17 August 2008
The event of the Georgian Programme, or rather, its result, the situation, has proved to be one of the pivotal tremors which indicate a profound tectonic shift of the continental plates. The landscape is irrevocably altered.
As a result of the incursion into Georgia and that tiny country’s political response, everything has changed. The very foundation of what they might grandly call their political philosophy, and everyone else their imperialist agenda, has collapsed in ruin – I mean the American doctrine of ‘The War on Terror’.
That is the radical shift but from it others, too, can be discerned. The myth of an objective media has been simply blown away.
The foundational viewpoint was that the Cold War was won by the illiterate American leader (‘Mr Gorbachev, tear down that wall!’) triumphing over the Evil Empire. Both the American appraisal of the enemy and the claim to victory over them have been engulfed by the tsunami that has been caused by this shift in the world situation.
Let us put it clearly. Yes – communism as a state system was destroyed, but history did not, cannot, come to an end. When Soviet Russia became a capitalist commonwealth it could no longer be seen as an Evil Empire delineated as Other. Now we were all the same. Yet nothing was the same, only we did not see what had happened.
The methodology has been defeated – but Russia had won. The old order had been swept away but two institutions, the strongest, had survived. Gorbachev and Yeltsin were the Communist Party. Politics. First, they had to be de-activated. From the clouds of dust over the parliamentary buildings there emerged the survivors – the KGB and the Army. Stalinism had disgraced the Party system, Afghanistan had shamed the still powerful Army. Out from the ranks of the KGB stepped a new leader. All of us dismissed him as an apparatchik, but we were wrong. Bush said he had looked into Putin’s soul and he was good, meaning in his language, a pushover. Putin, however, had read his time correctly. Pull back the commodity ownership from the loathsome capitalist oligarchs and Russia became, inside the magical International Community, the dominant power of the world’s land-mass, commanding a wealth not based on an abstract money-system, but on necessary power commodities, oil and gas.
The pipeline had replaced paper as currency of choice.
In a highly symbolic act Putin laid a bunch of red roses on the corpse of the man who had defeated Stalin, single-handed, Solzhenitsyn. It was the end of an age.
When the demented puppet President of Georgia ordered his troops to invade, massacre and humiliate the Ossetians with his mocking TV declaration: “Ossetians, I love you,” he simply did not know who he was dealing with – Russia knew their every move. No sooner had they embarked on their ritual killing than the Russian tanks, forewarned by their superior intelligence service, were ready to move to the rescue.
Only very recently an amazed world watched while Georgia, a whole nation, was taken hostage in a staged democratic coup. Discerning people could see that it was not personality based. It was not even party based. The election was presented as a ‘choice’ between democracy and totalitarianism with a Russian face. Yet the face given to Georgians was not an American face but a local one. It seemed very simple – the new little democracy versus the wicked Russian super-state. Yet observing the sophisticated logistics behind the supposedly improvised demonstrations and rallies it was soon obvious that there was a far from hidden hand. The supplies of all-night food stalls to sustain numbers outside the palace indicated a planned and complex intelligence operation. Clever people said, “This is America’s hand.” Still the picture was not clear. Still it was too simple. If the Cold War had been won, why did it matter to the USA whether this tiny country faced East or West? Yet they had spent vast and ongoing amounts to assure the ‘West-facing’ President. No-one, least of all the Georgians, outside their psychiatric fraternity, seemed to be aware that he was mad.
If one pursues the official scenario of the political class then, of course, Georgia is Belgium to Hitler or Poland to Stalin. To buy this thesis you had to accept the evil versus good dichotomy of the Bush doctrine, except if you did, then you had to fit the great Russian state into an evil world that seemed increasingly crowded – Korea, Afghanistan, Iran, Syria, and maybe Egypt tomorrow, and that meant that the viability of democratic credentials could no longer be counted on – the zeitgeist was falling apart.
