Showing posts with label imperialism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label imperialism. Show all posts

Sunday, May 26, 2024

"The Drive for War" by Craig Murray

 

The Drive for War 288


The collective shrug with which the Western media and political class noted the attempted assassination of Slovakian Prime Minister Robert Fico has been telling.

Can you imagine the outrage and emotion that would have been expressed by Western powers if not Fico but a pro-Ukraine, anti-Russian leader within the EU had been attacked? The new orders for weapons that would have been presented to the arms manufacturers, the troops that would have been deployed, the sabres that would have been rattled?

Instead we have the media telling us that Fico opposed sending arms to Ukraine and opposed threatening Russia. We are told he did not accept the mainstream narrative on Covid vaccinations. The media do not quite say he deserved to be shot, but they come very, very close.

Fellow EU leaders followed correct form in making statements of shock and disgust at the attack on Fico, but they were formal and perfunctory. The “not actually one of us” message was very clear.

There are now an ordered set of neoliberal beliefs to which anybody in a Western nation participating in public affairs must subscribe, or they are beyond the pale.

Not to subscribe to all of these beliefs makes you a “populist”, a “conspiracy theorist”, a “Putin puppet” or a “useful idiot”.

These are some of the “key beliefs”:

1) Wealth is only created by a small number of ultra-wealthy capitalists on whom the employment of everybody else ultimately depends.
2) The laws governing financial structures must therefore tend to concentrate wealth to these individuals, so that they may deploy it as they choose.
3) State-created currency must only be concentrated in and distributed to private financial institutions.
4) Public spending is always less efficient than private spending.
5) Russia, China and Iran pose an existential threat to the West. That comprises both an economic threat and a physical, military threat.
6) Colonialism was a boon to the world, bringing economic development, trade and education to people of inferior cultures.
7) Islam is a threat to Western values and to world development.
8) Israel is a necessary project for spreading Western values to the uncivilised Middle East.
9) Security necessitates devoting very substantial resources to arms production and the waging of continual war.
10) Nothing must threaten the military and arms industry interest. No battle against corruption or crime can override the need for the security military industrial complex to be completely unchallenged and internally supreme.

Within this architecture of belief, other orthodoxies hang dependent, such as the correct way to respond to a complex pandemic, or support for NATO and impunity for the security services. (Support for Israel is probably better portrayed as a dependent point, but with the subject of Gaza so prominent at the moment I have figuratively moved it into the main structure.)

Any deviation on any point of belief is a challenge to the entire system, and thus must be eradicated. You will note there is no room whatsoever, within this architecture of thought, for values like freedom of speech or freedom of assembly. They simply do not fit. Nor is it possible within this architecture to incorporate actual democracy, which would give people a choice of what to believe.

If you accept this architecture of thought, then you must argue that the Genocide in Gaza is a good thing, and it threatens the entire structure if you state that it is not a good thing. That is why we have witnessed the spectacle of politicians defying and then repressing their own people, willing to place all of their political capital at the service of genocidal Zionism.

Words struggle to convey the horrors we have all seen from Gaza, and in no way does it lessen the terrible suffering nor the extent of the crime to observe that it has caused a major rift in the neoliberal belief system which cannot be hidden from the people.

Gaza has ramifications leading to questioning throughout the system. Why is Tik Tok being banned, to stop people getting information on Gaza? Why is it a problem that the platform is owned by China?

What has China done that makes in an enemy? China has no military designs on the West. Of recent purchases most of us have made of physical goods, a high proportion have come from China. Why is an important trade partner an “enemy”?

Why is Russia our enemy? The notion that the Russian army is going to land on the Wash is utterly implausible. The Russian state, over centuries and wildly differing regimes, has never had the slightest desire to invade the British Isles. In the UK, under various governments, for almost three centuries charlatans have been claiming a threat of Russian invasion to justify higher defence expenditure.

Why the need to have “enemies” at all?

One designated “enemy” is David McBride. He is the latest whistleblower to be jailed for serving humanity. An Australian military lawyer, he blew the whistle on war crimes by Australian forces in Afghanistan.

Now there is no dispute that the war crimes were real. There is no dispute that they were being covered up. There is no dispute that McBride released true information that was being hidden from the public.

But that does not matter. McBride was sentenced to five and a half years for leaking documents. As is the case in both the US and UK as well as Australia, there was no public interest defence allowed in McBride’s whistleblowing.

The case is slightly complicated by the fact that McBride claimed he did not leak the documents to expose the war crimes, but rather the opposite; to prevent the heavy-handed investigation of individual soldiers. Whatever the motive, nobody has in fact faced any punishment for the war crimes revealed by McBride, while McBride is in jail for exposing them.

The slavish worship of “national security” is of course similarly at play in the case of Julian Assange, who has another court date on Monday. He has already served five years in a dreadful maximum security jail, after seven years detained in the Ecuadorean Embassy, for his exposure of extensive war crimes for which nobody has been punished. Again, no public interest defence is permitted.

I am for once hopeful that we shall see Julian free very soon. Asked to give an assurance to the court that Julian Assange will not be barred from claiming First Amendment freedom of speech rights on the grounds of his nationality, the US government has replied that he will be able to argue in court that he should not be so barred.

That is of course not the same thing.

The “rules-based order” that has replaced international law in the neoliberal mind, depends on ad hoc rules designed to enforce the neoliberal thought construct outlined above. In the International Court of Justice in South Africa vs Israel, we will witness whether the established legal system retains enough self-respect to uphold actual law against these “rules”.

At the High Court in London we shall witness the High Court of England and Wales face the same test. In the face of blatant refusal by the United States to comply with the stipulated assurances, will the High Court maintain its intellectual self-respect? Or will it bow down to the dictates of the neoliberal world order?

It is a key moment. I believe the neoliberal structure is cracking. Who can be saved?

 

"Pinkwashing, "homonationalism" and postmodern imperialism" by laughlyn (johan eddebo)


Pinkwashing, "homonationalism" and postmodern imperialism

LAUGHLYN (JOHAN EDDEBO)

MAY 07, 2024

17

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We’re standing on a small overpass right next to Yoyogi park in Shibuya, watching the parade section of the Tokyo Pride event doing its circuit through the local city centre. There’s a significant turnout here, something which is actually unusual by the standards of the Tokyo sprawl.

Not the crowds as such, of course, but them being united for a purpose other than fragmented work or consumption is a rare thing in a culture splintered into thousands of little tiny bubbles. Only mass-marketed events like the Olympics or a Taylor Swift concert manages to really mount large crowds around anything vaguely resembling a common idea, and it soon becomes obvious that the Pride event is not at all different in that regard.

It’s literally nothing more than a PR event for brand marketing within the framework of the totally appropriated myth of sexual liberation.

The problem isn’t just that the propaganda of the corporate state is taking advantage of the Pride/LGBT framework to further its own agenda - the spectacle around us has now been almost completely emptied of its own original content, substituted for nothing more than brands and their symbolic trappings.


But there’s a hint of an awareness of these contradictions among the people around us. With us up there on the bridge are pro-Palestinian LGBT activists, who are manifesting against the participation in the Pride event by multinationals like Kawasaki, who currently make up significant links in the supply chains of the Israeli armed forces during the ongoing atrocities.

This is all well and good. I just wished they’d have gone deeper. Who cares if Kawasaki happened to commit a little faux pas - why are they even here at all in the first place? Why are Coca-Cola and its employees celebrating “equal rights” in history’s most stratified class society, while just next door, the homeless of Shinjuku and the prostitutes of Kabukicho languish in despair?

Back in 2007, in Terrorist Assemblages, Jasbir Puar coined the concept of “homonationalism” around her analysis of how narratives of sexual liberation are being strategically deployed in support and reproduction of imperialism. Her point was that cultural phenomena like the LGBT movement function as key symbols of the purported openness, freedom and tolerance of liberal regimes, which are then used as a tool of identity-building and integration propaganda, as well as in the contradistinction of the sexually repressive, anti-democratic and primitive other.

The Muslim. The terrorist. Russia. China.

This is quite perceptive. In a sense, sexual diversity and liberation is the quintessential expression of the core value system of Westernized liberal regimes, where sexual license is closely akin to the highest possible good on a framework of hedonist secular consumerism. The details take a bit of unpacking, but we can just observe that Enlightenment individualism expressed within a capitalist framework devoid of any transcendent reference points will almost by necessity tend towards the radical unfettering of the libido as a moral absolute.

So the narrative of sexual liberation, closely connected to universal suffrage and women’s rights, is thus through a set of strong symbolic connections a key foundation of the basic framework by which we moderns make sense of what’s good and bad in the world.

