Starmer’s Fingerprints, Not Just the Tories’, are all over Britain’s Race Riots

In the UK, Islamophobia is so bipartisan, so normalised, that BBC reporters refer to anti-Muslim pogromists as ‘pro-British protesters’

by Jonathan Cook / August 16th, 2024

LONG READ

Imagine this scene, if you can. For several days, violent mobs have massed in the centre of British cities and clashed with police in an attempt to reach synagogues to attack them.

Draped in England flags and Union Jacks, and armed with cricket bats and metal rods, the trouble-makers have dismantled garden walls to throw bricks.

Gangs have swept through residential areas where Jews are known to live, smashing windows and trying to break down doors. The rioters attacked and torched a hotel identified as housing Jewish asylum seekers, an act that could have burned alive the occupants.

For days, the media and politicians have chiefly referred to these events as far-right “thuggery” and spoken of the need to restore law and order.

In the midst of all this, a young Jewish MP is invited onto a major morning TV show to talk about the unfolding events. When she argues that these attacks need to be clearly identified as racist and antisemitic, one of the show’s presenters barracks and ridicules her.

Close by, two white men, a former cabinet minister and an executive at one of the UK’s largest newspapers, are seen openly laughing at her.

Oh, and if this isn’t all getting too fanciful, the TV presenter who mocks the young MP is the husband of the home secretary responsible for policing these events.

The scenario is so hideously outrageous no one can conceive of it. But it is exactly what took place last week – except that the mob wasn’t targeting Jews, but Muslims; the young MP was not Jewish but Zarah Sultana, the country’s most high-profile Muslim MP; and her demand was not that the violence be identified as antisemitic but as Islamophobic.

It all sounds a lot more plausible now, I’m guessing. Welcome to a Britain that wears its Islamophobia proudly, and not just on the streets of Bolton, Bristol or Birmingham, but in a London TV studio.

‘Pro-British protests’

Islamophobia is so bipartisan in today’s Britain that BBC reporters on at least two occasions referred to the mobs chanting anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant slogans as “pro-British protesters“.

The chief focus of nightly news has not been the anti-Muslim racism driving the mob, or the resemblance of the riots to pogroms. Instead, it has highlighted the physical threats faced by the police, the rise of the far-right, the violence and disorder, and the need for a firm response from the police and courts.

The trigger for the riots was disinformation: that three small girls stabbed to death in Southport on 29 July had been killed by a Muslim asylum seeker. In fact, the suspected killer was born in Cardiff to Rwandan parents and is not Muslim.

But politicians and the media have contributed their own forms of disinformation.

Media coverage has mostly assisted – and echoed – the rioters’ racist agenda by conflating the violent targeting of long-settled Muslim communities with general concerns about “illegal” immigration. The reporting has turned “immigrant” and “Muslim” into synonyms just as readily as it earlier turned “terrorist” and “Muslim” into synonyms.

And for much the same reason.

In doing so, politicians and the media have once again played into the hands of the far-right mob they are seemingly denouncing.

Or seen another way, the mob is playing into the hands of the media and politicians who claim they want calm to prevail while continuing to stir up tensions.

Muslim youth who turned out to defend their homes, as police struggled to cope with the onslaught, were labelled “counter-protesters.” It was as if this was simply a clash between two groups with conflicting grievances, with the police – and the British state – caught in the middle.

Again, can we imagine rioting, hate-filled pogromists trying to burn alive Jews being described as “protesters,” let alone “pro-British?”

None of this has come out of nowhere. The current anti-Muslim mood has been stoked by both sides of the political aisle for years.

The British establishment has every incentive to continue channelling public anger over economic issues – such as shortages of jobs and housing, crumbling services and the rocketing cost of living – onto scapegoats, such as immigrants, asylum seekers and Muslims.

Were it not doing so, it might be much easier for the public to identify who are the true culprits – an establishment that has been pushing endless austerity policies while siphoning off the common wealth.

‘Abusive relationship’

The case against the right is easily made.

Sayeeda Warsi, a Conservative peer and former cabinet minister, has been warning for more than a decade that her party is filled with Muslim-hating bigots, among both the wider membership and senior officials.

She declared back in 2019: “It does feel like I’m in an abusive relationship at the moment… It’s not healthy for me to be there any more with the Conservative party.”

A recent poll found that more than half of Tory party members believe Islam is a threat to what was termed a “British way of life” – far above the wider public.

Such racism stretches from the top to the bottom of the party.

Boris Johnson, whose novel Seventy-Two Virgins compared veiled Muslim women to letterboxes, won endorsement in his prime ministerial run from far-right figures such as Tommy Robinson, who has been fomenting the current wave of riots from a Cyprus hideaway.

Warsi was especially critical of Michael Gove, one of the key actors in successive Conservative governments. She observed: “I think Michael’s view is there is no such thing as a non-problematic Muslim.”

That may explain why the party has repeatedly refused to address proven and rampant Islamophobia within its ranks. For example, officials quietly reinstated 15 councillors suspended over extreme Islamophobic comments once the furore had died down.

Even when the leadership was eventually cornered into agreeing to an independent inquiry into anti-Muslim bigotry in the party, it was quickly watered down, becoming a “general inquiry into prejudice of all kinds.”

‘Swarm flooding UK’

In February, shortly after Lee Anderson stepped down as the Conservative party’s deputy chairman, he declared that “Islamists” had “got control of” Sadiq Khan, London’s mayor. The mayor, Anderson added, had “given our capital city away to his mates.”

He was suspended from the Tory parliamentary party when he refused to apologise. But even then, Tory leaders, including the then-prime minister, Rishi Sunak, and his deputy, Oliver Dowden, refused to label Anderson’s comments as racist or Islamophobic.

Dowden suggested only that Anderson had used the “wrong words.”

Sunak ignored Anderson’s inflammatory, hate-filled rhetoric altogether, redirecting public ire instead towards marches against Israel’s slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza – or what he described as a supposed “explosion in prejudice and antisemitism”.

Anderson soon defected to the even more aggressively anti-immigrant Reform party of Nigel Farage.

Suella Braverman, a former home secretary, similarly proclaimed: “The truth is that the Islamists, the extremists and the antisemites are in charge now.”

Right-wing media, from GB News to the Daily Mail, have regularly echoed such sentiments, comparing immigrants – invariably implied to be Muslims – as a “swarm” flooding Britain’s borders, taking away jobs and housing.

Even the body charged with identifying and protecting ethnic minorities made an all-too-obvious exception in the case of institutional Islamophobia.

The Equality and Human Rights Commission had been only too keen to investigate the Labour Party over what turned out to be largely evidence-free claims of antisemitism against its members.

But the same body has steadfastly refused to carry out a similar investigation into well-documented Islamophobia in the Tory Party, despite receiving a dossier from the Muslim Council of Britain containing allegations of bigotry from 300 figures in the party.

‘Stop the boats’

Labour Prime Minister Keir Starmer is now leading a high-profile crackdown on the violence of the far-right by setting up a “standing army” of anti-riot police squads and pressing for speedy and tough sentencing.

His supporters trumpeted his success in his first major test as prime minister last week, when expected riots last Wednesday failed to materialise. But since becoming Labour leader four years ago, Starmer has played a direct role in fuelling the anti-Muslim climate, too, a climate that encouraged the far-right out onto the streets.

In his campaign for No 10, he made a conscious decision to compete with the Tories on the same political terrain, from “illegal immigration” to patriotism and law and order.

That political terrain was shaped by a New Labour foreign policy 20 years ago that has had far-reaching domestic repercussions, stigmatising British Muslims as un-British, disloyal and prone to terrorism.

In lockstep with the United States, the Labour government of Tony Blair waged a brutal, illegal war on Iraq in 2003 that left more than 1 million Iraqis dead and many millions more homeless. Still more were dragged off to black sites to be tortured.

Along with a violent and prolonged occupation of Afghanistan by the US and UK, the Iraq invasion triggered regional chaos and spawned new and nihilistic forms of Islamist militancy, particularly in the form of the Islamic State group.

Blair’s brutalising crusade in the Middle East – often framed by him as a “clash of civilisations” – was bound to alienate many British Muslims and radicalise a tiny number of them into a similar nihilism.

In response, Labour introduced a so-called Prevent strategy that cynically focused on the threat from Muslims and conflated an entirely explicable disenchantment with British foreign policy with a supposedly inexplicable and inherently violent tendency within Islam.

Starmer modelled his own leadership on Blair’s and recruited many of the same advisors.

As a result, he was soon obsessively aping the Conservatives in a bid to win back the so-called Red Wall vote. The loss of urban areas of northern England in the 2019 general election to the Tories was in large part down to Labour’s muddled position on Brexit, for which Starmer was chiefly responsible.

Starmer tacked firmly rightwards on immigration, chasing after the Conservative Party as it veered even further to the right in its attempt to head off an electoral insurgency from Farage’s Reform Party.

As opposition leader, Starmer echoed the Tories in fixating on “stopping the small boats” and “smashing the smuggling gangs”. The subtext was that the migrants and asylum seekers fleeing the very troubles the UK had inflamed in the Middle East were a threat to Britain’s “way of life”.

It was a reinvention of the “clash of civilisations” discourse Blair had championed.