McCain’s sloganising was out of due season: “We are now all Georgians! I speak for all Americans.” Cafferty, the one brilliant thinker on CNN, announced: “Well, he does not speak for me.”
Russia was no longer Soviet Russia. Putin and his President were no Stalin. Wittily, the Russian official at the UN politely reminded the demented Georgian President that Stalin was a Georgian. Beria, head of the Soviet secret police, was also a Georgian. They had been the instruments that destroyed the Soviet System! Now the Georgians had declared war on Russia. Then they screamed invasion. Then they begged for peace. Then they called for the widening of the conflict into a continental open conflict. Georgia was being led into a dance of death, led by a President who acted and spoke in contradictory half-sentences, eyes flashing, spittle dribbling, and hands flailing.
Clearly politics and nation-states could not change anything. Bush muttered about observing “the territorial integrity of a sovereign state.” Laughing, Russia at the UN simply asked: “…and Iraq? And Afghanistan?” The age of politics had come to an end.
In order to make sense of events it is necessary to scrap the terminology, methodology, language and evaluation of a world governed by national laws and international agreements. On the same day that the American President actually declared the need to respect the territorial integrity of the sovereign state, he attended christian church in China, where Tibetans and Uighurs are tortured and sterilised on a regular basis, put his arm round an uncomfortable Chinese christian and announced: “God is love!” This, from the author of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo prisons.
It is this breakdown in rational discourse that forces us to re-define a new game played on the board with new pieces and new rules.
If the new Great Game is obscured from the masses, it is not only that the majority are, while techno-literate, utterly ignorant of the world they live in, peasants in planes with iPods, powerless in a way previous populations never were, but also that they are programmed. They are dictated to in their thoughts – told it is freedom of expression, they are intellectually as obedient, conditioned, and helpless as a herd of cattle with mad-cow-disease.
This viral condition is called Media. Before we move to the third and new chess-board we must understand the elusive and clouded game of the middle chess-board, our second level.
Everything we are positing here is based on the assumption, because recognition, that the current world system is at present in final phase collapse, and that ready to emerge is a new life pattern to rescue from the ruins, men, women, children, wealth ownership of the many, the soil, the sea and the sky – the myriad remaining species.
The second chess-game therefore is not merely ‘Media’ which is immediate and syllabic – breaking news, sound-bites, and so-called specialists. It is not just TV, movies and newspapers/magazines. That is its lowest order. Its next level is the educational dictatorship. If you wish to dispel the illusion of political freedom in a democracy – just try and set up an independent school, let alone an institute of higher learning. The University system is itself today, and has been for decades, homogenised and identical from Cambridge to Ulan Bator. The methodological formula for a Ph.D. is identical, globally, in every place. It is based on the dialectic of critical analysis.
Many years ago I went to Madinah to ask of Mauritania’s most renowned Faqih the fatwa I felt he best could give. He refused to see me in his home, his servant saying he had orders to admit no-one and that he had resigned from Madinah University. I insisted he come out – I needed the knowledge – he had it. Finally, he took me in and told me his tale. He had been brought to Madinah in order to prepare graduates at the Ph.D. level so that they in turn could teach Qur’an to others who wanted this academic authority to give definitive judgments on Qur’an.
He then discovered that his students – to fit the Ph.D. formula – had first to present past and current views on the Qur’an. Then, they had to measure these, accept some, reject others. Then, state their opinion and claim its precedence over the previous views. Critical analysis, thus based on the principle thesis that the Qur’an was ‘a thing’, created and analysable. Its errors could be corrected, rejected, or laid aside as outdated. Mu’tazili made legal. He resigned as a result. The matter is far from over. This week I was informed that the atheist socialist government of Britain wanted to set up a panel to give a definitive (!) analysis of Qur’an in tune with our age – that is terminal capitalism.