And what’s important to note, this foundation persists as a social fact whether you’re a fourth wave feminist or a card-carrying neo-Nazi. As long as we’re in some sense bearers of the Enlightenment heritage, we must navigate the strong symbolic statements of the sexual liberation. And if we happen take a moral stance against them, we’re forced to address the inevitable contradictions that arise, since they so effectively channel the value-foundations of the liberal, secular order which almost all of us are anchored in to some extent.

For these reasons, it makes perfect sense for modern multinationals to specifically appropriate and recuperate the once subversive gay rights movement, repackaged into this vapid brand-marketing event whose strongest and most politically incendiary statement was the meaningless slogan of “Happy Pride!” heard everywhere throughout the streets of the Tokyo ward.

The Panasonic section

And for all the corporate propaganda around sexual liberation, there’s surprisingly little actual sex taking place at the Pride event in Shibuya. The passion is at the level of a flea market, with vaguely interested consumers picking through the weird offerings of the corporate stalls that make up 90% of the exhibits on the event grounds. Not quite the atmosphere of the free festival, unchained.

I didn’t even see people holding hands, much less anybody kissing another human being’s face in an expression of something vaguely akin to desire.

Of course, in keeping with the socially required behaviour, all of that stuff must be channeled into consumption, and not be spent on actual intimacy. The sex is found in the brands, in the marketing of pharmaceutical multinationals, in the free energy drinks and the selfies taken in front of the garish sports car planted smack-dab in the middle of the open-air venue, right next to the tents of Pfizer and Panasonic, where you can get a sticker and a key chain. And in a bald-faced rip-off from Shinto ritual you’re invited to write your name on a paper heart that you attach to a painted tree symbolizing your participation in the LGBT-corporate alliance towards the inclusion and liberation of everyone. The voluntary reproduction of the spectacular image of modernity and liberalism.

So they can sell you their shit.

'When you make love you're using up energy; and afterwards you feel happy and don't give a damn for anything. They can't bear you to feel like that. They want you to be bursting with energy all the time. All this marching up and down and cheering and waving flags is simply sex gone sour. If you're happy inside yourself, why should you get excited about Big Brother and the Three-Year Plans and the Two Minutes Hate and all the rest of their bloody rot?'
That was very true, he thought. There was a direct intimate connexion between chastity and political orthodoxy. For how could the fear, the hatred, and the lunatic credulity which the Party needed in its members be kept at the right pitch, except by bottling down some powerful instinct and using it as a driving force?

The sex impulse was dangerous to the Party, and the Party had turned it to account.
Orwell. 1984.

The ultimate meaning of sex in the neoliberal framework is nothing more than an act of solipsistic consumption, and the foremost expression of this framing (but far from the only one) is found in neoliberalism’s specific recuperated manifestation of the transgender phenomenon. The customization of the self and its body into the expression of a stunted, socially constructed consumer desire through pharmaceutical intervention.

Of course, big pharma just by coincidence happens to hold pride of place at the event grounds in Shibuya, with GSK cozying up next to Pfizer and Astra-Zeneca, with “team Coca-Cola”, Amazon, Sony and Panasonic close by, in what stands out to me as the most perfectly recuperated manifestation of a once-genuine social movement I’ve ever encountered. And there’s literally nothing else here. Nothing but corporate stalls as far as the eye can see.

Unfortunately, the problem is almost impossible to communicate. The point doesn’t get across.

One key problem is that the analyses of the situation are almost always mind-numbingly stupid. The most radical criticisms of corporate pinkwashing in the mainstream media basically amount to calling brands out for not being sufficiently orthodox instruments in the propaganda of liberal regimes and for the hegemony of Western capital:

And a representative example of the most common response to these issues being raised, which obviously takes form against the backdrop of progessivist mythology and its centerpiece of sexual liberation, is as follows:

I was at Tokyo pride last year and studied abroad in Tokyo for the first half of 2023. (Had a fantastic time, one of the most well run prides I’ve ever been to.)
Our professors explained to us that recent judicial opinions discussing more progressive takes on LGBTQ+ rights noted that a significant factor in ruling in favor of these movements is the corporate messaging seen from events like these.
While in America we see it purely as rainbow washing, in Japan, the corporate messaging is seen by judges as representative of the voice of the people because in theory the money follows the will of the people otherwise the companies wouldn’t be bothering with the campaigning so much.
I’m no expert and am still learning a lot, but I got the impression that culturally, the rainbow washing actually has really significant political effects for achieving actual rights that are still being pursued in Japan. It really changed the way I look at corporate sponsorship at pride. It’s a luxury that Americans get to look at it from a purely cynical standpoint (and also maybe a shame that American Judges let their politics ignore the same economic responses in America that are indicative of that same cultural shift towards progress that even corporations can’t ignore from a market share standpoint).
(Reddit comment).

The corporate recuperation, literally labelled as “rainbow washing”, is here seen in a progressive light, as a force for good, since the end goal of attaining legal rights and social recognition for the sexual minority groups is nonetheless being pursued. The idea is that corporate recuperation of sexual liberation within the framework of Pride is not a problem if it’s an expression of the consumer’s agency in the marketplace.

This is basically a defense of the “Spontanous Demonstrations” of Animal Farm as by definition an authentic manifestation of the general will.

One would perhaps rather argue that corporate recuperation of a social movement under capitalism is vastly more of a problem if it were an actual expression of the popular will (since the tendency would then by definition be in the direction of an explicit totalitarian fusion of capital and popular agency).

And I just can’t stomach the final paragraph. It’s a privileged “luxury” to be cynical about capitalist hijacking of social movements? This has to be one of the finest examples of unwitting self-contradiction I’ve ever come across.

This interpretation and the final sentiment could only be possible from a position of profound ignorance. A total lack of understanding of the violent repression expressed in and through the corporate appropriation and colonization of popular social movements.

Or is it rather that the authoritarian attachment to the mythology of progress and its redemptive promises makes it completely palatable that Pride is hijacked and turned into an instrument of propaganda for capital and empire, propped up by the exploitation of the working classes and colonized peoples of the world?

I don’t know.

But I do know that this puritan, repressed emanation of neoliberal ideology and the commodification of human intimacy I had the misfortune to witness in Shibuya is a far fucking cry from Stonewall.

References

Puar, J. (2007). Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times. London: Duke University Press.


+++

Touch, we touched the very soul
Of holding each and every life
We claimed the very source of joy ran through
It didn't, but it seemed that way
I kissed a lot of people that day

Someone passed some bliss among the crowd
And we walked back to the road, unchained

The Sun Machine is coming down,
and we're gonna have a party


Friday, May 10, 2024

"Victory Day remembrance, why the Western elites want to forget" by Strategic Culture Foundation

 

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Source: Strategoc Culture Foundation

Victory Day remembrance, why the Western elites want to forget

May 10, 2024

Many ordinary citizens around the world, including in the United States and across Europe, are united with Russia in properly honoring Victory Day.

❗️Join us on TelegramTwitter , and VK.

Contact us: info@strategic-culture.su

Russian historian Roman Shumov aptly captured the sublime significance of Victory Day. He wrote this week, “For Russians, May 9 isn’t just a celebration of military triumph – it is a celebration of victory over death.”

This week Russia and allied nations celebrated Victory Day with the customary splendor and respect on display in Moscow’s Red Square. All across Russia, and on a smaller scale in other European countries too, there were commemorations in honor of the soldiers and civilians who gave their lives to defeat Nazi Germany in May 1945.

When Nazi Germany officially surrendered on May 9, the people of the Soviet Union had made the most excruciating and crucial sacrifice to gain victory. There is still no exact figure, but it is estimated that 27 to 30 million Soviet citizens died in the Great Patriotic War (1941-45). About 10 million of that total were Red Army soldiers, the rest civilians who died through unimaginable suffering of violence and deprivation. It was their collective sacrifice and heroism in the face of barbarism that finally wielded defeat on the Nazi Third Reich. It is only fitting that the Battle of Berlin was the last stand for Hitler’s regime and that the hoisting of the Soviet flag over the Reichstag was the iconic moment of triumph.

The contribution to defeat Nazi Germany by American, British and other volunteer soldiers from Western nations was not insignificant. But the “second front” that opened with the Normandy Landings in June 1944 is ridiculously overblown by Hollywood and self-serving Western narcissistic propaganda. The long-delayed D-Day landings were a relatively supplemental part to the massive damage that the Soviet people had already inflicted on the Eastern Front beginning in June 1941. Between 80 and 90 percent of German military casualties were incurred from numerous phenomenal battles, from Stalingrad to Kursk, Odessa to Kiev, and many more.

