OpEdNews August 22, 2017            veteranstoday.com

By Paul Fitzgerald Elizabeth Gould

Democracy and freedom of expression are under attack. There is blood in the streets. How did it get that way? Where did it come from, what are its sources and what continues to drive it? This four-part series will look at the origin of those sources and unlock connections that when understood should open doors of perception that have been locked shut for far too long.

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“Tensions between Russia and the U.S. are again on the rise and the risk of a trans-Atlantic trade war is greater than ever, which would have devastating consequences for the global economy. The West as an entity, it would seem, is disintegrating.”

Der Spiegel Magazine — June 30, 2017

On the eve of the 2017 G-20 summit in Hamburg the view of the United States from Germany is grim. Europe is overrun with refugees from NATO’s wars in the Middle East, Eastern Europe and Africa while President Trump makes impossible demands and offers nothing in return. In a scene reminiscent of Germany in the 1930s, angry masses riot in the streets of Hamburg protesting austerity and economic inequality. Like 18^th-century French Royals, the European Union’s detached and disaffected ruling elites struggle to deal with events beyond their control. The lessons of the past go unlearned, the classic mistakes of the ages repeated. The EU, a post-World War II project of the CIA, is broken. America’s role as a unipower has ended in bitterness and without ceremony. The post-war world order held together for better or worse by the perception of American omnipotence and the ideology of casino capitalism is disintegrating fast and with it “The West as an entity.”

Decline of the West

The end did not come suddenly. As disappointing as it may be to the fulminating anti-Trump political sphere, the “culture” of Western civilization has been in a state of confusion over its decline for some time. It is only befitting a cosmic joke that an American hotel/casino owner should bring down the curtain on it.

One hundred years ago in the run-up to World War I, the visionary historian/philosopher Oswald Spengler produced a radical analysis of civilization and culture entitled The Decline of the West, Form and Actuality. Written before the war, but published in 1918 in the aftermath of German defeat, the book became an immediate success and has for nearly one hundred years been challenging successive generations of geopoliticians to come to terms with it.

In Decline of the West, Spengler defines “cultures” as an organic whole that evolves through a life cycle of spring, summer, autumn and winter and then fades away. The final and death phase of this cultural evolution Spengler defines as “civilization” itself or the rule of the rational where only “the brain rules because the soul has abdicated.” As demonstrated throughout history, civilizations come and go and by World War I, Europe had achieved the high point in this cyclical experience and had no place to go but down.

As an inspiration to the young James Burnham, Spengler divided the existence of all things into a duality of the formal and the real, between the thinkers and the doers, the “sword side” and the “spindle side” which at the end of its endless cycle returns to formlessness. To Spengler and to Burnham the final phase of civilization comes as democracy gives way to what Burnham called the Oligarchy but Spengler referred to as Caesarism. It is a place in which the once-vibrant institutions of civilization have become spiritually dead, money has become valueless, and all the wars are cruel private wars waged by tyrants for the private possession of the world.

Between the Hamburg crowd’s protest under the banner of Welcome to Hell, and Donald Trump’s challenge to the Europeans whether the West had the “will to survive” the time has come for Americans to ask themselves some important questions; what then is this entity called the West that is disintegrating? Could this miserable ending have been avoided? And who and what exactly are responsible for bringing us to these gates of hell?

To Spengler, Western civilization was always a Faustian bargain. “In the poetry of the West, Faustian Man figures, first as Parzeval or Tristan, then (modified always into harmony with the epoch) as Hamlet, Don Quixote, Don Juan and eventually Faust or Werther.” Having already sold his soul to the devil, Western Man has been freed to decide his own fate. From Spengler to James Burnham to Patrick Buchanan the school of 20^th-century conservative and neoconservative/fascist thought has blamed the West’s decline on the betrayal of this contract by “soft” liberal values. The Third Reich promised to turn the clock back by crushing the communist heresy and returning Germany to its martial glories of the past. Hitler’s invasion of Russia was named Operation Barbarossa after Holy Roman Emperor Frederick Barbarossa’s 12^th-century crusade. But instead of a German renewal, Hitler’s scheme to thwart the end only brought it nearer.

The post-Vietnam rise of Ronald Reagan and the new right promised an ideological revival as well, a return to core conservative values and a new morning in America. In practice Reagan’s anti-government policies, his massive and unnecessary defense buildup and reckless trickle-down economics hastened its decline by decades and in the end destroyed the fabric of American society.

