Guido Preparata's website

[Paul Rigby]

Back to the Future: From the USSR to the Eurasian Century

Pablo Escobar

25.12.2016(updated 16:02 25.12.2016)

https://sputniknews.com/columnists/20161...n-century/

A quarter of a century ago, on the night of December 25, 1991, the red flag was lowered from the Kremlin cupola and the USSR was no more. Arguably what President Putin later described, in 2005, as "the biggest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century" doubled as the most comprehensive fall of an empire in modern history.

Way beyond the historical archives of Marxism-Leninism suddenly being besieged by graphic, glitzy signs of conspicuous consumption, what developed on a personal level was a "real drama" (again, Putin's words) of millions of Russians suddenly thrown out of the federation, dispersed among 12 new republics scattered across Eurasia.

The world went unipolar in a flash; one form of totalitarianism disappeared to the profit of another, supported by two key pillars; NATO, propelled to the role of global Robocop, and the exorbitant privilege of printing the US dollar as a fiat currency. Breathless neo-Hegelian functionaries of Empire hastily proclaimed the end of History. To widespread neocon glee, that seemed to erase the 1987 verdict of Yale historian Paul Kennedy in The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, who stressed that the global American empire, like all empires that came before, was declining. Everyone remembers December 25, 1991. Please allow me a brief personal interlude. On that fateful winter night, I was by the Ganges, in Varanasi, immersed in more spiritual matters. Being on the road non-stop, across Southeast Asia, and then in India, Nepal and booming China, way before the 24/7 instant com era, I only grasped the enormity of what had happened after I boarded the Transiberian from Beijing and arrived in USSR-deprived Moscow over two months after the fact. It was that trip that made me leave the West to learn Asia from the inside, and follow what I would later characterize as The Eurasian Century.

The go-go 1990s were heady times. Bill Clinton gleefully implemented the neocon Wolfowitz doctrine. Russia was raped by a bunch of Western remote-controlled oligarchs. NATO progressively reveled in its deeper role, as Lord Ismay had conceptualized, of "keeping the Americans in, the Russians out and the Germans down".

After all, since Dr. Zbigniew "Grand Chessboard" Brzezinski had led David Rockefeller to install the Trilateral Commission in 1973, the Big Picture was always to secure US power to prevail over every other national state, thus conforming what was dubbed "global governance". That was further expanded early in the new millennium via the Pentagon's Full Spectrum Dominance doctrine. By then Vladimir Putin, in 2000, had stepped onto the geopolitical stage. Only three years ago, Mikhail Gorbachev stressed Putin "saved Russia from disintegration". Arguably, he engineered much else. Twenty-five years after the fall of the USSR, Putin is the one and only geopolitical king maker; the prime deconstructor of the myth of Western liberal "democracy" be it of the neocon or the neoliberalcon, "humanitarian imperialistic" variety; and the smasher-in-chief of the Mother of All Geopolitical Myths: the supposedly God-given, exceptional, perennial domination of the unipolar superpower.

Pentagon vs. Pentagon

The 2008 casino capitalism-provoked financial crisis, plus the American "resolve" to remake the so-called Greater Middle East through wars of choice, regime change and covert ops miserably failed. As we wait for the dawn of the Trump era an almost intergalactic geopolitical question mark what's certain is that the War Party US deep state won't admit defeat. And the key geopolitical riddle to be answered is how strident internal American tensions will deal with the hub of progressive Eurasia integration: Russia, China and Iran.

Key to watch will be the role of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Joseph "Fighting Joe" Dunford, and how he will interpret the US National Military Strategy. The crucial part of the strategy is a five-part annex detailing America's top existential threats. In Pentagonese, they are the "four-plus-one": Russia, China, Iran, North Korea and (the "plus one"), "VEOs" violent extremist organizations. The Pentagon itself is divided. For the National Military Strategy, and for "Fighting Joe", the top threat is Russia. For "Mad Dog" Mattis, the new head of the Pentagon, it's Iran. For a lot of Joint Chiefs of Staff officers, it's actually the VEOs, especially ISIS/ISIL/Daesh. So the crucial question is who will Trump be really listening to.

Putin already cut to the chase when he spoke at the defense ministry's HQ in Moscow before the holiday season; "We can say with certainty: we are stronger now than any potential aggressor." And he added; "Anyone." This after Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu stressed Russia "for the first time in its history" has fully protected the extensive Russian borders with early warning anti-missile systems.

The Pentagon must be processing the information with extreme seriousness. That means, essentially, that before the S-500s were fully rolled out, Moscow could not but exercise extreme prudence. Now Russian air space seems to be effectively sealed. Putin could not actually admit on the record that Russia is the strongest military power in the world until the rollout of the S-500s is complete. All US offensive missiles and stealth aircraft as it stands are rendered useless. And that does no even take into account nuclear weaponized Russian silent submarines.

Putin's frank admission is extremely surprising, because the nature of Russian strategy is always to conceal strength. Yet in the new, geopolitical configuration, possibly a preamble to post-Cold War 2.0, the most important element was to send a clear preemptive "message" to the Pentagon.

At his year-end presser, Putin also remarked that, "what we have between Russia and China is more than just a strategic partnership." That was another subtle but clear message to any actors, inside or around the US deep state, Brzezinski included, or inside or lateral to the Trump administration, bent on deploying the usual Divide and Rule tactics to play Russia against China; moreover, the three crucial Eurasian actors, Russia, China and Iran, have already agreed on a mutual defense policy. So any fancy Pentagon ideas on Iran instantly hit a no-go area.

We might be reaching a possible geopolitical configuration where it's not far-fetched to expect some sort of Grand Bargain involving the US and the three key hubs of Eurasia integration; a sort of Interregnum Détente before an extended Cold War 2.0, instigated by the US deep state, picks up again. It was only 25 years ago today. That was not the end of History; rather the preamble for a brand new historical drama. Get ready, because the thick of the action starts now.

The views expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official position of Sputnik.

[Paul Rigby]

Hello Again Dear Reader,

This issue of my free newsletter I would like to devote to an heretofore unpublished chapter of a manuscript I worked on in the end of the 1990's dealing with the little-known role of a secretive network in Great Britain known as the Round Table. This manuscript never been shared before. I have decided now to make it exclusively available for you as a Newsletter subscriber to get better insights into history which the general public never reads about.

If you find this selection interesting, I urge you to purchase others of my books dealing with this period, notably The Gods of Money available through Amazon.

For a better reading experience I converted the text to a pfd-file which You can find in the attachment of this mail. It's 13 pages in A4 format.

My thanks for your interest and best wishes,

F. William Engdahl

Chapter Ten:

A New World Order Built on the Ashes of War

Securing the English-speaking Union

H.G. Wells, intimate of Lord Lothian's circles in Britain's foreign policy establishment, and, without doubt the most effective propagandist for the political outlook they represented, had summed it up well before Britain declared war on Germany in 1939. Utter destruction of the present world order would be a necessary precondition for creating a new world order, an order in which "yapping about nationality," as Wells contemptuously termed it, would be eliminated in favor of a World State. That World State had to be built on the ashes of war, a project which Wells preferred to call, "The Open Conspiracy."

Lord Lothian had echoed Wells' vision in a remarkable address to a 1937 conference of the World Council of Churches. The conference had taken place in Lothian's alma mater of Oxford University, at the very time Lothian himself had been involved in the intense back-channel diplomatic initiatives between Chamberlain and Hitler.

"Only a few persons appear to comprehend what far-reaching and daemoniacal consequences result from the fact that national sovereignty is the unquestioned foundation of the present international order," Lothian argued to the members of the World Council of Churches assembled.

"One does not exaggerate when one says, that the catastrophe vividly described by H.G. Wells in his book, 'The Shape of Things to Come,' cannot be averted unless we escape from this present state of affairs." Lothian proceeded to outline his proposal for achieving this escape from national sovereignty.