The defeat of Nazi Germany was not just an incredible military triumph, it was a victory over death, and not just for Russians, but for humanity as a whole. World War Two was the greatest, most heinous event in recent centuries, if not the last two millennia. The industrialized genocide of millions of civilians, the carpet bombing of cities, and the dropping of atomic bombs on innocents, all produced up to 70 to 100 million deaths. The destruction of life was unprecedented.

Arguably, World War Two can be said to be the most catastrophic, evil event in human history. Thus, by the same token, the victory over the perpetrators should also be elevated to the honor of the most important liberating event. And never should it be forgotten that the Soviet people hold the honor of largely securing that victory for humanity.

It needs also to be remembered that World War Two and the Nazi regime did not happen out of mysterious random happenstance. It was the culmination of imperialist politics, economics and rivalry. Nazi Germany was built up by Western capital in the 1930s during a collapse in Western capitalism to serve imperial interests of destroying the Soviet Union and any emerging socialist alternative.

Admittedly, eventually the Western powers sided with the Soviet Union (late in the war, it should be noted) but that wartime alliance was merely cobbled together to eliminate a perceived Nazi rogue regime that had grown to endanger Western interests. That is, the involvement of Western elites in WWII was one of expedience, not an imperative necessity based on principle. The proof of that is the subsequent and sudden treachery of the Western powers who turned hostile towards their Soviet wartime ally as soon as WWII was over and the beginning of the Cold War during which the Western powers recruited Nazi remnants to fight covertly against the Soviet Union. Some of the earliest recruits for the CIA and Britain’s MI6 were Ukrainian and Baltic fascists who had collaborated with the Nazi regime.

Today, Russia pays heartfelt respect to the countless heroes who defeated Nazi Germany and liberated Europe from fascism. Tellingly, as time passes, there is only shameful official silence in the United States and across Europe on the historic event. Conspicuously, there are hardly any May Day victory celebrations officially convened in the West. The reasons for Western silence are becoming clear, if nefarious.

Speaking at the Victory Day event in Moscow, Russian President Vladimir Putin was right to rebuke Western powers for “distorting the truth” about the most consequential conflict in history.

Western elites and their controlled media will not acknowledge the Soviet Union’s inimitable role in defeating Nazi Germany. They are blinded by Russophobia and their propaganda objectives of trying to demonize Russia.

The Western elites by necessity must also bury the historical truth that the Second World War was borne out of imperialist conflict. Nazi Germany was driven not just by its fanatical hatred of Jews, Slavs and Communism, but also by colonial conquest of others’ resources.

It was a land grab just like the Western powers exploit Africa and the Global South for resources to this day. One instance is U.S. troops illegally occupying Syria while driving truckloads of oil out of the Arab country to enrich American oil companies and Wall Street.

The same colonial objectives that underpinned the Nazi Reich continue to drive the wars engendered by the United States and its Western allies. Every war that these powers have engaged in over the past eight decades since the end of WWII is propelled by imperialist calculations and lust, albeit covered up by outrageous lies such as defending democracy or human rights. In his Victory Day speech, Putin hit the nail on the head when he said the Western hegemonic world order is one of elitist colonial privilege which is concealed by inciting conflicts and internecine tensions.

The United States and its cabal of Western partners must distort not just the origins of World War Two but every war thereafter. For at the heart of every war in modern times is the evil of colonial-style conquest.

To this end, it is entirely appropriate if not deplorable that the official Western powers have no time or inclination to celebrate Victory Day. Of course, they can’t bear to. For to do so in any genuine way would be to expose their own culpability not just in the most heinous war in history but the many others that have followed. That is why they must falsify the Second World War, the Soviet victory and indeed the present NATO proxy war in Ukraine.

One had to have a good belly laugh at Steve Rosenberg, the BBC’s pompous hack fraudulently called the BBC’s Russia Editor, who wrote with disparaging conceit about the Victory Day event in Moscow: “In Russia today the authorities are not just remembering the past. They are weaponizing it, to try to justify the present.”

The most telling circumstances of today is that the United States and its imperial lackeys in NATO are fully weaponizing a neoNazi regime in Ukraine that venerates the Third Reich and its genocidal crimes. Another consistent circumstance is that the same Western powers (who fancifully call themselves democracies) are fully weaponizing a genocide against the Palestinian people by a fascist Zionist regime conceived in 1948 as a bastard of Western colonialism pimping off the Jewish Holocaust.

And then this week, we have Britain’s Foreign Minister, Lord [sic] David Cameron trying to sound all Churchillian and portentous by warning in a speech that, “From Tallinn to Warsaw, Prague to Bucharest, a chill has once more descended across the European continent.”

Somebody should tell Cameron, who is the wealthy descendant of British slave traders, that the chill he imagines might have something to do with Britain supplying Ukrainian NeoNazis with long-range missiles that Cameron says should be aimed at Russia.

Today, Western states are steadily taking on the fascist form that they always were as they repress peaceful protesters against genocide in Gaza and arming a Nazi regime in Ukraine.

Russia’s celebration of Victory Day is incomparable in its significance with any other historical date of modern history. As Western states devolve into fascism, it is more important than ever to celebrate and fully understand the event for its contemporary meaning. Many ordinary citizens around the world, including in the United States and across Europe, are united with Russia in properly honoring Victory Day.

That’s why Western elites and rulers would prefer to forget history. It’s catching up with them and exposing their criminality.

"DECADENT IMPERIALISM: WITH JOTI BRAR - US IMPERIALISM IS DYING IN GAZA AND UKRAINE" by Garland Nixon









Wednesday, March 27, 2024

"Imperialism and Anti-imperialism Collide in Ukraine (Part 7)" by BJ Sabri

 

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Imperialism and Anti-imperialism Collide in Ukraine (Part 7)

Previously, Part 6, I stated that weakening, cancelling Russia’s presence in the world, planning to partition it, or even destroying it has been a fixed U.S. objective. I also stated that U.S. anti-Russian hostility predates the events in Ukraine by decades. For that purpose, I gave two examples out of four. The following are the other two.

Example 3: Under the headline: Revelations from the Russian Archives, The Library of Congress outlines U.S. stance toward Russia in clear terms. I’m citing here two consecutive paragraphs.

Paragraph A: “The United States government was initially hostile to the Soviet leaders for taking Russia out of World War I and was opposed to a state ideologically based on communism … The totalitarian nature of Joseph Stalin’s regime presented an insurmountable obstacle to friendly relations with the West. Although World War II brought the two countries into alliance, based on the common aim of defeating Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union’s aggressive, antidemocratic policy toward Eastern Europe had created tensions even before the war ended.”

Comment: If one wants to analyze U.S. motives for persistent enmity toward Russia without recourse to tiring research, paragraph “A”could provide invaluable insight.

  1. The phrase “Taking Russia out of WWI …” This is true. Vladimir Lenin, the founder of the Soviet State, took Russia out of that war because he did not want Russians to die for internecine capitalistic wars and colonialistic rivalry. He stressed his views in Imperialism, The highest Stage of Capitalism published during the war.

Further, Russia’s withdrawal from that war was a sovereign decision—considering its colonialist motives, and coupled with the discovery of the Sykes-Picot Agreement between Britain and France to divide among them the Arab land in Western Asia. Was that withdrawal the true cause for the U.S. hostility toward Russia as stated? No. Most likely, U.S. resentment of Russia was due to the missed hope that a protracted war with Germany and the Ottoman Empire may lead to the collapse of Russia and the newly established Communist system.

  1. The phrase, “Totalitarian Nature of Joseph Stalin’s Regime, etc.”: The writers of the “revelations” appear to be claiming that aside from opposing Communism, the U.S. also opposed Stalin’s “totalitarianism”. The argument is: preposterous, irrelevant, justificatory, and insidious.
  • It is preposterous because, ideally, no nation is entitled to preach, demand, or impose any form of government on other nations. For example, in the British settlers’ experience in what is now the United States, Britain had to bow to the will of George Washington and his lieutenants to form a republic thus detaching the aspired-for state from the British monarchy. During those times, did Spain, for example, intervene to abort the new republic because had reservations about it? Equally, then and now, the United States has no right to tell Russians how to choose their political system. Invariably, political systems are determined by historical circumstances and national events pertinent to each nation—except when imperialist forces impose them as it happened in Iraq consequent to the U.S.-British invasion.
  • It is irrelevant because the nature of Stalin’s government was in relation to his application of the Marxian theory of socialism through the “dictatorship of the proletariat” paradigm—not in relation to how the United States thinks of Marxism and Russia. Regardless of how one thinks of this paradigm, the fact is, this is how the forces of history work—by waves, currents, tumults, and uprisings; by philosophical, social, and political theories; and by dynamic social changes in all forms including revolutions.
  • It is justificatory: the United States was not opposing Russia under the premise that Communism posed a mortal danger to the U.S. capitalistic system. (If the foundations of capitalism are that strong, why the fear for their failure?) From the start, that opposition had a factual origin. With a huge landmass, diverse but cooperative nationalities, and bountiful natural resources, the Soviet model of equality among the constituent socialist states posed potential challenge to the U.S. imperialist model of domination.

