Part 2: The post WWII strategy of the neocons has been shaped by Russo phobia against the Soviet Union and now Russia
The Turning on Russia Series
By Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould
In the months and years following the Arab-Israeli war of October 1973, the issue of Israel and its security would become so enmeshed in American policy as to become one and the same. The lesson of October 1973 that détente had succeeded in securing American and Soviet interests, was anathema to the entire neoconservative agenda and revealed its true hand. At the time a majority of American Jews were not necessarily against better U.S.-Soviet relations. But with the forceful hammering of influential right-wing neoconservative pundits like Ben Wattenberg and Irving Kristol and the explosive manifestation of the Evangelical Christian Zionist movement, many of Israel’s liberal American supporters were persuaded to turn against détente for the first time. According to the distinguished State Department Soviet specialist Raymond Garthoff’s Détente and Confrontation; “Analytically and objectively the American-Soviet cooperation in defusing both the Israeli-Arab conflict, and their own involvement in a crisis confrontation, may be judged a successful application of crisis management under détente.” But as Garthoff acknowledges, this success threatened “Israel’s jealously guarded freedom of action to determine unilaterally its own security requirements,” and set off alarm bells in Tel Aviv and Washington.
With Richard Nixon on the ropes with Watergate and Vietnam dragging to a conclusion, American foreign policy was open to external pressure and within a year would fall permanently into the hands of a coalition of pro-Israel neoconservative and right-wing defense industry lobbying groups. These groups such as the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA), the American Security Council and Committee on the Present Danger would set about to make American interests and their own personal crusade to control the greater Middle East, interchangeable.
The issue of U.S. support for Israel, its neoconservative backers and its dedicated anti-Russian bias has a long and complicated history dating back long before Theodor Herzl’s19th century Zionist Project. Zionism was not instilled in American thinking by Jews but by 16th and 17th century British Puritans whose sacred mission was to reestablish an ancient Kingdom of Israel and fulfill what they believed to be biblical prophecy based on the King James Version of the bible.
Britain’s Anglo/Israel movement found common cause with the British Empire’s 19th and early 20th century political goals of controlling the Middle East through Jewish resettlement of Palestine which culminated in the Balfour declaration of 1917. This long term plan of the British Empire continues on today through American policy and what has been dubbed the Zionist Project or the Yinon plan. Add the 700 million strong worldwide Evangelical movement and its 70 million Christian Zionists in the United States and American foreign policy towards the Middle East becomes an apocalyptic confluence of covert agendas, ethnic grudges and religious feuds locked in permanent crisis.
It has been argued that the neoconservative’s slavish adherence to Israel makes neoconservatism an exclusively Jewish creation. Numerous neoconservative writers like the New York Times’ David Brooks tar critics of Israel as anti-Semites by accusing them of substituting the term “neoconservative” for “Jew.” Others argue that “neoconservatism is indeed a Jewish intellectual and political movement” with “close ties to the most extreme nationalistic, aggressive, racialist and religiously fanatic elements within Israel.”
Although clearly acting as a political front for Israel’s interests and an engine for permanent war, neoconservatism would never have succeeded as a political movement without the support and cooperation of powerful non-Jewish elites. New America Foundation co-founder Michael Lind writes in The Nation in 2004, “Along with other traditions that have emerged from the anti-Stalinist left, neoconservatism has appealed to many Jewish intellectuals and activists but it is not, for that reason, a Jewish movement. Like other schools on the left, neoconservatism recruited from diverse “farm teams” including liberal Catholics… populists, socialists and New Deal liberals in the South and Southwest… With the exception of Middle East strategy… there is nothing particularly “Jewish” about neoconservative views on foreign policy. While the example of Israel has inspired American neocons… the global strategy of today’s neocons is shaped chiefly by the heritage of cold war anti-Communism.”
Add to that the abiding influence of Britain’s Imperial policy-makers following World War II – the British creation of Pakistan in 1947 and Israel in 1948 – and the hidden hand of a global imperial strategy is revealed. Pakistan exists to keep the Russians out of Central Asia and Israel exists to keep the Russians out of the Middle East.
Whether American democracy could have survived the stresses put upon it by the Great Depression, World War II, the Cold War and the ongoing frauds posed by neoconservatism now poses an answerable question. It couldn’t. Fletcher School international law professor Michael Glennon maintains the creation of the national security state in 1947 as a second, double government effectively renders the question mute. He writes “The public believes that the constitutionally-established institutions control national security policy, but that view is mistaken. Judicial review is negligible; congressional oversight is dysfunctional; and presidential control is nominal. Absent a more informed and engaged electorate, little possibility exists for restoring accountability in the formulation and execution of national security policy.”
The motion to kill détente and hobble Henry Kissinger’s balance of power or “realist” foreign policy quickly followed the 1973 war in the form of the anti-Soviet amendment to the Trade Act known as Jackson-Vanik. Sponsored by Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson of Washington and Representative Charles A. Vanik of Ohio but engineered by Albert Wohlstetter acolyte Richard Perle, trade concessions and virtually anything regarding Moscow would be forever linked to the Zionist Project through Jewish emigration to Israel from the Soviet Union.
Supported by organized labor, traditional conservatives, liberals and neoconservatives, Jackson-Vanik hobbled efforts by the Nixon/Ford administration to slow the arms race and move towards a permanent easing of tensions with the Soviet Union. It removed control of American foreign policy from the President and Secretary of State while delivering it permanently into the hands of the old anti-Stalinist/Trotskyist neoconservatives.
Jackson-Vanik overcame liberal support for détente because of an intellectual dishonesty within the non-communist left that had been roiling America’s intelligentsia since the 1930s. That dishonesty had transformed left wing Trotskyists into the CIA’s very own anti-Soviet cultural Cold Warriors and aligned them with the goals of the West’s right-wing. By the1950s their cause was not about left or right, or even liberal anti-Communism versus Stalinism. It was about exchanging a value system of laws and checks and balances for a system alien to America. As Frances Stoner Saunder’s describes in her book The Cultural Cold War, it was simply about grabbing power and keeping it. “‘It’s so corrupt, it doesn’t even know it,’ said [legendary Random House editor] Jason Epstein, in an uncompromising mood. ‘When these people talk about a “counter-intelligentsia”, what they do is to set up a false and corrupt value system to support whatever ideology they’re committed to at the time. The only thing they’re really committed to is power, and the introduction of Tzarist-Stalinist strategies in American politics. They’re so corrupt they probably don’t even know it. They’re little, lying apparatchiks. People who don’t believe in anything, who are only against something, shouldn’t go on crusades or start revolutions.”
But neoconservatives did go on crusades and start revolutions and continued to corrupt the American political process until it was unrecognizable. In 1973 neoconservatives did not want the United States having better relations with Moscow and created Jackson-Vanik to obstruct it. But their ultimate goal as explained by Janine Wedel in her 2009 study the Shadow Elite, was a Trotskyist dream; the complete transfer of power from an elected government representing the American people to what she referred to as a “new nomenklatura,” or “guardians of the national interest,” free from the restraints imposed by the laws of the nation. Wedel writes, “Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the late senator from New York and onetime neoconservative, suggested that this kind of suspension of the rules and processes was what motivated him to part ways with the movement in the 1980s: ‘They wished for a military posture approaching mobilization; they would create or invent whatever crises were required to bring this about.’”