As it was in the past and remains now, the right’s use of Machiavellian tactics to turn the tide in its favor almost always works and in the end invariably winds up bringing down the house. The bitter philosophical conflict between idealism (form) and reality and what constitutes a just society goes back to the origin of Western thought and has produced profound political contradictions throughout the centuries. The arch-neoconservative Jeanne Kirkpatrick argued back in 1979 in an essay regarding the emerging new class in American politics, “The goal of the new-class reformer–whether of Left or Right–is to bring the real into conformity with the ideal (that is, with an idea of reality), [which] manifests a broader belief that social institutions can and should conform to and serve abstract principles. The most serious problems with this rationalist approach were recognized by Aristotle, who criticized Plato’s blueprint for the ideal state… Aristotle also argued that experience and law were better guides than reason alone to the good society and that Plato’s proposal would sacrifice real goods to illusory ideals.”

Kirkpatrick’s essay on the dangers of idealism should stand as a textbook study for James Burnham’s Machiavellians. Kirkpatrick would soon become the Reagan administration’s spokeswoman at the UN for the new neoconservative class with its emphasis on “illusory ideals” of a worldwide democratic revolution and service to abstract principles over experience and the law. But, as laid out by James Burnham in his Machiavellians: Defenders of Freedom, the new Machiavellians must delude the masses with lies and outright fraud if necessary to maintain control.

Kirkpatrick’s “idea of reality” was shaped by a hybrid neoconservative/fascist ideology whose roots lay in the social chaos of the early 20^th century; World War I, the breakup of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the Trotskyist schism within Marxist/Leninism. Supported by the Pentagon’s top brass from World War II forward and then brewed together by the CIA with Europe’s leftover fascist elites, Lenin’s followers metastasized from Trotskyist intellectuals into Defense Intellectuals. From the 1970s onward they would become a self-perpetuating force for war inside both Democratic and Republican parties and a fifth column for undermining any thought of normal diplomatic relations with Russia. The Reagan administration provided a platform for this new class of former Trotskyists who were willing to sacrifice anything real or imagined for their illusory ideals. But the ultimate success of their rise to power relied on more than just a Marxist dialectic of infiltration and subversion.

The neoconservative political takeover of the 1970s was made possible by a network of old right-wing European and American interests dedicated to overthrowing Western democracies and replacing them with a new class of fascist transnational elites. These elites, currently referred to as globalists but prior to World War II as Synarchists, have long plotted the overthrow of the nation state and rule by a one-world government. But none of it could have happened without the covert assistance of rogue right-wing factions of the West’s intelligence services and a brutal but sophisticated propaganda campaign backed by the CIA, to control the West’s perceptions of what that world would look like.

Join us for Part 3 as we look at the synarchy of fascist organizations vying for power and influence prior to World War II and their revival and consolidation under an exclusive Cold War circle of corporate power aimed at eliminating the nation state and democracy.

Copyright – 2017 Fitzgerald & Gould All rights reserved

OpEdNews August 21, 2017  veteranstoday.com August 22, 2017

By Paul Fitzgerald Elizabeth Gould

Democracy and freedom of expression are under attack. There is blood in the streets. How did it get that way? Where did it come from, what are its sources and what continues to drive it? In this four part series we’ll look at the origin of those sources and unlock connections that when understood should open doors of perception that have been locked shut for far too long.

As a brief darkness cuts a path across the American continent from the latest total eclipse of the sun, another more lasting darkness is now welling up from the ground of a secret history that to most Americans remains unknown. Recent events continue to demonstrate America is not at peace with itself or the world. It appears the United States is in opposition to just about everyone, everywhere and there is no relief in sight. A November 2008 report titled Known Unknowns: Unconventional “Strategic Shocks” in Defense Strategy Development by the U.S. Army’s Nathan Freier predicted this moment as the United States grappled with civil insurrection and a multi-polar world it was not equipped to handle. “Imagine ‘a new era of containment with the United States as the nation to be contained’ where the principle tools and methods of war involve everything but those associated with traditional military conflict. Imagine that the sources of this ‘new era of containment’ are widespread; predicated on nonmilitary forms of political, economic, and violent action; in the main, sustainable over time; and finally, largely invulnerable to effective reversal through traditional U.S. advantages.”

Our last four part series dealt with the origins of the neocons, their roots in Communist Leon Trotsky’s Fourth International and their emergence as a political force in the neoconservative politics for never-ending war. How many Americans would be happy to learn that the conservative new right revolution of the 1980s was really a rebranding of a Trotskyist anti-Stalinist agenda for worldwide Communist revolution made new and empowered by the CIA? Such was the outgrowth of Cold War psychological warfare that most Americans never learned about and still don’t understand. Unfortunately for most Americans in 2017, events that occurred a hundred years ago or even 50 years ago aren’t just vague remembrances, they’re non-existent. But the “system” of thought “dialectical materialism” employed by Marxist/Leninists is still in use by neoconservatives in both political parties and it has now reduced our democracy and everything else Americans once believed in, to a nascent Fascism.

