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Globalization: What’s in a Name?

The term “globalization” became very popular in the 1990s following the demise of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War. The breakup of the Soviet Union, whose technical name was the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), began with a popular uprising aimed at bringing down the Berlin Wall. This crack in the wall of East-West separation spread quickly to the breakdown of Soviet power in Eastern Europe and then to the demise of the USSR itself. With about half of the USSR’s economy and most of its landmass, the Russian Federation emerged from the breakup to retain the Soviet Union’s permanent seat in the UN Security Council.

The collapse of the Soviet superpower seemed to open the way for an all-embracing regime of worldwide capitalism. The competition between Soviet-led communism and US-led capitalism had formed the core global antagonism during the Cold War following the Second World War. Between 1917 and 1991, the lifespan of the USSR, Soviet Marxism had advertised itself as a communist antidote to capitalism’s most unjust inequities.

With the collapse of the Soviet Empire happening before his eyes, Francis Fukuyama triumphantly proclaimed in 1992 The End of History. With the fall of the Soviet state, a huge obstacle had seemingly been eliminated along the journey to capitalism’s global hegemony. Fukuyama anticipated the changes ahead in the institution of a comprehensive system of global governance. Fukuyama’s idealized future in what he declared to be history’s final destination would, in reality, involve rule by usurious banks, transnational corporations and police forces, media puppets, war profiteers, drug dealers, and technocratic henchmen.

In timing, impact, and meaning, the concept of The End of History became closely identified with popular conceptions of “globalization.” The term, “globalization,” became a code word constantly repeated by major think tanks, powerful business associations and their client media. “Globalization” was the primary word employed to advertise the objective of universalizing capitalism and further entrenching of the dominant system of power relations that capitalism both animates and edifies. In the era of globalization, those agencies once described as multinational and transnational corporations could grow to become truly global corporations.

No major communist state, it was thought, would any longer stand in the way of the globalization of a single system of material relationships. For the first time in history, all the world’s people, products and resources could be realistically envisaged as components of a universalized matrix of interchangeable monetary value.

The destruction of the Berlin Wall and the splintering of the USSR seemed to signal that the reign of capital would prevail indefinitely as the dominant determinant of human interactions. Entities above once-sovereign nation states would take over the governance of proprietary ownership, banking, the chartering of corporations, the enforcement of credit and debt as well as the creation of money. In this way, the governance of global capital would be severed from national regulation and control. The new supranational agencies would be vested with abundant powers to make, enforce and arbitrate a universalized framework for the worldwide movement and protection of global capital.

The World Trade Organization was formed in 1995 to help govern and oversee the extension of capitalism to global proportions. In 1999 at a WTO meeting in Seattle Oregon many activists gathered to protest the elitism and secrecy that the new organization embodied. Encompassing a wide array of constituencies from labor unions to environmentalists, from “Teamsters to Turtles,” the protestors condemned the undemocratic nature of the plan to universalize capitalism—to globalize capitalism.

The major complaint was that the WTO’s approach to globalization would extend further advantages to the most rich and powerful component of society even as it would create disadvantages for those in the middle and bottom ranges of economic wherewithal and wellbeing. The current level of economic inequity in the world continues to be obscenely unjust. A recent Oxfam study demonstrated that 62 of the world’s richest people own more that the poorest half of the world’s population, in other words of 3.6 billion people.

The apportionment of assets and liabilities in the global community projects into the present contemporary forms of debt enslavement derived from the injustice of many generations of imperial domination and colonial subjugation. The land grabs from Indigenous peoples and the theft embedded in slavery form but part of the patterns of kleptocracy permeating processes of capital accumulation that continue yet. In a system of finance empowering private central banks to create money through the issuing of loans, the perpetual compounding of debt dooms much of human to austerity. Most taxpayers must bear the weight of perpetually ballooning debt incurred both personally and as citizens of indebted nationalities.

In the course of the controversy over “globalization,” nuances of description began to arise so that one began to see adjectives attached to the contested word. Increasingly phrases like “imperial globalization,” “anti-imperial globalization” or “ecological globalization” were used to describe different visions of political economy set in a worldwide framework.

This development of nuance in identifying different types of globalization helps to clarify that there is no single universally agreed-upon usage of “globalization.” Should globalization be planned and regulated? If so, who should do this planning and regulation? What sorts of new confederacies of diverse peoples might be envisaged? What kind of representative bodies might be created? What new types of new institutions should be established so that the rule of law prevails rather than the rule of arbitrary violence as epitomized by unbridled militarism in aggressive warfare? What kind of law enforcement agencies are needed so that the human rights of people are afforded protections at least equal to the protections currently extended by police forces to the ownership and movement of property, of capital?

The possibilities are extensive. Globalization is not one coherent thing that people are either for-or-against. There are many possible versions of globalization. Globalization is a process of historical transformation. It has taken many forms in the past, even as the continuation of this same process will take many forms in the future. Globalization involves transformations in relationships between human beings and the rest of nature that unfold on local, regional and worldwide levels.

The popular protest against the WTO took place in 1999. This public wrestling over globalization’s future was dubbed the Battle of Seattle. The worldwide news coverage given Seattle’s live street theater of global conflict helped politicize the word, “globalization.” The conflict over the global future reflected the acrimony concerning “globalization’s” meaning. The debate over “globalization’s” semantics has important reverberations for our own time and conditions. Initially the critics of the agenda to transform global governance in the service of the richest and most powerful branches of society were declared to be proponents of “anti-globalization.”

