Soros Leaks – Intelligence In Action – By Walrus.

Walrus 4

Looking through a few documents allegedly from the Soros Open Society Initiative leaked by website Dcleaks, I noticed what I think is a pretty good illustration of an intelligence/PR appreciation, or analysis of the German news media and the German publics attitude to the Ukranian situation, at least as portrayed by the author.

I was intrigued enough to post the link in the hope that SST readers might like to comment both on its contents and crafting. The only conclusion I can draw from its content is that the intentions of OSI towards Russia are not benign.

 

http://soros.dcleaks.com/download/?f=/Ukraine%20and%20Europe/germany/osf%20draft.rtf&t=europe

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73 Responses to Soros Leaks – Intelligence In Action – By Walrus.

  1. michael brenner says:

    Soros has been a vociferous leader of the “war camp” calling for confrontation with Russia. See his essays in the New York Review of Books.

  2. Bandolero says:

    All
    I believe transatlanticist Ulrich Speck seriously misunderstood why the German media failed to be effective in argueing the case for the Ukraine Poroshenko government in Germany.
    The main problem was not that the pro-Poroshenko propaganda was not enough, but the case was just too bad. Most Germans tend not want to align with coups, especially when many foot soldiers of the coup are sporting Nazi emblems.
    What was described by Ulrich Speck as good reporting by foreign correspondents worked at first, but as more facts (like about the shots on Institutka being false flag, the mass murder in Odessa and Ukrainian activists sporting the Wolfsangel and even the Swastika) appeared, it was perceived by many German people as completely dishonest propaganda, so much, that it fired back on a significant part of the German population which got involved in pushing back the anti-Russian propaganda line.
    The same happened with the Borg PR line in general which almost completely dominated the German mass media. In talk shows usually Russian officials with little German language knowledge or allged friends of Russia who failed to put major arguments on display were invited to present an alibi for the Russian view, eloquent Russia-friendly politicians from the SPD like Schröder, Voscherau and their political friends were silenced by the media, and the general media line was Putin is the new Hitler, and what will we do about it? But while many TV consumers bougth that propaganda and their view on Russia changed negative, on the growing group of better informed internet users the propaganda seriously backfired. These people were outraged by the relentless anti-Russian propaganda Ulrich Speck describes as good reporting.
    So a serious split appeared in Germany, and even a Russia-friendly right-wing party (AfD) appeared shocking Merkel’s CDU and the transatlantic establishment. The trans-atlantic establishment in Germany – to which Speck belongs – is far from defeated, but it is now far less all-powerful as it once was.
    In the end the reason however, was not – as Speck believes – Russian propaganda skills or German business interests in Russia, but a bad case for the Ukraine revolutionary government and it’s forces. Germans nowadays just dislike Wolfsangeln, Swastikas, murderous false flag attacks and murdering peaceful protesters in union buildings, and the more the people learned about these things regarding Ukraine, the more they disliked the coup in Ukraine.

  3. Dubhaltach says:

    That would be the Soros whose been banging the drum for war with Russia since forever yes? That George Soros? The George Soros who’s the friendly face of war throughout the Balkans and who now wants to do the same in Ukraine and points east? That’s the George Soros whose vehicle you’re discussing?
    As a matter of interest do you speak read or write German? Because if you’ve paid anything more than even cursory attention to German language German media you’d know that when you wrote:
    “The only conclusion I can draw from its content is that the intentions of OSI towards Russia are not benign.”
    That you were engaging in massive understatement. The man is a war-mongering pig and quite frankly I wish he’d FOAD and take his various hirelings with him.
    As a PS: I think Bandolero’s comment above is spot on.

  4. LeaNder says:

    thanks, Walrus, highly interesting. If real. Maybe I have not paid enough attention on Ulrich Speck, the journalist. BUT: Unfortunately we don’t have Annex 1.
    From the top of my head, meaning arbitrary association, and not my favorites after reading it:
    A broad majority is in favor of supporting Ukraine, but only with non-military means. In March 2014 58% say that the EU and Germany should support Ukraine, in May 69% are in favor of economic help. But supplying weapons is, in February 2015, supported by only 8%. The view of a EU membership perspective for Ukraine is mixed. In March 2014, 55% according to one poll, 41% according to another poll support future EU membership for Ukraine, while 51% or 34% are against. On NATO membership the view is quite negative: In April 2014 39% against, 20% in favor, in September 2014 even 61% against, 31% in favor, in December 2014 67% against, 26% in favor.
    George drew my attention when he surfaced during the latest EU-Greece crisis. In a project he partly sponsored too:
    https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/ukraine-eu-last-chance-by-george-soros-2015-03
    Random cut: But Ukraine is different (then Greece). It is a black-and-white case. Vladimir Putin’s Russia is the aggressor, and Ukraine, in defending itself, is defending the values and principles on which the EU was built.
    Yet Europe treats Ukraine like another Greece. That is the wrong approach, and it is producing the wrong results. Putin is gaining ground in Ukraine, and Europe is so preoccupied with Greece that it hardly pays any attention.
    There were more explicit ones in which he showed enormous knowledge on what type of the EU’s financial tools could solve the Ukrainian debt problems. Or make them go away “via their big pockets”. 60 billion, may have felt comparatively little to him at the time, versus the Greek numbers.

  5. turcopolier says:

    walrus
    Soros does not do “intelligence.” Intelligence is about truth telling. Soros does “information operations” i.e., propaganda. This is about getting a result that you want. pl

  6. LeaNder says:

    Sorry, the Soros quote ends here:
    “….Greece that it hardly pays any attention. ”
    In other words should look like this:
    Random cut: But Ukraine is different (then Greece). It is a black-and-white case. Vladimir Putin’s Russia is the aggressor, and Ukraine, in defending itself, is defending the values and principles on which the EU was built.
    Yet Europe treats Ukraine like another Greece. That is the wrong approach, and it is producing the wrong results. Putin is gaining ground in Ukraine, and Europe is so preoccupied with Greece that it hardly pays any attention.

