentence of that era: "In these circumstances it is clear that the main element of any United States policy toward the Soviet Union must be that of long-term, patient but firm and vigilant containment of Russian expansive tendencies." And it originated in an 8,000 word telegram -- yes, in those days, unbelievably enough, there was no email, no Internet, no Snapchat, no Facebook -- sent back to Washington in February 1946 by George F. Kennan, the U.S. chargé d'affaires in Moscow, at a moment when the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union was just gaining traction.

The next year, a reworked version of Kennan's "Long Telegram" with that sentence would be published as "The Sources of Soviet Conduct" in the prestigious magazine Foreign Affairs under the pseudonym "Mr. X" (though it was common knowledge in Washington who had written it). From that moment on, "containment" of what, until the Sino-Soviet split, was called the Soviet bloc, would be Washington's signature foreign and military policy of the era. The idea was to ring the Soviet Union and China with bases and then militarily, economically, and diplomatically hem in a gaggle of communist states from Hungary and Czechoslovakia in Eastern Europe to North Korea on the Pacific and from Siberia south to the Central Asian SSRs of the Soviet Union. In other words, much of the Eurasian land mass.

And then, when the Berlin Wall came down in 1989 and the Soviet Union collapsed and disappeared from the face of the Earth in 1991, that was that. Along with the former Communist world, containment as policy was dispatched to the dustbin of history -- or was it? Strangely enough, as historian and TomDispatch regular Alfred McCoy points out today, if you look at Washington's military bases (which, if anything, were expanded in the post-Soviet era), its conflicts, and the focus of its foreign policy, American attempts to "contain" the heartlands of Eurasia, especially Russia and China, have never ended. Given the passage of almost a quarter of a century since the Cold War era, the map of those garrisons and the conflicts that go with them still looks eerily familiar.

And here's an even stranger thing, as McCoy again makes clear: the U.S. was not the first imperial power to put its energy into "containing" Eurasia. In 1945, when World War II ended with Great Britain and its empire hollowed out and in a state of exhaustion, the U.S. inherited a no-name version of "containment" policy from the British before Kennan even thought to use the term. It's odd to realize that "containment" as imperial policy has a history that is now, in a sense, more than two centuries old. It's strange enough, in fact, that McCoy turns his attention to the subject to help make sense of the edgy U.S.-China relationship for the rest of this century. Tom

The Geopolitics of American Global Decline: Washington Versus China in the Twenty-First Century

By Alfred W. McCoy

Quote:For even the greatest of empires, geography is often destiny. You wouldn't know it in Washington, though. America's political, national security, and foreign policy elites continue to ignore the basics of geopolitics that have shaped the fate of world empires for the past 500 years. Consequently, they have missed the significance of the rapid global changes in Eurasia that are in the process of undermining the grand strategy for world dominion that Washington has pursued these past seven decades.

A glance at what passes for insider "wisdom" in Washington these days reveals a worldview of stunning insularity. Take Harvard political scientist Joseph Nye, Jr., known for his concept of "soft power," as an example. Offering a simple list of ways in which he believes U.S. military, economic, and cultural power remains singular and superior, he recently argued that there was no force, internal or global, capable of eclipsing America's future as the world's premier power.

For those pointing to Beijing's surging economy and proclaiming this "the Chinese century," Nye offered up a roster of negatives: China's per capita income "will take decades to catch up (if ever)" with America's; it has myopically "focused its policies primarily on its region"; and it has "not developed any significant capabilities for global force projection." Above all, Nye claimed, China suffers "geopolitical disadvantages in the internal Asian balance of power, compared to America."

Or put it this way (and in this Nye is typical of a whole world of Washington thinking): with more allies, ships, fighters, missiles, money, patents, and blockbuster movies than any other power, Washington wins hands down.

If Professor Nye paints power by the numbers, former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger's latest tome, modestly titled World Order and hailed in reviews as nothing less than a revelation, adopts a Nietzschean perspective. The ageless Kissinger portrays global politics as plastic and so highly susceptible to shaping by great leaders with a will to power. By this measure, in the tradition of master European diplomats Charles de Talleyrand and Prince Metternich, President Theodore Roosevelt was a bold visionary who launched "an American role in managing the Asia-Pacific equilibrium." On the other hand, Woodrow Wilson's idealistic dream of national self-determination rendered him geopolitically inept and Franklin Roosevelt was blind to Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin's steely "global strategy." Harry Truman, in contrast, overcame national ambivalence to commit "America to the shaping of a new international order," a policy wisely followed by the next 12 presidents.

Among the most "courageous" of them, Kissinger insists, was that leader of "courage, dignity, and conviction," George W. Bush, whose resolute bid for the "transformation of Iraq from among the Middle East's most repressive states to a multiparty democracy" would have succeeded, had it not been for the "ruthless" subversion of his work by Syria and Iran. In such a view, geopolitics has no place; only the bold vision of "statesmen" and kings really matters.

And perhaps that's a comforting perspective in Washington at a moment when America's hegemony is visibly crumbling amid a tectonic shift in global power.

With Washington's anointed seers strikingly obtuse on the subject of geopolitical power, perhaps it's time to get back to basics. That means returning to the foundational text of modern geopolitics, which remains an indispensible guide even though it was published in an obscure British geography journal well over a century ago.

Sir Halford Invents Geopolitics

On a cold London evening in January 1904, Sir Halford Mackinder, the director of the London School of Economics, "entranced" an audience at the Royal Geographical Society on Savile Row with a paper boldly titled "The Geographical Pivot of History." This presentation evinced, said the society's president, "a brilliancy of description... we have seldom had equaled in this room."

Mackinder argued that the future of global power lay not, as most British then imagined, in controlling the global sea lanes, but in controlling a vast land mass he called "Euro-Asia." By turning the globe away from America to place central Asia at the planet's epicenter, and then tilting the Earth's axis northward just a bit beyond Mercator's equatorial projection, Mackinder redrew and thus reconceptualized the world map.

His new map showed Africa, Asia, and Europe not as three separate continents, but as a unitary land mass, a veritable "world island." Its broad, deep "heartland" -- 4,000 miles from the Persian Gulf to the Siberian Sea -- was so enormous that it could only be controlled from its "rimlands" in Eastern Europe or what he called its maritime "marginal" in the surrounding seas.

Mackinder's Concept of the World Island, From The Geographical Journal (1904)

The "discovery of the Cape road to the Indies" in the sixteenth century, Mackinder wrote, "endowed Christendom with the widest possible mobility of power... wrapping her influence round the Euro-Asiatic land-power which had hitherto threatened her very existence." This greater mobility, he later explained, gave Europe's seamen "superiority for some four centuries over the landsmen of Africa and Asia."

Yet the "heartland" of this vast landmass, a "pivot area" stretching from the Persian Gulf to China's Yangtze River, remained nothing less than the Archimedean fulcrum for future world power. "Who rules the Heartland commands the World-Island," went Mackinder's later summary of the situation. "Who rules the World-Island commands the world." Beyond the vast mass of that world island, which made up nearly 60% of the Earth's land area, lay a less consequential hemisphere covered with broad oceans and a few outlying "smaller islands." He meant, of course, Australia and the Americas.

For an earlier generation, the opening of the Suez Canal and the advent of steam shipping had "increased the mobility of sea-power [relative] to land power." But future railways could "work the greater wonder in the steppe," Mackinder claimed, undercutting the cost of sea transport and shifting the locus of geopolitical power inland. In the fullness of time, the "pivot state" of Russia might, in alliance with another power like Germany, expand "over the marginal lands of Euro-Asia," allowing "the use of vast continental resources for fleet-building, and the empire of the world would be in sight."

