5UX - Soviet Union https://5ux.com/category/soviet-union en The Top 10 Largest Nuclear Explosions, Visualized https://5ux.com/news/top-10-largest-nuclear-explosions-visualized <div class="clearfix body field"> <div class="field-items"> <div class="field-item even"><p><img src="https://www.visualcapitalist.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/Top-10-Largest-Nuclear-Explosions.png" /></p> <p>The Top 10 Largest Nuclear Explosions, Visualized</p> <p>Just how powerful are nuclear explosions? </p> <p>The U.S.’ <em>Trinity</em> test in 1945, the first-ever nuclear detonation, released around 19 kilotons of explosive energy. The explosion instantly vaporized the tower it stood on and turned the surrounding sand into green glass, before sending a powerful heatwave across the desert. </p> <p>As the Cold War escalated in the years after WWII, the U.S. and the Soviet Union tested bombs that were at least <strong>500 times</strong> greater in explosive power. This infographic visually compares the 10 largest nuclear explosions in history.</p> <p>The Anatomy of a Nuclear Explosion</p> <p>After exploding, nuclear bombs create giant fireballs that generate a blinding flash and a searing heatwave. The fireball engulfs the surrounding air, getting larger as it rises like a hot air balloon. </p> <p>As the fireball and heated air rise, they are flattened by cooler, denser air high up in the atmosphere, creating the mushroom “cap” structure. At the base of the cloud, the fireball causes physical destruction by sending a shockwave moving outwards at thousands of miles an hour.</p> <p><img src="https://www.visualcapitalist.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/Anatomy-of-a-Mushroom-Cloud-1.png" /></p> <p>A strong updraft of air and dirt particles through the center of the cloud forms the “stem” of the mushroom cloud. In most atomic explosions, changing atmospheric pressure and water condensation create rings that surround the cloud, also known as Wilson clouds.</p> <p>Over time, the mushroom cloud dissipates. However, it leaves behind radioactive fallout in the form of nuclear particles, debris, dust, and ash, causing lasting damage to the local environment. Because the particles are lightweight, global wind patterns often distribute them far beyond the place of detonation.</p> <p>With this context in mind, here’s a look at the 10 largest nuclear explosions.</p> <p>#10: Ivy Mike (1952)</p> <p>In 1952, the U.S. detonated the <em>Mike</em> device—the first-ever hydrogen bomb—as part of Operation Ivy. Hydrogen bombs rely on nuclear fusion to amplify their explosions, producing much more explosive energy than atomic bombs that use nuclear fission.</p> <p>Weighing 140,000 pounds (63,500kg), the Ivy Mike test generated a yield of <strong>10,400 kilotons</strong>, equivalent to the explosive power of <strong>10.4 million tons</strong> of TNT. The explosion was <strong>700 times</strong> more powerful than <em>Little Boy</em>, the bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945.</p> <p>#9: Castle Romeo (1954)</p> <p>Castle Romeo was part of the Operation Castle series of U.S. nuclear tests taking place on the Marshall Islands. Shockingly, the U.S. was running out of islands to conduct tests, making <em>Romeo</em> the first-ever test conducted on a barge in the ocean.</p> <p>At <strong>11,000 kilotons,</strong> the test produced more than double its predicted explosive energy of 4,000 kilotons. Its fireball, as seen below, is one of the most iconic images ever captured of a nuclear explosion.</p> <p><img src="https://www.visualcapitalist.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/castle-romeo-nuclear-explosion.jpg" /></p> <p>#8: Soviet Test #123 (1961)</p> <p>Test #123 was one of the 57 tests conducted by the Soviet Union in 1961. Most of these tests were conducted on the Novaya Zemlya archipelago in Northwestern Russia. The bomb yielded <strong>12,500 kilotons</strong> of explosive energy, enough to vaporize everything within a 2.1 mile (3.5km) radius.</p> <p>#7: Castle Yankee (1954)</p> <p>Castle Yankee was the fifth test in Operation Castle. The explosion marked the second-most powerful nuclear test by the U.S. </p> <p>It yielded <strong>13,500 kilotons</strong>, much higher than the predicted yield of up to 10,000 kilotons. Within four days of the blast, its fallout reached Mexico City, roughly 7,100 miles (11,400km) away. </p> <p>#6: Castle Bravo (1954)</p> <p>Castle Bravo, the first of the Castle Operation series, accidentally became the most powerful nuclear bomb tested by the U.S.</p> <p>Due to a design error, the explosive energy from the bomb reached <strong>15,000 kilotons</strong>, two and a half times what was expected. The mushroom cloud climbed up to roughly 25 miles (40km).</p> <p>As a result of the test, an area of 7,000 square miles was contaminated, and inhabitants of nearby atolls were exposed to high levels of radioactive fallout. Traces of the blast were found in Australia, India, Japan, and Europe.</p> <p>#5, #4, #3: Soviet Tests #173, #174, #147 (1962)</p> <p>In 1962, the Soviet Union conducted 78 nuclear tests, three of which produced the fifth, fourth, and third-most powerful explosions in history. Tests #173, #174, and #147 each yielded around <strong>20,000 kilotons</strong>. Due to the absolute secrecy of these tests, no photos or videos have been released.</p> <p>#2: Soviet Test #219 (1962)</p> <p>Test #219 was an atmospheric nuclear test carried out using an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM), with the bomb exploding at a height of 2.3 miles (3.8km) above sea level. It was the second-most powerful nuclear explosion, with a yield of <strong>24,200 kilotons</strong> and a destructive radius of ~25 miles (41km). </p> <p>#1: Tsar Bomba (1961)</p> <p>Tsar Bomba, also called <em>Big Ivan</em>, needed a specially designed plane because it was too heavy to carry on conventional aircraft. The bomb was attached to a giant parachute to give the plane time to fly away.</p> <p>The explosion, yielding <strong>50,000 kilotons</strong>, obliterated an abandoned village 34 miles (55km) away and generated a 5.0-5.25 magnitude earthquake in the surrounding region. Initially, it was designed as a <strong>100,000 kiloton</strong> bomb, but its yield was cut to half its potential by the Soviet Union. Tsar Bomba’s mushroom cloud breached through the stratosphere to reach a height of over 37 miles (60km), roughly <strong>six times</strong> the flying height of commercial aircraft. </p> <p>The two bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki had devastating consequences, and their explosive yields were only a fraction of the 10 largest explosions. The power of modern nuclear weapons makes their scale of destruction truly unfathomable, and as history suggests, the outcomes can be unpredictable.</p> <p>The post The Top 10 Largest Nuclear Explosions, Visualized appeared first on Visual Capitalist.</p> </div> </div> </div> <div class="field field-name-field-source field-type-link-field field-label-hidden field-wrapper"><a href="https://www.visualcapitalist.com/largest-nuclear-explosions/?utm_source=rss&amp;utm_medium=rss&amp;utm_campaign=largest-nuclear-explosions">Source</a></div><div class="field field-name-opencalais-calaisdocumentc-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-hidden field-wrapper"> <div class="field-items" class="comma-separated field-items"> <div class="field-item even" class="field-item even"><a href="/category/disaster">Disaster</a></div> <div class="field-item odd" class="field-item even odd"><a href="/category/environment">Environment</a></div> </div> </div> <div class="field field-name-opencalais-continent-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-hidden field-wrapper"> <div class="field-items" class="comma-separated field-items"> <div class="field-item even" class="field-item even"><a href="/category/europe">Europe</a></div> </div> </div> <div class="field field-name-opencalais-country-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-hidden field-wrapper"> <div class="field-items" class="comma-separated field-items"> <div class="field-item even" class="field-item even"><a href="/category/united-states">United States</a></div> <div class="field-item odd" class="field-item even odd"><a href="/category/soviet-union">Soviet Union</a></div> </div> </div> <div class="field field-name-opencalais-industryterm-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-hidden field-wrapper"> <div class="field-items" class="comma-separated field-items"> <div class="field-item even" class="field-item even"><a href="/category/explosive-energy">explosive energy</a></div> </div> </div> <div class="field field-name-opencalais-product-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-hidden field-wrapper"> <div class="field-items" class="comma-separated field-items"> <div class="field-item even" class="field-item even"><a href="/category/tnt">TNT</a></div> </div> </div> Fri, 13 May 2022 23:47:38 +0000 Guest 61521 at https://5ux.com How The US Swindled Russia In The Early 1990s https://5ux.com/news/how-us-swindled-russia-early-1990s <a href="/news/how-us-swindled-russia-early-1990s"><img class="teaserimage" src="https://5ux.com/sites/5ux.com/files/styles/medium_250/public/resize/remote/a97f1b2b66a28c0700bc982b6278c5eb-600x300.png?itok=FohQaZXy" alt="How The US Swindled Russia In The Early 1990s" title="How The US Swindled Russia In The Early 1990s" /></a><div class="clearfix body field"> <div class="field-items"> <div class="field-item even"><p><em>Authored by Eric Zuesse via The Strategic Culture Foundation,</em></p> <p><strong>Due to a historic data-dump on December 10th, the biggest swindle that occurred in the 20th Century (or perhaps ever) is now proven as a historical fact; and this swindle was done by the US Government, against the Government and people of Russia, and it continues today and keeps getting worse under every US President.</strong></p> <p>It was secretly started by US President George Herbert Walker Bush on the night of 24 February 1990; and, unless it becomes publicly recognized and repudiated so that it can stop, a nuclear war between the US and all of NATO on one side, versus Russia on the other, is inevitable unless Russia capitulates before then, which would be vastly less likely than such a world-ending nuclear war now is.</p> <p><strong>This swindle has finally been displayed beyond question, by this, the first-ever complete release of the evidence</strong>.</p> <p>It demonstrates beyond any reasonable doubt (as you’ll verify yourself from the evidence here), that <strong>US President G.H.W. Bush (and his team) lied through their teeth to Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev (and his team) to end the Cold War on Russia’s side, when the US team were secretly determined never to end it on the US-and-NATO side until Russia itself is conquered.</strong></p> <p>And this swindle continues today, and keeps getting worse and worse for Russians.</p> <p><strong>Until now, apologists for the US-Government side have been able to get away with various lies about these lies,</strong> such as that there weren’t any, and that Gorbachev didn’t really think that the NATO issue was terribly important for Russia’s future national security anyway, and that the only limitation upon NATO’s future expansion that was discussed during the negotiations to end the Cold War concerned NATO not expanding itself eastward (i.e., closer to Russia) within Germany, not going beyond the then-existing dividing-line between West and East Germany — that no restriction against other east-bloc (Soviet-allied) nations ever being admitted into NATO was discussed, at all. The now-standard US excuse that the deal concerned only Germany and not all of Europe is now conclusively disproven by the biggest single data-dump ever released about those negotiations. </p> <p>The release on December 10th, by the National Security Archives, of a treasure-trove of all the existing documentation — 33 key documents — that’s been made available to them from numerous archives around the world, and brought together finally for the very first time complete and in chronological order, <strong>makes crystal clear that the American apologists’ lies about the lies WERE lies, not accurate accounts of the history, at all.</strong></p> <p>The assemblers at the National Security Archives assume that the numerous and repeated false promises that were made by Bush’s team were mistakes, instead of as what they so clearly were (but you’ll judge it here for yourself): strategic lies that were essential to Bush’s goal of America ultimately conquering a future isolated Russia that would then have little-to-no foreign allies, and all of whose then-existing-as-Soviet allied nations within the Soviet Union itself, and beyond, including all of its former Warsaw Pact allies, would have become ultimately swallowed up by the US-NATO bloc, which then would be able to dictate, to a finally alone nation of Russia, terms of Russia’s ultimate surrender to the US That view (which the National Security Archives documents to be clearly true, even as it denies it and says that only Bill Clinton and subsequent Presidents were to blame) is now exposed irrefutably to have been the US plan ever since GHW Bush’s Presidency.</p> <p><em><strong>In other words: This release of documents about the turning-point, provides capstone evidence that the US never really had been in the Cold War against communism; the US was instead aiming ultimately to be the imperial nation, controlling the entire planet.</strong></em></p> <p>For America’s Deep State, or what President Eisenhower famously warned about as the “military-industrial complex,” <strong>the Cold War was actually about empire, and about conquest, not really about ideology at all. </strong>This also had been shown, for example, by America’s having assisted so many ‘former’ Nazis to escape and come to America and to be paid now by the US Government. After World War II, the top level of the US power-structure became increasingly taken over by the military-industrial complex, America’s Deep State, so that increasingly the US Government is in a condition of “perpetual war for perpetual peace” — a warfare state and economy: fascism.</p> <p><strong>Here, then, are highlights from this historic data-dump, presented in chronological order, just as in the release itself, and with a minimum of added commentary from myself [placed in brackets], </strong>but all stripping away here the dross of accompanying inconsequentials, and leaving only the golden steady core of stunningly successful American deceit of Russia. These are those highlights, from the data-dump, which <strong><em>the National Security Archives headlined “NATO Expansion: What Gorbachev Heard” and sub-headed “Declassified documents show security assurances against NATO expansion</em></strong> to Soviet leaders from Baker, Bush, Genscher, Kohl, Gates, Mitterrand, Thatcher, Hurd, Major, and Woerner,” so that the swindlers (or as the National Security Archive view them as having instead been blunderers) can become immediately recognized and known.</p> <p><strong>All of these documents pertain to negotiations that occurred throughout the month of February 1990, and a few relate also to the immediate aftermath. </strong>That’s the crucial period, when the geostrategic reality of today (which all the world now know to be a continuation of the Cold War, but this time against only Russia, and not against the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact) was actually created.</p> <p>At the negotiations’ start, West Germany’s Chancellor Helmut Kohl’s agent, Germany’s Foreign Minister, Hans-Dietrich Genscher, stated publicly to the whole world, West Germany’s initial offer to the Soviet Union’s President Mikhail Gorbachev, and this offer did not include a simultaneous termination of both military alliances — the Soviets’ Warsaw Pact and America’s NATO — but instead only a promise that NATO would never absorb any additional territory, especially to the east of West Germany (and this publicly made promise was never kept). So: right from the get-go, there was no actual termination of the Cold War that was being proposed by the US group, but only an arrangement that wouldn’t threaten Russia more than the then-existing split Germany did (and yet even that promise turned out to have been a lie):</p> <p><strong>Document 01</strong></p> <p><em>US Embassy Bonn Confidential Cable to Secretary of State on the speech of the German Foreign Minister: Genscher Outlines His Vision of a New European Architecture.</em></p> <p><em>1990-02-01</em></p> <p><em>Source: US Department of State. FOIA Reading Room. Case F-2015 10829</em></p> <p>“This US Embassy Bonn cable reporting back to Washington details both of Hans-Dietrich Genscher’s proposals – <strong>that NATO would not expand to the east, </strong>and that the former territory of the GDR in a unified Germany would be treated differently from other NATO territory.”</p> <p><strong>Document 02</strong></p> <p><em>Mr. Hurd to Sir C. Mallaby (Bonn). Telegraphic N. 85: Secretary of State’s Call on Herr Genscher: German Unification.</em></p> <p><em>1990-02-06</em></p> <p><em>Source: Documents on British Policy Overseas, series III, volume VII: German Unification, 1989-1990.</em></p> <p>“The US State Department’s subsequent view of the German unification negotiations, expressed in a 1996 cable sent to all posts, <strong>mistakenly asserts that the entire negotiation over the future of Germany limited its discussion of the future of NATO</strong> to the specific arrangements over the territory of the former GDR.” [The National Security Archives’ calling that Bill-Clinton-era State Department cable ‘mistaken’ is unsupported by, and even contradicted by, the evidence they actually present from the February 1990 negotiations.]</p> <p><strong>Document 03</strong></p> <p><em>Memorandum from Paul H. Nitze to George H.W. Bush about “Forum for Germany” meeting in Berlin.</em></p> <p><em>1990-02-06</em></p> <p><em>Source: George H. W. Bush Presidential Library</em></p> <p>“This concise note to President Bush from one of the Cold War’s architects, Paul Nitze (based at his namesake Johns Hopkins University School of International Studies), captures the debate over the future of NATO in early 1990. Nitze relates that Central and Eastern European leaders attending the ‘Forum for Germany’ conference in Berlin were advocating the dissolution of both the superpower blocs, NATO and the Warsaw Pact, until he (and a few western Europeans) turned around that view and instead emphasized the importance of NATO as the basis of stability and US presence in Europe.”</p> <p><strong>Document 04</strong></p> <p><em>Memorandum of Conversation between James Baker and Eduard Shevardnadze in Moscow.</em></p> <p><em>1990-02-09</em></p> <p><em>Source: US Department of State, FOIA 199504567 (National Security Archive Flashpoints Collection, Box 38)</em></p> <p>“Baker tells the Soviet foreign minister, ‘A neutral Germany would undoubtedly acquire its own independent nuclear capability. However, a Germany that is firmly anchored in a changed NATO, by that I mean a NATO that is far less of [a] military organization, much more of a political one, would have no need for independent capability. There would, of course,<strong> have to be iron-clad guarantees that NATO’s jurisdiction or forces would not move eastward.</strong>’”</p> <p><strong>Document 05</strong></p> <p><em>Memorandum of conversation between Mikhail Gorbachev and James Baker in Moscow.</em></p> <p><em>1990-02-09</em></p> <p><em>Source: US Department of State, FOIA 199504567 (National Security Archive Flashpoints Collection, Box 38)</em></p> <p>“Even with (unjustified) redactions by US classification officers, this American transcript of perhaps the most famous US assurance to the Soviets on NATO expansion confirms the Soviet transcript of the same conversation. Repeating what Bush said at the Malta summit in December 1989, Baker tells Gorbachev: ‘The President and I have made clear that we seek no unilateral advantage in this process’ of inevitable German unification. Baker goes on to say, ‘We understand the need for assurances to the countries in the East. If we maintain a presence in a Germany that is a part of NATO, <strong>there would be no extension of NATO’s jurisdiction for forces of NATO one inch to the east.’”</strong></p> <p>Document 06</p> <p><em>Record of conversation between Mikhail Gorbachev and James Baker in Moscow. (Excerpts)</em></p> <p><em>1990-02-09</em></p> <p><em>Source: Gorbachev Foundation Archive, Fond 1, Opis 1.</em></p> <p>“The key exchange takes place when Baker asks whether Gorbachev would prefer ‘a united Germany outside of NATO, absolutely independent and without American troops; or a united Germany keeping its connections with NATO, but with <strong>the guarantee that NATO’s jurisdiction or troops will not spread east of the present boundary.</strong>’ … Turning to German unification, Baker assures Gorbachev that ‘neither the president nor I intend to extract any unilateral advantages from the processes that are taking place,’ and that the Americans understand the importance for the USSR and Europe of guarantees that <strong>‘not an inch of NATO’s present military jurisdiction will spread in an eastern direction.’”</strong></p> <p><strong>Document 07</strong></p> <p><em>Memorandum of conversation between Robert Gates and Vladimir Kryuchkov in Moscow.</em></p> <p><em>1990-02-09</em></p> <p><em>Source: George H.W. Bush Presidential Library, NSC Scowcroft Files, Box 91128, Folder “Gorbachev (Dobrynin) Sensitive.”</em></p> <p>“This conversation is especially important because subsequent researchers have speculated that Secretary Baker may have been speaking beyond his brief in his ‘not one inch eastward’ conversation with Gorbachev. Robert Gates, the former top CIA intelligence analyst and a specialist on the USSR, here tells his kind-of-counterpart, the head of the KGB, in his office at the Lubyanka KGB headquarters, exactly what Baker told Gorbachev that day at the Kremlin: <strong>not one inch eastward.</strong> At that point, Gates was the top deputy to the president’s national security adviser, Gen. Brent Scowcroft, so this document speaks to a coordinated approach by the US government to Gorbachev.”</p> <p><strong>Document 08</strong></p> <p><em>Letter from James Baker to Helmut Kohl</em></p> <p><em>1990-02-10</em></p> <p><em>Source: Deutsche Enheit Sonderedition und den Akten des Budeskanzleramtes 1989/90</em></p> <p>“Baker especially remarks on Gorbachev’s noncommittal response to the question about a neutral Germany versus a NATO Germany with<strong> pledges against eastward expansion.”</strong></p> <p><strong>Document 09</strong></p> <p><em>Memorandum of conversation between Mikhail Gorbachev and Helmut Kohl</em></p> <p><em>1990-02-10</em></p> <p><em>Source: Mikhail Gorbachev i germanskii vopros, edited by Alexander Galkin and Anatoly Chernyaev, (Moscow: Ves Mir, 2006)</em></p> <p>“Prepared by Baker’s letter and his own foreign minister’s Tutzing formula, Kohl early in the conversation assures Gorbachev, ‘We believe that <strong>NATO should not expand the sphere of its activity.</strong> We have to find a reasonable resolution. I correctly understand the security interests of the Soviet Union, and I realize that you, Mr. General Secretary, and the Soviet leadership will have to clearly explain what is happening to the Soviet people.’ Later the two leaders tussle about NATO and the Warsaw Pact, with Gorbachev commenting, ‘They say what is NATO without the FRG. But we could also ask: What is the WTO without the GDR?’ When Kohl disagrees, Gorbachev calls merely for ‘reasonable solutions that do not poison the atmosphere in our relations’ and says this part of the conversation should not be made public.”</p> <p><strong>Document 10-1</strong></p> <p><em>Teimuraz Stepanov-Mamaladze notes from Conference on Open Skies, Ottawa, Canada.</em></p> <p><em>1990-02-12</em></p> <p><em>Source: Hoover Institution Archive, Stepanov-Mamaladze Collection.</em></p> <p>“Notes from the first days of the conference are very brief, but they contain one important line that shows that Baker offered the same assurance formula in Ottawa as he did in Moscow: ‘And if U[nited] G[ermany] stays in NATO, <strong>we should take care about nonexpansion of its jurisdiction to the East.’”</strong></p> <p><strong>Document 10-2</strong></p> <p><em>Teimuraz Stepanov-Mamaladze diary, February 12, 1990.</em></p> <p><em>1990-02-12</em></p> <p><em>Source: Hoover Institution Archive, Stepanov-Mamaladze Collection.</em></p> <p>“This diary entry is evidence, from a critical perspective, that <strong>the United States and West Germany did give Moscow concrete assurances about keeping NATO to its current size and scope.</strong> In fact, the diary further indicates that at least in Shevardnadze’s view those assurances amounted to a deal – <strong>which Gorbachev accepted.”</strong></p> <p><strong>Document 10-3</strong></p> <p><em>Teimuraz Stepanov-Mamaladze diary, <strong>February 13, 1990.</strong></em></p> <p><em>1990-02-13</em></p> <p><em>Source: Hoover Institution Archive, Stepanov-Mamaladze Collection.</em></p> <p>“Stepanov-Mamaladze describes difficult negotiations about the exact wording on the joint statement. … ‘During the day, active games were taking place between all of them. E.A. [Shevardnadze] met with Baker five times, twice with Genscher, talked with Fischer [GDR foreign minister], Dumas [French foreign minister], and the ministers of the ATS countries,’ and<strong> finally, the text of the settlement was settled.”</strong></p> <p><strong>Document 11</strong></p> <p><em>US State Department, “Two Plus Four: Advantages, Possible Concerns and Rebuttal Points.”</em></p> <p><em>1990-02-21</em></p> <p><em>Source: State Department FOIA release, National Security Archive Flashpoints Collection, Box 38.</em></p> <p>“The <strong>American fear was that the West Germans would make their own deal with Moscow </strong>for rapid unification, giving up some of the bottom lines for the US, mainly membership in NATO.”</p> <p><strong>Document 12-1</strong></p> <p><em>Memorandum of conversation between Vaclav Havel and George Bush in Washington.