  7. Lurker says:

    If you hold that the current Cold War pitches West vs East or America and NATO vs Russia and China you are only partially correct. The conflict is primarily between die hard Globalists against die hard Nationalists. The former are also known as Neo-Liberals. Some Neo liberals pay lip service to American exceptionalism while others are even less emphatic. Protectionists aka Nationalists are struggling to strengthen their borders and the sovereignity of their Nation State.
    Brexit, Turkexit, Likudnism (Zionism) and Trump’s political platform may be seen in the context of Nationalism opposing the Neo-Liberal Globalists.
    George Soros is the most prominent Neo-Liberal Globalist. He is the puppet master behind: Obama, the Clintons, Merkel, etc. He is credited with nearly breaking the Bank of England among many other engineered upheavals. Are we surprised at the success of Brexit? Soros is accused of engineering the regime change in Ukraine and the Migrant’s crisis in Europe.
    Why would Soros, a Hungarian born American billionaire Jew be opposed to the Likudniks in Israel? Because Likud’s settler policies against Palestinians run counter to fully enlisting the Islamic World into the Globalists’ agenda.
    The rapprochement between Netanyahu, Erdogan, Putin may be seen in this context. Erdogan’s loyalty to the Globalists was wavering due to Obama’s support for the Kurds. Erdogan decided to make up with Netanyahu and Putin for the survival of Turkey as a sovereign nation. Now Erdogan makes seemingly shocking public statements claiming to also want the integrity of undivided Syria as Putin does.
    The mutual sympathy between Trump and Netanyahu may be seen in this context. Likewise, the antipathy between Obama (and the Clintons) against Netanyahu may also be seen in the context of Neo-Liberals against Nationalism. People blame Obama as not friendly enough to Israel but people forget that Obama is just another Soros puppet.
    The so called Neocons are also known as Israel firsters in American politics. They may side with the Neo-Liberals tactically in so far as American Interventionism puts Israel first. Yet, strategically Neocons are Zionists and thus Nationalists.
    http://www.truthjustice.net/politics/george-soros-the-one-man-illuminati-machine/

  8. LG says:

    Nationalists when it comes to their country, globalists everywhere else. Sorry, I don’t buy this argument about likudniks opposed to sores or vice versa.

  9. robt willmann says:

    Alex Soros, the son of George Soros, had dinner with Democratic vice-presidential candidate Tim Kaine last week–
    http://www.targetliberty.com/2016/08/hillary-clintons-running-mate-dines.html
    https://www.instagram.com/p/BJBDwmcBYAl/
    Apparently Alex Soros also gets around with other politicians of the Democratic Party.

  10. All,
    It is interesting to look a little more closely at the backgrounds both of Ulrich Speck and Soros.
    Putting the former into Google, I discovered that he formerly worked for RFE/RL in Prague and Brussels. And I also discovered a March 2014 interview he gave to Michael D. Weiss, Editor-in-Chief of ‘The Interpreter’.
    (See http://www.interpretermag.com/ulrich-speck-on-german-russian-relations/ .)
    Explaining Merkel’s disillusion with Putin, Speck tells Weiss:
    ‘While the west was rolling out the red carpet, hoping to convince the Russian leadership of the virtue of liberal democracy and market economy through a growing web of interconnection on all levels, Russian leadership has put the country on an entirely different course: more autocratic and more capable and willing to project power outside its borders.’
    As it happens, the ‘Interpreter’ started as a project of the ‘Institute of Modern Russia’, behind whose foundation were Mikhail Khodorkovsky and his son Pavel. As of January this year, it is ‘funded and presented by Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.’
    (See http://www.interpretermag.com/about-us/ .)
    On Michael D. Weiss, incidentally, a profile which has just appeared on the ‘Unz Review’ site explains his role as a kind of ‘bridge’ between American and British ‘neoconservatism.’ It takes in, among other things, his role as ‘Research Director’ for the ‘Henry Jackson Society’, the principal British ‘neocon’ organisation.
    (See http://www.unz.com/article/michael-weiss-and-the-iran-u-s-hardline-nexus-that-led-iranian-american-to-evin-prison/ .)
    What unfortunately Michael D. Weiss, Ulrich Speck, and the ‘Henry Jackson Society’ people seem to have difficulty realising is that the result of Western-sponsored ‘shock therapy’ in the former Soviet Union in the ‘Nineties was that the place was systematically looted by a small number of – largely Jewish – oligarchs, Khodorkovsky being one of the most notable. At the same time, the vast majority of the population fell into destitution.
    If you really wanted to persuade the mass of the population that Western advocacy of ‘liberal democracy and market economy’ is so much BS, then frankly for RFE/RF to embrace the Khodorkovsky people is the right way to go about it.
    Actually, what makes Weiss particularly interesting is that he exemplifies in particularly acute form the intellectual incoherences found in so much ‘neocon’ thinking, alike in the United States and Britain.
    The ‘Unz Review’ profile quotes from, and links, to Weiss’s description on a site called ‘Jewcy.com’ (brought to you by Tablet Magazine) of the signing of the ‘Euston Manifesto’ in 2005, in the wake of the bitter arguments among ‘leftists’ and ‘progressives’ in Britain provoked by the invasion of Iraq.
    (See http://jewcy.com/post/mutiny_on_the_manifesto .)
    As Weiss describes the genesis of the document:
    ‘Amidst this moral and ideological muddle, a group of graying British Marxists and ex-Communists huddled together in a London pub in May of 2005 and began crafting a manifesto for the 21st century left. Enough was enough.’
    Actually, ‘enough was enough’ was what a lot of us felt about all these sometime silly-leftists who morphed into silly-rightists. If people have been as wrong as erstwhile Trotkyists like Irving Kristol – and Christopher Hitchens, who was apparently mentor and role-model to Weiss – were, couldn’t they just shut up?
    As to Soros, a critical fact about him is the formative influence of Sir Karl Popper’s arguments about the need to transcend ‘tribalism’ and the virtues of the ‘open society’. Accordingly, he is not a fanatical Zionist, as figures like Weiss are. Rather, he is a fanatical believer in the essentially utopian project of trying to eradicate traditional identities.
    What results – as is very evident both in the ‘New York Review of Books’ pieces to which Michael Brenner referred, and the ‘Project Syndicate’ piece to which ‘LeaNder’ linked – is that a very brilliant man ends up living in a total dream world.
    To say that ‘Ukraine is a black-and-white case’, and that ‘Vladimir Putin’s Russia is the aggressor, and Ukraine, in defending itself, is defending the values and principles on which the EU was built’ is the most complete and utter nonsense.
    At the one end one has Galicia, which had never been part of the Russian Empire until the population’s not entirely pleasant experience of the terrorist paternalism of Joseph Stalin following the Nazi-Soviet Pact. At the other one has Crimea, which was part of Byzantine/Rus culture a thousand years ago, before falling to the Mongols in the 1200s, and then reconquered by Russia from the Ottomans in in 1783.
    Between the two poles – all kinds of chaotic complexities.
    What both Weiss’s reflections on the ‘Euston Manifesto’ and Soros’s arguments about Ukraine illustrate is the intellectual shipwreck of certain kinds of ‘modernist’ project which are premised upon the delusion that one can somehow put the past behind one.
    And here, Weiss is incoherent in another way. While at least Soros is a relatively consistent ‘Popperian’, what Weiss seems to exemplify is a common ‘neocon’ predisposition to insist that the ‘goyim’ must put ‘tribalism’ behind them – while taking for granted that Jews, because of the Holocaust, are indefinitely entitled to their own kind of ‘tribalism’: Zionism.
    The tensions did not matter so much until recently. But, now the consequences of the ‘invade the world, invite the world’ policy are becoming all too grimly apparent, they quite clearly are liable to produce a revival of anti-Semitism.