The characterization “anti-globalization” activists makes no sense. The designation of critics of the WTO and related agencies as proponents of “anti-globalization” fails to take into account that the protesters by and large wanted more democratic and ecologically appropriate forms of globalization. Its members did not advocate some sort of negation of globalization. What sense would it make to be against globalization when all of humanity as well as our plant and animal relatives so obviously share an orb in the heavens that we sometimes refer to as earth? We all share a single globe. Thus we are all in a way all globalists.

There are many ways to envisage the future of the globe and many ways to negotiate and prioritize the desired goals of global change. Once the primary aims have been set, there are many possible routes to move towards shared objectives and ideals. Wherever we are headed, the term, “globalization,” has entered the language to become the site of considerable political discussion, debate and contestation. The stakes in this debate are high. They involve much more than a discussion about the use or abuse of language. At stake is the kind of world we will bequeath to our posterity, even seven generations hence.

From Al-Andalusia to the Fourth World

Although the word “globalization” is new, the processes of human interaction it describes are very old. Knowledge that our shared planetary home is spherical was widely shared among the educated classes long before Christopher Columbus set out to prove the world was round in 1492. In ancient Greece, Pythagoras postulated that the earth is round as early as the 6th century BC.

In the ninth century AD the Persian Islamic scholar, al-Biruni, used a combination of geometry, algebra and trigonometry to calculate with great precision the actual size of the spheric earth. Al-Biruni’s many scientific and literary achievements were part of a major surge of scholarship that accompanied the rapid spread of Islam especially in the 8th and 9th century AD.

This geopolitical transformation covered a vast territory extending from current-day Spain to North Africa to Arabia, the Levant as well as to Persia and Pakistan. Accompanying this rise of Islamic empire was a revolution in science and scholarship extending to major breakthroughs in, for instance, mathematics, astronomy, architecture, medicine and all facets of artistic expression.

This era is sometimes remembered as the Golden Age in the Islamic pursuit of knowledge. In this quest for understanding, the identification of universal principles embedded in the laws of nature was especially revered. Under the oversight of the Ummayad rulers and then the Abbasid caliphates, this phenomenon of imperial integration of large components of the human family gave rise to an important interlude in globalization’s history. With an emphasis on the promotion of collegiality, translation, as well as on the amassing and systemic study of scholarly texts assembled from all parts of the known world, savants and sages worked cooperatively to expand the frontiers of knowledge in great centers of heavily subsidized learning like Baghdad and Cordoba.

The Islamic caliphate of Al-Andalusia on the Iberian Peninsula became a major site of collaboration between Jewish, Christian and Muslim scholars. Their breakthroughs on many scientific, technological, and artistic fronts, including pulling forward much classical scholarship especially from ancient Greece and Rome, helped lay the intellectual foundations of the European Renaissance.

This period of enlightened interaction, however, proved short lived. The rise of the Vatican connected to Christendom’s Crusades against Muslim control of Jerusalem and its surrounding Holy Land contributed to a “Reconquista” north of the Straits of Gibraltar. The final Islamic caliphate of Granada fell to Christendom’s soldiers in 1492, the very year that Christopher Columbus made his transformative voyage to the Western Hemisphere.

The Reconquista of the Iberian Peninsula, where Spain and Portugal now sit, included the increasing severity of the Inquisition with its blood-drenched persecution of supposed “heretics.” Galileo was one of those condemned by Inquisitors charged to uphold Roman Catholic orthodoxy. Galileo’s alleged crime was to have published his findings from telescope-based research in 1633. He believed his close scrutiny of moving celestial bodies proved that Copernicus was correct in his prior thesis that the sun, not the earth, is the fixed center of a revolving planetary system. Earth is not the center of the Universe.

The sense of violent intolerance infusing the Inquisition also permeated the heavily militarized Reconquista north of the Mediterranean Sea. This ethos of violent expansion extended to the trans-Atlantic exploits of early Spanish conquistadors like Hernan Cortes and Francisco Pizarro. Cortes’ conquest of the Aztec Empire in Mexico and Pizarro’s looting of the Incan Empire in the Peruvian Andes set in motion genocidal incursions into the Indigenous populations of the Americas that never really ended.

With sanction from the Vatican, the transformation of much of Central and South America into New Spain and New Portugal initiated the most aggressive phase of imperial globalization in all of history. First the Roman Catholic powers of Europe and then the Protestant powers, but primarily England and the Netherlands, began to spread their influence through the building of navies tied to the creation of overseas colonies. This process of colonization involved the establishment of expanded trade networks, legal frameworks, war agendas, as well as the merging of peoples, cultures and knowledge on an unprecedented scale.

The still-accelerating mixture of peoples, cultures and ideas forms the primary essence of globalization since 1492. Of course many Indigenous peoples resisted the process of imperial globalization. Increasingly the natural impulse of anti-imperial globalization necessitated the creation of confederacies of resistance to oppose the dominant agencies, armies and plutocrats pushing forward the expansionary incursions of aggressive colonization. The effort of Indigenous peoples to join together in support of one another’s initiatives of self-defense forms the basis of anti-imperial globalization. One of the most compelling examples of anti-imperial globalization took place in Bandung Indonesia in 1955.

Leaders from many colonized nations in Africa and Asia met together to plan for the independence of their countries during an era when they would be freed from the formal imperial power of their European governors. The two world wars of the twentieth century had bankrupted and decimated the European powers. Exhausted, they dwindled in scale, wealth and self-confidence. The European powers could not sustain their imperial empires that in the nineteenth century encompassed the largest part of global humanity.