The synthesis of James Burnham’s Cold War ethos (established formally by Paul Nitze in his 1950 NSC-68) together with Trotskyism (espoused by the core neoconservatives) combined with this aggressive new support for Israel empowered America’s neoconservatives with a cult-like political influence over American decision-making that would only grow stronger with time.
As envisaged by James Burnham, the Cold War was a struggle for the world and would be fought with the kind of political subversion he’d learned to master as a leading member of Trotsky’s Fourth International. But joined to Israel by Burnham’s fellow Trotskyists and the underlying influence of British Israelism – it would enter an apocalyptic mythos and resist any and all efforts to bring it to an end. John B. Judis, former editor of the New Republic relates in a 1995 Foreign Affairs book review of the Rise of Neoconservatism by John Ehrman: “In the framework of international communism, the Trotskyists were rabid internationalists rather than realists or nationalists… The neoconservatives who went through Trotskyist and socialist movements came to see foreign policy as a crusade, the goal of which was first global socialism, then social democracy, and finally democratic capitalism. They never saw foreign policy in terms of national interest or balance of power. Neoconservatism was a kind of inverted Trotskyism, which sought to ‘export democracy’ in [Joshua] Muravchik’s words, in the same way that Trotsky originally envisaged exporting socialism.”
Through the eyes of the State Department’s Raymond Garthoff, the moves against détente in 1973 are viewed from the narrow perspective of a professional American diplomat. But according to Judis in his article titled “Trotskyism to Anachronism: The Neoconservative Revolution” the legacy of NSC-68 and Trotskyism contributed to a form of apocalyptic thinking that would slowly exclude the professional policy-making process from the realm of empirical observation and replace it with a politicized mechanism for creating endless conflict. “The constant reiteration and exaggeration of the Soviet threat was meant to dramatize and win converts, but it also reflected the doomsday revolutionary mentality that characterized the old left.”
In the end, Judis argues that the neoconservative success at using self-fulfilling prophecies to kill détente actually made the Cold War far more dangerous by encouraging the Soviet Union to undertake a military buildup and expand its influence which the neoconservatives then used as proof that their theories were correct. In effect, “Neoconservatism was a self-fulfilling prophecy. It helped precipitate the crisis in U.S.-Soviet relations that it then claimed to uncover and respond to.”
Writing in the summer of 1995 with the Cold War finally ended and the storm passed, Judis considered neoconservatism as the subject of ridicule, describing key neoconservatives as merely political anachronisms and not the thriving political dynamo described by John Ehrman in his book. But in the end Ehrman turned out to be right, the neoconservative crusade had not come to a close with the end of the Cold War but had only entered a new and more dangerous phase.
Copyright © 2018 Fitzgerald & Gould All rights reserved
Part 1: It’s been done to Russia before but this time will be the last
The Turning on Russia Series
By Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould
“Stanley Fischer, the 73–year-old vice chair of the U.S. Federal Reserve, is familiar with the decline of the world’s rich. He spent his childhood and youth in the British protectorate of Rhodesia… before going to London in the early 1960s for his university studies. There, he experienced first-hand the unravelling of the British Empire… Now an American citizen, Fischer is currently witnessing another major power taking its leave of the world stage… the United States is losing its status as a global hegemonic power, he said recently… The U.S. political system could take the world in a very dangerous direction…”
A Shrinking Giant, Spiegel Online, 9/11/2017
With the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the creation of the so called Wolfowitz Doctrine in 1992 during the administration of George Herbert Walker Bush, the United States claimed the mantle of the world’s first and only Unipower as well as its intention to crush any nation or system that would oppose it in the future. The New World Order foreseen just a few short years ago becomes more disorderly by the day, made worse by varying degrees of incompetence and greed emanating from Berlin, London, Paris and Washington. As a further sign of the ongoing seismic shocks rocking America’s claim to leadership, by the time Stanley Fischer’s interview appeared in the online version of the conservative German magazine Der Spiegel, he had already announced his resignation as vice chair of the Federal Reserve; eight months ahead of schedule. If anyone knows about the decline and fall of empires it is the “globalist” and former Bank of Israel president, Stanley Fischer. Not only did he experience the unravelling of the British Empire as a young student in London, he actually assisted in the wholesale dismantling of the Soviet Empire during the 1990s.
As an admitted product of the British Empire and point man for its long term imperial aims, that makes Stanley Fischer not just empire’s Angel of Death, but its rag and bone man.
Alongside a handful of Harvard economists led by Jonathan Hay, Larry Summers, Andrei Shleifer, Anatoly Chubais and Jeffry Sachs, (the Harvard Project) Fischer helped to throw 100 million Russians into poverty overnight – privatizing, or as some would say piratizing – the Russian economy. Yet, Americans never got the real story because a slanted anti-Russia narrative covered the true nature of the robbery from beginning to end. As described by public policy scholar and anthropologist Janine R. Wedel in her 2009 book Shadow Elite, “Presented in the West as a fight between enlightenment Reformers trying to move the economy forward through privatization, and retrograde Luddites who opposed them, this story misrepresented the facts. The idea or goal of privatization was not controversial, even among communists… the Russian Supreme Soviet, a communist body, passed two laws laying the groundwork for privatization. Opposition to privatization was rooted not in the idea itself but in the particular privatization program that was implemented, the opaque way in which it was put into place, and the use of executive authority to bypass the parliament.”
Intentionally set up to fail for Russia and the Russian people under the cover of a false narrative, she continues “The outcome rendered privatization ‘a de facto fraud,’ as one economist put it, and the parliamentary committee that had judged the Chubais scheme to ‘offer fertile ground for criminal activity’ was proven right.”
If Stanley Fischer, a man who helped bring about a de facto criminal-privatization-fraud to post-empire Russia says the U.S. is on a dangerous course, the time has arrived for post-empire Americans to ask what role Stanley Fischer played in putting the U.S. on that dangerous course. Unknown to Americans is the blunt force trauma Stanley Fischer and the “prestigious” Harvard Project delivered to Russia under the leadership of Boris Yeltsin during the 1990s. According to The American Conservative’s James Carden “As the Center for Economic and Policy Research noted back in 2011… ‘the IMF’s intervention in Russia during Fischer’s tenure led to one of the worst losses in output in history, in the absence of war or natural disaster.’ Indeed, one Russian observer compared the economic and social consequences of the IMF’s intervention to what one would see in the aftermath of a medium-level nuclear attack.”
Neither do most Americans know that it was President Carter’s national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski’s 1970s grand plan for the conquest of the Eurasian heartland that boomeranged back to terrorize Europe and America in the 21st century. Zbigniew Brzezinski spent much of his life undermining the Communist Soviet Union and then spent the rest of it worrying about its resurgence as a Czarist empire under Vladimir Putin. It might be unfair to say that hating Russia was his only obsession. But a common inside joke during his tenure as the President’s top intelligence officer was that he couldn’t find Nicaragua on a map. If anyone provided the blueprint for the United States to rule in a unipolar world following the Soviet Union’s collapse it was Zbigniew Brzezinski and if anyone could be said to represent the debt driven financial system that fueled America’s post-Vietnam Imperialism, it’s Stanley Fischer. His departure should have sent a chill down every neoconservative’s spine. Their dream of a New World Order has once again ground to a halt at the gates of Moscow.
