by Dimitris Konstantakopoulos (*)
Let me begin by expressing my profound and sincere admiration for the political instincts of the Islamic terrorists. They seem to possess a formidable sense of political timing.
For the last three weeks no serious and knowledgeable observer (unfortunately there are not many of them these days) could be in any doubt about our being thoroughly implicated in an accelerating momentum towards war.
Ostensibly against Islam, “radical” or otherwise, and against Korea. In reality against Russia, China and the rest of the world.
But also against ourselves! Becoming an empire, Rome has ceased to be a republic.
War and Peace
This is not just the opinion of the author of these lines. Mr. Leon Panetta, former US Secretary of Defense, has warned that Mr. Trump is risking a nuclear war in Korea. Former acting CIA director Mike Morell has also characterized Trump’s policies in East Asia as “provocative”.
The Russian Prime Minister has said that the world went one step away from a direct military conflict between the two nuclear superpowers that are present in Syria. His Minister of Defense thought it appropriate to recall, on the very day that Mr. Tillerson was in conference in Moscow, that his country’s entire nuclear arsenal is in a state of “combat readiness”. According to one of the best-known “Russologists” in the US, Professor Cohen of the University of Princeton, the United States and Russia are in their most dangerous confrontation since the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Of course your newspapers and televisions are telling you that nothing very important is happening. Our politicians are either trying to hide the truth (if they understand it themselves) or are at a loss to know how to face this situation.
This race towards war in reality began much earlier but now, with the election of Mr. Trump in the United States, which has already proven to be political history’s most egregious act of deception, it has entered a decisive phase, though the process is not linear and much further twisting and turning may still be in store.
Most people, including decision makers and those who are well-informed, are not psychologically ready or intellectually prepared to accept what we have just written. But one should bear in mind that this is exactly how things were on the eve of the First and Second World Wars, and it greatly facilitated their outbreak.
The possibility of a large-scale war, though the progress towards it is complicated by the existence of nuclear weapons, was already inscribed in the global economic crisis that made its appearance in 2008 and is still ongoing. This crisis is profound, comparable in its depth to the crisis of 1873-96 that led to the First World War, and the crisis of 1929 that led to the Second World War. It also explains the crisis of the European Union, clearly the most important in its history.
Donald Trump exposed
Over ten days in April we had the bombardment of Syria, threats against Russia, Iran and Korea, the reminder from Russia of the existence of its nuclear arsenal, the threat of nuclear war in Korea, the bombardment of Afghanistan with the most powerful bomb employed in war since the bombing of Hiroshima, and the test of a new atomic weapon in Nevada, destined to destroy the enemy leaders, even in their bunkers.
The world has never before seen this kind of thing in such a short space of time, even at the beginning of the two world wars. Not a bad harvest for just ten days!
They are trying to tell us that everything that is happening is nothing more than business as usual, that this is not a project that has been under preparation for years but is a just a sudden inspiration from Ivanka Trump and her husband, who come into Daddy’s office every day and suggest that he should bomb this country or threaten that country, risk or not risk a nuclear war, test this or that weapon.
If this is true Ivanka and her husband seem to combine the ambition of an Alexander the Great with the strategic skill of a Napoleon, of a Marshal Tukhachevsky and the generals of Hitler, who planned the blitzkriegs at the beginning of the Second World War, all together.
One might expect that the international press would raise some very serious issues and ask questions. But there has been nothing. The big newspapers have treated all this as banal routine. They have even hidden from their readers information of very great significance, which would have made headlines if we were living in the sixties or the eighties of the last century. Such as for example the reminder by the Russian press agency Sputnik on 13th April (the same day that US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson was having talks in Moscow) of the Russian Defence Minister’s statements that almost all of his country’s strategic nuclear arsenal is “combat readiness” and that 96% of the missile launchers in a state of “immediate launching”.
One cannot find such information in these same newspapers. Nor can one find a debate on the possibility of a nuclear war that could eliminate life on earth. But one can find numerous articles on the atrocious treatment of homosexuals in Chechnya, published simultaneously in many different publications. If Goebbels were still alive in our day, he would be green with envy.
All of the newspapers that were criticizing Mr. Trump so severely only two weeks ago are now quite happy with him. It seems that what Mr. Trump has achieved is very much in line with the expectations of those who control global information.
Prepare Europe for War
On the face of it the war is against Islam and Korea. But the “real adversary”, as Monsieur Hollande would say, the enemy that is lurking behind Islam and Korea is none other than Russia, China and the rest of the world.
If one is in such a situation it makes no sense to try to understand and analyse what occurs in France, Great Britain, the United States, without taking into account the international context.
