This excerpt from the Steiner lecture analyzed in The Occult in Russian and Soviet Culture alludes to why the strange Trump/Putin alliance may be its fulfillment

“When Rudolph Steiner (1861-1925) reflected on the history of civilization, he envisioned a special role for Russia, because he considered Russia the country that could best embody the spirit of a new cultural epoch. In Russia, Anthroposophy developed beyond the mere study of an esoteric doctrine and its theory of knowledge. Anthroposophy sought to evaluate Russian and Soviet reality concretely, to interpret Russia’s historical development in the context of world history, and to become the basis of action for Russian cultural activities. Russian Anthroposophy is more than a variant of the Anthroposophical movement. Russia occupies a prominent place in the Anthroposophical conception of culture.

Steiner structured the history of civilzation in seven (post –Atlantean) periods: Indian, ancient Persia, Egyptian-Chaldean, Greek-Roman, Central European, Slavic, and American. According to his scheme, humanity at the end of the fifth ,the central European period-that is, at the threshold of the end of the fifth, the Central European period-that is, at the threshold of the sixth period, the Slavic period. The fifth post-Atlantean epoch began in the first half of the fifteenth century among the Germanic peoples. It manifested itself through an increase in individualism and through a growing interest in the sciences and technology. Around the year 3500, this era of perception was to be succeeded by the sixth epoch, the epic of the “Spirit Self” the characteristics of the Slavic people were to prevail: a sense of community, selflessness, patience, and the ability to accept a higher truth. These qualities constitute the basis for the ’seed’ of the world spirit incarnation in the Russian people, according to Steiner, the broad Russian masses already carried in them the seed of the coming civilization. Steiner used the image of ’seed’ repeatedly to describe the state of Russia’s development, the embryonic, nuclear state of the East as opposed to the ‘hypertrophy’ of the West. The spirit of the Russian people was ‘young and fresh in it’s hopes’ and ‘yet to confront it’s task.’ This task, to suffuse all aspects of life with new meaning, would be realized only in the course of history. Steiner called the Russian a child, in whose very soul one could find the questions that must be answered if humanity was to master the future. From the Russian character traits Steiner derived the capability of holistic thinking. In the Russian way of thinking, as he saw it, two opposing concepts can hold sway simultaneously so that rationality was mysticism and mysticism is rationality. ‘The Russian does not have the slightest understanding of what Westerners call ‘reasonableness.’ He is accessible to what we term ‘revelation. Basically, he will accept and integrate into the content of his soul anything he owns to a kind of revelation.”

In Soloviev’s ideas Steiner saw the seed of the philosophy of the ‘Spirit Self’ of the sixth epoch, for here the religious and philosophical worldviews merged. Soloviev’s philosophy spoke the language of religion, while his religion strove a philosophical worldview.” According to Steiner, this was where the superiority of the Russian philosophy over the aging Western philosophy lay: it transcended the limits of reason and it built a basis for a new holistic understanding. In order to develop the capacities and to fulfill its mission, Steiner said, the Russian people needed contact with the West; the ‘female East’ should be impregnated by the ‘male West.’ Intellectuality and technology, the achievement and problem of the fifth epoch of civilization, had led the life force to stagnate in Europe. Meanwhile this life force was at work in Russia, but was so lacking in form that it could fall into chaos. That was why Steiner felt that Russia depended on a Western awareness of form and consciousness. ‘To imagine that the East, at its present state, would develop on its own would be comparable to the foolish hope of a woman who wanted to have a child without a man. In the past, Eastern Europe had proved its receptiveness to the West. Steiner pointed to the reception of the Byzantine religion in Russia. Thus the Slavic peoples showed that they were also capable of absorbing higher truths- that is, the spirit of the sixth epoch.”

Edgar Cayce’s 1945 prophecy also explains Russia’s similar role in the future of the West.

By Paul Fitzgerald Elizabeth Gould

The Conjurer by Hieronymus Bosch (circa 1450–1516)
(image by The Yorck Project: 10.000 Meisterwerke der Malerei.) License DMCA Details

Neoconservative pundits howled when Yale historian Paul Kennedy suggested in his 1987 study The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers that America and its global Empire, like all empires before it, was in a process of decline. The disintegration of the Soviet Union just a few years later in 1991 seemed to undermine Kennedy’s thesis as the United States expanded its influence into the U.S.S.R’s former territories and moved on Moscow to bury the former communist economy. However, following the financial crash of 2008 and the chaos caused by Washington’s military adventurism in Iraq and Afghanistan, the illusion of American inevitability quickly vanished. Now, 30 years later, the idea that any empire facing unprecedented debt, political gridlock and military failure could somehow sustain itself purely on willpower and social media can only be described as delusional. Yet despite rising opposition to the costs and consequences at home and abroad, Washington’s demented imperialistsremain committed to Unipower dominance and are desperate to force the incoming Trump administration to obey its ghost.