"No system of simple cooperation is able to rid the world of the extraordinary power of national sovereignty. There is no other effective cure for the daemoniacal and evil consequences of national sovereignty, than through the creation of a single common sovereignty, a world federal state. At the beginning, such a World State does not need to encompass the entire world. It can begin with a smaller group of nations which grasp the real purpose of the idea, and then, proceed to expand." A union of the English-speaking nations, which would include the U.S., was uppermost in his mind.

What Wells and Lothian left unstated in more naive company, of course, was that for all the noble democratic rhetoric, theirs was to be a selective world order, in all crucial respects modeled on the same racially elitist old world order of the Anglo-Saxon world, or, as Wells termed it, an order dominated by a "great English-speaking English-thinking synthesis, leading mankind by sheer force of numbers, wealth, equipment and scope."

Agreeing with Cecil Rhodes, the founder of the Round Table's elite fraternity, Wells stressed that the coming world order must be based on cooperation, "between all the western peoples and, more particularly, between all the Nordic peoples," by which he meant Anglo-Saxon and racially kindred peoples. He insisted that "The British Empire had to be the precursor of a world-state or nothing," and that that world state must also be one in which, "Britain must draw the United States into a closer accord," into a new great English-speaking union.

A great war would be necessary for organizing such a new order. Since the first strategic alliance in the 1580's between the British monarchy and the King of Portugal, against Phillip II's Spain, one axiom had been fundamental to British geopolitics. Whenever England had been threatened with a decisive strategic loss of power or influence, or saw an opportunity for greater power and influence, she initiated a war to reassert or extend her hegemony. But a war, using the armies, the territories and the blood of her allies, never her own, if it could at all be avoided. This alliance strategy had in no way changed at the time England declared war against Germany in 1939.

Leading figures of the Round Table group were many things, but they were not stupid. They were well aware that England had emerged from the Great War in 1919, as a deeply indebted former world financial power, even if still the largest colonial power. To continue to exercise predominant influence over the course of world developments, Lothian and others knew all too well, that Britain must forge a unique new alliance relationship.

Of necessity, this time it had to be an alliance with the only economic giant on the world stage, sufficiently powerful and pliable to establish a new world order in accord with their design. It would be the first time in her history where England had forged a strategic alliance with a partner economically stronger. It helped the task immensely, that that economic giant was at the time relatively naive and inexperienced in the ways of British geopolitics, as the decade of the 1940's opened, and the war in Europe began to widen. A decade of economic depression appeared to have humbled America sufficiently to warrant the new try at alliance.

Lothian and Wells' post-war world order was to be centered around an "Atlantic Partnership," of England with the United States. This Anglo-American Special Relationship as it came to be known, in their conception, must come to dominate or control an array of new institutions of world order, military, political and monetary.

In the December 1941 issue of the "Round Table" magazine, in a piece written only days before Japanese bombing of the American fleet at Pearl Harbor, they elaborated the goals of their postwar Anglo-American cooperation. The central role would be played, of course, by Britain in the postwar world, even if discreetly: "The British nation has generations of experience in co-operating with other free peoples in far distant parts of the world, and in governing dependent countries not able to stand by themselves. The American nation," they argued, "has practically no such experience at all, and has neither the institutions nor the political outlook to fit it very well for either task." This was their trump card as they saw it.

That being the case, they demanded "everything to foster the closest collaboration with the United States, by the same means which have been found successful between the British nations." The Round Table call emphasized that, "if disaster is not to overtake the world again, the United States must, however reluctantly, now take its full share of this responsibility." Responsibility, however, for an agenda made in London, not in Washington.

British Foreign Office policy circles needed, above all, to win the United States to their idea of postwar world order. To do that, required bringing America once again into a war in alliance with England, and in the process, to overcome deep American suspicion, distrust, remaining anger at unpaid Versailles debts, and other broken promises left from 1919.

America had been significantly weakened through the Great Depression, and, they reasoned, would be more amenable than in 1919 to agree the English view of world responsibility for a great power. The method was an old one in British foreign policy practice. As soon as France had been humiliated by the showdown with Kitchner at Fashoda on the Nile in 1898, England began to organize France into the anti-German Entente Cordiale. Similarly, as soon as Czarist Russia had its naval fleet in the Pacific destroyed by Japan in the war of 1904-5, England began to negotiate a strategic Anglo-Russian alliance with a weakened Russia. It mattered not, that in 1905 Britain had had an alliance with Japan. British interests dictated the shifting alliance strategy.

Now at the onset of the second great war of the century, Round Table circles knew painfully well, their new postwar order had to be built on a foundation which would avoid the primary defect of the failed League of Nations. Britain's principal adversary of the 1920's must become her principal ally. This time around, the United States would remain not on the periphery, but at the very center of their new global world order. However, she would be bound inextricably, through a spider's web of carefully-crafted alliances, to Britain's larger geopolitical agenda.

The reason for their emphasis on winning America over was clear. To maintain "peace" in the postwar world would require, "a complete supremacy of Anglo-American military forces, and particularly naval and air forces," as they put it in the December 1941 writing. This military supremacy, in turn, "requires the maintenance at all costs of the stability of exchanges, currencies and prices in the main trading countries of the world." In short, before the United States had even declared war against Japan and the Axis powers, the Round Table group had elaborated what was to emerge after the war as NATO, as the United Nations Organization, as the Bretton Woods monetary control agencies of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank.

This new world order was to be the crowning point of the lifelong efforts of Halifax, Lord Lothian and their select group. To secure it, however, first required them to participate in and try to shape the greatest carnage in human history, the Second World War. Their design for the postwar order above all dictated decisive, and otherwise inexplicable events of World War II, including the unimaginable, gruesome destruction of more than sixty million lives in the six years of war between 1939 and 1945.

Only a war on such a grand global scale, Lothian and the others were convinced, one involving Russia, Germany, Japan and China, would be sufficient in its extent and horror to galvanize the public sentiment of the Allied nations, above all the United States, behind their scheme for world federalism. (1).

The Round World of Halford Mackinder

For their part, neither Hitler, nor his internal opposition within the German General Staff and Foreign Ministry, comprehended how they were being used as grotesque pawns in a global chess game to advance a greater geopolitical design. They fully misunderstood the basis of British strategy, and above all, ignored the explicit axioms of British geopolitics. They were far from the only ones.

Sir Halford John Mackinder, Royal Geographer, a member of the King's Privy Council, who served long years as chairman of the Imperial Shipping Committee, was the acknowledged architect of what came to be called, "British geopolitics."

Mackinder had formulated his core doctrine already in 1904, well before the First World War. In essence, he argued, there existed "a correlation between the larger geographical and the larger historical generalizations...a formula which shall express certain aspects of geographical causation in universal history. That formula should have a practical value, as setting into perspective some of the competing forces in current international politics."

For Mackinder, the "geographical pivot" of all world history was what he termed the Russian, or Eurasian "Heartland." Control over this Eurasian Heartland determined who would control the totality of Europe, Asia and Africa, designated by Mackinder as the "World Island."

In a text he had written in 1919, as a guide for the victors at the Versailles peace talks, Mackinder described the region centered in Germany, Austro-Hungary, Poland and Czechoslovakia, as East Europe. "Who rules East Europe," he insisted, "commands the Heartland. Who rules the Heartland, commands the World-Island." He took his geopolitical conclusion one step further: "Who rules the World-Island commands the World." It was meant as a stern warning to the Versailles negotiators, as well as to later generations of British policymakers.

Mackinder himself was a member of a close-knit circle of "new Empire" advocates, which included leading Round Table figures such as Leopold Amery, Lord Milner, Lord Cecil and H.G. Wells. Defending the supremacy of the British Empire, Mackinder argued vehemently that Britain must never allow any genuine alliance, economic or otherwise, between Germany and Russia. Were such a continental alliance between Central Europe and the Heartland ever to emerge, Mackinder warned, "the empire of the world would then be in sight."