If, as just postulated, we are well entrenched in the dynamic of preparation for a war in a different category of importance from those we have seen in recent decades, then Politics is called to prepare the War (its continuation) and War has to condition political choices.
Whether she is conscious of it or not (this is not the most important aspect), this is precisely what Madame Le Pen is doing, attacking Islam every second day. It is the war for which she is preparing the French people by centering everything in her discourse on the question of security, characterizing as “totalitarianism” not the extraordinary hold of finance over all mankind, but “Islamic Jihadism”, which is the political result of our own interventions in the Middle East and the “organizational” result of the work in the Middle East of the American secret services and their allies.
That said, it is remarkable that this “radical” Islam is bending over backwards to… help Mme. Le Pen, choosing to carry out its attacks at the moments that are most opportune for her, whether on the eve of the regional elections in November 2015, or on the eve of the first round of presidential elections in France.
And in fact there has been in these last days a perceptible current, weak but perhaps sufficient, of voters moving from “radical Lepenism” to the “Mélenchon radicalism”. This little current could perhaps have propelled M. Mélenchon into the second round, and subsequently into the presidency. But the attacks in Paris three days before the elections may well have had the effect of checking the rise in support for Mélenchon, securing his exclusion from the second round and so contributing to the final victory of Marine Lepen in the first round and of M. Macron in th second. We shall see.
Eliminate Corbyn!
If politics paves the way for war, war also conditions political choices. We cannot go into a great war with Jeremy Corbyn as the leader of the Labour Party. But all attempts to overthrow him have failed. This is most likely the reason why Theresa May decided to call early elections in Britain, hoping to inflict a defeat on Labour and thus finally enable the British establishment to get rid of this Mr. Corbyn. (It is perhaps also the reason for the violent attacks on the former mayor of London Mr. Ken Livingstone).
A few weeks ago, the British Minister of Defense made a very rare visit to Cyprus, where there are British bases of vital importance for any intervention in the Middle East. He declared that these bases “are more important now than at any moment in history.” Given that “history” includes the creation of the state of Israel, the Israeli-Arab wars, the Suez crisis and the 1974 crisis between Greece and Turkey, there are reasons to be worried.
Controlling Turkey and Cyprus
Since September 2015, Russia’s military intervention has changed the strategic configuration of the Middle East as a whole.
If one wants to reverse the situation, neutralizing the Russian military force that is installed now in the center of the region, it is necessary to impose the strictest possible control on the actions of Turkey, which finds itself between Russia and the Russian forces in Syria. This could be an explanation of the very hasty coup prepared against Erdogan in July 2016, a coup that was openly encouraged and announced before it happens by the American neocons.
To completely encircle the Russians it is also necessary to achieve total command over the island of Cyprus, which controls all the Eastern Mediterranean. This could very well help to explain the enormous pressures applied recently to “resolve” the Cyprus problem, avoiding the obligation of a referendum and imposing as a solution the transformation of the Cypriot state into a kind of post-modern Western protectorate, the second, after Greece, inside the EU.
“Encircle” Germany
In 2003 opposition in Paris and Berlin to the invasion of Iraq gave Washington some problems. Now that something much more serious seems to be under preparation against Russia and/or China, it is absolutely essential to control Europe.
Words are not innocent. It has always been through words that one has prepared the way for wars. Mr. Steingart, editor of the most important German economic journal, Handelsblatt, and one of the most original minds still existing in the European press, wrote an article in August 2014. He did not take a position for or against Russia. He simply said that the German press is dealing with Russia and its leader Vladimir Putin, in reference to the Ukrainian crisis, in the same way that it dealt with Russia and the Russians in August 1914, that is to say at the outset of the First World War.
Germany already supports the US line on Ukraine and the Middle East, contrary to its own interests. But how long can it continue on such a course, for which it risks having to pay the costs?
There is no way of being sure in advance. This is why it is necessary, for a start, to control France and Great Britain. Consequently, given Berlin’s isolation from all of Europe’s periphery because of the economic war it has launched against its own partners, Berlin will find itself totally alone if it wants to oppose any project of a major war.
Reappearance in France of the US electoral triangle
On the eve of the first round of the presidential elections the French political landscape resembles last year’s scenario in the United States.
- the emergence of Jean-Luc Mélenchon, totally unexpected, as was the emergence of Bernie Sanders in the United States (or of Corbyn in Great Britain), of a radical left current authentically hostile to the wars in the Middle East and the confrontation with Russia. What is at issue here is not the chances of success of this current given the demands of the objective situation. The fact is that it constitutes a certain progressive opening and a certain impediment to the push towards war.
- the official representative of financial capital and globalization, the ex-banker and financial advisor to the Rothschilds: Emmanuel Macron, the French equivalent of Hillary Clinton.
