Tuesday, 05 March 2013

The headlines were grim in September 2002. ‘BRITS 45 MINS FROM DOOM’ and ‘45 MINUTES FROM ATTACK – dossier reveals Saddam is ready to launch chemical war strikes’ – set the tone. The hysteria was primed by a deliberately misleading government briefing crafted to dupe the nation into an invasion of Iraq – which duly followed in March 2003. The Prime Minister behind the plot was Tony Blair. Ten years on, he commands respect.

The BBC shrieks “Tony Blair calls for UK intervention in Syria crisis”. The Guardian offers “Blair: fight against al-Qaida could last a generation.” Those who called Tony a war criminal must bite their tongues.

Mr Blair’s comments were made in an interview with the BBC. It was put to him that Iran possessed “weapons of mass destruction” and was now “the number one enemy of the West, the number one enemy of America”. He amicably agreed that Iran should be bombed. The world was still threatened by “forces linked by a common ideology based on a perversion of religion, based on this Islamism…” The Syrian government was wiping-out villages with Scud missiles and heavy artillery. Mr. Blair’s fantasies went unchallenged.

Hollywood also influences the western consumer’s view of the world. Argo, which won the Oscar for best picture, keeps an entire and complex US covert operation – to install the Ayatollah Khomeini and destabilise the Carter Administration – out of shot. The Iranians substitute for Red Indians. “Zero Dark Thirty” claims torture helped the CIA find Osama Bin Laden. The lie has been refuted by a US Senate Committee. South Africans who lived under apartheid will remember the pervasive fear of torture – its psychological trauma and deadly effect. The film ignores the illegality, immorality and futility of torture; the lack of any evidence for its story-line; the disinterest in water-boarding Mr Bin Laden himself.

“Zero Dark Thirty” and the rehabilitation of Mr Blair are coherent with the massacre of mineworkers in South Africa, savage austerity programmes in Europe and the nonchalance with which the US bombs countries back into the Stone Age. The West is no longer indifferent to the killing of children in dreadful numbers – it deliberately targets them. The facts are not controversial. This is part of that everyday life where trying to get as rich as possible, individually, is regarded as a mathematical certainty for making your neighbourhood a nicer place. It’s a reflection of how crude eugenics and the racist rant of Nazism have found their ultimate expression in the cold-blooded rationality of capitalist accumulation; of how we have moved beyond evil.

Sir Francis Galton, a cousin of Charles Darwin, speculated on the possibility of producing “a highly gifted race of men” an idea inspired by animal husbandry. Eugenics – the term he coined in 1883 – was the application of the principle to humans. In early 20th century America – reeling from a series of depressions that highlighted staggering inequality and inflamed the xenophobia of the elite – eugenics swiftly became a repressive, racist ideology and a legitimate science.

America and the world’s social and economic problems would be solved by promoting the reproduction of blond, blue-eyed Nordic types and by exterminating and phasing out the rest. This grand idea provided the moral justification for a horrifying national program of ethnic cleansing – forced sterilization, casual euthanasia, segregation and restrictions on marriage – that became law in some 30 states.

America’s wealthy elite- exemplified by the Carnegies and Rockefellers – played a central role. They funded a eugenics research laboratory and the Eugenics Record Office in Cold Spring Harbour, New York. Eugenics campaigns were unrolled across America. Rockefeller money seeded and supported the fledgling “science” in Germany – including the Kaiser Wilhelm Institutes which would become the centre for Nazi eugenics policies. In short, Americans inspired and cultured Germany’s race science long before the arrival of Hitler. American eugenics law rationalised the “final solution” – the extermination of Jews.

Meanwhile, Standard Oil – owned by the Rockefellers – developed close links with German chemical giant I.G. Farben. American money was routed to German industrialists through the Union Banking Corporation in New York – set-up by the powerful German steel magnate August Thyssen in cahoots with banker Averell Harriman. Prescott Bush – father of one president and grandfather of another – was a director. For the Nazis world-rule was the highest moral objective; terror simply a means of achieving it.

Eugenics has moved on from the elimination of undesirables to an ostensibly more respectable preoccupation with population control and genetic manipulation. This is small comfort when mass culling of people to save the planet – and altering the genetic code of humanity – remains on the agenda. Moreover the CIA’s operating licence under the 1947 National Security Act endorsed Nazi finesse and the US is now, quite fairly, recognised as a police state.

For almost 60 years across ten presidencies, in and out of office, three men have powerfully shaped and directed American aggression; the violent overthrow of governments, the invasion and occupation of third world countries. They are John Foster Dulles, US Secretary of State (1953 to 1959); Henry Kissinger, National Security Advisor and Secretary of State (1969-1977) and Zbigniew Brzezinski, National Security Advisor (1977-1981). All three are protégés of David Rockefeller. This element of elite continuity is even more sinister as it comes – like eugenics – with a big idea to justify atrocity.

At a 1991 meeting of the secretive Bilderberg group- comprising the world’s most influential corporate and political leaders – David Rockefeller thanked the directors of papers like the Washington Post, The New York Times and Time Magazine who attended the meetings but kept silent for almost 40 years. He said it would have been impossible to develop their plan for the world in the glare of publicity. “But the world is more sophisticated and prepared to march towards a world government. The supranational sovereignty of an intellectual elite and world bankers is surely preferable to the national auto-determination practiced in past centuries.”

The dismantling of nation states and the imposition of elite rule across the planet is a large project. Despite a century of unbridled barbarism it will require extremes of violence barely imaginable. There will be no qualms; the new intellectual elite are equipped with a moral doctrine provided by the “philosopher king” of the US covert state and the father of neo-conservatism, Leo Strauss. At the heart of the Strauss equivalent of “Mein Kampf” is a concept of natural right which extols corporate plunder – “limitless capital accumulation” is “the highest right and moral duty.” This is the ethical absolute. The looting of poorer societies is simply the exercise of a natural right in pursuit of the supreme goal.

Moral philosopher John McMurtry says, “To justify its meaning, the Straussian canon adopts a potted reading of Western moral and political philosophy from Plato through Hobbes, Hegel, Nietzsche, Marx and Weber. This impresses American political operatives of the faith, but Strauss is a failed philosopher …only saved from academic ruin in Germany by Rockefeller grant money.” In short Strauss deliberately misrepresents the finest efforts of classical philosophy to give the conquest of the world by corporations a pseudo-intellectual veneer. This is what he was paid to do. In this doctrine nothing is “too mendacious, greed-crazed or murderous”.

For Strauss there is only one natural right, the right of the superior to rule over the inferior. Only the wise-elite is capable of governing and must do so by way of secrecy, deception, violence, the abrogation of international law and the myth of a broad external threat to inspire the vulgar many. The wise-elite are lovers of the harsh, unadulterated truth, recognising neither God nor moral imperatives.

This is slop for most sensible people. The reality is that powerful figures like Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle are disciples of Strauss. Along with other neo-conservatives they found their way into the George W Bush administration. They had been working on a plan for American world domination in the Project for the New American Century think tank.

They also realised world-rule would be hard to sell to sophisticated Americans and said so in a September 2000 PNAC strategy document. “Further, the process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary changes, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event – like a new Pearl Harbour.” The 9/11 attacks followed a year later providing exactly what they wanted.

Neither the neo-conservatives nor Tony Blair are the supermen of a defiant moral independence that Friedrich Nietzsche celebrates in ‘Beyond Good and Evil”. They are Strauss’s corruption; prison wardens from the Nazi concentration camps, resurrected as an “intellectual elite” to mercilessly rule a corporate global state.