</em></p> <p><em>1990-02-20</em></p> <p><em>Source: George H.W. Bush Presidential Library, Memcons and Telcons (https://bush41library.tamu.edu/)</em></p> <p>“<strong>Bush took the opportunity to lecture the Czech leader</strong> about the value of NATO and its essential role as the basis for the US presence in Europe.”</p> <p><strong>Document 12-2</strong></p> <p><em>Memorandum of conversation between Vaclav Havel and George Bush in Washington.</em></p> <p><em>1990-02-21</em></p> <p><em>Source: George H.W. Bush Presidential Library, Memcons and Telcons (https://bush41library.tamu.edu/)</em></p> <p>“Bush’s request to Havel to pass the message to Gorbachev that the Americans support him personally, and that ‘We will not conduct ourselves in the wrong way by saying “we win, you lose.” Emphasizing the point, Bush says, ‘tell Gorbachev that … I asked you to tell Gorbachev that we will not conduct ourselves regarding Czechoslovakia or any other country in a way that would complicate the problems he has so frankly discussed with me.’ The Czechoslovak leader adds his own caution to the Americans about how to proceed with the unification of Germany and address Soviet insecurities. Havel remarks to Bush, ‘It is a question of prestige.’”</p> <p>[I think that Havel was deceived to believe that “prestige” was the issue here. This is what the US team wanted the Soviet team to think was the US team’s chief motivation for wanting NATO to continue. But subsequent historical events, especially the US team’s proceeding under President Bill Clinton and up through Donald Trump to expand NATO to include, by now, virtually all of the Warsaw Pact and of the Soviet Union itself except for Russia, in NATO, proves that US aggression against Russia has been the US aim from the start, and the US Government has been working assiduously at this plan for ultimate conquest. I think that Havel’s use there of the word “prestige” was very revealing of the total snookering of Gorbachev that Bush achieved. Gorbachev and his team trusted the US side. Russia has paid dearly for that. If the US side continues and NATO isn’t voluntarily terminated by the US Government, then WW III will be the inevitable result. NATO will end either after the ‘conquest’ of Russia or before that WW-III ‘conquest’ (likelier to be actually destruction of the entire world) even happens. The world, today, will decide which. NATO should have ended in 1991, when the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact did.]</p> <p><strong>Document 13</strong></p> <p><em>Memorandum of Conversation between Helmut Kohl and George Bush at Camp David.</em></p> <p><em>1990-02-24</em></p> <p><em>Source: George H.W. Bush Presidential Library, Memcons and Telcons (https://bush41library.tamu.edu/)</em></p> <p>“The Bush administration’s main worry about German unification as the process accelerated in February 1990 was that the West Germans might make their own deal bilaterally with the Soviets (see Document 11) and might be willing to bargain away NATO membership. … The German chancellor arrives at Camp David without [West German Foreign Minister] Genscher because the latter does not entirely share the Bush-Kohl position on full German membership in NATO, and he recently angered both leaders by speaking publicly about the CSCE as the future European security mechanism.[11] … <strong>Bush’s priority is to keep the US presence, especially the nuclear umbrella, in Europe: ‘if US nuclear forces are withdrawn from Germany, I don’t see how we can persuade any other ally on the continent to retain these weapons.’ </strong>… [Bush wanted Lockheed and other US weapons-makers to continue booming after the Cold War ‘ended’ — not for the nuclear-weapons market to end. Bush continued:] <strong>‘We have weird thinking in our Congress today, ideas like this peace dividend. We can’t do that in these uncertain times.’</strong> [For the US team, ‘perpetual war for perpetual peace’ would be the way forward; a ‘peace dividend’ was the last thing they wanted — ever.] … At one point in the conversation, Bush seems to view his Soviet counterpart not as a partner but as a defeated enemy. Referring to talk in some Soviet quarters against Germany staying in NATO, he says: <strong>‘To hell with that. We prevailed and they didn’t. We cannot let the Soviets clutch victory from the jaws of defeat.’”</strong> [I earlier had placed that crucial secret statement from Bush into historical perspective, under the headline, “How America Double-Crossed Russia and Shamed the West”.] </p> <p><strong>Document 14</strong></p> <p><em>Memorandum of conversation between George Bush and Eduard Shevardnadze in Washington.</em></p> <p><em>1990-04-06</em></p> <p><em>Source: George H.W. Bush Presidential Library, Memcons and Telcons (https://bush41library.tamu.edu/)</em></p> <p>“Shevardnadze mentions the upcoming CSCE summit and the Soviet expectation that it will discuss the new European security structures. Bush does not contradict this but ties it to the issues of the US presence in Europe and German unification in NATO. He declares that he wants to ‘contribute to stability and to the creation of a Europe whole and free, or as you call it, a common European home. A[n] idea that is very close to our own.’ The Soviets — wrongly — interpret this as a declaration that the US administration shares Gorbachev’s idea.”</p> <p><strong>Document 15</strong></p> <p><em>Sir R. Braithwaite (Moscow). Telegraphic N. 667: “Secretary of State’s Meeting with President Gorbachev.”</em></p> <p><em>1990-04-11</em></p> <p><em>Source: Documents on British Policy Overseas, series III, volume VII: German Unification, 1989-1990. (Foreign and Commonwealth Office.</em></p> <p>“Ambassador Braithwaite’s telegram summarizes the meeting between Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs Douglas Hurd and President Gorbachev, noting Gorbachev’s ‘expansive mood.’ Gorbachev asks the secretary to pass his appreciation for Margaret Thatcher’s letter to him after her summit with Kohl, at which, according to Gorbachev, she followed the lines of policy Gorbachev and Thatcher discussed in their recent phone call, on the basis of which the Soviet leader concluded that ‘the British and Soviet positions were very close indeed.’”</p> <p><strong>Document 16</strong></p> <p><em>Valentin Falin Memorandum to Mikhail Gorbachev (Excerpts)</em></p> <p><em>1990-04-18</em></p> <p><em>Source: Mikhail Gorbachev i germanskii vopros, edited by Alexander Galkin and Anatoly Chernyaev, (Moscow: Ves Mir, 2006)</em></p> <p>“This memorandum from the Central Committee’s most senior expert on Germany sounds like a wake-up call for Gorbachev. Falin puts it in blunt terms: while Soviet European policy has fallen into inactivity and even ‘depression after the March 18 elections in East Germany, and Gorbachev himself has let Kohl speed up the process of unification, his compromises on Germany in NATO can only lead to the slipping away of his main goal for Europe – the common European home. ‘Summing up the past six months, one has to conclude that the “common European home,” which used to be a concrete task the countries of the continent were starting to implement, is now turning into a mirage.’ <strong>While the West is sweet-talking Gorbachev into accepting German unification in NATO, Falin notes (correctly) that ‘the Western states are already violating the consensus principle by making preliminary agreements among themselves’</strong> regarding German unification and the future of Europe that do not include a ‘long phase of constructive development.’ <strong>He notes the West’s ‘intensive cultivation of not only NATO but also our Warsaw Pact allies’ with the goal to isolate the USSR</strong>. … He also suggests using arms control negotiations in Vienna and Geneva as leverage if the West keeps taking advantage of Soviet flexibility. … The main idea of the memo is to warn Gorbachev not to be naive about the intentions of his American partners: <strong>‘The West is outplaying us, promising to respect the interests of the USSR, but in practice, step by step, separating us from “traditional Europe”.’”</strong></p> <p><strong>Document 17</strong></p> <p><em>James A. Baker III, Memorandum for the President, “My meeting with Shevardnadze.”</em></p> <p><em>1990-05-04</em></p> <p><em>Source: George H. W. Bush Presidential Library, NSC Scowcroft Files, Box 91126, Folder “Gorbachev (Dobrynin) Sensitive 1989 – June 1990 [3]”</em></p> <p>“Baker reports, ‘I also used your speech and our recognition of the need to adapt NATO, politically and militarily, and to develop CSCE to reassure Shevardnadze that the process would not yield winners and losers. Instead, it would produce a new legitimate European structure – one that would be inclusive, not exclusive.’”</p> <p><strong>Document 18</strong></p> <p><em>Record of conversation between Mikhail Gorbachev and James Baker in Moscow.</em></p> <p><em>1990-05-18</em></p> <p><em>Source: Gorbachev Foundation Archive, Fond 1</em></p> <p>“When Gorbachev mentions the need to build new security structures to replace the blocs, Baker lets slip a personal reaction that reveals much about the real US position on the subject: ‘It’s nice to talk about pan-European security structures, the role of the CSCE. It is a wonderful dream, but just a dream. In the meantime, NATO exists. …<strong>’ Gorbachev suggests that if the US side insists on Germany in NATO, then he would ‘announce publicly that we want to join NATO too.’ </strong>Shevardnadze goes further, offering a prophetic observation: ‘if united Germany becomes a member of NATO, it will blow up perestroika. Our people will not forgive us. People will say that we ended up the losers, not the winners.’”</p> <p><strong>Document 19</strong></p> <p><em>Record of conversation between Mikhail Gorbachev and Francois Mitterrand (excerpts).</em></p> <p><em>1990-05-25</em></p> <p><em>Source: Mikhail Gorbachev i germanskii vopros</em></p> <p><strong>“[Miterrand] implies that NATO is not the key issue now and could be drowned out in further negotiations</strong>; rather, the important thing is to ensure Soviet participation in new European security system. He repeats that he is ‘personally in favor of gradually dismantling the military blocs.’ <strong>Gorbachev expresses his wariness and suspicion about US effort to ‘perpetuate NATO’.</strong>” [This was extraordinary documentation that the US team had deceived Gorbachev to think that they were trying to suggest to him that both military alliances — NATO and Warsaw Pact — would be ended, but that Gorbachev was “wary” and “suspicious” that maybe they didn’t really mean it. Stunning.]</p> <p><strong>Document 20</strong></p> <p><em>Letter from Francois Mitterrand to George Bush</em></p> <p><em>1990-05-25</em></p> <p><em>Source: George H.W. Bush Presidential Library, NSC Scowcroft Files</em></p> <p><strong>True to his word, Mitterrand writes a letter to George Bush describing Gorbachev’s predicament on the issue of German unification in NATO, calling it genuine, not ‘fake or tactical.’ He warns the American president against doing it as a fait accompli without Gorbachev’s consent</strong> implying that Gorbachev might retaliate on arms control (exactly what Mitterrand himself – and Falin earlier – suggested in his conversation). Mitterrand <strong>argues in favor of a formal ‘peace settlement in International law,’</strong> and informs Bush that in his conversation with Gorbachev he “‘indicated that, on the Western side, <strong>we would certainly not refuse to detail the guarantees that he would have a right to expect for his country’s security.’”</strong></p> <p><strong>Document 21</strong></p> <p><em>Record of conversation between Mikhail Gorbachev and George Bush. White House, Washington D.C.</em></p> <p><em>1990-05-31</em></p> <p><em>Source: Gorbachev Foundation Archive, Moscow, Fond 1, opis 1.[12]</em></p> <p>“Baker repeats the nine assurances made previously by the administration, including that the United States now agrees to support the pan-European process and transformation of NATO in order to remove the Soviet perception of threat. Gorbachev’s preferred position is Germany with one foot in both NATO and the Warsaw Pact — the ‘two anchors’ — creating a kind of associated membership. Baker intervenes, saying that ‘the simultaneous obligations of one and the same country toward the WTO and NATO smack of schizophrenia.’ After the US president frames the issue in the context of the Helsinki agreement, Gorbachev proposes that the German people have the right to choose their alliance — which he in essence already affirmed to Kohl during their meeting in February 1990. Here, Gorbachev significantly exceeds his brief, and incurs the ire of other members of his delegation, especially the official with the German portfolio, Valentin Falin, and Marshal Sergey Akhromeyev. Gorbachev issues a key warning about the future: ‘If the Soviet people get an impression that we are disregarded in the German question, then all the positive processes in Europe, including the negotiations in Vienna [over conventional forces], would be in serious danger. This is not just bluffing. It is simply that the people will force us to stop and to look around.’ It is a remarkable admission about domestic political pressures from the last Soviet leader.”</p> <p><strong>Document 22</strong></p> <p><em>Letter from Mr. Powell (N. 10) to Mr. Wall: Thatcher-Gorbachev memorandum of conversation.</em></p> <p><em>1990-06-08</em></p> <p><em>Source: Documents on British Policy Overseas, series III, volume VII: German Unification, 1989-1990. (Foreign and Commonwealth Office</em></p> <p>“Gorbachev says he wants to ‘be completely frank with the Prime Minister’ that if the processes were to become one-sided, ‘there could be a very difficult situation [and the] Soviet Union would feel its security in jeopardy.’ Thatcher responds firmly that it was in nobody’s interest to put Soviet security in jeopardy: ‘we must find ways to give the Soviet Union confidence that its security would be assured.’”</p> <p><strong>Document 23</strong></p> <p><em>Record of Conversation between Mikhail Gorbachev and Helmut Kohl, Moscow (Excerpts).</em></p> <p><em>1990-07-15</em></p> <p><em>Source: Mikhail Gorbachev i germanskii vopros</em></p> <p>“This key conversation between Chancellor Kohl and President Gorbachev sets the final parameters for German unification. Kohl talks repeatedly about the new era of relations between a united Germany and the Soviet Union, and how this relationship would contribute to European stability and security. <strong>Gorbachev demands assurances on non-expansion of NATO</strong>: ‘We must talk about the nonproliferation of NATO military structures to the territory of the GDR, and maintaining Soviet troops there for a certain transition period.’ The Soviet leader notes earlier in the conversation that NATO has already begun transforming itself. For him, the pledge of NATO non-expansion to the territory of the GDR in spirit means that NATO would not take advantage of the Soviet willingness to compromise on Germany.”</p> <p>[Of course, Gorbachev never knew that Bush had instructed his agents, on the night of 24 February 1990, “To hell with that. We prevailed and they didn’t. We cannot let the Soviets clutch victory from the jaws of defeat,” indicating that for the US aristocracy, conquest of an isolated Russia was the actual ultimate aim — there would be no actual end of the Cold War until the US would conquer Russia itself — grab the whole thing. Gorbachev was, it is now absolutely undeniable, conned.]</p> <p><strong>Document 24</strong></p> <p><em>Memorandum of Telephone Conversation between Mikhail Gorbachev and George Bush</em></p> <p><em>1990-07-17</em></p> <p><em>Source: George H.W. Bush Presidential Library, Memcons and Telcons ((https://bush41library.tamu.edu/)</em></p> <p>“In this phone call, Bush expands on Kohl’s security assurances and reinforces the message from the London Declaration: ‘So what we tried to do was to take account of your concerns expressed to me and others, and we did it in the following ways: by our joint declaration on non-aggression; in our invitation to you to come to NATO; in our agreement to open NATO to regular diplomatic contact with your government and those of the Eastern European countries; and our offer on assurances on the future size of the armed forces of a united Germany – an issue I know you discussed with Helmut Kohl. We also fundamentally changed our military approach on conventional and nuclear forces. We conveyed the idea of an expanded, stronger CSCE with new institutions in which the USSR can share and be part of the new Europe.’”</p> <p><strong>Document 25</strong></p> <p><em>September 12 Two-Plus-Four Ministerial in Moscow: Detailed account [includes text of the Treaty on the Final Settlement with Respect to Germany and Agreed Minute to the Treaty on the special military status of the GDR after unification]</em></p> <p><em>1990-11-02</em></p> <p><em>Source: George H.W. Bush Presidential Library, NSC Condoleezza Rice Files</em></p> <p>“the agreed text of the final treaty on German unification. The treaty codified what Bush had earlier offered to Gorbachev – ‘special military status’ for the former GDR territory. At the last minute, British and American concerns that the language would restrict emergency NATO troop movements there forced the inclusion of a ‘minute’ that left it up to the newly unified and sovereign Germany what the meaning of the word ‘deployed’ should be. Kohl had committed to Gorbachev that only German NATO troops would be allowed on that territory after the Soviets left, and Germany stuck to that commitment, even though the ‘minute’ was meant to allow other NATO troops to traverse or exercise there at least temporarily. Subsequently, Gorbachev aides such as Pavel Palazhshenko would point to the treaty language to argue that NATO expansion violated the ‘spirit’ of this Final Settlement treaty.”</p> <p>[Obviously, now, it was no “Final Settlement” at all.]</p> <p><strong>Document 26</strong></p> <p><em>US Department of State, European Bureau: Revised NATO Strategy Paper for Discussion at Sub-Ungroup Meeting</em></p> <p><em>1990-10-22</em></p> <p><em>Source: George H. W. Bush Presidential Library, NSC Heather Wilson Files,</em></p> <p>“Joint Chiefs and other agencies, posits that ‘[a] potential Soviet threat remains and constitutes one basic justification for the continuance of NATO.’ At the same time, in the discussion of potential East European membership in NATO, the review suggests that ‘In the current environment, it is not in the best interest of NATO or of the US that these states be granted full NATO membership and its security guarantees.’ The United States does not ‘wish to organize an anti-Soviet coalition whose frontier is the Soviet border’ – not least because of the negative impact this might have on reforms in the USSR. NATO liaison offices would do for the present time, the group concluded, but the relationship will develop in the future. In the absence of the Cold War confrontation, NATO ‘out of area’ functions will have to be redefined.” [Clearly, they wanted the revolving door to land them in high-paid positions supported by US weapons-making corporations, not just in retirements with only military pensions. Or else, they just loved war and, like Bush, didn’t want there to be any “peace dividend.”] </p> <p><strong>Document 27</strong></p> <p><em>James F. Dobbins, State Department European Bureau, Memorandum to National Security Council: NATO Strategy Review Paper for October 29 Discussion.</em></p> <p><em>1990-10-25</em></p> <p><em>Source: George H. W. Bush Presidential Library: NSC Philip Zelikow Files</em></p> <p>“This concise memorandum comes from the State Department’s European Bureau as a cover note for briefing papers for a scheduled October 29, 1990 meeting on the issues of NATO expansion and European defense cooperation with NATO. Most important is the document’s summary of the internal debate within the Bush administration, primarily between the Defense Department (specifically the Office of the Secretary of Defense, Dick Cheney) and the State Department. On the issue of NATO expansion, OSD ‘wishes to leave the door ajar’ while State ‘prefers simply to note that discussion of expanding membership is not on the agenda….’ The Bush administration effectively adopts State’s view in its public statements, yet the Defense view would prevail in the next administration.”</p> <p><strong><em>[This allegation, by the National Security Archives, fundamentally misrepresents, by its underlying assumption that the Bush Administration’s statements such as that NATO would move “not one inch to the east” weren’t lies but instead reflected Bush’s actual intention. They ignore altogether Bush’s having secretly told his vassals on the crucial night of 24 February 1990, “To hell with that. We prevailed and they didn’t. We cannot let the Soviets clutch victory from the jaws of defeat.” Gorbachev believed that this was to be a win-win game; but, the US side were now under secret instructions that it’s to be purely more of the win-lose game, and that now a lone Russia would end up being its ultimate loser. The despicable statement by the National Security Archives, “yet the Defense view would prevail in the next administration,” presumes that it didn’t actually already ‘prevail’ in the Bush Administration itself. It prevailed actually in George Herbert Walker Bush himself, and not only in his Defense Department. Bush brilliantly took advantage of Gorbachev’s decency and expectation that Bush, like himself, was decent. Bush lied — and his team and their successors ever since have been carrying out his vicious plan. The National Security Archives downplays to insignificance Bush’s crucial instruction to his people, “To hell with that. We prevailed and they didn’t. We cannot let the Soviets clutch victory from the jaws of defeat.” That statement, at that crucial moment, is what enables us to understand what was actually going on throughout these negotiations. The Archives’ blaming only Bill Clinton and the other Presidents after Bush is a despicable lie. And it wasn’t just “the Defense view” — Cheney — who prevailed within the Bush Administration there. Cheney, like Baker, were doing what GHW Bush had hired them to do. Baker’s job was to lie. If it weren’t, then he’d have told Gorbachev the next day not to trust what the Bush team were saying, but instead to demand everything to be put in writing in the final document, and to assume the worst regarding anything that the Bush team were refusing to put in writing in the final document. Baker was a lawyer, and a very skilled liar, who was just doing his job for Bush. For some inexplicable reason, the National Security Archives simply assumes otherwise.]</em></strong></p> <p><strong>Document 28</strong></p> <p><em>Ambassador Rodric Braithwaite diary, 05 March 1991</em></p> <p><em>1991-03-05</em></p> <p><em>Source: Rodric Braithwaite personal diary</em></p> <p>“British Ambassador Rodric Braithwaite was present for a number of the assurances given to Soviet leaders in 1990 and 1991 about NATO expansion. Here, Braithwaite in his diary describes a meeting between British Prime Minister John Major and Soviet military officials, led by Minister of Defense Marshal Dmitry Yazov. The meeting took place during Major’s visit to Moscow and right after his one-on-one with President Gorbachev. During the meeting with Major, Gorbachev had raised his concerns about the new NATO dynamics: ‘Against the background of favorable processes in Europe, I suddenly start receiving information that certain circles intend to go on further strengthening NATO as the main security instrument in Europe. Previously they talked about changing the nature of NATO, about transformation of the existing military-political blocs into pan-European structures and security mechanisms. And now suddenly again [they are talking about] a special peace-keeping role of NATO. They are talking again about NATO as the cornerstone. This does not sound complementary to the common European home that we have started to build.’ Major responded: ‘I believe that your thoughts about the role of NATO in the current situation are the result of misunderstanding. We are not talking about strengthening of NATO.’”</p> <p><strong>Document 29</strong></p> <p><em>Paul Wolfowitz Memoranda of Conversation with Vaclav Havel and Lubos Dobrovsky in Prague.</em></p> <p><em>1991-04-27</em></p> <p><em>Source: US Department of Defense, FOIA release 2016</em></p> <p>“These memcons from April 1991 provide the bookends for the ‘education of Vaclav Havel’ on NATO (see Documents 12-1 and 12-2 above). US Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Paul Wolfowitz included these memcons in his report to the NSC and the State Department about his attendance at a conference in Prague on ‘The Future of European Security,’ on April 24-27, 1991. During the conference Wolfowitz had separate meetings with Havel and Minister of Defense Dobrovsky. In the conversation with Havel, Wolfowitz thanks him for his statements about the importance of NATO and US troops in Europe. … In conversation with Dobrovsky, <strong>Wolfowitz remarks that ‘the very existence of NATO was in doubt a year ago.’“</strong></p> <p><strong>Document 30</strong></p> <p><em>Memorandum to Boris Yeltsin from Russian Supreme Soviet delegation to NATO HQs</em></p> <p><em>1991-07-01</em></p> <p><em>Source: State Archive of the Russian Federation (GARF), Fond 10026, Opis 1</em></p> <p>“This document is important for describing the clear message in 1991 from the highest levels of NATO – Secretary General Manfred Woerner – that NATO expansion was not happening. The audience was a Russian Supreme Soviet delegation, which in this memo was reporting back to Boris Yeltsin (who in June had been elected president of the Russian republic, largest in the Soviet Union), but no doubt Gorbachev and his aides were hearing the same assurance at that time. The emerging Russian security establishment was already worried about the possibility of NATO expansion, so in June 1991 this delegation visited Brussels to meet NATO’s leadership, hear their views about the future of NATO, and share Russian concerns. <strong>Woerner had given a well-regarded speech in Brussels in May 1990 in which he argued: ‘The principal task of the next decade will be to build a new European security structure, to include the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact nations.