This essay was originally written and published on a technical site in November 2009 for Information Technology professionals.  However, given the embedded nature of software in the daily lives of all people in the industrialized nations on Earth, what this piece has to say is just as important for the non-technical users and how it damages and incurs stress in such lives.

In an industry that is mostly  governed by arrogance, ignorance, and personal agenda software development, a field, which should have matured scientifically by today’s standards is still very much in the dark ages of its infancy.  It will continue to remains so as the bulk of professionals continue to allow their exploitation by those who see the actual science as nothing more relevant than the procurement of a new “toaster for their kitchens”…

Recently a new report has come out stating that recent trends in software development have shown a rate of failure at approximately 68%.  Such failure is not judged simply by the fact that a project failed to be implemented but instead among several factors, which include unsatisfactory results, missed implementation date, budget overruns as well as project cancellation.  Given this criteria, it easy to understand why the percentage of failure is so high and why it has remained hovering at this rate since the inception of modern software development.  In other words, it is a stark indication that the Information Technology field has yet to mature like every other technical or process-driven field (ie: manufacturing).

When reading such reports the analysis of project failure has consistently revolved around what development processes were used or not used and the number of software engineering (SE) mistakes that were made.  All of these factors have been substantially proven by software engineer analysts over many years of studying project failure as the cardinal mistakes technical managers constantly and consistently make.

In fact, the reporting style of such an indicator in the Information Technology field is so formula driven that one report hardly reads as any different from another.  It is as if such reports are simply cranked out on a random basis with the same reasoning and the same failure numbers just to keep reminding professionals in the industry that it still has no standards of quality when it comes to legitimate output.  The interesting thing to note is why such reports are never changing and have been consistent for some 35+ years in a field that promotes modernization through technologies; technologies that are themselves ridden with defects and often cannot demonstrate the specifications they were designed with.

The major factor in such a constant abysmal state in software development is that it is not done in a vacuum.  It is part of a larger process that must include several parties coming together to produce a deliverable; the users who will eventually be using the software, the technical managers who will be providing guidance to the projects, and the developers themselves who will create the actual product.  With three distinct parties all who have vested interests in a successful outcome, you would think they would do everything possible to make sure their projects are successful.  However, this is hardly the case.  And the results have been disastrous not only for those involved in the implementations but those who the implementations affect.  To take this one step further, the software industry has been a disaster for societies in general despite the common efficiencies it has fostered such as the word-processor.

The “ugly truth” is that actual software development is done within the constraints of corporate cultures that supersede the interests of the parties to any individual project.  And it is this culture that provides the underlying sociology that most often causes software project failure even before any project is actually begun.

As a company becomes increasingly larger its internal bureaucracy naturally grows along with it, which in of itself becomes a self-perpetuating entity, that most often invades the corporate landscape with its own agendas from an institutional perspective. This group-like agenda is well known among sociologists and has as its underlying foundation the agendas of the company managers from the most senior down to the middle layers who are most often more interested in their own self-aggrandizement than the best interests of the company.  The management hyperbole about only promoting the finest quality with in any specific corporation is complete nonsense as such statements are completely disassociated from reality.  In fact, it is well known by now that most American corporations produce nothing more than junk as increasingly product development is outsourced to the cheapest labor forces that can be found on the planet with the idea that it will promote reduced prices for the buying public… and the eventual blame for the support of such processes.  Software development is no different in this deteriorating process that often puts quality software engineers at odds with the results they have to oversee from such work.

The end result, is that like a product that does not work or breaks down to early in its expected life-span, poor quality software development produces an ever increasing number of complexities, stresses and agitations that do more to make everyday life more difficult than that which is promoted as the modern miracles of such technologies.

To understand such a contention one also has to have an understanding of the sociology of corporations, which few people do with the exception of those that study such institutions.  There is a difference between an actual “company” and what we have come to know as the “corporation”.  Companies, especially private ones, have been around since the 17^th century and earlier.  They historically have been made up by people who have a vested interest in either providing a quality service or a quality product.  And if they failed to do so there were no shareholders to worry about though the owners of course lost everything in the process.  “The Company” as we should call it is the actual basis for modern Capitalism, not what society is currently dealing with in the guise of corporations.  These early business structures are what made Capitalism what it was and were the model for private profit; a profit that was based off of a creation of something that provided a purchaser with a realistic value for their purchase.  Such structures were often small to middling in size and provided societies with cottage industries that were often competitive within their own right.  Some were large such as the famous Lloyds of London but they prospered since their managers were sincerely interested in maintaining a sense of quality about them, which is what also provided them with their reputations.

“The Corporation” on the other hand, the type of institution that we constantly read about on a daily basis was actually created as a scam, a swindle in the 17^th century (see Joel Bakan’s excellent sociological study on this, “The Corporation”) with the sole purpose of fleecing third-party investors out of their monies.  So blatantly flagrant were these situations that European governments banned such institutions from operating for over 200 years.  It was in England where the ban was eventually first lifted but only to the extent that “corporations” could not extend their risk to unknowing shareholders and all owners in a corporation (including the shareholders) incurred legal liabilities for any illegalities committed by the corporation. Thus corporations were in a very real sense forced to act in the same way that their smaller company counterparts had operated where all involved assumed the risk.

Such enforcement then kept such operations in line as far as fair and equitable operating practices were concerned.  And up through the late 19^th century both companies, which were still private, and corporations which sold shares of stock to shareholders for capital investment operated side-by-side without too many upheavals, if any at all.  It is true that there were several depressions during this period but such occurrences were not so much a result of corporate fraud as we have become used but more to forces that were a result of the Industrial Revolution, something which analysts at the time had yet to fully understand economically.

However, at the turn of the 19^th century and then shortly later, two things happened to the modern misanthrope we now understand as the “corporation”.  In and around 1898, the corporation was granted “personhood” when a judge granted such a consideration to a corporation involved in a litigation; a judgment that was based on extraneous trial documentation, which was not supposed to be considered allowable for interpretation due to the nature of its position in the document it was found in.  The judge in the case thus allowed a corporation rights as an individual, which set precedent for all other such litigation up through the present.  Thus the stage was set for the eventual corruption of what had been strong enforcement against the egregious frauds that are now routinely carried out and termed “excesses of Capitalism”.

Recent studies of the case have also concluded that the allowance of “personhood” was inappropriate and not actually legal thus in essence invalidating every such instance where a corporation was treated as an individual in the case.  However, try undoing over 100 years of jurisprudence…

The next thing to happen was around 1925 when corporations were able to eliminate shareholder liability in terms of illegalities committed by the corporation.  These two events allowed the corporation to separate itself completely from the people who were actually running it thus eliminating any personal liability for anyone involved.  It was a boon for the institution as it was now possible to return the “corporation” to its roots as nothing more than what it was originally designed for, fleecing people out of their monies.  With the known reasons for the current economic calamity there is not really any possibility of disputing this.

From an institutional culture in terms of the private company that operated within a Capitalistic structure that was more or less fair and equitable as a result of the desire to produce a quality product we went to the modern corporation whose sole motive is the creation of a profit.  Eliminating that sense of quality has had terrible effect on what corporations thus produce and the evidence for this abounds on a daily basis.

To believe that software development, which came on the scene long after corporations were in a state of sociological decline, could produce quality output is an almost impossibility.  And here the evidence is quite extensive as well.

This is not to say that there aren’t companies that still produce quality output and that there aren’t companies that can produce quality software.  In both cases there are.  However, such cases are fostered by only two factors; either the company must produce quality products by necessity or management is enlightened enough to understand that quality output will always outlast those competitors who do not provide such output.

The classic example of necessity is the aircraft manufacturer.  If Boeing Corporation for instance produced planes that crashed, even on occasion from faulty production processes, they wouldn’t be in business.  And it is interesting to note that the Boeing 757 (and its big brother the 767, which was modeled off the 757) is considered one of the finest commercial manufacturing\software projects in history producing an aircraft of uncanny performance with an exceptional level of quality that is very difficult to equal or match.

However, such quality is not often found in the environments that most software developers and engineers work in because most corporate cultures don’t really consider it important… and most such corporations do not exist with the underlying necessity of quality for their products.  The result is that “perception of quality” is infinitely cheaper and less expensive to incorporate which promotes the newly described term for acceptable software development in most companies, “good enough”.  This result is merely an extension of the l level of quality that most sociologists of corporate institutions have attributed corporations of being capable of, which is simply that of “mediocrity”.

It is no joke when people say that the companies they work in have nothing better to offer than mediocre products.  Often they are quite right and simply coming to an understanding what most modern companies are truly capable of producing.

This then is what the underlying basis is for where all software project failure begins.  However, in terms of the actual corporate Information Technology organizations themselves, they have been literally ravaged by uncanny business theories and implementations that have no regard for the requirements of software development but are simply implemented from management whim or the corporation’s need to “cut costs” in order to look good for Wall Street.

Information Technology costs… period!  There is no getting around it but corporations in their own enlightened manner continue to find ways to reduce these costs especially from labor standpoint, which is a critical factor in the process since software development is labor intensive.  The result is that such “cost cutting” drives down the numbers on the ledgers, while driving up the “hidden costs”, those costs that cannot be accounted for unless a sociological study of the corporation has been implemented.

There are ways to reduce the costs of software technology but this takes the skills of technical architects, those people who understand the nature of those components that are required to applications and systems in place.  However, such specialists have been eliminated from companies to again, “save money”.  In fact, in the attempt to save money, corporations have been eliminating vital tiers from the software development process for years that have left the actual software developers responsible for handling tasks they are not supposed to be handling such as system specification development; s specialty unto itself.

So to save money corporations eliminate the very people who are the most knowledgeable in their areas to help a firm do just that.  The classic example of this is found in small to medium sized companies that are led to believe that only the frightfully expensive Oracle Database System is suitable for their data storage needs.  This is often the result of letting Database Administrators who are trained on the Oracle Database make such decisions for the company when an impartial technical architecture team could produce recommendations of capable and less expensive alternative solutions that readily available.

In the end, what happens is the “vicious circle” where personnel are laid off during times of economic stress instead first considering the elimination of very expensive software tools, which can be more easily replaced.   Corporate “fiefdoms” than are protected instead of the institution as a whole.  And the monies that are saved are soon lost as the knowledge that the laid off personnel had goes out the door with them.

Corporations make a big to do about maintaining quality but it is mostly lip-service to cover up what is really being done which is to put saved monies from reduced labor forces into the pockets of greedy corporate overseers since it is much easier to do so than actually create something worthwhile…

Outsourcing is one of the most outlandish processes to have ever been implemented by a corporation; again with the idea to reduce costs.  The toll in dislocation that tends to spread across the entire spectrum of a company as result has been massive destroying vital corporate loyalties while reducing quality to such an extent as to make it a wonder that such companies survive at all.  Again the evidence of this is quite extensive and needs no further explanation.

From a military analytical perspective, the concept of outsourcing goes against every military axiom of logistics ever founded making the term “business leadership” a classic oxymoron.  Outsourcing unnecessarily extends a supply-line and the longer a supply-line the more vulnerable it is too disruption.  How many times then have developers complained of having to deal with people in another country who can barely converse properly over project specifications?  That in of itself has been found to be a major point of disruption on software projects.  In some cases the disruption has been so critical that project failure was the only result.

Yet, outsourcing is done to contain costs, or so the mantra goes.  It is not done to produce a higher quality out- come since when you reduce costs, at some level quality must suffer.  And for any software project there must be a minimal level of cost in order to produce quality.  However, when managers are making such decisions they often respond to such needs by promoting the hard work of the software development team.  To them such “hard work” will make up for any of the deficiencies they have provided the development environment with.

Unsurprisingly, and to the complete ignorance of the buying public, most American managers are bone stupid.  Not all, but most.  This easily filters into the Information Technology organization within the technical management cadres that most often haven’t a clue about what they are managing.  American IT technical managers, though they used to enjoy a good reputation have never really deserved it.  Most often they have been nothing more than abstractions of the general business executive that often rules from a tyrannical vantage point.  The really good technical managers in the field have been often ground under as they attempted to bring a sense of reality to project development which often went contrary to the predicted deadline for project completion.  It should be remembered here that we are not talking about companies where quality is a necessity or the management is enlightened enough to require it…

This has been a prevalent problem in American Information Technology and it has become worse with the influx of Indian technical management into the management ranks of US corporations.  Through the 1990s Indian technical professionals were some of the most professional technicians one could want to work alongside with.  However, after the dot-com bust in 2000 this seemed to change as “in-sourcing” less expensive professionals from India and other third-world nations was ramped up significantly.  From a highly professional and capable cadre of development specialists from India suddenly the people coming over were of a different level of quality, while their own management contemporaries were being increasingly hired as managers in US firms.  This brought two sets of new problems to the corporate Information Technology organization; one of which has been often kept hidden from view and the other which is impossible to hide.

Given the spiritual nature of the Indian people it is very surprising to find that in terms of their business and politics it is one of the most corrupt nations on Earth.  Yet, this aspect of Indian society has been well documented internationally and by their  own investigative journalists.  Its corruption suffocates legitimate business endeavors to the point that it is a wonder that any such endeavor is even successful.  In a broad review of several major business centers in the world several years ago it was surprisingly found that India ranked the lowest in terms of business-friendly environments.

What is heard about Indian prominence in terms of their business acumen is in reality only a handful of companies when you compare it to the entire population.  And in terms of Information Technology and its associated adjuncts such as technical support, the working conditions for the people there are equivalent to what was once an abomination in US labor up through the 1960s.  Not everywhere of course but enough so that mainstream business news has picked it up often enough.  Indian call centers have a reputation for being nothing more than ‘sweat shops” while small farming in India is so ill supported that many simply commit suicide out of despair.

What such environments have yielded are business managers from the more affluent classes that are often arrogant and completely devoid of any concern for the people that work for them.  And these are the people who have been hired into many US technical management positions.  Today it is impossible to find a US Information Technology organization of any substantial size that is not populated with many managers from India.

Indian technicians on the other hand have seen a reduction in quality from those who were coming over prior to 2000.  With the chance to increase their outsourcing companies, Indian technical training, which was generally superb began substituting the equivalent of less than quality training for people being sent over to the States to take positions as consultants from these companies.  Reports abounded of such personnel being trained just well enough to pass interviews.

Indian technicians today do not seem to have the same grasp or understanding of what it takes to actually develop quality systems as their predecessors did.  And their coding seems to demonstrate this whereby sloppiness appears to be a more common trait.  This is not by any means an indictment on Indian technical capabilities.  They are very capable personnel.  However, their training, which appeared to be more robust prior to 2000 now appears to be centered on memorizing technical facts and attempting to meld strictly factual information with a development process that requires a sense of flow.  System and application development is much like a dance and contemporary Indian technicians appear to be so immersed with the clinical aspect of such development they have seemingly been taught to ignore the movements…

This is not strictly the fault of the Indian technology industry by the way.  In some respects, Indian service companies are merely responding to what American corporations are demanding… cheap labor.  And the cheaper the labor is, the lower the quality output you are going to get.  It doesn’t matter how you slice and dice it from the perspective of a given labor market.

These same problems have plagued Asian outsourcing as well but for some reason, few Asians are hired into American technical management positions as much as their Indian contemporaries.  This may be a result of the more predominant Indian outsourcing firms whereby Asian developers are seen at an even lower rung in the “food chain” than that of Indians.

However, surprisingly this does not seem to be symptomatic of Russian developers or their firms as Russian technicians demand higher pay while also expecting to be treated as equals in the development process whereby they can recommend and implement their own proposed methodologies for accomplishing a given project.  The result is that Russian outsourcing is no way comparable in breadth to Indian or Asian outsourcing.

All this was demonstrated in a study of the three major outsourcing regions in an extended article in Business Week several years ago.  There is no evidence so far that this situation has changed to any major degree, especially with current economic circumstances.

What is also interesting to note is another common phenomena within American corporations (and no doubt the UK ones as well since they have been following similar trajectories) that has been occurring since the Reagan Administration; the rise of psychopaths in the management ranks.  In their critical treatise on the subject, “Snakes in Suits – When Psychopaths Go To Work”, Drs. Paul Babiak and Robert Hare, the two psychiatric researchers that created the definitive screening process for weeding out such people within institutions, demonstrate that increasing numbers of classic psychopath personalities have been appearing in US management ranks since Reagan took office in 1980.

This can be attributed to the constant reduction in regulatory requirements that corporations no longer must adhere to along with the rise in prominence of the business manager when compared to technical specialists, scientists, and doctors who have all seen their professions downgraded to subservience to business interests.  This combination of events have encouraged Human Resource departments to more often ignore due diligence in their screening of prospective employees thereby allowing power hungry personalities to enter their management ranks.  And it is only later that the level of damage incurred by these personalities has been found out where in some cases the level of damage has reached such levels as to literally destroy companies and their reputations.

This is not a joke and is increasingly being unknowingly found out by staff members who are finding themselves at odds with their own reactions to their superiors when they feel like they have just experienced a classic “nut job”.  As both Babiak and Hare would say, “They most likely have…”.

Much more can be discussed regarding the detrimental idiosyncrasies of American management but suffice it to say that much of this management has serious personality disorders which often lead to the precarious decisions that have been made under the aegis of “cost containment”.

All of this and more has had a massive ripple effect into software development by setting unrealistic and ruthless attitudes among technical management who implement unrealistic requirements and deadlines towards getting software development accomplished without realizing or even caring about the actual needs of the craft…  And it is a craft and much more so than a science in many respects.  However, the additional stresses that are placed upon developers and engineers aside from the management stresses they labor under can be directly attributed to the software vendors themselves.

Again, such companies are driven by profit and set their priorities accordingly by rushing out  increasingly complex sets of development tools with new defects that all have their own learning curves.  For  an industry where one would think would be run from a somewhat of a scientific perspective vendors produce new software at a rate that has long exceeded the capacity for technical professionals to absorb and work with efficiently.  The effect is to reduce the overall knowledge-base that is vital to good software development.  Thus software developers and engineers labor with tools that are in a constant state of flux where differing versions of even the individual elements have defects that must be surmounted.

Microsoft, one of the most egregious causes to such a state of chaos in the industry releases new versions of their popular .NET development environment every few years which causes a complete imbalance in the professional technical arena.  Corporate developers slowly integrate such new upgrades putting such professionals at a disadvantage when compared to their contemporaries in the consulting and freelancing arena who most often look to use the latest technologies available… and with good reason.  The fickle employment market in Information Technology often demands the latest skills while rarely if ever taking real advantage of them.  Nonetheless, the misappropriated confusion that comes out of corporate hiring specifications demonstrates the complete disconnect between what is really needed in a good technical professional and what more unrealistic perceptions often produce in terms of specific hiring requirements.

A classic example of this serious disconnect was the competition in the 1990s between technical personnel who were still developing with Microsoft’s Visual Basic version 5.0 and those that were working with the newer 6.0 version.  With the exception of a few features, both versions were basically the same in capability and yet, companies were reluctant to hire people who were still primarily working with the 5.0 version.  It was a level of hiring insanity that to this date has not been equaled.

The ever increasing production of software upgrades, patches, fixes and new versions with ever more extensive features produces a level of stress on software engineers and developers that has few if any rivals in any other industry.  If you don’t have access to the new technologies in your current position you are forced to spend additional hours studying in order to keep pace with the market.

All of the factors here provide a level of influence within the Information Technology organization whereby frustration abounds that is combined with ill-equipped and ignorant management as to the proper practices and techniques for good software engineering.  This confluence has maintained the Information Technology industry at a level of immaturity that will continue to produce high rates of software project failure while at the same costing business hundreds of millions of dollars in lost productivity and wasted efforts.  And this is all of a result that business itself will not reflect on what it is doing to itself or the people involved.