Days before polling in last month’s general election, Starmer went one further, promoting dog-whistle racism of the kind more usually associated with the Tories.

The Labour leader singled out Britain’s Bangladeshi community as one where he would act more decisively in carrying out deportations. “At the moment, people coming from countries like Bangladesh are not being removed,” he told an audience of Sun readers.

War on the Left

But there was another, even more cynical reason Starmer made racial and sectarian politics central to his campaign. He was desperate not only to win over the Tory vote but to crush the Labour left and its political agenda.

For decades, Jeremy Corbyn, his predecessor, had been celebrated by the Labour Left – and reviled by the Labour Right – for his anti-racist politics and his support for anti-colonial struggles such as that of the Palestinians.

For his troubles, Corbyn was roundly smeared by the British political and media establishment in every way possible. But it was the charge of antisemitism – and its conflation with anything more than the mildest criticism of Israel – that proved the most damaging.

The same Equality Commission that resolutely refused to investigate the Tories over Islamophobia hurried to bolster the smears of Corbyn’s Labour Party as institutionally antisemitic, even though the body struggled to produce any evidence.

With the chameleon-like Starmer, it is difficult to divine any certain political convictions. But it is clear he was not going to risk facing the same fate. The party’s leftwingers, including Corbyn, were hurriedly purged, as was anything that smacked of a left agenda.

Starmer became a rabid cheerleader for Nato and its wars, and a champion of Israel – even after 7 October, when it cut off food and water to the 2.3 million people of Gaza in what the world’s highest court would soon be calling a “plausible” genocide.

By then, Starmer’s war on the left and its politics was well-advanced.

‘Threat’ snuffed out

The nature of that factional attack was already clear in April 2020, shortly after Starmer had taken over Labour’s reins, when an embarrassing internal party report was leaked.

Among many other things, it showed how, during Corbyn’s leadership, the Labour right had sought to damage him and his supporters using antisemitism smears as the weapon of choice.

Still finding his feet as leader, and trying to head off an internal revolt over the revelations, Starmer appointed Martin Forde KC to carry out an independent review of the leak.

After long delays, largely caused by obstructions from party officials, Forde published his findings in the summer of 2022. He identified what he called a “hierarchy of racism”, in which the Labour right had sought to weaponise antisemitism against the left – including against its Black and Asian members.

Perhaps not surprisingly, Labour members from ethnic minorities tend to share more political ground with Corbyn and the Labour left, especially in their strong opposition to racism and the decades-long colonial oppression of the Palestinians.

That was seen by the Labour right and Starmer as a threat – and one they were determined to snuff out.

An Al Jazeera documentary broadcast in September 2022, drawing on more documents than Forde had managed to secure, discovered rampant Islamophobia from Starmer’s officials and the Labour right.

One of the victims of Starmer’s purges of the left described to the programme-makers Labour’s recent years as a “criminal conspiracy against its members”.

Al Jazeera’s investigation found that Muslim party members, including local councillors, had been firmly in the Labour right’s crosshairs.

Party officials were revealed to have colluded in concealing law-breaking, covert surveillance and data collection on Muslim members, as a prelude to suspending the entire London constituency of Newham, apparently because there were concerns about it being dominated by the local Asian community.

Ethnic minority staff in the Labour head office who raised complaints about these discriminatory actions were dismissed from their jobs.

Purges

Labour continued its visible purges right up to the July general election, cynically excluding and removing left-wing, Black and Muslim candidates at the last minute, so there would be no time to challenge the decision.

The highest-profile victim was Faiza Shaheen, an economist who had already been chosen as the parliamentary candidate for Chingford and Woodford Green until she was ditched very publicly and unceremoniously. Questioned about the decision, Starmer said he wanted only the “highest quality candidates”.

A similar campaign to humiliate and undermine Diane Abbott, the first black woman MP and a Corbyn ally, dragged on for weeks before being resolved begrudgingly in her favour.

The barely veiled insinuation yet again was that Muslim and Black candidates could not be trusted, that they were suspect.

Notably too, it later emerged that Starmer’s officials had sent a threatening legal letter to Forde after he had spoken to Al Jazeera about racism within the party. Forde concluded it was a barely veiled attempt to “silence” him.

Shortly after winning an overwhelming parliamentary majority on one of Labour’s lowest-ever ever vote-shares, Starmer effectively suspended a handful of leftwing MPs from the parliamentary party – as he earlier had done to Corbyn. Their offence was voting to end child poverty.

Most visible was Zarah Sultana, the young Muslim MP who had been barracked and jeered on Good Morning Britain for arguing that the riots needed to be identified as Islamophobic.

Dangerous conflation

Though it has been widely understood that Starmer was determined to crush the Labour left, the inevitable consequences of that policy – especially in relation to large sections of Britain’s Muslim population – have been far less examined.

One of the ways Starmer distanced himself from Corbyn and the left was to echo Israel and the British right in redefining anti-Zionism as antisemitism.

That is, he has smeared those who take the same view as the judges of the World Court that Israel is an apartheid state and one that has assigned Palestinians inferior rights based on their ethnicity.

He has also vilified those who believe Israel’s slaughter in Gaza is the logical endpoint for a racist apartheid state unwilling to make peace with the Palestinians.

Two groups in particular have felt the full force of this conflation of opposition to Israel’s crimes against the Palestinians – namely, anti-Zionism – and antisemitism.

One is Labour’s left-wing Jews. The party has assiduously tried to conceal their existence from public view because they all too obviously disrupt its antisemitism narrative. Proportionally, the largest group expelled and suspended from Labour have been Jews critical of Israel.

But conversely, and even more dangerously, Starmer’s conflation has served to visibly tar Muslims in general as antisemitic, given that they are the most vocal and united community in opposing Israel’s “plausible” genocide in Gaza.

Starmer’s denunciations of anti-Zionists as Jew haters have – whether intentionally or not – readily bolstered a poisonous caricature the Tories have been promoting of Islam as a religion inherently hateful and violent.

Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza over the past 10 months – and the horrified reactions of millions of Britons to the slaughter – has brought the problem with Starmer’s approach into especially sharp relief.

The Labour leader may have eschewed the incendiary rhetoric of Braverman, who denounced as “hate marches” the mass, peaceful protests against the slaughter. But he has subtly echoed her sentiments.

In rejecting the left’s anti-racism and anti-colonialism, he has had to prioritise the interests of a genocidal foreign state, Israel, over the concerns of Israel’s critics.

And to make his stance appear less ignoble, he has tended, like the Tories, to gloss over the diverse racial composition of those opposing the slaughter.

Loyalty test

The goal has been to try to discredit the marches by obscuring the fact that they have multiracial support, that they have been peaceful, that many Jews have taken a prominent part and that their message is against genocide and apartheid and in favour of a ceasefire.

Instead, Starmer’s approach has insinuated that domestic Muslim extremists are shaping the nature of the protests through chants and behaviour that are likely to make Jews fearful.

The Labour leader has claimed to “see hate marching side by side with calls for peace, people who hate Jews hiding behind people who support the just cause of a Palestinian state”.

It is a lawyerly, coded version of the racist right’s “Londonistan” – the supposed takeover of the UK’s capital by Muslims – and the smears, now even from government advisors, that the weekly marches in solidarity with Gaza’s suffering are turning British cities into “no-go zones” for Jews.

Starmer’s words – whether by design or not – have breathed life into the racist right’s preposterous allegation of “two-tier policing”, in which the police are supposedly so afraid to take on the Muslim community that the far-right needs to do their job for them.

The reality of that two-tier policing was only too visible last month when a video showed a police officer stamping on the head of a tasered and inert Muslim man after a fracas at Manchester airport. The man’s brother was shown being assaulted while his hands were behind his head, and their grandmother reports having been tasered too.

As with the Tories, Starmer’s unstinting support for Israel since 7 October – and his framing of protests against the slaughter as threatening to Jewish communities – has created an undeclared, implicit loyalty test. One that assumes most British Jews are patriots while casting suspicion on British Muslims that they need to prove they are not extremists or potential terrorists.

Both the main parties appear to believe it is fine for British Jews to cheerlead their co-religionists in Israel as the Israeli army bombs and starves Palestinian children in Gaza – and even that there is nothing wrong with some of them heading to the Middle East to take a direct part in the killing.

But the two parties also insinuate that it may be disloyal for Muslims to march in solidarity with their co-religionists in Gaza, even as they are being butchered by Israel, or vociferously oppose decades of belligerent Israeli occupation and siege that the world’s highest court has ruled are illegal.

In other words, Starmer has tacitly endorsed a logic that views the waving of a Palestinian flag at a demonstration as more dangerous and alien to British values than joining a foreign army to commit mass murder – or, let us note, than sending weapons to that army for it to slaughter civilians.

Reclaiming the streets

There are indications that Starmer’s alienation of large parts of the Muslim community – intimating that its views on Gaza equate to “extremism” – may have been intentional and designed to impress voters on the right.

A “senior Labour source” told reporters that the party welcomed the resignation of dozens of councillors from Labour over Starmer’s comments in support of Israel starving Gaza’s population. It was, the source said, the party “shaking off the fleas”.

A related narrative was advanced by Starmer loyalists ousted in last month’s general election by leftwing independents, including Corbyn, running on a platform to stop the slaughter in Gaza.