For the next two hours, as he read through a text thick with the convoluted syntax and classical references expected of a former Oxford don, his audience knew that they were privy to something extraordinary. Several stayed after to offer extended commentaries. For instance, the renowned military analyst Spenser Wilkinson, the first to hold a chair in military history at Oxford, pronounced himself unconvinced about "the modern expansion of Russia," insisting that British and Japanese naval power would continue the historic function of holding "the balance between the divided forces... on the continental area."

Pressed by his learned listeners to consider other facts or factors, including "air as a means of locomotion," Mackinder responded: "My aim is not to predict a great future for this or that country, but to make a geographical formula into which you could fit any political balance." Instead of specific events, Mackinder was reaching for a general theory about the causal connection between geography and global power. "The future of the world," he insisted, "depends on the maintenance of [a] balance of power" between sea powers such as Britain or Japan operating from the maritime marginal and "the expansive internal forces" within the Euro-Asian heartland they were intent on containing.

Not only did Mackinder give voice to a worldview that would influence Britain's foreign policy for several decades, but he had, in that moment, created the modern science of "geopolitics" -- the study of how geography can, under certain circumstances, shape the destiny of whole peoples, nations, and empires.

That night in London was, of course, more than a long time ago. It was another age. England was still mourning the death of Queen Victoria. Teddy Roosevelt was president. Henry Ford had just opened a small auto plant in Detroit to make his Model-A, an automobile with a top speed of 28 miles per hour. Only a month earlier, the Wright brothers' "Flyer" had taken to the air for the first time -- 120 feet of air, to be exact.

Yet, for the next 110 years, Sir Halford Mackinder's words would offer a prism of exceptional precision when it came to understanding the often obscure geopolitics driving the world's major conflicts -- two world wars, a Cold War, America's Asian wars (Korea and Vietnam), two Persian Gulf wars, and even the endless pacification of Afghanistan. The question today is: How can Sir Halford help us understand not only centuries past, but the half-century still to come?

Britannia Rules the Waves

In the age of sea power that lasted just over 400 years -- from 1602 to the Washington Disarmament Conference of 1922 -- the great powers competed to control the Eurasian world island via the surrounding sea lanes that stretched for 15,000 miles from London to Tokyo. The instrument of power was, of course, the ship -- first men-o'-war, then battleships, submarines, and aircraft carriers. While land armies slogged through the mud of Manchuria or France in battles with mind-numbing casualties, imperial navies skimmed over the seas, maneuvering for the control of whole coasts and continents.

At the peak of its imperial power circa 1900, Great Britain ruled the waves with a fleet of 300 capital ships and 30 naval bastions, bases that ringed the world island from the North Atlantic at Scapa Flow through the Mediterranean at Malta and Suez to Bombay, Singapore, and Hong Kong. Just as the Roman Empire enclosed the Mediterranean, making it Mare Nostrum ("Our Sea"), British power would make the Indian Ocean its own "closed sea," securing its flanks with army forces on India's Northwest Frontier and barring both Persians and Ottomans from building naval bases on the Persian Gulf.

By that maneuver, Britain also secured control over Arabia and Mesopotamia, strategic terrain that Mackinder had termed "the passage-land from Europe to the Indies" and the gateway to the world island's "heartland." From this geopolitical perspective, the nineteenth century was, at heart, a strategic rivalry, often called "the Great Game," between Russia "in command of nearly the whole of the Heartland... knocking at the landward gates of the Indies," and Britain "advancing inland from the sea gates of India to meet the menace from the northwest." In other words, Mackinder concluded, "the final Geographical Realities" of the modern age were sea power versus land power or "the World-Island and the Heartland."

Intense rivalries, first between England and France, then England and Germany, helped drive a relentless European naval arms race that raised the price of sea power to unsustainable levels. In 1805, Admiral Nelson's flagship, the HMS Victory, with its oaken hull weighing just 3,500 tons, sailed into the battle of Trafalgar against Napoleon's navy at nine knots, its 100 smooth-bore cannon firing 42-pound balls at a range of no more than 400 yards.

In 1906, just a century later, Britain launched the world's first modern battleship, the HMS Dreadnought, its foot-thick steel hull weighing 20,000 tons, its steam turbines allowing speeds of 21 knots, and its mechanized 12-inch guns rapid-firing 850-pound shells up to 12 miles. The cost for this leviathan was £1.8 million, equivalent to nearly $300 million today. Within a decade, half-a-dozen powers had emptied their treasuries to build whole fleets of these lethal, lavishly expensive battleships.

Thanks to a combination of technological superiority, global reach, and naval alliances with the U.S. and Japan, a Pax Britannica would last a full century, 1815 to 1914. In the end, however, this global system was marked by an accelerating naval arms race, volatile great-power diplomacy, and a bitter competition for overseas empire that imploded into the mindless slaughter of World War I, leaving 16 million dead by 1918.

Mackinder's Century

As the eminent imperial historian Paul Kennedy once observed, "the rest of the twentieth century bore witness to Mackinder's thesis," with two world wars fought over his "rimlands" running from Eastern Europe through the Middle East to East Asia. Indeed, World War I was, as Mackinder himself later observed, "a straight duel between land-power and sea-power." At war's end in 1918, the sea powers -- Britain, America, and Japan -- sent naval expeditions to Archangel, the Black Sea, and Siberia to contain Russia's revolution inside its "heartland."

Reflecting Mackinder's influence on geopolitical thinking in Germany, Adolf Hitler would risk his Reich in a misbegotten effort to capture the Russian heartland as Lebensraum, or living space, for his "master race." Sir Halford's work helped shape the ideas of German geographer Karl Haushofer, founder of the journal Zeitschrift für Geopolitik, proponent of the concept of Lebensraum, and adviser to Adolf Hitler and his deputy führer, Rudolf Hess. In 1942, the Führer dispatched a million men, 10,000 artillery pieces, and 500 tanks to breach the Volga River at Stalingrad. In the end, his forces suffered 850,000 wounded, killed, and captured in a vain attempt to break through the East European rimland into the world island's pivotal region.

A century after Mackinder's seminal treatise, another British scholar, imperial historian John Darwin, argued in his magisterial survey After Tamerlane that the United States had achieved its "colossal Imperium... on an unprecedented scale" in the wake of World War II by becoming the first power in history to control the strategic axial points "at both ends of Eurasia" (his rendering of Mackinder's "Euro-Asia"). With fears of Chinese and Russian expansion serving as the "catalyst for collaboration," the U.S. won imperial bastions in both Western Europe and Japan. With these axial points as anchors, Washington then built an arc of military bases that followed Britain's maritime template and were visibly meant to encircle the world island.

America's Axial Geopolitics

Having seized the axial ends of the world island from Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan in 1945, for the next 70 years the United States relied on ever-thickening layers of military power to contain China and Russia inside that Eurasian heartland. Stripped of its ideological foliage, Washington's grand strategy of Cold War-era anticommunist "containment" was little more than a process of imperial succession. A hollowed-out Britain was replaced astride the maritime "marginal," but the strategic realities remained essentially the same.