Whenever the epitaph for the abbreviated American century is written it will be sure to feature the iconic role the neoconservatives played in hastening its demise. After emerging from their Marxist/Leninist cocoon after World War II their movement helped to establish the Cold War. And from the chaos created by Vietnam they set to work restructuring American politics, finance and foreign policy to their own purposes. Dominated at the beginning by Zionists and Trotskyists but directed by the Anglo/American establishment and their intelligence elites, the neoconservatives’ goal was to deconstruct the nation-state through cultural cooptation and financial subversion and in that they have been overwhelmingly successful. From the end of World War II through the 1980s the focus of this pursuit was on the Soviet Union, but since the Soviet collapse in 1991, their focus has been on dismantling any and all opposition to their global dominion.
Shady finance, imperial misadventures and neoconservatism go hand in hand. The CIA’s founders saw themselves as partners in this enterprise and the defense industry welcomed them with open arms. McGill University economist R.T. Naylor, author of 1987’s Hot Money and the Politics of Debt, described how “Pentagon Capitalism” had made the Vietnam War possible by selling the Pentagon’s debt to the rest of the world. “In effect, the US Marines had replaced Meyer Lansky’s couriers, and the European central banks arranged the ‘loan-back’” Naylor writes. “When the mechanism was explained to the late [neoconservative] Herman Kahn – lifeguard of the era’s chief ‘think tank’ and a man who popularized the notion it was possible to emerge smiling from a global conflagration – he reacted with visible delight. Kahn exclaimed excitedly, ‘We’ve pulled off the biggest ripoff in history! We’ve run rings around the British Empire.’” In addition to their core of ex-Trotskyist intellectuals early neoconservatives could count among their ranks such establishment figures as James Burnham, father of the Cold War Paul Nitze, Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson, Jeane Kirkpatrick and Zbigniew Brzezinski himself.
From the beginning of their entry into the American political mainstream in the 1970s it was known that their emergence could spell the end of democracy in America and yet Washington’s more moderate gatekeepers allowed them in without much of a fight. Peter Steinfels’ 1979 classic The Neoconservatives: The men who are changing America’s politics begins with these fateful words. “THE PREMISES OF THIS BOOK are simple. First, that a distinct and powerful political outlook has recently emerged in the United States. Second, that this outlook, preoccupied with certain aspects of American life and blind or complacent towards others, justifies a politics which, should it prevail, threatens to attenuate and diminish the promise of American democracy.”
But long before Steinfels’ 1979 account, the neoconservative’s agenda of inserting their own interests ahead of America’s was well underway attenuating American democracy, undermining détente and angering America’s NATO partners that supported it. According to the distinguished State Department Soviet specialist Raymond Garthoff, détente had been under attack by right-wing and military-industrial forces (led by Senator “Scoop” Jackson) from its inception. But America’s ownership of that policy underwent a shift following America’s intervention on behalf of Israel during the 1973 October war. Garthoff writes in his detailed volume on American-Soviet relations Détente and Confrontation, “To the allies the threat [to Israel] did not come from the Soviet Union, but from unwise actions by the United States, taken unilaterally and without consultation. The airlift [of arms] had been bad enough. The U.S. military alert of its forces in Europe was too much.”
In addition to the crippling Arab oil embargo that followed, the crisis of confidence in U.S. decision-making nearly produced a mutiny within NATO. Garthoff continues, “The United States had used the alert to convert an Arab-Israeli conflict, into which the United States had plunged, into a matter of East-West confrontation. Then it had used that tension as an excuse to demand that Europe subordinate its own policies to a manipulative American diplomatic gamble over which they had no control and to which they had not even been privy, all in the name of alliance unity.”
In the end the U.S. found common cause with its Cold War Soviet enemy by imposing a cease-fire accepted by both Egypt and Israel thereby confirming the usefulness of détente. But as related by Garthoff this success triggered an even greater effort by Israel’s “politically significant supporters” in the U.S. to begin opposing any cooperation with the Soviet Union, at all. Garthoff writes, “The United States had pressed Israel into doing precisely what the Soviet Union (as well as the United States) had wanted: to halt its advance short of complete encirclement of the Egyptian Third Army east of Suez… Thus they [Israel’s politically significant supporters] saw the convergence of American-Soviet interests and effective cooperation in imposing a cease-fire as a harbinger of greater future cooperation by the two superpowers in working toward a resolution of the Israeli-Arab-Palestinian problem.”
Copyright © 2018 Fitzgerald & Gould All rights reserved
A great review of The Voice
The Voice
by Paul Fitzgerald & Elizabeth Gould
Review by Burl and Merry Hall
5.0 out of 5 stars Towards the Truth!
October 20, 2015
Powerful book, powerful story. At points, I erupted into spiritual ecstasy. If the reader is truly attentive to this book, she may become more attuned to becoming enlightened. She will be enlightened by the history taught in the book regarding the Grail Quest. My personal response to this book is that it is one of many that include the likes of mythologist Joseph Campbell and psychiatrist Carl Jung that can lead us into wholeness. Ok, I’ll also nudge my book, “Sophia’s Web: A Passionate Call to Heal our Wounded Nature.” My point regarding “The Voice” is: Can we let go of our conditioned minds and become virgin, i.e., de-conditioned (the actual meaning of the virgin birth, it wasn’t meant to be literal. Can we let go of our conditioned minds in finding the Grail, the Deep Knowledge of “All-That-Is”? This book is one that will point you towards that knowledge. Not a small profit from such a small inexpensive book. What’s money anyway? For more information on The Voice visit www.grailwerk.com
Our Neocon History Articles 2011-2017
We are finishing up the finale to our Neocon history series. Here are the URLs to the already published articles:
—The Neocon Takeover of America Series Published August, 2017
Part 1: Darkness at Noon
Part 2: The West is Disintegrating
Part 3: Engineering Public Perception to the Right for the Right
Part 4: Ceaseless Propaganda, Outright Lies and Distorted Facts
–The Universal Empire Series, Published April, 2017
Part 1: American Imperialism Leads the World Into Dante’s Vision of Hell
Part 2: How Neocons Push for War by Cooking the Books
Part 3: How the CIA Created a Fake Western Reality for ‘Unconventional Warfare’
Part 4: The Final Stage of the Machiavellian Elites’ Takeover of America
—America, an Empire in Twilight Series Published November, 2016
Part 1: When America Became the Dark Force
Part 2: How Guilt, Innocence & Facts Have Been Rendered Irrelevant
Part 3: Neoconizing the Just War Doctrine in the service of American Empire
Part 4: The End of Illusion
FINALE: The Trump Card is played! Never Underestimate THE FOOL
—Psychological Warfare and the American Mind Series Published September, 2016
Part 1: A Campaign Where the Lie Became the Truth and the Truth Became the Enemy of the State
Part 2: Building the Afghan Narrative with Black Propaganda, the People, the Process & the Product
Part 3: A Clockwork Afghanistan
Part 4: Willie Wonka & the National Security State
Individual Articles
America’s Late Stage Imperial Dementia 11/3/2016
New York Times Strikes Out Again on Afghanistan Published 11/6/2017
What have they done to our fair sister? An Epitaph Published 10/6/2017
Brzezinski Vision to Lure Soviets into ‘Afghan Trap’ Is Orlando’s Nightmare Published 6/16/2016
America Pivots to Brzezinski’s Delusion of Eurasian Conquest Essay 10/14/2015
America Pivots to Brzezinski’s Delusion of Eurasian Conquest Published 6/2/2015
America’s Financial Armageddon and Afghanistan Published 9/14/2011.