Jonathan Ashworth, who lost his Leicester South seat to Shockat Adam at July’s general election, accused supporters of his Muslim rival of failing to abide by democratic norms – through what Ashworth has termed “vitriol”, “bullying”, and “intimidation”.

No evidence has been produced for his claim.

Palestinian flags have been all too visible at what politicians and the media have been calling “counter-demonstrations” – anti-fascists reclaiming the streets from the far-right, as they did last Wednesday.

The Labour right, which like Starmer is keen to see the left disappear from British politics, had insisted that anti-racists stay at home to let the police deal with the racist rioters.

But it is precisely because the anti-racist left has been forced onto the back foot through a bipartisan campaign of smears – painting it as extreme, antisemitic, un-British, traitorous – that the racist right has felt emboldened to show who is in charge.

Starmer is now determined to put the genie he helped release back into the bottle through sheer brute force, using the police and courts.

There is every reason to fear, given Starmer’s campaign of smears against the left and authoritarian purges within his party, that his new government is more than capable of deploying the same heavy hand against the so-called “counter-demonstrators”, however peaceful.

The Labour leader believes he reached power by smearing and crushing the anti-racist left, by driving it into the shadows.

Now, as prime minister, he may yet decide it is time to roll out the same programme across the nation.Facebook

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Jonathan Cook, based in Nazareth, Israel is a winner of the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. His latest books are Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East (Pluto Press) and Disappearing Palestine: Israel's Experiments in Human Despair (Zed Books). Read other articles by Jonathan, or visit Jonathan's website.

Elusive Language: What Is Terrorism Really?

by T.P. Wilkinson / August 16th, 2024

LONG READ

Actually I have gotten tired of explaining to people the deception at the heart of airport security procedures. For years I have tried to show that the explanations given for the increasingly intrusive, not to mention time-consuming, controls to which passengers in international travel and for decades now domestic movement have nothing to do with safety or protection of travellers, nor the safety and protection of transport assets such as aircraft or railway rolling stock. I have told younger people how easy it was to board a train or enter an airport in the 1970s. The response was either incredulity or claims that the world has become more dangerous than in those “good old days”.

Very recently I read a scholarly article in which the author attempted to summarize the history of US policy in Africa, dating from when the Kingdom of Morocco was the first government to recognize the newly formed confederation of North American states that had won their independence from Great Britain. The author supplied a diplomatic history which culminated in the regime’s focus on the risks of “terrorism” in Africa as a key element of its foreign policy. Nowhere in the article—and this is no exception—was the concept of terrorism defined or elaborated. Apparently there was no need to identify or even to investigate the content of a “terrorism” or “counter-terrorism” policy.

In previous reflections I have attempted to clarify the political language used to manage and confuse both the ordinary person and those who for whatever reason have devoted professional efforts to understand the course of events since the end of what Eric Hobsbawm called the “long 19th century”. Economist Michael Hudson has argued that until the outbreak of the Great War (World War I) the world—at least the industrialised part—had in fact been moving toward socialism. Anglo-American scholarship has traditionally mocked this observation attributed most notably to Karl Marx. However such a denial of historical facts only served to justify the wars initiated by the British and American Empires to prevent this development. Professor Hudson argued that there were competing forms of socialism. Marx was a partisan for a particular tendency. However, Marx had every reason to believe that some form of socialism was inevitable. The successful October Revolution in Russia and the failed November revolution in Germany were not aberrations. On the contrary the two world wars and subsequent long war after 1945 were concerted efforts by the meanwhile merged Anglo-American Empire to resist and ultimately defeat socialism—except in China.

The summary argument below is based on the assumption that the 20th century and its extension into the 21st century has been shaped by the Anglo-American war against any form of socialism, especially to the extent based upon popular democratic political culture. The principal obstacle to understanding this long war lies in a failure to properly comprehend the underlying philosophy of governance in the Anglo-American Empire and its idiosyncratic use of the term “democracy”. The US, due largely to its settler-colonial history, but also to the culturally diverse immigrant pool that would compose its population, has been the site of considerable conflict over the terms of “democracy” to the extent that immigrants from non-English-speaking countries also brought their own political and social culture with them. Hence, much of US political warfare has been the concerted effort by the Anglo-American elite to impose that idiosyncratic democracy model on ethnic communities with different social and political traditions. The imposition of a highly concentrated mass media propaganda apparatus and industrial management structure was facilitated by the absence of any surviving indigenous socio-political culture or entrenched population. Thus, it is hardly surprising that numerous foreign observers of US society were struck by the extreme conformism among the country’s inhabitants, something quite unfamiliar to visitors from the European continent or other parts of the world.

Anglo-American political theory, going back at least as far as the so-called Glorious Revolution, defined democracy, not as a principle of popular political rule but as a model for the governance of joint stock companies. The franchise was not only explicitly restricted to property ownership. The scope of the franchise extended to the appointment of officers and servants and the allocation of profits generated by business operations. Following the example of the Dutch East India Company (VOC), the British East India Company became the model of the corporate state, where even the monarch was reduced to the role of shareholder. The “democracy” and democratic procedures formulated for directing the business of the chartered companies were never intended for determining, let alone implementing, policies for the general welfare. The general welfare, although occasionally the subject of English and Scottish theories, was effectively limited to the privileges and immunities of shareholders, individually or collectively. The origin of parties in this system was not the organised interest of citizens but of economic actors, i.e. adventurers (investors), landowners, and merchants. The fact that Anglo-American political theory has been extrapolated to include citizens, i.e. nominally independent commercial actors, does not mean that the underlying qualification for the franchise has been altered.

Here it is important to note that the joint stock company is an exclusive not an inclusive entity. The substance of political struggle throughout the 19th and 20th centuries can also be understood as efforts to either reduce the entry barrier to shareholding or expand the scope of business interest to include elements of the general welfare. The so-called progressive movement was essentially an effort to subject social or general welfare interests to the principles of scientific management. Management principles that evolved in the concentration of industry were adapted to discipline populist demands. Professional specialisation in political, social and economic functions created experts in the fields to which citizen interests were allocated. Just as Frederick Taylor used time-motion studies to turn skilled work into discrete operations that could be performed by unskilled workers, the progressive movement and emerging social sciences turned complex social and economic interests into simplified business operations that could be performed without the need for educated, informed and interested deliberation. Politics was established as a management discipline within the dominant ideology of corporatism, the underlying theory of joint stock company governance.

Fast forward to the post-colonial, liberation struggle epoch following the failed attempt to destroy the Soviet Union and prevent the emergence of New China: After the consensus-building diplomacy among the great powers of Europe and North America, culminating in the Berlin Conference, the allocation of overseas territories, mainly but not exclusively Africa, was inscribed in international law. When in 1918, the German Empire, Austria-Hungary, and the Ottoman Empire were subjugated militarily, their respective overseas territories or domains were allocated to the victors. In some cases they were absorbed into the winning empires properly and in other cases they were distributed after negotiations to the victors as so-called “mandates”. After WWII the remaining mandates were converted into so-called Trusteeships, reflecting the change in language between the League of Nations and its successor the United Nations. The mandate was a legal concept introduced to conceal the spoils system by which the losers of the Great War were punished by depriving them of their colonial possessions under the pretext of self-determination, whereby the victors’ colonies were not offered such benefits. The survival of the Soviet Union despite all attempts to destroy it since its foundation, left the Western powers, now led by the United States of America, with the unpleasant task of supporting the independence of former colonies while keeping the deep economic control over them that had made them so profitable for their owners. The USSR, which since the consolidation of the October Revolution had renounced imperial aspirations or legacy, became a vocal and occasionally material supporter of the rights to national self-determination which had first been proposed by the insincere US government presided over by Thomas Woodrow Wilson. Whether Wilson actually believed his famous 14 points or simply promoted them as beneficial for US interests can never be known for sure. The man who “kept the US out of war (in Europe)” to win election and then proceeded to approve US war mobilization efforts may be accused of insincerity or impotence (or both). The details are something for archivists and apologists to sort.

One of the less directly advertised outcomes of the Great War was the consolidation of financial capital protected mainly in the City of London, New York City and the Swiss Confederation. The establishment of the Federal Reserve System in 1913 extended the private control of national economies exercised through the Bank of England in the British Empire to the once independent North American federation. Carroll Quigley, in his posthumously published The Anglo-American Establishment, describes the Cecil Rhodes Round Table project for reasserting the British Empire by integrating the United States. What later became known as the Milner group, after Rhodes protégé Alfred Milner, concentrated doctrinal control over the British media, through All Souls and Baliol and the Rhodes Scholarships over British academia, and through the Chatham House consortium (Royal Institute of International Affairs and Council on Foreign Relations) over the formulation of imperial policy. According to Quigley, this doctrinal control was imposed on what passes for journalism and historical scholarship. Thus in combination with its friends in North America, Herbert Hoover comes to mind, what counts as knowledge about the British Empire (and since 1945 the Anglo-American Empire) has been subject to the control and manipulation by a complex cadre structure extending through universities, publishers, research institutions and so-called “think tanks”. While this invisible ministry of truth, as George Orwell called it, has not been able to suppress all dissenting interpretations of the past three centuries of Anglo-American dominance, it has been able to force much of the dissent to the margins. This is done by a) denying access to regular teaching and research posts with the authority they confer; b) strict control of access to archives and official records much of which are held in secured private vaults like those of the Hoover Institution at Stanford University; c) exclusion from the reputable press and publishing entities who propagate the authorized history and interpretations; d) rewarding ideological compliance with all the preferment and largesse at the Empire’s disposal; e) the creation and promotion of innumerable institutions with real and simulated scholarly expertise to flood public space with the authorized version(s). Of course, there are less pleasant means available but despite the proliferation of alternative and social media these are sufficient to impose an enormous burden on anyone trying to present facts or interpretations inconsistent with the preservation of the Empire and the devotion it fosters.