  11. LeaNder says:

    you somewhat loose me post, your question “why would”:
    Now Erdogan makes seemingly shocking public statements claiming to also want the integrity of undivided Syria as Putin does.
    why do you find this statement shocking? Beyond nationalism versus the free flow of money, we don’t seem to have a model post nations yet. Do we?
    The mutual sympathy between Trump and Netanyahu may be seen in this context. Likewise, the antipathy between Obama (and the Clintons) against Netanyahu may also be seen in the context of Neo-Liberals against Nationalism.
    Explain. Could you.
    But you remind me, I should urgently finish reading a book on neoliberalism and Russia ….

  12. CE says:

    When you search the Europe list for “Germany” there are more documents related to this one, the two annexi (trivial) and also the contract. Speck got $6,500 plus expenses for the work and agreed to work at least 15 days full time on it. I don’t think his report is worth the money, to put it politely. In addition to what Bandolero wrote, I think one point the guy is totally unaware of is that there are still let’s say ten million Germans including Merkel who speak, read and write Russian, with many direct contacts into Donbass, so once one got suspicious of the narrative, it was and is easy to find authentic peer-to-peer first hand information from a number of semi-private web outlets reporting in German.

  13. LeaNder says:

    “the two annexi (trivial)”
    two, did I miss one? Where didn’t I pay attention? When people were grouped into camps, partly based on special or financial interests? Is there more? … not really serious, maybe.
    But if real, Soros no doubt was paid for the endeavor and the paid knew his customer.

  14. Lurker says:

    Yet, Soros’ OSF hacked documents, made public, reveal its funding of anti-Likud initiatives. The Globalist’s agenda seeks: to dissolve national borders with visa free travel, to eliminate all remaining sovereign currencies, to combat official religions, to abolish all gender or sexual preference discrimination, to abolish racial discrimination, to promote supranational entities such as WB, IMF, NATO, EU and “free” trade agreements such as NAFTA, TPP, etc.. In contrast Likud defines Israel as a Jewish state. Clearly the Likud and the Globalists hold adversarial views. A nationalist, Yigal Amir, assassinated Globalist Yitzhak Rabin. Likud is sympathetic to the Globalist agenda, only if it cooperates with the implementation of the Obed Yinon plan.

  15. Tyler says:

    ((((((((((((((((Soros))))))))))))))))))) is Hillary’s puppet master and a patient zero for insane progressive policies being pushed on the West.
    If I wasn’t so familiar with lefty doublethink I’d be amazed how the same people here who,bang on about globalism and war mongering go and defend Hillary.

  16. Babak Makkinejad says:

    “Globalist”, I think, obfuscates the fundamental character of what is going on.
    And I am now going to state my opinion:
    The Western Diocletian Civilization, per its claim to Universalism, is trying to impose its political will on other civilizations.
    In cases of China, Russia, and Iran, the boundaries of civilization and the boundaries of state largely coincide; or else; the state is the core state of another civilization. This is a civilizational confrontation with no end in sight – in my opinion.
    This is a useless and un-needed confrontation; Russia, China, Iran (and many others, like Japan) have been emulating & copying the Western Diocletian civilization for centuries – paying it the highest compliment by doing so.
    They have not become Western; in case of Russia – she is a very good decaf.
    Moreover, the Western Diocletian Civilization has been singularly unsuccessful in transplanting itself anywhere outside of its historical area in the Northwest corner of Eurasia over the last 200 years among different cultures and civilizations.
    In North Africa, in India, in Vietnam – Western Diocletian Civilization failed to take root – even after a hundred years and multiple wars.
    (I am excepting the New World for a number of reasons that I could elaborate if asked.)
    What these Universalists seek to achieve is patently unachievable – but who is listening?

  17. Lurker says:

    you somewhat loose me post, your question “why would”:
    I don’t understand your first question
    why do you find this statement shocking?
    Until now, Erdogan has been supporting the partition of Syria. He had a change of heart after he realized that America is supporting a free Kurdistan entity. My statement used these wording: “seemingly” shocking not “shocking. Emphasis is on “seemingly.”
    Explain. Could you.
    I think I have elaborated elsewhere but let me try again. Netanyahu is Likud and Likud defines Israel as a Jewish state. Trump has stated he will transfer the American Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. In contrast, Kerry has rebuked Israel for announcing the demolition of shanty housing in Susya for settlement building. Likud may support the Globalists only in so far these cooperate with the Obed Yinon plan’s implementation.
    The neo liberals want to dissolve national borders with visa free travel (not just free flow of money), abolish sovereign currencies, abolish racism and gender bias, abolish sexual preference bias, terminate official religions. Promote supranational entities such as WB, IMF, NATO and “free” trade pacts such as NAFTA, TPP & TTIP.

  18. Matthew says:

    BM: Western Civilization–particularly, Anglo-Saxon democracy–is very hard to export because it is idiosyncratic. The self-governing American colonies were already fully developed politically and legally before the War of Independence. For example, London booksellers sold more volumes to the American colonies than to the home market. And John Peter Zenger was acquitted of criminal libel long before we had a First Amendment.
    Unless we can export Anglo-Saxon history, it’s hard to export the institutions.

  19. jld says:

    A rare occasion where I concur with Babak.
    🙂

  20. jld says:

    I don’t understand your first question.


    Ah! You’re new here? Obviously…

  21. CE says:

    The first (germany debate annex i.rtf) sources the mentioned polling data and the second (osf annex ii.rtf) lists some potential cooperation partners.

  22. Fred says:

    Babak,
    In North Africa Western Diocletian Civilization was mostly destroyed at the point of the sword by the Islamic conquest a thousand years ago.

  23. Babak Makkinejad says:

    France was in Algeria for more than a hundred years, treating it as a French “Department”. Yet, she failed there – as anyone even remotely familiar with the Algerian scene today could attest.