Understanding the forces that drive Washington’s quest for empire may appear on the surface to be limited to money and power. But when it comes to the ultimate objectives of the so called Anglo/American “deep state” the foundations of today’s realities may be better explained by looking into the deep past.

The term Anglo/American itself bears within it a complex matrix of races, heterodox religious beliefs, families and family grudges that date back before the Norman Conquest of 1066. The army of Normans and mercenaries that gathered under William the Conqueror to invade England was drawn from across Europe but differed little from the population of Celts, Anglo-Saxons, Danes and Normans that had already migrated there in previous centuries. The battle of Hastings established the nation of Britain as we know it today but what remains unappreciated is the degree to which those original Anglo/Norman warrior families continue to control decision-makingand remain at the epicenter of financial and political power nearly 1000 years later.

In its current expanded iteration consisting of the United States, Canada, Britain, Australia, and New Zealand; known as the “Five Eyes”, the Anglo/American “deep state” came to gain political hegemony over the world following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. However, although popularly known as the “Anglo/Saxon” nations, a more accurate description of the genetic legacy should read Anglo/Norman.

In 2005 when a historian in Wexford Ireland discovered that President George W. Bush was a descendent of the 12^th century Anglo/Norman Earl Richard de Clare, “Strongbow” it caused something of a commotion in the British press not to mention our own personal shock. I’d first heard the name Strongbow at the age of ten when my family-historian-aunt told me our branch of the Fitzgerald family had come to Ireland with him. During the 1990s I’d written a novel about his influence on the family and here he was again staring out from the imperial White House of George W. Bush.

As Strongbow’s vassals and veterans of the conquest of Wales, the Fitzgeralds had done their share of the dirty work of empire building. After taking part in the Norman conquest of England in 1066, the family and their extended clans had become deeply entwined in Angevin family politics as part of King William I’s invasion force of South Wales. The marriage (arranged by Henry I) of the patriarch of the Fitzgerald family, Gerald FitzWalter of Windsor to Princess Nest, daughter of Rhys Ap Tewdwr (Tudor) the last king of the Britons, cemented the Fitzgeralds to an ancient British dynasty of kings and the Arthurian legends surrounding them. But our discovery of an old book titled Strongbow’s Conquest of Ireland forced us to realize that the standard historical accounts we were accustomed to have never included the deeper inside forces at work that made a true understanding of the past, possible.

The first Crusade to Jerusalem in 1099 came at a time of deep social unrest in Europe. Muslims occupied Portugal, Spain, Sicily and Southern Italy. Pagans warred with Christian Crusaders throughout Eastern Europe. Pope Urban II’s call for a Crusade to the holy land began a movement that would last until the failed Crusade of the Spanish Armada against Elizabeth I’s English heretics in 1588. Unlike most dry, bowdlerized accounts of the origins of British history, Strongbow’s Conquest offered up a personal account by a family prelate named Gerald de Barry (Gerald of Wales). Gerald was also the personal tutor to the future Angevin King John and offered plenty of insight into dealing with Henry II’s internecine warfare with and between his three sons. For us, the family feuds surrounding the conquest of Ireland detailed by Gerald of Wales personalized our understanding of an historical event and the beginnings of British history. Now with the Bush connection to Strongbow came a chance to take those family feuds and track them a thousand years into the future.

Ever since John Fitzgerald Kennedy, tracing a presidential candidate’s lineage to Ireland is a common pastime. But the Guardian’s description of Strongbow as “a desperate land-grabbing warlord whose calamitous foreign adventure led to the suffering of generations” was a sadly deficient twist on what had really happened. Strongbow was an Anglo-Norman Earl with a long Viking lineage from one of the most powerful Norman/French families in 12^th century England. His grandfather Gilbert and great uncle Roger were closely affiliated with William the conqueror’s son King William Rufus and were among the few intimates present at his mysterious murder by Walter Tyrell in the New Forest in 1100. The de Clare brothers were never implicated in Rufus’s death but along with a select handful of Norman barons gained great wealth and prominence from backing the rise of his successor, Henry I.