</strong> The Soviet Union will have an important role to play in the construction of such a system. If you consider the current predicament of the Soviet Union, which has practically no allies left, then you can understand its justified wish not to be forced out of Europe.’ Now in mid-1991, Woerner responds to the Russians by stating that he personally and the NATO Council are both against expansion — ’13 out of 16 NATO members share this point of view’ — and that he will speak against Poland’s and Romania’s membership in NATO to those countries’ leaders as he has already done with leaders of Hungary and Czechoslovakia.”</p> </div> </div> </div> <div class="field field-name-field-source field-type-link-field field-label-hidden field-wrapper"><a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/zerohedge/feed/~3/VY3c9U9q_Mk/how-us-swindled-russia-early-1990s">Source</a></div><div class="field field-name-opencalais-calaisdocumentc-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-hidden field-wrapper"> <div class="field-items" class="comma-separated field-items"> <div class="field-item even" class="field-item even"><a href="/category/politics">Politics</a></div> <div class="field-item odd" class="field-item even odd"><a href="/category/war">War</a></div> </div> </div> <div class="field field-name-opencalais-city-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-hidden field-wrapper"> <div class="field-items" class="comma-separated field-items"> <div class="field-item even" class="field-item even"><a href="/category/moscow">Moscow</a></div> <div class="field-item odd" class="field-item even odd"><a href="/category/warsaw">Warsaw</a></div> </div> </div> <div class="field field-name-opencalais-continent-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-hidden field-wrapper"> <div class="field-items" class="comma-separated field-items"> <div class="field-item even" class="field-item even"><a href="/category/america">America</a></div> <div class="field-item odd" class="field-item even odd"><a href="/category/europe">Europe</a></div> </div> </div> <div class="field field-name-opencalais-country-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-hidden field-wrapper"> <div class="field-items" class="comma-separated field-items"> <div class="field-item even" class="field-item even"><a href="/category/germany">Germany</a></div> <div class="field-item odd" class="field-item even odd"><a href="/category/russia">Russia</a></div> <div class="field-item even" class="field-item even odd even"><a href="/category/united-states">United States</a></div> <div class="field-item odd" class="field-item even odd even odd"><a href="/category/soviet-union">Soviet Union</a></div> </div> </div> <div class="field field-name-opencalais-organization-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-hidden field-wrapper"> <div class="field-items" class="comma-separated field-items"> <div class="field-item even" class="field-item even"><a href="/category/north-atlantic-treaty-organization">North Atlantic Treaty Organization</a></div> <div class="field-item odd" class="field-item even odd"><a href="/category/us-state-department">US State Department</a></div> <div class="field-item even" class="field-item even odd even"><a href="/category/national-security-council">National Security Council</a></div> </div> </div> Thu, 21 Dec 2017 06:30:00 +0000 Guest 57959 at https://5ux.com https://5ux.com/news/how-us-swindled-russia-early-1990s#comments Newly-Declassified Documents Show Western Leaders Promised Gorbachev that NATO Would Not Move “One Inch Closer” to Russia https://5ux.com/news/newly-declassified-documents-show-western-leaders-promised-gorbachev-nato-would-not-move-one <a href="/news/newly-declassified-documents-show-western-leaders-promised-gorbachev-nato-would-not-move-one"><img class="teaserimage" src="https://5ux.com/sites/5ux.com/files/styles/medium_250/public/resize/remote/f8bdcd4429f7eaa60d2e3d08f8349aee-936x415.jpg?itok=9OA2jx7o" alt="Newly-Declassified Documents Show Western Leaders Promised Gorbachev that NATO Would Not Move “One Inch Closer” to Russia" title="Newly-Declassified Documents Show Western Leaders Promised Gorbachev that NATO Would Not Move “One Inch Closer” to Russia" /></a><div class="clearfix body field"> <div class="field-items"> <div class="field-item even"><p>The U.S. Ambassador to the Soviet Union at the time it broke up and many other experts have said that the West <em>promised</em> Gorbachev that – if the USSR allowed German re-unification – NATO wouldn’t move “one inch closer” to Russia.</p> <p>While Western leaders have long denied that such a promise, newly-declassified documents now prove this.</p> <p>The National Security Archive at George Washington University reported Tuesday:</p> <blockquote><p>U.S. Secretary of State James Baker’s famous “not one inch eastward” assurance about NATO expansion in his meeting with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev on February 9, 1990, was part of a cascade of assurances about Soviet security given by Western leaders to Gorbachev and other Soviet officials throughout the process of German unification in 1990 and on into 1991, according to <strong>declassified U.S., Soviet, German, British and French documents posted today by the National Security Archive at George Washington University</strong> (http://nsarchive.gwu.edu).</p> <p> </p> <p><strong>The documents show that </strong>multiple national leaders were considering and rejecting Central and Eastern European membership in NATO as of early 1990 and through 1991, that discussions of NATO in the context of German unification negotiations in 1990 were not at all narrowly limited to the status of East German territory, and that subsequent<strong> Soviet and Russian complaints about being misled about NATO expansion were founded in written contemporaneous memcons and telcons at the highest levels</strong>.</p> <p> </p> <p><strong>The documents reinforce former CIA Director Robert Gates’s criticism of “pressing ahead with expansion of NATO eastward [in the 1990s], when Gorbachev and others were led to believe that wouldn’t happen.” </strong>The key phrase, buttressed by the documents, is “led to believe.”</p> <p> </p> <p>***</p> <p> </p> <p>The first concrete assurances by Western leaders on NATO began on January 31, 1990, when <strong>West German Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher</strong> opened the bidding with a major public speech at Tutzing, in Bavaria, on German unification. The U.S. Embassy in Bonn (see Document 1) informed Washington that Genscher <strong>made clear “that the changes in Eastern Europe and the German unification process must not lead to an ‘impairment of Soviet security interests.’ Therefore, NATO should rule out an ‘expansion of its territory towards the east, i.e. moving it closer to the Soviet borders.’” The Bonn cable also noted Genscher’s proposal to leave the East German territory out of NATO military structures even in a unified Germany in NATO</strong>.</p> <p> </p> <p>This latter idea of special status for the GDR territory was codified in the final German unification treaty signed on September 12, 1990, by the Two-Plus-Four foreign ministers (see Document 25). <strong>The former idea about “closer to the Soviet borders” is written down not in treaties but in multiple memoranda of conversation between the Soviets and the highest-level Western interlocutors (Genscher, Kohl, Baker, Gates, Bush, Mitterrand, Thatcher, Major, Woerner, and others) offering assurances throughout 1990 and into 1991 about protecting Soviet security interests and including the USSR in new European security structures</strong>. The two issues were related but not the same. Subsequent analysis sometimes conflated the two and argued that the discussion did not involve all of Europe. The documents published below show clearly that it did.</p> <p> </p> <p>The “Tutzing formula” immediately became the center of a flurry of important diplomatic discussions over the next 10 days in 1990, leading to the crucial February 10, 1990, meeting in Moscow between Kohl and Gorbachev when <strong>the West German leader achieved Soviet assent in principle to German unification in NATO, as long as NATO did not expand to the east</strong>.</p> <p> </p> <p>***</p> <p> </p> <p>The conversations before Kohl’s assurance involved explicit discussion of NATO expansion, the Central and East European countries, and how to convince the Soviets to accept unification. For example, on February 6, 1990, when Genscher met with British Foreign Minister Douglas Hurd,<strong> the British record showed Genscher saying, “The Russians must have some assurance that if, for example, the Polish Government left the Warsaw Pact one day, they would not join NATO the next</strong>.” (See Document 2)</p> <p>Having met with Genscher on his way into discussions with the Soviets, <strong>Baker repeated exactly the Genscher formulation in his meeting with Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze</strong> on February 9, 1990, (see Document 4); <strong>and even more importantly, face to face with Gorbachev</strong>.</p> <p> </p> <p><strong>Not once, but three times, Baker tried out the “not one inch eastward” formula with Gorbachev in the February 9, 1990, meeting. He agreed with Gorbachev’s statement in response to the assurances that “NATO expansion is unacceptable.” Baker assured Gorbachev that “neither the President nor I intend to extract any unilateral advantages from the processes that are taking place,” and that the Americans understood that “not only for the Soviet Union but for other European countries as well it is important to have guarantees that if the United States keeps its presence in Germany within the framework of NATO, not an inch of NATO’s present military jurisdiction will spread in an eastern direction.”</strong> (See Document 6).</p> </blockquote> <p>Here are two relevant excerpts from Document 6:</p> <blockquote><p>***</p> </blockquote> <p>The National Security Archive report continues:</p> <blockquote><p>Baker reported: “And then I put the following question to him [Gorbachev]. Would you prefer to see a united Germany outside of NATO, independent and with no U.S. forces or would you prefer a unified Germany to be tied to NATO, with assurances that NATO’s jurisdiction would not shift one inch eastward from its present position? He answered that the Soviet leadership was giving real thought to all such options [….] He then added,<strong> ‘Certainly any extension of the zone of NATO would be unacceptable.’” Baker added in parentheses, for Kohl’s benefit, “By implication, NATO in its current zone might be acceptable.” (</strong>See Document 8)</p> <p> </p> <p>Well-briefed by the American secretary of state, <strong>the West German chancellor</strong> understood a key Soviet bottom line, and <strong>assured Gorbachev on February 10, 1990: “We believe that NATO should not expand the sphere of its activity.” (See Document 9).</strong></p> </blockquote> <p>Here is a related excerpt from Document 9:</p> <p>The National Security Archives report concludes:</p> <blockquote><p>All the Western foreign ministers were on board with Genscher, Kohl, and Baker. Next came the British foreign minister, Douglas Hurd, on April 11, 1990.</p> <p> </p> <p>***</p> <p> </p> <p>Hurd reinforced the Baker-Genscher-Kohl message in his meeting with Gorbachev in Moscow, April 11, 1990, saying that Britain clearly “recognized the importance of doing nothing to prejudice Soviet interests and dignity.” (See Document 15)</p> <p> </p> <p>The Baker conversation with Shevardnadze on May 4, 1990, as Baker described it in his own report to President Bush, most eloquently described what Western leaders were telling Gorbachev exactly at the moment: “I used your speech and our recognition of the need to adapt NATO, politically and militarily, and to develop CSCE to reassure Shevardnadze that the process would not yield winners and losers. Instead, it would produce a new legitimate European structure – one that would be inclusive, not exclusive.” (See Document 17)</p> <p> </p> <p>Baker said it again, directly to Gorbachev on May 18, 1990 in Moscow, giving Gorbachev his “nine points,” which included the transformation of NATO, strengthening European structures, keeping Germany non-nuclear, and taking Soviet security interests into account. Baker started off his remarks, “Before saying a few words about the German issue, I wanted to emphasize that our policies are not aimed at separating Eastern Europe from the Soviet Union. We had that policy before. But today we are interested in building a stable Europe, and doing it together with you.” (See Document 18)</p> <p> </p> <p>The French leader Francois Mitterrand  … continued the cascade of assurances by saying the West must “create security conditions for you, as well as European security as a whole.” (See Document 19) Mitterrand immediately wrote Bush in a “<em>cher George</em>” letter about his conversation with the Soviet leader, that “we would certainly not refuse to detail the guarantees that he would have a right to expect for his country’s security.” (See Document 20)</p> <p> </p> <p>At the Washington summit on May 31, 1990, <strong>Bush went out of his way to assure Gorbachev that Germany in NATO would never be directed at the USSR</strong>: “Believe me, we are not pushing Germany towards unification, and it is not us who determines the pace of this process. And of course, we have no intention, even in our thoughts, to harm the Soviet Union in any fashion. That is why we are speaking in favor of German unification in NATO without ignoring the wider context of the CSCE, taking the traditional economic ties between the two German states into consideration. Such a model, in our view, corresponds to the Soviet interests as well.” (See Document 21)</p> <p> </p> <p>The “Iron Lady” also pitched in, after the Washington summit, in her meeting with Gorbachev in London on June 8, 1990. <strong>Thatcher</strong> anticipated the moves the Americans (with her support) would take in the early July NATO conference to support Gorbachev with descriptions of <strong>the transformation of NATO towards a more political, less militarily threatening, alliance</strong>. She said to Gorbachev: “We must find ways to give the Soviet Union confidence that its security would be assured…. CSCE could be an umbrella for all this, as well as being the forum which brought the Soviet Union fully into discussion about the future of Europe.” (See Document 22)</p> <p> </p> <p>The NATO London Declaration on July 5, 1990 had quite a positive effect on deliberations in Moscow, according to most accounts, giving Gorbachev significant ammunition to counter his hardliners at the Party Congress which was taking place at that moment.</p> <p> </p> <p>***</p> <p> </p> <p>As Kohl said to Gorbachev in Moscow on July 15, 1990, as they worked out the final deal on German unification: “We know what awaits NATO in the future, and I think you are now in the know as well,” referring to the NATO London Declaration. (See Document 23)</p> <p> </p> <p>In his phone call to Gorbachev on July 17, Bush meant to reinforce the success of the Kohl-Gorbachev talks and the message of the London Declaration. Bush explained: “So what we tried to do was to take account of your concerns expressed to me and others, and we did it in the following ways: by our joint declaration on non-aggression; in <strong>our invitation to you to come to NATO</strong>; in our agreement to open NATO to regular diplomatic contact with your government and those of the Eastern European countries; and our offer on assurances on the future size of the armed forces of a united Germany – an issue I know you discussed with Helmut Kohl. We also fundamentally changed our military approach on conventional and nuclear forces. We conveyed the idea of an expanded, stronger CSCE with new institutions in which the USSR can share and be part of the new Europe.” (See Document 24)</p> <p> </p> <p><strong>The documents show that Gorbachev agreed to German unification in NATO as the result of this cascade of assurances</strong>, and on the basis of his own analysis that the future of the Soviet Union depended on its integration into Europe, for which Germany would be the decisive actor. He and most of his allies believed that some version of the common European home was still possible and would develop alongside the transformation of NATO to lead to a more inclusive and integrated European space, that the post-Cold War settlement would take account of the Soviet security interests. The alliance with Germany would not only overcome the Cold War but also turn on its head the legacy of the Great Patriotic War.</p> <p> </p> <p><strong>But <em>inside </em>the U.S. government, a different discussion continued</strong>, a debate about relations between NATO and Eastern Europe. Opinions differed, but the suggestion from the Defense Department as of October 25, 1990 was to <strong>leave “the door ajar” for East European membership in NATO</strong>. (See Document 27)</p> <p> </p> <p>***</p> <p> </p> <p><strong>As late as March 1991, according to the diary of the British ambassador to Moscow, British Prime Minister John Major personally assured Gorbachev, “We are not talking about the strengthening of NATO</strong>.” Subsequently, when Soviet defense minister Marshal Dmitri Yazov asked Major about East European leaders’ interest in NATO membership, the British leader responded, “<strong>Nothing of the sort will happen</strong>.” (See Document 28)</p> <p> </p> <p><strong>When Russian Supreme Soviet deputies came to Brussels to see NATO and meet with NATO secretary-general Manfred Woerner</strong> in July 1991, Woerner told the Russians that “We should not allow […] the isolation of the USSR from the European community.” According to the Russian memorandum of conversation, “<strong>Woerner stressed that the NATO Council and he are against the expansion of NATO</strong> (13 of 16 NATO members support this point of view).” (See Document 30)</p> <p> </p> <p><strong>Thus, Gorbachev went to the end of the Soviet Union assured that the West was not threatening his security and was not expanding NATO</strong>.</p> </blockquote> </div> </div> </div> <div class="field field-name-field-source field-type-link-field field-label-hidden field-wrapper"><a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/zerohedge/feed/~3/ph_9Icj28TM/newly-declassified-documents-show-western-leaders-promised-gorbachev-nato-would-not-">Source</a></div><div class="field field-name-opencalais-calaisdocumentc-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-hidden field-wrapper"> <div class="field-items" class="comma-separated field-items"> <div class="field-item even" class="field-item even"><a href="/category/war">War</a></div> <div class="field-item odd" class="field-item even odd"><a href="/category/politics">Politics</a></div> </div> </div> <div class="field field-name-opencalais-city-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-hidden field-wrapper"> <div class="field-items" class="comma-separated field-items"> <div class="field-item even" class="field-item even"><a href="/category/moscow">Moscow</a></div> </div> </div> <div class="field field-name-opencalais-continent-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-hidden field-wrapper"> <div class="field-items" class="comma-separated field-items"> <div class="field-item even" class="field-item even"><a href="/category/europe">Europe</a></div> </div> </div> <div class="field field-name-opencalais-country-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-hidden field-wrapper"> <div class="field-items" class="comma-separated field-items"> <div class="field-item even" class="field-item even"><a href="/category/germany">Germany</a></div> <div class="field-item odd" class="field-item even odd"><a href="/category/united-states">United States</a></div> <div class="field-item even" class="field-item even odd even"><a href="/category/soviet-union">Soviet Union</a></div> </div> </div> <div class="field field-name-opencalais-organization-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-hidden field-wrapper"> <div class="field-items" class="comma-separated field-items"> <div class="field-item even" class="field-item even"><a href="/category/north-atlantic-treaty-organization">North Atlantic Treaty Organization</a></div> </div> </div> <div class="field field-name-opencalais-region-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-hidden field-wrapper"> <div class="field-items" class="comma-separated field-items"> <div class="field-item even" class="field-item even"><a href="/category/eastern-europe">Eastern Europe</a></div> </div> </div> Thu, 14 Dec 2017 21:21:33 +0000 Guest 57518 at https://5ux.com https://5ux.com/news/newly-declassified-documents-show-western-leaders-promised-gorbachev-nato-would-not-move-one#comments Thanksgiving 2017 - David Stockman Explains Why There Is No Peace On Earth https://5ux.com/news/thanksgiving-2017-david-stockman-explains-why-there-no-peace-earth <a href="/news/thanksgiving-2017-david-stockman-explains-why-there-no-peace-earth"><img class="teaserimage" src="https://5ux.com/sites/5ux.com/files/styles/medium_250/public/resize/remote/34ac8224110420dc923545a900b08852-1920x800.png?itok=DbTJhxEh" alt="Thanksgiving 2017 - David Stockman Explains Why There Is No Peace On Earth" title="Thanksgiving 2017 - David Stockman Explains Why There Is No Peace On Earth" /></a><div class="clearfix body field"> <div class="field-items"> <div class="field-item even"><p></p><p><em>Authored by David Stockman via Contra Corner blog,</em></p> <p>After the Berlin Wall fell in November 1989 and the death of the Soviet Union was confirmed two years later when Boris Yeltsin courageously stood down the red army tanks in front of Moscow's White House,<strong> a dark era in human history came to an end.</strong></p> <p>The world had descended into what had been a 77-year global war, incepting with the mobilization of the armies of old Europe in August 1914. If you want to count bodies, 150 million were killed by all the depredations which germinated in the Great War, its foolish aftermath at Versailles, and the march of history into the world war and cold war which followed inexorably thereupon.</p> <p>To wit, upwards of 8% of the human race was wiped-out during that span. The toll encompassed the madness of trench warfare during 1914-1918; the murderous regimes of Soviet and Nazi totalitarianism that rose from the ashes of the Great War and Versailles; and then the carnage of WWII and all the lesser (unnecessary) wars and invasions of the Cold War including Korea and Vietnam.</p> <p>We have elaborated more fully on this proposition in <em><strong>"The Epochal Consequences Of Woodrow Wilson's War"</strong></em>, but the seminal point cannot be gainsaid. <strong>The end of the cold war meant world peace was finally at hand, yet 26 years later there is still no peace because Imperial Washington confounds it.</strong></p> <p>In fact, the War Party entrenched in the nation's capital is dedicated to economic interests and ideological perversions that guarantee perpetual war; they ensure endless waste on armaments and the inestimable death and human suffering that stems from 21st century high tech warfare and the terrorist blowback it inherently generates among those upon which the War Party inflicts its violent hegemony.</p> <p><em><strong>In short, there was a virulent threat to peace still lurking on the Potomac after the 77-year war ended. The great general and president, Dwight Eisenhower, had called it the “military-industrial complex” in his farewell address, but that memorable phrase had been abbreviated by his speechwriters, who deleted the word “congressional” in a gesture of comity to the legislative branch.</strong></em></p> <p>So restore Ike’s deleted reference to the pork barrels and Sunday afternoon warriors of Capitol Hill and toss in the legions of beltway busybodies that constituted the civilian branches of the cold war armada (CIA, State, AID etc.) and the circle would have been complete. It constituted the most awesome machine of warfare and imperial hegemony since the Roman legions bestrode most of the civilized world.</p> <p><em><strong>In a word, the real threat to peace circa 1991 was that Pax Americana would not go away quietly in the night.</strong></em></p> <p>In fact, during the past 26 years Imperial Washington has lost all memory that peace was ever possible at the end of the cold war. Today it is as feckless, misguided and bloodthirsty as were Berlin, Paris, St. Petersburg, Vienna and London in August 1914.</p> <p>Back then a few months after the slaughter had been unleashed, soldiers along the western front broke into spontaneous truces of Christmas celebration, singing and even exchange of gifts. For a brief moment they wondered why they were juxtaposed in lethal combat along the jaws of hell.</p> <p>The truthful answer is that there was no good reason. The world had stumbled into war based on false narratives and the institutional imperatives of military mobilization plans, alliances and treaties arrayed into a doomsday machine and petty short-term diplomatic maneuvers and political calculus. Yet it took more than three-quarters of a century for all the consequential impacts and evils to be purged from the life of the planet.</p> <p>The peace that was lost last time has not been regained this time for the same reasons. Historians can readily name the culprits from 100 years ago, such as the German general staff's plan for a lightening mobilization and strike on the western front called the Schlieffen Plan or Britain's secret commitments to France to guard the North Sea while the latter covered the Mediterranean.</p> <p>Since these casus belli of 1914 were criminally trivial in light of all that metastisized thereafter, it might do well to name the institutions and false narratives that block the return of peace today. The fact is, these impediments are even more contemptible than the forces that crushed the Christmas truces one century ago.