To prevent emergence of that rival "empire of the world," Round Table policy, as executed first by the Chamberlain government, and after May 1940, by Churchill, was to orchestrate events for a bloody war of mutual destruction between Russia and Germany, one which would also bring Japan into battle against China and Russia in the Pacific Theater.

That global conflagration was to form the basis for convincing America to overcome her skepticism about the war, and, more importantly, skepticism about a permanent postwar alliance with Britain.

Such an Anglo-American alliance in a war against the German Axis powers was necessary, in order to "save the human civilization," as the Round Table's magazine described it in December 1939. Of course, the theater of this war was to be as far from British shores as possible, fought by others, and ultimately won by the Round Table policy elite in Britain.

In 1943, in the heat of battle, the London foreign policy establishment had determined that the task of organizing the American establishment to their postwar order was so vital that they asked Mackinder, then 82 years old, personally to outline for a special American audience, the blueprint for the Round Table's postwar world order. Now that America was fully in the war on England's side, the shaping of what British Foreign Minister Anthony Eden termed the "After-War," had begun to assume urgency. Only if America were convinced of the British postwar agenda, would Churchill be able to direct the theaters of conflict to maximum advantage for Britain's postwar design.

Very few in the United States, beyond the elite circles of the New York banking and business world with its close ties to London, had the slightest appreciation who Halford Mackinder was, let alone, the awesome importance of his system of geopolitics, for the shaping of strategy among leading British circles. Only a handful of American scholars were aware that Hitler's own teacher, Karl Haushofer, was also a disciple of Mackinder's geopolitics, even if viewing the process from a German, rather than British perspective.

Mackinder argued that Britain, as the world's leading sea-power, must prevent, at all costs, consolidation of an alliance between Germany and Russia. Haushofer agreed with Mackinder that Germany, as the dominant land power in central Europe, were she to control the Heartland of Russia and Ukraine, would indeed be in a position to control the entire Eurasian landmass.

However, Haushofer argued, and Hitler repeated his argument in "Mein Kampf," Germany, when once in control of the Heartland, as the hegemonic land power of Eurasia, must then propose to England a bi-polar division of the world. The British Empire would be the hegemonic sea power, and the German Reich, the hegemonic Eurasian land power.

Pursuit of Mackinder's geopolitical doctrine of Heartland and World Island, was to shape the world for the entirety of the Second World War, and for almost five decades after, despite the fact that most of mankind would never realize who had been the architect of that order.

To further his geopolitical design, in the summer of 1943 Mackinder turned to an elite New York journal, a most influential forum to address the American establishment. It was "Foreign Affairs," the magazine of the New York Council on Foreign Relations. The Council itself was the sister organization to Britain's Royal Institute of International Affairs (RIIA), or Chatham House, as it was known. Both the New York Council and Chatham House had been created as a joint project of the Round Table, with the backing of the J.P. Morgan banking group, in Paris, in private negotiations during the 1919 Versailles Peace talks.

From the outset, the Royal Institute had been shaped by leading figures of the Round Table. The New York Council on Foreign Relations, by J.P. Morgan partners, later joined by strong participation and financing from the Rockefeller Standard Oil group.

The alliance of the two, Chatham House and the New York Council, had been created in order to channel British policies to America's leading banking and industrial circles. During the war, British Round Table insider, Arnold Toynbee, had transferred all his Royal Institute papers to the New York Council for safe-keeping, while Toynbee himself remained in London to serve as head of British Foreign Office Intelligence. The appearance of Mackinder's 1943 essay, "The Round World and the Winning of the Peace," in the New York Council's journal, was a precisely targetted intervention into the U.S. debate.

What Mackinder presented to his American readers was a postwar order which would encompass the globe. The postwar order, he argued, must create a system of permanent containment of Germany, as well as of Japan, as the two pillars of the new global order.

A war-prone Germany, he argued, would in the future be "controlled by strong embankments of power on either hand--land power (of the Soviet Union-w.e.) to the east, in the Heartland, and sea power to the west, in the North Atlantic basin.

"Face the German mind with an enduring certainty that any war fought by Germany must be a war on two unshakable fronts," Mackinder told his American audience. "For this to happen, it will be necessary in the first place that there be effective and lasting cooperation between America, Britain and France, the first for depth of defense, the second as the moated forward stronghold--a Malta on a grander scale--and the third as the defensible bridgehead." It was the broad outline of what after 1948, with only slight modification, became NATO.

In the Pacific region, Mackinder outlined the necessary postwar design as well. "The conquering of Japan waits for a while. In due course China will receive capital on a generous scale as a debt of honor, to help in her romantic adventure of building for a quarter of humanity a new civilization, neither quite Eastern nor quite Western." He was describing a yet-to-be communist-run China under Mao Tse-tung, at a time that outcome was anything but certain.

"Then," Mackinder stressed, "the ordering of the Outer World," by which he meant nations bordering on the Pacific Ocean, "will be relatively easy, with China, the United States and the United Kingdom leading the way."

Making clear to his American readers just who must dominate this postwar order, Mackinder declared, "What a pity the alliance, negotiated after Versailles, between the United States, the United Kingdom and France was not implemented! What trouble and sadness that act might have saved!"

Sir Halford Mackinder outlined in the few brief pages, what was to become the broad blueprint for a postwar order lasting until the crumbling of the Berlin Wall in the end of the 1980's.

Germany would be faced by a permanently hostile Soviet foe, tens of millions of whose sons would have died at the hands of German forces during the war, and by an Atlantic alliance with Britain and the United States at its heart.

Similarly, Japanese geopolitical ambitions would be permanently contained by the British and American alliance in the Pacific, and a hostile communist China to the west. Only such a permanent hostility from the great Chinese expanse to Japan's west, as that which would come from a regime run by Mao's communists, could assure for Mackinder's geopolitical design a lasting effectiveness.

The nurturing and shaping of the postwar order, which depended above all on the winning of the United States as its centerpiece, was of such strategic importance that Lord Lothian himself, the most pivotal spokesman of Round Table policy in England, was sent to Washington as British Ambassador, days after outbreak of war in Europe in 1939. Lothian was joined in Washington by no fewer than a dozen fellow members of the Round Table circle during the war years, including Lazard Brothers banker, Lord Brand, as special Treasury representative. Adam Marris, Sir Arthur Salter, Harold Butler and others filled out the Washington Round Table group. The American relationship had become, in effect, a Round Table proprietary in those critical months.

Lothian, who, little-known to his American audience had only months before been among the strongest advocates of German appeasement, soon became admired across America, for his making impassioned speeches from St. Louis to Boston to Philadelphia, portraying himself as the foremost spokesman for the moral cause of democratic civilization, against dictatorial Nazi tyranny. Until his sudden death in December 1940, Lothian played a vital role in organizing the highest circles, as well as the broadest public of the United States for ultimate support of the British cause, at the time when America was strongly neutral, and highly uncertain about joining another European war.

As early as October 25 1939, when the war against Germany was limited to dropping propaganda leaflets over Poland, Lothian addressed the anglophile Pilgrim Society in New York, to begin his tireless campaign to win America to the new order.

After taking note of the minor "technical" detail that America was still adamantly neutral, he began to speak of what the postwar world should be. "We are fighting a defensive war," Lord Lothian told his elite American audience. "We are trying to prevent the hordes of paganism and barbarism from destroying what is left of civilized Europe." At that point, he became overly generous with the truth, "We are putting every nerve into the task. We are up to our necks in action." England at the time was in the midst of what was called the "phoney war."

Warming up to his American audience, Lothian made a direct attack on U.S. neutrality, declaring with florid rhetoric, "It is inconceivable to me that the United States, which has already done such immeasurable things for the freedom of mankind, which has produced the greatest democratic leaders that the world has seen, should not have its own contribution to make to the solution of the greatest problem that has ever presented itself to the genius of man." Conveniently, Lothian omitted his own central role only months earlier, in shaping that "greatest problem," as a leading architect of Chamberlain's appeasement of Hitler. (2).

