Category Archives: Blowback

Two Sorts of Bishops

I met my first Orthodox bishop exactly fifty years ago, in 1974. Since then I have met perhaps 100 more bishops, 10% of the current total. Although in 1974 I was naïve enough to think that all bishops were Christians and did not tell lies, I soon learned otherwise. Indeed, I have learned that there are two sorts of bishops: those who tell the truth and the liars.

For example, a young and inexperienced bishop told a pack of lies about his priests for two and a quarter years. He told these lies to all the bishops in this country and in his own country and was believed even in Moscow and Antioch. People believed him because naïve people believe a bishop, imagining that he is a Christian, and think that the priest is lieing. But, as Chaucer said, the truth will out. Now he has been found out. We were telling the truth. His schism has been found out. And he has shown himself to be a liar.

The 11th Century Scramble for Europe and 21st Century Globalization

Eight centuries before the 19th century European ‘scramble for Africa’ (the rush with which Western European elites invaded and conquered Africa for purposes of exploitation), there took place the scramble for Europe, the same process of legalized plunder. This happened between 1050 and 1250, the year 1050 being an endpoint in a 300-year long process of degeneration and so a launch-pad for what had been unknown before in the vast part of Europe – feudalism. The process was led by the Franks, a people whose name means ‘the free’, for all whom they encountered became their slaves. From 1050 on the Franks created a new institutional and cultural uniformity in the first ‘European Union’.

This process can therefore be called ’the Frankization of Europe’. It was a process that had begun in the Carolingian heartland of what is now western Germany and north-eastern France. From here in the 11th century, this spread southwards to Italy and northwards to Scandinavia, in 1066 it was carried by its Norman shock-troops westwards to England and later to Wales, Scotland and Ireland, then southwards to Spain and later carried by Teutonic shock troops eastwards to the Slav Lands and Hungary. By the end of the 11th century the process had reached beyond Europe to the Holy Land. This was the beginning of what is now called ‘globalization’, which merely means the scramble for the world.

Thus, the ordinary people of Europe were the first victims, and not the bearers, of Frankish expansion, trampled down beneath the alien castle-building cavalry elite. The Crusades are the best example of this papally-orchestrated war of conquest, fought in the name of God and profit, expanding Frankish religion and trade. This is also what is happening today, the expansion of the Frankish/Western religion of political correctness (including sodomy) and its asset-stripping business. Vigour, boldness, brutality and greed, this was what made up the Faustian brew of the Frankish conqueror, just as it does today. By the late Middle Ages 80% of Europe’s rulers were Franks; today they belong to the ‘Davos elite’.

In the late 11th century the Welsh bishop, Rhygyfarch (1057-1099), witnessed to the ‘gratuitously cruel’ Norman conquest of south Wales and wrote his lament: ‘The people and the priests are despised by the words, hearts and deeds of the Frenchmen. They burden us with taxes and consume our possessions. One of them, however lowly he may be, makes a hundred natives tremble with his command and terrifies them with his look. Alas, our fall, alas our deep sorrow’. Similarly, but this time in support of conquest and not lamenting it, in the 1090s the Frankish monk and historian Guibert of Nogent wrote of the Crusades that ‘God has instituted holy war’. He could have written ‘jihad’.

So began the myth of the ‘Free World’, which means the world enslaved by the Franks. So was born the myth of freedom and democracy, that is, of the anti-social individualism (narcissistic selfishness) of modern times. It can be heard in the imperialist anthem ‘Rule Britannia’, which proclaims that upper-class Britons will ‘never, never, never be slaves’, yet theirs was an empire founded on slavery, or at best, wage-slavery. So was born the chosen people myth, of Aryans, Nazis and, in the USA, of WASPS and ‘American exceptionalism’. BBC Establishment propaganda still insists on ‘the international community’ – the same myth of ‘the West is best’ and ‘the West against the rest’, which is today called the G7 and the New World Order.

However, today, after a thousand years of the sanctification of warfare, of the Western delusion of self-justification, of the militarization and monetarization of society, of institutionalized Western terrorism (‘shock and awe’), the myth is coming to an end. God is not on the side of Western, or anyone else’s, greed and terrorism. The lies of a thousand years have their consequences and will have to be paid for. It is called retribution. The vassal states of American feudalism, from Western Europe to Japan, from South Korea to New Zealand will not forever be held in subjugation by their lords. And this is the future history of the twenty-first century, the terrible yet redeeming story of which is now being written.

 

 

Jerusalem, 11 December 1917-2017

In Memory of Private James Rance of the British Army Cycle Corps (1896-1981)

The announcement by President Trump that the USA is to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel has caused quite predictable deaths, violence and diplomatic chaos. It is what used to be called ‘repercussions’ and is now called ‘blowback’. Sadly, the United States is only repeating the gaffes of Imperial Great Britain 100 years ago, though it now no longer uses gunboats and the British Army cycle corps, but drones and Tomahawk missiles. However, the disastrous long-term consequences are the same.

For this present tragedy began not last week, but 100 years ago, in that year of tragedies, 1917. Then there was not only the palace revolt in Saint Petersburg that has killed tens of millions and destabilized all the territories of the Russian Empire ever since, the slaughter in the trenches in France, where ‘lions were led by donkeys’, the entry into the War of the USA, the bankruptcy of the Allies and the transfer of power to trans-national bankers in New York, but also the conquest of the Ottoman Empire, with Baghdad being taken in March 1917 and Jerusalem on 11 December 1917, exactly 100 years ago today. (My own grandfather was present, with thousands of others, at both events).

Then General Sir Edmund Allenby, later Viscount Allenby of Megiddo and Felixstowe, walked into Jerusalem with British and Imperial troops, ending 401 years of Ottoman occupation. By the Old Testament-minded Baptist Prime Minister of Great Britain, Lloyd George, later a great admirer of Hitler,it was seen as a victorious Crusade.

Without this event, it is probable that the nations of Israel, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon and Iraq would not exist today. The Anglo-French carve-up of the Middle East brought them and other nations, like Saudi Arabia, into being. That of course has had disastrous consequences as the recent and present turmoil and bloody wars in Iraq, Syria, Saudi Arabia and the Yemen prove. Behind it all stood the semi-secret, pro-Zionist Balfour Declaration. What was this?

‘His Majesty’s government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country’.

This statement by the British Establishment was the fruit of negotiations between it and Zionists at a conference on 7 February 1917. Subsequent discussions led to Balfour’s request, on 19 June, that Rothschild and Chaim Weizmann submit a draft of a public declaration. Further drafts were discussed by the British Cabinet, with input from Zionist and anti-Zionist Jews, but with no representation from the local people of Palestine.

The declaration was contained in a letter dated 2 November 1917 from the United Kingdom’s Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour to Lord Rothschild, a leader of the British Jewish community, for transmission to the Zionist Federation of Great Britain and Ireland. The text of the declaration was published in the press on 9 November 1917.

The declaration had a consequence – a chronic state of conflict between Arabs and Jews throughout the Middle East. It has been described as the ‘original sin’ with respect to both Britain’s failure in Palestine and wider events in Palestine. The only senior figure in the British government who foresaw the catastrophic consequences (‘blowback’) was, ironically, the arch-Imperialist Lord Curzon.

Too late, the British government acknowledged in 1939 that the local population’s views should have been taken into account, and finally recognized in 2017 that the declaration should have called for protection of the Palestinian Arabs’ political rights. Britain’s involvement in this has damaged its reputation in the Middle East for ever.  According to historian Elizabeth Monroe: ‘Measured by British interests alone, [the declaration was] one of the greatest mistakes in [its] imperial history’.