  24. turcopolier says:

    Babak
    Actually, three “Departments.” I remember a conversation I had with an Algerian ambassador at a cocktail party. The talk was in Arabic. After a while I told him how clear and easy to understand his Arabic was. He replied that he was a Berber and had learned Arabic in school just like me. At home his parents had spoken Berber and French. pl

  25. Dubhaltach says:

    In reply to Lurker 15 August 2016 at 11:15 AM
    Attempting to close your unclosed html tag which is affecting all the comments beneath yours

  26. Fred says:

    Babak,
    What is now Algeria had been a Roman client state (Numidia) from the time of the Second Punic war and later was a province for many centuries before the it’s conquest.

  27. Kerim says:

    Colonel,
    That was the case for the vast majority of berbers of that generation.

  28. Lurker says:

    What are these: Western, Anglo-Saxon and/or Universalists seeking to achieve by attempting to export extreme decadent values (i.e. Wahabism & Sharia law, LGTBQ, Neo-Nazism)?

  29. Nick Smith says:

    The brackets stuff is really, really beneath a forum of this quality.

  30. LeaNder says:

    thanks CE, have two annex files by now, both apparently largely connected to the content. None at first made sense as “the” annex I, I am looking for. On the other hand, seems like that is it. I only have a hard time to believe he seriously only offered these two sources as basis for polls: Forschungsgruppe Wahlen, ARD-DeutschlandTrend.
    Maybe there isn’t more to it???? … Although? …
    _Ukraine and Europe_germany_osf annex ii.rtf
    _Ukraine and Europe_germany_germany debate annex i.rtf
    … Don’t understand the notation in annex I:
    March 2014
    77 Against kicking Russia out of G8
    69/57 Against economic sanctions against Russia
    69 Don’t expect that Russia and west won’t be partners anymore for a long time
    58 EU and Germany should support Ukraine
    57 Crimea crisis is Ukraine’s fault
    56 Crimea crisis is Russia’s fault
    55/41 Against EU membership for Ukraine in some years/next years
    51/34 In favor of EU membership for Ukraine in some years/next years
    44 Only diplomatic means should be used against Russia (not sanctions)
    25 Expect that Russia and west won’t be partners anymore for a long time
    24/26/38 In favor of economic sanctions against Russia
    19 In favor of kicking Russia out of G8
    12 In favor of military support for Ukraine

    But yes, the time frame fits, since it ends here:
    February 2015
    89 Against supplying weapons to Ukraine
    70 Afraid that conflict between Russia and west will escalate
    65 Generally in favor of sanctions
    55 EU should counter Russia more decisively
    51 in favor of more sanctions
    41 EU shouldn’t counter Russia more decisively
    41 Against more sanctions
    31 Generally against sanctions

    take care.

  31. Will,
    It is necessary to understand Soros, as also others, in the context of long-standing arguments coming out of the new opportunities, and also new dangers, created for Jews by the Enlightenment.
    There were, and are, many different Jewish responses to these.
    Actually, that adopted by Soros has a great deal in common with that originally taken by his fellow Hungarian Jew, Arthur Koestler.
    In both cases, the initial impulse was an attempt to leap into a utopian future. In Koestler’s case, it was the utopian future promised by Marxism. In that of Soros, it was a certain kind of ‘Hapsburg liberalism’, as reworked by Sir Karl Popper.
    A difference is that Koestler came to realise his utopian future did not work – see his 1940 novel, ‘Darkness at Noon’. In relation to Soros, however, there has been a curious kind of ‘dual movement’.
    So, on the one hand, the ‘individualism’ of Popper’s liberalism has gone progressively bonkers (the crusade for the transgender toilet being only the most salient example.)
    On the other hand, the ‘backlash’ has been so long coming that it could be ignored. So the kind of intellectual crisis which was forced on Koestler has not yet materialised for Soros. And he is now too old to face it.
    That said, Soros is, at least, relatively consistent.
    So while he wants to see Israel survive, and has fellow-feeling for Jews there, he has tried to push the country’s inhabitants towards some kind of accommodation with the Arab population.
    What he does not represent is a position taken by many influential American and British Jews: which might be caricatured, using the terminology employed by ‘Lurker’, as: ‘Globalism’ for the ‘goyim’ – for the Jews, ‘globalism’ when it suits, ‘nationalism’ when it doesn’t.
    Another Jewish response, of course, was assimilation.
    And this is central to the tragedy of Jews in Germany: which lay quite precisely in the fact that so many very deeply identified with a culture which turned on them.
    In relation to Britain, however, the ‘assimilationist’ strand was, and has remained, very strong.
    However, in a way that creates its own problems.
    I sometimes think that the contemporary Jewish ‘community’ here is what is left, when most of the interesting Jews have ‘married out’.
    One does not read the ‘Jewish Chronicle’ for intellectual stimulation.

  32. b says:

    I have always regarded Soros as a high CIA asset or more of an operator. His open society is just like the NED, just feeding from different trough. You do not break the Bank of England without support of the U.S. deep state. That was the starter money of his operation.
    He is a dangerous man as a soon as his whole operation gets blown up as better.

  33. LeaNder says:

    (I am excepting the New World for a number of reasons that I could elaborate if asked.)
    should we ask him, Fred?
    Admittedly, I almost asked for clarification here:
    In North Africa, in India, in Vietnam – Western Diocletian Civilization failed to take root – even after a hundred years and multiple wars.
    Irony Alert:
    What about this paradigm: the Western Diocletian Civilization can only succeed outside the ‘diocletian line’ if settled completely by Diocletians, e.g. the Pilgrim Fathers in the “new world”. …
    Would that work for Israel too? Maybe, Babak will rule them out as pure Diocletians.
    But, the settlers have to be prepared to fight the indigenous people as Diocletian fought his own interior enemies, the Christians.

  34. turcopolier says:

    b
    The NED is not a CIA front. They have lots of those but the NED is not one of them. you need to stop fantasizing about the US. We are not the devil. We are not the evil country you and leaNder want to think us. This is a shame. You are a fine military analyst but you so much want to hate us. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Endowment_for_Democracy pl

  35. Fred says:

    LeaNder,
    Give modern jihadist Islam time and they’ll be happy to convert Mexico and Peru the same way their ancestors did North Africa. However they won’t have smallpox to kill off half the population while they are doing it and unlike leftists the Mexicans are going to fight just as hard as their ancestors did to maintain their way of life.

  36. ex-PFC Chuck says:

    Lurker
    You mention a “rapprochement between Netanyahu, Erdogan, [and] Putin.” According to John Helmer’s reporting from Moscow last week’s meeting between the latter two of these three was anything but. Virtually nothing was agreed upon. Nor does Erdogan appear to have given Putin any reason to believe that he has given up his Syria machinations. Below are links to Helmer’s long report on his Russia-focused news site and also an interview of him on The Real News Network that is about 15 minutes long.
    http://johnhelmer.net/?p=16253
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=02j7Vh8X5SQ&feature=youtu.be

  37. Skuppers says:

    Spot on as far as Soros goes.