Further, the U.S. never proved that the USSR of Stalin was a threat to the United States. It is a well-known fact that prior to WWII, Stalin’s focus was set on one exclusive target: Socialism in one country—the Soviet Union. He knew that the West would not sit idle while seeing a socialist experiment (the collective ownership of means of production) unfolding. Knowing the perils of possible wars because of it, Stalin had no interest in expanding his socialist model beyond Russia. He even ferociously fought Leon Trotsky who was advocating Permanent Revolutions across the world.

  • It is insidious because it wants to spread the notion that the United States is the sole authority in charge of how the world must function.

To close, Stalin neither urged the United States to convert to Communism nor proposed military action to force it upon any other country. However, with WWII knocking on all doors, and seeing the U.S.’s continuing hostility (the U.S. recognized the USSR in 1933—16 years after the Communist revolution) the formation of the Socialist bloc at the end of war can be seen as response to defend the USSR from Western adventurism and declared intent to attack it—Churchill’s was an example.

In all cases, being a major world power does not qualify the United States to impose on Russia any form of government or to fight Communism just because (a) it is antithetical to Capitalism and its notions of private property, and (b) it did not fit its world agenda. (Note: discussing the speculative concept of totalitarianism (coined by the anti-Communist and anti-Russian Hanna Arendt) goes beyond the scope of this work.)

Of special interest: why did the United States feel compelled to oppose totalitarianism but not Europe’s dehumanizing colonialism? As for its own colonialism and imperialism, the United States purposely does not see itself in that way.

Another argument: U.S. unipolarity in world relations, as well as its oversized pressure on all nations resisting subjugation is a form of totalitarianism—the same concept they purport to oppose. Without a doubt, the accusation of totalitarianism (selectively applied to others) is a ruse to justify adversarial political decisions versus the accused.

  • The phrase, “The Soviet Union’s Aggressive, Antidemocratic Policy”: I discussed the notion of “democracy” as defined by the United States in the upcoming parts. As for the claim of “Soviet aggressive policy”, this is worn projection psychology. Even if the Soviet Union was aggressive, its aggressiveness pales by comparison with that of the Union States. For one, the Soviet Union did not exterminate the population of its republics. But the United States nearly exterminated all Original Peoples to make space for European settlers.

To close, accusing others of aggressions and aggressive behavior while dismissing own aggression and aggressive behavior is a tactic that the United States has been practicing since foundation.  It does not matter whether people point to that fact or not. What matters for U.S. ruling circles is the continuation of the practice as a tradition, and as a means for public relations.

Paragraph B: “Beginning in the early 1970s, the Soviet regime proclaimed a policy of détente and sought increased economic cooperation and disarmament negotiations with the West. However, the Soviet stance on human rights and its invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 created new tensions between the two countries. These tensions continued to exist until the dramatic democratic changes of 1989–91 led to the collapse during this past year of the Communist system and opened the way for an unprecedented new friendship between the United States and Russia, as well as the other new nations of the former Soviet Union.”

Comment

  • The United States, the primary violator of human rights around the world, is not qualified to speak of human rights—it is like a criminal and a thief who insists to give solemn sermons against crime and theft. Besides, the proverbial crocodile tears shed on the question of human rights as violated by Russia could never cover up U.S. criminal conduct around the world—the ongoing U.S.-Israeli genocidal war on Gaza is a case in point.
  • Claiming that the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan created “new tensions between the two countries” is so preposterous that one cannot help but recalling U.S. voluminous history of invasions and interventions. Playing the virtuous preacher has been constantly a game that the U.S. could never master because of its venality and the ease with which it can be seen. The following limited references can corroborate my charge: (1) A Chronology of U.S. Military Interventions From Vietnam To the Balkans; (2) Foreign interventions by the United States; (3) S. Launched 251 Military Interventions Since 1991, and 469 since 1798.
  • Legions of American politicians, ideologues, think tanks, writers, media owners, and smattering opinion makers have joined in the relentless campaign to vilify and oppose Russia. When the USSR was alive and kicking, the pretext was Communism. When Russia became capitalist, the pretext was authoritarianism. This strongly suggests that America’s former anti-Communist policy was no more than a ploy to (a) weaken and destabilize Russia, and (b) establish the United States as an arbiter of its fate.

Example 4: is there an origin to U.S. hostile attitudes toward Russia in post -WII environment? Yes. It is called McCarthyism. McCarthyism, in its vast anti-communist ideological and psychotic contexts, has been invariably understood by U.S. imperialists and public alike as being anti-Russian—is the matrix to U.S. official enmity toward Russia.

Joseph McCarthy’s campaign against intellectuals, artists, writers, actors, and politicians is known. His role in creating stable anti-Russian hysteria and policies could never be overlooked for two reasons. First, from his time through present, his anti-Communist campaign (anti-Russian by association) and the ideology behind it kept reincarnating in different ways through countless personalities. Second, he left deep marks on U.S. political attitudes in the context of international and Russian relations. (Writing for Middle Tennessee State University under the headline: “The First Amendment Encyclopedia: McCarthyism,” Marc G. Pufong gives an incisive review of Joseph McCarthy and his American world)

Before everything, McCarthy, as a politician, is a product of U.S. ideologized imperialism. Meaning, whatever that system represents in terms of political cultural, party line, government policy, and worldview are necessarily imbued in him. Proving this, the Senate website published an article on McCarthy dated June 9, 1954. The opening paragraph is quite telling. It states,

“Wisconsin Republican senator Joseph R. McCarthy rocketed to public attention in 1950 with his allegations that hundreds of Communists had infiltrated the State Department and other federal agencies. These charges struck a particularly responsive note at a time of deepening national anxiety about the spread of world communism.” [Italics added].

The meaning is self-evident: the system has already created an atmosphere of “of deepening national anxiety about the spread of world communism”. All what McCarthy had to do was to dip into that anxiety and amplify what the system wanted him to do. In essence, he played according to preset rules including the anti-Russian rule. As such, he was (a) the leading promotor for building the future American hostility toward Russia, and (b) the ideological progenitor to countless clones who followed his example without mentioning his ideological influence.

The point: high profiles anti-Russian figures—without McCarthy’s theatrics and hearings—across U.S. political spectrum, followed the basic ideological stance of McCarthy vs. Russia. Examples: John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Henry Jackson, Barry Goldwater, Paul Nitze, Alfonse D’Amato, Ronald Reagan, Harold Brown, Madelaine Albright, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, Lindsay Graham, Nancy Pelosi, Joe Biden, Nikki Haley, Victoria Nuland, her husband Robert Kagan and Robert’s brother Frederick, Antony Blinken, John Bolton, Mike Pompeo, and countless others.

Discussion: I maintain that U.S. foreign policy conduct vis-à-vis Russia never recovered from Kennanism and McCarthyism. Both currents had origins in and found inspirations in Woodrow Wilson’s stance on Russia after the October Revolution and his intervention on the side of forces fighting Communism. Proving this are the multiple ideologies copied from Wilson—Nixon-ism is the highest example. With his many hyper-imperialist books, Nixon, the mass destroyer of Viet Nam, Cambodia, and Laos set the tones on how to hate Russia while appearing “normal”, “cool”, and “knowledgeable”.

In the end, American anti-Russian currents inserted themselves deep inside the American political culture, pop culture, policymaking, and legislation. The anti-Russia plan moved along two axes. The first owes its existence to the original thinking patterns of empire. That is, the United States would do anything to assert itself as a world power that accepts no challenges. The second is McCarthyism, Kennanism, and all their derivations. By dint of this configuration, all traits, principles, and paradigms of acute ideological determinism related to Russia embedded in those currents have become the distinguishing marks and modus operandi of the United States.