Our Neocon History Articles 2011-2017
We are finishing up the finale to our Neocon history series. Here are the URLs to the already published articles:
–The Neocon Takeover of America Series Published August, 2017
Part 1: Darkness at Noon
Part 2: The West is Disintegrating
Part 3: Engineering Public Perception to the Right for the Right
Part 4: Ceaseless Propaganda, Outright Lies and Distorted Facts
–The Universal Empire Series, Published April, 2017
Part 1: American Imperialism Leads the World Into Dante’s Vision of Hell
Part 2: How Neocons Push for War by Cooking the Books
Part 3: How the CIA Created a Fake Western Reality for ‘Unconventional Warfare’
Part 4: The Final Stage of the Machiavellian Elites’ Takeover of America
–America, an Empire in Twilight Series Published November, 2016
Part 1: When America Became the Dark Force
Part 2: How Guilt, Innocence & Facts Have Been Rendered Irrelevant
Part 3: Neoconizing the Just War Doctrine in the service of American Empire
Part 4: The End of Illusion
FINALE: The Trump Card is played! Never Underestimate THE FOOL
–Psychological Warfare and the American Mind Series Published September, 2016
Part 1: A Campaign Where the Lie Became the Truth and the Truth Became the Enemy of the State
Part 2: Building the Afghan Narrative with Black Propaganda, the People, the Process & the Product
Part 3: A Clockwork Afghanistan
Part 4: Willie Wonka & the National Security State
Individual Articles
America’s Late Stage Imperial Dementia 11/3/2016
New York Times Strikes Out Again on Afghanistan Published 11/6/2017
What have they done to our fair sister? An Epitaph Published 10/6/2017
Brzezinski Vision to Lure Soviets into ‘Afghan Trap’ Is Orlando’s Nightmare Published 6/16/2016
America Pivots to Brzezinski’s Delusion of Eurasian Conquest Essay 10/14/2015
America Pivots to Brzezinski’s Delusion of Eurasian Conquest Published 6/2/2015
America’s Financial Armageddon and Afghanistan Published 9/14/2011.
Huffingtonpost Published Blogs
URLs for OPEDs and Films by GOULD&FITZGERALD with BIO
URLs for OPEDs by GOULD&FITZGERALD
—New York Times Strikes Out Again on Afghanistan published 11/6/2017.
—What have they done to our fair sister? An Epitaph published 10/6/2017.
—The Neocon Takeover of America Series published 8/24/2017.
Part 1: Darkness at Noon
Part 2: The West is Disintegrating
Part 3: Engineering Public Perception to the Right for the Right
Part 4: Ceaseless Propaganda, Outright Lies and Distorted Facts
–The Universal Empire Series, an examination of the neocon takeover of American policy that began after World War II, published April, 2017
Part 1: American Imperialism Leads the World Into Dante’s Vision of Hell Part 2: How Neocons Push for War by Cooking the Books Part 3: How the CIA Created a Fake Western Reality for ‘Unconventional Warfare’
Part 4: The Final Stage of the Machiavellian Elites’ Takeover of America
—America, an Empire in Twilight Series published 11/7/2016 Part I: When America Became the Dark Force Part II: How Guilt, Innocence & Facts Have Been Rendered Irrelevant Part III: Neoconizing the Just War Doctrine in the service of American Empire Part IV: The End of Illusion FINALE: The Trump Card is played! Never Underestimate THE FOOL
—Psychological Warfare and the American Mind Series published 9/9/2016 Part I A Campaign Where the Lie Became the Truth and the Truth Became the Enemy of the State Part II Building the Afghan Narrative with Black Propaganda, the People, the Process & the Product Part III A Clockwork Afghanistan Part IV Willie Wonka & the National Security State ——————————————————————————————————-
—America’s Financial Armageddon and Afghanistan analyzes the Cold War effects on today’s economy published on Counterpunch 9/14/2011
—Brzezinski Vision to Lure Soviets into ‘Afghan Trap’ Is Orlando’s Nightmare
published on Sputnik News 6/16/2016
—America Pivots to Brzezinski’s Delusion of Eurasian Conquest , the Essay 10/14/2015
—America Pivots to Brzezinski’s Delusion of Eurasian Conquest published on Sputnik News 6/2/2015
URLs for FILMS on YOUTUBE by GOULD&FITZGERALD
–Afghanistan and Mystical Imperialism: An expose of the esoteric underpinnings of American foreign policy , a 2012 presentation with a Q&A following the talk. Afghanistan bedeviled by ‘Mystical Imperialism , a review from Examiner.com.
Afghanistan Between Three Worlds is on YouTube – A 1981 film from behind Soviet Lines and those first few moments in a conflict that still rocks the world
The Woman in Exile Returns The Sima Wali Story a 2002 film of Sima Wali’s first return to Afghanistan since her exile in 1978.
The Arms Race and the Economy: A Delicate Balance, a documentary with economist John Kenneth Galbraith and Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT II) negotiator Paul Warnke in 1979 that is still relevant today.
About the authors–
Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould, a husband and wife team, began working together in 1979 co-producing a documentary for Paul’s television show, Watchworks. Called, The Arms Race and the Economy, A Delicate Balance, they found themselves in the midst of a swirling controversy that was to boil over a few months later with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Their acquisition of the first visas to enter Afghanistan granted to an American TV crew in 1981 brought them into the middle of the most heated Cold War controversy since Vietnam. But the pictures and the people inside Soviet occupied Afghanistan told a very different story from the one being broadcast to Americans.
Following their exclusive news story for the CBS Evening News, they produced a documentary (Afghanistan Between Three Worlds) for PBS and in 1983 they returned to Kabul for ABC Nightline with Harvard Negotiation Project director, Roger Fisher. They were told that the Soviets wanted to go home and negotiate their way out. Peace in Afghanistan was more than a possibility, it was a desired option. But the story that President Carter called, “the greatest threat to peace since the second World War” had already been written by America’s policy makers and America’s pundits were not about to change the script.
As the first American journalists to get deeply inside the story they not only got a view of an unseen Afghan life, but a revelatory look at how the U.S. defined itself against the rest of the world under the veil of superpower confrontation. Once the Soviets had crossed the border into Afghanistan, the fate of both nations was sealed. But as Paul and Liz pursued the reasons behind the wall of propaganda that shielded the truth, they found themselves drawn into a story that was growing into mythic dimensions. Big things were brewing in Afghanistan. Old empires were being undone and new ones, hatched. America had launched a Crusade and the ten year war against the Soviet Union was only the first chapter.
It was at the time of the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993 when Paul and Liz were working on the film version of their experience under contract to Oliver Stone, that they began to piece together the mythic implications of the story. During the research for the screenplay many of the documents preceding the Afghan crisis were declassified. Over the next decade they trailed a labyrinth of clues only to find a profound likeness in Washington’s official policy towards Afghanistan – in the ancient Zoroastrian war of the light against the dark – whose origins began in the region now known as Afghanistan. It is a likeness that has grown visible as America’s entanglement in Afghanistan threatens to backfire once again.