  38. Doug Colwell says:

    I don’t remember the details but I’ve heard Soros described as a Rothschild asset. That was a while back, but seemed convincing at the time. Perhaps you know more.

  39. Tyler says:

    Mr. Habakkuk,
    You have, in your scholarly way, driven the hammer on the nail’s head.
    A lot of the antipathy towards Jews on the AR isn’t because of Hitler fetishism (the 14/88 crowd is regarded as a lot of try hards), but because of Jewish prog/marxist attitudes towards Western nations and their use of tikkun olam as a license to meddle.
    Specifically the fact that Israel gets a wall on the border, Israel gets to decide who is a citizen, but Western nations have to be open to the refuse of the world or else oy vey its another Shoah. Then when you start peeling back the layers of the onion, its another Jew like Barbara Spencer demanding that Western nations commit national suicide.

  40. Babak Makkinejad says:

    That is what King Leopold II was doing in Congo; murdering Africans in order to depopulate it for the Europeans; modeling himself after the settlers in Argentina, Uruguay and Chile.

  41. b says:

    /Allen Weinstein, who helped draft the legislation establishing NED, was quite candid when he said in 1991: “A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA.”/
    See:
    The CIA’s successors and collaborators
    US: overt and covert destabilisation
    http://mondediplo.com/2007/08/04ned
    Call it however you will. NED is builds and is financing groups the CIA then deploys for regime change. There is no cooperation between them? No CIA assets under the cover of NED operations? They are not pulling on the same string? I could probably list dozens of cases where they are.

  42. turcopolier says:

    b
    Yes, the different parts of the US government try however fitfully to carry out the same policies even if over decades. Does the German government not do that? Yes, the CIA has been used to support political parties, etc. that the US favored or favors. They probably still do but the NED was created to do that in a more open way. What is it about that concept that you object to? Are you upset that the USSR collapsed? The CIA’s support of anti-Soviet forces was a very useful thing in bringing down the USSR. I do not support the Obama Administration’s policies just about anywhere in the world. IMO the policy is neo-liberalism/neoconism writ large and the NED and CIA as well as the armed forces are being used as tools to support that policy. IMO your arguments would be more impressive if you were attacking the policy rather than the US as a country that you obviously hate. pl

  43. irf520 says:

    The US per se is not the problem – it’s the unipolarity that’s the problem. Any person, institution or state with no checks on its power and no serious opposition eventually develops a severe case of hubris.

  44. jld says:

    So the US policy is not “The US”?
    Then what is “The US”?

  45. LeaNder says:

    sorry, for the delay.
    I think I have elaborated elsewhere but let me try again. Netanyahu is Likud and Likud defines Israel as a Jewish state.
    Never be sure, anyone around here does or in fact can follow your elaboration. But now I understand where you are heading.
    Maybe I have problems from one point on, since my mental capacities aren’t big enough to wrap my head around everything as neatly as you would like me to?
    The neo liberals want to dissolve national borders with visa free travel (not just free flow of money), abolish sovereign currencies, abolish racism and gender bias, abolish sexual preference bias, terminate official religions. Promote supranational entities such as WB, IMF, NATO and “free” trade pacts such as NAFTA, TPP & TTIP.
    thanks for the answer, anyway.

  46. LeaNder says:

    I never got attracted to the ‘deliberate genocide via smallpox plankets” idea, Fred. But yes, I am aware of it.
    Beyond that I appreciate your warning, which I read somewhat like: Islam had the jihadist component from the start. But no, I did not seriously reflect this response.

  47. Babak Makkinejad says:

    There is a multi-religious war, disguising itself under various names.

  48. Babak Makkinejad says:

    Look no further than that man, Martin Buber, who chose to live in Israel. All his profound ideas on theology did not save him from his own willful tribalism.

  49. Lurker says:

    Thank you for these links. I appreciate Helmer’s insight into the meeting. I also read a cautious assessment from close sources to Erdogan like Ibrahim Karagul (read on from: the Atlantic is not the only center and keeping away from Asia is suicide)
    http://www.yenisafak.com/en/columns/ibrahimkaragul/petersburg-revenge-pkk-and-feto-striking-with-terrorism-2031101
    Yet, there are other analysts from Russia focused web sites like Katehon that give a different perspective from St. Petersburg meeting. They point of the rapid succession of technical meetings between Russian and Turkish officials, Turkish and Iranian and Turkish and Central Asian leaders after St. Petersburg.
    At stake is not only the end of Turkey’s support for the Turkmen and ex-Caucasus fighters in Syria and Central Asia but its exit from NATO and entry into SCO.
    Consider that Greece press released a picture of the US Ambassador in Turkey John Basse together with “the Turkish senior officer, who looks like one of the leaders of the coup Col. Ali Yazıcı (former military adviser to President Erdogan). They had a private meeting in Cengelkoy café the day before the coup.”
    It might appear that the Greeks are interested in driving further the wedge between NATO and Turkey. But the Greek Orthodox connection between Greece and Russia cannot be counted off.
    http://katehon.com/news/us-ambassador-met-coup-leader-day-upheaval
    Assad granted indefinite rights to the Russian Aerospace Defence Forces in Syria at the Hmeymim airbase at Latakia. Yet, Putin waited until the meeting with Erdogan in St. Petersburg to send the air base expansion project to the Duma. I find this very significant because Latakia is not too far from Incirlik from where most coup plotters came from.
    Furthermore, Zbigniew Brzezinskis tweeted a scorching condemnation of US involvement in the coup
    http://middleeastpress.com/english/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2016/08/Zbigniew-Brzezinskis-Tweet.png
    PCR writes: “Paul Craig Roberts
    If Turkey leaves NATO, that would be a big change. Turkey has been in the pockets of Washington for a long time. If Washington was behind the coup, this probably has damaged the relationship permanently. Erdogan has very strong motives to realign with Russia despite the problems he had caused. The Russian government has a very strong interest to overlook Turkey’s past behavior and to befriend it, because it weakens NATO on Russia’s borders.”
    And finally, once again the news from Yeni Safak. “It revealed information that the Guvercinlik First Army Aviation Regiment’s Maintenance Battalion Commander Lieutenant Colonel Murat Bolat told prosecutors that the US was ready to help them to assassinate Erdogan during the coup.
    “Americans were to provide the exact coordinates of Erdoğan, if the team was unable to find him in the hotel. They also said that up to four persons with civil dress have been tracking Erdoğan “, – the Turkish newspaper quotes the rebel.
    The same fact, that Erdogan’s newspaper attacks the US and NATO so fiercely corroborates that Turkish authorities are preparing for harsh anti-US moves, including leaving NATO. And they have a lot of the evidence of NATO’s involvement in the coup.”
    For practical purposes, Turkey is gone from NATO but it may take time or the US may try to apologize and bring them back into the fold by hook or by crook.