American business over the years has become the worst example of poorly run organizations that attempt to align themselves with military style theory without actually understanding what such theory involves.  In a study of the many different doctrines of business organization a number of years ago it was found that out of all of them, American business organizations have overwhelmingly adopted the “positioning doctrine”, which based off of Sun Tzu’s famous treatise on warfare, “The Art of War”, attempts to provide senior management a set of protocols that only investigates and considers decisions based upon factual data.  Unfortunately, if this were so, many of the serious issues that plague US corporations and to a lesser extent their international contemporaries, would not be as disruptive as they already are.

With this type of upheaval a continuous factor in the daily endeavors of IT organizations it is near nigh impossible for good technical management to implement policies and practices that have been thoroughly proven to yield cost effective and successful project implementation while substantially reducing the costs to their companies.  However, with the limited and narrow focus that the majority of business managers take they are incapable of understanding the realities that so many business organizations are in desperate need of.  The current financial crisis is merely a stark clarification of how poorly most US businesses are currently being run and thus the hope or even the expectation that quality software engineering will become common-place in such environments is nothing more than a pipe dream.

Of course, this discussion has not taken into account the contribution that the actual software developers have made to this mess.  However, such contributions have mostly been reactive to the conditions surrounding their own needs to accomplish unrealistic requirements and deadlines.  As corporations have eliminated the necessary tiers of requirements and systems development analysis, software engineers have been forced to accommodate increased responsibilities in areas that had traditionally been handled by equally highly trained professionals.  The result has been software development approaches that find ways to eliminate within their own processes the need for the formalized aspects of this profession.  Thus, the actual design of a software system is now done “on the fly” instead of with the more critical nuances that design analysts often bring to the process.  This has resulted in the creation of new software development doctrines that are often at odds with sound software development principals.  In fact, one such doctrine was found to be a complete failure in terms of its use in the development environments but by the time it was found to be so flawed it had either been adopted as a methodology or spawned into other new style developing processes.  All of this was done with the same business mantra that this was the “new way of doing things…”  In reality it is been demonstrated to be just so much crap… and another example as to how current business environments degrade everything that they touch.

With such trends in place it is most probable then that software project failure will continue to remain at the 70% average as it has since it was being first analyzed and calculated…  And the public in the industrialized nations will continue to find their lives made more complex but such mediocrity instead of eased as it should be with the technologies at hand…

The Naked Ape

Israeli Zionist influence in the United States has often been the cornerstone of increasing divisive debate with charges and counter-charges flying relentlessly from both positions regaling the legitimacy or illegitimacy of either viewpoint. However, the conclusive view is that such an influence does in fact have substantial effect on the policies as they regard US interests in the region and Israel itself.

Though such noted intellectuals as Dr. Noam Chomsky of MIT have argued against such influence as being nothing more than that of any other type of political lobby by using individual examples of Israeli failure to obtain desired outcomes, such examples are being taken out of context from the overall effect of Israeli access to high government officials in the US government and their capability to influence how people think in overall terms when regarding policy development towards this tiny Mid-East nation.

The average American opponent against such influence often levels charges that Zionism is ruining not just the Mid-East but US interests in the region as well with the intonation that such effect is provided by the Jewish Community at large both nationally and internationally. However, nothing could be further from the truth. Ardent American and Israeli Zionists are relatively few in number but have developed highly focused techniques for inserting themselves into debates that are important to them so that they can influence the final resolutions.

Zionism is not Judaism… It has nothing to do with the religious aspects of the Jewish religion. However, as Professor Baruch Kimmerling, a leading professor of sociology and anthropology at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, has successfully argued, Zionism, has co-opted religious overtones merely from the nature of its endeavor. And due to the very deep emotional beliefs in that literal aspect of the Old Testament that promised the land of Israel to the Jews, Zionists have and still continue to muddy their aspect of the debate with finely tuned writings and oratory that either ignore the truth or veil it to such an extent as to prevent its subtleties from being uncovered, which would in turn either negate their argument or provide it in an entirely different context.

A classic example of this is the nature of Zionist claims about the Arab expulsion of their Jewish communities at the conclusion of the 1948 war between Israel and her Arab neighbors. In most cases, the expulsions are presented as a quid-pro-quo reaction to the formation of the State of Israel and its subsequent ethnic cleansing of approximately 750,000 Palestinians from the long standing Palestinian Community that had existed there for centuries living peacefully and quite happily with their Jewish neighbors.

It is true that the Arab nations did in fact encourage Jewish emigration out of their countries at this time and in some cases forced their Jewish communities to migrate. However, there were many subtleties to this process that made it somewhat more than just a simple reaction to the new state of Israel. And these subtleties are enough to demonstrate to any intelligent reader that simply accepting such claims at face value is not historically accurate.

In an article written around 2004, David Green, a policy analyst for the University of Illinois at Urbana, shed some light on some of the distortions of historical truth surrounding the tragedy that befell these once and very proud Arab-Jewish communities, when he had the opportunity to listen to the lectures of visiting Professor Joel Beinin, the Donald J. McLachlan Professor of History and Professor of Middle East History at Stanford University.

Green sums up some of what Professor Beinin was trying to convey about this period of time in Jewish history with the following excerpt from his article, “Arab Jews and Propaganda: Exploring the Myth of Expulsion”.

This propaganda has its origins in, among other things, a tendentious revision of the history of Arab Jews, from one of general cooperation with Muslims (also over-simplified) to deep-seated conflict and persecution. Beinin mentions prominent examples of this revisionism in his book. In 1974, a Jewish Israeli woman with the pen name of Bat Ye’or, published Les Juifs en Egypte, to which Beinin credits with originating the “neo-lachrymose” view of the Arab and Sephardic Jews, or Mizrahim, as they have come to call themselves in Israel.

Beinin defines two motivations for the popularity of this “normative Zionist interpretation of the history of the Jews of Egypt” and, by generalization, the Jews of other Middle Eastern and North African countries. First, it served to counter the grievances of Palestinian refugees, by claiming a “fair exchange” between refugee populations. Second, it provided the Mizrahim in Israel a means with which to redress their mistreatment in Arab countries, and—just as important—to claim a status in Israel comparable to Ashkenazi survivors of European anti-Semitism. To distance themselves from Arab cultural attachments, Beinin argues, was “the price of admission to Israeli society.” As Beinin quotes one Israeli emigrant from Iraq: “In Baghdad we got along fine with the Arabs. But here we have to fight them.”

Though, Green provides this insight from a single article it is easy to trace any interest in this subject to a host of books that are also available to the general public for research.

The Nazi Holocaust is yet another example of where Zionist distortion has become literally amoral by raising it to a secondary religious reverence that regards any critique of Israel in the same light that Nazis approached their own German Jewish Communities. Much of this promotion comes in reaction to “Holocaust Revisionists” or what are also known as “Holocaust Deniers”. And to give the Zionists some credit, such theorists who promote the idea that the Holocaust did not happen have never been able to substantially prove their claims since their research and writings are so shoddy as to make any serious reader ignore any such conclusions.

However, Zionist prevarications to regaling the Holocaust as the single most serious tragedy to befall anyone during the World War II conflict belittles the memories of those who died as Jews along with the 70 million or so other nationalities that died along with them. And this contention is beginning to have serious affect on those who regard such tragedies in the same light. However, this in no way mitigates Zionist tendencies to proffer the Holocaust for any situation they deem necessary whereby they provoke their listeners into worried states about supporting Anti-Semitism.

The Holocaust has been recently used to decry everything from Iranian nuclear ambitions, which to date have shown to be completely benign, to perceived threats against Israel by phantom “5th Columns” in the guise of Arab Israelis who up until 2000 and the Second Intifada were probably some of Israel’s most law abiding citizens.

The decrying of the Holocaust by Israeli leaders and their supporters is itself a form of revisionism in that they have raised this tragedy to a level that far exceeds its relative importance in a historical context. It is no doubt true that over 5,000,000 Jews in Europe died as a result of the World War II (The number of “5,000,000+” is used as an extraction from the conclusions of Professor Raul Hilberg, whom up until his recent death was considered to be one of the leading historians on the subject. Based on his intense research he could only conclude that approximately 5,100,000 Jews died as a result of the Nazi regime.). Nonetheless, in a historical context, mass murder of populations has been occurring throughout history and are still ongoing with little note from observers and media outlets. The Holocaust, which happened to the Jews of Europe during World War II was no worse than any other such atrocity as for instance the Armenian genocide by Turkey in 1915 or the Ukrainian Homodor in the 1930s by Stalin.

In fact the term “genocide” was originally coined by Raphael Lemkin in 1933 to describe the Assyrian Massacre that took place in the same year by the Iraqi government. Yet, most people understand this word to have been attributed to the Nazi Holocaust of the 1940s. It has been “popularized” in this fashion and in fact can be completely attributed to this atrocity. Nonetheless, it was not designed to describe this tragedy.

It has been well documented that Israeli leaders use this atrocity to neutralize its critics while raising the seminal fear that anyone who criticizes the Israeli nation is guilty of Anti-Semitism. Of course nothing could be further from the truth since critiquing a nation’s activities or policies in a negative light has little to do whether the person levying the charge has any feelings against the people of that nation simply for who they are.

And it is further interesting to note that Israel often demands to be equitably treated as a nation and not simply as the people who inhabit it in terms of those Jews in its population. Yet, when treated in such a light critically Israeli leadership trots out the Holocaust like a tethered lamb for the slaughter. Witness Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s last speech at the UN, which raised the specter of the Holocaust in regards to the Iranian nuclear program, a program they are legally entitled to pursue as a signatory to the Non Proliferation Treaty.

Zionist distortion of the Holocaust atrocity has reached a level of such consistency with successful results that an entire sub-conscious industry has developed around it, which internationally recognized scholar, Norman Finkelstein, details in his acclaimed treatise, “The Holocaust Industry”. Like many who have crossed the Zionists, Professor Finkelstein has been castigated for his views and writings to the extent that he lost his opportunity for tenure at DePaul University when Allen Derschowitz, Dean of the Harvard Law School, interfered in the process by opposing Finkelstein’s tenure confirmation; a confirmation that his entire department wished to confer upon him but was overridden by a foolish university president who preferred “political correctness” to quality scholarship.

In a 2007 article written by Amira Hass, a leading Israeli journalist, she describes the political advantages that Israel puts the Holocaust to good use for. The extract below will immediately make her contentions evident…

Turning the Holocaust into a political asset serves Israel primarily in its fight against the Palestinians. When the Holocaust is on one side of the scale, along with the guilty (and rightly so) conscience of the West, the dispossession of the Palestinian people from their homeland in 1948 is minimized and blurred.

The question at this point is of course is why would Zionists distort so much and so consistently historical fact if their claims to the land of Israel are in fact justifiable and accurate? And the simple answer is that if left only with the hard truth, they wouldn’t have any legitimate claims to their goal of Judaising all the lands that they believe belong under Israeli domination.

The underlying problem with Zionism, regardless of the fact that it is just another “ism” much like fascism, socialism, capitalism, and other such political\economic dogma, is that it has no real basis for existence as a moral foundation for the creation of anything. Zionism is strictly a political ideology that grew out of the incessant anti-Semitism in Europe and Russia. Tired of the constant attacks on the Jewish communities, minor groups of idealistic Jews gathered to create an alternative to maintaining their existence in Europe. Up until World War II they were considered a fringe group of radicals that more or less accomplished nothing of import.

However, to generate support for their goal of the creation of a Jewish State they also needed a history that could support their contentions, which was for the most part anathema to current Judaic beliefs. Up until the Zionists came along the majority of Jews around the world saw no need and had no longing to return to the land of Israel. If they had they wouldn’t have waited for 2000 years to do so… And most would have found a more peaceful way to emigrate to a land, which already had an indigenous people living there…

Zionism required a distortion of the lens through which Jewish communities have consistently viewed themselves. This gave rise to the general distortions of actual Jewish history that gradually convinced Jews that such distortions were a part of their actual history since few Jews up until the emergence of Zionism were anymore well read than their non-Jewish neighbors and nor were large amounts of accurate information available to the average Jew for corroboration.

Such distorted history included the concept of the Jewish Diaspora as an outgrowth of a Roman exile of Jews after 70 AD. However, as a number of Israeli historians have documented, most recently Professor Shlomo Zand, no such exile ever took place since Rome was not in the habit of exiling people in its lands. Romans were actually more like their futuristic counterpart of the infamous Borg of “Star Trek” fame; they assimilated peoples into their collective.

Another distortion was the claim that the Jews had their historical roots in ancient Israel. In this regard, the Jews making this claim were the Ashkenazim of Eastern Europe, which again is inaccurate as such Jews have been well documented to have been mostly the descendants of the 9th century kingdom\empire of the Khazars that converted to Judaism to avoid embroiling themselves within the ongoing conflicts between Muslim and Christian. Though, the religious heritage may have tied these Jews to ancient Israel, there was nothing anthropologically beyond this that did. And recent attempts to prove such an anthropological link through genetic studies have proven to be worthless.

If any Jewish Community could be historically tied to ancient Israel it would be the Sephardim, the Jews of the Mid-East, North Africa, and Spain. These are the people that have always remained within this historical context along with their immediate cousins, The Palestinians.

Unfortunately, recent studies by Professor Zand also demonstrate that even this part of the Jewish Community most likely has little claim to the ancient lands in Palestine from an anthropological perspective.

If anyone deserves to legitimately call the lands they have been populating for centuries the “inheritors of this Earth”, it is the Palestinian Peoples… And Israelis since the days of Ben-Gurion have always known that the Palestinians were most likely the true inheritors of the lands of ancient Israel; ancient Jews that converted to Islam during the times of the Ottoman Empire.

Nonetheless, as Zionism grew into importance during the rise of the Hitler regime in Nazi Germany, a new strain of pathological radicalism began to make its effect known among Zionist supporters and organizers. Such theories as expounded by Polish Zionist Revisionist, Vladimir Jabotinksy; a man of high intellect but at the same time an intellect that was completely guided by his own selfish, distorted views of himself became popularized among the Zionist elite. It thus gave them a way to convince themselves of not only the righteousness of their cause but why any indigenous people in Palestine had no right to take part in it..

Jabotinsky developed the concept of the “Iron Wall” that Zionists bent on creating a national state in Palestine would have to adhere to in order to literally steal the lands of the then peaceful Palestinian peoples populating the country. In this view, Jabotinsky well understood that the Palestinians would tenaciously resist any Zionist incursion into Palestine seeing such an incursion as invasion of not only their lands but the lands of their neighbors, the Orthodox Palestinian Jews, who would later resist the Zionists alongside their Palestinian friends. The “Iron Wall” theory specified that the Palestinians would have to be treated brutally and critically in order to move them out of Palestine so a Jewish state could be founded with a Jewish majority.

This radicalized theory, which was completely at odds with the original intent of early 19th century Zionists, who saw no need to colonize the land in terms of a state and wanted merely to return to it while blending with the existing indigenous population, declared instead a brutal onslaught towards a people that had never committed any crime against the Jews in Palestine or anywhere else.

Lenni Brenner, in his classic on the subject of Zionist collaboration with the Nazis from 1933 onwards, “51 Documents”, lets the people involved speak for themselves. In other words, instead of trying to tell history from his particular viewpoint, Brenner lets the actors tell the story. In one enlightening letter written by Jabotinksy himself, he espouses his theory of the “Iron Wall” that must be built by emigrating Zionists to Palestine and used to literally steamroll the indigenous population into leaving if not forced to do so.

Here we let Vladimir Jabotinksy speak for himself with an extract from his letter that Lenni Brenner’s book and other sources have provided…
“Thus we conclude that we cannot promise anything to the Arabs of the Land of Israel or the Arab countries. Their voluntary agreement is out of the question. Hence those who hold that an agreement with the natives is an essential condition for Zionism can now say “no” and depart from Zionism. Zionist colonization, even the most restricted, must either be terminated or carried out in defiance of the will of the native population. This colonization can, therefore, continue and develop only under the protection of a force independent of the local population – an iron wall which the native population cannot break through. This is, in to, our policy towards the Arabs. To formulate it any other way would only be hypocrisy.” (see notes below for full letter access)
This brutal interpretation of Zionism eventually became the founding philosophy for the state of Israel and David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first president admitted as much. In fact, this white haired, compassionate looking elder of the Zionist cause was no better than Jabotinsky in his views and is demonstrated in the following statements as recorded by Nahum Goldman, then president of the World Jewish Congress in 1956, the very same year that ben-Gurion conspired with France and England to attack Egypt of the Suez Crises.

“Why should the Arabs make peace? If I was an Arab leader I would never make terms with Israel. That is natural: we have taken their country … There has been anti-Semitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz, but was that their fault? They only see one thing: we have come here and stolen their country. Why should they accept that? They may perhaps forget in one or two generations’ time, but for the moment there is no chance. So it is simple: we have to stay strong and maintain a powerful army”

In fact the view expressed above is a mirrored interpretation of the “Iron Wall” theory as proposed by Vladimir Jabotinksy.

Despite the brutality of the Zionist incursion into Palestine, their public relations people along with a lack of easy access to information at the time, created the illusion that the state building for the Jewish state was something of a utopian experience and to be admired by the world in such a light. Unfortunately, again nothing could have been further from the truth if it existed inside a different galaxy.

Yet, then and now, ardent Zionists are still promoting an illusion of the Zionist project that attempts to continue to delude not only the Jewish Community in the Diaspora but all non-Jews in general as it regards Zionist intent.

A classic example of such distortion can be found in the literature on what has become known as “The Transfer Agreement”. And probably the definitive study on this subject is Edwin Black’s publication on this agreement between European Zionists and the nascent Nazi regime in 1933 entitled the very same name.

Black does a very admirable job of detailing the entire period when such collaboration took place between representatives of the various Zionist organizations, the American Jewish Community, and the Nazis which resulted in this historic compromise. The foundations for such an agreement were to allow Jews to acquire enough of their own wealth within Nazi Germany so that they could pay the emigration fees to Palestine that were required by the British Mandate at the time. In return, the Zionists would provide the Nazi regime, a regime that was becoming increasingly economically devastated by the growing international boycott against their businesses, a basis for export and profit by sending German goods to the developing Zionist economy in Palestine.

“The Transfer Agreement” is a terrible stain on Zionist endeavors to create the Jewish state and Black, whether he intended to or not, demonstrates that the people involved, from American Rabbi Stephen Wise to the top Zionist representatives, all had difficulty in separating out their personal agendas from that of the Zionist project itself. You come away from such a read with a sad taste in your mouth for those who would be the initiators of the atrocities that would later come to symbolize the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians from their homelands.

Shadowing all of this however, was the eventual Nazi holocaust of European Jewry, which Zionists were able to later successfully use in order to rally European and American public opinion to their cause in Palestine. But much has been lost in terms of the historical truths that surrounded this epic in nation building. And Black actually brings some of these details to light.

First and foremost, Zionists, like the Nazis were originally a fringe group in their own communities. Like most Germans who saw Adolph Hitler as a political clown before the incessant World War I reparations combined with the devastating world depression of 1929 to destroy German economic life, European Jews viewed Zionists as nothing more than a radicalized group of idealists who were proposing an emigration idea that few Jews had any interest in. In fact, to this day, despite protestations of support for Israel, most Jews in the international Jewish community have no interest in immigrating to the nation that purports to be the home for all Jews, while many in Israel are now looking to leave, fed up with the constant warfare and social dislocation.

Yet, Zionists, few though they were, they were nonetheless highly organized unlike many other contemporary Jewish groups and organizations at the time. It is this organization and their goal to move the entire Jewish Community out of Europe to Palestine in the 1930s that gave them the ability to negotiate with the nascent Nazi regime to transfer specifically German Jews out of Germany in order that both the Germans and the Jews could fulfill their highly racist goals. Unfortunately, this didn’t work out as well as had been planned since these very same Zionists quite directly aided in the destruction of the highly successful economic boycott against Germany thereby providing enough breathing space for Germany to rebuild and re-arm. The end result was the movement of about 60,000 Jews from Europe while the rest were led to the slaughter.

