{"id":110435,"date":"2018-05-07T12:00:42","date_gmt":"2018-05-07T11:00:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=110435"},"modified":"2018-05-07T12:59:04","modified_gmt":"2018-05-07T11:59:04","slug":"turning-on-russia-part-1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2018\/05\/turning-on-russia-part-1\/","title":{"rendered":"Turning on Russia (Part 1)"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

Read Part 2<\/a><\/h2>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The Origins of the Neoconservative Targeting of Russia<\/em><\/p>\n

29 Apr 2018 – <\/em>The German newsmagazine Der Spiegel<\/em> last September reported<\/a> that, \u201cStanley Fischer, the 73\u2013year-old vice chair of the U.S. Federal Reserve, is familiar with the decline of the world\u2019s rich. He spent his childhood and youth in the British protectorate of Rhodesia\u2026 before going to London in the early 1960s for his university studies. There, he experienced first-hand the unravelling of the British Empire\u2026 Now an American citizen, Fischer is currently witnessing another major power taking its leave of the world stage\u2026 the United States is losing its status as a global hegemonic power, he said recently\u2026 The U.S. political system could take the world in a very dangerous direction\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n

With the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the creation of the so called Wolfowitz Doctrine in 1992 during the administration of George Herbert Walker Bush, the United States claimed the mantle of the world\u2019s first and only Unipower with the intention of crushing any nation or system that would oppose it in the future. The New World Order, foreseen just a few short years ago, becomes more disorderly by the day, made worse by varying degrees of incompetence and greed emanating from Berlin, London, Paris and Washington.<\/p>\n

As a further sign of the ongoing seismic shocks rocking America\u2019s claim to leadership, by the time Fischer\u2019s interview appeared in the online version of the Der Spiegel<\/em>, he had already announced his resignation as vice chair of the Federal Reserve\u2014eight months ahead of schedule. If anyone knows about the decline and fall of empires it is the \u201cglobalist\u201d and former Bank of Israel president, Stanley Fischer. Not only did he experience the unravelling of the British Empire as a young student in London, he directly assisted in the wholesale dismantling of the Soviet Empire during the 1990s.<\/p>\n

As an admitted product of the British Empire and point man for its long term imperial aims, that makes Fischer not just empire\u2019s Angel of Death, but its rag and bone man.<\/p>\n

Alongside a handful of Harvard economists led by Jonathan Hay, Larry Summers, Andrei Shleifer,\u00a0and Jeffry Sachs, in the \u201cHarvard Project,\u201d plus Anatoly Chubais, the chief Russian economic adviser, Fischer helped throw 100 million Russians into poverty overnight \u2013 privatizing, or as some would say piratizing \u2013 the Russian economy. Yet, Americans never got the real story because a slanted anti-Russia narrative covered the true nature of the robbery from beginning to end.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Jackson: Neocon founding father<\/p><\/div>\n

As described by public policy scholar and anthropologist Janine R. Wedel in her 2009 book Shadow Elite: <\/em>\u201cPresented in the West as a fight between enlightenment Reformers trying to move the economy forward through privatization, and retrograde Luddites who opposed them, this story misrepresented the facts. The idea or goal of privatization was not controversial, even among communists\u2026 the Russian Supreme Soviet, a communist body, passed two laws laying the groundwork for privatization. Opposition to privatization was rooted not in the idea itself but in the particular<\/em> privatization program that was implemented, the opaque way in which it was put into place, and the use of executive authority to bypass the parliament.\u201d<\/p>\n

Intentionally set up to fail for Russia and the Russian people under the cover of a false narrative, she continues \u201cThe outcome rendered privatization \u2018a de facto fraud,\u2019 as one economist put it, and the parliamentary committee that had judged the Chubais scheme to \u2018offer fertile ground for criminal activity\u2019 was proven right.\u201d<\/p>\n