Engineering American Public Opinion

Lothian's job in winning America to the British side was made easier by highly effective support from America's most influential journalist. Walter Lippmann had started his career as a protege of the Morgan banking interests in 1914, shortly after leaving Harvard, when he was made editor of a new, well-financed liberal weekly, "The New Republic."

The journal was owned by a J.P. Morgan partner, Willard Straight, and his wife, Dorothy Whitney Straight. Its name, "New Republic," had been suggested by Lippmann from a phrase used by H.G. Wells, whom Lippmann had met in England in 1913.

By the 1930's, before the era of television, Lippmann had become America's most widely read and respected political commentator, with a three-times-weekly column in the New York "Herald Tribune," syndicated in more than 200 newspapers across America. What Lippmann never mentioned to his readers, as he argued for support of the British cause, was that he, Lippmann, was also a secret initiate member of Lothian's Round Table circle.

Not surprising, therefore, Lippmann echoed Halford Mackinder and the Round Table's views on war aims. He published it in a widely read book by the same name, which he had written in 1942 and into early 1943, even before Mackinder's "Foreign Affairs" piece circulated in the United States.

In his book, "U.S. Foreign Policy and U.S. War Aims," Lippmann called for creation of a permanent "Atlantic Community," centered around the postwar alliance of America, Britain and France, to contain what he called "the German war party." This Atlantic pressure on Germany must of necessity be combined, he argued, with an implacably anti-German Soviet group of states to Germany's East. Interestingly, Lippmann, writing well before Yalta, included Poland in a postwar Soviet system: "Any plan for disarmament (of Germany)...or international control would be frustrated if Germany were able to detach, let us say, France from the Atlantic Community, or Poland from the Russian Orbit."

Lippmann was in fact outlining and preparing public opinion in America for what would become the postwar antagonistic blocs of the Warsaw Pact and NATO, directly following Mackinder's outline.

Similarly, for Japan, Lippmann, again taking the geopolitics of Mackinder and the Round Table as his guide, proposed, "Once Japan is ousted from the mainland, she cannot return without the consent of Russia and China. Once she is ousted from the islands of the Pacific, she cannot return to them if the United States is determined to prevent her."

The core of Lippmann's proposed postwar U.S. aims was an Atlantic Community, one centered on a special Anglo-American relationship, which Lippmann called, "the Oceanic Community." In the Oceanic Community, the United States and Britain must cooperate, despite all past bitterness and conflicts. In his vision of an Atlantic Community, Lippmann included the nations of the Americas, together with Iceland, Denmark, Netherlands, Belgium, Norway, even including neutral Sweden, Switzerland and Greece.

All this, Mackinder argued, would form the cornerstone for a new world order, as it indeed became. It would become a world order in which a tiny, near bankrupt island power effectively dominated world events from behind the scenes, that, for more than four decades following the end of the war.

In addition to his intimate ties with the British circles of Lothian and the Round Table, Lippmann was perhaps the most skilled American manipulator of popular consensus. He had spent years studying the idea, and wrote a book on the then-new discipline of "engineering public opinion." In the book, Lippmann declared, "the common interests very largely elude public opinion entirely, and can be managed only by a specialized class whose interests reach beyond the locality. This class is irresponsible, for it acts upon information that is not common property."

Lippmann added, "the creation of consent is not a new art," but one which has "improved enormously in technique, as a result of psychological research, coupled with the modern means of communication. The practice of democracy has turned a corner," he declared. "A revolution is taking place infinitely more significant than any shifting of economic power." It was the revolution of mass manipulation, made with psychology rather than guns, in what Lippmann revealingly termed, "the manufacture of consent."

Lippmann was describing himself and his friends in the Anglo-Saxon establishment when he spoke of an irresponsible elite. He argued that any government depends, ultimately, on public approval. The role of the specialized class or elite of Lippmann's circle, was to "engineer the public's consent to a program or goal." The goal was the postwar world order, and crucial support for Lippmann's effort to win America to Round Table war aims came from an influential American based in London.

"We interrupt this broadcast..."

Like Lippmann, also an American who had been coopted into the elite British Round Table circle, Edward R. Murrow broadcast over American CBS radio network from London. In a widely heard program, "This is London," Murrow was able to reach a listening audience of twelve million people. Those radio broadcasts, every day, and often four or five times per day, combined with the regular newspaper columns of Lippmann, were extremely effective in winning a key section of the American intelligentsia, and the ordinary population, to the cause of British informal imperialism, as it was being defined by Wells and the Round Table in the early years of the war.

By 1940, Murrow's role in London had assumed such importance in mediating the British cause to his American audience, that the U.S. Ambassador to Great Britain, John Winant, warmly referred to Murrow as the "authentic" ambassador, brokering Atlantic relations. He had become widely regarded as "the most important American in London" by that time.

Murrow, a stage actor by training, had been active since 1933 with the Emergency Committee for Displaced European Scholars, a group tied to the New York Council of Foreign Relations, of which Murrow had also become the youngest member. The Emergency Committee decided which European intellectuals would be allowed refuge in America during the Nazi oppression. The infamous Frankfurt School circles of Kurt Lewin, Herbert Marcuse, Theodore Adorno and others, had been brought to the United States by Murrow's group, where they then deployed to create the psychological climate inside America for the Round Table's postwar order. The Committee itself had been financed by the Rockefeller family, bringing the young Murrow into contact with select New York circles.

In 1937, well before England had even declared war on Germany, Murrow had been sent to London, where he was trained in radio propaganda by the British government's BBC, at the same time George Orwell and Guy Burgess of the Kim Philby spy ring, were at the British Broadcasting headquarters.

Murrow had been put in charge of European radio programs by CBS president, William S. Paley, with responsibility for deciding which events and which personalities to make known to the network's large American listening audience. Paley, and Paley's socialite wife, were personal friends of Winston Churchill's son, Randolph Churchill. The Randolph Churchill introduction was useful for Murrow to gain regular access to the Prime Minister.

In the 1930's radio reached into the homes of some 30 million American families, but was still largely in its infancy. Radio news commentary or regular news programs were almost non-existent. It had been Murrow, the trained stage actor, with tutoring from friends at BBC in London, who pioneered techniques of dramatizing breaking news events to gain maximum listener attention.

One remarkably successful technique Murrow introduced to heighten the dramatic effect of his London broadcasts during the early months of 1938, was to break into transmission of an ongoing program in progress on the United States CBS network, whether it be a comedy hour, music program or whatever. Murrow would take the microphone, and, with an ominous tone in his voice, announce, "We interrupt this broadcast to bring you news from London of vital breaking developments of the war in Europe. Today Nazi troops marched into..."

That format, "We interrupt this broadcast...," was used again and again, day after day, to dramatize to American listeners the news of latest German atrocities or military threats. At the time, America had pledged strict neutrality, but Murrow had not.

Significantly, in October 1938, just one month after the dramatic Munich meeting of Neville Chamberlain and Edouard Daladier with Hitler, where the fate of Czechoslovakia had been sealed, CBS radio carried a dramatized re-enactment of "The War of the Worlds," H.G. Wells' science fiction account of an invasion of the planet by extraterrestrial "alien" creatures, who destroy all civilization. The actor who played the role of radio announcer in Wells' radio drama in 1938, Orson Wells, began the drama with the words, "We interrupt this broadcast to bring you an urgent news bulletin..."

That broadcast on CBS radio in October 1938, triggered wholesale panic across the United States, with thousands of families getting into their cars or on busses, racing to the countryside to escape the "invaded" cities. The reaction to what had been clearly announced beforehand as a fictional report, whose content spoke of Martian invaders, was afterwards studied by a group of social pyschologists, based out of Princeton New Jersey, and led by Theodor Adorno, Kurt Lewin and a group of Frankfurt School social psychologists, many of whom had been brought to the United States after 1933 by Murrow's Emergency Committee for Displaced European Scholars.