In essence, in their first opportunity to aid the Jews of Europe during the growing persecution of the German Jewish Community by Hitler and his regime, German Zionists inadvertently and quite knowingly contributed as much to the subsequent mass murder of European Jews as did the Nazis who committed the physical atrocities. By aiding in the destruction of the economic boycott against Germany by not linking up with the rest of the international Jewish Community that so ardently supported it (the American Jewish Committee was actually quite neutral on the matter publicly but they opposed the boycott internally due to their own connections in Germany at the time) and concentrating on their goal of the establishment of a Jewish state, German Zionists ignored the more prescient issues affecting European Jews when they could have in fact endeavored to derail German supremacy while at the same time aiding and abetting the escape of German Jews from Germany. Of course, by doing so they would have given up their state goals, correctly understanding that the opportunity they had to establish such an entity was at the same time the same when European Jews needed their help more directly. In fact, Zionist goals at the time were so focused and so uncaring for the current crises that they ignored and actually were complicit in destroying legitimate escape routes that could have save hundreds of thousands German Jews such as with South America where a number of countries graciously opened their doors to accept European Jewish refugees.

This intentional disregard for European Jewish lives thus set the stage for the eventual radicalism in Zionist thought that would appropriate the Jabotinsky philosophies; the establishment of a Jewish state thus superseded everything else.

The subsequent mass murder of 5.1+ million Jews in Europe then furthered Zionist ideologues with the foundations for the creation of international sympathy for the European Jews that was directly responsible for the creation of the state of Israel among a variety of other factors. With disregard for their own community members it should come as no surprise then as to why Jabotinsky’s philosophies were so readily appropriated and used against the Palestinian communities that along with their own Orthodox Jewish neighbors were opposed to the mass resettlement of European Jews in their lands.

The racist and prejudicial attitudes of modern Israel today are thus not a recent innovation or any form of sociological change from the original intent of the early founders of the country. These attitudes have been merely refined and made even worse with the aid and support, which the United States has blindly provided since 1967 for a variety of reasons including the support of the politically powerful American Jewish Community.

Since the rise of Evangelism in the United States in the past 20 to 30 years, this initial Jewish support has found an additional partner in both the financial and political support for Israel that seemingly knows no boundaries; this latter group providing their own support based simply on the Biblical passages of the “End of Days”.

Prior to 1967, Israel was just another nation in the world that was just making it economically. And little was heard about her. However, after the 1967 War, the United States became interested in securing Israel as a client state given the quality of its military and its ability to secret away intelligence on Soviet weaponry. The result was that the US began to increasingly fund her with economic aid, most of which went to the maintenance and modernization of the Israeli Armed Forces.

This support combined with the ever smoldering racism of the Israeli leadership who, since the nation’s inception, had wanted to rid the territory of her remaining Palestinian population, now provided them with a more concrete foundation to move towards such a racist goal. And slowly but surely subsequent Israeli governments began to enact ever more stringent controls and repression towards their Palestinian citizens as well as those in the newly occupied territories of the West Bank and Gaza.

Knowing that demographics played a critical role in maintaining a Jewish majority within Israel, this sociological construct, and known early on, led increasingly to fears in the Israeli leadership that their Arab citizens and occupied residents would at some point overwhelm Jewish residency due to their higher birth rates. No matter what happens today, whether the Palestinians finally get their own state or Israel successfully annexes the West Bank and Gaza into a “Greater Israel”, their Palestinian neighbors or residents will in fact eventually outnumber the Jewish citizens of the Israeli state.

This demographic fear combined with the psychological damage created by the near extinction of European Jewry along with those who simply accommodated radicalized Zionism of the Jabotinsky strain promoted a racial radicalism that slowly but inevitably became the guiding motivations of all Israeli governments.
After the 1967 War suddenly the “Holocaust” of World War II was now promoted as the foundation for everything that would be eventually done for the security and defense of the Israeli state including the increasing derision of the Palestinian peoples. Prior to this event, the overwhelming majority of Jews around the world who had survived this mass extermination attempt merely saw themselves as just one of many who survived the same horrific atrocities that other survivors had. Granted, this experience was internalized to the Jewish Community but it was not regarded with any special reverence that Israeli leadership and their supporters begun to promote to the world at large in order to generate continued international sympathies for the plight of the Jewish state.

Dr. Norman Finkelstein was one of the first authors to overtly expose this radicalization of the view of the “Holocaust” in his irrefutable treatise on the subject, “The Holocaust Industry”. And with the rise in Holocaust promotion as the single, worst Humanitarian catastrophe to occur in history as a result of conflict came the inevitable confrontation with those who saw this promotion as nothing more than the fraudulent endeavor of the Jewish Community “crying wolf”. The result has been an actual splitting in conceptualization of the atrocities committed against the Jews by the Nazis.

In reality, millions of Jews in Germany and the surrounding Nazi occupied countries, were in fact murdered in a variety of ways. There can be little doubt about this given the wealth of research on the subject. And the intent on the part of the Nazis, on the surface, can be seen as a genocidal intent. However, the other side of the coin is that this was not the “Holocaust” but a holocaust, one of many perpetrated by tyrants in power. It was not the worst in history and nor was it the lightest, for want of a better word. It was mass murder plain and simple. And so too was it for the Gypsies, the physically infirm, the mentally handicapped, the homosexuals, and anyone else the Nazi regime came to define as a deviant life form.

Prior to the attempted extermination of European Jewry we had the Armenian Genocide in and around 1915 where approximately 1.5 million Armenians were slaughtered at the hands of the Turks. Later in the early 1930s we had the Ukrainian Homodor where between 7 and 10 million Ukrainians were forcibly starved to death by Stalin when Ukrainians and their leadership sought independence from the Soviet state. However, the worst of all such tragedies has always been the European\American holocaust of over 500,000,000 native people from South America up through North America culminating with the near and complete destruction of the Native American population.

These are but several examples of Humanity’s utter disregard for its own species. And the list is endless. The Jewish holocaust in the 1940s was just one of a string of continuous brutalities leveled against the less fortunate and defenseless.

Nonetheless, Israeli leadership with its growing support in the United States began to promote this European tragedy as the defining moment in such events in Human history, if for no other purpose than to promote a grotesque “sleight of hand” that could be used to cover Israeli security agendas while developing and maintaining a perception in the world that Israel was a helpless victim surrounded by nations that all wanted to see her destroyed. As documentation from across the spectrum, including that from Israeli sources, has demonstrated nothing could have been further from the truth. Israel, as a nation, has never been imperiled of destruction by her neighbors, who except for the early 1970s when Egypt nearly defeated Israel in the Yom Kippur War, were never able to achieve any military parity with the Jewish state. After 1967, the United States has always made sure of this by supplying her with monies and the latest weaponry to come out of the US arms industries. And Israel, no newcomer to the world of weaponry, developed her own highly refined arms industry.

However, even from the beginning in 1948, Israel was a nation well armed, well organized militarily, and numerically superior to the Arab coalition that attempted to curtail Israeli expansionist agendas immediately after the UN Partition of Palestine went into effect.

This perception of innate Israeli weakness in light of her neighbors has aided Israel greatly in her demographic war against the Palestinians and allowed the Jewish state to ratchet up the distortions of her treatment of her minorities while levying exacting repressions on them in the ongoing attempt to encourage them to leave. In the occupied territories, where it was somewhat easier to hide the truth, Israel increased her depravities against innocent Palestinians when in 2000 it began to reach a crescendo that finally led to the Second Intifada or Arab Uprising all of which was based on her Palestinian citizens wanting to be treated as equals. Even Israeli sources point to the fact that up until that time Israeli-Palestinian citizens were some of the most law abiding in the country and rarely gave Israel for concern in terms of endangering the welfare and daily lives of her Jewish citizens. In fact, one can hardly remember any reporting in any of the international news wires of Israeli-Palestinians being criminally disposed and thus a sociological problem for the Israeli state in that vein. We hear of the suicide bombings, the protests, the rock throwing, and the rocket fire into southern Israel, all of which have been reactions to the growing despair and brutal repression of the Palestinian Community both within and outside Israel proper but not much else.

Nonetheless, the responses by Israel to such events are not accorded in the vein that such events are directly linked to Israeli policies, repression, and occupation. Instead, Israel turns on a people that for the most part are not armed with anything more than light weaponry with responses that can only be seen as devastating. The question is why? Why is Israel so intent on destroying the lives of the Palestinians that remain within Israel and those who are inhabitants of the occupied territories.

The answer, which has been mentioned earlier is the demographic fear of being overwhelmed by a non-Jewish majority and overt racism which has transcended from ideological racism to messianic racism….

The racism has always been there but kept somewhat in check by the natural boundaries of the Israeli state. However, in 1967 Israel took on the additional tasks of being an occupying force in the captured territories of this conflict, which was the underlying reasons behind the war in the first place. Later documentation has conclusively demonstrated that the idea that Israel was in fear of an attack by the Arab nations in that year was pure propaganda. With the advent of the occupation Israel was now free to expand her domain into what she liked to call “Greater Israel”, which included both Judea and Sumeria, the ancient Hebrew names for the areas in the West Bank that Israel coveted. And with expansion came the growing power of the Jewish Fundamentalists as they became the new Israeli settlers in the illegal settlements that Israel began building since 1967.

These people are not ordinary, peaceful bible students so stereotypical of past views of members of the Jewish Communities. These fundamentalists are on a mission from God to free the land of anything not Jewish just as much as Islamic radicals attempt to do to non-Muslims or American Evangelicals promote their inherent superiority over non-believers. In short, these new settler Jews are your typical dysfunctional personalities that are often derided in private (and sometimes in public) for their nonsensical beliefs in such messianic fantasy.

And they bring with them a torrent of hatred for the Palestinians that evinces itself in beatings, torching of groves, destruction of property, vandalism, mob attacks and downright murder. The Israeli state is right there with them to help bulldoze down Palestinian homes that have been on land newly annexed to the state through outright theft.

And while Israel continues to plead victimhood to the world these same settlers are being given the capabilities to expand even further as settlement construction continues unabated (even with the recent Israeli 10 month moratorium) and the Israeli state looks for ways to keep such expansion going under the nose of all international observers and interested parties. Thus the entire state, in a very real sense, has sociologically developed itself along the same lines as ancient Sparta so it can complete its mission from God, the acquisition of the promised lands.

For the secular Zionists its simply about power within the Jewish world but for the religious Zionists and\or Jewish fundamentalists its just as much about power as it is about fulfilling what they see as their God given destiny.

However, there are a number of problems with this scenario. First of all, the establishment of Israel itself was illegal since it was never approved by the commissions which were designed to oversee such a development. Alan Hart, a veteran of Israeli and mid-east affairs has recently exposed the myth of Israel’s establishment by providing the actual UN chronology of events in a recent article. Second, once the Israelis forcefully established their state, despite unanimous Arab disapproval, they simply stole the lands from the Palestinian population by engaging in a conflict that would have not been inevitable with the surrounding Arab nations had they been satisfied with the lands they were granted by the UN. However, since they weren’t the subsequent conflict provided cover for the new Israeli government to ethnically cleanse the new Israeli territory of over 750,000 Palestinians and razed 438 Palestinian villages to the ground. Finally, if one were to read the actual scripture that describes the gift of Israel to the ancient Hebrews it was not so much a gift as it was a covenant of faith. In return for this land, the Hebrews would become examples for the rest of the world to follow and this is what is meant by “a light unto nations”.

The political realties in the Mid-East which include the subjugation of most Arab states to the interests of the US allow Israel to continue its activities and endeavors under the guise of their self-proclaimed victim-hood. Such an inherent political contention in turn allows them to continue their distortions as to the reality of the sociology of the state; the greatest being that Israel is the only democratic state in the region. As the previous contentions in this piece have demonstrated there is nothing to support this contention and when delved into in-depth has been consistently been disproven as just mere rhetoric.

If one were to read Jonathan Cook’s 2006 publication, “Blood & Religion”, a reader would get an uncomfortable reality check as to just how undemocratic a state Israel actually is. Yet, the rhetoric continues to provide cover for the barbaric policies that Israel as a political entity has implemented. While the US, Israel, and some European nations denouncing other Arab nations as nothing more than dangerous theocracies, Israel has evolved into an “ethnocracy” that is a combination of ideological racial hatred and messianic fervor that has produced a society that can only be described as sociopathic.

Sociopathic personalities are not what Hollywood has so often presented in even their finest productions involving the subject. In fact, most of what Hollywood has promoted in this regard has actually been found to be “psychopathic” and there is a difference. While the “psychopathic” personality exhibits no sense of morality a “sociopathic” personality does but in a very aberrant sense. With the “sociopathic” personality, morality is interpreted only within the confines of the environment it has found itself in, which most often is outside the bounds of what is considered acceptable as a normal and healthy sense of morality.

And it should be noted that Israel, is not the only country to exhibit such traits. US administrations since Truman have developed their own interpretations of morality and have subsequently attempted to re-order the entire world around such aberrant thinking.

However, Israel’s sociopathology goes much further than just its government but has become imbued within the entire society whereby most of the Israeli populace are willing enablers and accomplices to policies which are the direct result of such sociopathology.

European and US populations for the most part do not acquiesce in the same way to their governments’ aberrant dictums much the same way Israelis do providing them with a healthier understanding of true “morality”.

The claim of Israeli leadership to Israel’s “right to exist” is as vacuous as its promotions of peace and regional democracy. She is a nation that much like the United States has been based on a string of lies and historical distortions without the countervailing and healthier aspects of Human and Civil Rights activism that the US is especially known for. It is not a nation, that is any more introspective than the Islamic religion which even its own adherents are now claiming a need for.

And Israel is not a nation from any legal and political standing that has any right to exist as much as it may claim to have. Nevertheless, this concept, which is merely used as a delaying tactic by Israeli leaderships during negotiation processes, is not important in the long term. Whether Israel has right to exist or not is not going to be the fundamental result of this story. If present trends continue, and there appears to be no reason why they won’t, Israel will simply cease to exist as an exclusionary state as it is forced to change under the increasing pressures and awareness of its dysfunctional and aberrant society. No society that cannot enter the international community at the same level as all other nations, that requires some type of dispensation from the rest of the world’s nation states for the way it wants to exist, can last forever…

The Naked Ape

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The Human species is still very much made up of cave-dwellers. The only real change that has come about is that instead of sitting around the discovery of fire it sits in front of a television…

The concept of Power and its sociological relationship to societies has never been discussed in the mainstream media, and most likely never will, but more pressing, has also been a rare subject, for that matter, in any of the growing popular alternative press outlets. And the alternative press, most importantly, should be the natural forum for such a discussion.

There are of course many such discussions of citizen responsibility towards their governing institutions in terms of participation but they are rarely couched in terms of citizens taking their required responsibilities to ensure equitable and fair government. In fact, when was the last time anyone, in the course of any conversation concerning social obligations, political discourse, or citizen welfare, has the idea of Power ever come up? It probably never has, as it is always something that to most is so nebulous and ambiguous that only those in government or business are the rightful owners of this highly volatile construct that should be, in fact, understood by anyone concerned about the welfare of their nation as a viable, living, entity. Instead, power is something that has been completely divorced from the everyday realities of people.

The reason for this failure in the natural linkage of power as a consideration within the lives of the individual is because most individuals are made to feel powerless by those that employ and govern them. Governing and business institutions have grown so large and unwieldy that individuals are completely overwhelmed by both their size and simple inertia from such size that to contemplate any level of individual power in relation to them is an impossible consideration.

This is not just true in the United States but true for every citizen in every country on earth whether it be an industrialized nation or the poorest of third-world countries. Power is simply not part of the thought processes of the masses of peoples that populate Earth.

And it is this lack of conscious thought on this construct that in of itself not only yields Power to those who desire it and pursue it ruthlessly but have also abrogated their responsibilities to others in order to wield it.

Yet, we have hundreds if not thousands of books and essays written on the subject of the theft of power from the masses both in terms of political as well as financial thievery leaving the reader bereft of anything more than individual impotence on the subject.

History books are littered with the pursuits of power by national governments, politicians, military leaders, financiers, criminals; and as we travel further back in history, by individuals who desired nothing more than to rule others with the few exceptions of those that wanted to rule for the betterment of others. Some of these individuals ruled with idea of “divine mandate”; that they alone were chosen by God to rule while others discarded any such omnipotent source for their own grandiose visions of their abilities to rule only aligning themselves with their family name or self-anointed perception of themselves…

If nothing else, such histories have shown one constant fact about power, that it is nothing more… and nothing less than an intoxicating drug that those who pursue it are helpless without that very pursuit.

Those that pursue power to the exclusion of everything else, no matter what the reasoning, are the ruthless, the dysfunctional, the mentally ill, and most dangerously, many times the criminally insane as we have recently witnessed with George W. Bush Administration. Yet, their successful attainment of power, relies on one single trait that all such people posses… focus. Whether it is the desire to rule, to generate immense forms of wealth, or both, it is this singular focus on its attainment that drives such people to the heights of power in their environments. And it is this singular reason that allows the few, the inept, and the rather unintelligent to gain a foothold far and above the masses they look down upon as nothing more than stepping stones to get them to where they want to be.

Power, like any other mind-altering drug, is an intoxicating mix of both the good and evil that has made itself known since a Human first picked up a wooden club to kill his neighbor thousands of years ago. For the weak-minded, this drug blinds them to anything but; while for a few, it is understood that to control it requires just the slightest touch in order to avoid being dragged to the “Dark Side” of the Human heart.

This is what power is, what it can do and in fact does to any individual who seeks it for its own sake while disregarding any caring for its intoxicating effect or understanding its ability to consume the soul in an unending need for the daily fixes it can provide. It is no wonder that the average citizen not only does not understand this sociological force but is also frightened by it and cares little for doing anything other than attempting to maintain the constant battle against the onslaughts of those who are in positions of power.

These then are the constructs that makes it nearly impossible for the masses to gain any long lasting and credible control over those fewer and far less intelligent people who have a singular goal in life. This failure has nothing to do with economics such as Marx and Engels contended, as it has nothing to do with enlightenment as western, democratic idealists promote. It is simply a failure of understanding as well as orientation and thus is a psychological problem which extends to the sociological environment that any citizen contends with.

No matter what the society, people are trained from their earliest years to think in such ways that avoid any assumption power for themselves; and that power is the purview of those who already have it or are deemed worthy to attain it by those same people. Everyone in the industrialized nations are trained in school systems where class orientation becomes a primary social factor in developing followers and “leaders”; the leaders, mostly those who more or less bully themselves into such positions either by arrogance, family standing, brawn, or all three… but rarely true intelligence.

How many remember the power of the “class bully”, the teacher, the rich kid who always seemed to be favored by their teachers, “the teacher’s pet”, the “politician” who could talk his or her way in… and out of anything?

In culturally run societies such as Japan which are both industrialized as well as preformatted with cultural mores and traditional ways of thinking, power comes as easy as an inheritance to those who posses it and will do so for generations to come.

In the less industrialized societies, power comes at the end of a blade or a gun… And in all such societies the individual is brutalized, cast aside, ignored, and just beaten into submission through one method or another whether it be non-violent or violent, or both for the simple reason that the maintenance of power is as critically important to those who have achieved it as it is to those attempting to gain it.

The result is a complete distortion as to how any society lives with itself as well as with those around it. The result is the creation of twisted and warped governmental policies, both domestic and foreign, criminally generated financial structures and laws so labyrinthine, arcane, and complex that only those who make careers understanding them can ever hope to navigate their waters, which often swallow the misinformed, no matter how intelligent.