Evidence of heretical cult practices swirls around the 11^th century court of William Rufus and his ruling nobles. William Rufus regarded himself as divine, was an avowed pagan, openly homosexual and fiercely anti-Christian. He surrounded himself with long haired, clean shaven “effeminati”, compared himself to Alexander the Great and acted as a patron to the Troubadours. The conquest of Wales brought him into contact with a Prince of Dyfed named Bledri, author of the original Grail romances who remained friendly to William Rufus throughout the wars against the Welsh. Norman mercenaries who’d fought Muslims in southern Italy were no strangers to dualist life-denying heresies and neither were the courts of France from where the new English royalty drew its political base.

The threat to the Roman Church by these heresies was not a simple challenge. As described by Reverend V.A. Demant, Canon of London’s St. Paul’s Cathedral in a preface to a 1947 book on the subject titled The Arrow and the Sword, “It was in fact a rival religion and almost succeeded in being a counter-Church with its own rival and ritual system.”

By 1170 the struggle for power within that system extended to Strongbow’s challenge to the authority of King Henry II’s House of Anjou and his threat to set himself up as a rival Norman King of Ireland. Upon his death in 1176 the challenge extended to the Fitzgerald antecedents of John Fitzgerald Kennedy. At the behest of Strongbow a number of Fitzgerald vassals married directly into the de Clare family line shortly after coming to Ireland and to the horror of the Angevin royal court, proceeded to establish themselves as a competing dynasty. With political and military independence and with religious connections to Rome, the Fitzgerald’s ambitions were viewed from London as dangerous from the very beginning and as the medieval Catholic Church evolved that danger would grow in bitter hatred.

Strongbow had been a Crusader, served in the Holy Land and was known to be a generous supporter of both the Knights Hospitaller and the infamous Knights Templar, the warrior monks for whom the Cistercian Abbot Bernard of Clairvaux penned De Laude Novae Militiae (In Praise of the new Knighthood) thereby redefining the very nature of murder when done in the name of Christ.

The early Catholic Church was riven with multiple dualist heresies left over from the conversion of the Roman Empire from pagan to Christian. Much has been romanticized in the past decades about the Knights Templar and their supposed dedication to the divine feminine as represented by the Holy Grail. Credited with magical powers of prophecy and divination, popular mythology such as Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code has them guarding the secrets of the Messianic Grail lineage, i.e. the royal descendants of the House of David from the marriage of Jesus Christ and Mary Magdalene.

Other supposed Templar secrets link them to life-denying Gnostic cults like the Paulicians, Manicheansand Cathars. But less has been said about the Templar’s central role as bankers to Europe’s royalty and their practice of financing wars between Europe’s rival kings and princes.

The Templar Knighthood walked a fine line between two worlds in their role as bankers and “warrior monks” and often failed to maintain a balance between them. The Knights Templar’s circular “Temple” in the very center of the city of London still echoes their primary military and financial role as a prototype multinational bank opening trade routes between Europe and the Middle East. But their internecine political rivalries with the other Christian knighthoods, the Knights Hospitaller and the Teutonic Knights and their long string of military defeats causing them to lose Jerusalem, precipitated their downfall.

On Friday October 13, 1307 the French King Philip IV, who was deeply indebted to the Templars, ordered them arrested and charged with heretical practices and on November 22 of that year under pressure from Philip, Pope Clement V issued the papal bull Pastoralis Praeeminentiae instructing all the monarchs of Europe to seize their assets.

Instead of capping a feud between the rival knighthoods and their benefactors, the dissolution of the Templars and the subsequent transfer of their vast assets to the Hospitallers by Pope Clement in 1312 would create an anti-Catholic firestorm. The repercussions from November 22, 1307 would set the stage for the Protestant Reformation, the rise of Britain’s empire and the destruction of the competing dynasties, especially the Fitzgeralds.

Join us for the finale of this saga as we explain how this hatred for Catholic Rome would establish a life and death struggle within the European deep state. This conflict would in turn lead to the rise of a crypto-Cathar counter church, whose apocalyptic world-ending goals would finally come to fruition in the Anglo/Norman America of the present day.

Copyright 2016 Fitzgerald & Gould All rights reserved

By Paul Fitzgerald Elizabeth Gould.

America, an Empire in Twilight Series

By Paul Fitzgerald Elizabeth Gould

John Milton’s “Paradise Lost” 1866 by Gustave Doré[Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

No matter who is labeled president after the election, the crisis this process has created for most Americans will not be over. It will be like no other moment in all of America’s history. Now is the time to look back into the past and connect those events that have led us to this most strange and significant moment. We’ll start with the day America’s leadership lost all consciousness.