Emerging from that pre-determined indoctrination of University come the ‘experts’. They then move from that sphere “into the field”. They write the script of the discourse of the political class, ‘Wind of change’, ‘Axis of evil’, ‘Time for change’, ‘Yes, we can!’ They provide our terror experts and our academics who call for tolerance, dialogue and human rights.
The stars of this process are the ones who win a place as ‘Senior Correspondent’ or ‘Political Adviser’ to a TV channel. All are beneath contempt, in particular CNN’s strange, bald transvestite, Christiane Amanpour, and Sky’s Tim Marshall, both of whom hold forth as authorities on Islam in all its legal aspects!
Yet the media status quo which had lasted almost a century fell, also a casualty of the Georgia event. Up until then it was made simple for us: in the Second World War Hitler and the Nazis were evil – the Allies were not only good but were themselves Western Civilisation. After that came the Cold War. The West (America and Europe) were good and Russia was the Evil Empire. The deaths of Hitler, then Stalin seemed to confirm the good/evil duality of events. In the euphoria of 24-hour-trading the capitalist world was named (by whom?) the International Community. History was abolished, there only remained monopoly capitalism, which to the peasant masses meant consumerism, or shopping, as was the preferred term. Outside that emerged a dark force – it was called ‘Terrorism’.
Terrorism was the stateless evil against the world’s united states. With the event of Georgia’s attack on the Ossetians and its Russian response, rescue on one level but a new evaluation of the geopolitical on the other, that dialectic is rendered outmoded.
On the level of the now irrelevant national politics and its background of the ‘International Community’, too, all has undergone a sea-change. Both the political class at the national level and at the super-state and the international level had come to an end-game. The British Foreign Secretary does not know how to perform and is untrained in diplomacy’s use. It is pointless for this upstart to read up the Harold Nicolson trilogy which is the art’s key work. Both training and capacity are required. One does not start with abrasive and commanding words when Britain is a lesser nation and Russia a super-state. Also, in diplomacy, courtesy requires one to meet the morning after!
The French Foreign Secretary is equally unfit for office. A man who kept starving Africans from getting their rescue food aid until the TV cameras were there to film him giving it is scarcely diplomatic material. President Chirac’s only advice to Sarkozy was, “Do not use Kuchner as a Minister.”
Worst of them all is the USA’s man at the UN. Where did they find him? In which mafia – the Camorra of Naples, or Sicily, or in the hinterland of the Himalayan underworld? The dazzling Russian UN spokesman dismissed him mockingly as “A high-flying diplomat.”
In Russia we find another level of power and competence. From the suave and relaxed but firm President and his masterly Prime Minister on to their man at the UN, then their impressive military chiefs, down to a TV team of coherent, well-spoken (unlike Sky) and educated commentators – what we find is a new and open regime free of the malodorous political class. A country with a future in a post-political world, and one that has decoded the current system of lies and deception that covers over that genuine power nexus we are about to examine.
The collapse of the political class is finalised by the collapse of the illusion that our media and education modules were trustworthy and honest. If anything, ‘the Free World’ is now in Russia.
Today you can book your plane for Russia at the travel agency and, visa-ed, step off the plane and visit the country freely. Today business-men dread the USA’s tortuous travel obligations, at visa-level, at departure airport, on-flight, at arrival a positive nightmare. On the same day the USA announced the removal of Nelson Mandela from the list of wanted terrorists (a 90th birthday gift!) and later that the one millionth name had been posted on it. To get foreign brain-power into the country, the USA has to advertise world-wide on TV begging for Green-Card applicants. If you have the same name as a listed terrorist prepare for the nightmare. Water-boarding, torture, rendition and disappearance!
If the political chess-board, and beneath it the hazy media/education information technology chess-board were all that now is operative you would be forgiven for pessimism and even, alas, nihilism. If the world is really in the hands of the politicians, and if the news we get is true – then we are in a state of anarchy. In 1648, on the occasion of the Peace Settlement which ended the Thirty Years War, Axel Oxenstierna, the Swedish Chancellor, wrote to his son: “Do you know, my son, with what little wisdom the world is governed?” Well, now in 2008, it is much, much worse!