The results are always the same, which are environments that promote their basis for furthering civilization (in their own view) while often involving themselves in endeavors that are just as barbaric as the most uncivilized of peoples that have ever populated this Earth.

A glaring example of such outcomes can be found in Dr. Michael Hudson’s treatise on 1970s economics, “Global Fracture: The New International Economic Order” (copyright 1977). Starting on page 194 in the paperback edition of this book, a section entitled, “The US Position”, Dr. Hudson describes the arrogance of US economic policies towards the rest of the world; created by the very individuals who sought to maintain newly gained US economic hegemony after World War II.

Dr. Hudson’s words are as follows…

“From the U.S. vantage point the world economy should remain controlled by the multinationals – hence, indirectly, by itself as overseer of its large multinational firms, Third World countries should remain dependent on U.S. food and arms. Their raw-materials export prices should remain low, although U.S. raw-materials prices should be supported to ensure domestic self-sufficiency and the economic ability to break possible Third World commodity boycotts. The 1976 Economic Report of the President thus endorsed only those international agreements ‘which reduce excessive price swings without raising commodity prices above their long-term market trends,’ that is, their historically low levels. Third World raw-materials exports must be increased to help ‘market forces’ hold down world prices as they had during the preceding quarter-century of overabundant world mineral supplies. Proposals to index Third World export prices ‘to changes in the price of manufactured goods… need to be opposed on various grounds… Such arrangements tend to result in selling prices that are higher than world market forces would bring about, [and thus] impart an inflationary bias to the international economic system. Therefore, earnings stabilization schemes can better be implemented through… more market oriented ways and any transfer of resources to the poorer countries can better be accomplished through official aid channels.’

In January 1976 Assistant Secretary of the Treasury Gerald Parsky announced that the United States would not sign the recently negotiate4d cocoa agreement designed to support world prices, nor would it commit itself to join the sugar or coffee agreements. The cocoa agreement was rejected on the ground that its ‘range of minimum and maximum prices was regarded as too high, and another objection was that it sought to keep prices up by unwieldy controls over exports by producing countries.’ Such commodity agreements ‘inevitably result in higher prices to the United States and other consumers.’ The United States ‘would be willing to join a producer-consumer forum to discuss problems of copper, and possibly bauxite, [but] would not join any agreement aiming at bolstering prices.’ If raw=materials exporters needed funds to support their balance-of-payments position, Mr. Parsky suggested, they might resort to the IMF’s compensatory financing facility (borrowing from which would have to be repaid at a point, thereby adding to the Third World’s foreign debt). He speculated that ‘if governments can set the price of copper, how long will it be before they can dictate the type, quality and quantity of copper products? Commodity agreements will increase the role and impact of government in the marketplace. Increasingly, the government will displace the role of the actual producer and consumer in setting the terms and conditions of trade.’ Exactly! Just as had resulted from U.S. actions in the fields of textiles, specialty steels and TVs. As the international economy becomes more political, America is unwilling to be partner in trade agreements supported in world forums by a substantial majority of small powers.”

In not so subtle terms, Dr. Hudson’s recount of this particular incident in US economic history describes just how much hubris and arrogance goes with the projection of US national power. Not satisfied to be an equal partner in trade negotiations between the nations of our world, the US instead attempts to interceded by promoting its own hegemonic, economic interests over the interests of everyone else. Such unilateralism, which is not a new wrinkle solely related to the recent Bush Administration, is a direct result of the US’s consistent abuse of power as the world’s leading economy at the time. And such abuse is what happens when those who control such power have no limitations or accountability as to its use.

To the extent that the US was at that time and still quite capable of projecting its own interests in such a manner is not a subject for celebration but instead, goes directly to the core reason as to how citizen responsibility has been often ignored and disregarded in the United States over the decades by allowing others to handle such responsibility while diverting it for their own agendas.

Such related complaints from citizen groups often follow the argument that the US political infrastructure has become an increasingly closed institution, increasingly disallowing citizen participation. And such groups are right to argue such. However, no group has ever offered any alternative to the current process and has thereby, not only by acquiescence but in many cases openly as well, promoted the continuation of a political infrastructure that has become inherently more corrupt over the years while paying lip-service to a two-party system, which was one, never a concept of the “Founding Fathers” and two, to this day makes little if any relevant political sense to the requirements of citizen welfare.

Nonetheless, Hudson’s extract above is just one of a myriad of examples throughout American history that easily demonstrates the distortions that accompany governments which are completely intoxicated with not only power but their own self-derived fantasies about its unlimited possibilities. The bludgeoning of the interests of others is a direct result of the concept of substance abuse, which does not always necessarily mean use of illegal compounds but in many instances is just as relevant to the use of situations of psychological and sociological currents that are just as addictive.

Surprisingly, if most Americans were to study US economic and financial history, they would be aghast to find the level of criminally oriented results that have been proffered in their name; a people who for the most part are individually some of the most generous people in the world.

The same would hold true if Americans studied in-depth their own general histories as to how many people have been hurt by such hubris, including our own, once very proud Native American civilization, which in many respects has always been far more advanced sociologically than White Male America could ever hope to be.

What is even more critical here, is that the extract above also shines a very bright light on the fact that as a capitalistic nation, the United States follows a trend much more in tune to Communist thought than that of either capitalistic or democratic both of which are constantly touted as the ideals of the American nation.

In the first place, Capitalism does not support state planning of price controls. Anyone familiar with Capitalism-101 knows this. The idea that in the instance above, the United States is attempting to maintain low prices in an artificial manner for its own interests breaks one of the basic capitalistic tenets from the get-go. Second, Capitalism also does not allow for the subsidy of producers, thus keeping them afloat against severe fluctuations in world prices. Both declarations by the United States are, in fact, quite anti-Capitalistic.

Given that by the 1970s international economic activity was becoming quite advanced, the world’s economic forum was justified in requesting that the producer nations of raw-materials be allowed to let their prices rise in conjunction with the then market forces. That in fact, is Capitalism. If the US was not happy with this arrangement than the proper thing to have done would have been to find an alternative for their import pricing requirements or abandon the use of such imports all together.

However, most importantly, the narrow focus which is the common trait inherent to all participants of pursuits and maintenance of power, disallows for any reasonable thought outside of this narrowly defined construct. Any intelligent reader of this extract would certainly know that with the divesting of the United States of any ability to integrate itself fairly with the rest of the economic world stands a good chance of reaping less than satisfactory consequences in the long-term. The result is the eventual creation of even more problems in international relations that if not resolved properly leads to a progressive, proportional development of continued problems into the distant future.

To gauge the over-arching effect of such US political incompetence, this same process has been repeated in every aspect of international diplomacy that the US has ever engaged in thus generating far more problems for itself than necessary. This does not even begin to quantify similar results for domestic policy development. All of this, the result of the extremely narrow focus that is shared by all of the individuals that are elected and appointed into government institutions.

Let us take a more wide-ranging example without any concern for US national interest and delve into merely the study of economics itself and how over many years, narrowly focused academic and political thought in the United States (as well as elsewhere for that matter) for such a study has led to a terrible result for the world’s ecological system.

In the “Monthly Review’s” recent edition, an excellent article has been published by Richard York, Brett Clark, and John Bellamy Foster entitled, “Capitalism in Wonderland”. The first two paragraphs quite a bit concerning the detriments to having such narrowly focused views on capitalist economics to the detriment of everything else …

“In a recent essay, “Economics Needs a Scientific Revolution,” in one of the leading scientific journals, Nature, physicist Jean-Philippe Bouchaud, a researcher for an investment management company, asked rhetorically, “What is the flagship achievement of economics?” Bouchaud’s answer: “Only its recurrent inability to predict and avert crises.”1 Although his discussion is focused on the current worldwide financial crisis, his comment applies equally well to mainstream economic approaches to the environment—where, for example, ancient forests are seen as non-performing assets to be liquidated, and clean air and water are luxury goods for the affluent to purchase at their discretion. The field of economics in the United States has long been dominated by thinkers who unquestioningly accept the capitalist status quo and, accordingly, value the natural world only in terms of how much short-term profit can be generated by its exploitation. As a result, the inability of received economics to cope with or even perceive the global ecological crisis is alarming in its scope and implications.

Bouchaud penetratingly observes, “The supposed omniscience and perfect efficacy of a free market stems from economic work done in the 1950s and 1960s, which with hindsight looks more like propaganda against communism than plausible science.” The capitalist ideology that undergirds economics in the United States has led the profession to be detached from reality, rendering it incapable of understanding many of the crises the world faces. Mainstream economics’ obsession with the endless growth of GDP—a measure of “value added,” not of human well-being or the intrinsic worth of ecosystems and other species—and its failure to recognize the fundamental ecological underpinnings of the economy, has led to more than simply an inability to perceive the deterioration of the global environment. In fact, the problem goes much deeper. Orthodox economics, like the capitalist system that it serves, leads to an “Après moi le déluge!” philosophy that is anything but sustainable in orientation. As Naomi Klein has said, there is something perversely “natural” about Disaster Capitalism.”

The most dangerous aspect of this “liassez faire” attitude towards economics is that the direct result is the ongoing destruction of the South American rain forests as a result of economic exploitation. These rain forests aren’t simply a luxury for us Earth-bound mortals but a vital component to the overall ecological environment. Without them, the planet’s climatic environs are more than likely to go completely haywire with a detrimental effect on life as we know it. Is there anything else that needs to be said? In short, such exploitation should cease immediately without any of the political verbiage that accompanies such travesties.

Despite the downsides of such examples there is one thing that does stand out that should be noted. Though such people who pursue power in a variety of realms and are quite successful at their pursuit, the downside to their focus is that it disallows them for seeing anywhere beyond the constructs of their singular quest. In other words, if it doesn’t serve their immediate needs and interests, whatever the information may be, it is simply discarded. This then is the “Achilles Heel” of such people. It is their weakness. Their strength comes from their determination and ruthless ambition to attain a level of power that is often denied the average citizen. However, such a strength has severe limitations.

If we were to look at religious fanatics as one example we would find over the course of history they have rarely, if ever, rendered any overall good to the welfare of the societies they inhabit. In fact, such people are more trouble than they are worth as they attempt to distort the realities of the societies in which they live to their own warped visions of their own belief systems.

American Fundamentalist Evangelicals are typical of such societal problems in terms of fanatical personalities and have done their fair share of aiding in the destruction of constitutionally guaranteed liberties in the United States.

Of course, we also have our “economic fanatics” in the guise of neo-liberalism and its adherents, all who came out of or have supported the University of Chicago School of Economics theories on economy as promoted by the late Milton Friedman; a man who promoted monetarist economic theory even after it had lived beyond its usefulness. Our current financial crisis is a result in large part from this adherence, which posits that there is no room for any government activity within the economic realm.

Up until our recent bout with financial dysfunction, many of these neo-liberal types, more popularly called neo-conservative adherents, were very much in favor of complete anarchy as they postulated that there was no longer any need for governments and thus their penchant for divesting countries of government control while privatizing everything in site, including the restroom facilities. Such theories have led to terrible and destructive processes in South America as well as in other Third World nations with millions becoming unemployed, homeless, and murdered by government sanction.

The late, great Austrian economist, Friedrich Hayak, one of the founding fathers of neo-liberalism, was repulsed by the rampant disregard for both the Human aspects as well as sound economic principals that were being promoted in Chile in the 1970s by Friedman and his disciples with the help of the latter-day monster created by Henry Kissinger, Augusto Pinochet.

Yet, this “Achilles Heel” of such a focus leads directly to such results instead of more satisfactory consequences that most people would prefer.

Understanding this dichotomy with those people that pursue Power for its own sake is the key to overcoming it with more principled and relevant solutions to national issues. Such people may be ruthless, dysfunctional, and criminally oriented. They may appear to have their own interests safely guarded as a result of their own personality disorders but that is more perception than reality.

Once this dichotomy is understood than there is the basis for usurping such a deranged format for our political institutions, which for the most part are nothing more than legalized crime syndicates. And this was understood even at the turn of the 19th\20th centuries when Samuel Clemens turned from famous writer and satirist to ferocious anti-imperialist.

“It could probably be shown by facts and figures that there is no distinctly native American criminal class except Congress.” Mark Twain

Thoroughly understanding one’s opponent is the key to any successful strategy. However, such attempts at doing so by a variety of organizations in the United States have engaged such endeavors with the understanding that they are going to work within the given political system. If one is going to work within a given sociological construct it stands to reason that there should be no real expectation for change of that construct and so the argument for doing so in the first place becomes rather moot.

If in fact, the idea is to develop greater equity for the citizens of the United States, or any other nation for that matter, than one must understand one of two things; either the current political infrastructure can be used to foment such changes or it cannot. In the case of the United States, the political construct has become hopelessly outdated but even more dangerously, completely infested from top to bottom with corruption, personal agenda, conflict of interest, and its own internal level of money laundering as payoffs and bribes are the only way to guarantee that anything gets accomplished.

Of course, listening to the American press, which is where most Americans still receive most of their daily “disinformation”, than it is also expected that good Americans should still believe in the drivel that is so easily passed off as legitimate government.

Europeans on the other hand had a greater form of flexibility with their governments until the centralization of their national aspirations took hold in the form of the European Union for which European citizens are beginning to suffer the same fates as their cousins “across the pond” in the US. Unfortunately, for both the United States as well as European citizens, the development of the European Union was just as much a reaction to US hegemonic interests after World War II as it was a planned entity with interests of power as its pivotal birthing factor.

Today, in the European Union, which had its conceptual birth in the early 1950s, citizens from the increasing number of nations that are now a part of this “super state”, are beginning to come to grips that so much centralized power is having detrimental effects on their own national sovereignties. Such discord is the current factor for the growing disenchantment of European citizens with their EU representatives over the newly named Lisbon Treaty which is merely a re-hashing of the unpopular EU Constitutional enhancements developed in 2007 but never ratified.

As the Wikipedia description shows below, not all of the EU nations have ratified this treaty, and those that have, have not included direct citizen participation in the process but was done by government representatives, making this a less than honestly developed program for the EU’s future.

EU Treaty Excerpt

see… http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisbon_treaty

The Treaty of Lisbon (also known as the Reform Treaty) is an international agreement signed in Lisbon on 13 December 2007 that would change the workings of the European Union (EU). The treaty is not yet ratified by all EU member states. The treaty would amend the Treaty on European Union (TEU, Maastricht) and the Treaty establishing the European Community (TEC, Rome). In the process, TEC is renamed to Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU).

Prominent changes include more qualified majority voting in the EU Council, increased involvement of the European Parliament in the legislative process through extended codecision with the EU Council, eliminating the pillar system, preventing the provision in the Treaty of Nice reducing the number of commissioners, and the creation of a President of the European Union and a High Representative for Foreign Affairs to present a united position on EU policies. If ratified, the Treaty of Lisbon would also make the Union’s human rights charter, the Charter of Fundamental Rights, legally binding.

The stated aim of the treaty is “to complete the process started by the Treaty of Amsterdam and by the Treaty of Nice with a view to enhancing the efficiency and democratic legitimacy of the Union and to improving the coherence of its action.”[1] Opponents, such the British think-tank Open Europe and former Danish MEP Jens-Peter Bonde, argue that it will centralise the EU,[2] and weaken democracy by moving power away from national electorates.[3]

Negotiations to modify EU institutions began in 2001, resulting first in the European Constitution, which failed due to rejection by French and Dutch voters. The Constitution’s replacement, the Lisbon Treaty, was originally intended to have been ratified by all member states by the end of 2008, so it could come into force before the 2009 European elections. However, the rejection of the Treaty on 12 June 2008 by Irish voters means that the treaty cannot currently come into force. As of February 2009, 23 of the total 27 member states have ratified the Treaty.

Currently the Irish are still to vote for its ratification as they rejected it during the first round of voting. This time around there is so much pressure on the Irish citizenry to vote in its favor, that it is expected to pass. However, Czech Republic President, Vaclav Klaus has stated on 7 May 2009 that he would not ratify the Czech’s government senate ratification as a result of such staunch resistance by the Irish citizenry leaving complete ratification of this agreement currently in limbo until a new voting process in Ireland can be enacted later this year …

The development and growth of the centralized European Union as well as a more powerful federal government in the United States have followed similar trajectories, though in different styles. The EU was a response to the devastating conflict of World War II, which in the 1970s became as much a response to growing hegemonic power by the US by acting as a counter-balance to such international influence.

The United States reached its inception of nascent centralized power as a result of the travesty of the “War Between The States”, or what is more commonly but erroneously called “The Civil War”. As far as the Confederacy was concerned, it was an independent entity of the union of northern states and no such concept of “The United States” (as a single nation) existed at the time. And it was Lincoln who promoted the concept of “The Union” which was a new political construct to American citizens who saw themselves as citizens of their states first and then, as a result, citizens of a nation. Lincoln, for the most part viewed such thinking as provincial and thought on a much grander scale.

Though many scholars of Abraham Lincoln have promoted the 16th president of the United States as the standard by which all successors are to be modeled after, there are a handful of historians on this personage that disagree with this contention and have made substantive arguments on their behalf.

There is no doubt that Abraham Lincoln, from the perspective of those who favor (and favored) more centralized power in the federal government, is the US president that should be championed from such a perspective. Lincoln and he alone, successfully fostered the increasing powers of the centralized, federal government, as we know them today, through the internal conflict of 1861 through 1865. Every egregious consequence of centralized authority in the US government today began with Lincoln. And though, there were those that came before him who promoted such ideas as Alexander Hamilton, up until 1861, such constructs were marginalized in the national debate. Citizens simply did not want such power being vested in a single, federal entity. And for the most part they didn’t want it after the conflict either. However, Lincoln provided the ability of national representatives to take ever more power from the States over time as policies and endeavors initiated by Lincoln and his administration allowed for a weaker interpretation of States’ rights on an increasing scale. This then continued until more recent times where the federal government began ceding national power to the executive branch which culminated in its most grotesque form under the previous Bush Administration. Unfortunately, many of these new constructs still remain with President Obama.

Professor Thomas J. DiLorenzo at Loyola College in Maryland is one such author who argues that Abraham Lincoln was the president that began the tide against states’ rights and an elective democracy, whereby state representatives elected to their own legislatures demonstrated the actual democratic process through a confederation of states with a less than omnipotent national government. Though, by the time of Lincoln the actual implementation of “The Articles of Confederation” had been long past with the ratification of the U.S. Constitution in 1787, the sociological view of autonomous states as part of a greater whole still held sway in most daily thought.

Professor Di Lorenzo makes a powerful case against the hordes of authors who have lionized this president in the eyes of the American public for generations by demonstrating in simple prose the disparities by which Lincoln governed and prosecuted the conflict of 1861. Di Lorenzo shows such basic breaks by Lincoln with founding principles through such examples as the lack of recognition for states to secede through documents prepared by the “Founding Fathers” and others including “The Articles of Confederation”…

There is no doubt that many could challenge such contentions made by Professor Di Lorenzo. However, one thing that cannot be taken from him is the basic fact that the federal government of the United States emerged more powerful and stronger after the end of these hostilities than it was before. And such a radical change to the political infrastructure was not simply the result of a violent conflict but the policies set in motion by the Lincoln Administration.

It was at this point in US history that the democratic processes evolved from the communally processes of the state to the less and more ambiguous infrastructure of the “super state” of federal power. And with this change came the growing disenfranchisement over time of the American citizen to his or her country which in current times is one of the underlying factors in the continuous and ineffective opposition endeavors to federal policies which are patently illegal if not morally reprehensible when reviewed against original constitutional constructs.