The delegates who met in Bandung resolved to ally themselves together in shared embrace of the principles of peace, justice and the rule of law. In 1961 they continued what they had started in Bandung by founding the Non-Aligned Movement composed of former colonies. This international entity still exists.

A Canadian Indian man by the name of George Manuel give voice to the philosophy of Non-Aligned movement composed of colonized Indigenous peoples the world over. In the milieu of the Cold War, Manuel spoke of the unwillingness of Indigenous peoples to divorce themselves from their Aboriginal heritages in order to embrace without reservation imposed models of development, whether capitalist or communist.

The Shuswap leader from the interior of British Columbia would go on to found the World Council of Indigenous Peoples. George Manuel used the United Nations and other venues of international relations to reject the paradigm of the “Third World” and “underdevelopment.” Instead, Manuel imagined the Fourth World, a realm where Indigenous peoples would use science and technology to move towards futures based on forward projections of their own Aboriginal systems of knowledge, spirituality and philosophy. Manuel outlined his vision in a co-authored book entitled The Fourth World.

Some of George Manuel’s ideals found expression in the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. This international instrument was ratified by in the UN General Assembly in 2007. Four national delegations initially voted against the resolution. Tellingly, the opponents of the UN Declaration on Aboriginal Rights were the governments of USA, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.

Propaganda and the Psychology of Colonialism

A vital aspect of colonization involves the molding of beliefs and attitudes to make repressive and violent systems of top-down control seem normal and acceptable. This colonization of minds to make war, injustice and inequity seem natural and unremarkable forms a huge factor in the constitution of our manufactured psychological environments. Probing the psychological factor in humanity’s engineered habitats is an enterprise of major importance in the study of globalization.

Franz Fanon, a Black psychiatrist from the French Caribbean colony of Martinique, gave an important psychological twist to his agenda for revolutionary change. His analysis provided thoughtful coherence to the struggle of colonized people to liberate themselves from the external conditions of colonialism as well as from the internal trauma arising from conditioned self-loathing. Too often White governors caused dark-skinned populations to internalize imperial perceptions of “native” inferiority.

Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth came to prominence in the decolonization struggles of the 1960s. Written in the context of the struggle against French colonialism in Algeria, Fanon’s book was especially influential throughout Africa and in the Black Power movement in the United States.

Fanon anticipated that the revolutionary struggles of colonized people would be sabotaged by an ambitious class of Black bourgeoisie that would displace White governors that ruled during the heyday of formal European colonialism. This prophesy would be fulfilled by the Western-backed puppet dictatorships set up to oversee the corporatist exploitation of, for instance, Mobutu’s Congo or Suharto’s Indonesia.

The formal trappings of colonialism technically diminished as the number of sovereign countries recognized by the United Nations. The numbers went from 50 countries that endorsed the UN’s Charter in San Francisco in 1945 to about 200 countries now afforded international standing in the UN General Assembly. This internationally-sanctioned process of decolonization, however, merely disguises many of the forces that continue to divide the world between small concentrations of disproportionately entitled elites and the huge mass of disentitled and subjugated masses that Fanon described as The Wretched of the Earth. This pattern subjugation can sometimes transcend configurations of race and skin color. The divisions of class and caste can prevail within countries as well as between countries.

The continuation of oppressive colonization, sometimes referred to as neo-colonialism and neo-imperialism, depends on unjust structures for the apportionment of credit and debt as well as the ongoing application of very potent instruments of propaganda and psychological warfare.

The term, “propaganda,” has its origins in the evangelical impulse to propagate the Gospel of Christianity through missionary work. One of the most effective missionary organizations ever was the Society of Jesus whose priestly members are often described as Jesuits.

Founded in 1540 by Ignatius Loyola, the Jesuit Order is sometimes referred to as the avant-garde of the Counter-Reformation, the Roman Catholic response to the Protestant Reformation. Jesuits missionaries made very effective use of sophisticated psychological techniques to win converts by propagating the Gospel. From the Americas to Japan and China, the Jesuits were intermediaries in the exchange of knowledge between Europe and many non-Western societies. Their activities present an important case study in the overlap between propaganda, colonization and globalization.

The Christian missionaries often undermined the internal integrity of Aboriginal societies even as they sometimes defended the Aboriginal rights of the Native groups amongst whom they worked. Dominican Friar Bartoleme de las Casas was one of the first missionaries in New Spain to present himself as a defender of Indians. Among the positions he filled in the 1500s were those of Bishop of Chiapas and the Spanish Crown’s Protector of the Indians. Las Casas distinguished himself as a jurist who defended the rights of the First Nations of the Americas in major court cases in sixteenth-century Spain.

From Propaganda to Public Relations:

The Career of Edward Bernays as a Master Psychologist of Social Control

The twentieth century was a time when vast resources were devoted to manipulating and controlling the attitudes and opinions of large masses of people through propaganda. In this era Edward Bernays, a nephew of the famous psychologist Sigmund Freud, became the father of media spin. As illustrated by the text of Propaganda, the title of the book he published in 1928, Bernays built on the pioneering psychological studies of missionaries to develop the science of thought control in the secular realm.

Bernays wrote, “propaganda is the executive arm of the invisible government.” He continued,

Universal literacy was supposed to educate the common man to control his environment. Once he could read and write he would have a mind fit to rule. So ran the democratic doctrine. But instead of a mind, universal literacy has given him rubber stamps, rubber stamps inked with advertising slogans, with editorials, with published scientific data, with the trivialities of the tabloids and the platitudes of history, but quite innocent of original thought.