We now come to the third simultaneous chess game of level three. It in turn has a new terminology, new pieces, new evaluations, new rules. It, too, has underlying principles which are irrational, contradictory and illusory. It is non-conspirational, structuralist and yet shrouded in secrecy at the same time as declaring its protocols are Kantian in their actuality.
It is the world of non-national, because supra-national, institutions and procedures which, while adhering to, or behind, known structures, submit to no legality, national or international. They are, not in essence but in practice, above the law. No, even that cannot define them. Israel is ‘above’ the law in ignoring the statute ordering a return to its 1947 borders, or in arrogantly refusing to submit to the International Atomic Agency which it accuses Iran of disobeying. Still, Israel operates inside the first chess game and as such is governed by it. Here we can say, this level game is different from the entities which flout the law. Here, there is no law. There is no Court of Appeal. No Court of Justice. No trial. No punishment. No-one has been elected. No-one can be voted out or into office. Some of its modules appear outwardly to be dependent on political entities to appoint their leadership, but this is a further illusion. The procedure works in these cases with a regular body of short-listed players already selected by a rigorous scrutiny and programming which assures they will take on no rogue personnel.
These entities are: the United Nations Organisations and its ancillary institutions of health, culture and refugees. The North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, and a raft of Super-Banks that operate outside the strict and traditional form of banks which have had a trading history in the past century.
On the 8th day of the 8th month of 2008, while the world rewarded China for its systematic murder of girl foetuses, Uighur men, women and children and Tibetan monks – in response to the attempt by Georgian forces to eliminate the South Ossetian population – the great Russian Commonwealth ordered its Army into Georgian disputed territory. However, this was not, categorically not, Stalin invading Poland, or Hitler Czechoslovakia. Russia, in its new position as a post-democratic yet capitalist state, had moved against a new enemy. Up until that moment that enemy’s only antagonist consisted of an army in Afghanistan, defined as terrorist. Russia had declared war on Nato.
Just as a new understanding of a post-Soviet Russia has to be absorbed, so also, a new realisation of what Nato is and does and does not do has to be discovered.
The first indication we had that in Nato we were not dealing simply with a military protocol was when the Canadian General in Bosnia under Nato mandate raped a Muslim girl. To the apparent astonishment of the occupying force, Bosnians seemed to call for justice and punishment. Their first reaction was to brush the charges aside. When Bosnia’s lawyers persisted the criminal was quite simply pensioned off and sent home. However, what emerged was the unhidden but never practised clause in the Nato Constitution – that no member of Nato personnel could be arraigned before any national court. If that right had been granted, individually, nation by nation to Nato soldiers, it would have been lawful, granted by democratic judiciaries, or at least it would have been above the law, sanctioned by law. In fact what emerged was that Nato is lawless. It can do what it likes. At the present time there are multiple reports of child rape on the boys and girls of Afghanistan. Nothing is being done, for nothing can be done.
The first statesman to grasp that what had to be dealt with fell outside the structural reality of nation states was one of the last century’s greatest leaders, General de Gaulle. In 1966 President de Gaulle forced Nato to leave French soil. That event, and his far-sighted and first-sighted recognition that a transfer from numbers currency to gold (commodity) currency was needed to restore freedom, assured his expulsion from office. The second statesman to understand the true reality of Nato was President Putin right at the beginning of his mandate when he faced the robber oligarchs who had simply seized Russia’s commodity wealth. These robbers are still presented in the US and Europe as victims and martyrs!