If Fischer, a man who helped bring about a de facto criminal-privatization-fraud to post-empire Russia says the U.S. is on a dangerous course, the time has arrived for post-empire Americans to ask what role he played in putting the U.S. on that dangerous course. Little known to Americans is the blunt force trauma Fischer and the \u201cprestigious\u201d Harvard Project delivered to Russia under the leadership of Boris Yeltsin during the 1990s. According to The American Conservative\u2019s<\/em> James Carden<\/a> \u201cAs the Center for Economic and Policy Research noted<\/a> back in 2011\u2026 \u2018the IMF\u2019s intervention in Russia during Fischer\u2019s tenure led to one of the worst losses in output in history, in the absence of war or natural disaster.\u2019 Indeed, one Russian observer compared the economic and social consequences of the IMF\u2019s intervention to what one would see in the aftermath of a medium-level nuclear attack.\u201d<\/p>\n

Neither do most Americans know that it was President Jimmy Carter\u2019s national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski\u2019s 1970s grand plan for the conquest of the Eurasian heartland that boomeranged to terrorize Europe and America in the 21st<\/sup> century. Brzezinski spent much of his life undermining the Communist Soviet Union and then spent the rest of it worrying about its resurgence as a Czarist empire under Vladimir Putin. It might be unfair to say that hating Russia was his only obsession. But a common inside joke during his tenure as the President\u2019s top national security officer was that he couldn\u2019t find Nicaragua on a map.<\/p>\n

If anyone provided the blueprint for the United States to rule in a unipolar world following the Soviet Union\u2019s collapse it was Brzezinski. And if anyone could be said to represent the debt driven financial system that fueled America\u2019s post-Vietnam Imperialism, it\u2019s Fischer. His departure should have sent a chill down every neoconservative\u2019s spine. Their dream of a New World Order has once again ground to a halt at the gates of Moscow.<\/p>\n

Whenever the epitaph for the abbreviated American century is written it will be sure to feature the iconic role the neoconservatives played in hastening its demise. From the chaos created by Vietnam they set to work restructuring American politics, finance and foreign policy to their own purposes. Dominated at the beginning by Zionists and Trotskyists, but directed by the Anglo\/American establishment and their intelligence elites, the neoconservatives\u2019 goal, working with their Chicago School neoliberal partners, was to deconstruct the nation-state through cultural co-optation and financial subversion and to project American power abroad. So far they have been overwhelmingly successful to the detriment of much of the world.<\/p>\n

From the end of the Second World War through the 1980s the focus of this pursuit was on the Soviet Union, but since the Soviet collapse in 1991, their focus has been on dismantling any and all opposition to their global dominion.<\/p>\n

Pentagon Capitalism<\/strong><\/p>\n

Shady finance, imperial misadventures and neoconservatism go hand in hand. The CIA\u2019s founders saw themselves as partners in this enterprise and the defense industry welcomed them with open arms. McGill University economist R.T. Naylor, author of 1987\u2019s Hot Money and the Politics of Debt<\/em><\/a>, described how \u201cPentagon Capitalism\u201d had made the Vietnam War possible by selling the Pentagon\u2019s debt to the rest of the world.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn effect, the US Marines had replaced Meyer Lansky\u2019s couriers<\/a>, and the European central banks arranged the \u2018loan-back,\u2019\u201d Naylor writes. \u201cWhen the mechanism was explained to the late [neoconservative] Herman Kahn \u2013 lifeguard of the era\u2019s chief \u2018think tank\u2019 and a man who popularized the notion it was possible to emerge smiling from a global conflagration \u2013 he reacted with visible delight. Kahn exclaimed excitedly, \u2018We\u2019ve pulled off the biggest ripoff in history! We\u2019ve run rings around the British Empire.\u2019\u201d In addition to their core of ex-Trotskyist intellectuals early neoconservatives could count among their ranks such establishment figures as James Burnham, father of the Cold War Paul Nitze, Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Senator Henry \u201cScoop\u201d Jackson, Jeane Kirkpatrick and Brzezinski himself.<\/p>\n