“‘We’re the dark matter. We’re the force that orders the universe but can’t be seen,’ a strapping Navy SEAL, speaking on condition of anonymity, said in describing his unit.”

If anyone thought the war on terror contained an otherworldly quality, this quoteon the front page of the September 11, 2011Washington Post from Dana Priest and William M. Arkin’s book Top Secret Americaconfirmed it. 9/11 had taken America through the mirror and there was no coming back.

Following 9/11 the elected government of the United States willingly delivered over what remained of America’s civilian control to a department of Homeland Security dedicated to expanding the unelected government’s fear of darkness into everybody’s life. Added to this was a top secret military operation known as the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) that thought of itself as the dark.

Begun as a modest hostage rescue team, by 2011 JSOC had morphed into a veritable heart of darkness, with the power to murder at will and completely unaccountable to American or international law.

At the height of its notoriety under General Stanley McChrystal in Iraq and Afghanistan JSOC operated completely in the black as a “Stovepipe,” operation reporting to no one and employing infamous rogue ex-CIA professionals such as indicted Iran Contra operative Dewey Clarridge. The Navy Seal Team that was said to have taken out Osama bin Laden operated under JSOC. Retired military personnel refer to JSOC as “Murder, Incorporated” and the “most dangerous people on the face of the earth.”

But if JSOC’s reputation for secrecy, vengeance and death can’t be explained from within the context of traditional U.S. military operations or U.S. law, then what set of rules is it operating from? Or is it simply that the rational enlightenment traditions that most Americans take for granted have become subjected to deeper and older rules of behavior rooted in an irrational world of personal, private and holy war?

No one less than the legendary Cold Warrior, Time Magazine’s Henry Luce understood that his passion for defeating Communism constituted “a declaration of private war,” which, in citing the example of the privateer Sir Francis Drake made it not only “unlawful,” but “probably mad.” As the child of American missionaries, Luce was committed to the militant spread of Christian Capitalism while viewing its ultimate triumph over the world as an inevitable consequence of God’s will.

Described by Tournament of Shadows authors Karl E. Meyer and Shareen Blair Brysac as mystical imperialism, the term can be traced to both Britain and Russia’s 19^th century efforts to establish dominion through a mix of imperialism and Christian zeal. The competition came to a dead stop in Afghanistan with the end of the Great Game in 1907 when Imperial Russia and Great Britain chose to accept Afghanistan as a neutral buffer state between empires. But with the advent of the Cold War in 1947 and the mysterious and intoxicating god-like qualities inherent in nuclear weapons, a new and more apocalyptic iteration of mystical imperialism came into being.

The sole purpose of America’s mid 20^th century defense intellectuals was to rationalize nuclear war, not mystify it. America’s cold warriors were far removed technologically from their 19^th century counterparts whose Christian elite believed they were bringing enlightenment to the “darker regions of the earth.”

But whether by design or by accident within a short time an entire stratum of American scientific and political thought found itself immersed in an irrational realm that looked, smelled and tasted like medieval mysticism. A 1960s London Times Literary Supplement marveled at the new priesthood who moved as freely through the corridors of the Pentagon and the State Department as the Jesuits once had through the courts of Madrid and Vienna, centuries before. Tasked with defeating Communism by any means possible they invented their own reality, accelerated the nuclear arms race, created an imaginary domino theoryof Communist aggression in Southeast Asia and then escalated a real war in Vietnam to counter it.

President Kennedy’s science advisor Jerome Wiesner eventually came to realize that the so called “missile gap” and the massive buildup of America’s nuclear arsenal in response to it was only a “mirror image” of America’s own intentions towards the Soviet Union and not the other way around. Yet instead of addressing the error, the U.S. slipped deeper into the Cold War mirror.

By 1978 these thermonuclear Jesuits and their CIA counterparts were using the U.S., NATO, China, Iran and Saudi Arabia to shake the Soviet Union’s domination over Central Asia through a Christian/Islamic holy war in Afghanistan. In a rational world it might be assumed that this war would stop with the defeat of the Soviet Union and the collapse of Communism. But instead of ending, America’s full blown splurge into personal and private holy war caused the U.S. to slip into a crisis of identity.

Forced after seventy five years of anti-communism to finally define itself based on what it stood for and not what it stood against, the United States entered a house of shadows in which it continues to wander. Stricken by decades of economic and military excess, its mission has become confused, its legal, moral and philosophical foundation abandoned and its role as leader of the western world questioned as never before.