Afghanistan’s civil war followed America’s Cold War while Washington walked away. A new strain of religious holy warrior called the Taliban arose but at the time few in America cared to look. As the horrors of the Taliban regime began to grab headlines in 1998 Paul and Liz started collaborating with Afghan human rights expert Sima Wali. Along with Wali, they contributed to the Women for Afghan Women: Shattering Myths and Claiming the Future book project published by Palgrave Macmillan (2002). In 2002 they filmed Wali’s first return to Kabul since her exile in 1978. The film they produced about Wali’s journey home, The Woman in Exile Returns, gives audiences the chance to discover the message of one of Afghanistan’s most articulate voices and her hopes for her people.
In the years since, much has happened to bring Paul and Liz’s story into sharp focus. Their efforts at combining personal diplomacy with activist journalism are a model for restoring a necessary dialogue to American democracy. Their book, Invisible History: Afghanistan’s Untold Story, published by City Lights (2009), lays bare why it was inevitable that the Soviet Union and the U.S. should end up in Afghanistan and what that means to the future of the American empire. Their book, Crossing Zero The AfPak War at the Turning Point of American Empire, published by City Lights (2011), lays out the paralyzing contradictions of America’s AfPak strategy. It clarifies the complex web of interests and individuals surrounding the war and focuses on the little understood importance of the line of demarcation between Afghanistan and Pakistan called the Durand line. Their novel The Voice , first published in 2000, is the esoteric side of their Afghan experience
Gould and Fitzgerald’s articles and blogs have been published in numerous online and print journals and newspapers such as The Boston Globe, The International Herald Tribune, Huffington Post, The New York Times, GlobalPost World News, Middle East Institute’s Viewpoints, CounterPunch, Sputnik News and OpedNews. They have been interviewed by major media outlets such as MSNBC, RealNews TV, Democracy Now and numerous commercial and PBS radio stations from Boston to LA. They have also made presentations that have aired across the country on C-Span Book TV and the Cambridge Forum (WGBH Forum Network). Their presentation-Afghanistan and Mystical Imperialism: An expose of the esoteric underpinnings of American foreign policy–was filmed by Zev Deans & Jacqueline Castel and is viewable here. A review of the presentation titled Afghanistan bedeviled by ‘Mystical Imperialism’ is available here.
For more information visit their websites at invisiblehistory and grailwerk.
Reviews and Praise for Gould & Fitzgerald’s Books
“Readers with a serious interest in U.S. foreign policy or military strategy will find it helpful… Bob Woodward’s recent Obama’s War focuses on the administration’s AfPak deliberations, but this book provides a wider perspective—Marcia L. Sprules, Council on Foreign Relations Lib., NY Library Journal
“Journalists Fitzgerald and Gould do yeoman’s labor in clearing the fog and laying bare American failures in Afghanistan in this deeply researched, cogently argued and enormously important book. “ —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“A probing history of the country and a critical evaluation of American involvement in recent decades . . . A fresh perspective on a little-understood nation.” —Kirkus
“The Voice takes its audience on a quest for the real Holy Grail, entwining scientific mythology with geopolitical intrigue in an esoteric thrill-ride Dan Brown couldn’t dream up…” — Michael Hughes Huffpost Books
“Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould have seen the importance of the ‘Great Game’ in Afghanistan since the early 1980s. They have been most courageous in their commitment to telling the truth—and have paid a steep price for it.” —Oliver Stone
“Fitzgerald and Gould have consistently raised the difficult questions and inconvenient truths about western engagement in Afghanistan. While many analysts and observers have attempted to wish a reality on a grim and tragic situation in Afghanistan, Fitzgerald and Gould have systematically dug through the archives and historical record with integrity and foresight to reveal a series of misguided strategies and approaches that have contributed to what has become a tragic quagmire in Afghanistan.” –Professor Thomas Johnson, Department of National Security Affairs and Director, Program for Culture and Conflict Studies, Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey California
“A ferocious, iron-clad argument about the institutional failure of American foreign policy in Afghanistan and Pakistan.” — Daniel Ellsberg
“Crossing Zero is much more than a devastating indictment of the folly of U.S. military intervention in Afghanistan. Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould demonstrate that the U.S. debacle in Afghanistan is the predictable climax of U.S. imperial overreach on a global scale. Like their earlier work documenting the origins of U.S. involvement in Afghanistan during the Cold War, Crossing Zero deserves the attention of all serious students of U.S. foreign policy.” —Selig S. Harrison, Co-author with Diego Cordovez of Out of Afghanistan: The Inside Story of the Soviet Withdrawal
“I loved it. An extraordinary contribution to understanding war and geo-politics in Afghanistan that will shock most Americans by its revelations of official American government complicity in using, shielding, sponsoring and supporting terrorism. A devastating indictment on the behind-the-scenes shenanigans by some of America’s most respected statesmen” —Daniel Estulin, author of The True Story of the Bilderberg Club
“Americans are now beginning to grasp the scope of the mess their leaders made while pursuing misguided military adventures into regions of Central Asia we once called ‘remote.’ How this happened–and what the US can do to extricate itself from its entanglements in Pakistan and Afghanistan–is the story of Crossing Zero. Based on decades of study and research, this book draws lines and connects dots in ways few others do.”—Stephen Kinzer, author of All the Shah’s Men and Reset: Iran, Turkey and America’s Future
“In this penetrating inquiry, based on careful study of an intricate web of political, cultural, and historical factors that lie in the immediate background, and enriched by unique direct observation at crucial moments, Fitzgerald and Gould tell ‘the real story of how they came to be there and what we can expect next.’ Invocation of Armageddon is no mere literary device.” —Noam Chomsky
“A serious, sobering study… illuminates a critical point of view rarely discussed by our media…results of this willful ignorance have been disastrous to our national well-being.” —Oliver Stone
URLs: Blogs, Interviews, Videos, Extras 12/27/17
BLOGS, ANALYSIS & OPEDs
—New York Times Strikes Out Again on Afghanistan was published 11/6/2017 as a Truthdig original
—What have they done to our fair sister? An Epitaph was published 10/6/2017 on OpEdNews Zbigniew Brzezinski, the man who’d sacrificed Sima Wali’s Afghanistan to give the Soviet Union its own Vietnam, passed on four months earlier in the same city where Sima lived until her death. If they should meet in the afterlife, one can easily imagine how delightfully uncomfortable that encounter would be for Zbig!