From the beginning of their entry into the American political mainstream in the 1970s it was known that their emergence could imperil democracy in America and yet Washington\u2019s more moderate gatekeepers allowed them in without much of a fight.<\/p>\n

Peter Steinfels\u2019 1979 classic The Neoconservatives: The men who are changing America\u2019s politics<\/em><\/a> begins with these fateful words. \u201cTHE PREMISES OF THIS BOOK are simple. First, that a distinct and powerful political outlook has recently emerged in the United States. Second, that this outlook, preoccupied with certain aspects of American life and blind or complacent towards others, justifies a politics which, should it prevail, threatens to attenuate and diminish the promise of American democracy.\u201d<\/p>\n

But long before Steinfels\u2019 1979 account, the neoconservative\u2019s agenda of inserting their own interests ahead of America\u2019s was well underway, attenuating U.S. democracy, undermining d\u00e9tente and angering America\u2019s NATO partners that supported it. According to the distinguished State Department Soviet specialist Raymond Garthoff, d\u00e9tente had been under attack by right-wing and military-industrial forces (led by Senator \u201cScoop\u201d Jackson<\/a>) from its inception. But America\u2019s ownership of that policy underwent a shift following U.S. intervention on behalf of Israel during the 1973 October war. Garthoff writes in his detailed volume on American-Soviet relations D\u00e9tente and Confrontation<\/a>, <\/em>\u201cTo the allies the threat [to Israel] did not come from the Soviet Union, but from unwise actions by the United States, taken unilaterally and without consultation. The airlift [of arms] had been bad enough. The U.S. military alert of its forces in Europe was too much.\u201d<\/p>\n

In addition to the crippling Arab oil embargo that followed, the crisis of confidence in U.S. decision-making nearly produced a mutiny within NATO. Garthoff continues, \u201cThe United States had used the alert to convert an Arab-Israeli conflict, into which the United States had plunged, into a matter of East-West confrontation. Then it had used that tension as an excuse to demand that Europe subordinate its own policies to a manipulative American diplomatic gamble over which they had no control and to which they had not even been privy, all in the name of alliance unity.\u201d<\/p>\n

In the end the U.S. found common cause with its Cold War Soviet enemy by imposing a cease-fire accepted by both Egypt and Israel thereby confirming the usefulness of d\u00e9tente. But as related by Garthoff this success triggered an even greater effort by Israel\u2019s \u201cpolitically significant supporters\u201d in the U.S. to begin opposing any<\/em> cooperation with the Soviet Union, at all.<\/p>\n

Garthoff writes, \u201cThe United States had pressed Israel into doing precisely what the Soviet Union (as well as the United States) had wanted: to halt its advance short of complete encirclement of the Egyptian Third Army east of Suez\u2026 Thus they [Israel\u2019s politically significant supporters] saw the convergence of American-Soviet interests and effective cooperation in imposing a cease-fire as a harbinger of greater future cooperation by the two superpowers in working toward a resolution of the Israeli-Arab-Palestinian problem.\u201d<\/p>\n

_______________________________________<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould<\/em> are the authors of <\/em>Invisible History: Afghanistan\u2019s Untold Story<\/a>, Crossing Zero The AfPak War at the Turning Point of American Empire<\/a> and<\/em> The Voice<\/a>. Visit their websites at invisiblehistory<\/a> and grailwerk<\/a>.com<\/u><\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

 <\/p>\n

Copyright \u00a9 2018 Fitzgerald & Gould All rights reserved. <\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 consortiumnews.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

29 Apr 2018 – With the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the creation of the so called Wolfowitz Doctrine in 1992 during the administration of George Herbert Walker Bush, the United States claimed the mantle of the world\u2019s first and only Unipower with the intention of crushing any nation or system that would oppose it in the future. The New World Order, foreseen just a few short years ago, becomes more disorderly by the day.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":110437,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[65],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-110435","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-anglo-america"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/110435","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=110435"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/110435\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/110437"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=110435"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=110435"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=110435"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}