</p> <p><em><strong>Imperial Washington - Global Menace</strong></em></p> <p><strong>There is no peace on earth today for reasons mainly rooted in Imperial Washington</strong> - <em>not Moscow, Beijing, Tehran, Damascus, Mosul or Raqqah.</em> <strong>The former has become a global menace owing to what didn't happen in 1991.</strong></p> <p>What should have happened is that Bush the elder should have declared "mission accomplished" and slashed the Pentagon budget from $600 billion to $200 billion; demobilized the military-industrial complex by putting a moratorium on all new weapons development, procurement and export sales; dissolved NATO and dismantled the far-flung network of US military bases; slashed the US standing armed forces from 1.5 million to a few hundred thousand; and organized and led a world disarmement and peace campaign, as did his Republican predecessors during the 1920s.</p> <p>Unfortunately, George H.W. Bush was not a man of peace, vision or even mediocre intelligence. He was the malleable tool of the War Party, and it was he who single-handedly blew the peace when he plunged America into a petty arguement between the impetuous dictator of Iraq and the gluttonous Emir of Kuwait that was none of our business.</p> <p><strong>By contrast, even though liberal historians have reviled Warren G. Harding as some kind of dumbkopf politician, he well understood that the Great War had been for naught, and that to insure it never happened again the nations of the world needed to rid themselves of their huge navies and standing armies.</strong></p> <p>To that end, he achieved the largest global disarmament agreement ever during the Washington Naval conference of 1921, which halted the construction of new battleships for more than a decade.</p> <p>And while he was at it, President Harding also pardoned Eugene Debs. So doing, he gave witness to the truth that the intrepid socialist candidate for president and vehement anti-war protestor, who Wilson had thrown in prison for exercising his first amendment right to speak against US entry into a pointless European war, had been right all along.</p> <p>In short, Warren G. Harding knew the war was over, and the folly of Wilson's 1917 plunge into Europe's bloodbath should not be repeated at all hazards.</p> <p>Not George H.W. Bush. The man should never be forgiven for enabling the likes of Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, Robert Gates and their neocon pack of jackals to come to power----even if he has denounced them in his bumbling old age.</p> <p>Even more to the point, by opting not for peace but for war and oil in the Persian Gulf in 1991 he opened the gates to an unnecessary confrontation with Islam and nurtured the rise of jihadist terrorism that would not haunt the world today save for forces unleashed by George Bush's petulant quarrel with Saddam Hussein.</p> <p>We will momentarily get to the 45-year old error that holds the Persian Gulf is an American Lake and that the answer to high old prices and energy security is the Fifth Fleet. Actually, the answer to high oil prices everywhere and always is high oil prices-----a truth driven home in spades again two years ago when the Brent oil price plunged below $35 per barrel.</p> <p><em><strong>But first it is well to remember that there was no plausible threat anywhere on the planet to the safety and security of the citizens of Springfield MA, Lincoln NE or Spokane WA when the cold war ended.</strong></em></p> <p>The Warsaw Pact had dissolved into more than a dozen woebegone sovereign statelets; the Soviet Union was now unscrambled into 15 independent and far-flung Republics from Belarus to Tajikistan; and the Russian motherland would soon plunge into an economic depression that would leave it with a GDP about the size of the Philadelphia SMSA.</p> <p>Likewise, China's GDP was even smaller and more primitive than Russia's. Even as Mr. Deng was discovering the PBOC printing press that would enable it to become a great mercantilist exporter, an incipient threat to national security was never in the cards. After all, it was 4,000 Wal-Marts in America upon which the prosperity of the new red capitalism inextricably depended and upon which the rule of the communist oligarchs in Beijing was ultimately anchored.</p> <p><em><strong>No Islamic Or Jihadi Terrorist Threat Circa 1990</strong></em></p> <p><strong>In 1991 there was no global Islamic threat or jihadi terrorist menace at all. </strong>What existed under those headings were sundry fragments and deposits of middle eastern religious, ethnic and tribal history that were of moment in their immediate region, but no threat to America whatsoever.</p> <p>The Shiite/Sunni divide had co-existed since 671AD, but its episodic eruptions into battles and wars over the centuries had rarely extended beyond the region, and certainly had no reason to fester into open conflict in 1991.</p> <p>Inside the artificial state of Iraq, which had been drawn on a map by  historically ignorant European diplomats in 1916, for instance, the Shiite and Sunni got along tolerably well. That's because the nation was ruled by Saddam Hussein's Baathist brand of secular Arab nationalism.</p> <p>The latter championed law and order, state driven economic development and politically apportioned distribution from the spoils of the extensive government controlled oil sector. To be sure, Baathist socialism didn't bring much prosperity to the well-endowed lands of Mesopotamia, but Hussein did have a Christian foreign minister and no sympathy for religious extremism or violent pursuit of sectarian causes.</p> <p><strong>As it happened, the bloody Shiite/Sunni strife that plagues Iraq today and functions as a hatchery for angry young jihadi terrorists in their thousands was unleashed only after Hussein had been driven from Kuwait and the CIA had instigated an armed uprising in the Shiite heartland around Basra.</strong> That revolt was brutally suppressed by Hussein's republican guards, but it left an undertow of resentment and revenge boiling below the surface.</p> <p><strong>Needless to say, the younger Bush and his cabal of neocon warmongers could not leave well enough alone. </strong>When they foolishly destroyed Saddam Hussein and his entire regime in the pursuit of nonexistent WMDs and ties with al-Qaeda, they literally opened the gates of hell, leaving Iraq as a lawless failed state where both recent and ancient religious and tribal animosities are given unlimited violent vent.</p> <p>Likewise, the Shiite theocracy ensconced in Tehran was an unfortunate albatross on the Persian people, but it was no threat to America's safety and security. The very idea that Tehran is an expansionist power bent on exporting terrorism to the rest of the world is a giant fiction and tissue of lies invented by the Washington War Party and its Bibi Netanyahu branch in order to win political support for their confrontationist policies.</p> <p><strong>Indeed, the three decade long demonization of Iran has served one over-arching purpose. Namely, it enabled both branches of the War Party to conjure up a fearsome enemy, thereby justifying aggressive policies that call for a constant state of war and military mobilization.</strong></p> <p>When the cold-war officially ended in 1991, the Cheney/neocon cabal feared the kind of drastic demobilization of the US military-industrial complex that was warranted by the suddenly more pacific strategic environment. In response, they developed an anti-Iranian doctrine that was explicitly described as a way of keeping defense spending at high cold war levels.</p> <p>And the narrative they developed to this end is one of the more egregious Big Lies ever to come out of the beltway. It puts you in mind of the young boy who killed his parents, and then threw himself on the mercy of the courts on the grounds that he was an orphan!</p> <p>To wit, during the 1980s the neocons in the Reagan Administration issued their own fatwa again the Islamic Republic based on its rhetorical hostility to America. Yet that enmity was grounded in Washington’s 25-year support for the tyrannical and illegitimate regime of the Shah, and constituted a founding narrative of the Islamic Republic that was not much different than America's revolutionary castigation of King George.</p> <p><strong>That the Iranians had a case is beyond doubt. The open US archives now prove that the CIA overthrew Iran’s democratically elected government in 1953 and put the utterly unsuited and megalomaniacal Mohammad Reza Shah on the peacock throne to rule as a puppet in behalf of US security and oil interests.</strong></p> <p>During the subsequent decades the Shah not only massively and baldly plundered the wealth of the Persian nation; with the help of the CIA and US military, he also created a brutal secret police force known as the Savak. The latter made the East German Stasi look civilized by comparison.</p> <p>All elements of Iranian society including universities, labor unions, businesses, civic organizations, peasant farmers and many more were subjected to intense surveillance by the Savak agents and paid informants. As one critic described it:</p> <blockquote><p>Over the years, Savak became a law unto itself, having legal authority to arrest, detain, brutally interrogate and torture suspected people indefinitely. Savak operated its own prisons in Tehran, such as Qezel-Qalaeh and Evin facilities and many suspected places throughout the country as well. Many of those activities were carried out without any institutional checks.</p> </blockquote> <p>Ironically, among his many grandiose follies, the Shah embarked on a massive civilian nuclear power campaign in the 1970s, which envisioned literally paving the Iranian landscape with dozens of nuclear power plants.</p> <p><strong>He would use Iran’s surging oil revenues after 1973 to buy all the equipment required from Western companies - and also fuel cycle support services such as uranium enrichment - in order to provide his kingdom with cheap power for centuries.</strong></p> <p>At the time of the Revolution, the first of these plants at Bushehr was nearly complete, but the whole grandiose project was put on hold amidst the turmoil of the new regime and the onset of Saddam Hussein’s war against Iran in September 1980. As a consequence, a $2 billion deposit languished at the French nuclear agency that had originally obtained it from the Shah to fund a ramp-up of its enrichment capacity to supply his planned battery of reactors.</p> <p>Indeed, in this very context the new Iranian regime proved quite dramatically that it was not hell bent on obtaining nuclear bombs or any other weapons of mass destruction. In the midst of Iraq's unprovoked invasion of Iran in the early 1980s the Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa against biological and chemical weapons.</p> <p><strong>Yet at that very time, Saddam was dropping these horrific weapons on Iranian battle forces - some of them barely armed teenage boys - with the spotting help of CIA tracking satellites and the concurrence of Washington.</strong> So from the very beginning, the Iranian posture was wholly contrary to the War Party’s endless blizzard of false charges about its quest for nukes.</p> <p>However benighted and medieval its religious views, the theocracy which rules Iran does not consist of demented war mongers. In the heat of battle they were willing to sacrifice their own forces rather than violate their religious scruples to counter Saddam’s WMDs.</p> <p>Then in 1983 the new Iranian regime decided to complete the Bushehr power plant and some additional elements of the Shah’s grand plan. But when they attempted to reactivate the French enrichment services contract and buy necessary power plant equipment from the original German suppliers they were stopped cold by Washington. And when the tried to get their $2 billion deposit back, they were curtly denied that, too.</p> <p><strong>To make a long story short, the entire subsequent history of off again/on again efforts by the Iranians to purchase dual use equipment and components on the international market, often from black market sources like Pakistan, was in response to Washington’s relentless efforts to block its legitimate rights as a signatory to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) to complete some parts of the Shah’s civilian nuclear project.</strong></p> <p>Needless to say, it did not take much effort by the neocon “regime change” fanatics which inhabited the national security machinery, especially after the 2000 election, to spin every attempt by Iran to purchase even a lowly pump or pipe fitting as evidence of a secret campaign to get the bomb.</p> <p>The exaggerations, lies, distortions and fear-mongering which came out of this neocon campaign are truly disgusting. Yet they incepted way back in the early 1990s when George H.W. Bush actually did reach out to the newly elected government of Hashemi Rafsanjani to bury the hatchet after it had cooperated in obtaining the release of American prisoners being held in Lebanon in 1989.</p> <p>The latter was self-evidently a pragmatist who did not want conflict with the United States and the West; and after the devastation of the eight year war with Iraq was wholly focused on economic reconstruction and even free market reforms of Iran's faltering economy.</p> <p><strong>It is one of the great tragedies of history that the neocons managed to squelch even George Bush's better instincts with respect to rapprochement with Tehran.</strong></p> <p>So the prisoner release opening was short-lived---especially after the top post at the CIA was assumed in 1991 by Robert Gates. He was one of the very worst of the unreconstructed cold war apparatchiks who looked peace in the eye, and elected, instead, to pervert John Quincy Adams' wise maxim by searching the globe for monsters to fabricate.</p> <p>In this case the motivation was especially loathsome. Gates had been Bill Casey's right hand man during the latter's rogue tenure at the CIA in the Reagan administration. Among the many untoward projects that Gates shepherded was the Iran-Contra affair that nearly destroyed his career when it blew-up, and for which he blamed the Iranian's for its public disclosure.</p> <p>From his post as deputy national security director in 1989 and then as CIA head Gates pulled out all the stops to get even. Almost single-handedly he killed-off the White House goodwill from the prisoner release, and launched the blatant myth that Iran was both sponsoring terrorism and seeking to obtain nuclear weapons.</p> <p>Indeed, it was Gates who was the architect of the demonization of Iran that became a staple of War Party propaganda after the 1991. In time that morphed into the utterly false claim that Iran is an aggressive would be hegemon that is a fount of terrorism and is dedicated to the destruction of the state of Israel, among other treacherous purposes.</p> <p>That giant lie was almost single-handedly fashioned by the neocons and Bibi Netanyahu's coterie of power-hungry henchman after the mid-1990s. Indeed, the false claim that Iran posses an “existential threat” to Israel is a product of the pure red meat domestic Israeli politics that have kept Bibi in power for much of the last two decades.</p> <p><strong>But the truth is Iran has only a tiny fraction of Israel's conventional military capability. And compared to the latter's 200 odd nukes, Iran has never had a nuclear weaponization program after a small scale research program was ended in 2003.</strong></p> <p>That is not merely our opinion. It's been the sober assessment of the nation's top 17 intelligence agencies in the official National Intelligence Estimates ever since 2007. And now in conjunction with a further study in conjunction with the nuclear accord that will straight-jacket even Iran's civilian program and eliminate most of its enriched uranium stock piles and spinning capacity, the IAEA has also concluded the Iran had no secret program after 2003.</p> <p>On the political and foreign policy front, Iran is no better or worse than any of the other major powers in the Middle East. In many ways it is far less of a threat to regional peace and stability than the military butchers who now run Egypt on $1.5 billion per year of US aid.</p> <p>And it is surely no worse than the corpulent tyrants who squander the massive oil resources of Saudi Arabia in pursuit of unspeakable opulence and decadence to the detriment of the 30 million citizens which are not part of the regime, and who one day may well reach the point of revolt.</p> <p><strong>When it comes to the support of terrorism, the Saudis have funded more jihadists and terrorists throughout the region than Iran ever even imagined.</strong></p> <p><em><strong>Myth Of The Shiite Crescent</strong></em></p> <p><strong>In this context, the War Party’s bloviation about Iran’s leadership of the so-called Shiite Crescent is another component of Imperial Washington's 26-year long roadblock to peace. </strong>Iran wasn't a threat to American security in 1991, and it has never since then organized a hostile coalition of terrorists that require Washington's intervention.</p> <p>Start with Iran's long-standing support of Bashir Assad's government in Syria. That alliance that goes back to his father’s era and is rooted in the historic confessional politics of the Islamic world.</p> <p>The Assad regime is Alawite, a branch of the Shiite, and despite the regime’s brutality, it has been a bulwark of protection for all of Syria’s minority sects, including Christians, against a majority-Sunni ethnic cleansing. The latter would surely have occurred if the Saudi (and Washington) supported rebels, led by the Nusra Front and ISIS, had succeeded in taking power.</p> <p>Likewise, the fact that the Bagdhad government of the broken state of Iraq——that is, the artificial 1916 concoction of two stripped pants European diplomats (Messrs. Sykes and Picot of the British and French foreign offices, respectively)——–is now aligned with Iran is also a result of confessional politics and geo-economic propinquity.</p> <p>For all practical purposes, the Kurds of the northeast have declared their independence; and the now "liberated" western Sunni lands of the upper Euphrates have been physically and economically destroyed---- after first being conquered by ISIS with American weapons dropped in place by the hapless $25 billion Iraqi army minted by Washington’s departing proconsuls.</p> <p><strong><em>Accordingly, what is left of Iraq is a population that is overwhelmingly Shiite, and which nurses bitter resentments after two decades of violent conflict with the Sunni forces. Why in the world, therefore, wouldn’t they ally with their Shiite neighbor?</em></strong></p> <p>Likewise, the claim that Iran is now trying to annex Yemen is pure claptrap. The ancient territory of Yemen has been racked by civil war off and on since the early 1970s.  And a major driving force of that conflict has been confessional differences between the Sunni south and the Shiite north.</p> <p>In more recent times, Washington’s blatant drone war inside Yemen against alleged terrorists and its domination and financing of Yemen’s governments eventually produced the same old outcome. That is, another failed state and an illegitimate government which fled at the 11th hour, leaving another vast cache of American arms and equipment behind.</p> <p>Accordingly, the Houthis forces now in control of substantial parts of the country are not some kind of advanced guard sent in by Tehran. They are indigenous partisans who share a confessional tie with Iran, but which have actually been armed by the US.</p> <p>And the real invaders in this destructive civil war are the Saudis, whose vicious bombing campaign against civilian populations controlled by the Houthis are outright war crimes if the word has any meaning at all.</p> <p>Finally, there is the fourth element of the purported Iranian axis—–the Hezbollah controlled Shiite communities of southern Lebanon and the Bekaa Valley.  Like everything else in the Middle East, Hezbollah is a product of historical European imperialism, Islamic confessional politics and the frequently misguided and counterproductive security policies of Israel.</p> <p><strong>In the first place, Lebanon was not any more a real country than Iraq was when Sykes and Picot laid their straight-edged rulers on a map. </strong>The result was a stew of religious and ethnic divisions—-Maronite Catholics, Greek Orthodox, Copts, Druse, Sunnis, Shiites, Alawites, Kurds, Armenians, Jews and countless more—– that made the fashioning of a viable state virtually impossible.</p> <p>At length, an alliance of Christians and Sunnis gained control of the country, leaving the 40% Shiite population disenfranchised and economically disadvantaged, as well. But it was the inflow of Palestinian refugees in the 1960s and 1970s that eventually upset the balance of sectarian forces and triggered a civil war that essentially lasted from 1975 until the turn of the century.</p> <p>It also triggered a catastrophically wrong-headed Israeli invasion of southern Lebanon in 1982, and a subsequent repressive occupation of mostly Shiite territories for the next eighteen years. The alleged purpose of this invasion was to chase the PLO and Yassir Arafat out of the enclave in southern Lebanon that they had established after being driven out of Jordan in 1970.</p> <p>Eventually Israel succeeded in sending Arafat packing to north Africa, but in the process created a militant, Shiite-based resistance movement that did not even exist in 1982, and which in due course became the strongest single force in Lebanon’s fractured domestic political arrangements.</p> <p>After Israel withdrew in 2000, the then <em><strong>Christian President of the county made abundantly clear that Hezbollah had become a legitimate and respected force within the Lebanese polity, not merely some subversive agent of Tehran:</strong></em></p> <blockquote><p>“For us Lebanese, and I can tell you the majority of Lebanese, Hezbollah is a national resistance movement. If it wasn’t for them, we couldn’t have liberated our land. And because of that, we have big esteem for the Hezbollah movement.”[</p> </blockquote> <p><strong>So, yes, Hezbollah is an integral component of the so-called Shiite Crescent and its confessional and political alignment with Tehran is entirely plausible. But that arrangement—-however uncomfortable for Israel—–does not represent unprovoked Iranian aggression on Israel’s northern border.</strong></p> <p>Instead, it’s actually the blowback from the stubborn refusal of Israeli governments—–especially the rightwing Likud governments of modern times—–to deal constructively with the Palestinian question.</p> <p>In lieu of a two-state solution in the territory of Palestine, therefore, Israeli policy has produced a chronic state of war with nearly half the Lebanese population represented by Hezbollah.</p> <p>The latter is surely no agency of peaceful governance and has committed its share of atrocities. But the point at hand is that given the last 35 years of history and Israeli policy, Hezbollah would exist as a menacing force on its northern border even if the theocracy didn't exist and the Shah or his heir was still on the Peacock Throne.</p> <p><strong>In short, there is no alliance of terrorism in the Shiite Crescent that threatens American security. </strong>That proposition is simply<strong> one of the Big Lies that was promulgated by the War Party after 1991;</strong> and which has been happily embraced by Imperial Washington since then in order to keep the military/industrial/security complex alive, and justify its self-appointed role as policeman of the world.</p> <p><em><strong>Washington's Erroneous View That The Persian Gulf Should Be An American Lake - The Root Of Sunni Jihaddism</strong></em></p> <p><strong>Likewise, the terrorist threat that has arisen from the Sunni side of the Islamic divide is largely of Washington's own making; and it is being nurtured by  endless US meddling in the region's politics and by the bombing and droning campaigns against Washington's self-created enemies.</strong></p> <p>At the root of Sunni based terrorism is the long-standing Washington error that America’s security and economic well-being depends upon keeping an armada in the Persian Gulf in order to protect the surrounding oilfields and the flow of tankers through the straits of Hormuz.</p> <p>That doctrine has been wrong from the day it was officially enunciated by one of America’s great economic ignoramuses, Henry Kissinger, at the time of the original oil crisis in 1973. The 42 years since then have proven in spades that its doesn’t matter who controls the oilfields, and that the only effective cure for high oil prices is the free market.</p> <p>Every tin pot dictatorship from Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi to Hugo Chavez in Venezuela to Saddam Hussein, to the bloody-minded chieftains of Nigeria, to the purportedly medieval Mullahs and fanatical Revolutionary Guards of Iran has produced oil—-and all they could because they desperately needed the revenue.</p> <p>For crying out loud, even the barbaric thugs of ISIS milk every possible drop of petroleum from the tiny, wheezing oilfields scattered around their backwater domain.<strong> So there is no economic case whatsoever for Imperial Washington’s massive military presence in the middle east, and most especially for its long-time alliance with the despicable regime of Saudi Arabia.</strong></p> <p><strong>The truth is, there is no such thing as an OPEC cartel——virtually every member produces all they can and cheats whenever possible. </strong>The only thing that resembles production control in the global oil market is the fact that the Saudi princes treat their oil reserves not much differently than Exxon.</p> <p>That is, they attempt to maximize the present value of their 270 billion barrels of reserves, but ultimately are no more clairvoyant at calibrating the best oil price to accomplish that than are the economists at Exxon or the IEA.</p> <p><strong>The Saudis over-estimated the staying power of China’s temporarily surging call on global supply; and under-estimated how rapidly and extensively the $100 per barrel marker reached in early 2008 would trigger a flow of investment, technology and cheap debt into the US shale patch, the Canadian tar sands, the tired petroleum provinces of Russia, the deep offshore of Brazil etc. And that’s to say nothing of solar, wind and all the other government subsidized alternative source of BTUs.