—The Neocon Takeover of America Series was published in OpEdNews 8/24/2017
Part 1: Darkness at Noon
Part 2: The West is Disintegrating
Part 3: Engineering Public Perception to the Right for the Right
Part 4: Ceaseless Propaganda, Outright Lies and Distorted Fac
–The Universal Empire Series, an examination of the neocon takeover of American policy that began after World War II, was published on Truthdig April, 2017
Part 1: American Imperialism Leads the World Into Dante’s Vision of Hell
Part 2: How Neocons Push for War by Cooking the Books
Part 3: How the CIA Created a Fake Western Reality for ‘Unconventional Warfare’
Part 4: The Final Stage of the Machiavellian Elites’ Takeover of America
—America, an Empire in Twilight Series was published on Veterans Today 11/7/2016
Part I: When America Became the Dark Force
Part II: How Guilt, Innocence & Facts Have Been Rendered Irrelevant
Part III: Neoconizing the Just War Doctrine in the service of American Empire
Part IV: The End of Illusion
FINALE: The Trump Card is played! Never Underestimate THE FOOL
—Psychological Warfare and the American Mind Series was published on OpEdNews 9/9/2016
Part I A Campaign Where the Lie Became the Truth and the Truth Became the Enemy of the State
Part II Building the Afghan Narrative with Black Propaganda, the People, the Process & the Product
Part III A Clockwork Afghanistan
Part IV Willie Wonka & the National Security State
——————————————————————————————————-
—America’s Financial Armageddon and Afghanistan analyzes the Cold War effects on today’s economy that was published on Counterpunch 9/14/2011
—Brzezinski Vision to Lure Soviets into ‘Afghan Trap’ Is Orlando’s Nightmare was published on Sputnik News 6/16/2016
—America Pivots to Brzezinski’s Delusion of Eurasian Conquest , the Essay 10/14/2015
—America Pivots to Brzezinski’s Delusion of Eurasian Conquest was published on Sputnik News 6/2/2015
—An Urgent Message to Bernie Sanders’ Supporters was published on Huffingtonpost 2/17/2016
YOUTUBE VIDEOS
–Afghanistan and Mystical Imperialism: An expose of the esoteric underpinnings of American foreign policy , a 2012 presentation by Paul Fitzgerald & Elizabeth Gould
A review from Examiner.com, Afghanistan bedeviled by ‘Mystical Imperialism’.
Afghanistan Between Three Worlds is on YouTube – A 1981 film from behind Soviet Lines and those first few moments in a conflict that still rocks the world by Paul Fitzgerald & Elizabeth GouldThe Woman in Exile Returns The Sima Wali Story a 2002 film by Paul Fitzgerald & Elizabeth Gould
The Arms Race and the Economy: A Delicate Balance , a 1979 film by Paul Fitzgerald & Elizabeth Gould with economist John Kenneth Galbraith and Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT II) negotiator Paul Warnke in 1979 that is still relevant today. The Arms Race and the Economy: A Delicate Balance can be viewed here.
Why the Rock Musical HAIR matters today as told by Paul Fitzgerald, Claude in the 1970 Boston production of HAIR. A Rare 20 Minute Video of the Boston Cast of HAIR Benefit Performance Filmed at Boston City Hospital 1970 and posted 5/16/2016INTERVIEWS
–Alexandra Bruce, creator of ForbiddenKnowledge TV, interviewed Paul Fitzgerald & Elizabeth Gould.
1. An Encrypted Monologue’ – Forbidden Knowledge TV March 2017 interview we discuss how we came to understand the esoteric underpinnings of American foreign policy.
2. The History of the Neocon Takeover of the USA – Forbidden Knowledge TV May 2017 interview we discuss how the deep state will maintain the neocon narrative through dream control, and what we can do about it.
–Kevin Barrett’s 5/17/2017 Truth Jihad Radio Show: Gould and Fitzgerald discuss their article “The History of the Neocon Takeover of the USA.” What precisely is neo-conservatism, and how did it come to power? Most scholarship focuses on Leo Strauss and his cult followers. But Gould and Fitzgerald sketch an alternate history. They focus on “ex-Trotskyite” James Burnham – whose real-life inspired the dystopian vision of George Orwell. They also name Zbigniew Brzezinski as a key neocon whose Russo phobia took over during first term of Jimmy Carter. This is historical revisionism at its finest! Listen to the broadcast here.
—WZBC’s EXPANDING AWARENESS with Victor Venckus (1/14/2017) As host since 1974, Venckus continues to reach out to the people who are in the front of paranormal and personal development. Listen to our intervie here.
EXTRAS
Zbigniew Brzezinski and Ahriman, The Demon of the Lie by Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould
Master Mystical Imperialist Zbigniew Brzezinski, Afghanistan and Winning the Cold War by Paul Fitzgerald & Elizabeth GouldRudolph Steiner’s 1915 & Edgar Cayce’s 1945 prophecies and Russia’s importance to the future of the West by Paul Fitzgerald & Elizabeth Gould
A thoughtful review of our multi-dimensional novel, The Voice! 8/17/2015
‘The Voice: An Encrypted Monologue’:Gould and Fitzgerald’s E book of The Voice.
The Spiritual Roots of Russian-American Conflict August 26th, 2015 Whatever Russia is called outwardly, there is an inner eternal Russia whose embryonic character places her on an antithetical course to that of the USA Kerry R Bolton
New York Times Strikes Out Again on Afghanistan
In the final days of the Soviet Union, an old witticism about truth (pravda) went something like this: In the United States, they tell you everything, but you know nothing. In the USSR, they tell you nothing, but you know everything.
Who would ever be nostalgic for the old Soviet Union, where truth was what the official government mouthpiece told you it was and everything else was a lie meant to undermine the state? Whoever that might be, he or she would feel at home in the now totally neocon-ized U.S., where the old mainstream media marches in lockstep with a dysfunctional federal bureaucracy to aggressively limit freedom of speech and label anything that contradicts its ideological view of reality as enemy propaganda.
From 1918 until its demise in 1991, Pravda was the official newspaper of the Soviet Union’s Communist Party. But most Americans would be surprised to learn that The New York Times has been operating for decades as the U.S. government’s Pravda without anyone being the wiser.
Now the truth-war rages between such old mainstream media outlets as The New York Times and any news operation or website that challenges its version of the truth.
We were drawn into this battle by a recent New York Times obituary for our dearest Afghan friend, Sima Wali, who fled the violent Marxist coup in 1978 that kicked off the U.S.-backed rise of Islamic extremism and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.Considering that the Times maintains that the alternative media is filled with false news and Russian propaganda, we were shocked to find many claims in Sima’s obituary that contained American Cold War propaganda about Afghanistan that has long since been debunked. One particularly outrageous example was the claim that in 1978, “gender apartheid” was “imposed by the Communists and then by the Taliban.”
Apparently, The New York Times believes it can turn day to night by blaming communists for introducing gender apartheid, a term adapted (from the South African apartheid regime) in 1996 to draw the public’s attention to the cruelty and human rights abuses imposed by the Taliban on the women of Afghanistan. The communists did not impose it after their takeover in 1978. In fact, the opposite was true. As Sima stated in the introduction to our book, “Invisible History: Afghanistan’s Untold Story,” “The draconian Taliban rule stripped women of their basic human rights. Their edicts against women in Afghanistan led to an introduction of a new form of violence termed ‘gender apartheid.’ ” In reality, a major cause for the growth of the resistance to the communists in the more tradition-bound countryside was the forced education of women and girls and the forced removal of the veil. Nor is it understood in the West that many Afghan rulers in the past attempted these reforms with some level of success.
Related Articles Sima Wali obituary | theguardian.com What Have They Done to Our Fair Sister? by Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould| truthdig.com
As David B. Edwards writes in his book, “Before Taliban,” there is a direct line between these and other reforms to the reforms mandated by King Amanullah after 1919. He writes, “The transformations that he [Amanullah] sought to bring about before his overthrow in 1929 were in many respects forerunners of those of the Marxists and were particularly revealing of the problems they later encountered.”
An accurate picture of what was done by the communists during their rule in the early 1980s can be read in Jonathan Steele’s 2003 Guardian article, titled “Red Kabul revisited,” in which he compares the U.S. occupation of Kabul in 2003 with Soviet-occupied Kabul of the 1980s:
“In 1981, Kabul’s two campuses thronged with women students, as well as men. Most went around without even a headscarf. Hundreds went off to Soviet universities to study engineering, agronomy and medicine. The banqueting hall of the Kabul hotel pulsated most nights to the excitement of wedding parties. The markets thrived. Caravans of painted lorries rolled up from Pakistan, bringing Japanese TV sets, video recorders, cameras and music centres. The Russians did nothing to stop this vibrant private enterprise.”