Quigley admits that he actually agreed with the objectives of the Establishment he described. As a sympathetic reporter he was more concerned about the potential failures than betraying any secrets that might impede the progress of the world he ardently supported. That is probably one reason why he discusses the problems created by the Rhodes testaments in their various versions, aggravated by the fact that Cecil Rhodes had no heirs to the fortune he had amassed through his British South Africa Company and other entities. Quigley gives little attention to Lord Rothschild, Rhodes’s friend and executor. In fact, the Rothschild interests are barely mentioned. Although the two branches of the infamous financial barony are notorious for the extent of their involvement in international affairs (business and political), discussion of their familial or business interests in the affairs of nations has been consistently trivialized if mentioned at all. In the era when the Habsburg dynasty ruled an “empire upon which the sun never set”—predating British claims to that distinction—no serious historian would ignore the matrimonial arrangements made to extend that control. Yet since the French Revolution, the only attention to dynastic profligacy has been given to the House of Saxe-Coburg/ Battenberg/ Windsor, in short the dispersion of the family of which Britain’s Victoria became “grandmother”. Monarchy, especially the British, is inseparable from pageantry. The display of opulence or even its conspicuous avoidance serves a critical function in maintaining the respect for the power behind it. Although apparently trivial, the fact that the recently deceased and longest reigning British monarch, Elizabeth Windsor, was casually called “the queen” even by people who were not imperial/ commonwealth subjects or citizens demonstrates how an archaic form of personal rule can be popularized even among ostensible republicans. In other words, what is displayed officially should never be treated as accidental. At the same time what is conspicuously absent from public view should not be considered careless omission.

All that said, what does this tell us about the definition of the term “terrorism”? Meanwhile there is an enormous body of literature on the subject. The subject has been treated as a species of crime, as an instrument of political action, as a moral issue, and as a field of behavioural control, e.g. policing, prevention, protection, care for victims etc. Terrorism has been defined sociologically, psychologically and politically. It has been treated as a policing problem and a military threat. An industry has been established and thrives on the products of “counter-terrorism”, “anti-terrorism”, and security. Innumerable institutions have been founded and funded to handle the problem. In my youth the term “terrorism” was used to categorize violent crime or threatened violence by persons or organizations that were not entitled to use violence, usually against—at least it was claimed—unarmed, innocent or defenceless civilians. The most notorious “terrorist” act of my youth resulted in the death of an Israeli Olympic squad during the Munich Olympics. According to the story at the time, a group called “Black September” seized the Israeli Olympic team in Munich as a means of calling attention to the policies of the Israeli government in Palestine. The immediate result of this action was the deployment of a special weapons and tactics team, what became Grenzschutzgruppe Neun (GSG 9) to rescue the hostages whereby all hostages and Black September members were killed. The second result was the first regular and systematic searches of international airline traffic, initially applied to all flights to Israeli destinations.

Of course the actions of the National Liberation Front in Vietnam were also called “terrorism,” but due to the fact that the US was waging a massive war in the then Republic of Vietnam (the scale of which only became apparent after Richard Nixon’s forced resignation) and that all these acts occurred in Vietnam, they were merely local matters for those in Vietnam. Terrorism in the western peninsula of Eurasia was mainly of interest to NATO bases and the political establishment that had been created by the US after 1945. Bombings and kidnapping in Italy or kidnapping and assassination in Germany were designated as terrorism but still treated as local matters. No later than the late 1990s it was revealed that much if not all of that European terrorism was organized by the Gladio network created by the Anglo-American intelligence services at the end of WWII. The term that emerged was the “strategy of tension” whereby covert NATO forces intended to purge what remained of the Left from European politics by associating it with supposed “left-wing terrorism”. The immediate effect of this covert action campaign, aside from the selective death and destruction caused, was the adoption of internal security legislation and proliferation of special police powers throughout the West European Union/ EEC/ EU. Those powers and legislation have only been increased and radicalized with time.

The ideological premise of the “strategy of tension” was that the Soviet Union and its communist allies was funding and arming groups of dissidents (mainly youth) in order to foment revolution and overthrow the “basic democratic order” in the West. In some cases these terrorists were supposed to be Maoists or even Trotskyists. These distinctions added to public confusion and permitted the actual sponsors to manipulate competing groups. As operatives have occasionally admitted, the funding of a Maoist group of “ultra-leftists” was a powerful strategy for dividing mainstream socialist and communist parties, thus diluting their electoral impact in countries like France and Italy where they enjoyed substantial support.

With the demise and annexation of the German Democratic Republic and subsequent collapse of the Soviet Union with the entire Eastern European infrastructure it had created, terrorism could no longer be presented as the work of the “Evil Empire” headquartered in Moscow. The only useful terrorist venue remaining was in Palestine where the terrorist regime that established the Israeli State had been waging war against the remainder of the indigenous inhabitants (their “Indians”) at least since 1948. The expansion of the occupation to part of Egypt and parts of the other states reluctantly carved by the French and British out of their Sykes-Picot mandates had elevated the armed resistance to international terrorism. Despite United Nations resolutions adopted with the license given to European and Ottoman terrorists to found an independent state by the name of Israel, recognizing the inherent rights of the indigenous inhabitants as at least equal to those of the invading immigrants, the Israeli terrorist forces were regularized as a national army while the indigenous self-defence was relegated to the status of terrorists. The expansion of territorial control—i.e. conquest and imposition of vassalage—in neighbouring countries created the conditions de facto whereby the indigenous resistance became “international terrorism”. Countries that explicitly supported what would become the Palestine Liberation Organization in compliance with the UN resolutions licensing the establishment of Israel and the inherent rights of Palestine’s historic inhabitants were denounced by the former mandatory powers, under aegis of the Anglo-American Empire, as sponsors of “international terrorism”. While the term terrorism continued to be used in US-led counter-insurgency operations throughout Southeast Asia and Latin America, the focus of attention became the Middle East. Terrorism was popularized as a kind of generic trait of “Arabs”, itself a term of distortion applied now to all people in the Middle East who are not European Jews or their descendants living under the state of Israel.

In 1997, William Kristol and Robert Kagan, founded the Project for the New American Century (PNAC). In this context, such notions as “a new Pearl Harbor” began to circulate in what are called neo-conservative political circles. The “new” American Century refers to the appellation attributed to Henry Luce, that the 20th century, especially in the wake of World War II, was the American century. Kristol, Kagan and their like argued that with the elimination of the Soviet Union as the archenemy the world had essentially been made free for US supremacy. However, such supremacy would be challenged. They asserted that just as “Pearl Harbor” brought Americans together behind strong leadership to wage an international war for American values, it would take extreme stimulus to move the American people from their inherent lethargy and turn them into a force capable of assuring US supremacy around the world. This stood in stark contrast to the idea held widely beyond American shores that the end of the Soviet Union and hence the end of the so-called Cold War would bring the long-desired “peace dividend”. Kristol, Kagan and those who supported them were worried—just as their fathers had been in 1945—that peace would break out. Members of the permanent foreign policy establishment, like George Kennan, and the arms industry, like the DuPont family, were seriously concerned that the enormous profits and power accrued waging covert war against the Soviet Union and counter-insurgency everywhere else would stop once the public on both sides of the Atlantic recognized that there was no more enemy. In fact, the principal occupation of the policy elite in the Anglo-American Empire as it emerged in 1913 has been the threat of peace. Once one understands the implications of that principle then it is no longer a mystery that the longest continuing war since 1945 is the United Nations invasion of the Korean peninsula in 1951.

Just as Carroll Quigley pays almost no attention to the interest the Rothschild dynasty could have in the Round Table project, almost no attention is given to the role of the Rockefeller dynasty—acting mainly, but not exclusively, through the Rockefeller Foundation—in the establishment of the United Nations. However, a sober recognition of the function of so-called philanthropy (the corporate successor to papal or royal patronage and preferment) ought to induce more critical attention to dynastic power. The League of Nations is inconceivable without the establishment of the Federal Reserve System with its merger of Rockefeller and Rothschild interests. The shift from Geneva to New York was an acknowledgement of where industrial and military power lay. The invisible pseudo-neutrality of the imperial-based League was replaced by the unabashed display of US power, managed by its paramount dynasty. While it is true that the Du Pont dynasty is the senior “noble house” in North America it lacked the international scope that the Standard Oil magnates had acquired when dividing the world of petroleum with their British counterparts. The October Revolution and the failure to destroy the Soviet Union by 1943 meant that Standard Oil was simply the more powerful of the two energy kingdoms. Naturally it can only be speculation but it is reasonable to assume that the Anglo-American financial oligarchy consummated in 1913 and baptised in 1918 was ready to wed in 1945.