One of the admirer’s of Bernays’ text, Propaganda, was Joseph Goebbels, the German Minister of Propaganda in the National Socialist government of Adolf Hitler. In the 1930s Bernays sought to distance himself from his professional connection to Goebbels and the propaganda techniques then being applied in Germany. This alignment of tactics for influencing public opinion in Germany and the United States formed the background of Bernays’ decision to invent a new label for his work. Bernays’ decided that “Public Relations” would be a more benign description for the activities formerly identified with the term, “propaganda.”

To this day the term “Public Relations” covers a broad array of thought control activities in the public sphere. For instance, many of the widely-published news reports pointed our way actually originate in large Public Relations firms. Public Relations agencies increasing permeate news-gathering organizations. These Public Relations corporate entities are in the business of messaging our attitudes, impressions, preoccupations, understandings and, ultimately, our behaviours.

The biggest and most lucrative Public Relations contracts are devoted to the selling of wars to the public. We are called upon to pay with our tax dollars the enormous costs of high-tech warfare. We are also expected to serve the war machine logistically, including through the provision by our families of soldiers and other personnel. Usually it is necessary to demonize and dehumanize the image of the enemy as the necessary prelude for waging of war.

Bernays made a huge name for himself in 1929 by mass marketing cigarettes to women on behalf of his client, the American Tobacco Company. To achieve this goal Bernays created a “photo opportunity” at the New York Easter Parade. He hired suffragettes to light up cigarettes in front of the cameras. The suffragette’s lit cigarettes were described in the media spin as “Torches of Freedom.” The story was thus planted in many news reports indicating that the smoking of cigarettes by women amounts to an enlightened stance for gender equality. This episode helped blur the line between advertising, news reporting and “Public Relations.” The mixture of information, entertainment and marketing would become even more intense with the introduction and development of the television.

From his corporate offices on Madison Avenue in New York, Bernays led the way in developing mass communications methods to invade and influence the subconscious levels of human brain function. The aim of this infiltration of mental functions was to impose various forms of social control.

Bernays’ techniques of managing public opinion drew the attention of the US Armed Forces and especially the CIA. In the early 1950s the CIA entrusted Bernays with the task of making a US-instigated removal of Guatemala’s elected government appear like a popular local revolt against Soviet-backed communism. The impetus to remove from office Jacobo Arbenz, Guatemala’s elected president, originated with the United Fruit Company. Its corporate profits were being diminished because of the types of land reform being implemented by the Arbenz government.

In the early 1950s the CIA entrusted Bernays with the task of making a US-instigated removal of Guatemala’s elected government appear like a popular local revolt against Soviet-backed communism.

Bernays’ success in making a false narrative on Guatemala appear real and authentic in the mass media established a prototype for many cycles of deception yet to come. The strategy of tension— the strategy of creating divisions between and among people to keep them from developing the collective strength of political solidarity--- dominated the psychological warfare on the US-led side of the Cold War. This Cold War would come to an abrupt end with demise of the Soviet Union in 1991.

The Cuban Revolution, Operation Mockingbird,

MKUltra and The Shock Doctrine

The Argentinian doctor, Che Guevarra, and the Cuban lawyer, soldier and politician, Fidel Castro, were much affected by the US display of ruthlessness in Guatemala combined with the CIA’s utter disregard for the truth. Having witnessed the deployment of US tactics in seizing control of Guatemala, Che and Castro were radicalized. Che and Castro teamed up with the goal of overturning the Mafia-led government that dominated Cuba. Their tactic to achieve societal change would be classic guerilla warfare combined with the revolutionary infiltration of the rural peasantry. The US Mafia’s control of Cuba before 1959 is dramatized on a grand scale in part 2 of Francis Ford Coppola’s classic American film, The Godfather.

The Cuban Revolution became one of the hallmarks of the Cold War struggle depicted in the popular media as a global showdown between US-led capitalism and Soviet-led communism. Cuba devoted much of its revolutionary energy to developing a system of socialized health care that sent many thousands of Cuban-trained doctors to work among the poor and oppressed people of Africa and Latin America. The Cuban government was instrumental in rendering help in the effort, especially in Angola, to quash militarily and psychologically the bastions of support for South Africa’s notorious apartheid regime.

The Cuban government was instrumental in rendering help in the effort, especially in Angola, to quash militarily and psychologically the bastions of support for South Africa’s notorious apartheid regime.

The leader of the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa, Nelson Mandela, paid homage to the help rendered by Castro’s government shortly after he was released from prison to lead his country in its journey towards color-blind political enfranchisement. One of the factors in the fall of the apartheid regime in South Africa was the demise of the Soviet Union. The disappearance of the USSR undermined the apartheid government’s propagandistic claim that its criminalization of Mandela’s African National Congress was to prevent a dangerous agency of communist subversion from coming to power.

One facet of the Cold War assault on a free, balanced and honest media came to light in the late 1970s. A Congressional investigation revealed that the US Central Intelligence Agency, the CIA, had assumed control of many venues of mass communications in Operation Mockingbird. The essence of Operation Mockingbird involved the hiring by the CIA of thousands of journalist, editors, media managers and media owners. The Mockingbird strategy was to censor and distort news stories or to plant outright disinformation in order to advance the anti-communist agenda of the US-led side in the Cold War.