Prior to 9/11, Laili Helms, a spokeswoman for and defender of the Taliban and niece to former CIA Director Richard Helms, went so far as to suggest that educating women was a communist plot, claiming that any Afghan woman who could read had to be a communist, because only the communists had educated women. After the American invasion of Afghanistan in late 2001, Wali was outraged by this Taliban mentality, which she saw creeping into the American-installed Afghan leadership with the blessing of the American government. In an address to the Global Citizens Circle in Boston in 2003, she stated her objections: “[A]s an Afghan and an American, I will testify to you that the argument against women’s rights is neither Afghan nor Islamic!”
Thirty-four years ago in May, I stood before the irate Afghan press officer for the communist government in Kabul as he threw a copy of The New York Times onto his desk. “Have you read this?” he demanded, pointing to an article by Leslie Gelb, titled “U.S. Said to Increase Arms Aid For Afghan Rebels.” What Gelb, the former Jimmy Carter administration’s assistant secretary of state, had disclosed had angered the Foreign Ministry’s press secretary, Roshan Rowan, and he was holding me, an American, responsible. “Why are you doing this to us?” he shouted. “What is it we have done to you, to deserve this invasion?”
I didn’t need to rely on The New York Times to tell me what was going on in Afghanistan. As the first American journalist to risk the wrath of the Ronald Reagan administration, with its newly installed neoconservative foreign policy, by bringing a news crew to Kabul in 1981, I was one of only a handful of Americans who knew the score. The United States was backing Muslim guerrillas who were burning down schools specifically for girls and killing local officials, whether they were communist or not. The Gelb article made clear that in collaboration with the Saudis, Egyptians, Chinese, Iranians and Pakistanis, the “bleeders” inside the Reagan administration were upping the ante in order to “draw more and more Soviet troops into Afghanistan,” while at the same time claiming to pursue “a negotiated settlement to the war.” It was not obvious from the Gelb article how the United States could be escalating a conflict while negotiating a settlement at the same time in Afghanistan in 1983. Also missing from the article was any indication that the administration’s policy was a fundamental contradiction.
In the spring of 1983, we had invited Roger Fisher, director of the Harvard Negotiation Project, to return with us to Kabul to unwrap the riddle of why the United Nations negotiations were getting nowhere. Contracted to ABC’s “Nightline,” Fisher met with the Kremlin’s chief Afghan specialist, who had flown down from Moscow and told him point blank, “We want to get out. Give us six months to save face, and we’ll leave the Afghans to solve their own problems.” Upon his return, Fisher expected his discovery would be greeted with relief. Instead he found that “negotiated settlement” was only a fig leaf for escalating the war. The mainstream media were just beginning to ramp up a propaganda campaign, which would become known as Charlie Wilson’s War, to drive support for keeping the Soviets pinned down in their own Vietnam while bleeding Sima Wali’s Afghanistan to death.
The American people expect the full story from their “free press,” and the Constitution demands that the press serve the people and not the bureaucracy. The New York Times needs to get its mission straight, lest it sacrifice its credibility to the very thing it claims to stand against. Left-wing Afghan communists cannot be magically transformed into right-wing Pakistani Taliban. The United States is not the Soviet Union, and The New York Times should stop behaving as if it is Pravda.
Copyright © 2017 Fitzgerald & Gould All rights reserved
What have they done to our fair sister? An Epitaph
By Paul Fitzgerald Elizabeth Gould OpEdNews October 6, 2017 Truthdig VeteransToday
Afghan human rights expert Sima Wali delivers her acceptance speech for Amnesty International’s Ginetta Sagan Fund Award in 1999.
(Image by Wikisi117) Permission Details DMCA
Sima Wali, the first Afghan refugee to come to this country in 1978 has died at her home in Falls Church, Virginia. To the many Afghans and Americans who knew her, Sima Wali was the soul of Afghanistan, a woman who dedicated her life to helping not just her country of birth, but refugee women and the men who support them, from around an increasingly desperate and dangerous world. You probably never heard of Sima Wali because she was not the kind of Afghan woman the mainstream media and their establishment backers wanted you to know about. As a member of Afghanistan’s ruling family, Sima represented many generations of Afghan leadership dedicated to bringing their country into the modern world after centuries of crushing colonialism from both the east and the west.
Sima was uniquely adept at that task, a cultured woman whose intelligence, grace and beauty charmed all who met her including the world’s leaders. From the time she arrived in the United States until illness consumed her, she worked tirelessly for human rights and the rights of women through her organization Refugee Women in Development (RefWid). Her work impacted the U.S. Congress, the State Department, and the United Nations. It led to numerous awards and to her selection as one of only three women to be chosen as delegates to the U.N.-organized Bonn Agreement, which created a new Afghan government after the fall of the Taliban in 2001. Because of Sima, that government mandated the creation of a Ministry of Women’s Affairs.
Sima’s death constitutes an immense tragedy not just for her friends and family but for Afghanistan and especially for her adopted country, the United States. The fate of America and Afghanistan has been intimately linked since the 1970s when the Carter administration’s Zbigniew Brzezinski began a covert mission to undermine Afghanistan’s government long before the Soviet invasion. Sima was one of the earliest victims of that destabilization when Marxists claimed power in a bloody April 1978 coup and she was forced to flee. As a refugee woman and naturalized American, no one embodied the commitment, the dedication and the determination to overcome the catastrophic consequences of that relationship more than her.
In 1998 when we first met in New York City she was nearly despondent. Despite her over two decades of work, the Clinton administration saw little problem with the draconian military advances made by the Taliban from their bases in Pakistan. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright in fact, was said to believe that the Taliban represented a cleansing antidote to the corrupted and feuding warlords empowered by the U.S. in their 1980s war against the Soviets.
That same year, 1998, Jimmy Carter’s national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski boasted to an interviewer from the French Nouvel Observateur that the consequences of the CIA’s secret operation that destroyed Sima’s country were far from bad. In fact the destruction of Afghanistan was never a concern at all. “That secret operation was an excellent idea.” He said. “It had the effect of drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap and you want me to regret it? The day that the Soviets officially crossed the border, I wrote to President Carter. We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam War.”
Brzezinski dismissed concern about the rise of Islamic fundamentalism, or having armed future terrorists by saying: “What is most important to the history of the world? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some stirred-up Moslems or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the cold war?” And Brzezinski even went so far as to admit that the U.S. had not only lied about its support for the rebels before the Soviet invasion but that he’d told Carter the action would probably guarantee that the Soviets would invade.
We were fortunate enough to return with Sima to Afghanistan in 2002 in a remarkable journey where we witnessed first-hand her commitment to the Afghan people. Filming Sima’s workwith the women and men who had risked their lives to secretly educate and train women during the Taliban era – with no budget other than their meager earnings – was beyond humbling. That October trip held a moment of promise and hope even amidst the ruins. One of the Cold War’s ugliest chapters had finally come to an end. The Taliban had been sent back to Pakistan where they came from and a ravaged Afghanistan could be set back on a course to peace and prosperity.
