As journalist George Monbiot writes, imperialism did not disappear; today it is called international law. As he also points out, ”Although the crime of aggression has been recognized in international law since 1945, there is still no jurisdiction over” what he describes as ”the supreme crime.” This is because the powerful nations, for obvious reasons, have delayed its implementation. Neither the United Kingdom, the United States, nor any other Western countries have incorporated the crime of aggression into their domestic legislation.
International law remains an imperialist project in which only crimes committed by vassal states are punished.
Modern imperialism is the United States. The United States uses economic, cultural, and military influence to accumulate wealth and power, doing so to advance the interests of large-scale business interests and banks. For example, some banks provide excessive loans to other countries while claiming to promote economic growth and development. However, these developing countries become heavily indebted, are unable to repay their debts, and consequently become vulnerable. This is a well-known phenomenon, particularly in Central and South America, as well as in Africa. These developing countries are then stripped of their natural resources and, in some cases, even of their land itself. This type of policy lies at the heart of imperialism, using economic, military, or cultural influence to effectively take control of or assimilate a country into the empire.
Two excellent books to read in order to gain a deeper understanding of the systematic violence carried out by the Anglo-American Empire are The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II by the historian and Pulitzer Prize winner John W. Dower, and Washington Rules: America’s Path to Permanent War by the historian Andrew Bacevich.
The fact that the economic corruption of the IMF and the World Bank has systematically caused the deaths of millions of people (in addition to the hundreds of millions whom globalization is claimed to have killed economically) in what is described here as a form of economic extermination, while also providing economic support to several dictatorships, is not something we like to talk about today. In recent years, the United States has also acknowledged that the IMF and the World Bank are instruments of U.S. national power (Chapter 2, ”Financial Instrument of U.S. National Power and Unconventional Warfare,” in the U.S. military document FM 3-05.130).
This economically driven, deliberate destruction is argued to include the additional large number of victims claimed by all the illegal and manipulated wars waged by the Anglo-American Empire (approximately 20 million deaths since the Second World War). It is further argued that the deaths of hundreds of millions more must be taken into account when considering countries subjected to globalization whose economies were destroyed or denied the right to restructure in order to provide for their citizens. According to this perspective, this was the result of Western imperialist capitalism from 1945 to 1990 (Mark Curtis, Unpeople (2004), and J. W. Smith, Economic Democracy (2005)).
In the nineteenth century, there were not yet the active journalists, researchers, and individuals who traced networks of power and studied elites in the way that began during the twentieth century, as Gustavus Myers, Matthew Josephson, Louis Brandeis, Ferdinand Lundberg, and others later did. However, as I mentioned earlier, there were isolated individuals and politicians with insider knowledge who, already in the nineteenth century, spoke about the economic conspiracies and interests of banks and about elite societies exercising control over governments.
Today, everything has become more fully institutionalized, and the ruling class has become conscious of the clear constraints within which it must operate and which it must work around and accept. During the period when journalists such as Ferdinand Lundberg were studying power, the structures within the system were still relatively recent, and there were many connections that could be traced, as well as ongoing processes of institutional formation. At that time, it was possible to follow an extraordinary number of connections and observe developments in a more scientific manner.
In today’s world, such connections are more difficult to detect. Only a small number of political researchers have any realistic opportunity to study elite networks, and even within that field there are varying levels of expertise and different understandings of what is actually being studied. Most researchers, according to this perspective, lack a full grasp of the historical significance and background of these elite networks.
Today, we have a more fully developed, gigantic, and highly sophisticated system that has been built up in the United States, with global networks whose origins can be traced back to the time of John D. Rockefeller. This system is tangible and observable, but its connections can no longer be traced as easily as before for various reasons, since the more open processes of institutional formation are no longer as visible.
The level of expertise among academics—who, according to this perspective, have for many years been subjected to social control and taught how they are expected to think—has declined. It is also no longer as easy to pursue an academic career focused on studying power, partly because the system has become more adept at concealing itself.
What is, however, continually studied today—even if it sometimes takes years before new research emerges that succeeds in uncovering additional connections—is the activities of think tanks, various economic interests, war elites, and globalist elite networks.
As Laurence H. Shoup writes in Imperial Brain Trust: The Council on Foreign Relations and United States Foreign Policy:
”As the New York Times put it, ’Except for its annual public Elihu Root Lectures, the Council’s discussions and seminars are strictly off the record. An indiscretion can be grounds for dismissal or termination of membership.’ Despite this deliberate secrecy, it is possible to discover something about what the Council is and what it does. By piecing together information from many sources and searching for references to the Council’s activities in government archives, we have assembled a picture of the Council’s inner workings and significance. Our conclusions challenge the conventional interpretations of policymaking as being dispersed among a wide variety of groups and elites. In contrast to this view, we demonstrate the leading role played by the Council on Foreign Relations and the social sector it represents—the corporate upper class. We believe that the process itself is not only undemocratic, but that its outcomes have been, and continue to be, contrary to the interests of both the majority of the American people and the rest of the world’s population.”