- Marine Le Pen, apparently corresponding to Donald Trump in the United States.
Le Pen says that she is against the attack on Syria, but all her declarations on Islam prepare the political ground for a great offensive in the Middle East. Trump also said that he was against the policies of overthrowing Assad, but he has just started a new war against him.
Mme Le Pen says that she is a friend of Russia. Mr. Trump also let it be understood that he wanted better relations with Russia, but he has already led relations with Moscow to their most dangerous point since the Cuba crisis of the sixties!
Donald Trump also intimated that he is an enemy of Goldman Sachs, multinationals, finance, globalization. And he ended up investing Mr. Gary Cohn of Goldman Sachs (one of the architects of Greece’s economic and social ruin) with all the powers over economic subjects.
The fact that the adversary of Mme. Le Pen is M. Macron suggests to electors that she is an adversary of Finance, and that facilitates victory for her in a duel with Macron. But probably M. Rothschild realizes that as well as anyone else. If he really wanted to eliminate Le Pen and have her lose the election, why didn’t he advise his banker not to stand against her and propose a personality less well-known for his relations with the world of finance and more likely to beat Le Pen?
Is Mme Le Pen really what she makes herself out to be? Or is she too an accessory to what looks like world history’s greatest act of deception, which started with the election of Trump on a platform that is the total opposite of what he is now implementing?
It is one thing to judge ideas, another to judge people. People should be judged on the basis of their own ideas, not ours. A nationalist, a fascist, a liberal, a socialist, a Trotskyist: they are to be judged by comparing what they do with the ideas they announce themselves as defending, with their own supposed ideology and system of ethics, not with ours.
How can one explain that Mme Le Pen, given her origins, has become a friend of Israel or of homosexuals? Could a partisan of General de Gaulle defend France’s colonial heritage in Algeria?
Is it a question of run-of-the-mill political opportunism, which is so prevalent? Or is it a question of a quasi-Faustian “historical compromise” that she has already concluded with the Devil, as each of our readers might like to understand him?
None of this means that Mme Le Pen is necessarily aware of the role she will be called upon to play. Prior to her, Mr. Trump, Mr. Tsipras, M. Hollande, played out the role that was required of them, not because they knew it in advance but because they didn’t.
Trump’s Election – the coup of the millennium!
The election of Donald Trump in the United States has already proved to be world political history’s greatest feat of deception. Elected as an opponent of Financial Globalization, an opponent of the Middle East wars, a supporter of better relations with Russia (exactly what Marine Le Pen claims in France), Donald Trump (or rather the forces that control him and set him up) has already handed over all the economic power to Goldman Sachs.
To follow up on that he utilized the Idlib provocation (as Hitler used the Reichstag fire) to recommence the well-known and well-publicized program of the neocons in its most dangerous previsions (overthrowing of the regimes of Assad and North Korea, wars – probably nuclear – against Iran and North Korea). A program whose most dangerous previsions had been halted because of the strong opposition, albeit not open and political, of Obama, of an important section of the armed forces and secret services of the United States and Israel and, above all, of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s decision to intervene militarily in Syria.
Despite certain differences, what is involved here is a repetition sui generis of the historical trajectory of German National Socialism. Nazism was propelled to power through a display of opposition to big capital and the victors of the First World War. Hitler pretened to be a friend, and even an ally, of Soviet Russia.
He then eliminated those, like Roehm and his friends, who helped him take state power (as Trump eliminated Steve Bannon), put himself at the disposal of German big capital and, finally, launched Operation Barbarossa to destroy his friend and supposed ally.
Published in DefendDemocracy.Press on April 22nd under the title
Mélenchon (et Corbyn) ou la Guerre
(*) Journalist, writer, graduate in Physics. Advisor to Greek Prime Minister Andreas Papandreou on East-West relations and Arms Control (1985-88). Greek Press Agency ANA chief correspondent in Moscow (1989-1999). Collaborated with Michel Pablo to launch the international review for self-management Utopie Critique. Secretary of the Movement of Independent Greek Citizens (2011-12), Member of Secretariat of SYRIZA (2012-2013).
You can also read the following articles written in March before the initiation of the United States’ new military campaign.
The Hijacking of France (from Donald Trump to Marine Le Pen)
Do the Forces Controlling Trump Need a Nuclear War in Korea?
The “Collective Nero” behind Trump threatens…
Ex-CIA chief says Trump’s Actions Escalate Crisis with
Russia Buries “Trumpomania”, Trump scarier than…
Towards a new Cuban Crisis? Immediate Danger of Nuclear War
Leading US Neocon wants to “End” North Korea