  50. Babak Makkinejad says:

    And how do you explain the unbridled enthusiasm of US allies in support of US policies; in Canada, Australia, Germany, France, UK, Spain, Denmark?

  51. b says:

    ” What is it about that concept that you object to? ”
    The policy concept of influencing foreign interior parties is a severe breach of the sovereignty principle of the Westphalian peace which demands non-intervention.
    It is not the U.S., or anyone’s business how internal politics here or there develop. There is no “universal mission” or whatever for the U.S. or anyone else to interfere in politics in Egypt, Germany, Bangladesh or elsewhere. It’s a breach of a basic tenant of international law and the U.S. is one of the most eager country to hold that part up when it comes to itself (see your own FARA application).
    I see any foreign organization that tries to influence interior policy finding processes in my country as hostile. Be it NEC, Soros, the CIA or some Russian shop. I do not mind RT, VOA or other foreign media as long as they are open about their finances and agenda and stick to the usual media codex. I am then free to avoid them.
    But silent payments (or in kind) to German organizations, politicians or media (like Soros gives) is deceit and nefarious. The use of camouflage organizations (see NED) is even worse. Both issues should be penalized under the criminal code such organizations completely banned from operating in my country.

  52. Tyler says:

    Nick,
    I’ll hold your purse while you go find somewhere to faint.

  53. turcopolier says:

    b
    “It is not the U.S., or anyone’s business how internal politics here or there develop.” That is such a childish, naive idea that I am incapable of dealing with it. You need to grow up. pl

  54. Tyler,
    This puts me in mind of two articles by Jewish journalists, both ironically published on the same day back in January.
    One, by Benjamin Schwarz in the ‘American Conservative’, was entitled: ‘Unmaking England: Will immigration demolish in decades a nation build over centuries?’ The other, by Gideon Rachman in the ‘Financial Times’, was headed: ‘‘Mass migration into Europe is unstoppable.’
    (The Schwarz article is at http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/unmaking-england/comment-page-1/#comments ; the Rachman piece is behind a subscription wall, but there is a discussion at http://www.breitbart.com/london/2016/01/12/financial-times-mass-immigration-is-here-to-stay-we-should-learn-to-accept-it/ .)
    In his discussion of Britain, Schwarz actually takes up where a more general piece he produced back in 1995 for the ‘Atlantic’, under the title ‘The Diversity Myth’, leaves off.
    Although I have some reservations about Schwarz’s analysis of this country – which I set out in the comments – he has done serious research, and provides I think some of the best dissection of the problems of ‘multiculturalism’ I have come across: a dissection acutely relevant to both parts of the ‘invade the world, invite the world’ syndrome.
    In relation to Rachman’s piece, what is actually most significant is the uniform hostility, indeed contempt, of the ‘most recommended’ comments.
    What is not raised, of course, is the question of whether Rachman’s being by origin a South African Jew is relevant to his arguments: these are matters which commenters on articles in the paper – who have to be subscribers – are unlikely to bring into the discussion.
    Unfortunately, the time when diplomacy was helpful is now clearly over.
    As it happens, Rachman’s Jewishness, and that of Schwarz, were very much in my mind when I read the two pieces.
    My responses were quite different. Learning that Schwarz had studied over here, I felt a tinge of regret that he had not stayed – he reminds me of very many Jewish immigrants from whom this country has benefited enormously in the past, a few of whom I knew personally.
    (At the risk of self-caricature, I might say I was attacked by a sneaking feeling: why didn’t Schwarz find himself – or get snapped up by – a nice English or Welsh girl, and settle down?)
    As to Rachman, my fundamental response, if I had produced a comment which said candidly what I thought, would have been something close to unprintable. But, mildly censoring it, it might have read as follows:
    1. This does seem to be a sad case of the failure of the British educational system. It is clear that you have absolutely no ability to imagine what the ‘Third Worldisation’ of Britain might mean, when it spread from places like Rotherham, about which you are too incurious, and snobbish, to find out, to locations nearer home;
    2. Why the hell in any case should you give a damn about what happens to the traditional culture of Britain – it isn’t your culture (why don’t you go to New York, for God’s sake? – you wouldn’t like it in Israel);
    3. You write: ‘The current migration crisis is driven by wars in the Middle East.’
    But I recall another article you wrote, in which you explained how to people like you it seemed obvious that all those who opposed the invasion of Iraq were like Jeremy Corbyn.
    Again, this seems to me another instance that with you the British educational system failed – in that anyone who was interested in evidence could see that a lot of people, like myself, who opposed the war did so for reasons which had nothing to do with left-wing ‘anti-imperialist’ enthusiasms.
    4. At the time, it seemed to me all-too-likely that you and many other Jews supported the war because – again manifesting the failure of the British educational system – you had the delusional belief that ‘democratisation’ in the Middle East would provide a magical answer to the probably insoluble security problems of a Jewish settler state in the region;
    5. But, given that you were promptly shown to be drivelling, and in essence to have fallen into a trap laid by Ahmed Chalabi, why can’t you wise up?
    Instead, all these years later, the ‘FT’ is trotting out Richard C. Haass, Ivo Daalder, Dennis Ross, Uncle Tom Cobbleigh and all, talking gibberish about ‘moderate Islamists’ in Syria;
    6. Why are you so determined to convince people like me that the old ‘anti-semites’, whom we so despised, who insisted that Jews could never be unequivocally loyal to a non-Jewish polity, had a point?
    We knew this was not true, because we had seen so many people of ethnic Jewish origin – both from long-established Anglo-Jewish families, and immigrants – in relation to whom it patently was not.
    Few groups of people, indeed, could have been more diverse: in religious belief, lack of it, political conviction, among other things. And this was one of the things which made them so interesting.
    But then, perhaps, the ‘shiksas’ – to use a phrase from John Podhoretz – snapped up most of the interesting Jewish men, leaving a ‘Jewish community’ for which ‘Israel right or wrong’ is a fundamental marker of identity.
    (And which is good at making money, writing articles in newspapers, creating computer programmes, producing films, and quite a few other things, but completely out of its depth in matters to do with foreign and security policy.)
    What I have been hoping is that recent events will drive some sense into the heads of people like Rachman.
    However, it has to be said that the omens are not good.
    What I see in ‘liberal’ Jewish publications in the U.S., and also to a considerable degree here, is a ‘circling of the wagons’ around Israel and Zionism. This seems to be true, not simply of the ‘New York Times’, but of the ‘New York Review of Books’.
    As to the ‘Atlantic’, it seems symptomatic that, in 2013, Benjamin Schwarz left the magazine, and moved to the ‘American Conservative’.
    Among their star correspondents, it seems, is Jeffrey Goldberg.
    Now, there you really do have a case of the failure of the American educational system. And then, as an incitement to anti-Semitism …