America is clearly not the country it was before 9/11 but what has it become and what do the current candidates for the 2016 presidential election tell us about the direction we’re headed?

Join us as we explore the little-analyzed facts and covert agendas that the United States must now reconsider in the 21^st century and what those agendas mean to America’s role as “the dark force that orders the universe,” in our next installment of America, an Empire in Twilight Part II.

Copyright 2016 Fitzgerald & Gould All rights reserved

Inside Charlottesville with Coy Barefoot

Elizabeth Gould and Paul Fitzgerald discuss the on-going presidential campaigns between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. They also connect some critical dots in the history and dynamics of international affairs between British and American imperialism on one hand and the Soviet Union/Russian nation on the other, and how that has played out over generations through proxy wars in the Middle East and Af-Pak region.

Five Part Series: 15th anniversary of 9/11, 2016

Zbigniew Brzezinski, Jimmy Carter and Cyrus Vance,1977: As National Security Advisor Brzezinski activated the greatest game plan of the 20th cc that killed detente and broke the Vietnam Syndrome by luring the Soviets into their own Vietnam(By Unknown or not provided (U.S. National Archives and Records Administration) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons) License DMCA

The End of the Game

The inspiration behind Winston Churchill’s famous Iron Curtain speech of 1946 and its warning of the growing Communist threat to “Christian civilization” was the American child of British immigrants, James Burnham. As the “first neoconservative,” Burnham would work his way from acting as an assistant to Bolshevik revolutionary Leon Trotsky in the 1930s, to the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) during World War II. His much critiqued landmark 1940 The Managerial Revolution would be read and admired by Hitler’s general staff and viewed as the blueprint for George Orwell’s 1984 in which a new class of business executives, technicians, government bureaucrats and soldiers would destroy the old capitalist order, crush the working class and seize all of society’s wealth for themselves.

In a 1945 Partisan Review article titled “Lenin’s Heir” Burnham, while still at the OSS, infused his apocalyptic political views with mystical allusions to the Eurasian heartland. Defined as “the magnetic core” of Soviet power, he compared it to the mystical “reality of the One of Neo-Platonism,” whose inexorable and unstoppable “emanative progression” descends through the stages of Mind, Soul, and Matter” towards its ultimate destination beyond the Eurasian boundaries and through “Appeasement and Infiltration (England, the United States).” Burnham was a keen advocate of dirty tricks. He would play an important role in the overthrow of Iran’s Mohammed Mosaddeq and the installation of the Shah. His book The Machiavellians would become a handbook for CIA planners.

As an “anti-Communist ideology” Burnham’s apocalyptic warnings about the inevitability of Soviet expansion from Eurasia’s magnetic core, ring like a medieval incantation throughout Churchill’s “Iron Curtain” speech. George Orwell even makes clear in his 1946 “Second Thoughts on James Burnham” that Burnham’s words read like a mystical invocation and were most likely intended to hypnotize.

Twenty six years later, Senator J. William Fulbright would realize that only because of the disastrous outcome of Vietnam was there any willingness at all to reexamine the basic assumptions of American postwar policy toward the Soviet Union and what had brought the United States to such a sorry state. The 1972 Strategic Arms Limitation Talks SALT would spring from this realization, as would the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty ABM and eventually SALT II, until in January of 1980 President Jimmy Carter would ask the Senate to delay consideration of the Treaty on the Senate floor because of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. That treaty would never be passed. At the time few understood that Carter’s national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski had masterminded the campaign to bait the Soviets into invading Afghanistan and then used the invasion as a pretext for moving an extremist neoconservative agenda into the mainstream of American politics.

Our involvement in the Afghanistan story started in the summer of 1979 when we began production of a documentary titled Arms Race and the Economy: A Delicate Balance. During the next months numerous experts including economist John Kenneth Galbraith lent their experience to our understanding of the unseen damage that a massive new diversion of tax dollars and investment capital would represent to the civilian economy. Galbraith insisted that accelerated defense spending and renewing the Cold War — as the neoconservative right was demanding at that critical moment — would ultimately destroy the civilian economy. He was convinced that the Cold War had already made America more and more like the Soviet Union, ruled by a military-industrial-academic establishment suspended from reality.

But by the time our program aired that winter, the argument was no longer whether our government should call a halt to the nuclear arms race and reinvest in the civilian economy. The December 27, 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan had rolled back the narrative to 1947, the Truman Doctrine, to Churchill and Burnham’s mystical, medieval enchantment and the psychological warfare campaign necessary to bring it back to life was about to begin.