The preeminence of the financial oligarchy, not just in the latter half of the 20th century, but for the entirety of the 20th century, must be understood in order to grasp what terrorism really means today. Political-economist Michael Hudson has argued—in support of Karl Marx but based on historical analysis—that in fact everyone in the industrialized economies saw socialism as inevitable by the end of the 19th century. Marx was not utopian. Nor did the 1918 German revolutionaries, murdered at the behest of their Social Democratic and aristocratic enemies, err in the judgement that the collapse of the Hohenzollern monarchy was the signal for socialism in the German Reich. It took enormous violent effort to prevent socialism from becoming the dominant political-economic form in the West. That effort began with the Great War, later World War I, which despite propaganda at the time and since was a class war intended to destroy working class movements throughout Europe and impose the new world financial order on what had been an agricultural and industrial economic system. A lot of popular debate, stimulated by attacks on China, focusses on the deindustrialization of the major Western economies. This is attributed to free trade agreements and expanding offshore manufacturing promoted by the policies introduced under Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. While it is true that the end of the war against Vietnam and the artificial oil crisis nominally caused by the 1973 oil boycott were inducements for major manufacturers to look for cheaper labour, this was opportunity not novelty. The end of World War II would have returned the US to massive unemployment had the destruction of competing industrial base not been so thorough, leaving US cartels with seemingly infinite markets for excess production. By 1973 this was no longer the case. European manufacturing, especially in Germany had recovered and was demonstrably more competitive than anything the US had to offer. Thus, the oil boycott purged the SME sector and—because of the secret agreements between the US and the main Arab producers to only bill oil in US dollars—allowed the US to continue to increase its financial stranglehold on much of the world economy that now needed USD liquidity to buy fuel and feed stock. The official media practically equated the results of this covert deal-making with “economic terrorism” by Arab states taking advantage of their nominal sovereignty over much of the world’s known oil reserves in an attempt to impose a solution to the expansion of the Israeli state in the region.

The confluence of interests that led to the so-called Oil Crisis can be grasped by anyone who has read John Blair’s book The Control of Oil (1976), based on his work as a researcher for the US Congress investigating transnational corporations. The original report upon which Blair based his book exposed the intricate workings of the “Seven Sisters”, the world oil cartel, but was suppressed by order of President Eisenhower since its publication would possibly impair national security. Specifically the report showed how the oil cartel, led by Standard Oil (Esso), controlled the world supply of oil—and not the Arab potentates most of whom had been installed through the efforts of those very oil companies. Naturally the Eisenhower administration did not want to expose a key element of its international economic power. More importantly, as the 1973 fixing of oil prices to US dollars demonstrated, the control of oil was integral to the power of the Anglo-American financial oligarchy. Although the Bretton Woods institutions, World Bank and IMF, were initially designed so that the US dollar would replace sterling and subordinate the franc, the oil coup in 1973 gave the regime virtually unlimited power to bankrupt its collective bete noir, the newly independent countries of the fallen empires.

Jamaican prime minister at the time, Michael Manley, made the point clear. When the Bretton Woods accords were signed, Jamaica as well as practically all the newly independent countries were part of either the sterling or franc system. They had no national currencies. Needless to say they were not represented in the negotiations. Until 1973 they imported or exported based on fixed exchange rates for their own currencies. With the Oil Crisis (coup) all these countries had to buy US dollars at exchange rates that could only drive their economies into debt spirals. Meanwhile the US Treasury could issue as many dollars as it needed to buy whatever it desired. Its banks, as owners of the World Bank and IMF, could dictate terms to any country without its own oil reserves and refining capacity. As Cuba learned, US refiners would not process alternative oil supplies from the Soviet Union, forcing it to nationalize plants built and operated by US multinationals. The capacity to manipulate both energy markets and currency markets was lodged in the two biggest banking and oil cartels, those of the Rockefeller and Rothschild families. The story of the international debt crisis is to extensive and complex to elaborate here. Yet it is crucial to recognize that energy and finance are two sides of the same institutional power. There is no financial power without control over energy and no energy policy without brute financial power.

The familial or dynastic element in this analysis will strike many as excessively personal and others as insufficiently dialectical. However, even if men do not make history as they choose, history is nonetheless made by men. Men make history through organized action and through the capacity to shape the perceptions upon which others base their action. Men create institutions and they shape them, even if no one man ever completely controls even the institutions he creates. As I pointed out at the start of this appreciation, there are methods for investigating or at least describing how history is made or how power is exercised. Yet, many of these methods are incomplete or even insincerely applied. Political science and history offer explanations, but these are actually fairly low order descriptions of group behaviour or the results attributed to such actions. The terms of reference are simply too restricted. In the case of the Anglo-American Empire, Quigley argued that these restrictions are not accidental or incidental to some scholarly process which, were it refined, would give better results. Instead, Anglo-American historiography and hence its political science are skewed by those upon whose patronage they ultimately depend. This patronage has long ceased to be merely the gentlemen’s agreements made at All Souls or White’s. It did not take a century, but more than a hundred years have lapsed in which generations of cadre have spread throughout the imperial system. There is a plenitude of institutions whose staff and members may never have heard of let alone seen a Rockefeller or a Rothschild. The last thing that would occur to them is that they are domestic servants or courtiers in some great aristocratic household. However, they were born and raised in a culture which sustains the ideas, values and practices of those who engendered these dynasties. That is what distinguished institutions do. It is their primary function. Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard and Yale do have the capacity to educate but their foremost role is to indoctrinate, to instil loyalty first to the alma mater but also the culture for which she stands. While the fashions may change, the petty morality be modified, the essence which made these institutions possible and continues to sustain them is spiritual, in the Hegelian sense (cultural in Peckham’s sense). Hence it is from the capacity for cultural continuity along with the capability of undermining or destroying competing cultures that any serious analysis must accept as a foundation to extended power.

It must be added here that the focus on the Rockefeller or Rothschild dynasties is historically accidental. They did not invent the financial system they currently dominate. The central elements of the modern financial system were internationalized by the papal-rabbinical regime in Rome. Meanwhile, these instruments have been digitalized. However the root of them all is the complex of indulgences, auricular confession, Inquisition and crusades. There is really nothing available to the IMF or Goldman Sachs that was not in the purview of Innocent III when waging the Fourth Crusade.

Finance and energy are governed by two rarely stated but cardinal rules: “other people’s money” and “other people’s oil”. Since whatever is called money in any society is ultimately arbitrary, there is no natural limit to the supply. Financial power derives from controlling other people’s money. The Standard Oil trust was established not by owning the oil supplies but by controlling the transport, refining, sale and distribution of oil and oil products. The Anglo-American “central bank” cartel does not create money—that is solely the prerogative of the State. It creates debt for which the State farms taxes and other charges or provides enforcement. This is plain from the statutes establishing the Federal Reserve, the charter of the Bank of England and the agreements by which the Bank of International Settlements, World Bank, International Monetary Fund and their subsidiaries were formed as international entities beyond the reach of sovereign states or their citizens.

Terrorism is not really what masked men do when they try to kidnap someone or seize something to extort a favourable political decision. It is not something Arabs, Muslims or communists do to achieve their aims. Terrorism is not a phenomenon against which one can be protected like locking one’s car or home or wearing safety belts. There is no armour or surveillance that can prevent or interrupt terrorism. Airport controls or entry controls at other public spaces cannot prevent terrorism or limit any damage attributed to it. Neither the amount of fluids carried in hand luggage, nor the prohibition of cutlery or small arms can have any impact on terrorism. Moreover, none of the foregoing are relevant to terrorism at all—in the way has been consistently and deceptively defined for decades.

In order to understand terrorism and its relationship to the innumerable activities supposedly conducted or promoted to counter terrorism, one has to have a proper understanding of the overall cultural system in which this term is applied. It is necessary to examine what behaviour corresponds to terrorism, not the term is used to label. In other words one has to move from the explicit to the implicit or the stated to the unstated. Watch what is done. Do not be distracted by what is said. The overall cultural system is financial. That means that the instructions for performance at the highest explanatory level are governed by what can be called the imperatives of cash flow. Cash flow describes the movement of money, energy, primary commodities, and people (who for all intents and purposes are just another commodity).

In the process of transforming the agricultural – industrial society back into a system of rents (or to use the papal-rabbinical terminology, the trade in grace), an model of allocating economic surplus was replaced with a model for managing scarcity. This model, sometimes attributed to Alfred Marshall but in fact developed by his successors, has been called marginalism. Coincidentally the economic theories upon which marginalism is based were articulated and popularized about the same time chattel slavery was being abolished, at least formally. One can speculate whether a restored theory of economic scarcity just happened to become popular once bonded labour was withdrawn from the market and newly freed labour could demand some of the surplus it had been forced to generate. It is not necessary to prove that the economists of the day devised theories to diminish any demands by freed slaves. If one accepts the premise that an emerging financial oligarchy funding and guiding the direction of teaching and research raises the questions that scholars and scientists ought to answer—as is clearly the case today—then no explicit instruction was needed to shape the overall agenda. At the same time as the political economy of surplus allocation was being realigned to reflect planned scarcity, free labour and other popular movements were being guided by what became known as progressivism in North America and Fabianism in Britain. There many of the proponents were more explicit that professional or expert solutions were needed for systemic problems (disorder) to prevent popular movements from asserting themselves in such a way as to threaten the oligarchy materially. Again the trail of philanthropy can be found. Without disparaging actual improvements in the daily lives of millions, the purpose of philanthropy is not to end the plunder and exploitation which enriches the donor but to selectively dilute resistance to the donor’s plunder and exploitation. Philanthropy is like the fluid a parasite injects into its host to conceal extraction or make it less painful. Progressivism evolved from the same cultural swamp as Frederick Taylor’s scientific management. By analysing the complaints among populists, the pwog administrator performs the equivalent of a time-motion study on the movement under study. Like Frederick Taylor who saw this dissection as a means of replacing skilled workers with interchangeable employees performing subroutines that could be easily taught and learned, the pwog or Fabian sought to identify the elements of discontent which could be corrected by employing professional staff and permanent bureaucrats who were able to perform the needed tasks but immune to the political or social concerns from which they arose.