  55. Lurker says:

    You may want to read this:
    Tue Aug 16, 2016 12:30
    Turkey Readying to Join Iran-Russia Front after U-Turn in Syria Policy
    http://en.farsnews.com/newstext.aspx?nn=13950526000251

  56. b says:

    “That is such a childish, naive idea”
    It is so childish that you insist on it whenever Israel mixes itself into U.S. policies.

  57. turcopolier says:

    b
    This is not some child’s graduate school debate. It is not a game. Each country must protect itself weighing up pluses and minuses as the Israelis do. I am an American and a Canadian and I want my countries to win whatever there is to be had. pl

  58. Fred says:

    LeaNder,
    Nice try with the genocide bait. Sounds like cultural guilt, feel free to keep it. If you are truly this ignorant of the spread of smallpox in the Americas among a native population with zero previous exposure to the disease then I recommend some research.

  59. Tyler says:

    Mr. Habakkuk,
    I have nothing to add, I just want to let you know I read your exposition and appreciate you taking the time to share it with me.

  60. jld says:

    Yup, the promoters of Westphalian peace were bumbling idiots, we have now a much much “shinier” prize worthy of fighting, win a nuclear war…

  61. b says:

    “I want my countries to win whatever there is to be had”
    Your expression of unabashed American supremacism – no surprise there.
    But I reject such just as much as I reject German supremacism. I am more inclined to argue for equality between nations and, derived from that, international legality.
    I also believe that you have to make serious bends in catholic philosophy to bring that view into conformity with the sermon of the mount and other basic catholic teachings. What medieval author supports such line?

  62. turcopolier says:

    b
    Wanting your country to win translates for you as “American supremacism?” It seems to me that you believe you are living in some sort of “post historical” world a la Fukuyama. You Europeans have tried to construct what is basically a continent without borders. That vision is falling apart. That must be difficult for you. pl

  63. jld says:

    🙂
    I have no doubt you are entirely sincere in your feelings but may be you should pay more attention to the fact that from the outside, i.e. for nearly every non-american, THIS is American supremacism and no matter how you think this view is misguided you cannot ignore it.

  64. turcopolier says:

    jld
    Don’t talk down to me, jackass. I have spent my life dealing with soreheads like you all over the world while at the same time trying to explain to my countrymen that we should be nicer to you. Your resentment of “American supremacism” is the result of your unhappiness at not being on top. pl

  65. b says:

    It is ot “wanting to win” that is problematic, its is the “whatever there is to be had”. That’s limitless, and dangerous.
    Crimea was to be had? Stalingrad was to be had? Your country gave the first a try recently and lost. My the second, long ago, and lost. One shouldn’t try such but acknowledge there a lots of things not to be had.
    As for an United Europe – its a long term U.S. project, was started by the CIA in 1948. Bad idea in my view,bad even for the U.S.
    It could have probably worked if it were restricted to the borders of the Carlemagne empire.
    But the inclusion of everyone, especially the eastern countries, was destined to fail. The Poles are nutty nationalists, always were. The Balitics are fascists. Hungary and Czechia fit somewhat in, what’s souths/east of that not. Britain is a no no. A U.S.mole that screws up every senisble idea. Hope they leave. A good precedent to get rid of some others.

  66. turcopolier says:

    b
    Whatever is to be had does not mean at any cost. My language was clumsy. I have made it clear by my actions in the real world that I do not think the end justifies the means. “a long term U.S. project, was started by the CIA in 1948.” Yes. A united Europe was a long term US projects. There is no doubt but your obsession with CIA is nuts. Don’t you think the rest of the US government does anything? pl

  67. Jack says:

    David
    IMO, its not really a failure of educational systems but an evolution of cultural precepts and the resulting groupthink. That in a recursive algorithm has modified the academic environment. The elites in the west have disassociated themselves from their countrymen and have developed a narrow set of relationships among themselves. Some what analogous to the caste system in India. The “priestly” caste of western elites are developing a post-national ethos best epitomized by Davos Man. Many people of Jewish association due to their outsized role in finance, media and academia have dominated the shaping of the current groupthink. They have bought into the thesis of Israel as the bulwark of civilization in the Middle East surrounded by savages.
    There is a certain amount of cognitive dissonance building both politically and financially. Euro-skeptic parties are gathering strength on the continent as the euphoria around the Euro fades and the more recent consequences of mass immigration. Brexit was a perfect example of a shock. Similarly, one is seeing the outcomes of extraordinary monetary policies that force even more extreme policies as the apparatchiks can’t countenance failure. One sees this argument that unlimited spending and borrowing in a sovereign currency is benign among the cognoscenti. The suppression of financial volatility and the the increasing trajectory of credit growth and backstops of “moneyness” of financial instruments.
    When this gathering intensity in cultural “mood” is coupled with ferocity with which the elites are maintaining their delusions there is a potent cocktail brewing. Neil Howe’s generational cycles provide a very interesting context to view the landscape.

  68. YT says:

    Good Lord.
    I feel sorry for the entire world already.
    After soros senior FOAD, there’s still junior to contend with…