The CIA's Mockingbird strategy was to censor and distort news stories or to plant outright disinformation in order to advance the anti-communist agenda of the US-led side in the Cold War.

Operation Mockingbird was a close cousin to the CIA’s thought control experiments known as MKUltra. Part of the research of MKUltra scientists was to experiment in the possible use as a “truth serum” of the psychedelic drug, LSD. A major center of MKUltra activities was the Allan Memorial Institute at McGill University in Montreal. There Dr. Ewen Cameron led many experiments in the 1950s in various forms of mind alteration.

Naomi Klein discussed the long-term applications of Dr. Cameron’s experiments in behavioral control to introduce her book and her video entitled, The Shock Doctrine.

The existence of Operation Mockingbird was exposed in the Congressional investigations following the resignation of US President Richard Nixon in 1974 under a cloud of infamy. Nixon was forced to resign as a result of revelations that came to light in the Watergate scandal. Carl Bernstein was of the two much-lauded investigative journalists who broke the original stories that led to Nixon’s undoing. Bernstein famously reported in 1977 in Rolling Stone Magazine the myriad of links connecting the media, including many of America’s most high-profile celebrity journalists, to the CIA’s thought control strategies.

BRICS and the Business of War

The era of Cold War bipolarism gave way to what seemed to be a unipolar moment between 1991 and the early twenty-first century. In 2008 a meltdown of deregulated financial institutions on Wall Street instigated an international commercial contagion demonstrating the economic fragility of the West. As the twenty-first century unfolded, the apparent unipolar omnipotence of the United States gave way to a more complex multipolar world.

China continued to emerge as the commercial and industrial powerhouse of capitalist enterprise. China was sometimes grouped with India, Russia, Brazil, and South Africa as a new economic powerhouse entitled BRICS. The European Union continued to expand, alternating between periods of boom and bust. Working closely with NATO, the EU incorporated the former Soviet satellite countries. This trajectory of expansion was checked by the setback of financial overextension. This crisis was reflected in the huge indebtedness of many European countries as epitomized by the saga surrounding Greece’s embattled economy.

The Global War on Terror was initiated in the aftermath of the events of September 11, 2001. The military-industrial complex that grew up over the course of World War II and then the Cold War continued as the machinery of anti-communism was retooled and expanded in the name of anti-terrorism. Indeed, the military budgets of many countries, but especially that of the US government, were inflated to unprecedented levels after 9/11. One of the continuities in the US role in the transition from the Cold War to the Global War on Terror is that the deployment of military, police, diplomatic and propaganda resources to oppose the designated enemies maintained the a class structure dominated by the chief beneficiaries, owners and managers of the increasingly elaborate military-industrial complex.

War profiteers benefited greatly as the corporate patrons and clients of the world’s dominant war machine geared up their businesses of industrialized murder. High-tech weaponry was directed at the populations of a number of countries including Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and, most recently, Syria.

The invasion of Syria has been accompanied by Russia’s military encirclement. This process puts prominence especially on the NATO countries that border on the Russian Federation. The North Atlantic Treaty Alliance, NATO, first emerged from the dominant US role in Western Europe as a counter to the Soviet military role in the Warsaw Pact countries. NATO did not end with the Cold War but rather expanded along with the European Union, the EU. NATO’s military might is presently being directed at making territorial disputes involving the Ukraine a justification for war with Russia.

All this military activity could be interpreted as a build up towards World War III to include a large-scale invasion of the Islamic Republic of Iran. Built on the deep civilizational foundations of Persia, Iran is a resource-rich country peopled by 80,000,000 mostly well-educated inhabitants.

Charlie Wilson’s War

The Cold War and the prelude to the Global War on Terror overlapped significantly in Afghanistan. The CIA and its allies in Pakistan built up Muslim proxy armies in Afghanistan in the 1980s with the goal of overturning the Soviet-backed regime of Mohammad Naijibullah. This Cold War instrumentalization of Islamic fighting forces went by many names. The mujahideenwas one of the terms used to describe the US-backed, US-recruited, US-armed and US-trained enemies of the communist Naijibullah regime. The Taliban is another term deployed often with propagandistic intent. At the center of gravity of the Taliban are the Pushtun-speaking tribes of Persian descent. Their territories include the border region of Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Al-Qaeda is another term closely associated with jihadism, which means “struggle” in Arabic. The CIA first adopted the termal-Qaeda to describe a military database it maintained in Saudi Arabia. The term was made to enter the big leagues of geostrategic language when the events of 9/11 were immediately blamed before the Twin Towers even fell on Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda. Significantly, the very group blamed for 9/11 now receives major US support in the US-led side of the superpower conflict aimed at overthrowing the Syrian government of Bashar al-Assad? What is wrong with this picture? Why is the US government helping the very group that it still accuses of being responsible for the 9/11 crime?

Why is the US government helping the very group that it still accuses of being responsible for the 9/11 crime?

The outcome of the Cold War conflict in Afghanistan would have major ramification in undermining the prestige of the Soviet Union. The success of the US-backed proxy armies that defeated Soviet armed forces helped energize the Vatican/CIA-backed Solidarity movement in Poland. In retrospect the success of the Solidarity movement led by Lech Walesa turned the tide towards the subsequent failure and implosion of the Soviet system of governance. The celebrated Hollywood director, Mike Nichols, made a lively dramatization of the US sponsorship of Islamic fighters in Afghanistan in Operation Cyclone. In Charlie Wilson’s War Tom Hanks stars as the Texas Congressman that promoted this US-backed military adventure in Afghanistan.