In Iraq the ignominy of torture at Abu Ghraib prison and the housing of men without any civic identity that could offer them protection or even a possibility of release, legally non-persons, at Guantanamo, and the final degradation of rendition which effectively made men disappear so that they could never be accounted for (something already a norm of the internal US prison system) – all this had done irreparable harm to the USA’s reputation of standing for ‘the Free World’. It had, in the bye-going, abolished the doctrine of humanism once and for all. That implied the need for modalities of power and control outside the discourse of values. It was for this that the effective governance of the world had to pass onto a new zone of functionality, valueless and enslaving. For this the third-level chess board and its new rules and counters was set up.
The transfer of the zone of conflict from Iraq to Afghanistan was the switch-over. Now, the indiscriminate killing of civilians, the inaccessible torture centres, the unpunishable rape and violation of the innocents, all this became the quotidian norm of a post-national army, mercenaries – and merciless.
The last inhibition was removed. In Iraq the Americans called finally to bring the boys back home. In Afghanistan there was no agitation to pull back the soldiers. They had no home. They were a Foreign Legion, or like the Roman Legion once its soldiers were no longer Roman but recruits of Empire. Nobody cared. Nations were silent – media were ‘embedded’ and rendered silent, too.
There has begun a desperate research by a handful of intellectuals to try to come to grips with this new uncharted phenomenon. The first results are terrifying. Daniele Ganser, a Senior Researcher at the Centre for Security Studies at the Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, Switzerland has just issued a devastating report, ‘Nato’s Secret Armies’ which charts its clandestine activities from 1947 up to the present. What his research reveals is that there has been a policy and practice of counter-terrorism, setting up, through Agents Provocateurs, terrorist events by recruited terrorists, but under Nato guidance, that have involved the bombing and killing of innocents IN ORDER to blame and anathematise communist cells and programmes – a successful programme aimed at eliminating the current enemy of the capitalist system. It inescapably points to the strongest possibility that this has continued to be their policy with the new ‘enemy’ – the world’s Muslims. What had seemed the domain of conspiracy psychosis has become the arena of serious academic research! These Nato secret armies had tried in 1961 to stage a coup in Algiers to overthrow de Gaulle’s democratic regime in France.
Today Nato personnel have been systematically moving to the edges of the Russian Commonwealth in the Baltic States, Ukraine and Georgia. President Medvedev is the first national state leader to have moved against them.
The UNO is another of the new power structures of the monetarist elite. When the people of Srebrenica took the UNO to court accusing them of their known responsibility in the massacre, to the amazement of thinking men and women it was declared that the UNO cannot be accountable for its actions.
There is a fourth chess-board beneath the other three, at present obscured by their successful clouding over of its identity. It is the Islamic module with its irresistible historicity. At the minute players cannot see beyond the smoke of terrorist attacks. What soon will become clear to the world’s presently enslaved masses is that that configuration of Islam as terrorism and oppression of women, is utterly false.
What is about to be discovered is that Islam holds the key to the global prison of numbers currency and inflationary doom. The two dominant civic factors of Islam are 1) worship of the Divine Creator and 2) trade and governance being founded on personal and accountable transactions. The two – inseparable.
One final reflection and one final observation:
Reflection: In the light of this the Russian leadership should look to a fresh concordance with Islam and the Muslims, (not Iran, the USA’s ideological double) and an alliance with Afghanistan and Pakistan which should be seen as an equivalent to the successful post-war alliance of France and Germany. Similarly, Russia should look to replacing the left-over Soviet puppets in the other ‘Stans with a friendly Muslim leadership.
Observation: The Nato missile shield is not pointing at Russia but at China. However, this was based on an outdated US view of a helpless post-communist, now benign and weak Russia. Put it this way: the 20th century read the map as: Fascist Germany – helpless Poland – the Russian enemy. The 21st century read the map as Nato Europe – helpless Russia – the Chinese enemy. They have been proved wrong. Russia is now stronger than the USA. It is Russia and a Central Asian Islam that must face China as it loses West Turkestan and fights as it breaks up.
Post Scriptum: In any event success will be with the Muslims and their allies. The believers always defeat the pagans.
La Ghaliba ila’Llah.