</strong></p> <p>Way back when Jimmy Carter was telling us to turn down the thermostats and put on our cardigan sweaters, those of us on the free market side of the so-called energy shortage debate said the best cure for high oil prices is high prices. Now we know.</p> <p>So the Fifth Fleet and its overt and covert auxiliaries should never have been there—–going all the way back to the CIA’s coup against Iranian democracy in 1953.</p> <p>But having turned Iran into an enemy, Imperial Washington was just getting started when 1990 rolled around. Once again in the name of “oil security” it plunged the American war machine into the politics and religious fissures of the Persian Gulf; and did so on account of a local small potatoes conflict that had no bearing whatsoever on the safety and security of American citizens.</p> <p>As US ambassador Glaspie rightly told Saddam Hussein on the eve of his Kuwait invasion, America had no dog in that hunt.</p> <p><strong>Kuwait wasn’t even a country; it was a bank account sitting on a swath of oilfields surrounding an ancient trading city that had been abandoned by Ibn Saud in the early 20th century.</strong></p> <p>That’s because he didn’t know what oil was or that it was there; and, in any event, it had been made a separate protectorate by the British in 1913 for reasons that are lost in the fog of diplomatic history.</p> <p>Likewise, Iraq’s contentious dispute with Kuwait had been over its claim that the Emir of Kuwait was “slant drilling” across his border into Iraq’s Rumaila field. Yet it was a wholly elastic boundary of no significance whatsoever.</p> <p>In fact, the dispute over the Rumaila field started in 1960 when an Arab League declaration arbitrarily marked the Iraq–Kuwait border two miles north of the southernmost tip of the Rumaila field.</p> <p>And that newly defined boundary, in turn, had come only 44 years after a pair of English and French diplomats had carved up their winnings from the Ottoman Empire’s demise by laying a straight edged ruler on the map. So doing, they thereby confected the artificial country of Iraq from the historically independent and hostile Mesopotamian provinces of the Shiite in the south, the Sunni in the west and the Kurds in the north.</p> <p><strong>In short, it did not matter who controlled the southern tip of the Rumaila field—–the brutal dictator of Baghdad or the opulent Emir of Kuwait. Not the price of oil, nor the peace of America nor the security of Europe nor the future of Asia depended upon it.</strong></p> <p><em><strong>The First Gulf War - A Catastrophic Error</strong></em></p> <p>But once again Bush the Elder got persuaded to take the path of war. This time it was by Henry Kissinger’s  economically illiterate protégés at the national security council and his Texas oilman Secretary of State. They falsely claimed that the will-o-wisp of “oil security” was at stake, and that 500,000 American troops needed to be planted in the sands of Arabia.</p> <p><em><strong>That was a catastrophic error, and not only because the presence of crusader boots on the purportedly sacred soil of Arabia offended the CIA-trained Mujahedeen of Afghanistan, who had become unemployed when the Soviet Union collapsed</strong></em>.</p> <p><em><strong>The 1991 CNN glorified war games in the Gulf also further empowered another group of unemployed crusaders. Namely, the neocon national security fanatics who had mislead Ronald Reagan into a massive military build-up to thwart what they claimed to be an ascendant Soviet Union bent on nuclear war winning capabilities and global conquest.</strong></em></p> <p>All things being equal, the sight of Boris Yeltsin, Vodka flask in hand, facing down the Red Army a few months later should have sent them into the permanent repudiation and obscurity they so richly deserved. But Dick Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz managed to extract from Washington’s pyric victory in Kuwait a whole new lease on life for Imperial Washington.</p> <p>Right then and there came the second erroneous predicate. To wit, that “regime change” among the assorted tyrannies of the middle east was in America’s national interest.</p> <p>More fatally, the neocons now insisted that the Gulf War proved it could be achieved through a sweeping interventionist menu of coalition diplomacy, security assistance, arms shipments, covert action and open military attack and occupation.</p> <p>What the neocon doctrine of regime change actually did, of course, was to foster the Frankenstein that utlimately became ISIS.<strong> In fact, the only real terrorists in the world which threaten normal civilian life in the West are the rogue offspring of Imperial Washington’s post-1990 machinations in the middle east.</strong></p> <p>The CIA trained and armed Mujahedeen mutated into al-Qaeda not because Bin Laden suddenly had a religious epiphany that his Washington benefactors were actually the Great Satan owing to America’s freedom and liberty.</p> <p><strong>His murderous crusade was inspired by the Wahhabi fundamentalism loose in Saudi Arabia. This benighted religious fanaticism became agitated to a fever pitch by Imperial Washington’s violent plunge into Persian Gulf political and religious quarrels, the stationing of troops in Saudi Arabia, and the decade long barrage of sanctions, embargoes, no fly zones, covert actions and open hostility against the Sunni regime in Bagdad after 1991.</strong></p> <p>Yes, Bin Laden would have amputated Saddam’s secularist head if Washington hadn’t done it first, but that’s just the point. The attempt at regime change in March 2003 was one of the most foolish acts of state in American history.</p> <p>The younger Bush’s neocon advisers had no clue about the sectarian animosities and historical grievances that Hussein had bottled-up by parsing the oil loot and wielding the sword under the banner of Baathist nationalism. But Shock and Awe blew the lid and the de-baathification campaign unleashed the furies.</p> <p><strong>Indeed, no sooner had George Bush pranced around on the deck of the Abraham Lincoln declaring “mission accomplished” than Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a CIA recruit to the Afghan war a decade earlier and small-time specialist in hostage-taking and poisons, fled his no count redoubt in Kurdistan to emerge as a flamboyant agitator in the now disposed Sunni heartland.</strong></p> <p>The founder of ISIS succeeded in Fallujah and Anbar province just like the long list of other terrorist leaders Washington claims to have exterminated. That is, Zarqawi gained his following and notoriety among the region’s population of deprived, brutalized and humiliated young men by dint of being more brutal than their occupiers.</p> <p>Indeed, even as Washington was crowing about the demise of Zarqawi, the remnants of the Baathist regime and the hundreds of thousands of demobilized Republican Guards were coalescing into al-Qaeda in Iraq, and their future leaders were being incubated in a monstrous nearby detention center called Camp Bucca that contained more than 26,000 prisoners.</p> <p>As one former US Army officer, Mitchell Gray, later described it,</p> <blockquote><p><strong>You never see hatred like you saw on the faces of these detainees,” </strong>Gray remembers of his 2008 tour. <strong>“When I say they hated us, I mean they looked like they would have killed us in a heartbeat if given the chance. I turned to the warrant officer I was with and I said, ‘If they could, they would rip our heads off and drink our blood.’ ”</strong></p> <p> </p> <p>What Gray didn’t know — but might have expected — was that he was not merely looking at the United States’ former enemies, but its future ones as well. According to intelligence experts and Department of Defense records, the vast majority of the leadership of what is today known as ISIS, including its leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, did time at Camp Bucca.</p> <p> </p> <p>And not only did the US feed, clothe and house these jihadists, it also played a vital, if unwitting, role in facilitating their transformation into the most formidable terrorist force in modern history.</p> <p> </p> <p>Early in Bucca’s existence, the most extreme inmates were congregated in Compound 6. There were not enough Americans guards to safely enter the compound — and, in any event, the guards didn’t speak Arabic. So the detainees were left alone to preach to one another and share deadly vocational advice.</p> <p> </p> <p>…….Bucca also housed Haji Bakr, a former colonel in Saddam Hussein’s air-defense force. Bakr was no religious zealot. He was just a guy who lost his job when the Coalition Provisional Authority disbanded the Iraqi military and instituted de-Baathification, a policy of banning Saddam’s past supporters from government work.</p> <p> </p> <p>According to documents recently obtained by German newspaper Der Spiegel, Bakr was the real mastermind behind ISIS’s organizational structure and also mapped out the strategies that fueled its early successes. Bakr, who died in fighting in 2014, was incarcerated at Bucca from 2006-’08, along with a dozen or more of ISIS’s top lieutenants.</p> </blockquote> <p><strong>The point is, regime change and nation building can never be accomplished by the lethal violence of 21st century armed forces; and they were an especially preposterous assignment in the context of a land rent with 13 century-old religious fissures and animosities.</strong></p> <p>In fact, the wobbly, synthetic state of Iraq was doomed the minute Cheney and his bloody gang decided to liberate it from the brutal, but serviceable and secular tyranny of Saddam’s Baathist regime. That’s because the process of elections and majority rule necessarily imposed by Washington was guaranteed to elect a government beholden to the Shiite majority.</p> <p>After decades of mistreatment and Saddam’s brutal suppression of their 1991 uprising, did the latter have revenge on their minds and in their communal DNA?  Did the Kurds have dreams of an independent Kurdistan that had been denied their 30 million strong tribe way back at Versailles and ever since?</p> <p><em><strong>Yes, they did. So the $25 billion spent on training and equipping the putative armed forces of post-liberation Iraq was bound to end up in the hands of sectarian militias, not a national army.</strong></em></p> <p>In fact, when the Shiite commanders fled Sunni-dominated Mosul in June 2014 they transformed the ISIS uprising against the government in Baghdad into a vicious fledgling state in one fell swoop. It wasn’t by beheadings and fiery jihadist sermons that it quickly enslaved dozens of towns and several million people in western Iraq and the Euphrates Valley of Syria.</p> <p><em><strong>ISIS Is Washington's Frankenstein</strong></em></p> <p>Its instruments of terror and occupation were the best weapons that the American taxpayers could buy. That included 2,300 Humvees and tens of thousands of automatic weapons, as well as vast stores of ammunition, trucks, rockets, artillery pieces and even tanks and helicopters.</p> <p>And that wasn’t the half of it. <strong>The newly proclaimed Islamic State also filled the power vacuum in Syria created by its so-called civil war. But in truth that was another exercise in Washington inspired and financed regime change undertaken in connivance with Qatar and Saudi Arabia.</strong></p> <p>The latter were surely not interested in expelling the tyranny next door; they are the living embodiment of it. Instead, the rebellion was about removing Iran’s Alawite/Shiite ally from power in Damascus and laying gas pipelines to Europe across the upper Euphrates Valley.</p> <p>In any event, ISIS soon had troves of additional American weapons. Some of them were supplied to Sunni radicals by way of Qatar and Saudi Arabia. More came up the so-called “ratline” from Gaddafi’s former arsenals in Benghazi through Turkey. And still more came through Jordan from the “moderate” opposition trained there by the CIA, which more often than not sold them or defected to the other side.</p> <p><strong>So that the Islamic State was Washington’s Frankenstein monster became evident from the moment it rushed upon the scene 18 months ago.</strong> But even then the Washington war party could not resist adding fuel to the fire, whooping up another round of Islamophobia among the American public and forcing the Obama White House into a futile bombing campaign for the third time in a quarter century.</p> <p>But if bombing really worked, the Islamic State would be sand and gravel by now. Indeed, as shown by the map below, it is really not much more than that anyway.</p> <p>The dusty, broken, impoverished towns and villages along the margins of the Euphrates River and in the bombed out precincts of Anbar province do not attract thousands of wannabe jihadists from the failed states of the middle east and the alienated Muslim townships of Europe because the caliphate offers prosperity, salvation or any future at all.</p> <p><strong>What recruits them is outrage at the bombs and drones being dropped on Sunni communities by the US air force; and by the cruise missiles launched from the bowels of the Mediterranean which rip apart homes, shops, offices and mosques containing as many innocent civilians as ISIS terrorists.</strong></p> <p><strong>The truth is, the Islamic State was destined for a short half-life anyway. </strong>It was contained by the Kurds in the north and east and by Turkey with NATO’s second largest army and air force in the northwest. And it was surrounded by the Shiite crescent in the populated, economically viable regions of lower Syria and Iraq.</p> <p>So absent Washington’s misbegotten campaign to unseat Assad in Damascus and demonize his confession-based Iranian ally, there would have been nowhere for the murderous fanatics who pitched a makeshift capital in Raqqa to go. They would have run out of money, recruits, momentum and public acquiesce in their horrific rule in due course.</p> <p>But with the US Air Force functioning as their recruiting arm and France’s anti-Assad foreign policy helping to foment a final spasm of anarchy in Syria, the gates of hell have been opened wide. What has been puked out is not an organized war on Western civilization as Hollande so hysterically proclaimed in response to the mayhem in Paris.</p> <p><em><strong>It was just blowback carried out by that infinitesimally small salient of mentally deformed young men who can be persuaded to strap on a suicide belt.</strong></em></p> <p>Needless to say, bombing wont stop them; it will just make more of them.</p> <p>Ironically, what can stop them is the Assad government and the ground forces of its Hezbollah and the Iranian Revolutionary Guard allies. Its time to let them settle an ancient quarrel that has never been any of America’s business anyway.</p> <p>But Imperial Washington is so caught up in its myths, lies and hegemonic stupidity that it can not see the obvious.</p> <p><strong>And that is why a quarter century after the cold war ended peace still hasn’t been given a chance and the reason that horrific events like November's barbarism in Paris still keep happening.</strong></p> <p>Even the so-called "inspired" terrorists like the pair who attacked San Bernardino emerge episodically because the terror that the American military visits upon Muslim lands is actually what inspires them. After all, whatever the Koran has to say about purging the infidel, it inspired no attacks on American soil until Imperial Washington went into the regime change and military intervention business in the middle east.</p> <p><em><strong>Another False Demon - Putin's Russia</strong></em></p> <p><strong>At the end of the day there now exists a huge irony.</strong> The only force that can effectively contain and eventually eliminate the Islamic State is the so-called Shiite Crescent - the alliance of Iran, Baghdad, Assad and Hezbollah.</p> <p>But since they are allied with Putin's Russia, still another unnecessary barrier to peace on earth comes into play.</p> <p><strong>The fact is, there is no basis whatsoever for Imperial Washington's relentless campaign against Putin, and Washington-NATO's blatant intervention in Ukraine.</strong></p> <p>Contrary to the bombast, jingoism, and shrill moralizing flowing from Washington and the mainstream media, America has no interest in the current spat between Putin and the coup that unconstitutionally took over Kiev in February 2014.</p> <p>For several centuries the Crimea has been Russian; for even longer, the Ukraine has been a cauldron of ethnic and tribal conflict, rarely an organized, independent state, and always a meandering set of borders looking for a redrawn map.</p> <p>Like everything reviewed above, the source of the current calamity-howling about Russia is the Warfare State–that is, the existence of vast machinery of military, diplomatic and economic maneuver that is ever on the prowl for missions and mandates and that can mobilize a massive propaganda campaign on the slightest excitement.</p> <p>The post-1991 absurdity of bolstering NATO and extending it into eastern Europe, rather than liquidating it after attaining “mission accomplished”, is just another manifestation of its baleful impact. In truth, the expansion of NATO is one of the underlying causes of America’s needless tension with Russia and Putin’s paranoia about his borders and neighbors. Indeed, what juvenile minds actually determined that America needs a military alliance with Slovenia, Slovakia, Bulgaria and Romania, and now Montenegro!</p> <p><strong><em>So the resounding clatter for action against Russia emanating from Washington and its house-trained media is not even a semi-rational response to the facts at hand; its just another destructive spasm of the nation’s Warfare State and its beltway machinery of diplomatic meddling, economic warfare and military intervention.</em></strong></p> <p><strong>Memo To Obama: It’s Their Red Line</strong></p> <p><strong>Not only does Washington’s relentless meddling in the current Russian- Ukrainian food fight have nothing to do with the safety and security of the American people, it also betrays woeful disregard for the elementary facts of that region’s turbulent and often bloody history.</strong></p> <p>In fact, the allegedly “occupied” territory of Crimea was actually annexed by Catherine the Great in 1783, thereby satisfying the longstanding quest of the Russian Czars for a warm-water port. Over the ages Sevastopol then emerged as a great naval base at the strategic tip of the Crimean peninsula, where it became home to the mighty Black Sea Fleet of the Czars and then the commissars.</p> <p>For the next 171 years Crimea was an integral part of Russia—a span that exceeds the 166 years that have elapsed since California was annexed by a similar thrust of “Manifest Destiny” on this continent, thereby providing, incidentally, the United States Navy with its own warm-water port in San Diego.</p> <p>While no foreign forces subsequently invaded the California coasts, it was most definitely not Ukrainian and Polish rifles, artillery and blood which famously annihilated The Charge Of The Light Brigade at the Crimean city of Balaclava in 1854; they were Russians defending the homeland from Turks, Europeans and Brits.</p> <p>And the portrait of the Russian “hero” hanging in Putin’s office is that of Czar Nicholas I—whose brutal 30-year reign brought the Russian Empire to its historical zenith, and who was revered in Russian hagiography as the defender of Crimea, even as he lost the 1850s war to the Ottomans and Europeans.</p> <p>At the end of the day, it’s their Red Line. When the enfeebled Franklin Roosevelt made port in the Crimean city of Yalta in February 1945 he did at least know that he was in Soviet <strong>Russia</strong>.</p> <p>Maneuvering to cement his control of the Kremlin in the intrigue-ridden struggle for succession after Stalin’s death a few years later, Nikita Khrushchev allegedly spent 15 minutes reviewing his “gift” of Crimea to his subalterns in Kiev in honor of the decision by their ancestors 300 years earlier to accept the inevitable and become a vassal of Russia.</p> <p><strong>Self-evidently, during the long decades of the Cold War, the West did nothing to liberate the “captive nation” of the Ukraine—with or without the Crimean appendage bestowed upon it in 1954. Nor did it draw any red lines in the mid-1990’s when a financially desperate Ukraine rented back Sevastopol and the strategic redoubts of the Crimea to an equally pauperized Russia.</strong></p> <p>In short, in the era before we got our Pacific port in 1848 and in the 166-year interval since then, our national security has depended not one wit on the status of the Russian-speaking Crimea.</p> <p>That the local population has now chosen fealty to the Grand Thief in Moscow over the ruffians and rabble who have seized Kiev is their business, not ours.</p> <p>The real threat to peace is not Putin, but the screeching sanctimony and mindless meddling of Susan Rice and Samantha Power. Obama should have sent them back to geography class long  ago-------and before they could draw anymore new Red Lines.</p> <p>The one in the Ukraine has been morphing for centuries among the quarreling tribes, peoples, potentates, Patriarchs and pretenders of a small region that is none of our damn business.</p> <p><strong>The current Ukrainian policy farce emanating from Washington is not only a reminder that the military-industrial-beltway complex is still alive and well, but also demonstrates why the forces of crony capitalism and money politics which sustain it are so lamentable.</strong> The fact is, the modern Warfare State has been the incubator of American imperialism since the Cold War, and is now proving itself utterly invulnerable to fiscal containment, even in the face of a $19 trillion national debt.</p> <p><strong>So 101 years after the Christmas truces along the Western Front there is still no peace on earth.</strong> And the long suffering American taxpayers, who foot the massive bills generated by the War Party's demented and destructive policies, <strong>have no clue that Imperial Washington is the principal reason.</strong></p> </div> </div> </div> <div class="field field-name-field-source field-type-link-field field-label-hidden field-wrapper"><a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/zerohedge/feed/~3/Ew0vQ9QCp7U/thanksgiving-2017-david-stockman-explains-why-there-no-peace-earth">Source</a></div><div class="field field-name-opencalais-calaisdocumentc-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-hidden field-wrapper"> <div class="field-items" class="comma-separated field-items"> <div class="field-item even" class="field-item even"><a href="/category/politics">Politics</a></div> <div class="field-item odd" class="field-item even odd"><a href="/category/war">War</a></div> </div> </div> <div class="field field-name-opencalais-city-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-hidden field-wrapper"> <div class="field-items" class="comma-separated field-items"> <div class="field-item even" class="field-item even"><a href="/category/moscow">Moscow</a></div> <div class="field-item odd" class="field-item even odd"><a href="/category/paris">Paris</a></div> <div class="field-item even" class="field-item even odd even"><a href="/category/damascus">Damascus</a></div> <div class="field-item odd" class="field-item even odd even odd"><a href="/category/mosul">Mosul</a></div> </div> </div> <div class="field field-name-opencalais-continent-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-hidden field-wrapper"> <div class="field-items" class="comma-separated field-items"> <div class="field-item even" class="field-item even"><a href="/category/america">America</a></div> <div class="field-item odd" class="field-item even odd"><a href="/category/europe">Europe</a></div> <div class="field-item even" class="field-item even odd even"><a href="/category/asia">Asia</a></div> </div> </div> <div class="field field-name-opencalais-country-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-hidden field-wrapper"> <div class="field-items" class="comma-separated field-items"> <div class="field-item even" class="field-item even"><a href="/category/france">France</a></div> <div class="field-item odd" class="field-item even odd"><a href="/category/iraq">Iraq</a></div> <div class="field-item even" class="field-item even odd even"><a href="/category/iran">Iran</a></div> <div class="field-item odd" class="field-item even odd even odd"><a href="/category/russia">Russia</a></div> <div class="field-item even" class="field-item even odd even odd even"><a href="/category/united-states">United States</a></div> <div class="field-item odd" class="field-item even odd even odd even odd"><a href="/category/soviet-union">Soviet Union</a></div> </div> </div> <div class="field field-name-opencalais-operatingsystem-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-hidden field-wrapper"> <div class="field-items" class="comma-separated field-items"> <div class="field-item even" class="field-item even"><a href="/category/isis">ISIS</a></div> </div> </div> <div class="field field-name-opencalais-organization-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-hidden field-wrapper"> <div class="field-items" class="comma-separated field-items"> <div class="field-item even" class="field-item even"><a href="/category/north-atlantic-treaty-organization">North Atlantic Treaty Organization</a></div> <div class="field-item odd" class="field-item even odd"><a href="/category/central-intelligence-agency">Central Intelligence Agency</a></div> <div class="field-item even" class="field-item even odd even"><a href="/category/washington-war-party">Washington War Party</a></div> <div class="field-item odd" class="field-item even odd even odd"><a href="/category/white-house">White House</a></div> </div> </div> Mon, 27 Nov 2017 04:20:00 +0000 Guest 56249 at https://5ux.com https://5ux.com/news/thanksgiving-2017-david-stockman-explains-why-there-no-peace-earth#comments Disaster In Red: The 100th Anniversary Of The Russian Socialist Revolution https://5ux.com/news/disaster-red-100th-anniversary-russian-socialist-revolution <a href="/news/disaster-red-100th-anniversary-russian-socialist-revolution"><img class="teaserimage" src="https://5ux.com/sites/5ux.com/files/styles/medium_250/public/resize/remote/1943b8479a96bbfbe8495ba7642cb8b6-600x321.jpg?itok=hCM_Lvr4" alt="Disaster In Red: The 100th Anniversary Of The Russian Socialist Revolution" title="Disaster In Red: The 100th Anniversary Of The Russian Socialist Revolution" /></a><div class="clearfix body field"> <div class="field-items"> <div class="field-item even"><p><em>Authored by Richard Ebeling via The Future of Freedom Foundation,</em></p> <p><strong>November 7, 2017, marked the one hundredth anniversary of the Russian (or Bolshevik) Revolution in Russia</strong> that happened on that date in November 1917, which<strong> lead to the communist “dictatorship of the proletariat” and ushered in an epoch of totalitarian tyranny and mass murder both in Russia and in every other country where socialism was put into practice.