The Adorno "Radio Project," as the study was named, conducted extensive personal interviews with people who had heard the Orson Wells broadcast. What they found demonstrated the awesome power of well-orchestrated radio. They confirmed what was to be an enormously potent breakthrough in manipulation of public perception and social engineering. Because of the repeated conditioning of American radio listeners by the format of Murrow from London, always announcing, "We interrupt this broadcast...," where the news reported was invariably of some new Nazi military conquest, listeners to Orson Wells' fictional drama psychologically were "certain" what they heard was an actual report of a Nazi invasion of United States cities, and therefore, fled or acted in panic. This, despite the clear statement before the broadcast that it was fiction.

Such was the subtle nature of the propaganda tools being refined in London by Edward R. Murrow. In London, Murrow was soon sponsored by Lord Milner's widow, Lady Violet Milner, for membership in the Royal Institute for International Affairs, an extremely unusual event for an American. The head of the Royal Institute, Ivison Macadam, became a close personal friend and a frequent dinner guest at Murrow's in London during the early war years. Through Lady Milner's close friendship, as well, Murrow met and soon became part of the Round Table circle, joining his American friend, Walter Lippmann in that elite group. (3).

Walter Lippmann's and Edward R. Murrow's visions of the postwar Round Table world order required the necessary outcome of the war. But the war was not to be, as some might have imagined, a war fought by Britain and her allies against the alliance of Axis powers led by Germany. Rather, as had been their aim since the Round Table first formulated Chamberlain's appeasement strategy in the 1930's was intended to prepare for Halford Mackinder's war, a war of mutual annihilation, fought first and foremost between Germany and Soviet Russia. All else would be kept secondary.

---------------------------------------------
Footnotes:

1. A remarkable example of Wells' propaganda fiction is the 1935 book out of which he also wrote the movie script for an extremely popular film, "Things to Come," in which a world war breaks out with bombs falling on London in the year 1940. The "fictional" war all but destroys civilization. Out of the rubble of the war emerges a new world government. Wells, H.G., "The Shape of Things to Come," London, The Cresset Press, 1935. The group's vehement hatred of national sovereignty is most bluntly spelled out in the essay by Lord Lothian, "The demoniacal influence of national sovereignty," contained in, Oldham, J.H., ed., "The Universal Church and the World of Nations," Allen & Unwin Ltd., London 1938. The December, 1941 issue of "Round Table" magazine contains the discussion of the group's postwar aims, in a piece titled, "Anglo-American Cooperation."

2. The postwar geopolitical design is in, Mackinder, Halford, "The Round World and the Winning of the Peace," in "Foreign Affairs," New York, July 1943. The basic formulation of Mackinder's doctrine can be found in his piece, "The Geographical Pivot of History," The Royal Geographical Society, in "Geographical Journal," no. 23, 1904, London. H.G. Wells, in his "Experiment in Autobiography," The Macmillan Co., New York, 1934, describes his debates with Mackinder over the future of the Empire, in meetings of a private circle they named, "Coefficients," which also included the Round Table inner circle figures Lord Milner, Leo Amery and others.

3. Lippmann, Walter, "U.S. Foreign Policy and U.S. War Aims," Little, Brown & Co., Boston, 1943, and "Public Opinion," Macmillan Co., New York, 1922. Kendrick, Alexander, "Prime Time: The Life of Edward R. Murrow," Avon, New York, 1969. Much of the background on the role of Murrow and the Radio Project and their role in creating the climate for supporting Britain, as well as that of H.G. Wells, comes from private research by Michael Minnicino of Leesburg, Virginia.
Straight, Michael, "Make This the Last War: The Future of the United Nations," George Allen & Unwin, London, 1943. The career of Michael Straight, son of the founder of Lippmann's "New Republic" is exemplary of the cultivation of relations by Britain inside elite American circles during the war. Straight, raised by his mother in England, had been inducted into the secret Cambridge Apostles with Anthony Blunt and Guy Burgess, of the notorious Kim Philby spy ring. That Philby-Burgess ring, later accused of working for Soviet intelligence, in actual fact, represented British interest in creating Mackinder's new world order by feeding Soviet intelligence selected information, reports which later in fact helped create the Cold War, so essential for the Mackinder postwar order. In 1938, Straight had been told by Blunt to return to the United States, where his family connections won him an appointment to the State Department as Adviser on International Economic Affairs. See Deacon, Richard, "The Cambridge Apostles: A history of Cambridge University's elite intellectual secret society," Farrar, Straus & Giroux, New York, 1985.

[Paul Rigby]

Ukrainian Journalist: Poroshenko Stopped Applauding Merkel After Her Comment About a Russian-European Union

February 18, 2017

Translated by Ollie Richardson & Angelina Siard

Also he added in the comments to the post: "Sitting in the hall and listening to Merkel, P. Poroshenko even stopped to applaud, having heard from her lips about the union of Europe and Russia from Vladivostok to Lisbon".

http://stalkerzone.org/ukrainian-journal...ean-union/

From : politnavigator.net

(http://www.politnavigator.net/na-konfere...abona.html)

[Paul Rigby]

Hitler's American Business Partners

Published on Dec 8, 2012

This documentary uncovers the unholy alliance between Nazi Germany and some of the biggest corporations in the US companies which were indispensable for Hitler to wage war. Henry Ford, the automobile manufacturer; James D Mooney, the General Motors manager; and Thomas Watson, the IBM boss were all awarded the Grand Cross of the German Eagle the Nazi's highest distinction for foreigners for their services to the Third Reich.

http://www.thedossier.info
https://twitter.com/theDossier_info

[video=youtube_share;SMKnH2BlkBA]http://youtu.be/SMKnH2BlkBA[/video]

[Paul Rigby]

"Today, when the world's financial elite began to implement the plan, "The Great Depression - 2" with the subsequent transition to the "new world order", identifying its key role in the organization of crimes against humanity becomes a priority,"

Yuri Rubtsov, Doctor of Historical Sciences, Academician of the Academy of Military Sciences, a member of the International Association of Historians of the Second World War, 13 May 2016.

Translation here:

http://www.stalkerzone.org/hitler-financ...k-england/

Original here:

http://ru-polit.livejournal.com/9212706.html

[Paul Rigby]

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

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/

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

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.

Webster Tarpley on, among other things, the British use of assassination in the prelude to WWI:

http://kpfa.org/player/?audio=263378

[Paul Rigby]

They want to turn us all into a global society of termites

PUBLIÉ LE 24 JUILLET 2017

https://mohsenabdelmoumen.wordpress.com/...-termites/

Mohsen Abdelmoumen: Your book « Conjuring Hitler » received a laudatory criticism of our friend Peter Dale Scott. Moreover, I share the view of this great intellectual on the fact that this book is essential in the work of historical research. How did you arrive at conclusions against the flow of the historians of the establishment, namely that Hitler was made by the United States and Great Britain and that World War II was inevitable?

Dr. Guido G. Preparata: I started out like most westerners, whose childhood was steeped in the typical propagandistic "currents" of the Cold War: by watching, endlessly and enthusiastically, epic pro-Allies and anti-German war movies. My parents postwar Italians were solidly in the pro-US, pro-Israel, pro-capitalist camp, and my father, an academic physicist, was then militantly anti-Communist. That is what I grew up with. We were enthusiastic "Americanists," and were awed by British "class." Though superficially proud of our "classical," "Greco-Latin" heritage, we, deep down, suffered from the typical inferiority complex exhibited by nationals of spiritually defeated, irrelevant countries.

Then the Berlin Wall came down and most of us slowly began to unravel from some kind of stupor. When I began working at the central bank of Italy in the mid-90s, I chose in my free time to tap the Bank's library in order to study Nazi Finance, which I saw as an esoteric and exotic theme. And from there, I started digging. What I remembered from those war movies I saw as I child was the narrative, always the same, and the point of attack: the action begins when these monsters (e.g., the SS) are already fully formed and extraordinarily truculent, vicious. That makes for great cinema, of course, but it begs far bigger questions: how did that happen? How did this phenomenon emerge? How did the world allow that to happen? How could this be?