Despite the anomalies surrounding Abraham Lincoln and policies there is another important factor regarding the underlying weakness of the petitioning of the US federal government by American citizenry for more progressive approaches towards the US political infrastructure. This is the Constitution itself, which is not the powerful political doctrine that as has been touted over the decades. We hear as much but when one reads the actual Constitution one is left with a sense of ambiguity and in many cases a question of what makes such a document superior to those that came before it… or any after…

First of all, the Constitution is hardly original in its philosophical foundations. Most of it was lifted from existing and earlier constructs of English Law. The entire structure of the then nascent American nation was based upon English Parliamentary infrastructure, which was composed of the “House of Commons” (our “House or Representatives”), the “House of Lords” (our “Senate”) and the position of Prime Minister (our President). So right here we have a basic and direct copy of the existing English political infrastructure of the 18th century. There is nothing new here… except for the fact that we did not include a monarchy, which Alexander Hamilton would have much preferred being the single-most prominent near-monarchist the early colonies and then subsequent government could have had.

The original weakness of the American presidency, which was stipulated in the Constitution was more or less akin to the necessary requirement by Prime Ministers that they build coalition consensus for legislation and thus were not able to proclaim “executive orders” as such. The powers of an American president were limited with most of the powers returning to the states, which was necessary in order to get the Constitution ratified in 1787. At the time, no state was going to yield its own sovereignty to a strong national government and such weaknesses in the resulting Constitution were demonstrated by the continued allowance for the abhorrent institution of slavery in the South.

However, we have to also understand who actually created the Constitution of the United States, which was the new, emerging American Aristocracy and hardly the people it would most dramatically affect on a daily basis, the average citizen. In fact, the promotions of succession from England by the “Founding Fathers” prior to the “American Revolution” were not substantial enough to convince an overwhelming majority of colonists to follow suit. In fact, approximately one third of colonists had no interest in succession from England, a second third remained staunchly loyal to England to become the hated “Tories”, leaving only a last third that wanted desperately to gain their independence from England and mostly on the basis of economic incentive with little for actual political idealism.

The result was a document that was more or less designed to be economically favorable to those who had much to gain through their own family interests as an independent nation than that which would remain dominant by a foreign country 3000 miles away.

Three noted scholars have studied the Constitution along the lines of economic priorities and have all found similar results from their research:

Charles A. Beard

“An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States “ (1913)

Considered the leading US conservative historian of the 20th century

Ferdinand Lundberg

“Cracks in The Constitution” (1980)

Robert A. McGuire

“To Form a More Perfect Union: A New Economic Interpretation of the United States” (2003)

All three of these studies present and substantiate the argument that the priorities of the “Founding Fathers” primarily lay in developing a new governmental infrastructure that would allow them to maintain and extend their own personal interests of personal wealth and fortune. This then is also the underlying factor in the granting of more power to the states than to a more powerful centralized government.

In the 18th century, personal and family power lay at the state level where their influence and interests were paramount. None of these people and their families associated themselves with the institution of a powerful federal structure but instead thought of themselves as mere extensions and the basis of existing state power. In the North, you had the merchants and the financiers. In the South, the plantation owners, all of which were also slave holders. And though their interests may have coincided at various points on a cooperative level in agreement of thought and philosophy, their loyalties were primarily to the states where their families maintained the centers of their power and wealth.

It is not a far reach than to conclude as the noted scholars above have done that personal interest lay at the foundation of the development of the US Constitution as much as anything else.

However, after the conflict of 1861-1865, family influence and power gave way to the beginnings of a more centralized federal power of which the powerful families over the years followed suit and evolved through the development of powerful companies and corporations which were again, initiated for the most part by family fortune and influence.

Today we have the culmination of the evolution of personal interest with a federal government that is as much controlled by individual and family wealth as it is by institutionalized wealth. Many economic analysts and historians are now suggesting that the United States has become in its own way an imitation of the Soviet financial oligarchies, which still control most of the financial power in modern Russia today with the perception of a democracy while in reality still being the infrastructure of a republic.

Thus, what was originally individual wealth and influence, has come full circle to become completely focused in the melding of US business and federal government to almost manifest itself in a modern form of Fascism.

Such institutional power is far more difficult to attack or bring to heel since it so extremely porous. Attempts by literally hundreds of well-meaning organizations throughout the United States have endeavored to bring more progressive laws and structures in place only in the end to land up with the same morass of existing law and federal bureaucracy, much of which contradicts itself while yielding little or nothing for the efforts in any changes successfully accomplished. The overall result of such efforts is a continuation of basically the same policies that have gone before while applying less than satisfying political band-aids to the specific issues that these organizations have attempted to address.

Institutional federal power in the United States is now so complete and so entrenched that little can be accomplished to change it, reduce it, or even address it for the welfare of the public at large. The institutional bureaucracy of the US federal government is simply so large and extensive that attacking any singular issue merely results in a pin-prick like confrontation which is lost in the ambiguity of such an extended power structure. And it matters not how many such attacks are initiated. The similarities between ineffective “frontal assaults” on strongly defended positions on the battlefield are startling where so much effort goes into such an approach only to be easily deflected with the accompanying loss of many valuable troops.

“Pickett’s Charge” during the Battle of Gettysburg is classic in its metaphor to progressives’ attacks on the federal power structure.

What most progressive organizations have been mimicking in their attempts to modernize law and the federal power structure is what is known in military parlance as the “frontal approach”. Primarily such organizations are then attempting to mold the most powerful entity in the US political spectrum to their own needs which reflect the wishes and desires of those who support them. As has been already noted, most such attempts have yielded very little and have shown more as lessons in futility than anything substantive.

If these organizations are actually sincere in what they are attempting to accomplish then they are going to have to have a change in approach which will not only yield better results for their own requirements but more far reaching capabilities that will reflect the actual power of such organizations as combined entities.

If you look at the US federal government from a military, analytical point of view, it is easy to see that it has developed its defenses from any external changes and\or forces for change from an in-depth, layered aspect. The labyrinthine maze of organizational structures and individual gate-keepers that have to be overcome is monumental in size and dysfunction allowing such a political infrastructure to maintain itself by simple inertia. It is the same with any institution but as the size of the institution becomes smaller, attainment of goals against it are more manageable as well as possible.

Thus, the best approach to take in regarding such political action would then be what has been termed in military vernacular as the “indirect approach”.

Captain Liddel Hart of the Royal British Infantry, first coined this military axiom in the 1930s in his famous treatise, “Strategy”. By studying numerous field engagements throughout history, Hart was able to find such indirect approaches to combat, developed and executed by highly competent field commanders, which all had the exploitation of either weak areas in their opponents battle lines or alternative and unexpected areas of attack as a commonality.

For example, the crossing of the Alps by Hannibal to enter Italy from the north was completely unexpected by the Roman legions at the time so little defense was afforded such a circuitous route.

Scipio, who would become the famed Scipio Africanus for defeating Hannibal in the North African desert by Zama, did so by first launching an operation that defeated a critical ally of Hannibal’s, which resulted in a serious threat to his supply lines and to his home city of Carthage. This then forced Hannibal to leave Italy where Scipio would draw his forces to the open desert and ultimate defeat.

However, the first noted use of the “indirect approach” that Hart could find was with Alexander the Great and his confrontation with the Persians at Gaugamela in 331 B.C.

To understand the complexities of Alexander’s tactics of the “indirect approach” the following excerpt from Wikipedia has been selected…

“Alexander began by ordering his infantry to march in phalanx formation towards the center of the enemy line. The Macedonians advanced with the wings echeloned back at 45 degree angles to lure the Persian cavalry to attack. While the phalanxes battled the Persian infantry, Darius sent a large part of his cavalry and some of his regular infantry to attack Parmenion’s forces on the left.

During the battle Alexander used an unusual strategy which has been duplicated only a few times throughout history. His plan was to draw as much of the Persian cavalry as possible to the flanks. The purpose of this was to create a gap within the enemy line where a decisive blow could then be struck at Darius in the center. This required almost perfect timing and maneuvering, and the Great King himself to act first. Alexander would force Darius to attack (as they would soon move off the prepared ground) though Darius did not want to be the first to attack after seeing what happened at Issus against a similar formation. In the end Darius’s hand was forced, and he attacked.

Darius now launched his chariots, some of which were intercepted by the Agrianians. It is said that the Macedonian army had trained for a new tactic to counter these devastating chariots if they ran into their ranks. The first lines would step aside, opening a gap. The horse would refuse to run into the lances of the front ranks, and enter the “mouse trap”, only to be stopped by the lances of the rear ranks. The charioteers and their horses could then be killed at leisure. The chariots were rendered useless.”

Not surprisingly the art of the “indirect approach” is far more complex and involved than has been demonstrated here. However, it should suffice to understand that such an approach involves the use of logistics, feints, flanking movements (one of the first forms of this tactic), unexpected maneuver, and a host of other tactics that are implemented with the core priority of keeping your opponent off-balance.

The political landscape can be easily viewed as an appropriate environment for such military perspectives as the use of such successful theory as the “indirect approach”. However, with a political environment, one has to concentrate such theories against what such an environment offers in terms of approachable levels of exploitation.

For example, a centralized power structure is simply not open or available to approach by any citizen based organization, though on the surface, it may appear to be by offering a plethora of avenues that citizens and citizen groups can use to gain such access. However, many individuals and groups have tried and are still trying and the results are quite plain for everyone to see. Very little has changed in terms of the “real functionality” of the US federal government and it is as much by design as by inherent inertia. Our elected officials still engage in massive conflict of interest, corruption, deflection, and disregard for the real needs of the nation and its citizenry all of which have been a constant throughout most of American political history. In addition, in the past 30 or 40 years, increasingly powerful corporations and their influence in Washington have become so entrenched and to such a degree that steering around the obstacles of such influence have become a near impossibility.

However, on the other end of the political spectrum, localized power structures such as county, town, and village governments for the most part are irrelevant to real citizen participation in the more critical aspects of participatory government. Such local structures do not provide and cannot provide relief to many serious citizen grievances and needs on a national level where they are most affected. Local governments are often rife with petty jealousies and personal power agendas as to make them almost useless to any such consideration. As a result, most often these political environments often serve no other purpose than to collect local taxes while weakening the strength of citizen groups with the distraction that such small forms of government is “democracy in action” when in fact they do more to simply cloud the issue than justify it. The only exception to this contention is city government, whereby large groups of people require some form of local government that can handle their immediate needs. However, even this level of government lacks any capability to allow activism on a scale that can effectively provide a power-base for citizens. In fact, most city governments tend to be as unapproachable and bureaucratic as the federal and state governments.

The result, in all cases is complete inaccessibility, little useful functionality… or both. On the other hand, all serve to minimize citizen activism through deflection or ambiguity by allowing for too many government levels. When you think about it, do we really need so much localized government when better organized and more participatory processes can be made accessible via cooperative councils where everyone has not only an opportunity to participate but are expected to do so. In part, this has been already accomplished by such constructs as the Boulder, Colorado Community Center which offers as many if not more benefits and programs to all Boulder citizens than the city government does. And anyone can get involved.

This leaves the US citizen with only one real exploitable option in the US political system… and the one that can most effect change if approached and handled properly. This is the original, constitutional power construct of the “State”. And it is with the “State” that the US Constitution provided the most avenues for citizen power, regional diversity, and the capability to change the directions of a nation. In fact, the creators of the US Constitution (They were for the most part, men far removed from the original “Founding Fathers”.), despite their own inherent personal agendas actually provided several still remaining loop-holes for citizens to change national priorities that are no longer in the interest of the American populace. One such loop-hole is the “Article-V Convention”…

A Brief History:

“To guard against oppressive government of any kind, the authors of the United States Constitution sought to establish institutional checks and balances. In framing the Constitution as the fundamental embodiment of such safeguards, the constitutional convention assembled in Philadelphia in 1787.[1] One of the main reasons for the convention was that the Articles of Confederation required the unanimous consent of all 13 states for the national government to take action. This system had proved unworkable, and the constitution sought to address this problem.

The first proposal for a method of amending the constitution offered in the Constitutional Convention, contained in the Virginia Plan, sought to circumvent the national legislature, stating that “the assent of the National Legislature ought not to be required.” In response, Alexander Hamilton privately circulated a proposal that gave the power to propose amendments to the national legislature, and the power to ratify the amendments to the states. The first reference in the convention records to a convention called by the states to amend the Constitution comes from drafts of the Constitution kept by the Committee of Detail. After some debate, James Madison removed reference to the convention amendment process, giving the national legislature sole authority to propose amendments whenever it thought necessary or when two-thirds of the states applied to the national legislature. As the Convention reviewed the revision the Committee of Style had made, several delegates voiced opposition to the idea of the national legislature retaining sole power to propose constitutional amendments. George Mason argued from the floor of the Convention that it “would be improper to require the consent of the Natl. Legislature, because they may abuse their power, and refuse their consent on that very account.” Mason added that, “no amendments of the proper kind would ever be obtained by the people, if the Government should become oppressive.” In response to these concerns, the Convention unanimously voted to add the language allowing states to petition Congress for a convention to propose amendments to the Constitution. James Madison did not oppose reintroducing language permitting the convention amendment process, but in what proved to be prescient concerns about the lack of detail in Article V about how the convention amendment process would work, stated that “difficulties might arise as to the form” a convention would take.

The text of Article V referring to the convention amendment process reads: “The Congress, . . . on the application of the Legislatures of two-thirds of the several States, shall call a convention for proposing Amendments.” While the Article V convention process has never been used to amend the constitution, the number of states applying for a convention has nearly reached the required threshold several times. Several amendments to the constitution were proposed by Congress, at least in part, because of the threat of an Article V convention. Rather than risk a constitutional convention taking control of the amendment process, Congress acted first to propose amendments. At least four amendments (the Seventeenth, Twenty-First, Twenty-Second, and Twenty-Fifth Amendments) have been identified as being proposed by Congress partly in response to the threat of an Article V convention. [10]

There have been two nearly-successful attempts to amend the constitution since the late 1960s. The first try was an attempt to propose an amendment that would overturn two controversial Supreme Court decisions, Wesberry v. Sanders and Reynolds v. Sims, dealing with voting districts and apportionment of votes in state elections. The attempt fell only one state short of reaching the 34 needed to force Congress to call a convention in 1969. After this peak, several states rescinded their applications, and interest in the proposed amendment subsided. The next nearly-successful attempt to call a convention was in the late 1970s and 1980s, in response to the ballooning federal deficit. States began applying to Congress for a constitutional convention to propose a balanced-budget amendment. By 1983, the number of applications had reached 32, only two states short of the 34 needed to force a convention. Enthusiasm for the amendment subsided, this time in response to concerns about whether a constitutional convention could be limited to a single subject and because Congress passed the Gramm-Rudman-Hollings Act, which required that the budget be balanced by 1991 (but was overturned by the Supreme Court in 1986).”

see…

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convention_to_propose_amendments_to_the_United_States_Constitution

While state politics has become nothing more than the appearance of an administrative process, the state political structure still offers the most concrete methodology for gaining citizen representation in a smaller forum than that of an entire nation while also being capable of granting such participation a voice on a national scale. It is with the state political systems that citizens still can have their voices heard through direct elections of their representatives and thus still be capable of holding such officials accountable. Bringing corrupt state officials to task for crimes of fraud and corruption has always been a far easier process within the state than to do the same with similarly nationally elected representatives.

The state is also the only true democratic structure in the United States today since none have anything equivalent to an “Electoral College” (see the downloadable document below for a complete understanding of this institution) which became a convoluted way to provide for Southern states to have stronger ratification and voting powers than direct election results would have allowed for.

Though there have been many arguments for and against maintaining this electoral methodology, one of the original positive factors of this institution was that it would be used without the involvement of political parties which even by the ratification of the Constitution in 1787, most of the original “Founding Fathers” still abhorred.

It is true, that states in the US are highly corrupted and act as nothing more than extensions of the political mayhem that currently exists in Washington D.C. in addition to being extended avenues of influence for corporations. However, this is where progressive organizational power can be more easily attained since it is still the state that allows for direct representation of the residents. And given the smaller forum and size, much like many modern European nations today, citizen activism can get much further with their home state than that of a nationalized process which often appears as nothing more than a link on the Internet with less than satisfying personal connections to the process.

This may sound like a bit of fantasy, however, viewed from a military perspective, the structure of the State is the only realistic, exploitable avenue that citizens still have at their disposal, though few take advantage of it. Further, the discussion here is not to support the attainment of singular goals related to social, political, and\or economic issues but instead for the highly focused view of re-energizing substantive political debate among citizens while working for a more accessible and responsive political environments on a state-wide level. Once accomplished, the immense power of the current US federal government would have been in effect, nullified as now the states will be in a far more powerful position to retake control for their more regional priorities leaving critical national priorities for a less powerful federal government while also holding it to account, which was the original political intent all along.

This evolution of power returning to state control can be easily accomplished by demanding an “article V Convention” for not just simply amending the US Constitution but re-writing it as well with both a view from Federalist as well as Anti-Federalist principals. Thus a modernized document can be re-written to reflect the spirit of the original as well as a better appropriation of power between individual states and the federal government. In this case, citizens would have a chance to correct the ambiguities of the original intents of those that created the US Constitution, which more often were intended so as to serve the interests of the American aristocracy at the time, as well as clarify existing articles and sections for easier interpretation by the courts.

New developments can be added that reflect the requirements of a modern society, which incorporates new stresses and tensions that were non-existent when the Constitution was first created. However, above all, a new sense of fairness and recognition for the public welfare can be imbued in a new document with greater and more stringent measures of accountability.

Now this all sounds well and good, until the promotions and prognostications of the many and myriad laws regarding such moves are brought into play by the many legal scholars and Constitutional theorists in our legal community that would obviously become a part of the entire process. However, first and foremost several things must be kept in mind.

The United States from a sociological and political perspective is in far deeper trouble than any current economic crisis can compare. The current economic crisis is a direct result of these sociological and political ailments, which allowed for the development of a financial system that has run amok.

If this nation is to move itself forward into a healthier and more viable future, it requires less but more elegant and simplistic law as well as enlightened citizen understanding of the rights, privileges… and responsibilities of citizens in a free society. This is not going to be achieved by equivocation and debate over law that puts roadblocks in such a task. This is not to say that existing law should not be used as the guidepost for such improvement. However, the attainment of citizen state power must first and foremost develop and determine the path to cooperative state control over the developments of new national priorities such as a new Constitutional Convention. This can be done through existing laws which also allow themselves to be modified based upon the will of the people; an often forgotten but very powerful basis of the creation of the United States. The People merely have to let their will be known from a credible political approach.

And finally, it must be understood that “We The People” have never played a very important role, if any, throughout the entire history of this country. All one has to do to understand this major fallacy in the American society is read some good American history. It is all there, and well documented by countless, excellent historians, whether they be conservative or progressive. As noble as this preamble to the Constitution may sound, the reality of political life in these United States is that the citizenry has always inhabited a country “ruled by men” and not by laws. This must change… or there will be no United States to worry about in the future. It will simply continue to devolve into a grotesque, war-mongering, political monstrosity of personal political power which though the “Founding Fathers” may have wanted for their own personal interests as aristocrats in their own day, could never had foreseen the level of degeneration that is apparent today as modern technology has allowed for the powerful few to attain levels of wealth and power that has never before been accomplished in history…

Most often the most complex problems are resolved through the simplest of solutions and in this case the resolution is a highly leveled focus on restructuring a political environment that no longer serves the interests of those that it governs. It is this sense of focus that has put the incompetent, the ruthless, and the arrogant into power… It is this same focus that can just as easily take them out… And nothing else will be achieved without this first.

The Naked Ape

Links & Sources

Reading Notes

The use of Wikipedia as a source in this essay is not an attempt to bypass critical sourcing of material. It is intended to merely act as a starting point for further research by the reader. Wikipedia has been both lauded by serious authors as well as criticized by those who have found inaccuracies in its content. There is no doubt that content created by a multitude of contributors will have some inaccuracies. Nonetheless, this research site offers a substantive venue for the initiation of critical research which cannot be easily contained within a single essay.