J. William Fulbright’s 1972 “Reflections: In Thrall To Fear” represented an awakening from the deep hypnotic trance imposed upon Americans by Cold War ideology. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan brought about its re-emersion, but this time to a deeper and totally detached level of unreality.

With the election of Ronald Reagan in the fall of 1980, the United States rejected Fulbright’s concerns for the intellectual dishonesty represented by the Cold War and America’s disgust with the Vietnam war and committed itself to taking it one step further.

The U.S. crossed through a mirror in 1947 with the creation of President Harry Truman’s second and covert national-security-government. Few if any would fully understood at the time that the creation of this Double Government would soon lead to the transfer of power from the Congress, the courts and the Presidency to a concealed “Trumanite network” of military managers, diplomatic, intelligence and law enforcement agencies. The 1980 election would renew this shadow government’s power through a two dimensional Hollywood invention named Ronald Reagan and America would never be the same.

The Reagan campaign’s militaristic motto of Peace through Strength was sold to Americans as the Reagan Revolution. It was in fact a counter-revolution engineered by a reactionary group of insiders headed by former Research Industry of America employee, OSS veteran and Wall Street lawyer William J. Casey with the intention of burying the Vietnam legacy and restoring the power of America’s hidden Cold War masters. Casey’s mandate for control of the American mind was simple and clear. As he told the President of the United States in 1981 “We’ll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false.”

As a top level intelligence professional since 1939, Casey had built key access to the concentric circles of international power necessary to carry off the tectonic shift of wealth from Main Street to Wall Street that the Reagan Revolution really represented. And as Director of Central Intelligence he was perfectly positioned to put James Burnham’s dirty tricks and Machiavellian philosophy to work in the heartland of Eurasia.

Casey’s passion for the Afghan jihad against the Soviet Union was messianic. As an ultra-conservative Catholic, he saw little difference in the antimodernism of the House of Saud and the anti-enlightenment views of the newly installed Polish Pope, John Paul II. Disguised as a war to liberate Afghanistan from Soviet aggression, Casey’s campaign picked up where Zbigniew Brzezinski’s left off by expanding the infiltration of an extremist terror network beyond Afghanistan into the Soviet Union’s Muslim provinces to provoke an insurrection.

Backed by neoconservatives, the Saudis and secretive organizations like the Safari Club, Le Cercle, the Bilderberg Group and the 6I, the secret plan would ultimately play out in American propaganda from Rambo to Charlie Wilson’s War as the greatest American victory of the Cold War.

In the end, Casey’s team would so tear down the wall between fact and fiction, legal and illegal, truth and the lie; it would open the door for chaos from South America to South Central Asia.

But if any two men could be said to have infected the mind of America’s leadership with the germ of imperial world-domination and made 9/11 inevitable it is James Burnham and Zbigniew Brzezinski. Burnham’s 1940 prediction that Nazi Germany would win the war was wrong as was his belief that the Soviet Union would grow and expand to consume England and the United States. Nor did Burnham or any of his acolytes foresee the collapse of the Soviet Union; yet on February 23, 1983 James Burnham was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by Ronald Reagan culminating his fifty years of service as one of the “guiding lights in mankind’s quest for truth.”

In George Orwell’s 1946, “Second Thoughts on James Burnham,” Orwell clinically diagnosed Burnham’s convenient powers of revisionist prophecy as the product of a “mental disease” whose “roots lie partly in cowardice and partly in the worship of power, which is not fully separable from cowardice.”

Like Burnham, Zbigniew Brzezinski’s influence came with the help of that “Trumanite network” of defense professionals who continue to rule over the state behind a veil of secrecy. With the generous support and influence of the Rockefeller brothers Brzezinski rose from the obscurity of immigrant status to become a venerated master of the Global Imperial chessboard which he once predicted would be ruled by the United States. While Burnham propounded ideas, Brzezinski acted on them by subverting the diplomatic process and undermining the U.S. Secretary of State while at the National Security Council. Brzezinski’s plan to sacrifice Afghanistan on his Cold War chessboard also served to redirect an emerging modern state; propelling Afghanistan back into the Middle Ages and opening the door for a global jihad. Yet, the psychological warfare that enabled both Zbigniew Brzezinski and James Burnham lives on in the actions of the Obama administration in Ukraine, Syria, Iraq and again Afghanistan. It now grows shrill in calls for outright war with Russia in the rhetoric of presidential candidate Hillary Clinton who promises to restore the “Trumanite network” to its former glory once again.