Indeed, in 1943, two years before World War II ended, an aging Mackinder published his last article, "The Round World and the Winning of the Peace," in the influential U.S. journal Foreign Affairs. In it, he reminded Americans aspiring to a "grand strategy" for an unprecedented version of planetary hegemony that even their "dream of a global air power" would not change geopolitical basics. "If the Soviet Union emerges from this war as conqueror of Germany," he warned, "she must rank as the greatest land power on the globe," controlling the "greatest natural fortress on earth."

When it came to the establishment of a new post-war Pax Americana, first and foundational for the containment of Soviet land power would be the U.S. Navy. Its fleets would come to surround the Eurasian continent, supplementing and then supplanting the British navy: the Sixth Fleet was based at Naples in 1946 for control of the Atlantic Ocean and the Mediterranean Sea; the Seventh Fleet at Subic Bay, Philippines, in 1947, for the Western Pacific; and the Fifth Fleet at Bahrain in the Persian Gulf since 1995.

Next, American diplomats added layers of encircling military alliances -- the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (1949), the Middle East Treaty Organization (1955), the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (1954), and the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty (1951).

By 1955, the U.S. also had a global network of 450 military bases in 36 countries aimed, in large part, at containing the Sino-Soviet bloc behind an Iron Curtain that coincided to a surprising degree with Mackinder's "rimlands" around the Eurasian landmass. By the Cold War's end in 1990, the encirclement of communist China and Russia required 700 overseas bases, an air force of 1,763 jet fighters, a vast nuclear arsenal, more than 1,000 ballistic missiles, and a navy of 600 ships, including 15 nuclear carrier battle groups -- all linked by the world's only global system of communications satellites.

As the fulcrum for Washington's strategic perimeter around the world island, the Persian Gulf region has for nearly 40 years been the site of constant American intervention, overt and covert. The 1979 revolution in Iran meant the loss of a keystone country in the arch of U.S. power around the Gulf and left Washington struggling to rebuild its presence in the region. To that end, it would simultaneously back Saddam Hussein's Iraq in its war against revolutionary Iran and arm the most extreme of the Afghan mujahedeen against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan.

It was in this context that Zbigniew Brzezinski, national security adviser to President Jimmy Carter, unleashed his strategy for the defeat of the Soviet Union with a sheer geopolitical agility still little understood even today. In 1979, Brzezinski, a déclassé Polish aristocrat uniquely attuned to his native continent's geopolitical realities, persuaded Carter to launch Operation Cyclone with massive funding that reached $500 million annually by the late 1980s. Its goal: to mobilize Muslim militants to attack the Soviet Union's soft Central Asian underbelly and drive a wedge of radical Islam deep into the Soviet heartland. It was to simultaneously inflict a demoralizing defeat on the Red Army in Afghanistan and cut Eastern Europe's "rimland" free from Moscow's orbit. "We didn't push the Russians to intervene [in Afghanistan]," Brzezinski said in 1998, explaining his geopolitical masterstroke in this Cold War edition of the Great Game, "but we knowingly increased the probability that they would... That secret operation was an excellent idea. Its effect was to draw the Russians into the Afghan trap."

Asked about this operation's legacy when it came to creating a militant Islam hostile to the U.S., Brzezinski, who studied and frequently cited Mackinder, was coolly unapologetic. "What is most important to the history of the world?" he asked. "The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some stirred-up Moslems or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the Cold War?"

Yet even America's stunning victory in the Cold War with the implosion of the Soviet Union would not transform the geopolitical fundamentals of the world island. As a result, after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, Washington's first foreign foray in the new era would involve an attempt to reestablish its dominant position in the Persian Gulf, using Saddam Hussein's occupation of Kuwait as a pretext.

In 2003, when the U.S. invaded Iraq, imperial historian Paul Kennedy returned to Mackinder's century-old treatise to explain this seemingly inexplicable misadventure. "Right now, with hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops in the Eurasian rimlands," Kennedy wrote in the Guardian, "it looks as if Washington is taking seriously Mackinder's injunction to ensure control of the geographical pivot of history.'" If we interpret these remarks expansively, the sudden proliferation of U.S. bases across Afghanistan and Iraq should be seen as yet another imperial bid for a pivotal position at the edge of the Eurasian heartland, akin to those old British colonial forts along India's Northwest Frontier.

In the ensuing years, Washington attempted to replace some of its ineffective boots on the ground with drones in the air. By 2011, the Air Force and the CIA had ringed the Eurasian landmass with 60 bases for its armada of drones. By then, its workhorse Reaper, armed with Hellfire missiles and GBU-30 bombs, had a range of 1,150 miles, which meant that from those bases it could strike targets almost anywhere in Africa and Asia.

Significantly, drone bases now dot the maritime margins around the world island -- from Sigonella, Sicily, to Icerlik, Turkey; Djibouti on the Red Sea; Qatar and Abu Dhabi on the Persian Gulf; the Seychelles Islands in the Indian Ocean; Jalalabad, Khost, Kandahar, and Shindand in Afghanistan; and in the Pacific, Zamboanga in the Philippines and Andersen Air Base on the island of Guam, among other places. To patrol this sweeping periphery, the Pentagon is spending $10 billion to build an armada of 99 Global Hawk drones equipped with high-resolution cameras capable of surveilling all terrain within a hundred-mile radius, electronic sensors that can sweep up communications, and efficient engines capable of 35 hours of continuous flight and a range of 8,700 miles.

China's Strategy

Washington's moves, in other words, represent something old, even if on a previously unimaginable scale. But the rise of China as the world's largest economy, inconceivable a century ago, represents something new and so threatens to overturn the maritime geopolitics that have shaped world power for the past 400 years. Instead of focusing purely on building a blue-water navy like the British or a global aerospace armada akin to America's, China is reaching deep within the world island in an attempt to thoroughly reshape the geopolitical fundamentals of global power. It is using a subtle strategy that has so far eluded Washington's power elites.

After decades of quiet preparation, Beijing has recently begun revealing its grand strategy for global power, move by careful move. Its two-step plan is designed to build a transcontinental infrastructure for the economic integration of the world island from within, while mobilizing military forces to surgically slice through Washington's encircling containment.

The initial step has involved a breathtaking project to put in place an infrastructure for the continent's economic integration. By laying down an elaborate and enormously expensive network of high-speed, high-volume railroads as well as oil and natural gas pipelines across the vast breadth of Eurasia, China may realize Mackinder's vision in a new way. For the first time in history, the rapid transcontinental movement of critical cargo -- oil, minerals, and manufactured goods -- will be possible on a massive scale, thereby potentially unifying that vast landmass into a single economic zone stretching 6,500 miles from Shanghai to Madrid. In this way, the leadership in Beijing hopes to shift the locus of geopolitical power away from the maritime periphery and deep into the continent's heartland.

"Trans-continental railways are now transmuting the conditions of land power," wrote Mackinder back in 1904 as the "precarious" single track of the Trans-Siberian Railway, the world's longest, reached across the continent for 5,700 miles from Moscow toward Vladivostok. "But the century will not be old before all Asia is covered with railways," he added. "The spaces within the Russian Empire and Mongolia are so vast, and their potentialities in... fuel and metals so incalculably great that a vast economic world, more or less apart, will there develop inaccessible to oceanic commerce."

Mackinder was a bit premature in his prediction. The Russian revolution of 1917, the Chinese revolution of 1949, and the subsequent 40 years of the Cold War slowed any real development for decades. In this way, the Euro-Asian "heartland" was denied economic growth and integration, thanks in part to artificial ideological barriers -- the Iron Curtain and then the Sino-Soviet split -- that stalled any infrastructure construction across the vast Eurasian land mass. No longer.