The author then encourages the readers of this work to review in-depth studies on military analysis and maneuver theory in order to gain a deeper appreciation as to how such theory can take advantage of the opportunities in the political environment. One merely has to understand the terrain of battle to accommodate the successful axioms of this study, which will point the student in the only direction possible in terms of the modern American dilemma with its political environment, the State; the most flexible, and thus the most exploitable of the political constructs in the United States today.

Suggested Reading…

In 1949 George Orwell’s classic, “1948” was published…

If you believe that you misread the title, you didn’t. Orwell’s novel of totalitarianism was originally to be titled “1948”. The year 1948 was used because of what he saw and foresaw in Churchill’s England during World War II.

At the beginning of World War II, the Russian dictator, Stalin, was reviled by the British populace to a person. However, in need of him as an ally to defeat the German Reich, Churchill and his lieutenants conjured up a brilliant propaganda scheme to convert Stalin from a hated brute to a man that the English could admire. It worked quite well and by 1945, the English had dubbed the most notorious mass murderer in history with their affectionate “Papa Stalin”.

George Orwell saw this turn of events as a devastating warning to those who were capable of understanding that governments could easily use mass media to their advantage in creating consent on issues that government bureaucracy saw as necessary to their agendas. Understanding what Orwell was attempting to get across to the average reader, Orwell’s publisher, nonetheless, convinced him that entitling the book as he had would hit too close to home with very likely repercussions so Orwell simply switched the last two digits in his current title to come up with the famous title that is now a legendary classic.

As it happens, Orwell’s contentions have been proven true repeatedly since his death in 1950.

Up until the election of Tony Blair, Britain was more or less like any other European nation (with the exception of their novelty-like monarchy) whereby the rights and freedoms of its citizens were quite well protected resulting in a high level of British societal pride.. Yet, with the advent of Blair, things began to change, all of which went into hyper-drive after the tragedy of 9-11.

Mirroring President George W. Bush’s paranoia, which was heavily manipulated and promoted by his own lieutenants, Blair began his open attack on British civil rights, as if Bush’s attacks on the US Constitution suddenly gave him legitimacy in doing so. This process that is still ongoing and developing increasingly dangerous trends in Britain has already resulted with the implementation of so many surveillance monitors of the average citizenry that one report in the past several years has now declared British government as the most intrusive into the privacy of its citizens in the world. Monitors and cameras are everywhere British subjects walk and drive while legislation is constantly updated to allow for more invasion of a citizen’s person.

It is an odd turn of events when you consider the constant reminders about British exploits during World War II that were used to promote Britain’s love for freedom and democracy. However, this too appears to have been so much propaganda mirroring US propaganda at the same time. Historians have now shown increasingly the ulterior agendas of many of the allied leaders during this conflict making it less than the supposed “war for freedom from tyranny” as it was so touted.

Conservative writer, Patrick Buchannan, in his recent book, “Churchill, Hitler, and ‘The Unnecessary War’”, makes the claim that World War II itself was an unnecessary conflict that became so from the incompetence and political machinations of Churchill himself. Some readers have already disagreed with Buchannan’s contentions but if nothing else, he did hone in on one essential truth about war… it is never necessary but only made so by those who either have an affection for it or who have never fought and experienced its depth of inhuman degeneracy.

Today a new report has been released that is both frightening in its starkness but at the same time surreal in its essence. Britain, is now just a few laws away from becoming the very society that George Orwell feared it would become in his own life time.

Law, now aided with advancing technology, can easily evolve into any distorted legislation that deems the public’s welfare critically more important to those of individual privacy and rights. This dichotomy fails to take into account the individual who makes up the public welfare that governments so often easily use to develop increasingly draconian measures to subordinate civil liberties to the power of the state.

On Monday, March 13th, 2009 t was reported that new legislation in Britain has now been passed which will require the logging of every email and phone-call British citizens make along with every web-site they visit; the latter much like Google has been accused of doing on its own (see… “They’ve got your number”, http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/apr/13/investigative-journalism-protecting-sources). The dangerous precedent here is that now honest and sincere reporting by investigative journalists may have to resort to methodologies, much like those that terrorists are accused of using, which will allow them to work under the radar to get the information and facts that citizens have a right to know about.

Such laws, regulations, and processes rarely accomplish much in the scheme of anti-terrorism activities since too much information is just as bad as too little. With too little data, one does not have enough factors to make an informed decision as to what action to pursue. With too much data, the same is true but from so many variables, that confusion ensues. As a result, neither extreme is of any use to such activities but as government bureaucracies are run on the concept that “more” is better it stands to reason that legitimate intelligence activities would become overburdened with the nonsense of politicians instead of the realities of those who work in these professions.

Governments are notorious for ignoring realities and candy-coating new, invasive activities with the assumption and promotion that these new endeavors, in the “interest of the public welfare”, will make such processes more efficient, less costly, and protect the citizens from one threat while quietly incurring another. And if the US Department of Homeland Security (an Orwellian name if ever one could be called such) is any example, which in its new bloated form has barely found a single terrorist activity capable of legitimate prosecution since its inception, than it stands to reason any other such attempt is obviously for a different set of agendas.

Democratic governments that are not controlled and\or influenced by heavy citizen participation and activism are doomed to become totalitarian in nature no matter what type of underlying political infrastructure may be in place. The US has had institutionalized totalitarianism for many years which was begun in earnest by the Truman administration with the National Security Act of 1948 and continues to occur under the new Obama administration. The McCarthy years were a symptom of just such a detour from American idealism in the 1950s.

The British government however, in a shorter period, has done much to supersede US attempts with its smaller population but with the same level of technological advancement at its disposal.

The Naked Ape

Suggested Reading:

1984 (George Orwell)

Anthem (Ayn Rand)

Churchill, Hitler, and “The Unnecessary War” (Patrick J. Buchanan)

Common Sense, The Rights of Man (Jack Fruchtman)

The Constitution of the United States of America (Thomas Jefferson)

The Federalist & Anti Federalist Papers (Alexander Hamilton)

Democracy in America (Alexis De Tocqueville)

Civil Disobedience and Other Essays (Henry David Thoreau)

The Communist Manifesto (Karl Marx )

Hollywood and US mainstream media always seem to rescue fantasy from reality when and if the two are at odds with each other… as they usually are in what Nicholas Von Hoffman has called the American 3000 mile-wide terrarium.

Americans love their war heroes and the myths that surround them as well as their nation. So much so that getting past such nonsense in plain talk with many citizens is nearly an impossible missions of sorts.

We are not talking here about the intelligent people asking thoughtful questions on CSPAN’s “Book TV” but the average ones in the working streets of the United States that politicians love to gloat over as the true American spirit of this nation…. The really dumb ones who take loans way beyond their means to repay thus enabling our loan-shark financiers into creating the largest financial fraud in history. The ones that actually believe the US Constitution was written to protect and defend their rights against tyranny… The gun nuts who can’t see further than the business end of their weapons or the “armchair generals” that see the History Channel as just another way to reinforce their own beliefs in American ideals.

Recent events on the high seas off of Somalia are combined into yet another situation to be twisted and turned into Hollywood-like fodder for politicians looking to use such events for their own aggrandizement and that of American overseas interests. However, reality is often far different from the “truths” that Hollywood and US mass media would like Americans to believe so that support is once again generated for criminal activity by yet another US Administration and its cronies in Congress.

To begin with, we must take one myth and deconstruct it so that what has been reported by the Somalia piracy of a US merchant captain can be seen in a wider context; that of piracy itself.

Far from the mythological creation of the pirate as a high-seas villain, historians have long known that piracy, like modern-day terrorism, has been for the most part a reaction against unbearable environments that in many respects left the men, and some women, involved in such acts no alternatives.

This is not to say that there have been some pirates and pirate gangs that are exactly as they have been portrayed on the silver screens of our movie houses or the murderous thugs reported in the papers. However, the more often, not reported, demeanor of such people has been a need to escape sheer poverty and brutality or in the more recent cases a defense of their own countries.

In the 19^th century, when Britain’s formidable Royal Navy has received so much of the glory for defeating seagoing criminals as portrayed in popular history, pirate bands and ships actually developed as the most egalitarian of all democratic enterprises up until that time and still stands as an axiom in political infrastructure in terms of fairness and equality. Such people had become disenfranchised from the typical sea time service in what was one of the most brutal military environments in evolving maritime history, the British Royal Navy. Far from being a standard of military honor and purpose, the Royal Navy, for its enlisted personnel was more or less a criminal activity perpetrated on average British subjects who were forcefully pressed into service and then abused and tortured at any infraction of a rule or perception that their daily tasks were not being completed in a timely manner.

It is this environment that produced the highly popular “Mutiny on The Bounty” that villainized the tyrannical Captain Bligh, depicted brilliantly by the late Sir Peter Alexander Ustinov in the rendition of this story In US theaters. Even here, Hollywood got this story mostly wrong in terms of its character development as well as part of the story which was somewhat corrected in the superior version of the movie which starred Marlon Brando as the captain and Mel Gibson as the mutinous Fletcher Christian.

Yes, Captain Bligh was a tough military sea captain but he was also a brilliant sea-man who was far more compassionate towards his men than he has been given credit for. And far from being the brute he has been claimed to be he alternatively allowed his men too much relaxation on the island of Tahiti while acquiring breadfruit to transport to the West Indies. This then led to a desire by the men to not want to return to their former savage lives in merry-old England, which in turn led to a large faction to mutiny and return to these islands where their descendants are still inhabiting today.

The actual story of “Mutiny on The Bounty” however, depicts the brutal lives of the average Royal Navy sailor which historically gave rise to much of the piracy that has been popularized by the US film industry as nothing more than murderous thugs raping and pillaging any ship they may come upon.

This very same Hollywood construct has been very successfully applied to the events in Somalia first in 2001 when the movie “BlackHawk Down” was so well received by the American public as one of our greatest war films which depicted the tragic events of American interventions in that tiny nation in 1993. And more recently, as an unknown US merchant captain has been suddenly converted into a modern-day hero (though he has done nothing to warrant such praise) being rescued by famed American Navy Seals from the clutches of Somali barbarians of the sea.

As much more in-depth reporting has shown, such depictions are rather false while the realities of the reasons for such actions have been covered up to hide ongoing US atrocities against defenseless peoples.

Being that Somalia is a small, tiny African nation, there is little interest by most people in what goes on in that part of the world. Nonetheless, this tiny little country has acted as a microcosm for studies of US interventionism in parts of the world that most, on the surface, would seemingly have no interest in.

However, US actions in this area do depict ongoing encroachments into the affairs and lives of a sovereign nation and its citizens.

In 1993, for example, when the attacks on US Rangers occurred, which resulted in Somali militia dragging the corpses of the bodies of our dead soldiers through the streets of Mogadishu, it was not by any means an attempt to prevent Humanitarian aid from reaching Somali citizens but in fact an attempt to stop US military personnel from murdering them.

As freelance journalist, Larry Chin, wrote in 2002, this incident was far more complex than it has received credit for. And it had little or nothing to do with relief as the Clinton Administration at the time was promoting. As excerpted from his piece below (and provided in full at the end of the essay), Larry Chin puts things in perspective quite bluntly:

“According to the myth, the Somalia operation of 1993 was a humanitarian mission, and a shining example of New World Order morality and altruism. In fact, US and UN troops waged an undeclared war against an Islamic African populace that was hostile to foreign interests.”

Americans have a very difficult time accepting the murderous and atrocious nature of successive US administrations considering the indoctrination processes that have been an ongoing activity of government programs from when an American child first steps into a public school classroom. If it isn’t disoriented and distorted history that is being drummed down the throats of students, it is a constant litany of repetition via US mass media, which now has the international reputation of being some of the most inaccurate in the world… the very inaccuracy we used to blame on the recently demised Soviet Union.

This is hardly news to students and observers of this situation and much has been written to prove and document the realities of how US citizens are under a constant swarm of indoctrinating activities from disinformation to advertising of useless and dangerous drugs to their very lives. One of the leading scientific studies accomplished on this subject can be found in, “Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of The Mass Media”, by Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky.

The result of this then comes back in the very nature of the reporting of recent events concerning the capture of an American Sea Captain by a group of purported Somali pirates. The formula as usual is that “They are bad, we are good, and everything we do to them they deserve”.

From President Obama on down the chorus of American bravado has been unending in its litany of American patriotism, bravery, and moral use of lethal force. However, again, deconstructing the actual background and the events themselves has always led to a different set of circumstances which belies the fantasies that are made up to keep American citizens happily ensconced in their terrarium-like bubble society.

Much of this warped morality that has been inflicted on Americans can be traced in large part back to the business leaders of the 1930s and 1940s who fought FDR’s “New Deal” program tooth, nail, and claw to turn back what they foresaw as critically damaging to “American society”. In reality, they were concerned more about their own business interests and agendas than anything else and had little use or concern for the average American worker but for his or her utility as a zombie-like worker in their manufacturing facilities.

Right-winged organizations that Americans have suddenly found invading their intellectual space since the Reagan Administration appear to have seemingly sprung up with the grateful assistance of the Christian and Evangelical Right. Though religious activity within the political realm is in fact a new wrinkle in this societal endeavor, the actual political organizations themselves are merely stronger consolidations of what business leaders prior to World War II created in an effort to keep the United States as a form of barbaric, predatory Capitalism, which has now finally exploded in mass unsustainable failure.

To understand this conservative business orientation and time period, NYU’s Associate Professor Kimberly Phillips-Fein’s recent publication of “Invisible Hands” is recommended reading.

Nevertheless, it is this ongoing thrust in American culture that has led us to the string of recent events that the current Administration and its patrons are calling Somali piracy.

However, if we really look inward at what made up this tragic situation instead of merely looking outward we will find that what we believe to be seeing is in fact something else completely.

Primarily, we have to understand the type of lethal force that was used against the attackers was the equivalent of using an M-1 Abrams tank to eliminate an ant-hill.

Navy Seals are hardly your shining knights in armor. In fact, they are highly trained Human killing machines  who are trained to do one thing, their mission which most usually incurs the taking of Human life either collaterally or as the mission’s primary goal. This is true of any elite fighting force in the United States or anywhere else with few exceptions such as The Royal Marines of The Royal Netherlands, who were the ingenious creators of the safest methods for hostage extraction from dangerous situations.

Navy Seals, unfortunately cannot claim such a mantel and as such can only be used in operations that are directly proportional to their training. Retrieving a captured sea captain who was in no imminent danger was not one of them. And pointing an AK-47 at the man’s back under such circumstances does not offer sufficient explanation as such.

The supposed pirates had already given up some of their maneuverability by allowing themselves to be attached to the naval vessel with a 75 foot line to which the Navy Seals were also attached. They had the captain for 5 days and who was returned in good health, demonstrates to some degree that he was in no imminent danger to his person. Had he been, he would have been in worse shape than sporting a sun-burn without any apparent real loss in weight. And he was humble enough to understand that all the fanfare made about his “heroism” was just that, complete nonsense.

The “pirates” in fact, have been for the most part been nothing more than teenaged-kids and\or young men who had become members of a rag-tag group, which promoted itself as the Somali National Coast Guard for protecting their beaches from the nuclear waste that European shipping had been recently dumping with barrels of this hazardous material. A number of such barrels rolled up on to the beaches and caused over 300 deaths from radiation poisoning.

The Somali Coast Guard are also there to protect the local fishing industry from the massive fishing trawlers that were constantly coming into their waters with their huge automated nets and scooping up in unending amounts, fish for US and European dinner tables.

Yet again, we find American disinterest or even policy, along with European complicity, promoting the same genocidal processes that are quite similar to what the American movement westward did to the Native Americans and their food source, the Buffalo…

You combine these circumstances within a societal infrastructure that has been allowed to break down beyond any working sociological construct and it should come as no surprise that the level of desperation among Somalis is similar to that of Palestinians in the West Bank. The only course of action and logical response then to such circumstances then would of course be either terrorism or what we are now calling piracy. And both of these results have been documented by scholars and experts in studies, which demonstrate that such levels of desperation lead to varying forms of violent responses.

In this case, the response by the Somalis was quite legitimate since it was being viewed by them as a defensive measure. Yet, from the American perspective it was an attack on legitimate shipping and its people and promoted as such.

The US response was quite indicative of ulterior agendas which have been to go into Somalia yet again with force for its resources. Already in 2006, journalist was Larry Chin was reporting about US plans to enter Somalia for its energy resources as shown by the excerpt from his piece below:

“US covert operations underway in Somalia; resource conflict escalates over Horn of Africa”

“Somalia is of geostrategic interest to the Bush administration, and the focus of operations and policy since 2001.

This focus is a continuation of long-term policies of both the Clinton administration and the George H.W. Bush administrations. Somalia’s resources have been eyed by Western powers since the days of the British Empire.

According to the USEnergy Information Administration, Somalia currently has no proven oil reserves, and only 200 billion cubic feet of proven natural gas reserves, and no hydrocarbon production. But this has not dimmed continuing interest in Somalia’s untapped and unexplored potential, and the possibility of an energy bonanza following any resolution of the country’s “internal security problems.” The Somalian regime currently welcomes oil interests. Conoco, Agip, Amoco, Chevron, and Phillips held concessions in the area. Of more immediate logistical and military interest, Somalia is situated on a key corridor between the Middle East and Africa, strategically located on the coast of the Arabian Sea, a short distance from Yemen.

As laid bare in the January 1993 report by Mark Fineman of the Los Angeles Times, The Oil Factor in Somalia, US oil companies, including Conoco, Amoco, Chevron and Phillips were positioned to exploit Somalia’s rich oil reserves during the reign of pro-US President Mohammed Siad Barre. These companies had secured billion-dollar concessions to explore and drill in large portions of the Somali countryside prior to the coup led by warlord Mohammed Farah Aidid that toppled Barre. The US Somalia envoy at the time was CIA operative Robert Oakley, a chief “counter-terrorism” officer during the George H.W. Bush presidency, and veteran of the Afghanistan and Iran-Contra operations of the 1980s. Conoco’s Mogadishu office housed the US embassy and military headquarters”

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton within days of the event was already promoting a new plan to deal with such piracy on the high seas. Rather a readied response that supposedly caught everyone by surprise.

Some military leaders were appalled at President Obama’s use of lethal force before all forms of peaceful negotiations had been exhausted. As, they correctly predicted, such use of force would not silence such activities but merely increase them and within days their concerns were vindicated.

London-based journalist Johann Hari of “The Independent”, exposes the hypocrisy of the US action against people who in numerous circumstances have been attempting to prevent another notch in their own destruction through what limited means they had available to them. His piece, “Somalia: You Are Being Lied to About Pirates”,  demonstrates that not all may be what it appears to be. And more likely is merely a continuation of poorly thought out American foreign policy, which has been a product of American culture ever since Teddy Roosevelt started the Spanish-American war in 1898.

It is hard to justify or condone such actions by lesser nations even where massive political breakdown has been an ongoing process for many years; where internal terror and violence are a daily part of life from a lack of any capable internal constraints.  We would like to believe that no matter what the state a society may be in, its people would still conduct themselves with a sense of honor and decorum on the international stage.  However, sociologically speaking this is more wishful thinking than reality.  Like a child that is not cared for properly in the first months of its life, nations also undergo a detrimental metamorphism into something that is not acceptable to the norms of more organized societies when both internal and external capabilities are no longer available to guide a country’s ongoing development into acceptable and prosperous constructs.  It is both inevitable and tragic but treating the results or symptoms instead of the root causes of the problems will only promise more of the same…

The Naked Ape

Site Notes:

• Due to the amount of reading material below, only PDF format is available. However, all web-links are included in all papers.