As recent events in Charlottesville Virginia made clear, class and race hatred are still the tipping point for social upheaval much the way they were in Europe just prior to World War II. Today’s social dynamics are strikingly similar to that moment in history and likewise the behavior of the participants a mirror image of their 1930s counterparts. A three volume history written by newspaper columnist Waverley Root published in 1945 titled The Secret History of The War tells a tale of the internecine social chaos just before the fall of France in 1940 that could stand verbatim as a warning for what is happening today.

“Below the surface, this is a war to check the spread of democracy. This is easy to see if you examine the circumstances in which Fascist movements of various types were launched… There is no way to nullify the result of democratic elections except by eliminating the democracy, along with its machinery for following the course chosen by the majority. So that is what the Fascists did. Many highly respectable persons, genuinely horrified at what they considered unjustified attacks on the security of their property and social positions, gave support to the parties which dared oppose the result of the democratic elections. They considered that the voters had made a grievous error. They arrogated to themselves the right to correct it. They were not far-seeing enough to realize that the nullification of the result of an election meant necessarily the nullification of all elections, of the entire system which” guaranteed legal protection for acquired rights.”

Waverley Root concludes: “In France, the 1936 victory of the Popular Front was not followed by open revolt, but the classes who opposed it proceeded to sabotage the attempts by the elected government to put into force the platform which the voters had approved. These groups were easy victims of the Nazis…”

Even prominent neoconservatives like the Washington Post’s Charles Krauthammer, who lobbied heavily against Trump in last year’s election, are aware that the Democratic Party’s current campaign to sabotage Trump’s presidency risks catastrophe by undermining the credibility of the American election process. During the campaign for president, both Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders were targets for delegitimization and by the same group of elites, but in the maelstrom following the election the real target for delegitimization, democracy itself, has been consistently overlooked and the dangers are real and growing.

The interests of the upper classes in America today, the Wall Street hedge fund billionaires and technocratic elites are no different than those of France in the 1930s who were waiting for the moment to seize power once they had succeeded in undermining the democratic process. As it occurred in France and is now occurring in the U.S, the elites have manipulated the political system to destroy itself from within for no one’s benefit but their own. Ironically there is little difference today in the efforts to delegitimize Donald Trump’s presidency from those in the late 1930s that opened the door for Fascism and World War II. But the starkest historical similarity of all between now and the run up to World War II may lie in the overtly racist demonization of Russia and the original goals of the Third Reich, played out in the Nazi invasion of Soviet Russia in 1941.

According to an unpublished article prepared by the press section of the Nazi General Staff early in the Russian campaign as cited by Waverley Root, the Nazi’s sole aim had never been to wage war in Western Europe – but had always been to rid “Europe of ‘the purulent Bolshevik abscess’ in order to be able to ‘construct the New Order…'” And “once Russia is defeated, the New European Order, the New Asiatic Order and the New World Order will finally be able to establish themselves in a pacified universe, according to the grandiose plans of the greatest man the world has ever known–Adolph Hitler!”

The horror of World War II – which Waverley Root made abundantly clear, was intended solely for Soviet Russia and not Europe – was followed by the prolonged horror of another war against Russia known as the Cold War. The 1940 novel Darkness at Noon by Arthur Koestler, a Hungarian Zionist-ex-Communist propagandist who’d fled to London, would set the tone for the post-war demonization of the Soviet Union. Employed by the secret propaganda arm of the British Foreign office the (IRD), a dangerously unstable Koestler would become a major influence in the creation of the CIA-backed Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF). And with the aid of the British/ American intellectual James Burnham, a convert from Leon Trotsky’s Fourth International, Koestler would embrace the rule of America’s imperial hierarchy, urging his fellow anti-Soviet intellectuals to aid the West’s “power elite in its mission to rule.”

Today America faces its own Darkness at Noon moment, but much to the disappointment of the current crop of Arthur Koestlers, putting the blame on Moscow while blood is spilling in the streets of America begs questions that Washington cannot afford to ignore but yet cannot afford to answer.

Race hatred is a powerful influence on American policy today both at home and abroad. Seen in this light, the war against Russia and the current demonization of Vladimir Putin is a race war to finish the job the Nazi’s failed to accomplish in 1941 with their invasion of Russia known as Operation Barbarossa.

Democracy and freedom of expression are under attack. There is blood in the streets. How did it get that way? Where did it come from, what are its sources and what continues to drive it? In this four part series we’ll look at the origin of those sources and unlock connections that when understood should open doors of perception that have been locked shut for far too long.

Copyright – 2017 Fitzgerald & Gould All rights reserved