Only a few years after the Cold War ended, former National Security Adviser Brzezinski, by then a contrarian sharply critical of the global views of both Republican and Democratic policy elites, began raising warning flags about Washington's inept style of geopolitics. "Ever since the continents started interacting politically, some five hundred years ago," he wrote in 1998, essentially paraphrasing Mackinder, "Eurasia has been the center of world power. A power that dominates Eurasia' would control two of the world's three most advanced and economically productive regions... rendering the Western Hemisphere and Oceania geopolitically peripheral to the world's central continent."

While such a geopolitical logic has eluded Washington, it's been well understood in Beijing. Indeed, in the last decade China has launched the world's largest burst of infrastructure investment, already a trillion dollars and counting, since Washington started the U.S. Interstate Highway System back in the 1950s. The numbers for the rails and pipelines it's been building are mind numbing. Between 2007 and 2014, China criss-crossed its countryside with 9,000 miles of new high-speed rail, more than the rest of the world combined. The system now carries 2.5 million passengers daily at top speeds of 240 miles per hour. By the time the system is complete in 2030, it will have added up to 16,000 miles of high-speed track at a cost of $300 billion, linking all of China's major cities.

China-Central Asia Infrastructure Integrates the World Island

Simultaneously, China's leadership began collaborating with surrounding states on a massive project to integrate the country's national rail network into a transcontinental grid. Starting in 2008, the Germans and Russians joined with the Chinese in launching the "Eurasian Land Bridge." Two east-west routes, the old Trans-Siberian in the north and a new southern route along the ancient Silk Road through Kazakhstan are meant to bind all of Eurasia together. On the quicker southern route, containers of high-value manufactured goods, computers, and auto parts started travelling 6,700 miles from Leipzig, Germany, to Chongqing, China, in just 20 days, about half the 35 days such goods now take via ship.

In 2013, Deutsche Bahn AG (German Rail) began preparing a third route between Hamburg and Zhengzhou that has now cut travel time to just 15 days, while Kazakh Rail opened a Chongqing-Duisburg link with similar times. In October 2014, China announced plans for the construction of the world's longest high-speed rail line at a cost of $230 billion. According to plans, trains will traverse the 4,300 miles between Beijing and Moscow in just two days.

In addition, China is building two spur lines running southwest and due south toward the world island's maritime "marginal." In April, President Xi Jinping signed an agreement with Pakistan to spend $46 billion on a China-Pakistan Economic Corridor. Highway, rail links, and pipelines will stretch nearly 2,000 miles from Kashgar in Xinjiang, China's westernmost province, to a joint port facility at Gwadar, Pakistan, opened back in 2007. China has invested more than $200 billion in the building of this strategic port at Gwadar on the Arabian Sea, just 370 miles from the Persian Gulf. Starting in 2011, China also began extending its rail lines through Laos into Southeast Asia at an initial cost of $6.2 billion. In the end, a high-speed line is expected to take passengers and goods on a trip of just 10 hours from Kunming to Singapore.

In this same dynamic decade, China has constructed a comprehensive network of trans-continental gas and oil pipelines to import fuels from the whole of Eurasia for its population centers -- in the north, center, and southeast. In 2009, after a decade of construction, the state-owned China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC) opened the final stage of the Kazakhstan-China Oil Pipeline. It stretches 1,400 miles from the Caspian Sea to Xinjiang.

Simultaneously, CNPC collaborated with Turkmenistan to inaugurate the Central Asia-China gas pipeline. Running for 1,200 miles largely parallel to the Kazakhstan-China Oil Pipeline, it is the first to bring the region's natural gas to China. To bypass the Straits of Malacca controlled by the U.S Navy, CNPC opened a Sino-Myanmar pipeline in 2013 to carry both Middle Eastern oil and Burmese natural gas 1,500 miles from the Bay of Bengal to China's remote southwestern region. In May 2014, the company signed a $400 billion, 30-year deal with the privatized Russian energy giant Gazprom to deliver 38 billion cubic meters of natural gas annually by 2018 via a still-to-be-completed northern network of pipelines across Siberia and into Manchuria.

Sino-Myanmar Oil Pipeline Evades the U.S. Navy in the Straits of Malacca

Though massive, these projects are just part of an ongoing construction boom that, over the past five years, has woven a cat's cradle of oil and gas lines across Central Asia and south into Iran and Pakistan. The result will soon be an integrated inland energy infrastructure, including Russia's own vast network of pipelines, extending across the whole of Eurasia, from the Atlantic to the South China Sea.

To capitalize such staggering regional growth plans, in October 2014 Beijing announced the establishment of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank. China's leadership sees this institution as a future regional and, in the end, Eurasian alternative to the U.S.-dominated World Bank. So far, despite pressure from Washington not to join, 14 key countries, including close U.S. allies like Germany, Great Britain, Australia, and South Korea, have signed on. Simultaneously, China has begun building long-term trade relations with resource-rich areas of Africa, as well as with Australia and Southeast Asia, as part of its plan to economically integrate the world island.

Finally, Beijing has only recently revealed a deftly designed strategy for neutralizing the military forces Washington has arrayed around the continent's perimeter. In April, President Xi Jinping announced construction of that massive road-rail-pipeline corridor direct from western China to its new port at Gwadar, Pakistan, creating the logistics for future naval deployments in the energy-rich Arabian Sea.

In May, Beijing escalated its claim to exclusive control over the South China Sea, expanding Longpo Naval Base on Hainan Island for the region's first nuclear submarine facility, accelerating its dredging to create three new atolls that could become military airfields in the disputed Spratley Islands, and formally warning off U.S. Navy overflights. By building the infrastructure for military bases in the South China and Arabian seas, Beijing is forging the future capacity to surgically and strategically impair U.S. military containment.

At the same time, Beijing is developing plans to challenge Washington's dominion over space and cyberspace. It expects, for instance, to complete its own global satellite system by 2020, offering the first challenge to Washington's dominion over space since the U.S. launched its system of 26 defense communication satellites back in 1967. Simultaneously, Beijing is building a formidable capacity for cyber warfare.

In a decade or two, should the need arise, China will be ready to surgically slice through Washington's continental encirclement at a few strategic points without having to confront the full global might of the U.S. military, potentially rendering the vast American armada of carriers, cruisers, drones, fighters, and submarines redundant.

Lacking the geopolitical vision of Mackinder and his generation of British imperialists, America's current leadership has failed to grasp the significance of a radical global change underway inside the Eurasian land mass. If China succeeds in linking its rising industries to the vast natural resources of the Eurasian heartland, then quite possibly, as Sir Halford Mackinder predicted on that cold London night in 1904, "the empire of the world would be in sight."

Alfred W. McCoy, a TomDispatch regular, holds the Harrington Chair in History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is the editor of Endless Empire: Spain's Retreat, Europe's Eclipse, America's Decline and the author of Policing America's Empire: The United States, the Philippines, and the Rise of the Surveillance State, among other works.

Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Book, Nick Turse's Tomorrow's Battlefield: U.S. Proxy Wars and Secret Ops in Africa, and Tom Engelhardt's latest book, Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World.