But the future of Afghanistan was clouded by the expansion of American empire into Central Asia and the not so secret agendas of America’s supposed allies, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. From her many years on the public stage, Sima knew that she represented an obstacle to powerful forces that wanted to rewrite Afghanistan’s history and deny its long progress toward democracy. Her very existence threatened the warlords, drug dealers and human traffickers that thrived in an economy destroyed by 25 years of constant war. But most of all she threatened those who wanted the past forgotten; those that believed Afghanistan should never resume its drive for independence as a secular state, and that equal rights for women and the country’s ethnic minorities were a dangerous dream. And for that she will be remembered by us, the most.
Since America’s most recent war in Afghanistan began in 2001, Americans have been fed a steady diet of misinformation and outright falsehoods. These falsehoods range from claims that the Afghan nation was never really a nation at all; to proclamations that Afghanistan was always ruled by warlords and that it is dangerously naïve to think otherwise. Those who knew Afghanistan prior to America’s longest war, understand that these assumptions are wrong and are at best self-serving delusions. It was the United States who backed Afghanistan’s corrupt warlords against the country’s ruling dynasty as early as 1973 and it was the United States that put them back into power following its invasion in 2001. Yet these falsehoods form the basis of a Hollywood fiction that continues to hobble America’s failing effort there.
Over the years there have been glimmers of hope that a new awareness of Afghanistan’s true history was finally emerging from the darkness. An October 2009 article in the New York Times by Elisabeth Bumiller, titled REMBERING AFGHANISTAN’S GOLDEN AGE, stated: “American and Afghan scholars and diplomats say it is worth recalling four decades in the country’s recent history, from the 1930s to the 1970s, when there was a semblance of a national government and Kabul was known as “the Paris of Central Asia.” Bumiller goes on to write that “Afghans and Americans alike describe the country in those days as a poor nation, but one that built national roads, stood up an army and defended its borders.”
In a separate 2009 article in Foreign Policy Magazine titled A CASE FOR HUMILITY IN AFGHANISTAN, author Steve Coll writes: “In my view, most current American commentary underestimates the potential for transformational change in South Asia over the next decade or two, spurred by economic progress and integration” Between the late 18thcentury and World War I, Afghanistan was a troubled but coherent and often independent state. Although very poor, after the 1920s it enjoyed a long period of continuous peace with its neighbors, secured by a multi-ethnic Afghan National Army and unified by a national culture.”
In addition, prior to 1978, when Sima first became a refugee, Afghanistan was self-sufficient in food production and had no refugee problem. An even closer look reveals the origins of the modern Afghan state dating back to the 16th century and the rise of the Roshaniya movement. Led by Sufi poet Bayazid Ansarithe movement is indicative of the broadly progressive nature of Afghan Islam. Ansari’s goal was said to be the achievement of equality between men and women. In his landmark 1969 book The Emergence of Modern Afghanistan — the Carnegie Corporation’s Vartan Gregorian states: “Ansari’s aim, among other things was to establish a national religion, the movement encouraged the Afghans in the tribal belt to struggle against Moghul rule. The Roshaniya movement thus promoted the first political formulation of the concept of Afghan nationality.”
Prior to British military invasions of the mid-19th century, Afghans were not even hostile to European Imperialists. East India Company political officer Alexander Burnes wrote home in May of 1832, “The people of this country are kind hearted and hospitable. They have no prejudice against a Christian and none against our nation.” Concerned over Russian competition, Burnes argued that a strong Afghan leader could hold the country together and resist foreign encroachment, but a country split into feudal principalities and tribes would invite intrigue and cause chaos. Yet the good will of the Afghan people was lost in 1839 when the British government willfully acquiesced to sending an army into Kabul and suffered what was at the time, the greatest military defeat in British history.
Afghanistan’s late 19th century Amir Abdur Rahman Khan began his rule determined to establish a modern nation-state. By 1901 he had created a national army and a government bureaucracy that paved the way for a small but well educated middle-class. In 1919, Abdur Rahman’s grandson Amanullah brought on a period of rapid modernization and democratic change that would be the envy of any nation-builder today. Amanullah declared Afghanistan’s independence from Britain, drew up its first constitution in 1923, guaranteed universal suffrage and civil rights to all of Afghanistan’s minorities, prohibited revenge killings and abolished subsidies for tribal chieftains as well as the royal family.
Overthrown in 1929 with the help of the British, Amanullah’s embrace of modernism, equality and democracy is often viewed as the cause of his political downfall. Yet, as Vartan Gregorian and others have observed, Amanullah’s political undoing stemmed mostly from his inability to support his social reforms with solid economic measures, not from any underlying rejection of his educational and political programs. The same could be said of King Zahir Shah’s “experiment in democracy,” from 1963 to 1973, where failure stemmed from a weak economy and the emerging storm of external Cold War political forces that were already tearing at the fabric of Afghanistan’s political structure.
Sima Wali believed that of any force on earth the United States would understand and help to restore the hard fought victories over feudalism and backwardness that had been won for Afghanistan following British colonial rule. But as time went on she came to learn that those beliefs would never be fulfilled. She would laugh off the dangers of working in Afghanistan’s distant provinces. She would say she was the canary in the Afghan mineshaft and that as long as she was still breathing the voiceless Afghan people would have a voice in the struggle to restore what had been lost. But without the support she had been promised she stood alone. During her last trip to Afghanistan in 2005, she was targeted by the Taliban and narrowly escaped a violent militant attack. She returned home with unusual symptoms and a new enemy slowly gained ground.
The parallel struggles that Sima waged to restore her homeland for her people and her personal struggle to regain her heath are now over. Her open rejection of “misplaced charity”; and anguished cries for “sensible long-term strategies to rebuild the Afghan nation” have gone unheard. As far back as 2003 she stated clearly at a Global Citizens Circle presentation in Boston that she had deep concerns for events that were developing in Afghanistan. “Although some gains have been achieved in removing a repressive regime, women remain at risk and I remain highly concerned about the Taliban mentality in ruling circles. And as an Afghan and an American I will testify to you that the argument against women’s rights is neither Afghan nor Islamic!”
In a stroke of irony, Zbigniew Brzezinski, the man who’d sacrificed Sima’s Afghanistan to give the hated Soviet Union its own Vietnam had also passed on just four months earlier and in Falls Church, Virginia, the same city where Sima had lived until her death.
A year before, the architect of America’s use of Imperial power to attain global dominance had made a startling about face in an article titled “Towards a Global Realignment” warning that “the United States is still the world’s politically, economically, and militarily most powerful entity but, given complex geopolitical shifts in regional balances, it is no longer the globally imperial power.”
As Sima Wali discovered many years before, had Zbigniew Brzezinski used his powerful influence on American policy makers to aid Afghanistan in its struggles for democracy back in the 1970s instead of using it as the bait to lure the Soviets into invading, the world would be in a very different place.
For over a decade Sima fought with all her strength, but though her voice has now been silenced, her deeds and her words will live on to inspire new generations of Afghans and Americans to create the genuine democracy they have been denied for so long.
Copyright – 2017 Fitzgerald & Gould All rights reserved
Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould are the authors of Invisible History: Afghanistan’s Untold Story , Crossing Zero The AfPak War at the Turning Point of American Empire and The Voice . Visit their websites at invisiblehistory and grailwerk
What have they done to our fair sister? From “When The Music’s Over” by The Doors