The economist, historian, and political theorist Murray N. Rothbard employed a power-political analysis to examine the relationship between money, power, and war. Rothbard argued that wealthy elites can manipulate world affairs only through their connections with state power. In Wall Street, Banks, and American Foreign Policy (1984), he presents detailed accounts of how a network of banks, bond dealers, and Wall Street insiders both supported wars and profited from them. Rothbard maintained that world affairs are not random historical processes but rather the consequences of choices and paths taken by real people.
Rothbard embraced ”historical revisionism” as an antidote to what he regarded as the dominant influence exercised by corrupt ”court intellectuals” over mainstream historical narratives. He wrote that these mainstream intellectuals distorted the historical record in favor of ”the State” in exchange for ”wealth, power, and prestige” from the State. Rothbard characterized the revisionist task as ”piercing through the fog of lies and deception spread by the State and its court intellectuals and presenting the public with the true history.”
Rothbard’s history of the Federal Reserve described the role of a new intellectual class, without which, he argued, the banking system could not have succeeded. For Rothbard, the system that persuaded the American public to accept the Federal Reserve represented a ”new alliance between State and Opinion-Molders”—a ”partnership between government, business leaders, intellectuals, and experts.” Within this alliance, the intellectual served two functions: ”(a) to help shape and plan the new statist system; and (b) to justify the new order.” If historians themselves were part of this intellectual class that helped establish the Federal Reserve, Rothbard argued, it is not surprising that the interests of the Morgan and Rockefeller families are not widely understood today.
In The Case Against the Fed, Rothbard also rejected the traditional academic aversion to what is often called the ”historical conspiracy theory.” The issue, he argued, was ”not some sort of ’theory of history,’ but simply a willingness to use common sense. All the analyst or historian has to do is assume, as a hypothesis, that people in government or in lobbying groups for government policies may have at least as much self-interest and desire for profit as people in business or ordinary life, and then examine the significant and revealing patterns that will appear before his eyes.”
For Rothbard, the most significant pattern was not so much Democrats versus Republicans, but rather the rivalry or conflict between the Morgan family and its allies on one side and the Rockefeller alliance on the other. According to Rothbard, historians who were unwilling to question the true nature of the Federal Reserve failed to recognize the significance of the Morgan–Rockefeller model because they were not ”equipped for an analysis of the power elite or the ruling class.” As a result, established historians continued to focus on the traditional—but officially accepted—frameworks of interpretation, such as superficial party divisions.
One of the best-known economists in the United States in modern times has been sharply critical of the Federal Reserve System. Joseph Stiglitz—former Chief Economist of the World Bank and a Nobel Prize laureate in Economic Sciences—said at a conference at the Roosevelt Institute in 2010 that the structure of the Federal Reserve System is so riddled with conflicts of interest that it is corrupt and undermines democracy. Stiglitz emphasized that the Federal Reserve Banks have clear conflicts of interest because they are largely governed by boards that include executives from the very banks they are supposed to oversee.
Some books recommended for those who want to gain a better understanding of economics are:
- Fragile by Design by Charles Calomiris
- Money by Felix Martin
- The Nature of Money by Geoffrey Ingham
- Money Free and Unfree by George Selgin
- The End of Alchemy by Mervyn King
- Paper Promises: Money, Debt and the New World Order by Philip Coggan
- Gentlemen Bankers: The World of J. P. Morgan by Susie J. Pak
- The Economy as a System of Power: Corporate Powers, Vol. 2 by Warren J. Samuels
- History of Money and Banking in the United States by Murray N. Rothbard
- Economic Democracy by J. W. Smith
- The Blood Bankers by James S. Henry
- Wall Street: A History by Charles R. Geisst
- Web of Debt by Ellen Hodgson Brown
- Banking on the People: Democratizing Money in the Digital Age by Ellen Hodgson Brown
The world’s democratic ideologies emerged as a result of powerful eugenic interests that shaped the visible and falsely democratic system of government in the United States, which is not a pure democracy but is heavily controlled by financial interests. As the American politician William Jennings Bryan wrote in 1924, there exists an invisible government that, through Wall Street, exerts great influence over both political parties—a view that, according to this account, has in modern times been confirmed by insider and former U.S. congressional staff member Mike Lofgren.
Although genuine democratic processes have been shown to exist to some extent in the United States, this perspective holds that it is a weak form of democracy that is scientifically and economically controlled and serves as a cover for the real power structure, which is described as a form of scientific fascism shaped by a racially oriented, higher-level conspiratorial imperialist class with an iron grip on the major banks and the central bank, which it privately owns.
As President Kennedy explained, it is a system—which today is referred to as a deep political system—that, according to Kennedy, combines diplomatic, economic, scientific, military, intelligence, and political operations through covert means in order, in Kennedy’s words, to manipulate politics globally through conspiracy. Kennedy described it as the greatest threat to the freedom of the world and promised that he would use every means at his disposal to fight it shortly before he was assassinated.
Kennedy said in 1961:
”The very word ’secrecy’ is repugnant in a free and open society; and we are, as a people, inherently and historically opposed to secret societies, to secret oaths and to secret proceedings. We decided long ago that the dangers of excessive and unwarranted concealment of pertinent facts far outweighed the dangers which are cited to justify it.