From February 2022 (the day in which Russia intervened in Ukraine) forward, McCarthyism and Kennanism (with the added benefits of Nulandism, Bidensim, Blinkenism, Schumerism, and Grahamism) came out of their momentary hibernation after Gorbachev and associates dismantled the Soviet Union. The nouveau McCarthysts and Kennanists intimidate that if you do not side with the U.S. against Russia, then you are siding with Russia— and that would make of you a Putin-loving anti-American.  Lindsay Graham has recently applied his brand of McCarthyism to his own party. Zero Hedge reports that Graham suggests. “If Conservatives Want Border Security They Will Have To Support Funding For Ukraine”. This reminds us of fascist Israel: either you support the Zionist settler state in killing the Palestinians and annex their lands, or you are “anti-semitic”.

To close, turning Russia into an enemy because of its intervention in Ukraine was never spontaneous or empathic. In his article, “McCarthyism Re‐​Emerging Stronger than Ever in Ukraine Policy Debates,” Ted Galen Carpenter, a former senior fellow for defense and foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute (no lover of Russia), summarized the revival of McCarthyism as a political discourse vis-à-vis Russia as follows:

“A troubling pattern has developed over the decades in which foreign policy hawks smear their opponents and thereby seek to foreclose discussion of questionable U.S. policy initiatives…. Zealous anti‐​Russia voices are actually demanding that anyone opposing their views be silenced, and even criminally prosecuted.

In reviewing the history, aims, and details of U.S. foreign policy since WWI, it would not take long to conclude that self-serving rationalizations are effectively driving its world policy aiming at subduing or vanquishing any country out of U.S. control. Now that Russia has been re-baptized as America’s perennial enemy, how did all this start? A quick glance at the origin and successive stages of the United States can tell many things about current U.S. global posture and operational mentality. Early signs marking the U.S. forming character includes:

  • George Washington’s vision to expand the boundaries of his 13 colonies,
  • Slave owner Thomas Jefferson’s belief in the doctrine of discovery,
  • The near extermination of the Original Peoples, black and native slavery, violent colonialist expansions,
  • Manifest Destiny,
  • Monroe Doctrine,
  • Andrew Jackson wars against the Original Peoples and his Indian Removal Act (compare with the fascist Israeli plan to remove the Palestinians from Gaza).
  • James Polk’s doctrine,
  • Wars with Mexico and Spain,
  • McKinley’s annexation of the Philippines, Guam, and Puerto Rico,
  • William Walker’s push into Nicaragua and becoming its president,
  • Annexation of the Hawaiian Islands, Northern Mariana Islands, American Samoa, U.S. Virgin Island,
  • S. control of the Panama Canal Zone, and
  • Supremacism as a tool of domestic and foreign policies,

With each stage of the U.S. development as a state, the quest for an expanded empire and world domination has developed its self-perpetuating mechanisms. Meaning, whoever aspires to become a member of U.S. ruling establishment, must adopt them and defend their objectives. For instance, one cannot run for an elective office on any platform that is antagonistic to the doctrines of the dominant politico-ideological structures of the American state.

In defense of this assertion, consider the following question. Do you know of any candidate who ran and won on a platform calling for (a) ending U.S. military interventions, (b) ending U.S. control of the United Nations, and (c) ridding the United States from the policies and ideologies that underpin its world policy—specifically imperialism and Zionism?

For the record, in the immensely grim, Zionist-controlled American political landscape, courageous and principled politicians showed their moral sinews, stood against the imperialist system, and even sought to bring it to justice. I’m referring to former Representative and presidential candidate Denis Kucinich. Kucinich tried and failed to impeach George W. Bush for his crimes in Iraq (House Resolution: 258). Sixteen years later, could any Congress member today dare to challenge the Biden regime’s actions in Ukraine, Palestine, Syria, Iraq, Iran, and Yemen?

Thoroughout this article, I repeatedly used the term “doctrine”. Do doctrines have any relevance in the building of ideological attitudes, foreign policy culture, and political decision-making? How doctrines work in relation to the U.S. posture in Ukraine?

  • Read Part 1,  2345, and 6.
  • B.J. Sabri is an independent political analyst with focus on the politics, mentalities, ideologies, and praxes of imperialism, neocolonialism, fascism, and Zionism. He can be reached at b.j.sabri@aol.com Read other articles by B.J..

    Saturday, March 9, 2024

    "Why the State of Israel is a Tool of Western Colonial Domination in the Middle East" by Eduardo Vasco

     

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    Source: Strategic Culture Foundation

    Why the State of Israel is a Tool of Western Colonial Domination in the Middle East

    Eduardo Vasco
        March 6, 2024

    Zionism can be considered as fascism adapted to the conditions of the Middle East and the aspirations for domination of Anglo-American imperialism over that region, Eduardo Vasco writes.

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    The central thesis of this article is that the State of Israel is a pure imperialist invention to facilitate the domination of Western Asia by the great powers, a domination that can only be exercised through fascist methods. We seek to prove this thesis by analyzing the history of the Zionist movement from the end of the 19th century to the middle of the 20th century, using as sources the works of some of the greatest scholars on the subject worldwide, many of them Jews.

    The common origins of German Nazism, Italian fascism and Israeli Zionism

    The 19th century was the most important in the history of humanity. It was there where the greatest political, economic and social transformations of modernity took place, which opened the way for an unlimited development of human capabilities following the industrial revolution.

    It was when the different peoples of the world, particularly those of Europe, which was the center of these transformations, tried for the first time, on an international level, to free themselves from the chains that bound them to backwardness and oppression. Nationalist movements were born in several nations suffocated by colonial empires.

    To justify their action, the ideologues of nationalism often resorted to the invention of myths in order to present the purpose of building a nation as a natural historical result of the development of a people’s struggle. The myths had as their fundamental characteristic a religious, racial and territorial basis.

    The ideologists of Zionism, that is, of the colonization of Palestine by Jews, taking advantage of the need for protection of Jews after centuries of oppression in Europe, followed the example of the Germans and Italians, for example, who tried to unify their nations and build their own National State propagating the territorial rights of people of the same race and religious creed. In these three cases, their leaders evoked a mythical past, of heroic and superior peoples of whom they were their legitimate descendants and heirs.

    Israeli historian Shlomo Sand writes, in his book “The Invention of the Jewish People”, that

    In the image of other “patriotic” trends in 19th century Europe, which looked back to a fabulous golden age with the help of which they forged a heroic past for themselves (classical Greece, the Roman Republic, the Teutonic tribes or the Gauls) In order to prove that they had not been born ex nihilo, but had existed for a long time, the first adherents of the idea of a Jewish nation turned to the resplendent light that radiated from the mythological kingdom of David and whose strength was preserved for centuries in the heart of walls of religious faith.

    In “Rome and Jerusalem”, from 1862, the socialist intellectual Moses Hess said that “the Jewish race is a pure race that reproduced all its characteristics, despite different climatic influences. The Jewish type has remained the same through the centuries.” And he added: “It is of no use to Jews and Jewish women to deny their origin by getting baptized and mixing with the masses of the Indo-Germanic and Mongol peoples. Jewish types are indelible.”

    A racist, reactionary tendency was already noticeable within this movement of Jewish intellectuals. The same trend that generated the fascist far-right phenomena in Europe at the beginning of the 20th century.

    The religious basis attracted the most primitive instincts of the community and seemed something a little outdated after the consolidation of Enlightenment ideals and the era of reason and science. Therefore, nationalist ideologues had to adapt religious myths to a pseudoscientific discourse.

    Nazi historians, archaeologists and researchers struggled to find evidence of their supposed mythological past. His “science” was nothing more than a revision of history in order to manipulate it for the purposes of the Third Reich. “Science” served the official ideology and its falsification of history.

    At around the same time, the Zionists were going down the same path. When archaeological discoveries contradicted religious writings, Zionist researchers preferred to adopt “the ‘truth’ of the theological text over the truth of the archaeological object”, according to Sand.

    Ukrainian Ben-Zion Dinur, professor of Jewish History at the University of Jerusalem in the 1930s, is the author of the book “The History of Israel: Israel in its Country”, first published in 1918 and later expanded in 1938. According to Sand’s words, that author decided to “rewrite” the Bible, “adapting it to the ‘scientific’ spirit of his time”.

    This does not mean that, at some point, he doubted the historicity of the Holy Scriptures. From the account of the life of Abraham the Hebrew to his return to Zion, he remained faithful to every detail and every event reported.

    “The most important contribution of ‘biblical historiography’ to the elaboration of national consciousness certainly consisted in establishing the relationship with the ‘land of Israel’”, Sand states.