I spent 10 years of my life reading and thinking about this. I collected material and archival documents in Germany and at the Bank of England, talked to people, experts, politicians, etc. The result of all this is Conjuring Hitler.

And what I found is that, although the phenomenon of Nazism itself its deep, esoteric rootsis indubitably German, in ways we have yet to understand fully, the (political and economic) conditions in which it was allowed to breed, to incubate had been, in my view, unquestionably favored, predisposed by Britain, and to a less extent by the USA, though later in game, and always under the strategic, unchallenged leadership of Britain.

Why Britain? Because she was and, in a way, still is, the mistress of world. This is her time. She rules, and, apparently, she will do anything in her might to keep that power. Today, the US, as we all know, is simply continuing in the geopolitical tracks of the British Empire.

Was the war inevitable? Yes it was: when in 1900 Germany thought she could challenge Britain's mastery, the latter, clearly, had to act. If you add to this that Germany's eventual supremacy, through clever strategizing, could have entailed a harnessing of Russia to "Teuton" martial and technological initiative, then you could envision what was for British circles the ultimate geopolitical nightmare: a "Eurasian Alliance," which would have been, de facto, invincible. And the carnage that ensued in the first half of the 20th century is the chronicle of the pre-emptive move the British were "forced" to set in motion in order to avoid the materialization of this scenario.

"They" say: when she started rocking the boat in 1890-1900 or so, Germany was belligerent, militaristic, aggressive, and imperialist. Absolutely. And Britain, I may add, a thousand times more so. In 1914, Germany wanted a "fast war" to consolidate what appeared like a middle-European kingdom with colonial annexes. She got Britain's war instead: the Great War.

You demonstrate with pertinence Hitler's ties with the ruling classes in Great Britain and the United States. However, you are focusing on the role of Great Britain. Can you explain us why?

For the reasons just explained. For the past 200 years we are playing England's game, none other's, really.

How do you explain that these two powers, the United States and Great Britain, who financed and supported Nazism, developed a propaganda machine via Hollywood that gives them the best role by showing them anti-Nazi?

Well, when in 1916-1917 the Eastern front fell with the defection of Russia, England brought in the US. Eventually Germany, feeling overwhelmed for WWI was essentially a siege, a siege around Germany surrendered. Which implied that she had not been defeated on her own soil. In other terms, the German/Eurasian menace had not been annihilated once and for all. To that end, a scheme began, which lasted essentially 20 years; and the scheme was 1) to revamp Germany ("set her up," truly) and 2) destroy her, again, in a two-front war.

That this was indeed planned is testified by Thorstein Veblen's extraordinary 1920 prediction, according to which the true design of the Treaty of Versailles was to incubate a reactionary regime in Germany through a radicalization of the middle-class, and finally unleash this new force against Soviet Russia, which prediction came to pass in June 1941. This is sensational. To my knowledge, I am the only one who has had the decency to cite this unique, genial testimony.

But things evolved more wildly than even a genius like Veblen could have foreseen. The movement whose ascent he prophesied was not just "reactionary": it was something altogether new, different, more sinister and fiendish. The Nazis swallowed up the old monarchist guard, which, by 1932 had come to attract less than 10 percent of the popular vote.

And, as for demonizing the vanquished enemy, the Germans could not have made Anglo-America a more glorious gift: it is as if they gratuitously and catastrophically cast themselves as the Anti-Christ, really. Which, conversely, implied that Anglo-America's troops and commanders had to be the legions of God. The latter were also the Techno-knights of Hiroshima, as I like to call them, and I am not sure what God has to do with any of this. I rather see the Devil's footprints everywhere.

Be that as it may, at this point, the victors had the most powerful narrative, the most powerful militant myth one could think of: i.e., the crushing of the demoniacal Nazis as a God-given, manifest acknowledgement of their (the Allies') spiritual superiority, of their deserved triumph. In the mythological name of which, in fact, they are still waging wars around the world, to this day, with impunity. For human rights, democracy, and peace-keeping, "they" say.

This narrative is the most wonderful piece of propagandistic capital one could possess: it has yielded, and still yields phenomenal rents.

Any attempt to "revise" it will be met with the most violent and categorical castigation. And any historical evidence running against it will be suppressed or "interpreted" in ways congruent with the official version, naturally.

Your book « The Ideology of Tyranny » explains the work of Foucault, postmodernism, George Bataille and his followers, but it also evokes the bankruptcy of the left. Does not this synthesis, which you have established, lead to a fatality, that is to say, war, even the end of humanity?

"End of humanity" sounds dramatic and terrifying. But, in a way, yes: I think they want to turn us all into a global society of termites. And they are succeeding.

Can you explain to our readers your concept of « techno structure »?

The concept is not original. It may be found in a variety of authors who described the automatization of society in the 1960s and 1970s.

It is widely acknowledged that most of our social interactions are managed by and go through "structures" (corporations, ministries, organizations, etc), certainly not "the market" (it is reckoned nowadays that the market handles not more than ca. 20 percent of all economic transactions). The "Techno-Structure" is what in pop iconography is known as" The Matrix": i.e. a giant, soulless apparatus of social coordination, which transcends "Left" and "Right," "Public" and "Private" and seeks to control humanity like, in point of fact, a termitary, an ant-heap, a hive.

I do not see the Techno-Structure as the postmodern leftists, though: i.e. as some kind of headless monster, which has emerged out of nowhere and lives and breathes through a collective and unconscious hallucination. I find this interpretation (à la Baudrillard) postmodern hogwash, in the sense that it uses discursive tricks (psychologistic metaphors) to hide political malfeasance, i.e. the (criminal) responsibility of those in charge of the Matrix itself (the élites), in fact. It is corrupt, corrupting discourse. I envision the Techno-Structure like a conscious development of the hierarchies of power in our hyper-modern era, and solidly driven by a specific leadership Anglo-American metropolitan whites and their European vassals who perfectly know what they are doing and how they are doing it.

How do you explain the emergence of LGBT people and what is the ultimate goal of this organization?

I have devoted a two-part post to this very topic in my blog Ad Triarios, to which I would most eagerly direct the reader: therein, I discuss this important issue in detail.

In essence, the way I see it, the story goes like this.

For consolidating their grip on society the powers that be have to tighten control on the one hand, and pre-empt any kind of (intellectual and affective) resistance, on the other.

This sort of operation, which they calibrate daily, is conducted, as we know, on many fronts: control of belief and desire, propaganda, narratives, etc., as well as economic conditionings of all sorts, of course.

It appears that, though docile and malleable, the old patriarchal model of the male bread-winner earning enough to feed comfortably a family of 4, or 5 mouths the old middle-class standard must have been deemed not fully dependable, control-wise: despite all constraints, the middle-class nucleus still seemed to enjoy "too much" independence, both financial and spiritual.

So they had to undo this template, somehow. This was going to take time because, de facto, much hinged on the image of the "macho," socially speaking. Clearly, this work of societal re-design meant debilitating the familial nucleus itself. The macho has served its purpose; it is now time to discard, scrap him; and the System is doing so by immolating him publicly in a grand game of discursive terror.

They always conduct their campaigns with great skill, i.e. by leveraging real, tangible dysfunctions such as, to begin with, the subdued, semi-hallucinated, idle, and often degraded status of women under this macho tutelage (a jaundiced advertence to the sexist clichés of the 50s is typical in this regard). They leverage real problems to promote obliquely an altogether different agenda, which has nothing to do with the spiritual disaffection of women, yet is designed to manipulate it.

So you had feminism. The result, however, was that women were not in the least "emancipated," as they had been "promised": they left the hallucinated confinement in the kitchen only to rejoin their spouses in doing the same mind-deadening jobs for less pay, and overall less pay for both of them filing taxes together.

And now, you have less money, more worries, and the same amount of mounting stress affecting both parents.