</strong></p> <p><strong>Historians estimate that as many as 150 million people, if not more – innocent men, women and children – were killed in the name of building the collectivist utopia. </strong></p> <p>They were shot, tortured, worked or starved to death in prison cells, in interrogation rooms, in labor camps, or just in the places where they lived.</p> <p><em><strong>“Socialism-in-practice”</strong></em> created a chamber of horrors in which the individual was reduced to a<strong> mere expendable “cog in the wheel”</strong> to serve the collective good, or <strong>made into “enemies of the people” to be eliminated</strong> as the prelude to building the “bright, beautiful communist future.”</p> <p><strong>Power, Privilege, and Terror as Socialist Reality</strong></p> <p>In the name of a “classless society,” communism created the most minute and granulated system of privilege, favor, and power, depending upon where the individual stood in the hierarchies of the Communist Party and the management of the vast central planning bureaucracy. “Special” food and clothing stores, “special” clinics and hospitals, “special” apartments and country houses, “special” resort and recreational facilities and vacation sites, “special” opportunities (with Party permission) to visit the forbidden and decadent “West,” and to bring back some of the “bourgeois” goods unavailable in the “workers’ paradise.”</p> <p><strong>The Communist Party did all in their power to control and confine the minds of those over whom they ruled</strong> into narrow corridors of knowledge and belief so little or no doubt could arise that theirs was the best of all worlds, and far more “socially just” and materially better than anything existing in the reactionary and corrupted capitalist parts of the globe.</p> <p>If for a younger generation born after 1991 – the year the Soviet Union disappeared from the face of the world map – this all seems like ancient history that has no relevance or meaning for their lives (and especially so since so little is told about that Soviet chamber of horrors in school history books, or the mainstream opinion magazines and newspapers), its significance is no less important to know and a lesson not to be forgotten.</p> <p><strong>Prophets of the Socialist Destruction and Dictatorship-to-Come</strong></p> <p>Six years before Karl Marx and Frederick Engels published their famous, <em>The</em> <em>Communist Manifesto</em>, in 1848, the renowned German poet, Heinrich Heine (1797-1856), wrote the following in 1842:</p> <blockquote><p>Communism is the secret name of the dread antagonist setting proletariat rule with all its consequences against the present bourgeois regime. It will be a frightful duel. How will it end? No one knows but the gods and goddesses acquainted with the future. We only know this much: Communism, though little discussed now and loitering in hidden garrets on miserable straw pallets, is the dark hero destined for a great, if temporary, role in the modern tragedy . . . Will the old absolutist traditions reenter the stage, though in a new costume and with new cues and slogans? How could that drama end?</p> <p> </p> <p>Wild gloomy times are roaring toward us, and a prophet wishing to write a new apocalypse would have to invent entirely new beasts . . . The future smells of Russian leather, blood, godlessness, and many whippings. I would advise our grandchildren to be born with very thick skins on their backs.</p> </blockquote> <p><strong>Others gave warnings about what would be in store if the false fantasies of socialism were to be followed and introduced into any society</strong>. The nineteenth century French classical liberal economist, Paul Leroy-Beaulieu (1843-1916), gave warning in his important work, <em>Collectivism</em> (1885):</p> <blockquote><p>How can liberty exist in a society in which everyone would be an employee of the state brigaded in squadrons from which there would be no escape, dependent upon a system of official classification for promotion, and for all the amenities of life! . . . The employee (and all would be employees) would the slave, not of the state, which is merely an abstraction, but of the politicians who possessed themselves of power.</p> <p> </p> <p>A heavy yoke would be imposed upon all, and since no free printing presses would exist, it would be impossible to obtain publicity for criticism or for grievances without consent of the government. The press censure exercised in [Imperial] Russia would be liberty itself compared to that which would be the inevitable accompaniment of collectivism . . . A tyranny such as has never been hitherto experienced, would close all mouths and bend all necks.</p> </blockquote> <p><strong>Never were there prophecies more prescient than Heine and Leroy-Beaulieu’s many decades before the Bolshevik Revolution. </strong>The stench of oppression and death surrounds the notion of how socialism views man and mankind. The noted Russian mathematician, Igor Shafarevich (1923-2017), who spent years in the GULAG labor camps for his opposition to the Soviet regime, concluded his study of <em>The Socialist Phenomenon</em> (1975) with this telling interpretation of the nature of the communist system:</p> <blockquote><p>To begin with, most socialist doctrines and movements are literally saturated with the mood of death, catastrophe and destruction . . . The death of mankind is not only a conceivable result of the triumph of socialism – it constitutes the goal of socialism . . .</p> <p>Understanding socialism as one of the manifestations of the allure of death explains its hostility toward individuality, its desire to destroy those forces which support and strengthen human personality: religion, culture, family, individual property. It is consistent with the tendency to reduce man to the level of a cog in the state mechanism of non-individual features, such as production or class interest.</p> </blockquote> <p><em><strong>It is often rightly said, “Never Again,” when pointing to the madness and mass murders, especially against the European Jews, under German National Socialism (Nazism). This is equally as true when pointing out the horrors and mass murders of Marxian socialism and Soviet communism.</strong></em></p> <p>Indeed, one of the reasons why the Marxian variations on the socialist theme appealed to so many around the world was due to its more universal attraction compared to National Socialism. The Nazi ideal was reserved for a “racially pure” German people, with the rest of humanity viewed as genetic inferiors to be slaughtered or enslaved for the benefit of a “master race.”</p> <p><strong>Marxian-type socialism, on the other hand, claimed to be speaking for the large mass of humanity  — against a handful of profit-oriented exploiting capitalists (the “one percent”). </strong>Thus, it called upon all people, everywhere, suffering under the minority of property owning capitalists, to rise up in the name of “social justice” and a collectivist utopia that promised a “better world” for all mankind (except for the minority of “exploiters” everywhere who were to be expropriated and liquidated).</p> <p>National Socialism was never going to attract followers, fighters and fanatics outside of those who were classified and identified as among the chosen, based on “genes” and “blood” making them part of the German master race.  But Marxian socialism called upon all people, everywhere, who were “the workers” forced to be “wage slaves” at the command of the narrow “social class” of capitalist owners of the means of production to rise up and throw off their “chains” in a revolution for a “workers’ state” of collective ownership and central planning for the benefit of “the masses.”</p> <p><strong>This is what made Marxian socialism in its manifestations of political states such as the Soviet Union a universal threat to individual liberty and economic freedom.</strong> Its followers could be and were everywhere. Their ideological fanaticism on behalf of totalitarian collectivism made them place no value on truth, humanity or individual life, even their own. Sacrifice for “the collective” made them and all others expendable for the utopia to come. This is what led to the willingness to kill tens of millions. If the group – the “social class” – is what really exists and has meaning and value, then the individual is the illusion and has no worth and significance. On to the ash heap of history go those who must be sacrificed for wonderful world to come.</p> <p>Though Soviet communism came to an end slightly more than a quarter of a century ago, the ghost of the spirit of communism lives on around the world. It is not so much that many people intentionally want to be straightjacketed within the confines of a Soviet-style totalitarian state, or that they wish to wait on the tiring and unending lines at “people’s” retail stores for meager supplies of everyday necessities of life as was the case behind “the Iron Curtain,” or exist in fear that it could be tonight that the secret police might come to take you away to an unknown but frightfully imaginable fate.</p> <p><strong>Most people, especially in the United States, don’t see this as the inescapable future of a socialist system fully imposed and implemented because so few have any knowledge or awareness that this was how tens of millions, hundreds of millions lived under socialist regimes as the coerced and controlled worker bees in the collectivist hive commanded by the ruling Communist Party “vanguard of the revolution.”</strong></p> <p>The “specter” of communism, nonetheless, continues to haunt the world in the form of the Marxian critique of capitalist society: Workers are exploited by the capitalist employers; profits are ill-gotten gains at the expense of the rest of society; a handful of property owning capitalists rule over the mass of society with no benefit for “the people” from their manufactured and marketed goods; the capitalist property owners plunder the earth and spoil the environment; the capitalist system is inherently racist and sexist in its structure and methods. The list could go on and on.</p> <p><strong>The battle between the ideologies of freedom and individualism versus political planning and collectivism, therefore, continues in slightly different forms and permutations than those expressed in the communist slogans and ideological language of 1917 and after. But the combat is no less real and is no less the same at its foundational basis.</strong></p> <p>*  *  *</p> <p><em><strong>I have written a series of articles on the illogic of and danger from Marxism and socialism as ideas and as the reality of Soviet socialism-in-practice. </strong>May I suggest that they might usefully serve as a guide to share with others for an understanding of the nature of socialism in the twentieth century, and the underlying ideas and concepts behind collectivism that still threaten liberty and prosperity in the twenty-first century in their new and various forms:</em></p> <p><em>“Karl Marx, the Man Behind the Communist Revolution”</em></p> <p><em>“Karl Marx’s Misconceptions about Man and Markets”</em></p> <p><em>“Karl Marx and a Presumption of a ‘Right Side’ to History, Part I” </em></p> <p><em>“Karl Marx and the Presumption of a ‘Right Side’ to History, Part II”</em></p> <p><em>“Socialism: Marking a Century of Death and Destruction”</em></p> <p><em>“How Lithuania Helped Take Down the Soviet Union”</em></p> <p><em>“Witness to the End of Soviet Power – 25 Years Ago”</em></p> <p><em>“The 25th Anniversary of the End of the Soviet Union”</em></p> <p><em>“Barack Obama and the Meaning of Socialism”</em></p> <p><em>“The Austrian Economists Who Refuted Marx (and Obama)”</em></p> <p><em>“American Progressives are Bismarck’s Grandchildren”</em></p> <p><em>“Democratic Socialism Means the Loss of Liberty”</em></p> </div> </div> </div> <div class="field field-name-field-source field-type-link-field field-label-hidden field-wrapper"><a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/zerohedge/feed/~3/3C1jyIGYPog/disaster-red-100th-anniversary-russian-socialist-revolution">Source</a></div><div class="field field-name-opencalais-country-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-hidden field-wrapper"> <div class="field-items" class="comma-separated field-items"> <div class="field-item even" class="field-item even"><a href="/category/soviet-union">Soviet Union</a></div> </div> </div> <div class="field field-name-opencalais-organization-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-hidden field-wrapper"> <div class="field-items" class="comma-separated field-items"> <div class="field-item even" class="field-item even"><a href="/category/communist-party">Communist Party</a></div> </div> </div> Thu, 09 Nov 2017 10:00:00 +0000 Guest 55205 at https://5ux.com https://5ux.com/news/disaster-red-100th-anniversary-russian-socialist-revolution#comments Remembering Communism's Bloody Century https://5ux.com/news/remembering-communisms-bloody-century <a href="/news/remembering-communisms-bloody-century"><img class="teaserimage" src="https://5ux.com/sites/5ux.com/files/styles/medium_250/public/resize/remote/5900af4e820300ae3f51adca12dd68ea-600x341.jpg?itok=ze6moD0u" alt="Remembering Communism&#039;s Bloody Century" title="Remembering Communism&#039;s Bloody Century" /></a><div class="clearfix body field"> <div class="field-items"> <div class="field-item even"><p><em>Authored by Stephen Kotkin via The Wall Street Journal,</em></p> <p>In the 100 years since Lenin’s coup in Russia, the ideology devoted to abolishing markets and private property has<strong> left a long, murderous trail of destruction...</strong></p> <p><strong></strong></p> <p><strong>A century ago this week, communism took over the Russian empire, the world’s largest state at the time.</strong> Leftist movements of various sorts had been common in European politics long before the revolution of Oct. 25, 1917 (which became Nov. 7 in the reformed Russian calendar), but Vladimir Lenin and his Bolsheviks were different. They were not merely fanatical in their convictions but flexible in their tactics—and fortunate in their opponents.</p> <p>Communism entered history as a ferocious yet idealistic condemnation of capitalism, promising a better world. Its adherents, like others on the left, blamed capitalism for the miserable conditions that afflicted peasants and workers alike and for the prevalence of indentured and child labor. Communists saw the slaughter of World War I as a direct result of the rapacious competition among the great powers for overseas markets.</p> <p>But a century of communism in power—with holdouts even now in Cuba, North Korea and China—has made clear the human cost of a political program bent on overthrowing capitalism. Again and again, the effort to eliminate markets and private property has brought about the deaths of an astounding number of people. Since 1917—in the Soviet Union, China, Mongolia, Eastern Europe, Indochina, Africa, Afghanistan and parts of Latin America—communism has claimed at least 65 million lives, according to the painstaking research of demographers.</p> <p><strong>Communism’s tools of destruction have included mass deportations, forced labor camps and police-state terror - a model established by Lenin and especially by his successor Joseph Stalin. It has been widely imitated.</strong> Though communism has killed huge numbers of people intentionally, even more of its victims have died from starvation as a result of its cruel projects of social engineering.</p> <p> inline<br /> scope-web|mobileapps<br /> inline"&gt;</p> <p><em>A communal Chinese farm in the 1950s during the Great Leap Forward. Photo: UIG/Getty Images </em></p> <p><strong>For these epic crimes, Lenin and Stalin bear personal responsibility, as do Mao Zedong in China, Pol Pot in Cambodia, the Kim dynasty in North Korea and any number of lesser communist tyrants.</strong> But we must not lose sight of the ideas that prompted these vicious men to kill on such a vast scale, or of the nationalist context in which they embraced these ideas. Anticapitalism was attractive to them in its own right, but it also served as an instrument, in their minds, for backward countries to leapfrog into the ranks of great powers.</p> <p><strong>The communist revolution may now be spent, but its centenary, as the great anticapitalist cause, still demands a proper reckoning.</strong></p> <p>In February 1917, Tsar Nicholas II abdicated under pressure from his generals, who worried that bread marches and strikes in the capital of St. Petersburg were undermining the war effort against Germany and its allies. The February Revolution, as these events became known, produced an unelected provisional government, which chose to rule without the elected parliament. Peasants began to seize the land, and soviets (or political councils) started to form among soldiers at the front, as had already happened among political groups in the cities.</p> <p>That fall, as the war raged on, Lenin’s Bolsheviks undertook an armed insurrection involving probably no more than 10,000 people. They directed their coup not against the provisional government, which had long since become moribund, but against the main soviet in the capital, which was dominated by other, more moderate socialists. The October Revolution began as a putsch by the radical left against the rest of the left, whose members denounced the Bolsheviks for violating all norms and then walked out of the soviet.</p> <p>The Bolsheviks, like many of their rivals, were devotees of Karl Marx, who saw class struggle as the great engine of history. What he called feudalism would give way to capitalism, which would be replaced in turn by socialism and, finally, the distant utopia of communism. Marx envisioned a new era of freedom and plenty, and its precondition was destroying the “wage slavery” and exploitation of capitalism. As he and his collaborator Friedrich Engels declared in the Communist Manifesto of 1848, our theory “may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property.”</p> <p>Once in power in early 1918, the Bolsheviks renamed themselves the Communist Party as they sought to force-march Russia to socialism and, eventually, to history’s final stage. Millions set about trying to live in new ways. No one, however, knew precisely what the new society was supposed to look like. “We cannot give a characterization of socialism,” Lenin conceded in March 1918. “What socialism will be like when it reaches its completed form we do not know, we cannot say.”</p> <p><strong>But one thing was clear to them: Socialism could not resemble capitalism. The regime would replace private property with collective property, markets with planning, and “bourgeois” parliaments with “people’s power.” In practice, however, scientific planning was unattainable, as even some communists conceded at the time. As for collectivizing property, it empowered not the people but the state.</strong></p> <p>The process set in motion by the communists entailed the vast expansion of a secret-police apparatus to handle the arrest, internal deportation and execution of “class enemies.” The dispossession of capitalists also enriched a new class of state functionaries, who gained control over the country’s wealth. All parties and points of view outside the official doctrine were repressed, eliminating politics as a corrective mechanism.</p> <p>The declared goals of the revolution of 1917 were abundance and social justice, but the commitment to destroy capitalism gave rise to structures that made it impossible to attain those goals.</p> <p>In urban areas, the Soviet regime was able to draw upon armed factory workers, eager recruits to the party and secret police, and on young people impatient to build a new world. In the countryside, however, the peasantry—some 120 million souls—had carried out their own revolution, deposing the gentry and establishing de facto peasant land ownership.</p> <p> inline<br /> scope-web|mobileapps<br /> inline"&gt;</p> <p><em>Russian Communist Party supporters participated in a march in Moscow on Defender of the Fatherland Day, Feb. 23. Photo: Serebryakov Dmitry/TASS/ZUMA PRESS </em></p> <p>With the devastated country on the verge of famine, Lenin forced reluctant party cadres to accept the separate peasant revolution for the time being. In the countryside, over the objections of communist purists, a quasi-market economy was allowed to operate.</p> <p>With Lenin’s death in 1924, this concession became Stalin’s problem. No more than 1% of the country’s arable land had been collectivized voluntarily by 1928. By then, key factories were largely owned by the state, and the regime had committed to a five-year plan for industrialization. Revolutionaries fretted that the Soviet Union now had two incompatible systems—socialism in the city and capitalism in the village.</p> <p>Stalin didn’t temporize. He imposed coercive collectivization from the Baltic Sea to the Pacific Ocean, even in the face of mass peasant rebellion. He threatened party officials, telling them that if they were not serious about eradicating capitalism, they should be prepared to cede power to the rising rural bourgeoisie. He incited class warfare against “kulaks” (better-off peasants) and anyone who defended them, imposing quotas for mass arrests and internal deportations.</p> <p>Stalin was clear about his ideological rationale. <strong><em>“Could we develop agriculture in kulak fashion, as individual farms, along the path of large-scale farms” as in “America and so on?” he asked. “No, we could not. We’re a Soviet country. We want to implant a collective economy, not solely in industry, but in agriculture.”</em></strong></p> <p>And he never backtracked, even when, as a result of his policies, the country descended into yet another famine from 1931 to 1933. Forced collectivization during those few years would claim 5 to 7 million lives.</p> <p><strong>The Soviet Union’s awful precedent did nothing to deter other communist revolutionaries. </strong>Mao Zedong, a hard man like Stalin, had risen to the top of the Chinese movement and, in 1949, he and his comrades emerged as the victors in the Chinese civil war. Mao saw the colossal loss of life in the Soviet experiment as intrinsic to its success.</p> <p> inline<br /> scope-web|mobileapps<br /> inline"&gt;</p> <p><em>Chairman Mao Zedong in Beijing, 1952. Photo: Lyu Houmin/Visual China Group/Getty Images </em></p> <p><strong>His Great Leap Forward, a violent campaign from 1958 to 1962, was an attempt to collectivize some 700 million Chinese peasants and to spread industry throughout the countryside. “Three years of hard work and suffering, and a thousand years of prosperity,” went one prominent slogan of the time.</strong></p> <p>Falsified reports of triumphal harvests and joyful peasants inundated the communist ruling elite’s well-provisioned compound in Beijing. In reality, Mao’s program resulted in one of history’s deadliest famines, claiming between 16 and 32 million victims. After the catastrophe, referred to by survivors as the “communist wind,” Mao blocked calls for a retreat from collectivization. As he declared, “the peasants want ‘freedom,’ but we want socialism.”</p> <p><strong>Nor did this exhaust the repertoire of communist brutality in the name of overthrowing capitalism.</strong> With their conquest of Cambodia in 1975, Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge drove millions from the country’s cities into the countryside to work on collectives and forced-labor projects. They sought to remake Cambodia as a classless, solely agrarian society.</p> <p><strong>The Khmer Rouge abolished money, banned commercial fishing and persecuted Buddhists, Muslims and the country’s ethnic Vietnamese and Chinese minorities as “infiltrators.” Pol Pot’s regime also seized children to pre-empt ideological infection from “capitalist” parents.</strong></p> <p>All told, perhaps as many as 2 million Cambodians, a quarter of the population, perished as a result of starvation, disease and mass executions during the four nightmarish years of Pol Pot’s rule. In some regions, skulls could be found in every pond.</p> <p>Marx’s class analysis denied legitimacy to any political opposition, not just from “bourgeois” elements but from within communist movements themselves—because dissenters “objectively” served the interests of the international capitalist order. The relentless logic of anticapitalist revolution pointed to a single leader atop a single-party system.</p> <p> inline<br /> scope-web|mobileapps<br /> inline"&gt;</p> <p><em>A Cambodian man prayed during a ceremony in front of a map of skulls of Khmer Rouge victims at the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum in Phnom Penh, March 10, 2002. Photo: Andy Eames/Associated Press </em></p> <p>From Russia and China to Cambodia, North Korea and Cuba, communist dictators have shared key traits. All have conformed, more or less, to the Leninist type: a fusion of militant ideologue and unprincipled intriguer. And all have possessed an extreme willpower—the prerequisite for attaining what only unspeakable bloodshed could bring.</p> <p><strong>Communism was hardly alone over the past century in committing grand carnage. </strong>Nazism’s repression and wars of racial extermination killed at least 40 million people, and during the Cold War, anticommunism spurred paroxysms of grotesque violence in Indonesia, Latin America and elsewhere.