15 years after the events of September 11, 2001, thirty seven years after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and sixty nine years after the creation of the Cold War, James Burnham lives on as an icon to a deeply corrupted national security-state that remains “In Thrall to Fear.” Even Zbigniew Brzezinski has come to accept that “America is no longer the global imperial power,” it once was and must seek some kind of accommodation with the rest of the world, yet the psychological warfare continues and the danger grows by the day.

We cannot continue in this manner and survive as a people. We must calm down, face the facts of where we have come from, and put our minds to diffusing the crises and not making it worse. On this fifteenth anniversary of 9/11 we must finally take stock of ourselves and shake off the delusions of empire before it is too late. We have no one to blame but ourselves for allowing a culture of war with its lies and their fabrications to continue to hypnotize us.

Copyright 2016 Fitzgerald & Gould All rights reserved

Part I–Psychological Warfare and the American Mind

Part II–Psychological Warfare and the American Mind

Part III–Psychological Warfare and the American Mind

Part IV–Psychological Warfare and the American Mind

OpEdNews.com September 11, 2016

By Paul Fitzgerald Elizabeth Gould

America’s coordinated use of psychological warfare began in earnest during World War II and has grown and expanded into public relations, advertising, cinema, radio and television, electronic video games and now social media. Its pro-war boosterism extends over sports, religion, education, news and entertainment to form a seamless electronic cocoon-like web.

Five Part Series: 15th anniversary of 9/11, 2016

Nazi official Hermann Göring  in jail cell Nuremberg Trials 1945
(image by US Army Signal Corps photographer) License DMCA

Building the Afghan Narrative with Black Propaganda; the People, the Process & the Product

By Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould

By definition, America’s use of Psychological Warfare is described as the “The planned use of propaganda and other psychological actions having the primary purpose of influencing the opinions, emotions, attitudes, and behavior of hostile foreign groups in such a way as to support the achievement of national objectives.” Of course this very definition is itself propaganda, a black lie which omits the fact that America’s domestic population is just as often the target of psychological warfare as any “hostile foreign groups.”

The state’s use of psychological warfare to bend the population to war is as old, if not older than the existence of states themselves. But it was perhaps Nazi Reichsmarschall Hermann Goeringwhose statement while on trial at Nuremberg best summed up the cynical simplicity of the logic.

“Of course people don’t want war. But after all, it’s the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it’s always a simple matter to drag the people along whether it’s a democracy, a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders, that is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to greater danger.”

Psychological warfare in the form of propaganda comes in all shapes and sizes as well as shades of black, grey or white. America’s coordinated use of psychological warfare began in earnest during World War II and ever since has grown and expanded into public relations, advertising, cinema, radio and television, electronic video games and now social media. Its pro-war boosterism extends over sports, religion, education, news and entertainment to form a seamless electronic cocoon-like web. It is employed on an ever growing list of those deemed as enemies of America as well as on a confused and agitated American public — whose corporate news networks frame and manage an increasingly false narrative while engaging in a kind of Orwellian Kabuki Theatre of fairness and balance.

Americans were heavily propagandized to support a U.S. entry into World War II and again to accept the morality of deploying the atomic bomb to end it. Even Mickey Mouse was conscripted for America’s total war effort along with the minds of America’s youth. Following the war Americans were heavily propagandizedto accept the Cold War, the need for maintaining a permanent army, navy and air force as well as the buildup of a nuclear weapons arsenal.

Since 9/11 Americans have been bathed in psychological warfare on Islamic terrorism, but so much evidence has emerged linking that terrorism to covert U.S. policy goals, tha the propaganda value has backfired.

The Bush administration can take credit for breaking the system in the run-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, by using fraudulent claims as a pretext for the invasion. But for reasons that defy logic, the U.S. government continues to employ these methods despite them having been shown time and again to be fraudulent.

One has only to look to the U.S. role in Afghanistan in the 1970s to understand the background of the current crisis in American thinking; but without reexamining the real purpose behind America’s long term involvement, today’s disinformation wars will remain imponderable.

The origins of Washington’s war in Afghanistan have always been strategic, long term and particularly black, obscured throughout the Cold War by a narrative adapted from Britain’s 19^thcentury colonial expansion in India.

After a fruitless effort in Vietnam in the 1950s and 1960s, America’s psychological warfare campaign shifted its attention to Central Asia in 1973, when Afghanistan’s king was overthrown by his brother in law and cousin, Mohammed Daoud. Aided by the Parcham faction of the Marxist/Leninist People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA), Daoud’s takeover fit neatly into Washington’s anti-communist manifesto, despite his overwhelmingly nationalist credentials. The role of the Communist party meant so little to the U.S. media at the time that it remained invisible in both Time and Newsweek’s published reports of the coup. But to U.S. ambassador Robert G. Neumann, the presence of the PDPA meant that a “limited Great Game” with the Soviet Union was now back in play.