There is a larger Cold War background, therefore, to the CIA’s building up of proxy armies staffed by mercenary soldiers paid to fight under Islamic flags. Much of the financing of this operation took place through the Saudi-backed Bank of Credit and Commerce International whose CIA-dominated corruption came to light in the Iran-Contra scandal.

The Marxist ideology adopted by the Soviet Union and its satellites, including the Naijibullah regime in Afghanistan, was materialistic and atheist in character. This attribute made the US government the friends of religious theocrats of all varieties because religious people were necessarily anti-communist. The CIA and other so-called national security agencies placed much emphasis on building up [Saudi version of] political Islam. National security state operatives worked closely with the oil-rich ruling Saudi dynasty that give major financial backing to exporting Wahabi extremism throughout the Islamic world.

This Cold War foray by the US government into the realm of political Islam was also manipulated as a check on the more secular tendencies in somewhat socialist pan-Arab politics of Gamal Abdul Nasser and his Baathist successors including Saddam Hussein in Iraq and Bashar al-Assad in Syria. The role of the CIA in building up the Muslim Brotherhood is outlined in Ian Johnson’s A Mosque in Munich: The Nazis, the CIA, and the Rise of the Muslim Brotherhood in the West (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010).

USA-Israel; Israel-Palestine

In the years leading up to the demise of the Soviet Union many US think tanks began the search for a new paradigm of global interaction that would preserve the dominant role of the United States in global geopolitics. The primary paradigm embraced by strategic planners on the way to the Global War on Terror is known as “the clash of civilizations.”

This conception emerged from the work of so-called “Orientalist,” Bernard Lewis and political scientist, Samuel P. Hunting. Huntington is the author of The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996). The primary highlighted “clash,” real or imagined, was between “Western civilization” that was said to be centered in the United States, and Islamic culture with several core polities in the Middle East.

As Bernard Lewis observed, there were especially significant implications in the “clash of civilizations” for Israel, surrounded as it is by Arab culture that is predominantly, but not exclusively, Muslim. In his September 1990 Atlantic article entitled, “The Roots of Muslim Rage: Why So Many Muslims Deeply Resent the West,” Lewis looked to the intimate relationship between the United States and Israel as a primary reason for Islamic resentment. He wrote, “The cause most frequently adduced for anti-American feeling among Muslims today is American support for Israel.”

The political, economic and cultural facets of relations between the governments of the United States and Israel have become the center of much debate and controversy especially since 9/11. A central problem to be addressed in this regard is whether the post-9/11 clash of civilizations is real or at least partly manufactured. What is the role of the US-Israeli partnership in constructing the psychological and geopolitical framework of the Global War on Terror? Does this military, psychological and police operation respond to conditions that exist of their own accord or are the Western-Muslim antagonisms being artificially inflamed to advance certain interests and agendas?

Some of the sophisticated discourse surrounding US-Israeli relations have been generated from the lively debate centered on the publication in 2007 by John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt. Their co-authored volume is entitled The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007). The co-authors are both senior and broadly accomplished figures in the US academic establishment, Mersheimer and Walt have presented the case that the power of the Israeli lobby is extensive and many-faceted. The co-authors press the argument that the national interests of the United States are not always well served by placing so much emphasis on backing the policies of the Israeli government.

Much of the criticism directed at Israel from many sources involves condemnation of the Israeli treatment of the Palestinian people. The Aboriginal inhabitants of the lands on which Israel now sits have been uprooted, ejected, criminalized, and jailed, often without charges being laid. The Palestinians have been tortured without accountability. They have been killed, deprived of the most basic conditions of public health, and pervasively subjugated since Israel’s establishment in 1947-48.

The lands on which Israel and the so-called Occupied Territories now sit were formally subject to the rule of the Ottoman empire and then that of the British Mandate in Palestine. Those that defend the actions of the Israeli government describe its treatment of Palestinians as “self-defense” to protect against the real or imagined incursions of “terrorists.” Public discussion about the similar right of Palestinian people to engage in self-defense is rarely permitted to get very far.

A new phase in the relationship between Israel and the Palestinians became manifest shortly following 9/11 in the raising of a wall started in 2002. This wall, which is still being constructed, continues to divide territories claimed as the heartland of the Jewish State from the remaining fragments of the so-called “Occupied Territories.”

These Occupied Territories were supposed to be reserved by a resolution of the United Nations calling for the creation of an Arab state. The Arab countries, however, opted not to go along with the UN’s plan for a Palestinian mini-state as envisaged by the makers of UN Resolution 181. The “partition plan” introduced by Resolution 181 was instrumental in putting down the legal foundations of Israel . The land being reserved for a future Palestinian country was captured by force of arms in 1967 by the Israeli Defense Force. These conquered lands have become the site of many new Jewish settlements whose inhabitants tend to be advocates of the Revisionist Zionist vision of a larger Israel, a Greater Israel (Eretz Israel).

The Israeli government refers to the wall as a “Separation Barrier.” The critics of the Jewish State describe the still-growing structure as the Apartheid Wall. Whatever name used, this structure marks a variation on the Cold War forces that threw up the Berlin Wall as a way of preventing East Germans from escaping to West Germany. The wall dividing inner Israel from the outer realm of subjugated Palestinians serves as a fitting symbol of the perceptual dichotomies that have renewed old imperial paradigms of “savagery and civilization” in the name of the so-called Global War on Terror.