Copyright 2015 Alfred McCoy

Matthew Hewitt Wrote:

Michael Barwell Wrote:

Matthew Hewitt Wrote:What's interesting here is that Churchill (correctly) believed that bombing would get the general public behind the war, not against it. Even to the point of secretly beginning air attacks on German civilian targets during the so called 'quiet war', so that natural retaliation would appear as outright Nazi aggression and cause outrage. There's still a complete lack of awareness in the UK about the extent of German civilian casualties and how ours are, by comparison, small-fry.

Not defending Hitler there, or intending to diminish people who did suffer here. Just commenting on how mendacious and oblivious to public safety the ruling classes are and were.

One, or a very small number of Luftwaffe bombers seem to have dropped their loads on London by genuine error (never read anything to suggest otherwise) and very much against Hitler's orders. Churchill responded by throwing something like 70 Brit bombers at Berlin. Hitler retaliated, and the Luftwaffe stopped bombing Fighter Command fields, and started the Blitz, which seems to have been what Churchill wanted, the 'theory' being that Fighter Command were on the back foot due to GAF (German air force) attacks, but as I gather it, just one field was out of action for 24hrs.

Hajo Hermann was involved in a raid against industry on the Tyne; houses were hit, and he had to answer to Hitler in person for the screw-up.

That wasn't idle speculation on my part, I'm basing it on war cabinet minutes and witness statements.

Yeah, I wasn't contradicting you, tho' I'm not aware of RAF attacks on civilian targets with anything more irksome than leaflets, during the 'Sitzkrieg'. There's an interesting one that more Brits were killed and injured 'cos of the blackout than 'cos of actual hostilities by '41/'42, don't have the figures at hand tho'.

Churchill's been much mythologised, he was a bit of a bugger really; after Lidice & Lezaky - the assassination of Rheinhard Heydrich, he pressed for Bomber Command to be used to raise 3 German villages for every 1 the Germans raised - to the ground. All well and good in total war I guess, but flight crew would've died thru' being directed at knowingly un-military targets. Speer said the USAAF caused more hassled for German war production than the RAF did (kinda annoyingly...) as they at least aimed for factories, even tho' the RAF dropped twice as much 'love'. When the Septics joined the strategic air offensive, he pressed for them to fly by night, 'til someone mentioned the phrase "'round the clock bombing", which he liked, so changed his mind, which is a nice example of his mobilising the English language against Hitler, rather than having a 'great mind'.
Really good docu on tv recently about him - http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b05x31b6 , 'Churchill: When Britain said No', about the post-VE election really, but plenty more of interest. I liked the one about his never having been on a bus, and only once on the underground 'cos of a big strike action, but he didn't know when to get off so just went 'round an' 'round. I've a good radio docu (BBC R4) based on the diary of a fella who sat-in on cabinet meetings, Norman Brook, - BBC R4 - Churchill Confidential 1 of 2 - War Years-sp7 & BBC R4 - Churchill Confidential 2 of 2 - Return To Power-sp7. Max 'up' for MP3's here is 7meg and they're 40meg each, & I have no way to reduce the size...

Mackinder ReincarnatesNow Hungary Joins Silk Road

09.07.2015 By F. William Engdahl

http://journal-neo.org/2015/07/09/mackin...silk-road/

Quote:The magnetic force field pulling more EU countries to link up with the emerging Eurasian economic colossus is growing by the day as the economies of the EU sink deeper into debt, depression and economic stagnation. The latest intriguing development is the formal agreement of the Hungarian government to become a part of the routes of the China New Silk Road Economic Belt, a network of high-speed railway lines along the historical medieval silk road across Eurasia to Europe.

On June 9 during a meeting with Hungarian president, Viktor Orban, China's Foreign Minister, Wang Yi, formally signed a Memorandum of Understanding to work out the details of incorporating Hungary into China's Silk Road Economic Belt and Maritime Silk Road. It is now very clear that the project is a well-planned geopolitical and economic strategy of China to outflank the US Naval encirclement of China, President Obama's infamous "Asia Pivot" by firming land routes across Eurasia and thereby creating the world's largest integrated market.

Hungary's Orban, a President who is on the "bad guys" list of both Washington and of Brussels for his independent economic initiatives and his overtures to Russia and now China, has become the first EU country to join the China Silk Road. At the recent St. Petersburg International Economic Forum, Russia formally agreed to join the Silk Road and link China's Silk Road rail planning to that of the Eurasian Economic Union consisting of Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Armenia and most recently, Kyrgyzstan.

In an EU tour of Germany, France, Belgium and Holland in April 2014 Xi Jinping, China's President and the architect of the Silk Road project, urged China-EU cooperation in planning the link ups between the Silk Road Eurasian routes and EU countries. Again in December 2014, when Li Keqiang attended the China-Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) Leaders' Meeting in Serbia in December 2014, he also highlighted the role Europe has to play in the Belt and Road and the role China can play in completing China's Silk Road in Europe, not Just Hungary.

The official action plan for the Belt and Road, issued by Chinese government agencies in March 2015, described the Silk Road as "a new Eurasian Land Bridge" that "focuses on bringing together China, Central Asia, Russia, and Europe." That means the Belt and Road, by China's own definition, will be incomplete without participation from European countries. And Central and Eastern European countries in particular have a special role to play.

Long-term geopolitical strategy

Following World War II and the defeat of Hitler's Third Reich, the very word geopolitics became taboo as it was linked in many eyes with Haushofer and the Nazi "Lebensraum." Geopolitics however, is far larger than that, the study of integrating politics, economics and geography. The father of British geopolitics, Sir Halford Mackinder, first unveiled his concept of that relationship in a seminal address to the Royal Geographic Society in 1904 in London, "The Geographical Pivot of History." To this day it remains one of the most valued and useful volumes in my library.

It was a brilliant attempt to look at the world as an entirety with what Mackinder termed "natural seats of power." For him Russia was a mammoth threat to the future of the dominant British Empire because of its vast geography as the world's largest land power with its vast steppes, its huge natural resources and its people. He wrote, "The oversetting of the balance of power in favour of the pivot state (Russia-w.e.), resulting in its expansion over the marginal lands of Euro-Asia, would permit of the use of vast continental resources for fleet building (navies-w.e.), and the empire of the world would then be in sight. This might happen if Germany were to ally herself with Russia. "

Preventing that German-Russian cohesion was the focus of British diplomatic machinations from the Russo-Japanese War of 1905 to the secret shaping of a military encirclement of the German Reich with the Triple Entente of Britain, France and Russia that led London to initiate World War I against an encircled Germany, using Germany's natural ally, Russia to do the dirty deed. Notably, George Friedman, founder of the Texas-based Pentagon and US intelligence consultancy, and an obvious student of Mackinder, said recently in a speech to the Chicago Council on Foreign Affairs, "The primordial interest of the United States, over which for centuries we have fought warsthe First, the Second and Cold Warshas been the relationship between Germany and Russia, because united there, they're the only force that could threaten us."

Translated into 21st Century context, this describes precisely what is emerging from the amateurish military and political and financial provocations of Washington against Russia and China, where Obama's "Asia Pivot" is a poor attempt to reflect Mackinder today.

Geopolitics, properly understood, also shapes the growing Russian and Chinese response to those deadly provocations. Mackinder wrote with clarity in his 1904 essay, "True that the Trans-Siberian Railway is still a single and precarious line of communication, but the century will not be old before all Asia is covered with Railways. The spaces within the Russian Empire and Mongolia (read Mongolia and China today-w.e.) are so vast, and their potentialities in population, wheat, cotton, fuel and metals so incalculably great, that it is inevitable that a vast economic world, more or less apart, will there develop inaccessible to oceanic commerce."