A coordinated campaign of pressure from U.S.-backed Pakistan and Iran soon ousted Daoud’s Marxist partner, while the Shah’s dreaded spy agency SAVAK moved in to help Daoud clean house of leftists. The Shah even readied a military force to invade, should Daoud waver in his newfound anti-Communist zeal. But by 1978 a new day for Iran and Afghanistan was about to dawn.

Enter Hafizullah Amin. Before, during and after World War II, the U.S. had created a number of psychological warfare organizations designed to compete with the political propaganda of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. Integrated closely into the CIA’s intelligence and psychological warfare units after the war, organizations like Leo Cherne’s International Rescue Committee (IRC) and according to the CIA’s own website, the Congress for Cultural Freedom, helped to solidify CIA’s emerging strategy of promoting the non-Communist left–the strategy that would soon become the theoretical foundation of the agency’s political operations against Communism over the next two decades.”

In constant competition with the Soviet KGB, the CIA was also known to target foreign students destined to hold high rank in their home countries. Handpicked by U.S. administrators to participate in a UNESCO/Columbia University program, Amin was sent to New York in 1957. He later completed a master’s degree at Columbia–coincidentally, at a time when future National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski was gaining prominence there as a professor.

Amin claimed to have become radicalized at the University of Wisconsin in 1958. He also claimed to have become a Marxist that summer, but would conceal his emergence as a leader in the Kalq faction of the PDPA until much later. Despite being a Marxist, Amin was again chosen in 1962 by the Americans to attend Columbia, this time as a doctoral candidate, rising quickly to become the president of the Afghan Student Association. A disclosure in Ramparts magazine in April1967 would reveal the CIA’s sponsorship of that same Afghan Student Association during that time. Following his return, Amin rose rapidly in Afghan politics and by 1978 was positioned to play a pivotal role in another Palace coup, this time of Prince Mohammed Daoud himself.

1978 was a pivotal year in the foreign policy of the United States as President Jimmy Carter’s National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski made steady inroads into Secretary of State Cyrus Vance’s power. By that year, he had persuaded Carter to transfer jurisdiction over the CIA from the Inter-Agency Policy Review Committee, (headed by the Secretary of State), to the National Security Council’s Special Coordinating Committee, which he chaired. This shift gave Brzezinski control over covert operations in Afghanistan. It also gave him control of the psychological warfare campaign necessary to make those operations work both at home and abroad.

Hafizullah Amin played the perfect foil to Brzezinski’s propaganda war which, regardless of the lack of evidence, painted the PDPA takeover in Kabul as a clear example of the growing dangers of Soviet expansionism and their pursuit of dominance in the Persian Gulf. Throughout 1978 and into 1979, Amin’s actions dovetailed perfectly into the expanding psychological warfare campaign against detente and the Soviet Union, with Brzezinski blaming Amin’s February 1979 assassination of American Ambassador Adolph Dubs on the Soviets.

Transcripts from Politburo meetingsin Moscow from March 1979 show a Soviet leadership confounded as the events unfolded, referring to a conversation with Amin as seeming “like a detective novel.” Had the operation been scripted in advance by the CIA to confuse Moscow, it could not have worked more brilliantly.

The subsequent, December 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan ended detente, renewed the Cold War and opened a U.S. military relationship with Communist China that could not have been imagined up to that time. It established a new narrative of an expanding Soviet Evil Empire threatening America’s vital interests in the Persian Gulf, while shifting U.S. foreign policy permanently into the neoconservative’s hands. This policy shift was laid out within days of the Soviet invasion by former U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan Theodore Eliot and Harvard Professor Richard Pipes in a MacNeil Lehrer broadcast on January 2, 1980.

But it wasn’t until we probed this new narrative by going to Afghanistan ourselves in 1981 and were challenged personally in a public forum for doing so by Ambassador Eliot, that we realized there was much more to Ambassador Eliot and his narrative than met the eye. Join us for Part III as we explain how President Jimmy Carter’s reelection, as well as American diplomacy, suffered a stealth attack from his own national security advisor in the next installment of Psychological Warfare and the American Mind.

Copyright 2016 Gould & Fitzgerald All rights reserved

Part I–Psychological Warfare and the American Mind