Parallel to these organizational developments the chartered/ public accounting profession was launched. The financial oligarchy was able to prevent legislation which would oblige public companies (joint stock corporations) to submit their books to government regulators for inspection. Based, among other things, on assertions of intellectual and trade property rights vis a vis competitors but also the State, the legislatures adopted laws which permitted companies to hire their own inspectors whose certificates would be accepted in lieu of government inspection or public disclosure. The employees of these accounting companies would be examined and certified by boards of their peers. Only accountants so credentialed by their peers would be permitted to issue certificates for the accuracy and completeness of corporate financial records. Thus corporate financial records could remain secret and the public demand for disclosure diverted. Certified accountants and lawyers together would protect the public interest in fair dealing vicariously.

For this system to function in an environment dominated by huge, international trusts, internal corporate structures had to change too. Slowly major manufacturing enterprises managed by engineers or men with experience in their respective fields were to be subordinated to the new financial management ideology. The certified accountant gave birth to the controller. The controller or financial controlling department had two basic tasks. One was to translate all the manufacturing management data into accounting figures that could then be rendered in company reports, either to shareholders or regulatory/ tax authorities. The other task was to police material production processes using accounting and measurement criteria. That is to say the physical operations had to be reduced to measurable cash flows. The pinnacle of controlling was articulated in what became known as systems theory. From this controlling function all manner of operations were translated and integrated to produce reporting routines. Reporting, the regular production of measurement data and its application to internal corporate management, expanded wherever there was some movement from which value accumulation or loss could be expected. The bigger the corporation and more diverse the operations, e.g. in the trusts and conglomerates, the more powerful the controlling/ reporting function became. Economic concentration, which has not ceased since the end of the 19^th century, has made central controlling, reporting and planning indispensable. The central controlling and reporting departments do not add value or increase the effectiveness of any manufacturing or other enterprise operation. They provide the means for regulating the extraction of value from the enterprise both upstream in terms of reporting and downstream by dictating which activities are to be preferred or abandoned (because of their impact on key performance indicators). The controlling department is not interested in the end customer, the employee, the supplier of inputs or any other material quality relevant for actual business operation. It is a surveillance instrument. Its mere presence in the form of reporting requirements and planning targets imposes limits on all those doing real work, buying or selling, or anything else entrepreneurial. The demand to reduce everything to some numerical value shapes the corporate environment internally and at all the interfaces between corporation and other actors and entities.

To say that this controlling ideology is a metaphor for observable institutional behaviour beyond the factory gate is too little. The introduction of analogue computing machines in the 1940s found immediate application in state operations. An IBM subsidiary supplied state of the art computing machines to partially automate the administration of forced labour camps in Germany under the NSDAP regime. The creators of the Phoenix Program in the CIA developed—in collaboration with renowned academic institutions—the Phoenix Information System. This computer system reduced the digested interrogation and police surveillance data collected by units of the Republic of Vietnam on behalf of the CIA to numerical input to generate “kill lists” for the US counter-insurgency campaign against the National Liberation Front in Vietnam. One former CIA officer later called it “computerized mass murder”. Recent reporting from occupied Palestine told of a system called “Lavender” that supplies Israeli forces with similar “kill lists”. The controlling systems have been developed and deployed without interruption.

As horrifying as the use of computer technology for planned assassination or mass murder is, that is only the most spectacular and infamous application. The underlying controlling ideology is far more insidious. Controversy, albeit superficial, about the dangers of artificial intelligence (AI) beyond the industrial applications already common focus on the error rate or the capacity of someone, presumably decent and law-abiding, to control the AI systems and prevent their abuse or defective performance. They only rarely address the ideology embedded in the technology and its social-political genealogy, i.e. its cultural historical content. In a recent interview I was asked if AI, with its military-policing history, could not be converted to benign civilian uses? My reply was simple. Why should any society be spending extraordinary amounts for military technology to convert to civilian use? Would it not make more sense to invest in civilian uses from the very beginning? This economic aspect was so obvious to me that I cannot understand why it is so rarely asked—except as Joan Roelofs has shown, so much of the economy has been literally bought to support military over civilian purposes in return for token support of residual community needs. It is therefore tempting to ask if there really is any meaningful civilian sector in today’s economy or society?

The Anglo-American Empire in its conversion (or reversion) to a quasi-feudal formation ruled by a financial oligarchy adopted or restored systems for policing, regulating, expanding or restricting the flows of money and energy as well as people and primary commodities. The highest order principle in this organization (and hence explanation) is the numerical control of data flows. In the system of domination and enrichment (capital accumulation) these data flows can be distinguished as cash, energy, “contraband”, primary commodities or raw materials, and human populations. In the first two decades of the 21st century, the overall objective of the financial oligarchy or the output of the system it has created can be represented as the rearrangement of human populations such that they are removed from areas where the underlying resources are deemed more valuable than any labour that could be extracted by the inhabitants. These populations are being transferred to the spaces where populations are declining or actively being reduced. This population transfer policy is global and it is organized and conducted by a combination of actors including intergovernmental private-public partnerships (a euphemism for fascist organizations). At the same time resource flows are increasing, e.g., plundering of oil and grain from states under attack and subject to deliberate deportation efforts. One of the ancient professionals using this business model is George Soros, who by his own public admission already enriched himself at the age of 14 with the help of Nazi occupiers of his native Hungary. Another class of professionals use the World Health Organization and related agencies. They follow the Bill Gates version for neutralizing the recalcitrant and profiting through the entire value chain. Those are simply the most notorious. They are creatures of the financial oligarchy and its controlling system. As has been said often enough even Soros or Gates will die, like David Rockefeller finally did. However the proclamation “the king is dead, long live the king” does not apply solely to crowned monarchs. A culture’s resilience, even as a pathology or parasitical form, is reflected in the survival of the system even after the demise of its bodily representatives.

So having said what terrorism is not as well as recounting in summary form a lot of 20th century history, something ought to be said about what terrorism is, besides a much abused and confusing word. When the Project for the New American Century “anticipated” the “new Pearl Harbor” as the bonding moment for another century of US (Anglo-American) supremacy, to the extent that they were honest and not just true believers, they would have understood that they were calling for a state sponsored act that could be manipulated in order to impose a war that no ordinary person otherwise would have demanded—certainly not in the great and insular United States of America. Here is not the place to elaborate the means by which the demolition of the NY World Trade Center towers on 11 September 2001 was executed. The crucial point is that this event was branded as the “new Pearl Harbor” and led to the declaration of the Global War on Terror and the adoption of the USA Patriot Act.

A “war on terror” reflects language dating back to the presidency of Lyndon Johnson who while presiding over the war against Vietnam also led the launch of a “war against poverty”. This would be followed by “the war on drugs.” This habit of applying war as an instrument of social policy has been called “Wilsonian”. Thomas Woodrow Wilson, kept the US briefly out of the Great War only to turn it into the “war to end war”. American presidents would also advertise “war for democracy”. The real fact, however, has been that the financial oligarchy that seized power in 1913 transformed the US into a war economy and a war society. It was both financialized and militarized at the same time. The Great War—to end war—also gave birth to what is now the largest psychological warfare industry on the planet, comprising Hollywood and Madison Avenue, plus the “Beltway”. The Valstead Act (prohibition of alcoholic beverages) was the first step in the creation of what can now be called the pharmaceutical-military-industrial complex. The 20th century marked the transformation of the United States from a continental empire into the most heavily armed, full spectrum belligerent on the planet. In other words, every aspect of American life was defined by warfare in one form or another. This is reflected in the vernacular as well as the astronomical sums expended officially (the unofficial or concealed budget is immeasurable) for national defence.