He meant inaccessible to the British Royal Navy control of the oceans. Instead British secret diplomacy and two world wars and almost five decades of NATO Cold War delayed that natural fusion of the economies of all Eurasia with rails.

Mackinder's ideas of geopolitics shaped the Anglo-Saxon world until British financial policies caused her defeat in two world wars to the emerging power of the second land powerNorth America. Mackinder contributed his last essay in 1943 to the Foreign Affairs journal of the New York Council on Foreign Relations think tank. He shaped the ideology of postwar US military strategy from Henry Kissinger to Zbigniew Brzezinski to Stratfor's George Friedman.

However, the Chinese high command as well as the Russian also studied Mackinder thoroughly. This is today's Silk Road, integrating for the first time in history the vast untapped resources of Eurasia.

This is what is now unfolding before our eyes. This is what creates such alarm in Washington, London and Brussels.

Mackinder's "nightmare" a reality

The Hungarian Silk Road signing is no spontaneous Chinese initiative. It is part of a years' long strategy of building economic "hubs" or entry points into the larger EU market that began well before the Obama decision to create a new Cold War crisis in Ukraine to sanction Russia. This makes the present developments even more geopolitically significant for the future of the EU. Chinese firms have invested more than 5 billion US dollars in CEE countries in energy, infrastructure and machinery. Next China has contracted to build a high-speed railway connecting Hungary and Serbia and to construct two nuclear reactors at a Romanian nuclear power plant. Chinese investment in Europe doubled from 2013 to 2014 to $18 billion.

Already in 2011 then-Chinese Prime Minister Wen Jaibao made a trip to Hungaqry to meet with President Viktor Orban and sign several billion dollars' worth of trade deals, indicating China had decided on Hungary as a prime EU trade and economic partner. Orban has been invited to China as early as 2010 and Hungary has allowed Chinese companies to invest in Hungary. One of the largest is the Chinese telecommunications company, Huawei which built a smartphone manufacturing facility in Hungary, the company's second largest supply center worldwide. Intriguingly, given the present Greek EU crisis, China also happens to own a strategic property in the Greek country. Piraeusthe largest shipping port in Greece is owned and run by the Chinese company, China Ocean Shipping Co. That port is being used by China to reach Central European and Black Sea markets.

Given that both Beijing and Moscow know that they face the same "geopolitical opponent" as Vladimir Putin put it most recently, namely a USA superpower in terminal decline, the invitation to EU country, Hungary, to join the Silk Road along with Russia and the Eurasian Economic Union is a brilliant further development in creation of a multi-polar world to replace a misconceived NATO-Washington Sole Superpower dictatorship. It sets the banquet table, putting irresistible Chinese dishes before the economically struggling EU to "Go East, not West, young man," to rephrase the famous quote by American publicist Horace Greely in 1865 at the end of America's Civil War.

The era of the American Century so triumphantly proclaimed by Henry Luce in his famous 1941 Life magazine editorial, looks like it will not make it far beyond its 75th birthday next year. Seen from Budapest and increasingly from Berlin and Paris and Rome, the Eurasian emerging to their east, with the multi-trillion dollar trade potentials around creation of the world's largest rail infrastructure development is creating the magnet for rescuing the EU from its own hubris and foolishness around creation of the Euro and the stateless European Central Bank. Hungary realized the potential. It will likely be not so long before German industrial circles bring Berlin into that constellation, even if kicking and screaming. The world is simply tired of these endless wars for nothing.

F. William Engdahl is strategic risk consultant and lecturer, he holds a degree in politics from Princeton University and is a best-selling author on oil and geopolitics, exclusively for the online magazine "New Eastern Outlook".

First appeared: http://journal-neo.org/2015/07/09/mackin...silk-road/

Some interesting bits and pieces in here:

When Money Dies: The Nightmare of the Weimar Collapse by Adam Fergusson (London: William Kimber, 1975)

http://thirdparadigm.org/doc/45060880-Wh...y-Dies.pdf

Quote:Page 2: "It is not always clear what events what popular uprising, or Allied ultimatum, or political assassination contributed to the inflationary panic; or which were themselves directly or indirectly caused by the ceaseless depreciation of the currency and rise in the cost of living."

Pages 25/6: "Frontkdmpfertag expressed a spirit of reaction that was rife in Germany from north to south. Flesh was being added to the skeletal myth of the Dolchstoss. Two days later, on August 36, Mathias Erzberger himself, to the Right the embodiment of civilian treachery, was murdered by Nationalist gunmen in the Black Forest. It is not fanciful to suppose that this deed was largely inspired by the speeches of the Nationalist (DNVP) leader Karl Helfferich, the wartime Minister of Finance under whose auspices the German inflation first got a grip. Erzberger was not only a civilian and a Republican but a Jew.

The outside world watched with deep misgivings. In an article in Le Peuple, a Belgian Socialist deputy remarked that

"assassination seems now to have become the rule in Germany, where militarist brutes, after having practised on thousands of Belgians whom they massacred, continue to adopt this means of suppressing those in their way … it is a very grave sign of collective criminal degeneration, which must strike all Germans who have retained feelings of respect for human life."

In Germany itself, the death of Erzberger, that most fearless exponent of Socialist taxation, let loose a torrent of abuse against the Right. In Berlin the Majority Socialists and the Independent Socialists joined forces in a demonstration to protest 'against the enemies of the Republic'. One Herr Harden, whom Lord D'Aber-non described as an acute if somewhat acid observer, explained to the British Ambassador that 'the followers of the Right were perpetually hunting for the old culprits responsible for the downfall of the empire and the old system, but instead of attacking the generals Ludendorff and company who were really the cause, or the old gang of princes and sycophants, they reviled the Jews and assassinated the leaders of the Left together with those who did not take their own perverted view.' More than three hundred assassinations among the leaders of the Left had been perpetrated since the Armistice, Herr Harden said, 'and no one is punished.' (He himself had had fifty telephone calls to warn him that he was next on the black list, and was leaving for America.)

Page 55: "In the middle of May 1922 Dr Schober's gallant, almost single-handed efforts as Chancellor to bring order to Austria's economy and moderation and common-sense to her politics came to an end. His administration was defeated in parliament a bare four weeks after he had persuaded the Allies at Genoa to relinquish their prior mortgage rights on all Austrian State property held to meet occupation and reparation costs an agreement which cleared the way for raising an Austrian loan. The politicians may have felt that Schober had served his turn, but the dismissal of the country's strongest statesman immediately sprinkled question-marks over the country's creditworthiness so long as she controlled her own finances. With the news of the ex-police chief's resignation the British credit promised by Lloyd George ran out, that from France and Italy never materialised, and the krone began to slip away again. Austria's condition stayed particularly critical, in contrast to that of Hungary or Germany, because of her heavy dependence upon foreign imports.

After June 1 the graph of the krone's fall became vertiginous. The June 5 figure of 52,000 to the pound, well over 10,000 to the dollar, produced something of a panic which contributed during the next two days to a further fall of 40 per cent. On June 9 the pound was at 70,000 kronen, the dollar at more than 15,000. Within a month of Rathenau's assassination in Germany at the end of June, the krone dived in sympathy with the mark from 100,000 to 125,000. In parallel with the fall came huge price increases, the index whose base had been 100 in July 1921 reaching 2,645."