</p> <p>But as evidence of communism’s horrors emerged over the decades, it rightly shocked liberals and leftists in the West, who shared many of the egalitarian aims of the revolutionaries. Some repudiated the Soviet Union as a deformation of socialism, attributing the regime’s crimes to the backwardness of Russia or the peculiarities of Lenin and Stalin. After all, Marx had never advocated mass murder or Gulag labor camps. Nowhere did he argue that the secret police, deportation by cattle car and mass death from starvation should be used to establish collective farms.</p> <p><strong>But if we’ve learned one lesson from the communist century, it is this: That to implement Marxist ideals is to betray them. Marx’s demand to “abolish private property” was a clarion call to action—and an inexorable path to the creation of an oppressive, unchecked state.</strong></p> <p>A few socialists began to recognize that there could be no freedom without markets and private property. When they made their peace with the existence of capitalism, hoping to regulate rather than to abolish it, they initially elicited denunciations as apostates. Over time, more socialists embraced the welfare state, or the market economy with redistribution. But the siren call to transcend capitalism persists among some on the left.</p> <p>It also remains alive, though hardly in orthodox Marxist fashion, in Russia and China, the great redoubts of the communist century. Both countries continue to distrust what is perhaps most important about free markets and private property: Their capacity to give independence of action and thought to ordinary people, pursuing their own interests as they see fit, in private life, civil society and the political sphere.</p> <p>But anticapitalism also served as a program for an alternative world order, one in which long-suppressed nationalist aims might be realized. For Stalin and Mao, heirs to proud ancient civilizations, Europe and the U.S. represented the allure and threat of a superior West. The communists set themselves the task of matching and overtaking their capitalist rivals and winning a central place for their own countries on the international stage. This revolutionary struggle allowed Russia to satisfy its centuries-old sense of a special mission in the world, while it gave China a claim to be, once again, the Middle Kingdom.</p> <p>Vladimir Putin’s resistance to the West, with his peculiar mix of Soviet nostalgia and Russian Orthodox revival, builds on Stalin’s precedent. For its part, of course, China remains the last communist giant, even as Beijing promotes and tries to control a mostly market economy. Under Xi Jinping, the country now embraces both communist ideology and traditional Chinese culture in a drive to raise its standing as an alternative to the West.</p> <p><strong>Communism’s bloody century has come to an end, and we can only celebrate its passing. But troubling aspects of its legacy endure.</strong></p> </div> </div> </div> <div class="field field-name-field-source field-type-link-field field-label-hidden field-wrapper"><a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/zerohedge/feed/~3/T5UYGmmwIH0/remembering-communisms-bloody-century">Source</a></div><div class="field field-name-opencalais-continent-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-hidden field-wrapper"> <div class="field-items" class="comma-separated field-items"> <div class="field-item even" class="field-item even"><a href="/category/america">America</a></div> <div class="field-item odd" class="field-item even odd"><a href="/category/europe">Europe</a></div> <div class="field-item even" class="field-item even odd even"><a href="/category/africa">Africa</a></div> </div> </div> <div class="field field-name-opencalais-country-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-hidden field-wrapper"> <div class="field-items" class="comma-separated field-items"> <div class="field-item even" class="field-item even"><a href="/category/cuba">Cuba</a></div> <div class="field-item odd" class="field-item even odd"><a href="/category/russia">Russia</a></div> <div class="field-item even" class="field-item even odd even"><a href="/category/soviet-union">Soviet Union</a></div> <div class="field-item odd" class="field-item even odd even odd"><a href="/category/north-korea">North Korea</a></div> <div class="field-item even" class="field-item even odd even odd even"><a href="/category/china">China</a></div> </div> </div> <div class="field field-name-opencalais-region-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-hidden field-wrapper"> <div class="field-items" class="comma-separated field-items"> <div class="field-item even" class="field-item even"><a href="/category/latin-america">Latin America</a></div> </div> </div> Mon, 06 Nov 2017 02:45:00 +0000 Guest 54962 at https://5ux.com https://5ux.com/news/remembering-communisms-bloody-century#comments Scientists Look For A Cure For Politically Undesirable Behavior https://5ux.com/news/scientists-look-cure-politically-undesirable-behavior <a href="/news/scientists-look-cure-politically-undesirable-behavior"><img class="teaserimage" src="https://5ux.com/sites/5ux.com/files/styles/medium_250/public/resize/remote/f77ec44d11e8e4f5176129cdc9d04129-500x389.jpg?itok=ilJzBgOe" alt="Scientists Look For A Cure For Politically Undesirable Behavior" title="Scientists Look For A Cure For Politically Undesirable Behavior" /></a><div class="clearfix body field"> <div class="field-items"> <div class="field-item even"><p><em>Via GEFIRA,</em></p> <p><strong>The ‘Free World’ has taken on where the Soviet scientists and psychiatrists left off. </strong></p> <p><strong>German and American scientists of renowned Universities in Bonn and Lübeck do research on treatment for politically undesirable behaviour like their Soviet colleagues from the infamous Serbsky Central Research Institute in Moscow. In the Soviet Union people who protested the system had to undergo psychiatric treatment.</strong></p> <p>Vladimir Bukovsky, a world-known dissident survived one and described it. The same will be the fate of the so called Free World’s citizens if they fail to conform to the idea of a multi-cultural society. The powers that be have given a signal, and obliging, complaisant scientists are already busy working on bettering our collective and individual psyche. <strong><em>Apart from homophobia and Islamophobia, xenophobia is another psychiatric condition that needs to undergo therapy...hormonal therapy.</em></strong></p> <p>Throughout history, the world has been torn by two opposing factors that face each other with daggers drawn. These are natural biological, and unnatural forces, or reality and dystopia. It is natural for a human being to want to possess things and work as little as possible; to counter it, dystopian socialists, communists or Christian heretics came up with an idea of a society governed by the principle:<strong><em> From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.</em></strong></p> <p>It was supposed to work. And it failed miserably everywhere it was installed and implemented, from Cuba to East Germany, to the Soviet Union, to North Korea. </p> <p>The human being, an evolutionary extension of the animal world, is endowed with certain indelible features at the genetic level. Group loyalty and fear of aliens are among them. Man cannot survive alone. Mankind is not a biologically monolithic, homogeneous family. Rather, it is made up of human groups (clans, tribes, nations, races) that as a result of their long development are moving apart from each other. <strong>Biology is the basis on which human communities create culture and ultimately civilization, not the other way round.</strong></p> <p>Human groups, which have come into being as a result of living separately from each other for ages and so have developed incompatible cultures and religions, compete for resources i.e. for survival. Since man cannot make it through life on his own, he is a part of a group (clan, tribe, nation). <strong>In order for the group to function well and safeguard its (and simultaneously its members’ survival success), each group member is equipped with two psychological mechanisms (i) in-group loyalty and (ii) out-group enmity. </strong></p> <p>Group members collaborate, and support each other even to the point of sacrificing themselves for the whole. That’s the origin of altruism. Defection to another group means weakening one’s own group and strengthening the alien group, which has always been regarded as the gravest mortal sin: treason. (Dante’s hell has Judas Iscariot in its centre, which is the severest punishment for it). Altruism towards members of the out-group is something between in-group loyalty and defection. Its exuberant instances are technically referred to as <strong>pathological altruism. </strong></p> <p>The phenomenon can be compared to the rivalry among soccer teams. The team’s (survival) objective is to win the cup. The prize will be shared by all team members. In order to achieve it, each one of them has to cooperate with the others: no cooperation with members of any other, opposing, team is thinkable. A team’s player may want to sacrifice his personal career for another player from the same team by helping him to score as many goals as possible and thus becoming the team’s star, or by fouling the opposite team’s player and thus risk being sent out of the playground (death), thus enhancing the chances of his team’s win, but the same will not make things easier on the playground for any member of the opposing team. Helping members of the other team means lessening the chances for winning the cup (survival) of one’s own team and, ultimately one’s own chances.</p> <p>If my well-being and survival depends on that of the group that I am a member of, and, conversely, if my group’s survival is contingent on the cooperation, altruism and self-sacrifice of its members, including me, then in-group loyalty is in high demand whereas out-group (pathological) altruism is detrimental.<em><strong> That’s evolutionary mechanism. That’s game theory. That’s common sense. Everybody knows it. So do social engineers.</strong></em></p> <p><strong>Since social engineers have come up with the idea of building new, multi-racial, multi-national, multi-religious, multi-cultural societies, they have encountered the natural barrier: xenophobia, which is another name for in-group loyalty and out-group avoidance.</strong> Xenophobia is a biological mechanism imprinted at the genetic level that carries a survival advantage. It tells an individual to create bonds with members of the same group and be on his guard against aliens. To put it in plain language: xenophobia is practised at the very basic personal level each time parents warn their offspring to be wary of strangers: not to open the door to them, not to trust them. <em><strong>So modern social engineers have a problem. They need to overcome this deeply rooted biological barrier.</strong></em></p> <p><strong>A sign has been given, most probably followed by substantial grants and other financial incentives, and so scientists got down to work to find a cure for xenophobia.</strong> One of the research teams included psychologists and psychiatrists from Bonn, Tulsa, and Lübeck scientific institutions. Urged by the increasing globalization and the mass migration of peoples, as they say, the mentioned scientists, who otherwise dutifully recognize the evolutionary advantage of the in-group loyalty/out-group exclusion, nevertheless set themselves a task of demonstrating whether <strong>oxytocin</strong> can enforce the acceptance of aliens and reduce xenophobic out-group rejection. To this end they devised experiments in which subjects were asked to donate a certain amount of money to people in need, either compatriots or refugees. Before the experiment the subjects were screened for the level of xenophobia. During the experiment the subjects were either allowed to act on their own, or were exposed to peer pressure or were administered oxytocin intranasally. It turned out that (i) refugee-directed donation among the subjects scoring low on xenophobia were significantly increased by oxytocin, whereas (ii) oxytocin alone was not enough in the case of the subjects scoring high on xenophobia: their out-group avoidance (or parochial, as it is patronizingly named, altruism) could only be overcome by the orchestrated operation of oxytocin and peer pressure.</p> <p><strong>The conclusions are obvious.</strong></p> <p><strong>Citizens of host countries must be forced to accept the influx of aliens whether they like it or not. If they do not comply then, in the name of high-flown ideals of universal brotherhood of men, they will be forced either by peer pressure or by oxytocin or by both.</strong></p> <p>Oxytocin suits this purpose very well as this hormone raises the emotional well-being, it so to say oh-so humane.<em><strong> Like Aldous Huxley’s soma in his book Brave New World.</strong></em> The human being with his biologically-driven likes and dislikes is not to be tolerated, he must be changed. By ideological interaction or by chemistry. He must not be left alone. He must accept what he does not like not merely passively. He must be made to like what he previously disliked. </p> <p><strong><em>There was systematic political abuse of psychiatry in the Soviet Union, based on the interpretation of political opposition or dissent as a psychiatric problem. The ‘Free World’ has taken on where the Soviet ‘scientists’ left off.</em></strong></p> </div> </div> </div> <div class="field field-name-field-source field-type-link-field field-label-hidden field-wrapper"><a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/zerohedge/feed/~3/U7MC8F_RhYA/scientists-look-cure-politically-undesirable-behavior">Source</a></div><div class="field field-name-opencalais-calaisdocumentc-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-hidden field-wrapper"> <div class="field-items" class="comma-separated field-items"> <div class="field-item even" class="field-item even"><a href="/category/social-issues">Social Issues</a></div> <div class="field-item odd" class="field-item even odd"><a href="/category/religion">Religion</a></div> </div> </div> <div class="field field-name-opencalais-country-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-hidden field-wrapper"> <div class="field-items" class="comma-separated field-items"> <div class="field-item even" class="field-item even"><a href="/category/soviet-union">Soviet Union</a></div> </div> </div> Sat, 04 Nov 2017 00:40:00 +0000 Guest 54898 at https://5ux.com https://5ux.com/news/scientists-look-cure-politically-undesirable-behavior#comments Why Socialism Is Dead https://5ux.com/news/why-socialism-dead <a href="/news/why-socialism-dead"><img class="teaserimage" src="https://5ux.com/sites/5ux.com/files/styles/medium_250/public/resize/remote/26655966c677f26f4c251dc3e14883df-600x312.jpg?itok=jxLSdDfW" alt="Why Socialism Is Dead" title="Why Socialism Is Dead" /></a><div class="clearfix body field"> <div class="field-items"> <div class="field-item even"><p><em>Authored by Gary North via GaryNorth.com,</em></p> <p><strong>Socialism was a specific philosophy of government ownership of the means of production.</strong></p> <p><strong>The democratic welfare state was never a variety of socialism.</strong></p> <p><strong>Marx, the most famous socialist, despised democracy. </strong>He despised all attempts at economic amelioration through legislation. He wanted a proletarian revolution. He preached -- the correct verb -- a religion of revolution. That was the thesis of my first book, <em>Marx's Religion of Revolution</em> (1968). You can download it here.</p> <p><strong>He was silent about how the state would allocate resources under his system.</strong> He published nothing about the actual operations of the post-revolutionary society, socialism, and its final successor, communism. Late in his career, in his final major publication, little more than a pamphlet, he wrote this: "Between capitalist and communist society there lies the period of the revolutionary transformation of the one into the other. Corresponding to this is also a political transition period in which the state can be nothing but the <em>revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat</em>." (<em>Critique of the Gotha Program</em>, Pt. IV, 1875) This was a purely political focus. He was silent throughout his career about how the state should or will or can run the economy.</p> <p><strong>He provided some famous slogans. He offered rhetoric about the inevitable triumph of the proletarian class. But he offered no guidelines for the leaders of the victorious proletarians.</strong></p> <p><strong>Socialists in the nineteenth century were equally silent</strong> about how the state can allocate production so as to create the good society.</p> <p><strong>In the twentieth century, there was no major detailed theoretical treatise on the economics of socialism</strong> that went into detail about the actual operations of central planning agencies in a world where the state owned the means of production. There was no equivalent of Ludwig von Mises' <em>Human Action</em> or Murray Rothbard's <em>Man, Economy, and State</em> or George Reisman's <em>Capitalism</em>.</p> <p>In retrospect, this seems incredible. Here was a movement that captured the Soviet Union and China. Yet there was not a single book, let alone a shelf of books, available to Lenin in 1917 and Mao in 1949 that could serve as a guide to the kind of economic organization that they should impose. There was no treatise that could serve as a blueprint for the socialist New World Order, whether non-revolutionary socialism or Marxist communism. Yet Marx said that his was scientific socialism -- not utopian socialism, like the works of his critics.</p> <p><strong>Utopia meant "nowhere." They were all utopian socialists, including Marx.</strong></p> <p>Socialism has always been a movement based mostly on rhetoric. There was never any logic to it. <strong>There were endless promises about how politics or class revolution could bring in a socialist paradise</strong>, but there was nothing written about how this paradise would operate.</p> <p>Marx offered his famous ten steps in <em>The Communist Manifesto</em> (1848), but they were mere slogans. The fact that he included a central bank (#5) is indicative of how confused he was about the transition from capitalism to socialism to communism. He never went into any further detail. He had plenty of time to offer details. He died in 1883.</p> <p><strong>Here is what defenders of socialism refuse to face: there is no theory of socialist economic planning. </strong></p> <p>Socialist economic theory has always been missing in action. There is also no practical treatise that has served as a guide for socialist economic planners after their national revolutions. Socialist economic planning has been chaotic. No theory of socialist planning ever emerged from this chaos.</p> <p><strong>When we look at the history of socialism, meaning the state ownership of the means of production, there are few examples. </strong></p> <p>The USSR and Communist China did come close, but the black markets always operated in both societies.</p> <p>There have been tiny Communist states: Albania, Cuba, and North Korea. None have produced a theory of socialist planning.</p> <p>The Labor government of Great Britain from 1945 to 1951 nationalized coal mining and much of medical care, but it did not extend control over the capital markets of The City, the separate legal jurisdiction of the bankers in the center of London. The Bank of England maintained most of its sovereignty. Labor nationalized it in 1946, but then failed to exercise control. It remained Keynesian.</p> <p><strong>In short, there are no working models of socialism. </strong>This is fitting because there are no theoretical models of socialism.<strong> It has always been based on rhetoric, not logic.</strong> It has never been based on any system of economic causation. It has no theory of economic sanctions comparable to the sanctions in the free market of monetary profit and loss.</p> <p>This was pointed out in 1920 by Mises in his classic essay, "Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth." He argued that<em><strong> socialism is inherently irrational in theory. It has no system of private property. It, therefore, has no capital markets. But without capital markets, there can be no prices for capital. Without prices for capital, central planners do not know how to allocate capital to serve the wants of the people. So, he argued, pure socialism cannot survive.</strong></em></p> <p>This argument was never successfully refuted by any socialist. Polish immigrant and University of Chicago Professor Oskar Lange wrote several articles in the late 1930's on Mises' arguments, but they were strictly theoretical. When he went back to Communist Poland in 1945, and was later put into positions of authority in planning bureaus, nothing that he had written in his famous essays was actually implemented by the Polish government. His hypothetical socialist planning board always remained pure theory. It was based on the idea that central planners can do trial and error pricing to allocate capital. But there are no consumer-generated prices in a socialist commonwealth. More to the point, there were no economic sanctions attached to them. If there is no system of monetary profit and loss, there are no meaningful economic sanctions placed on the planners. But there are surely political sanctions, as the planners discovered under Stalin and Mao. It wasn't that the dictators liquidated capital. It was that they liquidated political opponents and bureaucrats who lost their favor.</p> <p>There have been very few Marxist economists teaching in American universities. They have had zero influence on the profession. There have hardly been many more socialist economists on the campus. There was a flurry of publicity in the late 1960's regarding a tiny group of these people, who call themselves the Union of Radical Political Economists. It had the unfortunate acronym of URPE, which was pronounced "urpee." I studied under one of its major figures in grad school, Howard Sherman. He lectured coherently. He wrote in English. He did not use equations. He never presented the case for socialism in the classroom that I attended. If he converted anybody to socialism, it must have been in private.</p> <p><strong>The socialist professors are confined mainly to the sociology departments and the English departments. These people have never taken an economics course. They do not comprehend the logic of economic causation. Like their predecessors in the nineteenth century, they confine their comments to rhetoric.</strong></p> <p><strong>We see crowds of undergraduates who claim to be in favor of socialism. But none of these people has ever read a book on socialist economic theory. This is understandable since there isn't one.</strong></p> <p>They are motivated by rhetoric. Rhetoric is all they have been exposed to. They go to large mass meetings to protest this or that aspect of capitalism. <strong>But they have no agendas. They don't have a personal agenda, and they don't have a social agenda. In this sense, they are just like Karl Marx.</strong></p> <p>The difference is this: <strong><em>they are not going to find sugar daddies like Frederick Engels, who ran his family's textile plant in Manchester and used a little of his money to put Marx on the dole for four decades.</em></strong></p> <p><strong>These people are noisy, but in terms of pursuing a systematic agenda for turning the United States into a socialist commonwealth, they really are harmless.</strong></p> <p>When Deng Xiaoping inaugurated an agricultural reform in 1979 which relied heavily on private ownership, he launched the most impressive period of economic growth that any large country has ever experienced. But that ended socialist economic planning. When, on December 25, 1991, Mikhail Gorbachev announced that the Soviet Union was going out of business, that ended the lure of socialism among the intellectuals. They had always clung to socialism because they expected that their class would exercise power in a socialist regime. When it became clear that the Soviet Union was too feeble to impose its will on the Russian masses, that was the end of their infatuation with Communism and socialism. It was always about power. It was never about the logic of socialism.</p> <p>So,<strong> in this month, the 100th anniversary of Lenin's Bolshevik revolution in Russia, we can rejoice in the fact that socialism is dead.</strong> From a theoretical standpoint, it was never alive. It was a corpse from day one. It was sustained by rhetoric, not logic.</p> <p><strong>If you want to visualize the future of socialism, think of Lenin's corpse in Lenin Square. </strong>It's all dressed up with nowhere to go.</p> </div> </div> </div> <div class="field field-name-field-source field-type-link-field field-label-hidden field-wrapper"><a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/zerohedge/feed/~3/qioU6Fpp8KY/why-socialism-dead">Source</a></div><div class="field field-name-opencalais-calaisdocumentc-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-hidden field-wrapper"> <div class="field-items" class="comma-separated field-items"> <div class="field-item even" class="field-item even"><a href="/category/social-issues">Social Issues</a></div> </div> </div> <div class="field field-name-opencalais-country-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-hidden field-wrapper"> <div class="field-items" class="comma-separated field-items"> <div class="field-item even" class="field-item even"><a href="/category/soviet-union">Soviet Union</a></div> </div> </div> Fri, 03 Nov 2017 00:30:00 +0000 Guest 54823 at https://5ux.com https://5ux.com/news/why-socialism-dead#comments "Liberal Socialism" - Another False Utopia https://5ux.com/news/liberal-socialism-another-false-utopia <div class="clearfix body field"> <div class="field-items"> <div class="field-item even"><p><em>Authored by Richard Ebeling via The Mises Institute,</em></p> <p><strong>Very often bad and failed ideas do not die, they simply reappear during periods of supposed social and political crisis in slightly different intellectual garb, </strong>and offer “solutions” that would merely help to bring about some of the very types of crises for which they once again claim to have the answers. <strong>Socialism in its various “progressive” mutations represents one of the leading ones in our time.