One of the hot political buttons in these contentions is the status of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, BDS. Its advocates are intent on pressuring the Israeli government through economic means to recognize and respect the human rights of Palestinian people. The BDS campaigns have involved especially heated contentions on many campuses in North America. According to a recent report by Judy Maltz in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, this acrimony is causing many Jewish students to opt out of the debate over Israel and the Palestinians altogether.

A Clash of Civilizations?

Like the waging of the Cold War, the waging of the Global War on Terror involves an especially intense component of psychological warfare. Since so many of the US-led invasions are directed at majority Muslim countries including Syria, Iraq and Yemen, much of the war propaganda is anti-Muslim in character. Some of those who have studied this feature of the war propaganda of the ongoing Global War on Terror have come up with the term, “Islamophobia Industry.” They posit that the reason for the propagandistic incitement of Muslim hating is to exploit fear in order to gain public approval for invasions abroad, surveillance state incursions at home.

Some of the critics of the inheritors of the Anglo-American empire have gone so far as to identify the phenomenon of false flag terrorism as a tactic for gaining popular support for the accelerating activities of the war machine. False flag terrorism involves the engineering of violent episodes so that targeted populations can be blamed and demonized in public perceptions as a prelude for mounting wars of aggression.

False flag terrorism flows consistently from the kind of tactics deployed by Edward Bernays in staging concocted events to deceive Americans so that they would overlook the illegal actions of their government, including the political assassinations of foreign leaders. One example of such a political assassination was the elimination in 1961 of Patrice Lumumba, the first elected president of the Congo. He was killed with the approval of the CIA and the former Belgian rulers of Congo in order to clear the way for the puppet-dictatorship of General Mobutu.

False flag terrorism flows consistent from the activities of Operation Gladio mounted by NATO officials and their agents. Operation Gladio involved the engineering of violent episodes to be speciously blamed on communists, socialists and even moderate progressive leftists. The aim of NATO’s false flag terrorism was to turn public opinion in Western Europe against those political parties less inclined to support the US-led side in the Cold War.

My colleague, Dr. Kevin Barrett, has moved to the center of a many-faceted investigation into recent episodes that many have interpreted as examples of false flag terrorism. Over a period of slightly more than a year Dr. Barrett has written portions of three books which he single-handedly edited. Incorporated in to these books edited by Dr. Barrett are the essays of 55 observers of the three distinct events.

The books appeared in 2015 and 2016. They are all published by Sifting and Winnowing Press. The first of the set is We Are Not Charlie Hebdo: Free Thinkers Question the French 9/11. The other volumes are entitled Another French False Flag: Bloody Tracks from Paris to San Bernardino and Orlando False Flag: The Clash of Histories. I have three essays in the first two books. The titles of my articles are, “Witch Hunt on Terrorism,” “Academic Complicity in the Global War of False Flag Terrorism” and “US Imperialism and the Wanton Destruction of Cultures: An Open Letter to Iran’s Ayatollah Khamenei.”

Like Christopher Bollyn and Dr. Alan Sabrosky, Dr. Barrett places much of the blame for instigating the current round of false flag terrorism beginning with 9/11 primarily on American friends of Likudnik Israel. Likud is the right-wing political party led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Its roots lie in Revisionist Zionism and the quest for Eretz Israel, Greater Israel. Dr. Barrett’s interpretation was strongly reviled as an abomination by Jonathan Kay in his volume, Among The Truthers: A Journey into the Growing Conspiracist Underground of 9/11 Truthers, Birthers, Armageddonites, Vaccine Hysterics, Hollywood Know-Nothings and Internet Addicts (Toronto: HarperCollins, 2011). As Kay sees it, Dr. Barrett’s analysis “absolves Islam of a terrible crime.” (p. 167)

Kay’s blaming of a major global religion for a world-altering event is bizarre to say the least. Religions do not commit crimes. People do. Kay delivers his condemnation of those that are skeptical of the official government narrative of what really transpired on 9/11 without any conscientious reckoning with the extensive literature on the subject. This literature includes ten books by Prof. David Ray Griffin covering the existing evidence on various aspects of the 9/11 crime.

A book by Trevor Aaronson supports the notion that the theory of “the clash of civilizations,” so central to the construction of the Global War on Terror, is more concocted that real. In The Terror Factory: Inside the FBI’s Manufactured War on Terrorism (Brooklyn NY: Ig Publishing, 2013) Aaronson looks into the role of federal police and their “informants” in creating and facilitating the circumstances often ending in the arrest of Muslim individuals subsequently charged with attempted terrorism. Aaronson found that, in the vast majority of cases, FBI agents were actually involved in helping to fund, facilitate and plan the scenarios of Islamic terror they took credit for preventing.

The abuse of policing to build up the imagery of "Islamic terrorism" was put on full public display in Canada in the summer of 2016. In British Columbia Judge Catherine Bruce ruled that a team of RCMP agents and officers had cooked up the conditions to set up recovering heroine addicts and recent Muslim converts, John Nuttal and Amanda Korody. The aim of this very expensive and elaborate police operation was to help Nuttal and Korody to plan a violent act at the BC legislature. Judge Bruce charged that Royal Canadian Mounted Police officers were guilty of entrapping their two assets.

The Judge ruled, "The world has enough terrorists. We do not need the police to create more out of marginalized people…. It is offensive for the police to commit illegal acts that enable an offence in circumstances where they knew the defendants could not have committed the offence absent police assistance."