Today, no war has been declared—and however fierce the struggle may be, it may never be declared in the traditional fashion. Our way of life is under attack. Those who make themselves our enemy are advancing around the globe. The survival of our friends is in danger. And yet no war has been declared, no borders have been crossed by marching troops, no missiles have been fired. …
Today, there is little value in opposing the threat of a closed society by imitating its arbitrary restrictions. Today, there is little value in ensuring the survival of our nation if our traditions do not survive with it. And there is very grave danger that an announced need for increased security will be seized upon by those anxious to expand its meaning to the very limits of official censorship and concealment. That I do not intend to permit to the extent that it is in my control. …”
”If you are waiting for a finding of ’clear and present danger,’ then I can only say that the danger has never been more clear and its presence has never been more imminent. . . . For we are opposed around the world by a monolithic and ruthless conspiracy that relies primarily on covert means for expanding its sphere of influence—on infiltration instead of invasion, on subversion instead of elections, on intimidation instead of free choice, on guerrillas by night instead of armies by day.
It is a system which has conscripted vast human and material resources into the building of a tightly knit, highly efficient machine that combines military, diplomatic, intelligence, economic, scientific and political operations. Its preparations are concealed, not published. Its mistakes are buried, not headlined. Its dissenters are silenced, not praised. No expenditure is questioned, no rumor is printed, no secret is revealed. It conducts the Cold War, in short, with a war-time discipline which no democracy would ever hope or wish to match. . . . This is a time of peace and peril which knows no equal in history.”
Kennedy was absolutely right in his warning that this system of the fascist cabal in the United States constituted a clear and present danger, and that the danger had never been clearer nor its presence more imminent. The ”deep state” was defined by the British newsletter On Religion as ”the entrenched anti-democratic power structures within a government, something that very few democracies can claim to be free from.” The term originated in Turkey in 1996 to refer to U.S.-backed elements, primarily within the intelligence services and the military, that repeatedly used violence to interfere with and shape Turkey’s democratic political process.
Since the end of the Second World War, a kind of racial-biological ideology concerning the blamelessness, deeper perfection, and superior ideological, social, and moral value of the white democrat in the Western world has gradually crept into the minds of most people, though without directly transforming the white population of the West, on the whole, into overtly racist or hate-driven ideological extremists, even if a great deal of hatred emerges during periods of heightened confusion, such as in times of war.
Rather, it is more a matter of an apologetic mentality in the Western world and a sense of possessing a higher science—a belief in the more sophisticated, civilized, and blameless human being, namely the predominantly white democrats of the Western world—who, together, have attained a higher scientific truth about how the world ought to function according to their way of thinking, and to which others should conform.
The minds of the white populations of the Western world have, in effect, scanned a racial-biological barcode of information from the ruling race-hygienic class in the United States, which, through its institutes and think tanks, has indoctrinated the democracies of the Western world and taught us that we can only accept that white communists in Russia may behave uncivilized in our modern world, along with people from Arab countries in the Middle East and people from countries in Latin America and Africa, where the United States has always had a hidden hand and has caused most of the unrest.
To defend against these mostly fabricated threats, efforts have actively been made to persuade and deceive the Western world into joining an international military system referred to as the New World Order. Under this system, all democracies in the Western world are expected to follow the ”greatest democracy,” which supposedly knows best, and to transfer their military powers, structures, and authorities to an international system of global military governance in an undemocratic manner.
As Anne-Marie Slaughter says in her own words, the New World Order is already here, and she asks us to completely rethink how we view the political world. It is not a collection of nation-states communicating through presidents, prime ministers, foreign ministers, and the United Nations. Nor is it a coterie of non-governmental organizations. According to Anne-Marie Slaughter’s academic evidence and insider information, it is governance through a complex global web of ”government networks.”
However, this New World Order has not succeeded in achieving the degree of control over the world’s military structures and authorities that it had previously sought, which has outwardly been presented as the primary objective whenever the term ”New World Order” has been used.
George H.W. Bush stated in a 1992 report (Executive Research Project A25, China’s Response to the ”New World Order”) that the United States should take the lead in the New World Order and establish a new international system. Laurence H. Shoup writes in the book Imperial Brain Trust about the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) that the CFR regarded it as its task to draft a blueprint for a new world order once the Second World War had begun: ”The Council’s leaders believed it was necessary to sketch a blueprint for a new world order and that this was precisely the kind of undertaking the Council had been created to carry out.”
According to the text, the imperialists of the New World Order consider democracy to be harmful and detrimental to imperial expansion, as Zbigniew Brzezinski writes in his book The Grand Chessboard, which the text describes as being very similar to the neoconservative PNAC document Rebuilding America’s Defenses, since it is fundamentally presented as a blueprint for American global hegemony or imperialism. Brzezinski argues that in a fully functioning democracy, only a truly massive and widely perceived direct external threat can make the American public willing to make sacrifices for ”imperial mobilization.”
The struggle during the twentieth century, Part 2 – International law as an imperialist project