In the 1980s they applied this trick to "race." The US is a thoroughgoing racist country that, seemingly, is rather unwilling to cure itself of this psychological malady. So, instead of attacking the problem head-on, the chiefs of propaganda devised a simple discursive expedient to cover and suppress the issue: via a regime of discursive terror and censure (i.e. "political correctness"), strictly enforced by the whites, they simply prohibited they banned from speech any words and expressions that could be construed as "racist."

Socially, economically, nothing changed, nothing had to change in the "ghetto" (which word, in the process, has been, it too, forbidden).

So the best way to keep the social order intact and immutable and to preserve the social truce with non-whites in America, especially blacks, is to use this Newspeak to praise them instead, and pre-empt thereby the utterance of any "slur." The hypocrisy and sur-reality of this arrangement have emerged in very bold relief with the latest US election, but the social phenomenon has been brewing, with extraordinary and far-reaching results, for over 30 years.

What this discursive policy/technique effects is remarkable: it maintains the status quo ante on the one hand, yet it also does precipitate two additional, crucial situations: 1) it divides folk (man vs. woman, black vs. white), and, most importantly 2) it propagandizes, on the other hand, a thoroughly fake ecumenism by which we are implicitly harnessed, via (precarious) labor and brain-washing, to the Structure itself. If there is job insecurity, division, mistrust, and divisiveness all around, then the "State" with its racial quotas (affirmative actions) and fanatically solemn proclamations of respect for otherness and diversity, emerges as the sole anchor of salvation.

We have thus come full circle: with the familial nucleus undermined and jobs administered with a dropper, we are approaching, slowly but surely, a model of insect society.

The last, though certainly not least, piece of engineering in this mechanical puzzle revolves around the issue of breeding and sex or "gender" as is now the fashion to say. Hence all this extraordinary emphasis, especially in the US, on abortion. It has to do with the capillary administration of function and resource allocation within the human ant-heap. Since credit is centralized and nothing is really left to chance, clearly, the issue of breeding and sex is of paramount importance for the Techno-Structure.

And that is when this LBGT movement comes into play. It is just the latest act in this grand discursive production of "diversity." There are big (vested) Interests, and big money, behind this; this much is patent. Why? Why would the élite whites, who are notoriously the most racist, sexist and homophobic people on the planet all of sudden affect such an allegedly maniacal concern for the civil fate, for the so-called "rights" of homosexuals and transsexuals as if nothing else mattered at the leftist end of the political spectrum? It seems absurd.

And the only reason for this hammering propaganda is, I think, to effect in people's mind much as the white males in charge of this game have succeeded in conditioning people to profess that white males are the most horrifying breed on the planet (how they pulled this off is amazing) that "gender" is a (phallocratic) construct, and, therefore, that so is "the family" and the genitorial role of both sexes.

What the System wants is asexual or sexually interchangeable human larvae that can morph at will into workers, warriors, and/or breeders.

Women, e.g., now figure prominently in the highest echelons of the US military and a year ago the top brass lifted the ban in the US army against transsexuals. Q.E.D.

Thus techno-structural "gender" is discursive food for the masses awaiting proper regimentation in the hive. Up there, at the top, among the eugenicized elites, the patriarchal, macho model may be retained (possibly with a few modifications), for they still think and manage things in conventionally feudal terms.

The issue of violence is very present in your works, ranging from Nazism to imperialist wars, and so on. What is, according to you, the best way to break a violent process?

Yes, I am heavily fixated on it: on what Tolstoy called "The Law of Violence."

How to get rid of it? Very difficult question.

I have for some time now attacked the study of various new fields (criminal and social psychology, zoology and entomology, and Buddhist epistemology) in order to understand, a little, how our psyche works, what consciousness is; how we form desire, and how hypnosis plays into all of this. I have just begun; I hope I will have semi-decent answers soon enough.

As a preliminary response to this vital issue, my conviction, especially in light of the profound influence Veblen's Theory of the Leisure Class has exercised on my way of thinking, I tend to believe that we have to divest ourselves, to tear off, as it were, from our psychic "chassis" any vestige, any stratum, any accreted layer of what Veblen identified, qualified as "barbarous traits." These are manifestations, ways of being of a predatory mindset a mindset, that is, which is characterized a constant, persevering proneness to "get ahead" of others, to bully them either brutally or in subtle psychological fashion; to push them of the way; to exploit (the labor of others as a matter of course), to think in clannish, exclusionary terms; to prey on whatever and whomever the mind thus disposed perceives as weak. At first blush, these definitions might sound trite and moralistic, but it is not so. If one ponders this over, he will realize that the inner hierarchical structures of our society is organized, for the most part (if not in toto), along these very lines. The vast majority of us are taught from an early age, not so much to cooperate as to secure a position of privilege. E.g., think of how proud are all those parents all those mothers and fathers, who have spent tens of thousands of dollars in academic tuitionTheir kids are "set," prestigiously so.

But what is there to be really proud about? That your children have tenaciously succeeded into making a lot of money? That's fine; yes, not everybody can do that. But what about beauty, making beautiful things; what about cooperation or peace?

In the rat race, we strive to "grab" for ourselves and our own a piece and/or a position of the "Vested Interests": let the rest fend for themselves and/or rot in fiery hell (for all we care).

It is this psychic "software" that one has to excise, wholesale, from his adperceptive apparatus through a patient work of re-education, through a re-design of school curricula, in which emphases need to be shifted, new topics introduced (e.g. mandatory study of music and harmony from first to last grade), and for which an overall approach to learning and doing ought to be developed.

It is understood that such an overhaul of the educational system should go hand-in-hand with a major renovation movement in society itself, and especially in the economic sector (monetary reform, biological farming, vegetarianism, etc.)

You have studied the terrorist phenomenon. Do not you think that the terrorism of Daesh and Al Qaeda funded and supported by the United States and Great Britain are in the continuity of Nazism since it serve the same interests, those of US imperialism and its British, French, and European allies?

In a sense, yes. Clearly, Nazism and Islamist terrorism are very different entities, but I suppose you could construe Nazi Germany as a giant, national terrorist movement that was ultimately used to "push" events in a certain direction in order to trigger other reactions that would eventually settle the issue in favor of the manipulators [which is by definition precisely what terrorism has been invented for]the main difference being in this case that Germany was a "terrorist nation" and the Islamist groups, instead, are forces of political violence that "move" within the confines of what are now proverbially known as "loose networks." The analogy is overall warranted, I think.

How do you explain the total absence of a strong anti-imperialist movement at a time when imperialism is breaking countries and nations? But where is resistance to imperialism gone?

That is a question I myself have been battling with, restlessly, since 9/11. "They" have set things up in such a way that, unless you are able to prove consistently that all inciting incidents and wars (at least since the time of the Cold War, in a systematic fashion, but even before) are fake and staged (on both sides), unless you are able to do so convincingly, i.e., overcoming people's inertia, fear, and superstitious allegiances, you will smash your teeth against a solid brick wall.

They will not listen to you. They will brand as you a kook, a conspiracy nut or what have you.

Think of Gulf One, Iraq Two, but even the incident of the Gulf of Tonkin, Pearl Harbor, or the "Sitting War" in 1940, the "Show Trials" of Stalin, etc. There is constant stagecraft at work. Theatrics.

And then there is the "mass." Us. Apparently, we merely want to get by, eat, drink and make merry. Honestly, who really wants to spend, say, five or more hours a day reading alt news and denounce this, that, or the other?

And yet, many of us feel they have to do so.

In general, people want job security and live their lives in peace. It is hard as it is to earn a living, not to mention if you have children. And on top of this, one has to worry about being deceived by "State Interests" into believing in the existence of various "enemies," into going into war, the "wrong" sort of war, into buying food that is poison, etc. And it is difficult, because the vast majority of us depend on the System, thoroughly.

How is one to rebel? At what cost? And what for? You protest against injustice, you defy, you denouncenon-violently, it is understood. Good. How many will rise and follow, to protest civilly? How many will stand up and be counted? What will have this all meant in the end? For my modest part, I have tried to denounce falsehoods and injustices; in the hic et nunc, I have invariably found myself completely alone.