What is the Global War on Terror, if it is more than a slogan like so many in American politics? I believe the answer can be found by returning to the cultural historical context—to the conditions under which the financial oligarchy seized power and maintains it. The project for the new American century is undoubtedly a program for permanent war. Yet that is restating the obvious. What is not so obvious, but bears closer scrutiny, are the beneficiaries of permanent war. For much of the twentieth century, the financial oligarchy could be and was identified with the dynasties responsible for its inception, specifically the Rockefeller and Rothschild families, their relatives and retainers. Today the public faces of the financial oligarchy are the CEOs of a small group of hedge funds, BlackRock being the most notorious among them. The hedge fund is the modern manifestation of the financial framework created by the papal-rabbinical monarchy in Rome—it is the modern market-maker in sin, grace and salvation. The hedge fund and its precursors in the evolution of the financial oligarchy rely on the accounting-controlling ideology originally applied within corporations but as the corporation and the State merged was extended to the management of the State itself. Just as the controlling department became the central policing, surveillance and regulatory element of the corporation, its equivalent has become the organizational heart of the State. The corporation is managed using surveillance and reporting the results of which are distilled into key performance indicators and many other measurements. The corporate state is not only a merger of interests, whereby the corporation excludes any previous claims against the State by citizens, it is also a merger of methods and instruments. These methods and instruments are applied to control the flows of cash, energy, contraband, raw materials and crucially people. While cash, energy, contraband and raw materials have historical economic measures that can be easily applied within the controlling framework. People, especially those who are neither bonded labour nor serfs, require intermediary methods and instruments in order to translate them into accounting values. When travel was relatively rare and largely restricted to upper classes, there was little need for mass surveillance. Even the great immigration waves of until the early 1920s were one-time policing actions, except for dissident deportations and race removals on the Pacific coast. Both the relative improvement of living standards in North America and post-war Europe added to the human traffic but not significantly.

The most significant challenges for population control began during the Central American counter-insurgency waged under Ronald Reagan. Eliminating about 20% of the population of El Salvador, by death or migration, was considered sufficient to suppress any nationalist movements that could threaten US domination. As long as the Soviet Union existed immigration/ migration in Western Europe was largely confined to movements from former colonies to the urban conurbations of the colonizers. The defeat of the Soviet Union and with it the expected potential to redesign the planet in the interests of the Anglo-American Empire (financial oligarchy) called for an entirely different scale of management. That was what the Project for the New American Century was actually proposing. That new management system is terrorism. Terrorism is not the advertised acts of politically or economically dissident individuals or groups. Those advertised acts are epiphenomena within what should properly be called the “terrorism system” or “terrorism resource management system”. When the US government—in the widest sense of that term—declared the Global War on Terror they were announcing the introduction of a global surveillance and accounting system intended to manage human flows worldwide. Just as Taylorism once had to be imposed by force in factories, terrorism has been imposed as a management tool wherever humans congregate, labour or are in transit. The arbitrary inspection and “security” measures, whether at airports or other nodes of human movement, are accounting instruments. They are dictated by the controlling department of the corporate state for operational management as well as reporting. Unarmed, ordinary travellers are monitored just as are those whose task it is to transport contraband or deploy to armed propaganda and terror action against targeted populations. The so-called “terrorists”, whether branded as Al Qaeda or ISIS, like their precursors in Phoenix and Gladio are system products and instruments for managing population flows. In some places, like Syria, they are also deployed for the management of resource plundering or demolition of civilian infrastructure, both of which are in turn parts of the cash flow model by which hedge funds operate. In order to understand the elusive meaning of the language around terrorism, a cultural historical concept is needed not merely a trivial political one. The political concept of terrorism is a marketing/ branding idea with no substantive explanatory utility. Just as so much political science is written about politics but not about power, the literature on terrorism describes supposed terrorists and imagined terrorist organizations but does not identify the terrorism system within the financial oligarchical culture that dominates the West in the early 21st century. By expanding the concept of terrorism to include, literally, the full spectrum of domination, the relevance of global psychological and financial warfare campaigns like the Covid-19 war and the Global Climate Change war to a culture of total financial control can be imagined and understood without losing the explanatory power for examining the nature of corporate state violence.FacebookTwitter

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T.P. Wilkinson, Dr. rer. pol. writes, teaches History and English, directs theatre and coaches cricket between the cradles of Heine and Saramago. He is author of Unbecoming American: A War Memoir and also Church Clothes, Land, Mission and the End of Apartheid in South Africa. Read other articles by T.P..

IMPERIALISM

Chinalco said to eye stake in biggest Philippine copper mine

Bloomberg News | August 16, 2024 | 

Camp at Tampakan copper-gold project on Mindanao Island, southern Philippines.

 ( Image: Sagittarius Mines.)

Aluminum Corp. of China is considering investing in what is set to be the Philippines’ largest gold and copper mine as part of its efforts to boost its global footprint, according to people familiar with the matter.


The state-run Chinese company known as Chinalco may acquire a stake worth around $2 billion in Indophil Resources Phils. Inc., which owns Sagittarius Mines Inc., the people said, asking not to be identified because discussions are private.


Sagittarius Mines is the developer of the Tampakan project in the southern island of Mindanao. The Sy family – among the Philippines’ richest clans – is the majority shareholder in the Tampakan project, the people said. Once production begins, a target currently set for 2026, it will be the largest mine in the Philippines.

An investment from Chinalco would help provide financial stability to the project and it would possibly purchase some of the mine’s output, one of the people said. Considerations are ongoing and the companies may still decide against pursuing a deal, the people said, adding that the project could also draw interest from other industry players. Geopolitical concerns represent another hurdle given recent tensions between China and the Philippines over territorial claims in the South China Sea.

Chinalco, China’s largest state-owned aluminum producer, has investments in various mines from Guinea to Peru to secure raw material for the world’s biggest commodity consuming nation. Other Chinese companies including Zijin Mining Group Co. have been searching for assets globally for the past decade or so, eyeing core industrial metals including copper, a campaign that has occasionally triggered local resistance.

A spokesperson for Sagittarius Mines declined to comment. A representative for Chinalco and officials at Indophil didn’t immediately respond to phone calls and emails seeking comment. When asked about a potential deal, a representative for the Sy family said “it is all rumors.”

The potential move by Chinalco reflects a wider trend across the global mining industry, with top producers rushing to expand copper production on anticipation of rising demand for the metal that’s key for energy transition and data centers.

Copper prices surged to a record in May, before erasing some gains largely due to the weakness in the Chinese economy. A deficit still looms longer-term as consumption is expected to increase, while large new mines are hard to find and increasingly costly to build.

The Tampakan project has stalled for years after being discovered three decades ago, with Glencore Plc exiting in 2015 and as regulatory concerns mounted, including a Philippine ban on open-pit mining that was lifted in 2021.

President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. is seeking to revitalize the mining industry in the Philippines to sustain one of Asia’s fastest-growing economies. It is estimated that Tampakan can produce an average of 375,000 tons of copper and 360,000 ounces of gold in concentrate annually over a 17-year period.

The Sy family controls SM Investments Corp., the Philippines’ biggest conglomerate by market value, which owns the nation’s largest lender and mall developer. It has a minority stake in Atlas Consolidated Mining & Development Corp., which operates a copper mine in the central province of Cebu. The Sy siblings also have investments outside of the conglomerate including Henry Sy Jr.’s stake in the country’s power grid.

(By Pei Li, Cliff Venzon and Elffie Chew)

PROTECTIONISM

China to limit antimony exports in latest critical mineral curbs

Reuters | August 15, 2024 | 

Antimony is used in military applications such as ammunition, infrared missiles, nuclear weapons and night vision goggles. Stock Image

China will impose export limits on antimony and related elements in the name of national security, its commerce ministry said on Thursday, Beijing’s latest move to restrict shipments of critical minerals in which it is the dominant supplier.


China accounted last year for 48% of global mined output of antimony, a strategic metal used in military applications such as ammunition, infrared missiles, nuclear weapons and night vision goggles, as well as in batteries and photovoltaic equipment.





The restrictions are being imposed “in order to safeguard national security and interests, and fulfill international obligations such as non-proliferation”, the ministry said in a statement.

At a regular weekly briefing on Thursday, the ministry said the curbs were not directed at any specific country or region.

“It’s a sign of the times,” said Christopher Ecclestone, a principal and mining strategist at Hallgarten & Company in London.

“The military uses of Sb (antimony) are now the tail that wags the dog. Everyone needs it for armaments so it is better to hang onto it than sell it,” he said. “This will put a real squeeze on the US and European militaries.”

The limits, effective from Sept. 15, apply to six kinds of antimony-related products, including antimony ore, antimony metals and antimony oxide, the ministry said in a statement.

The rules also ban the export of gold-antimony smelting and separation technology without permission.

Dual use

Exporters of affected products must apply for export licenses for dual-use items and technologies – those with potential military as well as civil applications – it said.

The US and other countries are scrambling to ease their reliance on China for key materials, setting out policies and support packages for their critical minerals sectors, including rare earths.

In an April research note, analysts at China Securities said increasing demand for arms and ammunition due to wars and geopolitical tensions was likely to see tightening control and stockpiling of antimony ore.


Perpetua Resources, which is building a US antimony and gold project with support from the Pentagon and the US Export-Import Bank, had initially planned to begin production by 2028, should it obtain final permits this year. But China’s moves meant the company is studying ways to produce antimony faster.

“We are looking at things that we can do during construction to get antimony out the door sooner for some of these strategic needs,” Jon Cherry, Perpetua’s CEO, told Reuters.

“The (US) Department of Defense is aware of the critical nature of antimony and the short supply available. We’ve been hearing from a lot of different sources about the lack of supply for antimony, that the market is very tight and getting tighter daily.”

Shares of Perpetua jumped as much as 19% on Thursday to levels not seen in three years.
Widening curbs

China’s latest curbs follow a wave of such restrictions introduced since last year.