    The Bible served mainly as an “ethnic” mark that indicated the common origin of women and men whose secular cultural data and components were completely different, but who were detested due to a religious faith to which they practically no longer adhered.

    The idea was in gestation that modern Jews were the descendants of the inhabitants of ancient Israel two thousand years ago, who had been expelled and who should retake that land. They would not accept the statement that all peoples and civilizations once belonged to a certain land and were expelled from there by other peoples, and that they also took lands from other peoples, consequently. Nor does the idea that modern Jews, like the descendants of all peoples who have had extensive contact with others, are heirs of a series of races, are not a pure race, and that they had little in common with the inhabitants of ancient Israel . They preferred to adopt the same racist prejudices as the ideologues of Nazism and fascism, that their race was pure and superior to others.

    Zionism, a movement started by the British big bourgeoisie

    When Palestine was part of the Ottoman Empire, in the mid-19th century, Great Britain – the great colonial and capitalist power of the time – installed its consulate in Jerusalem. In 1840, Lord Palmerston proposed that the Crown found a European Jewish colony in Palestine in order to “preserve the more general interests of the British Empire”, in his own words. Until then, around 500 thousand people inhabited those lands. Two-thirds of these were Muslim Arabs, 60,000 were Christians and only 20,000 were Jews, according to Ilan Pappé (“History of Modern Palestine”).

    A few decades later, the British purchased Egypt’s part of the newly built Suez Canal, which guaranteed them the presence of troops there to protect the navigation of their ships and a strategic presence at the gates of Palestine and its growing rival, the Ottoman Empire.

    While Great Britain penetrated Palestine, important sectors of the European bourgeoisie organized this colonization movement ideologically and politically. Theodore Herzl, a Jew from a banking family in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, is considered the main founder of Zionism. In 1896, he wrote “The Jewish State”, in which he elaborated the main theses of Zionist colonialism, the fundamental thesis being the need to build a state of its own in Palestine.

    In this book, he already indicated that the Zionists were powerful bankers, and exposed their racist views. “Supposing His Majesty the Sultan handed over Palestine to us, we could in return take care of regularizing finances in Turkey. We would form a civilization there in the face of barbarism,” he wrote. On the other hand, he also addressed the European powers, stating that the Jewish State would be, “for Europe, a piece of fortress against Asia”.

    The following year, Herzl led the first Zionist Congress, held in Switzerland. Congress gave a huge boost to the movement and set the goal of founding the Jewish State within 50 years. In the words of researcher Marcelo Buzetto,

    From then on, Zionists ran around the world to raise financial resources and political support for their proposal. Herzl and his followers will establish contacts with the governments of England, Germany, the Turkish-Ottoman Empire, and Jewish and non-Jewish bankers, industrialists and merchants, aiming to strengthen the idea of the need for a Jewish State. The European Jewish community is divided, and not everyone supports the Zionist idea, but this movement obtains the help of the Jewish bourgeoisie and important sectors of the non-Jewish European bourgeoisie. (“A questão palestina”)

    Britain was preparing for imminent war against Germany and its Turkish allies. For this, in addition to commercial gains, it was essential to establish positions in Suez and within Palestine. According to Ralph Schoenman, in “The Hidden History of Zionism”,

    For years the British used the Zionist leadership to obtain support from banks and large Jewish capitalists in the United States and Great Britain for their war against the German Empire.

    Sérgio Yahni explains the British imperialist project through the Zionists in Palestine:

    For Great Britain, Palestine was a base of operations for the Royal Navy and Zionist colonization, with resources it had to finance industrial development, was part of a strategy that guaranteed maritime transport, controlling access to the Suez Canal, and facilitated the transport of Iraqi oil through territories controlled by the British Empire. To achieve these objectives, His Majesty expected military security and social stability in the country through a system of immigration certificates that required a minimum economic capacity on the part of immigrants. Great Britain guaranteed the colonization of sectors of the middle class, thus alleviating class contradictions […] (“A questão palestina”, Prefácio)

    With the aim of settling Jewish settlers on land acquired in Palestine, in 1905 the Jewish National Fund began purchasing Arab properties.

    European Zionists, noticing the flowering of Arab independence sentiments against Turkish rule in Palestine in the early 20th century, organized to support the Ottoman Empire in repressing the Palestinian independence movement. While they supported the Turkish empire’s repression of the Arabs, they acted against the Turks in favor of the British. Still according to Schoenman, the Zionists began to give full support to the English in the face of the imminent implosion of the Ottoman Empire with the defeat in World War I.

    In 1914, the president of the World Zionist Organization, Chain Weizmann, declared:

    It is quite acceptable to say that if Palestine falls into the British sphere of influence and Britain encourages Jewish settlement there as a British dependency, in 20 or 30 years we could have a million Jews there, or perhaps more. They would develop the country, restore civilization and form a much more effective guard for the Suez Canal.

    The Zionists and British were not the only ones interested in the end of the Ottoman Empire. The Arabs in general, and the Palestinians in particular, organized themselves and actively fought for independence and even received a promise from Great Britain that they would have their own country if they helped defeat the Turks. The British, however, did not fulfill this promise. On the contrary, in the final months of the war they publicly declared their intention to create a Jewish state.

    Such was the character of the infamous Balfour Declaration, by the British Foreign Secretary, Arthur James Balfour, addressed to the leader of the Zionists in Great Britain, the banker Lionel Walter Rothschild, member of the powerful Rothschild family, published on November 2, 1917. It said:

    His Majesty’s Government views favorably the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will do everything in their power to facilitate the attainment of that object.

    With the end of the war and the defeat of the Turks, the Ottoman Empire was artificially divided by the victors and Great Britain transformed Palestine into a protectorate, without giving it the promised independence. But it was not yet time to transform it into a State for the Jews, as their presence in the territory was still negligible.

    From the turn of the 1920s to the 1930s, the Jewish company, financed by bankers and large Jewish businessmen, began to buy large amounts of land to install Jewish settlers in Palestine. By the early 1930s, twenty thousand Palestinian peasant families had been expelled from their land by European Zionists. In the middle of the decade, the company Africa Israel Investments was founded by important South African (white) investors and businessmen, which began acquiring land in Palestine.

    The Mandate government gave Jewish capital a privileged status, granting it 90% of the concessions in Palestine. This allowed the Zionists to gain control of the region’s economic infrastructure (road projects, Dead Sea minerals, electricity, ports, etc.) By 1935, the Zionists controlled 872 of Palestine’s 1,212 industrial companies. (Ralph Schoenman, “The Hidden History of Zionism”).

    Blood brothers unite to promote “the greatest tragedy in the history of humanity”

    National mythology has always been used by the ruling classes to dominate and manipulate people’s legitimate feelings and needs for independence and freedom against external oppression.

    The nascent imperialist bourgeoisie at the turn of the 19th to the 20th century perfectly maneuvered with these feelings among the European peoples in order to suppress the workers’ movement that was gaining strength and represented a growing threat to it dictatorship.

    It was from the need to suppress the enormous proletarian movements that took over Europe, and which encouraged the national struggle in colonized nations, as well as to expand their sphere of domination of world markets, that the great bankers and industrialists promoted the birth of Nazi fascism – and its blood brother, Zionism.

    The first embryos of the European fascist movement had the collaboration of Zionist leaders. This was the case of the tsarist repression in Russia against the Bolsheviks – who had strong support within the Jewish proletariat, so much so that four of the seven members of the revolutionary leadership of 1917 were Jews –, supported by Herzl and Weizmann.

    Simon Petliura was a Ukrainian fascist who personally directed the pogroms that killed 28,000 Jews in 1897 in separate massacres. [Vladimir] Jabotinsky [one of the founders of Zionism] negotiated an alliance with Petliura, proposing a Jewish police force that would accompany Petliura’s forces in the counter-revolutionary struggle against the Red Army and the Bolshevik Revolution – a process that involved the murder of peasants, workers and intellectuals who defended the Revolution. (Schoenman, “The Hidden History of Zionism”)

    When the fascist movement had fully developed, the Zionists increased their support for it.

    Mussolini formed squads of the Betar Revisionist Zionist youth movement, wearing black shirts in the same manner as his own fascist bands. When Menachem Begin became head of Betar, he preferred to wear the brown shirts of Hitler’s gang, a uniform that Begin and the members of Betar wore in all meetings and concentrations – in which they saluted each other, opening and closing the meetings, with the fascist salute. (Idem)

    But the darkest episode in the history of Zionism in the first half of the 20th century was yet to come. Particularly, from the end of the 1920s in Germany: active support for Nazism and even the Holocaust itself.