Incidentally, in one of her tunes, Sheryl Crow, the popstar, sings about an "All-American Rebel." And I wonder: what is an "All-American Rebel"? I have never seen, heard, or read about one. Where is "rebellion," in the US, or elsewhere? Where are the (political) heroes? What do heroes really do? What do they even mean in pop iconography? Do we actually need heroes? And if so, to achieve what exactly?

And who says, moreover, that your average man or woman wants to rebel, even if he or she disbelieves part of what s/he is told? There is, again, that barbarous mindset that prevents one from seeing things as they are. When you pursue privilege all your life and 99 percent of all people do, you become wedded to a certain lifestyle, a certain modus vivendi; you become dependent on the Structure; you perforce become loyal to it.

In my short essay "Techno-Structure," I have indeed acknowledged that it is no less true that, often, the dominant feeling within the mass is not so much one of defiant indignation as one of frustrated lack of identity, of purpose. Everybody wants to be a boss; everybody wants a piece of the Hollywood action; everybody wants to be famous, everybody wants followers, groupies, and friends; everybody wants glamour, toned bodies, and fashion lifestyle; everybody wants to be part of the great power narrative.

Veblen, again, said it: the lower strata of society are hyper-conservative; they will protest when they starve, otherwise it is unlikely, for their mental processes, on account of the spiritual debilitation to which they are continuously subjected, are essentially barbarous.

In sum, popular reactions are divided according to the social stratum in which you live.

In principle, dissent, if any, can only originate in the middle class. The upper middle classes and hyper-modern aristocracies are in charge: their job is to resist change. Of the lower classes, we have spoken.

If you are middle-class (intelligentsia), you can afford to dissent only if you come from a wealthy background, which might have allowed you to clear your mind of barbarous obfuscation (through well-guided nurture, study, and good teachers), and which gives you the liberty and financial ease to think and say what you really believe. We are talking of a very exiguous minority here.

For the most part, the middle-stratum is generally bent on seeking pleasure, and little more. They do so either by compromising and keeping quiet, when they are somewhat alert, or, as is more generally the case, by behaving erratically, confused as they are by the tug-of-war between wholesome sentiment on one side and barbarous, violent habits on the otherhabits which organically tie them to the supporting structures of the System (e.g., buying into the current banking-financial system of exploitation, "patriotic support" of war, implicit racism, allegiance to oligarchism, etc.)

At the "bottom of the pyramid," as they say, people are too busy making ends meet: they have no time to read books, study music, discuss alt news, worry about Syria, or comment on the latest exegesis of Heidegger. They could not care less about the history of Hitler, 9/11, the deeper mechanisms of terrorism, or the fate of dissent. Which is also the case for a large portion of the hedonistic middle stratum, as has been said.

True, in the 1960s, through the end of the 1970s, we have seen the middle class initiate movements of protest in the universal name of social justice and peace. There was good in that. And to a large extent, these movements appeared to have been genuine. They did cause some concern for the Establishment.

They exist no longer. They have been defeated, systematically so. I recount part of that story in my The Ideology of Tyranny.

However, if you look closer, you also notice that all this flurry of grassroots enthusiasm that animated the 60s was itself very much choreographed. Take Vietnam: it was not by accident that people started taking to the streets to protest against the war, massively so, in 1968. That is, at the very time when the apparatus knew that the war was lost. Which is to say that nothing really happens in our System unless some component thereof allows it.

It was easy/easier to "protest" during the Cold War; it was easy to strike the dissenting pose back then because the established Left was there already to provide you with a stage to do so; it had all been paid for. It did not take any guts to be defiant; they wanted you to. The political template chosen to wage power was then one of dichotomous antagonism: the "sides" were pre-arranged; you just had to pick one, and "militate." This was patent in Europe; we Italians have a strong recollection of this (especially the ten years of latent civil war and terrorism in the 1970s); we had Europe's most powerful Communist party.

And, in Europe, the progeny of those diehard Communists that so vehemently manifested against "US Imperialism" in the 70s and 80s form these days the most enthusiastic "Americanists" of the planet: "Liberals" all of them: they were the ones who cried tears of bliss when Obama was elected president in 2008. So much for intellectual consistency and the "culture of dissent."

When that sort of theatrics had exhausted its usefulness, again, it was disposed of. And the whole "Red" apparatus, once so imposing and awe-inspiring, just disappeared, overnight, without a sound. And, now, lo and behold, nobody, anywhere takes to the streets anymore: the political will, money, and societal arrangements devised for the purpose are no longer there to support the critical masses for this type of show to go on: and note that at the time the marches were to benefit Left-wing parties exclusively, not social justice or peace per se. To a large extent, it was all artificial, artificial dissent.

The "Left" has been stripped of that apparatus; it is now naked; you can see what it is made of: the usual group of bourgeois that will do whatever the upper class pay-masters will tell them to do. And today, indeed, the Left has been entirely reduced to the platform of LBGT. The "Left" does not exist; it never existed, really.

One could thereby conclude that, in this regard, we have come full circle to a sad ending. But, then again, what is there to be sad about? And I wonder: was there ever a golden age of dissent? Was there a real time of glory, of mass awareness and resistance versus the scourge of injustice and the perpetuation of violence?

I think not. In the end, those who have responsibly and unconditionally opposed violence and injustice have always, and unfortunately, been few and far between. Lone wolves.

Possibly it will change. I hope so.

Interview realized by Mohsen Abdelmoumen

Who is Dr. Guido Giacomo Preparata?

Born in Boston, Massachusetts, October 25th, 1968, Dr Preparata was raised in the United States, France, and Italy. He obtained a B.S. in economics at the Libera Università Internazionale degli Studi Sociali (LUISS, Rome, Italy), a Master's degree in Economics and a PhD in Political Economy at the University of Southern California (Los Angeles, USA), and an Mphil in Criminology at the University of Cambridge (UK). Further graduate and undergraduate coursework in financial history, applied mathematics, economic theory, and international economics was completed at Stanford University, the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), and the London School of Economics (LSE).

He first worked as a research associate at the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI, Palo Alto, USA); he subsequently joined the research division of the department of Supervision & Regulation at the Bank of Italy, Italy's central bank; and from 2000 to 2008 he taught political economy at the University of Washington. In 2005, as a Visiting Professor of Economics and Fulbright Scholar at the University of Jordan, in Amman, he has conducted research on Political Islam, Terrorism, and Islamic Economics. In 2012, he joined the Pontifical Gregorian University, in Rome, as a Senior Lecturer of Social Sciences, and before coming to the Gregorian, he served as a Lecturer at Kwantlen Polytechic University in Vancouver, Canada, where he taught the sociology and psychology of criminal behavior.

Dr Preparata lives in Taiwan with his wife and his two daughters.

[Paul Rigby]

Guido Preparata on Conjuring Hitler

1 July 2017

Guido Giacomo Preparata joins Our Interesting Times to discuss his book Conjuring Hitler: How Britain and America made the Third Reich. We talk about how Great Britain fomented two world wars to prevent an alliance forming between Germany and Russia and how the rise of National Socialism in Germany was not an aberration or accident of history but the result of Anglo-American financial support and intrigue.

[video=youtube_share;TFqCiJOpWhk]http://youtu.be/TFqCiJOpWhk[/video]

[David Butler]

I know it's not quite the main subject of this thread but around the mid point there are some interesting discussions on Ukraine from around 2015 and some podcast episodes are mentioned.

Do any of the contributors know if any of these have continued more recently to connect up to current events ?

[Lauren Johnson]

There haven't been any updates.

My favorite thread was this one: https://deeppoliticsforum.com/fora/threa...ovorussiya

Many thought Putin would send the tanks in 2015 when the Minsk accords were violated. Instead, he pushed through the Minsk II accords, which obviously been ignored by Ukraine since.