</strong></p> <p>The latest manifestation of this appeared on August 24, 2017 in the<strong> <em>New Republic</em> online in an article by John B. Judis on, “The Socialism America Needs Now.” </strong>He is heartened by the wide appeal, especially among younger voters, that Bernie Sanders received during the 2016 presidential contest. He thinks that this may herald a rebirth and a renewed possibility for a socialist alternative to the current American political and economic system.</p> <p>Having traveled over the decades from the 1970s to the present from being a radical, revolutionary socialist to a more “moderate” one today, Mr. Judis admits that the Marxian-style socialism of the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth centuries is now long passé. The embarrassing experience of “socialism-in-practice” in the form Lenin and Stalin created in the Soviet Union or by Chairman Mao in China will not fly anymore.</p> <p><strong>From Soviet Central Planning to “Liberal Socialism”</strong></p> <p><strong>Central planning seemed not to work too well, and the “communist” variation on the socialist theme also had a tendency to be “authoritarian” with some drawbacks for human life and liberty.</strong> (He tactfully avoids mentioning that Marxist-inspired regimes in the twentieth century murdered well over a 100 million people — with some estimates suggesting the number might have been closer to 150 million or more in the name of building the “bright, beautiful socialist future.” See my article, “The Human Cost of Socialism in Power”.)</p> <p>He turns his mind and ideal to the “democratic socialist” parties and regimes in Western Europe in the post-World War II era, or as Mr.<strong> Judis prefers to call it, following John Maynard Keynes, “liberal socialism.” </strong>What makes this form of socialism “liberal”? It is belief that there can be a “socialism with a human face.” In other words, a form of “economic” socialism that leaves in place democratic politics with a respect for a broad range of personal and civil liberties.</p> <p><strong>We have heard this all so many times before. </strong>While Mr. Judis wishes to suggest that there is no real or definitive definition of “socialism” (any more than there are of “liberalism” or “democracy”), the fact is that throughout the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth, virtually all socialists condemned and called for the abolition of private ownership of the means of production, and in its place some form of socialist central planning directed by government in the name of “the people.”</p> <p>Mr. Judis actually more or less admits this, and that the only great debate among socialists and communists in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries was over how the socialist utopia would be brought about – through violent revolution or through the democratic ballot box. The Russian Marxists led by Vladimir Lenin insisted that only revolution and a “dictatorship of the proletariat” could bring “the workers” to power and assure their permanent triumph over the exploitive capitalist class. The German democratic socialists opted for democratic means to power and rejected the dictatorship of Lenin and later Stalin.</p> <p>But it is nonetheless the case that well into the post-World War II period this was a dispute over political means and not ideological ends, which remained for both branches of the socialist movement the abolition of capitalism and the imposition of socialist central planning. Communists wanted to bring about this transformation of society in one fell swoop through violent means and imposed dictatorship. The German Social Democrats and the “Fabian” socialists in Great Britain proposed democratic means, with socialism coming more gradually and through incremental extensions of government control and planning over more and more parts of society. But for both, the end result would be the same: centralized government direction of economic affairs and social change.</p> <p>As the 1950s turned into the 1960s and 1970s, more and more “democratic” socialists in Western Europe grudgingly accepted the fact that comprehensive socialist central planning was a failure as practiced in the Moscow-dominated Soviet bloc countries; and it brought little of the prosperity that government planning promised to provide as an escape from poverty in the “third world” countries of Asia, Africa and Latin America. Plus, the tyranny and brutality of Soviet-style socialism made it ethically difficult to defend. So the democratic socialists turned to the interventionist-welfare state to achieve their “social justice” ends without nationalizing all the means of production or centrally planning all economic activity in society. (See my article, “Barack Obama and the Meaning of Socialism”.)</p> <p><strong>In Search of Socialist Utopias Elsewhere</strong></p> <p>But those communist regimes were not so repulsive that many, if not most, of these democratic socialists in the West would not continue to still give moral indulgence and wishful hopes that, maybe, somehow, Marxian socialism would still finally work and fulfill its promise in, first, Mao’s China, then in Castro’s Cuba, or Ho Chi Minh’s Vietnam, or in the Sandinista’s Nicaragua, or . . . <strong>The collectivist dream and delusion springs eternal.</strong> Plus, after all, even a rude, crude and rough Marxist regime isn’t the United States – please, please almost anything other than capitalist America!</p> <p>Even today, the enlightened “progressive” can take a tour of Castro’s Cuba with the leftist magazine, <em>The Nation</em>. Don’t miss out! This November 2017 you can go with <em>The Nation</em> and, their advertisement promises, “learn about the Cuban Revolution from experts at some of its most pivotal locations, including the Moncada Barracks, the site of the first armed assault by Fidel Castro and his band of rebels on July 26, 1953.” The progressive political pilgrim to the collectivist promised land will be spending his or her “days meeting with prominent Cuban professors, government officials,” including “urban planners” and “health care workers.” Don’t miss on your chance to visit one of the remaining socialist “utopias” before global capitalism succeeds in taking it away.</p> <p><strong>No doubt, these “social justice” tourists will not be taken to La Cabana prison, where Che Guevara was assigned by Castro the role of state prosecutor against “enemies of the people,” following Fidel’s triumphant entrance into Havana and seizure of power in January 1959. In the role as unrestrained judge and jury, Che arbitrarily sent hundreds to their death, sometimes literally by his own hand.</strong></p> <p>Nor are they likely to have quoted to them Che’s words that, “My ideological training means that I am one of those people who believe that the solution to the world’s problems is to be found behind the Iron Curtain.” And that “I can’t be the friend of anyone who doesn’t share by ideas.” Or that Che was the one who in 1960 instituted communist Cuba’s system of forced labor camps. This would not fit in with the heroic face of Che on the t-shirts that, no doubt, some of these “progressive” travelers to utopia would be wearing. After all, Fidel and Che did it all for “the people,” and, well, they did have “good intentions.”</p> <p>Of course, while such political pilgrims are pleased to visit these places and bask in the moral satisfaction that the few remaining communist regimes in the world are still trying to make that “better world,” even if with the heavy hand of dictatorship, censorship of art, music and political views, the imprisonment of political opponents, and torture and execution of “enemies of the people” (all of which they still mostly turn a blind eye), they prefer to live in their own Western countries and dream the “liberal socialist” dream, as clearly Mr. Judis is doing.</p> <p><strong>Liberal Socialism as the Regulatory and Redistributive State</strong></p> <p><strong>What, precisely, is this democratic or “liberal” socialism to which Mr. Judis hopes a younger generation of Americans will turn in the years ahead? It turns out to be the same “utopia” of the interventionist-welfare state that Western countries have been following since the end of the Second World War, though, admittedly, to different degrees in different places around the world.</strong></p> <p>Mr. Judis wants the government to intensively and pervasively regulate, command, restrict and direct various aspects of the private enterprises in society, while assuring that American society can still take advantage of the self-interested incentives and innovations that can improve the material conditions of life. But the direction, form and extent to which private enterprisers shall be allowed to do those productive and innovative things with their businesses will be confined to and constrained within those avenues that serve the “higher” and “non-market” values and purposes of “society.”</p> <p>Matching the regulatory and interventionist state must be the redistributive welfare state. The excessive and unnecessary income and wealth of the businessmen and private sector investors of America must be taxed, and heavily, to assure greater material egalitarianism, and to fund all the social services and government-provided safety nets, which “would bring immeasurable benefit to ordinary Americans. A good watchword is economic security – something that is very lacking to all except the wealthiest Americans.”</p> <p><strong>At this point, it might be wondered what, then, marks off Mr. Judis’ “liberal socialism” from the already existing modern American “liberal” interventionist-welfare state? It turns out that it is all a matter of intentions and the intended recipients. </strong>In Mr. Judis’ view, mainstream modern American liberals have lost their way; they too frequently sleep with the enemy (think Bill and Hillary Clinton) in the form of excessively collaborating with businessmen and bankers to the latter’s benefit; American liberals and progressives have stopped sufficiently emphasizing “economic justice” for middle America with their increasingly primary focus on “identity politics.”</p> <p><strong>Liberal Socialism and Democratic Politics Without Romance</strong></p> <p>Also, unlike the communists and many radical socialists and some progressives, <strong>Mr. Judis calls for moving towards his notion of a better socialist future through a more active participation in the Democratic Party. </strong>The task is to nudge and shove mainstream modern American liberals in the Democratic Party further to the socialist left, which in many of their hearts these people already know is right. And to use the Democratic Party as the vehicle to propagandize and persuade more in society that socialism is good and just and the best for them.</p> <p>In other words, Mr. Judis calls for using the methods of the earlier German Democratic Socialists and the British Fabians, only do so in a way that does not seem to be as threatening or undermining of all the institutions of existing society as those earlier groups often did with their call for the total abolition of capitalism.</p> <p><strong>Mr. Judis’ “liberal socialism” is really just the existing interventionist-welfare state placed – “democratically” – in the “right” elected hands, so those manning and managing the machinery of government will do what he wants political authority to do, rather than what it is currently being done by Republicans and the current Democratic Party establishments.</strong></p> <p>A way for Mr. Judis to more easily defend his desire and ideal is to suggest that the existing political-economic system in America today is a free market, “neo-liberal” capitalism, rather than what the Italian economist, Vilfredo Pareto once more accurately labeled it: “bourgeois socialism.” That is, a system of government regulation, redistribution, favors and privileges that benefits many in the private enterprise sectors of society rather than a more “proletarian socialism” that simply would take from “the rich” to give to “the workers” and “the poor.”</p> <p>What is sometimes called “crony capitalism” is just Pareto’s “bourgeois socialism.” Pareto also understood, in the 1890s, with amazing clarity one of the insights of modern Public Choice theory, that “participatory democracy” of the community as a whole is a theoretical and practical illusion in an complex society. Politics in an unrestrained democracy always becomes a contest among special interest groups capable of gaining concentrated benefits from State intervention and redistribution at the diffused expense of the rest of the society.</p> <p>In democratic societies it takes the form of coalitions of special interest groups who succeed in offering campaign contributions and votes to politicians desiring elected political office, who then fulfill their campaign promises to those groups once in the actual halls of political power. In totalitarian societies such as in the former Soviet Union, it took the form of hierarchical position within the Communist Party and within the central planning bureaucracy, including the state enterprise managers, who had the decision-making power over access to and use of the socialized means of production; thus, the communist “classless society” had one of the most intricate social webs of power, privilege, favoritism and plunder ever seen in human society.</p> <p><strong>This “politics without romance,” to use Nobel Laureate, James M. Buchanan’s phase, shows why the notion of “the people” owning, controlling, regulating and overseeing the collective direction of an economy is pure illusion and deception concerning the reality of how and why political power works the way it does.</strong></p> <p>What Mr. Judis and, far too many who share his views about capitalism and some form of socialism – “liberal” or otherwise – fail to understand is that any and all forms of planning, regulation and political redistribution in fact takes power and decision-making out of the hands of the people about whom they express their concerns.</p> <p><strong>Real Participatory Liberation under Free Market Liberalism</strong></p> <p>It is the open, competitive market economy that, precisely, gives each and every individual wide latitude and liberty over his own personal affairs. It is the market that enables each of us to make his own choices concerning the profession, occupation or productive calling to pursue. It is the market that enables each and everyone of us to have the freedom to make our own choices to earn an income and spend that income as we consider best in terms of the values, beliefs, purposes and desires that we think may bring meaning and happiness to our individual lives.</p> <p><strong>It is the free society of individual liberty and voluntary association that provides truly participatory opportunities to form organizations, clubs, and groupings of almost any type to further the goals and ends outside of the narrower arena of market transactions to better our lives materially, socially, culturally and spiritually. (See my article, “Individual Liberty and Civil Society”.)</strong></p> <p>At this point, no doubt, Mr. Judis would reasonably ask, but what about those who are unable to provide for themselves, due to personal tragedy, unfortunate circumstances, or simply bad luck? Is this not the reason why enlightened and decent societies had to move “left-ward” to establish and financially provide for those unable to personally meet the essentials of everyday life and to have opportunities to fulfill their potentials as a human being? Is not the welfare state of “liberal socialism” the inescapable necessity of having a humane society?</p> <p>The classical liberal responds that these very concerns can be far better and more successfully solved and served through the voluntary institutions and associations of civil society than to turn such tasks over to the government. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, before the modern welfare state, all such “social problems” were handled with wide and positive affect by charities, philanthropies and for-profit organizations in places such as Great Britain and the United States. That their workings and successes are virtually unknown to most people in modern society shows the extent to which their history and social nobility has gone down a memory hole of collectivist misinterpretation and misunderstanding of what a society of liberty did and could provide. (See my article, “A World Without the Welfare State”.)</p> <p>Furthermore, the transfer of such welfare responsibility to the government reduces each and every recipient to a ward of the State. It is politicians and bureaucrats who decide the education your children will receive in government schools; they are the ones who determine the retirement possibilities you will have; the healthcare to which you will have access and its type; the wages and work conditions under which you may be allowed to employed or unemployed, and the forms and types of associations you may enter into and the activities and membership you permitted.</p> <p><strong>The “liberal socialism” about which Mr. Judis dreams is not the path to liberation but a continuing servitude and obedience to the those with political power</strong> and who have the arrogance and presumption to imagine that they know better how people are to earn a living, care for their own lives and that of their families, and associate with other members of society better than those individuals deciding all of these matters for themselves. (See my article, “Democratic Socialism Means Loss of Liberty”.)</p> <p><em><strong>One would have thought that after more than seven decades of the interventionist-welfare state as the political left’s “liberal socialist” alternative to Marxian socialist central planning, it would be realized that it is just another constraining and corrupt manifestation of the unworkability of any collectivist system of control and command.</strong></em></p> <p><strong>Mr. Judis’ program for a socialist America also shows the intellectual bankruptcy of those on “the left.” </strong>The revolutionary transformation of society, for which they yearn, ends up being nothing more than the existing interventionist-welfare state, just with the desire that people who agree with Mr. Judis should be at the helm of political power rather than those with whom he disagrees.</p> </div> </div> </div> <div class="field field-name-field-source field-type-link-field field-label-hidden field-wrapper"><a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/zerohedge/feed/~3/H9OHq7ojw8k/liberal-socialism-another-false-utopia">Source</a></div><div class="field field-name-opencalais-calaisdocumentc-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-hidden field-wrapper"> <div class="field-items" class="comma-separated field-items"> <div class="field-item even" class="field-item even"><a href="/category/politics">Politics</a></div> </div> </div> <div class="field field-name-opencalais-continent-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-hidden field-wrapper"> <div class="field-items" class="comma-separated field-items"> <div class="field-item even" class="field-item even"><a href="/category/america">America</a></div> <div class="field-item odd" class="field-item even odd"><a href="/category/asia">Asia</a></div> <div class="field-item even" class="field-item even odd even"><a href="/category/africa">Africa</a></div> </div> </div> <div class="field field-name-opencalais-country-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-hidden field-wrapper"> <div class="field-items" class="comma-separated field-items"> <div class="field-item even" class="field-item even"><a href="/category/soviet-union">Soviet Union</a></div> </div> </div> <div class="field field-name-opencalais-politicalevent-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-hidden field-wrapper"> <div class="field-items" class="comma-separated field-items"> <div class="field-item even" class="field-item even"><a href="/category/presidential-contest">Presidential contest</a></div> </div> </div> Tue, 29 Aug 2017 16:40:35 +0000 Guest 50854 at https://5ux.com https://5ux.com/news/liberal-socialism-another-false-utopia#comments New York Times Says Sex was Better for Communists https://5ux.com/news/new-york-times-says-sex-was-better-communists <div class="clearfix body field"> <div class="field-items"> <div class="field-item even"><p>Via The Daily Bell</p> <p>Don’t you know that to be a liberated woman, you need to have the sex life of a chimpanzee?</p> <p>That’s the latest propaganda to come out of the New York Times.</p> <p>The Soviet Union may have had its pitfalls–you know, like the murder and starvation of tens of millions of people. But women had great sex lives!</p> <blockquote><p>A comparative sociological study of East and West Germans conducted after reunification in 1990 found that Eastern women had twice as many orgasms as Western women…</p> <p>In contrast, postwar West German women had stayed home and enjoyed all the labor-saving devices produced by the roaring capitalist economy. But they had less sex, and less satisfying sex, than women who had to line up for toilet paper.</p> </blockquote> <p>Tied up in this quest for women’s liberation is the lie that promiscuity equals empowerment. They basically use the sexual crusader male stereotype as a target for equality. Female orgasms are the bedrock of social justice, apparently, and a solid foundation on which other rights can be built.</p> <blockquote><p>Some might remember that Eastern bloc women enjoyed many rights and privileges unknown in liberal democracies at the time, including major state investments in their education and training, their full incorporation into the labor force, generous maternity leave allowances and guaranteed free child care.</p> </blockquote> <p>They were indoctrinated and forced to work. If they produced another little communist, they were given some time off. Sounds like a dream.</p> <p>The Soviet Union was very good at convincing youth to join their movement. Tell the kids with raging hormones that they are right to follow their base instincts, and you have a supporter. Make it easy for them to shirk responsibility for their decisions by legalizing abortion.</p> <blockquote><p>State-run women’s committees sought to re-educate boys to accept girls as full comrades, and they attempted to convince their compatriots that male chauvinism was a remnant of the pre-socialist past.</p> </blockquote> <p>That is what the author of that article, the New York Times, and the “progressive” left truly admire. The fact that a society was able to forcibly re-educate the <em>barbaric male oppressors</em>.</p> <p>To the left, equality means dragging everyone down to the same level. They laud the fact that women were forced to labor for the Soviet regime, saying “Communists invested major resources in the education and training of women and in guaranteeing their employment.”</p> <p>They gloss over the poverty, brutal conditions, and authoritarian state power. Instead, they tout the state as a replacement for husbands and families.</p> <blockquote><p>Communist women enjoyed a degree of self-sufficiency that few Western women could have imagined. Eastern bloc women did not need to marry, or have sex, for money. The socialist state met their basic needs…</p> </blockquote> <p>The missing truth is that sex was all the pleasure anyone in the Soviet Union could extract from life. It was the one thing the government hadn’t taken from them.</p> <p>Perhaps those living in freer countries did not have to rely on one fleeting animalistic pleasure in order to feel fulfilled. They had the freedom to seek pleasure elsewhere. They could pursue true happiness.</p> <p>Perhaps when people care about their lives, their future, their children, they don’t need to base their lives around sexual pleasure. Don’t get me wrong, there is nothing wrong with sex, but there is something wrong with making it the central theme of your life. Clearly, it was an escape for women who had nothing else going for them in the Soviet Union.</p> <p>It is common for people to hold onto whatever pleasure they can squeeze from a horrible situation. It is a psychological defense mechanism to say, “This is what I want! I may not have the freedom to speak my mind or choose my job, but at least I have great orgasms!”</p> <p>The author concludes that heavy handed government intervention was worth it in order to liberate women.</p> <blockquote><p>Those comrades’ insistence on government intervention may seem heavy-handed to our postmodern sensibilities, but sometimes necessary social change — which soon comes to be seen as the natural order of things — needs an emancipation proclamation from above.</p> </blockquote> <p>We just have to put up with a touch of genocide and a dose of forced labor, and we will be free at last!</p> </div> </div> </div> <div class="field field-name-field-source field-type-link-field field-label-hidden field-wrapper"><a href="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/zerohedge/feed/~3/Ib2zt_JI7_8/propaganda-new-york-times-says-sex-was-better-communists">Source</a></div><div class="field field-name-opencalais-calaisdocumentc-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-hidden field-wrapper"> <div class="field-items" class="comma-separated field-items"> <div class="field-item even" class="field-item even"><a href="/category/social-issues">Social Issues</a></div> </div> </div> <div class="field field-name-opencalais-country-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-hidden field-wrapper"> <div class="field-items" class="comma-separated field-items"> <div class="field-item even" class="field-item even"><a href="/category/soviet-union">Soviet Union</a></div> </div> </div> Wed, 23 Aug 2017 14:20:03 +0000 Guest 50518 at https://5ux.com https://5ux.com/news/new-york-times-says-sex-was-better-communists#comments