    When the Nazis came to power, Schoenman writes, based on documents from the time, “the Zionist Federation of Germany sent a memorandum of support to the Nazi Party on June 21, 1933,” hailing the “revival of national life” and “principle of race” that guided the new German State. The Congress of the World Zionist Organization confirmed this position in 1933, when it rejected, by 240 votes to 43, “a resolution that called for action against Hitler”. And the main Zionist entity went further: it broke the Jewish boycott of the Nazi regime by signing a commercial agreement between the Anglo-Palestinian Bank of the World Zionist Organization with Germany, becoming “the main distributor of Nazi products throughout the Middle East and northern Europe”.

    “The Zionists took Baron Von Mildenstein, from the SS Security Service, to Palestine on a six-month visit in support of Zionism”, which earned Joseph Goebbels much praise for Zionism and even the order to mint it “a medal with the swastika on one side and the Zionist Star of David on the other.”

    The researcher points out that, in 1937, when the persecution of Jews by the Hitler regime had already begun, the Haganah (armed Zionist organization) sent an agent to Berlin “to offer espionage to the SS Security Service, in exchange for the release of Jewish fortunes to be used in Zionist colonization.” Zionist agent Feivel Polkes told Adolf Eichmann that “Jewish nationalist circles were greatly delighted by German radical policy, since with it the strength of the Jewish population in Palestine would grow to such an extent that, in the foreseeable future, the Jews would reach have numerical superiority over the Arabs.”

    Schoenman defends the thesis that the Jewish-Zionist elite supported Nazism and the Holocaust because the ethnic cleansing of Jews in Europe would naturally lead to emigration to Palestine, the historical objective of the Zionists. According to the author, they organizedly sabotaged the emigration of persecuted Jews in Europe in the 1930s, because they were not heading to Palestine, but to America or other Western European countries. David Ben Gurion, who would later become Israel’s first head of government, said in 1938: “If I had known that it was possible to save all the children of Germany by taking them to Britain and only half of them by transporting for Eretz Israel [Greater Israel], I would opt for the second alternative.”

    They just wanted to save the young, healthy Jews, to build Eretz Israel in Palestine. Those considered old and incapable were easily discarded to the death chambers, as occurred from 1944 onwards, when a secret pact signed by the Zionist elite with the Nazis led to the abandonment of 800,000 Jews in Hungary to save 600 “pre-eminent Jews”, according to Schoenman. “If they come to us with two plans – to rescue the masses of Jews from Europe or to rescue the land – I vote, without hesitation, for the rescue of the land”, expressed Yitzhak Gruenbaum, a Zionist leader.

    Schoenman reports that, on January 11, 1941, Avraham Stern, another Zionist leader, proposed a pact between the Zionist National Military Organization (NMO) and Germany, which stipulated, for example, that:

    1. There may be common interests between the establishment of a New Order in Europe, according to the German conception, and the authentic national aspirations of the Jewish people, personified by the NMO.
    2. Would cooperation between the new Germany and a renewed nation of the National Hebrew people be possible, and
    3. The establishment of a historic Jewish state, on a national and totalitarian basis, united by an alliance with the German Reich, would be in the interest of a continued and strengthened future position of German power in the Near East.

    Stern concluded his document by offering NMO support to Germany in World War II. In Schoenman’s opinion, Zionists would rather see millions of Jews killed by Hitler than allow mass emigration to anywhere other than Palestine.

    We all know what the fate of European Jews was at the hands of the Nazis. In the calculations of Raul Hilberg, the “main authority on the Nazi Holocaust” in the words of Norman G. Finkelstein, no less than 5.1 million Jews were murdered in the Holocaust. Many representatives of the international community and the main world institutions call this event “the greatest tragedy in the history of humanity”, as Josep Borrell, the European Union’s high representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, said in 2022.

    Perhaps it was because of this active support from the Zionist elite that the Holocaust was forgotten during the first two decades after World War II. In his book “The Holocaust Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering”, Finkelstein raises some hypotheses for the cover-up by the Jewish elite in the US of crimes against Jews. For example, West Germany (where numerous Nazis were incorporated into the new regime) was an ally of the Americans in the Cold War against the Soviet Union. Also, the denunciation of Nazism – and the welcoming of many Nazis by the US and its allies – was an important agenda of the American left, which, following the centuries-old Jewish tradition, had a large Jewish following. And the main Zionist organizations in the US at the time, the American Jewish Committee and the Anti-Defamation League, collaborated in the witch hunts for communists during McCarthyism. “Remembering the Nazi Holocaust was labeled a communist cause” and, in order not to be confused with the left, the Jewish elite sabotaged any type of anti-Nazi campaign, according to Finkelstein.

    In the author’s assessment, it was only after the 1967 war between Israel and the Arab countries that the Holocaust began to be remembered, both by the Jewish elite and by the United States government. And the strong propaganda campaign that we know today was started. He does not take into account the possibility that this was done because the US realized that there would be intense opposition to the establishment of the State of Israel in the Middle East and this could compromise its domination in the region and, thus, began to label any criticism of the Zionism as anti-Semitism and apology for the Holocaust. It is needless to note that this remembrance did not include the Zionist elite’s support for Nazism and the Holocaust itself.

    Colonial and racist ideology and practice

    Concomitantly with the gradual Jewish colonization of Palestine, driven by European bankers and the British Empire, Zionist leaders developed and expressed their colonial and racist ideology.

    In his 1923 book “The Iron Wall”, Jabotinsky argued that there was a “complete impossibility of reaching a voluntary agreement with the Arabs of Palestine to transform Palestine from an Arab country into a country with a Jewish majority”. He recalled that colonization never “happened with the agreement of the native population” and admitted that “the natives fought because any type of colonization, anywhere, at any time, is unacceptable for any native people”.

    He fully confessed the colonial character of the Zionist enterprise when comparing it to the arrival of the Spanish in America or the massacre of the American Indians. He said that the Arabs

    look at Palestine with the same instinctive love and the same authentic fervor with which any Aztec looked at his Mexico or any Sioux contemplated his prairie (…). Therefore, a voluntary agreement is inconceivable. Any colonization, even the most restricted, must be developed in defiance of the will of the native population.

    Jabotinsky ended his argument by recognizing that Zionist colonialism should be supported by the British colonial Mandate:

    Through the Balfour Declaration or through the Mandate, external force is indispensable to establish in the country the conditions of domination and defense by which the local population, regardless of their desires, is deprived of the possibility of preventing our colonization, in physicists or administrative terms. Force must play its role, with energy and without indulgence.

    Zionists first widely put Jabotinsky’s ideas into practice in the second half of the 1930s. In 1936, the Palestinian people carried out a huge rebellion against the British yoke and imperial forces reacted violently. But they were unable to contain the revolt, which was armed, and resorted to the support of Zionist groups that had already immigrated to Palestine. “Zionist forces were integrated into the British intelligence services and became the police that enforced draconian British rule,” Ralph Schoenman says.

    Great Britain armed the Zionists, who had thousands of members within the Haganah and Irgun, and from then on had a number of armed fascist militias to crush the Palestinians, trained by British officer Charles Orde Wingate, according to Schoenman. At the end of the Arab uprising, in 1939, there were more than 14 thousand fascist-Zionist militiamen organized and commanded by British officers.

    This suppression of the Palestinian uprising of 1936-1939 was a vital event in the preparation of the Zionist armed forces that would facilitate, through ethnic cleansing, the invasion of 1948, authorized by the United Nations on November 29, 1947. This UN resolution occurred with just one month remaining before the end of the 50-year period stipulated by the Zionists, in 1897, for the creation of the State of Israel. If, at the end of the 19th century, Zionism gave signs that it was an imperialist project of European bankers – particularly the English ones –, in the middle of the 20th century it became clear that, in addition, it had become a project of world imperialism, now led by the US bourgeoisie, the great victor in World War II, along with the Soviet Union.

    As the Second World War ended with an agreement to divide the world into different zones of domination by the great powers, the Soviet government agreed with the US and Great Britain that that region of the Middle East would be theirs. Perhaps to get rid of his own Jews, Stalin participated in the creation of the State of Israel as part of the new era of collaboration, not confrontation – so the Stalinist bureaucracy thought – with its Western partners.

    The cruel and historic persecution of the Jews in Europe, which resulted in the Holocaust, was the great justification for the imperialist powers to impose the creation of a State for the Jews in Palestine. Even though the Jewish community was not consulted, much less the inhabitants of Palestine, the majority of whom were Arabs. The claim of the World Zionist Organization, a body founded and run by European bankers, was worth more than the opinion of the Jewish and Arab people.