So who was commanding & funding the death squads in German? One of the key figures is named below:

Former King wanted England bombed and an Anglo-German alliance, archives reveal

http://nsnbc.me/2015/07/19/former-king-w...es-reveal/

Quote:Duke of Coburg

Coburg was a grandchild of Queen Victoria destined for a privileged and unspectacular life. But the experiences of World War I changed him. After Germany lost the war, he turned to the radical right. In the 1920s he got involved with a German terrorist group that tried to overthrow the democratically elected German Republic. Members of the group were involved in several political murders in the 1920s. Though he did not pull the trigger himself, Coburg funded these murders.

After the failed Hitler Putsch of 1923, Coburg hid several Hitler supporters on the run in his castles. Hitler would not forget this great favour and later rewarded Coburg by making him a general. But he also needed him for something more secretive. In 1933 the Führer was short of international contacts and did not trust his own foreign ministry.

He therefore used members of the German aristocracy for secret missions to Britain, Italy, Hungary and Sweden. Coburg was particularly useful in London from 1935 to 1939 and was received in Britain due to his sister Alice Countess of Athlone's tireless work. She was Queen Mary's sister-in-law and fought for Coburg's acceptance. This resulted in him not just being welcomed in British drawing rooms, but most importantly, by the royals, including the Duke of Windsor.

Coburg as agent of MI6? Looks that way.

From the book Inspection For Disarmament
Edited by Seymour Melman

Columbia University Press, 1958 hardcover

from pages 203 -219

http://www.maebrussell.com/Articles%20an...ament.html

Quote:DISARMAMENT AND CLANDESTINE REARMAMENT UNDER THE WEIMAR REPUBLIC

by E. J. Gumbel

[Note: This paper bears especially on the role of government in a clandestine rearmament effort that followed disarmament by law, and on the nationalist atmosphere which surrounded and supported this effort in Weimar Germany. E. J. Gumbel writes on this subject with special competence. He was one of the small group of pacifists who exposed the illegal rearmament and the terrorism connected with it. For this activity he was three times charged with high treason.Editor.]

Terror as an Instrument for Enforcing Support for Illegal Armaments.

During the period of illegal German rearmament, terrorist methods were wielded against the opponents of rearmament. These included acts of personal violence carried out by the terroristic nationalist groups supported by the manipulation of the legal system.

Altogether, there were about four hundred political assassinations of the nationalists' foes. A considerable literature was published in Germany which detailed such charges. In reply to these charges the Federal Minister of Justice published a brochure in 1923 (2) full of details which officially confirmed the nature and the actions of the terrorist campaign against the opponents of the rearmament, and the fact that the murderers, with few exceptions, were not brought to justice.

The nationalist terrorists who enforced acquiescence in the rearmament of the Reich included many of the men who later became Hitler's trusted adjutants for overseeing the mass extermination program which the Nazis carried out during the Second World War.

Many of the nationalist terrorists were at the same time members of different organizations. Therefore, it is not always possible to fix the higher responsibilities. Since the victims were "traitors to the national cause," the murderers did not try, as a rule, to hide their responsibilities. On the contrary, there were even imposters who claimed to have engaged in such activities without having done so. In their memoirs the different terrorists, such as Salomon (who participated in the assassination of the foreign minister Rathenau), never showed the slightest trace of repentance, a fact which strongly speaks for the sincerity of their convictions. Nationalist terrorists have their code of honor like the members of any other criminal organization. The first rule is that no appeal to legal institutions is permissible. The second rule is that its arms must be protected from those who are deemed to be traitors. "Traitors" existed everywhere: law-abiding citizens who realized that the Republic was threatened by the military gangs; the Republic-minded Prussian police; profiteering merchants dealing in arms; agents of competing organizations; agents of the Communist party; agents of foreign powers attracted by payments in hard currencyall fell under the heading of "traitors."

A reliable administrator of secret arms cannot ask the legal authorities for aid; he cannot ask his illegal or semi-legal superiors' advice. Faced with the danger that the whole organization may blow up, he has no choice but to administer justice as he sees it. Such was the case with the illegal arms in Germany. "Traitors" had to be eliminated at all costs, with the tacit or explicit approval of the legal superiors. Military orders which clearly indicated that traitors should be eliminated were produced in court at the law suits against some of the murderers.

The Role of the Law Courts.

The political assassinations committed by the members of the former Imperial and the secret armies put a heavy burden on the administration of justice. The murderers had to be acquitted and the victims had to be shown as guilty. This task was fulfilled by the employment of military courts which sided with military men when they were accused of murder, by the slowness of the justice-enforcing agencies, by inability to find the guilty, by issuance of false papers of identity by the police, etc.

Another procedure consisted in accepting at face value the claim of the accused murderer that the victim had tried to escape. Since arrest by an illegal gang was legal, the victim had to bear the consequences of his resistance by "trying to escape."

For the protection of secret armaments, the law courts, following the Supreme Court, introduced a new notion: high treason committed by the press. In English the phrase "high treason" has two aspects. First, to prepare for revolution or to aid the enemy in time of war. This corresponds to Hochverrat in German. Second, stealing secret documents with the intent to transmit them to a present or potential enemy foreign power. This corresponds to Landesverrat which, of course, was a rare crime. Now, public opinion, as expressed by the leading newspapers, was strongly opposed to the secret rearmament. However, such publications, aimed at stopping illegal actions committed by branches of the government, were interpreted as high treason.

Accusation of "high treason" was the big weapon of defense of the illegal rearmament effort. Even the spread of well-known news and publication of facts concerning the relation between the army and the military groups, especially the Nazis, led to a lawsuit of "high treason." As a rule, no proof of the illegal activities was admitted in court. By this procedure, the Supreme Court could affirm at the same time that secret armaments did not exist and that any publication of such a fact was a crime. To insure sentences, officers of the Reichswehr responsible for the secret armament were called as witnesses of the prosecution. In order to terrorize the public, many more trials were started than could ever be completed.

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

1. Castellan, G. Le réarmement clandestin du Reich 1930-1935 (vu par le 2e bureau de l'état-major français). Paris, Plon, 1955.

2. Denkschrift des Reichsjustizministers, edited by E. J. Gumbel. Berlin, 1924.

3. Engelbrecht, H. C. Merchants of Death. New York, Dodd-Mead, 1934.

4. Fried, H. F. The Guilt of the German Army. New York, Macmillan, 1942.

5. Görlitz, W. History of the German General Staff. New York, Praeger, 1953.

6. Guhr, H. 7 Jahre Interalliierte Mililitär-Kontrolle. Breslau, W. G. Korn, 1927.

7. Gumbel, E. J. Verräter Verfallen der Feme. Berlin, 1929.

8., ed. Deutschlands Geheime Rüstungen? Berlin, Deutsche Liga für Menschenrechte, 1926.

9. , "Life and Death of a Spy Chief," Social Research, XIX (No. 3, 1952), 380-7.

10. Heuss, Theodor. Kapp-Lüttwitz, Das Verbrechen gegen die Nation. Berlin, 1920.

11. Kirk, Grayson. "German Disarmament under the Versailles Treaty," American Interests in the War and the Peace, No. 14, pp. 11ff. New York, Council on Foreign Affairs, 1944.

12. Lefebure, V. Scientific Disarmament. London, Mandanus, Ltd., 1932.

13. Melville, Cecil F. The Russian Face of Germany, An Account of the Secret Military Relations Between German and Soviet Governments. London, 1932.