The intervention of the FBI and RCMP to create sensational media reports highlighting the imagery, but lacking the substance, of Islamic terror is mirrored at the highest international levels. Starting with Osama bin Laden himself, intelligence agencies like the CIA, the UK’s MI 6 and the Israeli Mossad have developed close and intimate involvements with many of the most high-profile Islamic patsies, assets, and dupes held to be responsible for terror events. In some cases the violent episodes are entirely engineered and then blamed on Muslim patsies. In other occurrences violent and troubled individuals are identified and then put in positions where they do commit the crimes necessary to generate the political currency of public fear.

Both models of false flag terrorism run counter to the pervasive lie widely disseminated in the mainstream media that the violent actions attributed to Islamic terrorists take place independently without any backing, direction and logistical help from Western intelligence agencies. The Big Lie is that these violent events, including those highlighted in Dr. Barrett’s three edited books, come about because of nothing more than the perpetrators’ impulses of religious extremism and irrational hatreds directed against western freedoms.

In The War on Truth: 9/11, Disinformation and the Anatomy of Terrorism, Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed highlights the distance between how Islamic terrorism is reported in the mainstream media and what is known and is knowable about the actual phenomena from genuine research and honest investigation. Aaaronson’s and Ahmed’s texts add to the considerable weight of existing evidence indicating that there are strong elements of concoction and fraud aimed at giving the appearance of validation to the theory of the clash of civilizations. The ultimate aim of giving a veneer of validation to this theory is to justify the conduct of the Global War on Terror in its various incarnations.

Prophet or Profit? Nikola Tesla’s Legacy for Our Current Times

The descent of society into Bernays-style engineering of illusions that serve the interests of power is accelerating during an era when business and industry have been subject to less and less public regulation. In Alberta, for instance, the oil and gas industry actually pays for and operates its own agency of environmental regulation. The conflicts-of-interest involved in such a model of industrial self-regulation are enormous.

The other side of this process of deregulation is to eliminate protections for the public interest and public health. This move away from the social welfare state to favor instead the stock market state has huge implications whose effect is to widen inequality rather than close the vast gaps between rich and poor.

A core issue in determining the future shape of globalization has to do with the political economy of energy. Will fossil fuels continue to be the primary source of energy in our industrialized societies or will alternative ways of generating energy be brought on stream? Who will decide? Where will the resources come from if the infrastructures of energy production and consumption are to be radically changed? What is to be done about vested interests whose agents endeavor to use their superior access to capital to maintain the status quo of dependence on old and outmoded technologies?

How can technological innovation be managed to serve the well being of humans and all life on the planet rather than the profit margins of existing industrial conglomerates? How can a technological civilization of peace be made to overcome the barbarism of the permanent war economy that has dominated the United States since 1941 with no end in sight?

A brief consideration of the career of Nikola Tesla, the brilliant Serbian-American scientist, inventor and technician, marks a fitting conclusion to this brief consideration of technology and globalization in the public interest. Tesla’s career peaked in the late years of the nineteenth century and early years of the twentieth century. It was during this period that the industrial revolution began to incorporate the technology of electrical power as well as wireless communication through electromagnetically-enabled broadcasting.

With the backing of industrialist George Westinghouse, Tesla competed with Thomas Edison and his nascent General Electric Company to establish the basic standards for the transmission of electrical power over short and long distances. Tesla emerged triumphant from this contest having designed many of the components for alternating current electricity, AC. This AC system proved to be immensely superior to Edison’s direct current technology, DC.

The main venue of Tesla’s industrial victory was the enormously successful World’s Columbian Exposition that took place in Chicago in 1893. Tesla and George Westinghouse bear out Edison in the contest to produce electric power for the Chicago Exposition. The stated purpose of this World’s Fair was to commemorate the 400th anniversary of Christopher Columbus’ “discovery” of the Americas in 1492.

Tesla emerged as one of stars of the fair where many of the elements were introduced that would project America to the forefront of many global transformations in the twentieth century. From his triumph in Chicago, Tesla shifted his attention to Niagara Falls where he worked with his Westinghouse colleagues to establish the world’s first industrial-scale generator of hydroelectricity.

Tesla’s work attracted major investment especially from one of America’s most powerful bankers, J.P. Morgan. Tesla fell out of favor with his primary financial backer, however, when it became known the inventor’s goal was to develop technology that would naturally draw free energy from the ionosphere and other natural sources of energetic transformation. Tesla combined his quest for free and clean energy with research in electric cars as well as forms of wireless technology anticipating what we now refer to as cell phones.

Tesla fell out of favor with his primary financial backer, however, when it became known the inventor’s goal was to develop technology that would naturally draw free energy from the ionosphere and other natural sources of energetic transformation.

Instead of giving Tesla the green light to develop technological innovations in the public interest for the common good, the financial rug was pulled out from underneath the most costly experiments of this amazing savant. Tesla’s innovations apparently threatened many centers of vested interest and established wealth. Very often the business models that maintain the pre-eminence of entrenched elites depend on the continuing use of old technologies and established infrastructures.

This saga points to the uneasy relationship between capital and forms of technological change that could vastly improve the quality of life but in ways that do not conform to the imperative of accelerating and expanding very circumscribed models of predictable commercial activity. Tesla’s experience demonstrates that it is not good enough simply to “leave it to the market” when it comes to the prospect of embracing new technologies of free and clean energy. Who will restore the principles of the public interest and the common good to an esteemed place of major influence in the organization of global society?