    The increasing colonization of Palestine by bourgeois European Zionist Jews during the British Mandate served as an argument to prove that Jews wanted to emigrate to Palestine and were already doing so. In the early 1930s, four thousand Jews arrived in Palestine each year. In the middle of the same decade, this average reached sixty thousand (Marcelo Buzetto, “A questão palestina”). Even so, until 1947 only 6% of the land in Palestine was Jewish-owned, according to Schoenman.

    In 1939, there were 445 thousand Jews in a total population of 1.5 million inhabitants, according to Gattaz cited by Buzetto. In the year of the partition of Palestine by the UN, Jews represented one third of the country’s population (630 thousand), while the other two thirds were Arabs (1.3 million). Only 10% of Jews were originally from Palestine, according to Henry Cattan, while the overwhelming majority were European settlers.

    Ralph Schoenman states that the fascist-Zionist organizations Irgun and Haganah, even before the creation of Israel, “seized three-quarters of the land and virtually expelled all the inhabitants,” displacing 780,000 Palestinians and massacring thousands of others in identical terrorist actions those carried out by the Nazis in the Soviet Union. David Ben Gurion, Ariel Sharon and Yitzhak Shamir, all future Prime Ministers of the State of Israel, played an important role in these massacres.

    When the State of Israel was founded, on May 14, 1948, 90% of the land in Palestine had already been stolen by Jewish settlers. “In the territory occupied by Israel after partition, there were around 950,000 Palestinian Arabs. They inhabited around 500 villages and all large cities”, Schoenman points out. “After less than six months, there were only 138 thousand people left”, he adds. “Around 400 towns and cities were razed to the ground in 1948 and 1949. In 1950, they did the same to several others.”

     

    The Nakba (the great “catastrophe”) began for the Palestinians, which continues to this day, seven decades after its beginning. The institution responsible for this genocide, therefore, is the UN itself. The Zionist settlers felt completely at ease, even though they still constituted a minority within Palestine, to terrorize and expel the Arabs en masse from the moment that the United Nations, in an absolutely arbitrary and illegitimate way, granted more than half of the Palestinian territory to them.

    Conclusion

    Ever since they became aware of the strategic geographic position and enormous natural riches of that region of Western Asia, European empires have coveted it. As has been known for millennia, the best strategy for a colonizer is to divide and rule. This is what European, and later American, imperialism did to the Middle East. First, they divided it, and then they installed their representatives. It would not be possible to govern solely through puppet Arab regimes, as these – as we can clearly see today – are exposed to pressure from their population. It would be necessary to establish a colonial regime. But traditional colonialism was in crisis after the First and Second World Wars.

    Therefore, the Zionist project, which had been in the works for half a century, was ideal for dominating that region of the planet, which connects Europe with Asia and Africa, through which the main maritime routes that control world trade and where there is an abundance of such vital resources as gas and oil. Zionism, that is, the doctrine of the creation, maintenance and expansion of the State of Israel, is the great pretext manufactured by the imperialist bourgeoisie to dominate the most important geographic region in the world.

    Theodore Herzl already claimed, in 1904, “all of Lebanon and Jordan, two-thirds of Syria, half of Iraq, a strip of Turkey, half of Kuwait, one-third of Saudi Arabia, the Sinai and Egypt, including Port Said, Alexandria and Cairo”, highlights Schoenman.

    In 1938, Ben Gurion declared that “the State will be only a stage in the realization of Zionism and its task is to prepare the ground for our expansion.” And he elaborated: “the borders of Zionist aspiration include southern Lebanon, southern Syria, present-day Jordan, the entire West Bank and Sinai.” This meant that the objective of imperialism with Israel was not limited to the creation of a state for the Jews – in fact, this was just idle talk. The objective was to use it as a spearhead in the effort to dominate and subjugate the entire Middle East.

    In fact, since the artificial creation of Israel, with increasing support from the united imperial powers, the Zionist entity has come to occupy Sinai in Egypt, southern Lebanon and the West Bank, as well as the Golan Heights in Syria, which are still under Israeli power.

    Schoenman describes that, in “Moshe Sharett’s Personal Diary”, former Prime Minister Moshe Sharett (1954-1955) revealed the objectives of the high Zionist political-military leadership: “to dismember the Arab world, defeat the Arab national movement and create puppet regimes under Israeli regional power.” On October 26, 1953, he wrote that “1) The Army considers the current border with Jordan absolutely unacceptable. 2) The Army is planning the war in order to occupy the rest of Eretz Israel.” Sharett also documented meetings that discussed the annexation of Syrian and Lebanese territory and the “green light” given by the CIA to attack Egypt.

    This proves that Israel’s conquest of Arab territory was not a war reparation due to the aggression of the Arab nations against the Zionist entity, but rather a planned objective of domination, which is part of an even greater goal that encompasses the entire region.

    Schoenman highlights two more documents that point in this direction, both dated 1982. An analysis by Oded Yinon published in the newspaper of the Information Department of the World Zionist Organization highlighted the strategic need to fragment the countries of the Middle East as much as possible through the exploitation of ethnic and religious differences. He proposed extending this plan to North Africa, covering Egypt, Libya and Sudan. In the same year, a senior official from the Israeli Ministry of Defense, Y’ben Poret, declared: “neither today nor in the past is there Zionism, there is neither colonization nor a Jewish state without the removal of all Arabs, without confiscation.”

    The military dictatorship with a civil and pseudo-democratic facade that imposed an apartheid situation in Palestine occupied by Israel, in which Arabs are second-class citizens, suffer segregation and discrimination, are arbitrarily arrested, tortured and executed, lack civil and political rights and – as seen by the genocide that began on October 7, 2023 – have their homes bombed, there is no fundamental difference to the former apartheid regime in South Africa or the former Nazi regime in Germany. The State of Israel, however, has an aggravating factor: while Nazism was created by German imperialism and apartheid was created by white South Africans themselves, Israel was created and is maintained to this day by the entire global imperialist system as a whole. This makes his life longer than the lives of the Third Reich or Apartheid.

    Despite being an agent agreed and shared by the world’s imperialist powers, there is clearly a predominance of American imperialism over the State of Israel. In practice, it is the 51st state of the United States of America, taking into account all the economic and military investment made by Washington since 1948 and, particularly, since 1967, in Israel. The Zionist entity is absolutely dependent on North American funding and, without it, could easily cease to exist if it were attacked jointly by Arab and Islamic states. The Israeli government itself officially recognizes that it is “a country of immigrants”, with its population having increased almost tenfold since its creation. About three-quarters of Israelis are Jewish, half of them of European, American or Soviet origin. It is absolutely common to see blond white people talking in English on the streets of Tel Aviv, for example. Now, the native population of that region is neither white, nor blonde, nor does it speak English.

    Israel is, without a shadow of a doubt, a colonial entity artificially created and governed by imperialism – particularly American – using fascist methods to subjugate the people of that region of the planet. Another proof of this is the total impunity that Israel enjoys in the international political and diplomatic arena, including in the United Nations Security Council (responsible for its creation), being immune to any type of serious sanction even after more than seventy years of evidence which prove numerous human rights violations, such as genocide, ethnic cleansing, political prisons and mass extrajudicial executions. Everything we saw being carried out in Gaza between the end of 2023 and the beginning of 2024 in an amplified form.

    The dream of Western imperialism would be for the entire Middle East to become an Eretz Israel – more or less as the Zionist elite planned – which would thus be completely under its control with the Zionist entity as an intermediary.

    Fascism is a natural consequence of the “higher phase of capitalism”, imperialism, as Vladimir Lenin defined it. It is a new political form of imperialist domination, which began to replace parliamentary democracy when it was unable to stabilize the regime and the domination of the bourgeoisie in different countries. It is the subjugation by brute force, and not by liberal-democratic mechanisms, of the workers and people of their own country and abroad, with the imperialist expansion of the country in question. This domination is justified based on national mythology, which produces and reproduces chauvinist and racist feelings. Zionism, in turn, can be considered as fascism adapted to the conditions of the Middle East and the aspirations for domination of Anglo-American imperialism over that region. After all, as seen by the descriptions contained in this article and by the reality of apartheid experienced by the Palestinian people over the last 76 years, the characteristics of Zionism are very similar to those of traditional fascism, adapted to the conditions of the time and geographic location. The State of Israel was manufactured by imperialism and incorporated Zionist mythology into its education system and other forms of reproduction of official ideology, as well as fascist militias into its armed and police forces. Zionism – the State of Israel – is fascist imperialism applied to Palestine.

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