In December, China banned the export of technology to make rare earth magnets, which came on top of a ban already in place on exporting technology to extract and separate the critical materials.

Beijing has also tightened exports of some graphite products, and imposed restrictions on exports of gallium and germanium products widely used in the semiconductor industry.

Prices of antimony surged to record highs this year, fueled by tight supply and growing demand, especially from the photovoltaic sector, where the metal is used to improve the performance of solar cells.

That has helped push up the share prices of Chinese producers including Hunan Gold, Tibet Huayu Mining and Guangxi Huaxi Non-Ferrous by between 66% and 93% so far in 2024.

One antimony producer in Hunan province said they were waiting to see the results of the latest move, but added: “We believe in the short term prices should be supported by a wave of rush stockpiling from overseas buyers.” They declined to be identified as they were not authorized to speak to the media.

While China is the biggest supplier of refined antimony, it is a net importer of concentrates and depends on ore from countries including Thailand, Myanmar and Russia, customs data showed. Imports from Russia have fallen sharply this year.

“A lack of concentrate feedstock remains the key feature of the antimony market at present,” said Jack Bedder, co-founder of consultancy Project Blue.

(By Qiaoyi Li, Amy Lv, Siyi Liu, Bernard Orr, Polina Devitt, Seher Dareen and Ernest Scheyder; Editing by Christina Fincher, Tony Munroe and Jan Harvey)

Mpox risks spreading in Congo’s crowded mines, refugee camps

Bloomberg News | August 16, 2024 | 

The World Health Organization has declares mpox outbreak a public health emergency of international concern. (Image: WHO)

For medical and aid workers scrambling to contain an outbreak of mpox on the Democratic Republic of Congo’s eastern flank, the location couldn’t be worse.


A strain of the virus — which causes lesions that can result in disfigurement, blindness, and even death — has erupted around the gold-mining town of Kamituga, where about a quarter of a million people live.

It’s an area that thousands of small-scale, individual miners travel in and out of, attracting scores of sex workers while truckers ply routes between Congo and the neighboring nations of Burundi and Rwanda, and on to Tanzania.

Add to that the presence of 4.2 million internally displaced people, driven from their homes by years of intermittent conflict. Many of them are staying in crowded camps in the province, South Kivu, and neighboring North Kivu, which is a recipe for the rapid spread of a disease that’s killing the weak and malnourished, often children.

“There are millions of children already displaced and in addition now there is this outbreak of mpox,” said Katharina von Schroeder, director of advocacy and communications at Save the Children, a charity that has 300 staff in the central African country. “The big, big threat is the IDP camps. We are seeing the first cases. People are already very fragile and the fatality rate could be much higher” if it isn’t contained, she said.

The World Health Organization declared the outbreak a global health emergency on Wednesday, amid mounting concern about the rapid spread of the pathogen.

Already this year, about 15,700 cases have been suspected, resulting in around 550 deaths, according to the Congolese government. While many of those are due to an older, less contagious variant, there’s concern that infections from the newer variety will rise exponentially. And the way it’s presenting is problematic.

“We’re seeing a lot of cases among sex workers,” Roger Kamba, Congo’s public health minister, said in a televised presentation on Aug. 15. The variant is dangerous because it’s harder to spot — there are fewer external signs, like the raised buttons on the faces and hands of earlier mpox patients, he said, adding that about 3.5% of those infected have died.

Kamituga is surrounded by verdant hills that feel far removed from the sprawling trading hub of South Kivu’s capital, Bukavu. It’s in a region that Congo’s government has struggled to control since conflict began in the 1990s in the aftermath of the Rwandan genocide and the fall of longtime Congolese dictator Mobutu Sese Seko. The town has suffered decades of predation by armed groups and at times from soldiers of the country’s own army.

“Frequent travel occurs between Kamituga and the nearby city of Bukavu, with subsequent movement to neighboring countries such as Rwanda and Burundi,” Congolese and other researchers wrote in a paper published by the journal Nature Medicine in June. “Moreover, sex workers operating in Kamituga represent several nationalities and frequently return to their countries of origin.”

While the disease can spread sexually it can also be transmitted through skin-to-skin contact, making children vulnerable. Added to that, Kamba said, is that younger Congolese people have never been vaccinated against smallpox, a related disease that’s been eradicated. Immunizations against that disease provide protection against catching mpox.

For now aid agencies such as Save the Children and Unicef are focusing on awareness campaigns, so that people in the region where the disease is most prevalent know of its presence and how it spreads, and supporting woefully under-resourced health facilities.

“We are raising knowledge, raising awareness within the population. If a family member gets sick people still go and visit” and the infected aren’t always separated from the uninfected at medical facilities, Von Schroeder said. “The health systems are completely overwhelmed.”

Mpox is not a new disease. It’s been spilling over from animals into human populations in parts of west and central Africa, such as heavily forested Congo, with increasing frequency since the 1970s.

“We have to take that into account,” Kamba said. “We’re in a relationship with animals in relation to diseases.”

But human-to-human transmission, as seen with the latest variant, heightens the danger of a debilitating outbreak.

The next steps will be getting sufficient vaccines to the region. Kamba estimates that 3.5 million doses will be needed and that will cost hundreds of million of dollars, money that Congo, one of the world’s poorest countries, doesn’t have.

While Congo has dealt with other outbreaks before including Ebola, cholera and measles, those have weakened its health systems.

If this outbreak is to be tackled effectively there needs to be a solid vaccination plan once shots reach the area.

At about $100 per dose, the vaccines are currently very expensive and many countries in Africa can’t afford the cost, according to Jean Kaseya, director general of Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention.

“Mpox is a slow-burning fire that has been allowed to smolder in central Africa and is flaring up,” said David Tscharke, a poxvirus researcher at the Australian National University’s John Curtin School of Medical Research.

(By Antony Sguazzin, Michael J. Kavanagh and Janice Kew)

Proposal to ban open-pit mining advances in Mexican Congress

Reuters | August 15, 2024 | 

Plenary hall of the Mexican Chamber of Deputies. Stock image.

A committee in Mexico’s lower house of Congress approved two constitutional reforms that would prohibit open-pit mining and fracking, as well as restrict the use of genetically modified corn.


The proposals, passed on Wednesday, will be taken up for discussion by the full lower house after lawmakers return to session in September.

The changes would also prevent the exploitation of water in areas with water scarcity, with the exception of extraction in populated areas for domestic use, according to a statement released Wednesday night.

The changes are part of a package of constitutional reforms presented in February by President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, which contains other proposals, including one to restructure the judiciary.

In Mexico, constitutional changes must be approved by a two-thirds vote in the plenary session of the both the lower house and the Senate, and by the majority of local congresses. In the June elections, Lopez Obrador’s ruling Morena party and its allies achieved a qualified majority in the lower house and were just two seats short in the Senate.

Lopez Obrador has criticized the mining contracts with private companies signed by his predecessors and says that his administration has not granted any new private concessions in the sector.

The Mexican Mining Chamber (Camimex) opposes the ban on open-pit mining, saying such a prohibition would cause a 1% contraction in the country’s GDP and threaten some 200,000 jobs.

Regarding the genetically modified corn, the proposal comes as Mexico and the United States have an ongoing dispute at a panel of the US-Mexico-Canada Agreement. The lower house committee’s reform would allow for the entry of genetically modified corn into Mexico only for non-human consumption and only if the grain dos not have the capacity to germinate.

(By Ana Isabel Martinez and Raul Cortes Fernandez; Editing by Aurora Ellis)

Canada’s Yukon aims to reopen mine seized from Victoria Gold

Bloomberg News | August 16, 2024 | 

Victoria Gold’s Eagle gold mine Credit: Victoria Gold

Canada’s Yukon Territory wants to eventually reopen a gold mine it seized from Victoria Gold Corp. after a major landslide and cyanide spill at the facility earlier this summer.


Yukon’s government said Friday it moved to place Victoria Gold into receivership because of environmental concerns at the Eagle mne and so that the operation can reopen after clean-up efforts are completed.

“We chose this course of action so that Victoria Gold and mining could resume at this site,” Yukon’s Attorney General Tracy-Anne McPhee said in a press briefing. “We had no intention of ending the work of that corporation, but the environmental concerns were simply not being addressed to our satisfaction.”

The Canadian company suspended operations at Eagle mine in June following a failure at its heap leach facility, where mined ore is stacked into piles and sprinkled with cyanide-laced water. Since then, Yukon’s government has said it has identified elevated levels of cyanide in nearby waterways that has killed wildlife. Victoria Gold has disputed those claims.

The appointment of PricewaterhouseCoopers as receiver of Victoria Gold and its assets on Wednesday followed weeks of mitigation efforts at the site. The receiver will undertake further mitigation work at the mine site with funding from the Yukon, according to the government, though it did not provide a timeline on the clean-up effort.

The government said the money advanced for the efforts will constitute a debt that will be recovered from Victoria Gold’s assets.

“A lack of action by Victoria Gold left us with serious concerns about the heap leach failure,” said McPhee.

Victoria Gold’s board of directors resigned following the receivership placement on Wednesday. Chief executive officer John McConnell told Canada’s CBC News on Thursday he thinks the receivership is “totally unnecessary.”

The company did not immediately respond on Friday to a request for comment.

(By Jacob Lorinc)