Unbeknownst to most, the process of “globalization” is hardly a new international construct that suddenly sprung on to the modern economic scene. It has had little to do with the age of the Internet, though that medium has been highly advantageous to an economic endeavor that actually made its appearance in the 17th century. And since that time, those who believed in the sovereignty of their own nations and economies have been waging an ongoing battle against the many, more powerful factions and forces who saw the internationalization of national economic activity as beneficial to their own economic agendas.

Globalization has brought much wealth to those individuals who have been and are now the captains of this economic construct. In many respects, it has brought countries closer together that sociologically were light years apart while generating revenue streams for many of these nations across a spectrum of industries. The glaring opposite is just as true that globalization has also increased the inequities in economic life along with either a continued sustenance of existing poverty stricken enclaves or creating new ones.

Like most consequences of the Capitalistic process, globalization was merely an extension of the one process within Capitalism that requires its maintenance to remain stable in order to continue its ability to maintain its profitability… growth. Without continued growth, Capitalism falls into crisis which is its glaring “Achilles Heel”. Thus, as industrialists saw advantage for increased growth abroad from their own nationally, closed economies, the first nascent steps towards an international economic structure began to take shape.

International trade was the first phase in a process that would take several centuries before it would reach the in-depth complexity that we now deal with today. However, as communications and transportation modernized so too did this economic process where we now have corporate “supply lines”, much like the logistics of military operations, stretching across thousands of miles through multiple nations.

Unfortunately, like the modern derivatives market in finance, there has been little understanding of the pitfalls of rushing into the international quagmire of globalized trade along with high-speed capital movement in out of countries where investors could suddenly make a nation flush with new investment dollars as fast as they could strip the country bare for newer or better alternatives.

While technology promoted investment with its new found capacity for high-speed monetary flows, national sociological constructs and public mechanisms to deal with the less advantaged remained primarily the same or became worse as government assets and services were forced into sale to private industry under the pressures exerted for economic austerity by the International Monetary Fund and The World Bank. When this failed to yield enough profits to the mentally unbalanced who were the exploiters of such a system, the middle classes began to see their standards deteriorate in a creeping-like fashion to the extent where many fell to the classes below their original economic status. Thus, the foundations for a continuous growth in inequities between the economic classes ensued between those who could participate as equals in this new economy and those that couldn’t.

Mexico was probably the first nation to demonstrate such a paradox within the milieu of what appeared to be a heightened sense of wealth creation in the early 1990s with the signing of the NAFTA agreement. Hailed by its promoters as an equalizing economic factor between the United States and Mexico, it soon proved to be what it was really created to do, which was to allow US corporations to rush down to a less environmentally constrained political environment with the anticipation of taking advantage of lower paid laborers and wage earners.

Not to be deterred, much was made by the NAFTA supporters of the new ability by average Mexican citizens to suddenly find themselves capable of making purchases in the same US style department stores as their contemporaries were capable of in the United States. However, this was all window-dressing as the long-term effects of the agreement were soon in coming, as Mexican standards of quality of life remained more or less the same in comparison along with equivalent if not worsening environmental concerns.

India, despite it’s rise to prominence on the international scene recently was touted by promoters of globalization as a stark example of the benefits of globalization as US outsourcing to first India, then China, and finally to the smaller Asian nations ripped through the American Information Technology (IT) profession destroying in essence what had become known as the crown-jewel of US industrial capability.

The reality was that the United States through this process did not create new jobs for IT professionals in America while moving existing positions down a scaling ladder of prominence in the career rankings thus creating employment and new growth for both sets of technical professionals but merely cost shifted the work out of the States. Thus, the corporations involved reaped huge profits while IT positions grew more scant in certain areas of the US. The subsequent result was that only about 2% of the Indian labor force was actually affected by this shift demonstrating that a very limited amount of growth could be attributed to the Indian economic system. In addition, certain areas affected by this shift such as technical call-center positions continued brutal Indian processes of labor exploitation while software development standards were reduced to commodity-like assembly line processes for deliverables back to the corporations that employed such services.

Most of the people in India today live lives of quiet desperation as the spirituality of this nation remains as much mythological as US history. Indian peasant farmers, for example, have one of the highest suicide rates in the world as they find themselves literally unable to maintain subsistence levels on family run plots of land.

The result was what was being demonstrated as the new Indian economy was in fact merely a small segment of a nation whose population totals over one billion people.

Capitalistic activity had successfully taken advantage of the newly developing mechanisms for international trade. However, the failure of this same endeavor to take into account a fair and equitable distribution of the profit produced by those who actually created it was mired in the entrenchment of modern professional business managers and Wall Street speculators instead of those small-scale entrepreneurs who had a vested interest in seeing their firms succeed as entire entities.

The same process, but far more brutally, was also seen along similar lines during emergence of the Russian Federation after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989. Under Boris Yeltsin, newly arrived neo-liberal economic policies that had taken Mexico in the guise of NAFTA while tested in South America earlier, were quickly implemented and encouraged by the United States under the first Bush Administration which resulted in a massive sell-off of vital national resources and state-run businesses to rich Russian oligarchs that led to massive dislocation within the newly emerging Russian society.

Again, there was little concern for the needs of the average citizen, or in this case, even the viability of the state itself, as economics was turned completely upside down for the advantage of the very few. This was not globalization as we have come to know it but a symptom of the powerful influences that ideological based capitalistic activity was having on the health and welfare of the public interest in every country that this process would eventually touch.

South America was the birthing area for what has come to be known as Neo-liberalism in the economic environment; an economic philosophy that saw itself developed into a finely tuned engine of state asset destruction through the financial policies of the International Money Fund and The World Bank that infected any emerging economy with constrictive debt peonage. However, this was not as it was supposed to be.

The neo-liberal economic model was actually the result of theories developed by the great Austrian economist, Friedrich Hayek, who saw a more humanitarian implementation of Capitalism that allowed for a greater level of participation in the economic environment (see Friedrich Hayek at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedrich_Hayek).

His new economic theories were taken out of context by the new fanatics of laissez-faire policies who saw their idealism (for want of a better word) attached to the new role-model for state abstention from national economic endeavor in the person of Augusto Pinochet in Chile. Pinochet and his activities against the former Allende democratic\socialist regime were supported by no less than Henry Kissinger and Milton Friedman and his gang of economic thugs who became known as “The Chicago Boys” at the University of Chicago’s School of Economics.

An ardent critic of socialistic, state-planned economies, Friedrich Hayek also was a strong critic of such blaze attitudes towards capitalistic activity that covered itself in legitimacy with the aging concept of laissez-faire policy. In fact, Hayek saw a necessity for national government to be involved in the legitimate regulation of economic activity so that it could not be led astray by those who would simply use it for their own aggrandizement while causing harm to what he saw as a natural economic order to the market.

The theories of Hayek and others like him were swept aside by modern-day neo-liberal capitalists who swept into power in 2000 with the second Bush Administration under the guise of a mutation of political conservatism called neo-conservatism. Simply put, these promoters of laissez-faire theory took the concept to an extreme that eliminated the need for any national government altogether. However, the infestation by such ideologues was making itself known earlier to this catastrophic American election, most notably with the dilution of the Glass-Steagall act by the Clinton Administration in 1999 but initiated with the Reagan election in 1980. From that early point on, every possible attempt by neo-conservative ideologues was made to strip away the powers of the US government to oversee economic activity by the process of deregulation or failing that by the promotion of individuals into power that would successfully ignore any sense of disciplined oversight.

The result of all this, which appears to be very disconnected at this point, is that while the globalization of economic activity was increasing at a rate proportionately related to the advancements in communication technologies, the fabric of legitimate capitalistic transactional endeavor was deteriorating at the same speed as new ideologues force-fed their economic delusions on an unknowledgeable American public. The party was on while the creation of the biggest financial disaster in history began in an infancy that was made well aware to its promoters by those who understood and were repulsed by such indiscretion towards the viability of the national economy.

This paradox in international economic entanglement was noticed by the many who were engaging in their own wealth creation but simply ignored to the detriment of those it was certainly apparent to but were not able to participate which was the bulk of people living in either emerging economies or in the lower classes of the industrialized societies. And, those in the middle-classes may have noted it, as they found their standards of living remaining either stagnant or actually deteriorating under the newer burdens of freewheeling credit which put many in the economic strata into freewheeling debt but chose to do nothing about it.

Debt peonage had graduated from the national enclave of the IMF and World Bank to the individual who couldn’t consume the easy credit fast enough from banks who frothed at the idea of binding people up in credit-card monetary outlays and illegitimate equity loans as housing prices skyrocketed due to the influx of so many new buyers on the market.

It is this discrepancy in economic sanity that produced the extensive inequities today in the international economic arena proving that the idea of globalization was no more a solution to the world’s poverty stricken than any other program that any government before had conjured up. The ideology of the “free market” being a panacea to the world’s ills was proven as much the “snake oil” venom of charlatans as the grandiosity of politicians who bathed themselves in the aura of concerned personages for the less advantaged.

Now that the inequity in all of this has struck home against the industrialized economies that involved themselves in what has become nothing more than an economic casino, the world now worries about how to crawl out of its own selfishly self-made mess.

There are answers to these problems that have been forthcoming by highly reputable economists and analysts, all of which have fallen on deaf ears and disinterested parties. The massive disparity in wealth creation has been simply too toxic and addictive to consider alternatives to the current program that provide more intelligent and constructive approaches to a problem that has been with us for a much longer time than we would like to acknowledge. The actual inequality and dangers that the current economic systems promote have effectively shattered the lives of millions across our now “globalized” Earth but the real toxic poison is not the assets that are now valueless but the fact that so many who have produced such waste actually believe that this is Capitalism.

One result is a paper that demonstrates the sociological destructive nature of such activity while also providing in conclusion examples of countries that actually have already avoided such excesses while also succeeding in lifting themselves above this financial turmoil to the benefit of all of their citizens, their government… and their business institutions. And none of these citizens would consider their countries capitalistic…

See Göran Therborn’s recent essay, “The Killing-Fields of Inequality”, for an enlightened view for how we may all want to consider living with each other in the future. Friedrich Hayek would probably be quite interested in seeing that someone took his theories seriously…

The Naked Ape

To read Göran Therborn’s insightful essay go to either of these sources…

Further Suggested Reading:

Inequalities of the World (Goran Therborn )

What Does the Ruling Class Do When It Rules? (Goran Therborn )

The Road to Serfdom (F. A. Hayek)

The Many-Headed Hydra (Peter Linebaugh)

Globalization and Its Discontents (Joseph E. Stiglitz)

There is little doubt that both the US government and large, American financial institutions are so entwined with each other as to suggest that in this instance the US has acceded to the same level of a fascist state.

Now before the reader attempts to dispute this contention it should be understood that fascism does not mean totalitarianism as the mass-media has so successfully conveyed. It simply means that both state and business have become irrevocably linked with each other as to be one. Most often Fascism does reduce itself to totalitarianism. However, this is not the definition of fascism.

Given that there are many conflicts inside the American government and its business supporters and promoters, the idea of Fascism existing in the United States still must be used rather loosely but none the less it can be used.

In one respect, there is nothing wrong with Fascism or any other political system if the people implementing them were honest and sincere about promoting the public good. This was in fact true of the ancient Greek tyrants that were often seen as “benevolent” dictators and not ruthless thugs out to subvert the state and its citizens. Unfortunately, the most common outcome whereby there is a growing centralized control of government functionality is in fact varying levels of totalitarianism.

In the United States today we have succumbed to a level of totalitarianism that can only be described as “institutionalized dictatorship”. And with only two political parties, both served and supported by their favored business interests what else could have been expected. Our economic system mirrors this political construct with what is called “monopolistic oligarchy”, whereby true Capitalism no longer exists (and probably never has) since large, monolithic corporations have been allowed to control the major influences in most American business sectors.

Such developments usually only come about through massive fraud and deceit of the citizenry. And the United States today is no exception. Though the Bush Administration hardly conspired to devolve further to such depths of malfeasance and corruption by throwing such endeavors into the faces of Americans on a daily basis (Those who say they liked this president, surely must have been hatched on another planet and transported here by the Bush Administration for their own aggrandizement.), the new Obama Administration at least attempts to be more subtle. No doubt this subtlety has not been very successful given that so many honest journalists and columnists, tired of the Bush megalomania, are eager to not let another president slip his underhanded plans by the American public yet again.

President Obama came in on a wave of popular support not because he was in any way qualified to do the job but because “he promised” a change in the Washington status-quo, none of which he has followed through on since he came to office. His critics have labeled President Obama everything from a liberal to a socialist and no doubt, from his actions, they have proved somewhat correct. However, the extent of their vindication has yet to be fully realized.

On the other hand those that claim he is just another shill for Republican policies already implemented by the Bush Administration appear to be just as correct making President Obama a most interesting political enigma since one cannot be realistically both.

One thing that stands out among all this discussion of Obama’s politics is the continuing corruption that pervades the implementation of his policies via his cabinet choices and the support he gives to those policies they initiate that are so pro-business as to maintain the increasing deterioration of citizen rights and the public welfare in the United States.

Yes, President Obama is attempting to implement radical health-care reform which the United States desperately needs but at prohibitive costs while pouring taxpayer monies down the rat-hole of insolvent banks and financial institutions. At the same, time he is slowly taking control of the financial sector with the “strings” tied to the bailout monies afforded it while at the same time taking even more control over the ailing US auto industry. In the latter case, through policies that attempt to destroy the subsistence capabilities of auto workers with concessions that are so outrageous and unfair that the result would be the complete destruction of the US auto-workers unions.

There is no doubt that control of these sectors has to be passed into hands that can adequately deal with the seriousness that each of these industries face. However, there are legitimate alternatives to what is being done by the president and his administration which still achieve the same goals but at more equitable levels while still maintaining the very capitalistic traits in these particular economic infrastructures that US Administration continuously preach but never seemingly truly achieve.

All of this then appears to be nothing more than a façade for only who knows what. Is President Obama then a “benevolent dictator” who is attempting to right the “ship of state” by slowly eliminating the factors that created the current financial crisis by taking control of them so that he can eventually turn the government back over to the people? In this case we must understand the forces that are arrayed against him in such an attempt making much of what he may be attempting to do appear to be just a continuation of similar policies of his predecessor.

Unfortunately, the only credible information we can go in demonstrates that this new president is no more sincere than the last one. Before we had in idiot without brains and presently me may just have a paradox of the same but with them.

In Salon’s capable publication by Glenn Greenwald, the massive scale of continuing corruption by the Obama Administration is laid out in graphic detail in the article at the links below as well as the supporting articles Mr. Greenwald provides. It could all be a cover for something else, something much grander that may take time to unfold but for now, the facts do speak for themselves…

The Naked Ape

To read Glenn Greenwald’s insightful essay and his numerous supporting sources go to any of the links below…

Further Suggested Reading:

The Great Financial Crisis: Causes and Consequences (John Bellamy Foster)

“Socialism” is a bad word in the United States. It conjures up images of Communist dictatorships and fascist ideologies. This word has become the label for all things American citizens dread that their government may someday impose on them. And yet, in light of recent events with US financial Capitalism it may behoove most Americans to understand their fears of this political system in an impartial light.

The underpinning of such resentment towards this concept is the mythological interpretation which has been fostered on the American populace by their government and the mass media that Socialism means the end of private property and ownership. Given that the Capitalist state, as it has become, dreads the loss of a single penny of their precious profits this is understandable. However, if we review the historical placement of this interpretation from the writings of Marx it would be found that he never said that individuals could not own property or other such assets. What, he was in fact trying to demonstrate was the inadequacy of having property instead of more egalitarian perceptions of the Human condition. In addition, he was discussing private property in terms of economic ownership and not so much the ability to own a parcel of land or a library of books.

Marx’s development of the Communist political system in many respects went to the opposite extreme as much as Capitalism does. Therefore, it is understandable that some level of material wealth is perfectly acceptable in any society until it becomes a detrimental factor to society as a whole. What Marx was attempting to accomplish through his philosophies was the equality of the individual by preventing others from exploiting that individualism through the ownership of labor.

Unfortunately, much of the writings by Karl Marx can appear to be quite cryptic and difficult to understand. An example of one his papers can be found at the following link:

Karl Marx & Private Property

Nonetheless, Marx was writing on economics from a Humanistic perspective and not from the outcome that was originated in Stalinist Russia. His hope was to return Humanity to the social being that was commonly found in earlier societies whereby labor and production went to the benefit of all in a society and not a select few through the accumulation of wealth.

The misunderstanding of Communist theory is that it can work but not on such a large scale as in the United States or Russia. Communism, like Democracy, was conceived against small societies in which everyone was easily assimilated and was a participant. Karl Marx failed to understand this or at least those who attempted to implement his theories did and the result was what everyone came to fear… the totalitarian state.

It is stated that Karl Marx invented the concept of Socialism. However, this is not quite true. Socialism is actually a European concept developed in the early 19th century as an offshoot of Communistic theory, several years before Marx introduced his writings in 1844.

According to the brief historical notes on Wikipedia…

“The English word socialism (1839) derives from the French socialisme (1832), the mainstream introduction of which usage is attributed, in France, to Pierre Leroux[8] and to Marie Roch Louis Reybaud; and in Britain to Robert Owen in 1827, father of the cooperative movement.[9][10]

Western European social critics were the first, modern socialists – Robert Owen, Charles Fourier, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Louis Blanc, Charles Hall and Saint-Simon, who criticised the excessive poverty and inequality consequence of the Industrial Revolution, and advocated reform via the egalitarian distribution of wealth and the transformation of society to small communities without private property. Saint-Simon delineated collectivist principles reorganizing society to so build socialism upon planned, utopian communities.

Linguistically, the contemporary connotation of the words socialism and communism accorded with the adherents’ and opponents’ cultural attitude towards Religion. In Christian Europe, of the two, communism was believed the atheist way of life. In Protestant England, communism was too culturally and aurally close to the Papist Roman Catholic communion rite, hence English atheists denoted themselves socialists.[11]

In 1847, Frederick Engels said “socialism was respectable on the continent, while communism was not.” The Owenites in England and the Fourierists in France were considered socialists, while working-class movements that “proclaimed the necessity of total social change” denoted themselves Communists. This latter branch of socialism, was powerful enough to produce the communisms of Étienne Cabet, in France, and Wilhelm Weitling, in Germany.”

Socialism basically takes from Communist theory and applies it to the state at its most top-level which is the government, which makes perfect sense since the entity of government is in any event a socialistic structure; it is supposed to be there for the welfare of the public interest and not the welfare of a select few. Hence, the concept of state economic planning. Despite US “free market” ideologues promotions, there has never been a single instance in history of a true free-market unless it is being applied to those instances of local cottage industries that successfully existed in the past. It is these small and family-run industries that the concepts of Capitalism were discussed by John Stuart Mill in the early 19th century.

Now before the reader gets involved in any dispute over this, what should be questioned is exactly what type of economic structure do we actually have in the United States today. If the conclusion is Capitalism, it would be incorrect. If the conclusion is Fascism, this would be closer but rather incorrect as well. The truth of the matter is that the United States has become, since World War II, a “Monopolistic Oligarchy”, similar to what was found in Russia during the Yeltsin years in the 1990s without the many weak underpinnings of Russian economic society as a whole. A few very large companies in the major industrial sectors now influence every economic process in each of these sectors. No reputable economist would ever lend their approval to such an economy as Capitalistic since it has neither an effective competitive environment nor any yielding of wealth to those who actually create it.

The current financial crisis is a classic example of this as it has been clearly demonstrated by many economists that only 5 major investment banks along with the initial causative factor of AIG Corporation, which inflicted this crisis not on just the United States but Europe and the rest of the world financial system. There is no doubt that European, Japanese, and Chinese financial and economic activity played a contributing role in the current situation. However, compared to the role that the United States played, such contributions were effective in their own right but secondary in nature.