14. Morgan, I. H. Assize of Arms: The Disarmament of Germany and Its Rearmament, 1919-1936. New York, 1946.

15. Nollet, Gen. C. Une experiénce de désarmement. Paris, NRF, 1932.

16. Reitlinger, G. The Final Solution: The Attempt to Exterminate the Jews of Europe, 1939-1945. London, 1954.

17. Roddie, S. Peace Patrol. London, Christophers, 1932.

18. Russell of Liverpool, Edward F. L. Russell, 2d baron. The Scourge of the Swastika. New York, 1954.

19. Salomon, Ernst von. Der Fragebogen (The Questionnaire). Hamburg, 1951.

20. Sasuly, R. IG Farben. New York, Boni & Gaer, 1947.

21. Schüddekopf, O. S. Heer und Republik. Hanover, 1955.

22. Schwendemann, K. Abrüstung und Sicherheit, Vol. 2, Berlin, Weidmannsche Buchhandlung, November, 1935.

23. Seldes, G. Iron, Blood and Profits. New York, Harper, 1934.

24. Thyssen, F. I Paid Hitler. New York and London, 1941.

25. Wheeler-Bennett, I. W. The Nemesis of Power: The German Army in Politics. New York, 1954.

E. J. Gumbel was Professor of Statistics at the University of Heidelberg, from 1923 to 1932. He has been responsible for extensive scientific research and publications. Under the Weimar Republic he wrote numerous articles, brochures, and books against political murders and secret armaments, was therefore dismissed from the University under Nazi pressure, and expatriated by the Nazi government on its first list. He then went to France and became Professor at the University of Lyon. Threatened by extradition, according to the Armistice of 1940, he came to the United States and is now Adjunct Professor of Industrial Engineering at Columbia University. During the summers of 1953 to 1957 he was Visiting Professor at the Free University of Berlin, West Germany. His dismissal of 1932 from Heidelberg was declared void twenty-four years later.

'Hitler was an Anglo-American stooge': the tall tales in a Moscow bookshop

Conspiracies abound in the Dom Knigi store's non-fiction section, but what is truly unknown is the extent to which Russians believe what is written

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/au...w-bookshop

Quote:Adolf Hitler was installed in power in Germany as part of an Anglo-American plot, the CIA is planning a full-scale land invasion of Russia from Ukrainian territory within the next five years, and the world has become so dominated by women that they have evolved to be capable of reproducing without the need for male sperm.

All of these facts' could be gleaned by a curious reader browsing the non-fiction section at Dom Knigi (House of Books), one of Moscow's biggest bookshops. The shelves are stacked with books offering the most outlandish of conspiracy theories, and, at a time when Russia and the west are in their worst standoff since the cold war, geopolitical conspiracies are more popular than ever.

By far the biggest number of books in the contemporary politics section are devoted to recent events in Ukraine. Tragedy of Ukraine: Concentration Camp Instead of Paradise is a collection of essays on modern Ukraine by different authors. One describes Russia as the main opponent of a new "dehumanisation of mankind" promoted by Washington, and says Ukraine had been infected with "spiritual Aids".

Events in the country do not just represent "spiritual degradation and nationwide madness", according to the thesis of Ukrainian Chimera: the Final Stage of the Anti-Russian Project, a glossy-covered hardback. In fact, they are the logical conclusion of a western project that has lasted 150 years and is aimed at turning Ukraine into the launching pad for an attack on Russia by the west.

This longstanding anti-Russian conspiracy is also a common theme of books by Nikolai Starikov, a previously obscure writer who has shot to prominence, becoming one of the founders of the Anti-Maidan movement, which aims to counter any attempts at street protests in Russia. Dozens of his books are now on shelves across the country.

One of his many works, Chaos and Revolutions: the Dollar's Weapon, explains how all world conflict is instigated by the US in order to prop up its currency. This is a recurring theme in Russian political discourse, but Starikov goes further.

"Washington and London need fools to fight for them, because they don't like to fight themselves. This is why they brought Adolf Hitler to power in Germany in 1933. You need the person who will start the war, who will not flinch from committing crimes and shedding blood … It's the same today. They need a madman who will start a new world war in order to save the dollar."

If the reader, wide-eyed at the scope and history of international conspiracy against Russia, turns to international authors for confirmation, they may be in for another surprise.

Attention was drawn to the Russian publishing industry this week when it emerged that one publisher, Algoritm, had released a series of books about Vladimir Putin without the knowledge of the purported authors. The books included a title called Nobody but Putin, allegedly penned by the Guardian's former Moscow correspondent Luke Harding, and President Putin's Mistake, by Moscow-based journalist Michael Bohm. Both said they had not signed any contract with the publishing house, and the books appeared to be a mishmash of columns, extracts and hostile commentary written by third parties.

Some people play down the influence of these books. "There's always been that sub-genre of books; every country likes conspiracies," said Boris Kupriyanov, who runs another Moscow bookshop. "Russians read more conspiracies than Brits, but I'm not sure it's any more than Americans."

Others say they do have an impact. "Even though each book has a reasonably small print run, when you take them all together, it's a significant factor, and it's also combined with all the conspiracy theories on television," said Alexei Makarkin, a political analyst. "There's a tendency to think of conspiracy theories as the preserve of less-educated people, but that's not true in Russia. There are people at all levels who believe in them, including in the elites."

Recent interviews by top Russian officials support this view. This week Vladimir Yakunin, the head of Russian Railways and a member of Putin's inner circle, published an article claiming that the third world war could soon be upon us, with the "global financial oligarchy" against the people. Yakunin blamed the US for attempting global political hegemony through the triumph of consumerism, and said the new world war would be a "molecular war".

Sergei Naryshkin, speaker of the lower house of the Russian parliament, recently wrote a column accusing the US of all manner of provocations, and Nikolai Patrushev, the chief of Russia's security council and former head of the security services, noted recently that there was proof that the US wanted to destroy Russia. He quoted the former US secretary of state Madeleine Albright as saying that Siberia and the Russian far east did not really belong to Moscow. The only problem was that Albright never said the words: the claim came from a 1990s psychic with links to people in the Kremlin, who would fall into a trance and claim to be able to communicate with Albright.

On the shelves at Dom Knigi, many books blend geopolitical conspiracy with even more outlandish beliefs. Territory of Confusion: Forbidden Facts, part of a popular series by the TV presenter Igor Prokopenko, is a bestseller ranging over many subjects. It has been through several editions since coming out last year and is released by Russia's biggest publisher.

The blurb on the back cover promises to answer the question: "What are humans really? Bio-robots, descendants from monkeys, or a great alien race?" There are chapters on US attempts to split up the world, Stalin's undeserved bad reputation, and the worrying trend towards a female-dominated world.

"Recent scientific studies have shown that females will soon be able to take the male role in reproduction, with no external interference. The first cases of self-fertilisation have already been registered. Biologists say that without men, women will not die out immediately, but will instead slowly change their form, in a reverse process of evolution. Do we really now live in a new world, where there are no men and women rule?"

The interest in such views can be seen as a logical conclusion of the tremendous upheaval in Russia over the past decades.

"All of these beliefs are fairly normal for a transitional society that has undergone a political, economic and moral crisis," said Makarkin. "If you spent your youth being told Marxism-Leninism was the only true philosophy and then you found it was nonsense, it's not surprising you start to wonder if everything else you thought about the world might not be a trick too."

http://orientalreview.org/2015/09/21/who...o-germany/

Interesting...

I've been very suspicious of the sudden influx of refugees. With Twitter, a few people can get this going.