  69. Jack,
    I do not disagree with any of that, and clearly could usefully look further at Neil Howe, and ‘generational cycles.’
    My remark about ‘failure of the British educational system’ was in part a bad joke. But there was also a specific British context, which may be relevant to ‘generational cycles’.
    Like me, Gideon Rachman is a product of the Cambridge history school – although he graduated with a first, and I a lower second! It was also in substantial measure out of a strand in Cambridge history – associated with a college called Peterhouse and a figure called Maurice Cowling – that the ‘Henry Jackson Society’ emerged. As I noted in an earlier comment, this organisation, founded in 2005, is a central organisation of ‘neoconservatism’ in Britain.
    According to its ‘Statement of Principles’, the HJS:
    ‘Believes that only modern liberal democratic states are truly legitimate, and that the political or human rights pronouncements of any international or regional organisation which admits undemocratic states lack the legitimacy to which they would be entitled if all their members were democracies.’
    (See http://henryjacksonsociety.org/about-the-society/statement-of-principles/ .)
    The old sub-editor in me winces at the ambiguity. To say a state is ‘legitimate’ or ‘illegitimate’ can either mean that those subjected to its rule do, or do not, accept it as so – or that they should, or should not, accept it as so. If it is the former, it is clearly false.
    If the latter – then it seems likely that an implicit premise is that ‘liberal democratic’ government is a feasible possibility for everyone everywhere. Unless this is a credible premise, a question arises is whether what we have is indeed an ‘Empire of Chaos’.
    In January 2007, Gideon Rachman published a piece in the FT, under the title ‘How Iraq and climate change threw the right into disarray’, which in my view brings into sharp relief the relation between this delusional mindset and the events of the ‘Eighties.
    (See https://www.ft.com/content/2ebaf5d0-aa55-11db-83b0-0000779e2340 .)
    Two excerpts:
    ‘Most people’s first reactions to new political issues are instinctive. In 2003, the kind of people going on anti-war marches – or warning of impending climate doom – looked to many right-wingers like the same people who had been wrong about everything else for the past 25 years. They were the people warning the world was running out of oil in the 1970s; who opposed privatisation in the 1980s and marched against the first Gulf war in 1991. They were the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament crowd; the “East Germany has solved the housing problem” crowd; the “we are all going to die of mad-cow disease” crowd. They were earnest men in cardigans and fierce women in sensible shoes.
    ‘The thought that these people could be right about anything was frankly intolerable. But, in fact, they were right about two things: global warming and Iraq …
    ‘The Iraq debacle also cuts away at the intellectual and moral self-confidence of the right. The Reagan-Thatcher approach to the world was founded on an unapologetic belief in military strength and an unhesitant confidence in the moral superiority of western democracy. When the cold war was won in 1989, the right embraced an exuberant universalism. The cheering crowds in Prague and the Baltic states – and even the martyred students of Tiananmen Square – seemed like clinching evidence that all men do indeed desire the same things, and that a western formula for freedom and prosperity is infinitely exportable.’
    I won’t go in detail into the tissue of dubious judgements and non-sequiturs in this passage.
    The reference to CND brings back ironic memories.
    Back in the ‘Eighties, I was deeply suspicious about CND, in large measure because most of its members were socialists. And I also uncritically accepted the conventional wisdom according to which generational change in the Soviet leadership was not likely to produce radical policy change.
    A ‘blast from the past’, recently was discovering that a man called Stephen Shenfield had published a book on Kindle, ‘Stories of a Soviet Studier.’ Not only was a socialist when I met him back all those years ago – as was amply clear from his website, he still is.
    (See http://stephenshenfield.net/ .)
    As a result of his work in CND, Shenfield became involved from 1983 on in contacts with two Soviet academics, Colonel Viktor Girshfeld and Fyodor Burlatsky. When he published Girshfeld’s thoughts about a radical revision of the Soviet security policy the following year, and subsequently, he was, predictably, dismissed as the conduit for a ‘disinformation operation.’
    Subsequently, it was a magazine with which he was closely involved, ‘Detente’, which covered extensively the work of Soviet military reformers like Andrei Kokoshin and Valentin Larionov.
    At the time, both the intellectual heirs of ‘Scoop’ Jackson – like Perle and Wolfowitz – and also ‘mainstream’ British figures, like Lawrence – now Sir Lawrence – Freedman – patently had not the first idea what to make of Gorbachev’s ‘new thinking’.
    Another ‘blast from the past’ was reading a memorandum by Freedman which provided much of the intellectual basis for the advocacy of ‘humanitarian interventionism’ by Tony Blair – himself a former CND member – in his speech at the Chicago Economic Club in April 1999.
    (See http://www.iraqinquiry.org.uk/media/96209/1999-04-16-Memo-Freedman-to-Powell.pdf .)
    As it happened, being then a rather conventional Cold War liberal, I used Freedman as a presenter on a special programme a colleague and I made on European security in 1986 – we also had Perle on a satellite link.
    I was grimly amused by the following statement:
    ‘As we address world problems, at the NATO summit and G8 meetings, we might be tempted to think back to the clarity and simplicity of the cold war. There were arguments about the right strategy to adopt to contain the Soviet threat but the threat itself was well understood.’
    An ironic consequence of the collapse of socialist ‘narratives’ in the ‘Eighties is that people like Freedman can get away with lying. If ‘the threat itself was well understood’, then the liquidation of that threat ought to have been better understood.
    I was also grimly amused to learn that the novelist Saul Bellow wrote in the ‘National Interest’ in 1993 that he absorbed Marxism ‘in the high-chair while eating my mashed potatoes’.
    (See http://myemail.constantcontact.com/The-Leftists-Who-Turned-Right–book-review-.html?soid=1114009586911&aid=KiblNpPQY3c .)
    Perhaps I could say that in my own high chair, I imbibed the comprehensive contempt which comprehensive contempt which the old ‘Lib-Lab’ tradition in Britain had for communists of any stripe.
    As it happens, ‘unintended consequences’ were always at the core of a liberal critique of what the late Sir Karl Popper called ‘utopian social engineering.’ It is ironic that I now find myself concerned, as much as anything, with dangers which may arise, as a result of the predisposition of erstwhile ‘leftists’ of various kinds, to treat the Cold War in terms of ‘clarity and simplicity’.
    And there is a further irony. Both Freedman, and Shenfield, came from families of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe – and both started out as leftists (about Freedman, I am in a position to know, as we have mutual friends.)
    But people from similar backgrounds take different paths. So Freedman, who is fundamentally a careerist, and also a Zionist, got the end of the Cold War completely wrong. He ended up as a Privy Councillor, ‘The Right Honourable Sir Lawrence David Freedman, KCMG, CBE, FBA.’
    By contrast, Stephen Shenfield, who correctly anticipated radical change in the Soviet Union, had difficulty finding academic jobs, and ended up in the United States. He also restates one traditional response to the opportunities and dangers faced by Jews as a result of the Enlightenment: he is a left-wing, anti-Zionist, universalist.
    As such, there is a good deal in what he writes with which I would agree, and much with which I would disagree.
    But a real irony is that, whatever our disagreements, I think him a man of honour (although he might well regard that as an old-fashioned value.)
    In sharp contrast, I do not think that either Gideon Rachman or Lawrence Freedman have any sense of honour, worth speaking of, at all. As to the ‘Henry Jackson Society’ – I think the ‘Peterhouse right’ in Cambridge had a strong streak of rascality, which has now run out of control.

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