All of this brings us to the recent James Petras essay, “World Depression: Regional Wars and the Decline of the US Empire – Part I”. In lay-men terms but in graphic detail, Professor Petras outlines how this situation came to be by going behind the scenes into the multi-decade build-up to the present crisis.

If the reader reads the included article to the end it is very much expected that a reconsideration of the concepts of Socialism as an equalizing factor in American society along the lines of the European model has developed will be an endeavor that will be embarked upon.

This political\economic model does not eliminate private business but forces it into more equilibrium with the needs of the society. At the same time this model provides for far more societal support to the individual in terms of health care and safety-net services than the US model has ever done. Such a model also provides more wealth distribution among the populace who actually create the value in society while limiting the profit making abilities that private ownership in a purely Capitalistic society provides.

If you are a lone entrepreneur or one of the many businessmen that populate US society today, such a model will most likely not entice you unless your instincts are to the more Humane. However, if you are a professional careerist, a crafts-person, a trades-person, or unskilled labor, to not want such a model would be to endeavor against your own best interests which is currently a severe problem in the US political infrastructure.

No, Socialism, is not the perfect answer in its most basic form. However, to re-organize American society around productive means of creating value instead of the less than worthless means of an overly engorged financial sector creating only paper value is a start… and it will be found in time to be the only means out of the mess we and the rest of the world find ourselves in…

The Naked Ape

To read James Petras’ insightful essay go to either of these sources…

Suggested Reading…

Rulers and Ruled in the US Empire: Bankers, Zionists and Militants (James Petras)

Super Imperialism – New Edition: The Origin and Fundamentals of U.S. World Dominance (Michael Hudson)

Global Fracture: The New International Economic Order (Michael Hudson)

Contours of Descent: US Economic Fractures and the Landscape of Global Austerity (Robert Pollin)

Unequal Protection: The Rise of Corporate Dominance and the Theft of Human Rights (Thom Hartmann)

The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (Naomi Klein)

Web of Debt: The Shocking Truth About Our Money System and How We Can Break Free (Ellen Hodgson Brown)

Authors, John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt, were the first to successfully breach the “wall of silence” that exists in the United States today in terms of rational debate concerning America’s relationship with this troubled nation of Israel in the mid-east. In their book, “The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy”, they clearly and definitely outline the facts that describe the terrible influence the Israeli lobby has on United States government officials and the subsequent policies that are created as a result. These two writers have paid a price, like so many that have attempted such a restructuring of the ingrained perceptions of this influence previously. Luckily, for the American citizenry at large these two authors have successfully triumphed over the smears and attacks on their reputations that have either destroyed or silenced prior critics.

Israel today is a nation in decline both sociologically and militarily. It has, since its inception, been a nation under siege from its own continuing irrational fears that first sprung from the psychological imprint that World War II left on those who came after. Up to a point the massive destruction of European Jewry during the war years provided a completely understandable perspective for those filled with idealism that set off to build a new nation in the sands of the Middle-East. However, after time, the realities of such psychological distortions instead of fostering a healing of such wounds were instead allowed to develop into a politicized religion that would taint everything the Israeli nation would do in its short life-span. From viscous warfare to outright racism, Israelis have allowed themselves to become not the victims of “The Holocaust” but victims of their own distorted perceptions of those around them.

Along with this, the secular and political construct of Zionism, the emotional engine that led to the creation of this tiny country, was allowed to replace the Humanitarian aspects of Judaic Law and tradition not with a charter for developing the nation sociologically, politically, and morally but instead by fostering violence, racism, hatred, and massive dislocation. After so many years in which the time could have been used fruitfully to bind the wounds that the Ashkenazi Jew of Europe brought to Palestine the result has been the festering and growing of these old sores along with many new ones which combined now threaten the very existence of the Israeli state.

All this is not news; it is well known both inside Israel and those outside observers who continuously study this nation from a multitude of vantage points. In fact, many Israeli scholars are quite concerned over this situation and have been warning Israeli leaders for a number of years… all of which has seemingly fallen on deaf ears.

The current Israeli elections standout in stark contrast to its promotions of democracy and morality as Avigdor Lieberman, an ardent Arab racist, is welcomed with open arms by the new Netanyahu government as its foreign minister. Such an aberration in Israeli politics is akin to the Bush Administration appointing John Bolton as America’s UN Ambassador. Lieberman is such a staunch racist that even the reviled Arial Sharon had him dismissed from his own cabinet for his views.

Nonetheless, this is what has become of a nation that began its existence with warfare and ethnic cleansing while still retaining an opportunity to develop a creative and long lasting peace in the region.

Now Israeli scholar, Zeev Maoz, presents the world with a new look at the inner struggles that have taken place within Israel over its security and foreign policy strategies. Taking a scientific approach to his research methodology Zeev Maoz hopes the reader will come away with a greater understanding of how such policies have been unduly influenced by misguided priorities and perceptions.

The book was published in January of this year so the readership is still in its infancy providing only 4 reviews on Amazon.com. However, surprisingly 3 out of the 4 readers gave the book 5 stars while the fourth reviewer, Jill Malter, actually gave it 4. For those of you who may not be aware of Jill Malter, she is a rabid Zionist and admits to as much in her Amazon reviewer bio. She has always added her comments to any book critical of Israel leaving her with a batting average of nearly “1000” with her negativity until this book. As one reviewer stated, Moaz’s claims and subsequent corroborative research makes his presentations irrefutable. Has Ms. Malter gone soft on all of us?

In any event, long time writer on Israeli affairs, Ms. Ellen Cantarow, has provided interested readers with an extensive overview of the books contents below.

The Naked Ape

The Wages Of Force: Expansion, Not Peace

Go here for article source…

A review of Zeev Maoz’s Defending The Holy Land: A Critical Analysis Of Israel’s Security & Foreign Policy (University of Michigan Press: 2006).

March 21, 2009 By Ellen Cantarow

[Footnote added March 22. 2009]

In 1997 Hamas offered Israel a 30-year truce. Jordan’s King Hussein delivered the offer: Israel’s response was to send Mossad agents to Jordan where they tried to kill Hamas leader Khaled Meshal by dropping poison in his ear. The incident (described by former Mossad chief Efraim Halevy in his book, Man in the Shadows), not only deeply embarrassed the King, it also failed to kill Meshal. (Other peace bids were made; all were rejected, though none, perhaps, as dramatically as this.)

Hamas has also honored both short and long ceasefires, not the least of which took place during the six months preceding Israel’s recent devastation of Gaza. A January 2009 Huffington Post article by Nancy Kanwisher, Johannes Haushofer, & Anat Biletzki shows that in any “conflict pause” between 2000 and 2008 (“conflict pause” means a cessation of hostile actions on both sides) Israel most often killed first, shattering the peace. The longer the “conflict-pause,” the greater Israel’s propensity to break it with violence.

The 1997 assassination attempt illustrates what Zeev Maoz, in his landmark work, Defending the Holy Land, calls Israel’s “over my dead body” approach to peace. One form of Israeli ceasefire violation has been targeted assassinations, which Maoz says became policy — a specific “tactic intended to ignite escalation” — in the al-Aqsa Intifada. (He himself cites “four separate occasions” on which “Israel violated an implicit cease-fire that the Palestinians imposed upon themselves by assassinations that caused escalation” [287].)

Anyone seeking the background behind Israel’s demonizing of Hamas; its destruction of Gaza; its slide into today’s fascism (my word, not Maoz’s) should read this book. According to its author Israel has been a “Sparta state” from its inception, its national psyche veering between arrogance and paranoia. Shaped by the belief that all Arabs and their states would destroy Israel if they could, the Jewish state’s policies have been rooted from the start in Jabotinsky’s “Iron Wall” doctrine. Adopted by Jabotinsky’s arch-rival Ben Gurion, this doctrine has translated throughout Israel’s history as repeated military blows “to convince the Arabs of the futility and illogic of their dreams. Over time, the Arabs will come to accept the Jewish state and to make peace with it” (9).

The book brings a crushing weight of historical and analytical detail to bear on all arenas of Israel’s security and foreign policy. Readers will find blow-by-blow analyses (including details of military decisions, arms used, tactics chosen, advances, retreats, etc.) of all of Israel’s wars from Sinai in the mid-1950s through Lebanon in 1982 (the book ends in 2004). Here, too, is a compendium of its “lesser” conflicts from 1949 through the first part of the al-Aqsa Intifada.

Maoz gives careful attention to Israel’s secretive nuclear policy and its impact on the region. An illuminating exploration of Israel’s intervention into the affairs of neighboring states includes Israel’s covert operations in the Sudan, where it supported the Black Sudanese south against the Arab north from 1965-75; the West Bank, where it tried to create “village leagues” — these were manned by thugs loathed by the general population — to supplant the PLO. (When that didn’t work, it supported Muslim groups that morphed into Hamas.) A section on the “causes and implications of the mismanagement of National security & foreign policy” includes a detailed discussion of how Israel’s military came to dominate its civil society (including its court system).

This book was ignored (by The New York Times among others) when it appeared. My guess is that it wasn’t the book’s bulk (at over 700 pages including end notes and references this is a huge volume) that caused editors to ignore it. Certainly it wasn’t its plain-spoken but occasionally “poli-sci” style: such books are routinely reviewed in the Times and The New York Review of Books. I suspect that the book was simply too damning of policies slavishly underwritten by the US, and unquestioningly accepted by US intellectuals — including, say, the editors of the Times. Length and unwieldiness might have been an excuse; but the real reason probably lies in today’s unhappy atmosphere of censorship (both by the “self” and by the guardians of public thought in this arena).

I also suspect that a strike against Maoz is his unimpeachable credentials. He’s enough of an “establishment man” to be dangerous — hence, better ignored. He headed the Masters program of the Israeli Defense Force’s National Defense College; he also directed the Graduate School of Government Policy and the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies at Tel Aviv University. Of five major wars he analyzes here, he fought in three: the War of Attrition, the Yom Kippur War, and the 1982 Lebanon War. In the early 1990s he briefly advised Yitzhak Rabin on strategic affairs. His thirty-year ambition to write this book was driven by his frustration with “the persistent failure of the policy community to learn from Israel’s mistakes . . . ” (viii).

Israel committed one of its worst mistakes in 1971. That February, President Anwar Sadat announced to Egypt’s People’s Assembly a possible “interim agreement” with Israel. Within days this became a full-blown peace offer brokered by the UN’s Gunnar Jarring in trilateral negotiations with Israel, Egypt and the US. Egypt’s foreign minister wrote Jarring that Egypt would “enter into a peace agreement with Israel containing all the . . . obligations as provided in Security Council Resolution 242 . . . once Israel withdrew from the Sinai” (412; emphasis mine). The offer, comments Maoz, “could not be overstated . . . At the end of the road was what the Israelis had been, presumably, praying for over the past twenty-three years: a full-fledged peace treaty . . . It implied a formal acceptance of and peace with a Jewish state in the Middle East by the strongest and most important Arab state” (412).

If Israel had said yes to Sadat in 1971, the Palestinians might well have been quiet (subsequent leaked Israeli intelligence has revealed that Israel was considering letting the old families in the occupied territories run their affairs as they had under the Ottoman Empire). Egypt would have been removed as Israel’s greatest Arab threat; Egyptian compliance with the treaty would have been a touchstone for future negotiations with other Arab states.

Before 1967 Israel would have accepted Sadat “with both hands,” says Maoz. “In 1971, however, the price tag for this deal appeared excessively high . . .” (412). In short, Israel’s greed trumped its desire for peace. It wanted to hold onto what it had conquered in the Sinai in 1967; in specific it wanted to build a huge city on the site of a tiny settlement called Yamit (Israel was forced to evacuate that in 1982).

The choice was fateful. The Yom Kippur War, which largely owed to Israel’s rejection, cost the lives of three thousand Israeli soldiers; a “staggering” loss of equipment; $10 billion in overall damages. (Arab losses, of course, were far higher.) On at least two occasions (October 9 and 23), Israel armed its nuclear warheads, bringing the region to the brink of nuclear war (164). (Maoz thinks it’s reasonable “to suppose that [Israel] had two to three dozen bombs and a dozen or so nuclear warheads on its Jericho missiles” (165). He also feels that “nuclear deterrence did not do what it was supposed to do” (315). Soviet intelligence must surely have passed knowledge of Israel’s nuclear doings to Egypt, but neither Egypt nor Syria was deterred from pressing forward. (The chapter on Israel’s nuclear policy greatly expands the idea of its futility and its sparking of a regional arms race.) After the war Israel’s defense spending soared from 15% to 25% of GDP, “the largest in the world at that time” (165). Beyond sheer expense in blood and money, in January, 1974, Israel agreed “to a far worse deal” with Egypt (417).*

Was the choice of expansion over peace worth it? Maoz thinks not. The Yom Kippur War did improve Israel’s relations with the US; at the same time it increased Israel’s military dependence on the Americans. The Yom Kippur War further isolated Israel elsewhere in the world and, in Maoz’s view, “marked the growing legitimacy accorded by the international community to the PLO” (167). Israel’s security establishment (IDF intelligence) continued dominating its foreign-policy decisions. Among other things this produced Israel’s ties with “pariah states such as South Africa . . . ” (168).

Maoz use the specific terms “expansion” and “annexationist” only in reference to later events: “Once religious ideology became a major drive in the settlement policy, an unspoken alliance was formed between annexationist elements in the Labor Party and the Likud Party, on the one hand, and national-religious groups such as Gush Emunim, on the other” (489). But Israel’s expansionist ambitions are very clear in Maoz’s account of Sadat’s 1971 offer. Elsewhere, the author describes Israel’s territorial fixation as a far earlier motive:

“Even before 1948 . . . Zionist leaders strongly believed that the outcome of any political settlement in Palestine would be determined by the demographic distribution of the ethnic groups residing in it . . . Settlements form a human and physical fait accompli” (17).

In regard to the Sinai war,

“The Israeli leadership had been itching for war since the early 1950s…A large number of people in the military and political elite believed…that the outcome of the 1948 war had not been decisive . . . in providing Israel with defensible borders . . . Both military and political leaders…were actively searching for an appropriate pretext to occupy the West Bank” (74).

In regard to Israel’s relations with Syria: “Whenever requested to define the military requirements of a possible agreement with Syria, the IDF opted for territorial control rather than for security arrangements . . . ” (403).

The theme I’ve extrapolated from the book (that Israel’s expansionism has historically trumped peace) is not Maoz’s. But the evidence exists for such a conclusion. A flaw is that there’s so much detail, one can easily lose the forest for the trees. But the details do often make for arresting reading.

Readers will be reminded how “traditional” Israel’s brutal siege against Gaza was, how rooted in the past its subsequent destruction of the Strip, by reading the chapter, “Unlimited Use of the Limited Use of Force.” Here, Maoz goes back sixty years to describe a policy of collective punishment against civilians. From 1949 on, Israel struck villages from which 1948 refugees had “infiltrated” into the Jewish state. Moshe Dayan comments as follows:

“The only method that proved effective, not justified or moral [emphasis mine], but effective, when Arabs plant mines on our side (is retaliation.) . . . if we harass the nearby village . . . then the population there comes out against the (infiltrators) . . . and the Egyptian Government and the Transjordanian government are (driven) to prevent such incidents, because their prestige is (assailed) . . . ” (279).

What has changed in 55 years is that Israel’s leaders exhibit naked arrogance in committing outlaw acts — there’s no thought of using a phrase like “not justified or moral.” Yet the use by Ben Gurion, Dayan, and subsequent leaders of collective punishment inevitably produced today’s Israel. So has its long history of provocation. “[D]isproportionate responses to provocations, as well as military initiatives not in response to specific provocations” (232) include:

Moshe Dayan’s order to his general staff, October 23, 1955, to overthrow Nasser’s regime by “bring[ing] about a decisive confrontation with Egypt in the nearest possible future.” “Gradual deterioration” (Dayan’s term) would materialize through acts of disproportionate force against Egyptian provocations. If nothing else worked to make Egypt react satisfactorily, Dayan would order “the occupation of the Eilat Straits by the IDF” as “the detonator that will blow up the entire powder keg” (63-65). (Result: Nasser is not overthrown. The Sinai war is a military success, but it does not result in “making the region safer for Israel and the West . . . just the opposite” (79).

Dayan’s candid discussion, in a mid-1970s interview, of IDF provocations against Syria, designed to push that country and Egypt towards the 1967 war: “It worked like this: we would send a tractor to plow some place in the demilitarized zone where nothing could be grown, and we knew ahead of time that the Syrians would shoot. If they didn’t shoot, we would tell the tractor to move deeper (into the DMZ) until the Syrians got mad eventually and fired on it . . . We thought then, and it lasted for a long time, that we can change the armistice lines by a series of military operations that are less than war, that is, to snatch some territory and hold on to it until the enemy would give up on it . . . ” (103). (Result: the 1967 War is a victory, but it contains the poison pill of occupation and further conflict. It makes Israel arrogant and stupid enough to ignore all warnings, and be ravaged by the Yom Kippur War.)

Israel’s blanket-bombing of southern Lebanese towns and villages in July 1983 caused thousands of Lebanese to flee toward Beirut. “Operation Accountability” was meant to make the population reject Hezbollah: the opposite effect was achieved.

This book should take its place in your library next to, say, those of Israel’s “revisionist” historians, Noam Chomsky’s The Fateful Triangle and, more recently, Idith Zertal’s and Akiva Eldar’s Lords of the Land: The War Over Israel’s Settlements in the Occupied Territories (1967-2007) (Nation Books, 2007).

If you’re daunted by the book’s length, begin with the first chapter, an excellent overview of the whole that includes concise summaries of each subsequent chapter. You may want to jump to the concluding “Findings and Lessons.” Then dip at will into the chapters you find most intriguing (each has a convenient closing summary). Keep coming back over time: this is a book one digests over the course of many sittings.

Problems: I find the index sometimes frustrating: look for “Yamit” — it’s missing. Look for “assassinations” or even “targeted assassinations” — also missing. A substantive flaw: while Maoz at points alludes to the US’s influence on Israel’s conduct, he doesn’t hammer away at it as a theme.

Then there’s his belief that Israel’s policies of force have been “failures” or “folly.” But what if the inevitable escalation of war into war, “limited conflicts” into further conflagrations, were deliberate? As I write this review, Avigdor Lieberman has just become Israel’s new Foreign Minister. Gaza lies in ruins. (On the walls of a shelter where twenty-seven members of one family were killed by an air strike, are inscribed Israeli soldiers’ sentiments born of sixty years of “Iron Wall” indoctrination: “Make war not peace,” “Arabs need to die,” and “Arabs 1948-2009.” Such genocidal hatred will flourish only more luridly with the incoming government.) In the West Bank including East Jerusalem, settlement expansion goes on apace. Settler and army attacks against Palestinians and international supporters continue unabated. As usual, Obama hasn’t said boo, nor has Hillary Clinton (her only remark about the destruction of 1,000 Gazan homes was that it was “unhelpful”). The real lesson of this book may be grim: force works.

* [Note added March 22, 2009] In 1974, following the Yom Kippur War, Israel had to agree to a “much worse deal” than Sadat had offered in 1971. But withdrawal from the Sinai wasn’t part of the deal — that happened only after Camp David (1978-79). Moreover, the burden of blame for Israel’s rejection of Sadat’s 1971 peace offer falls on the US’s Henry Kissinger (then national security adviser), whom Maoz describes as having been in a “turf battle” with Secretary of State William Rogers who did favor the peace plan. Absent Kissinger, Israel might well have followed a different path in 1971 — and even after. Those who want to follow up on the Kissinger role should also consult Noam Chomsky’s The Fateful Triangle from p. 65.

Ellen Cantarow has written since 1979 about Israel and the West Bank for The Village Voice, Z, Znet, Counterpunch, and many other publications.

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