This article appears in the Sept. 23, 2005 issue of Executive Intelligence
Review.
Cheney Revives Parvus ‘Permanent War’ Madness
by Jeffrey Steinberg, Allen Douglas, and Rachel Douglas
It was never a secret that the ranks of today’s Washington
neo-conservative war-party are filled with former first and second
generation Trotskyists’ personified by Irving Kristol, the former
Shachtmanite Trotskyist, self-described “Godfather” of the entire
neo-con apparatus, and the father of Weekly Standard editor William
Kristol. What was ignored was that fact that both they and Vice
President Dick Cheney’s are still fanatically committed to former
Bolshevik minister of war Leon Trotsky’s doctrine of “permanent
revolution,” and to the kind of permanent war which Cheney has created
in Iraq, and is preparing to launch, very soon, as nuclear-armed
warfare against Iran, and similarly permanent warfare against Syria,
in South American, and elsewhere as soon, and as often as possible. It
is this doctrine, which most historians associate with the name of
Josef Stalin rival Leon Trotsky and his followers, which is presently
the most immediate threat of mass-murderous violence to the world as a
whole.
It is also the leading active threat to the continued existence of the
U.S.A. as a constitutional republic, here, at home.
That is the root of the wide-spread failure of most leading circles in
the U.S. and Europe to grasp the true nature of the menace which has
been unleashed as a result of Vice President Cheney’s adoption of a
doctrine which the Russian-born British intelligence asset Alexander
Helphand, also known as “Parvus” dictated to Leon Trotsky’s effort to
overthrow Russia’s Tsar in revolution of 1905. What Helphand dictated
to his dupe Trotsky, in writing, personally, there at that time, is a
doctrine of “permanent revolution/permanent war” which Trotsky himself
continued defended up to the moment of his assassination by a Soviet
assassin, in Mexico in 1940. That is the policy actually being
conducted by Cheney’s alleged former Trotskyist, neo-conservative
advisors today. That is the the policy which has unleashed the
monstrous and worsening catastrophe which Cheney’s continued policies,
and Cheney’s lies to the U.S. Congress, have created, which is moving
now to the brink of a new disaster, in the entire region of Southwest
Asia today.The facts which more than prove all this are not only
clear. The greatest threat to the U.S. today, is the failure of most
leading circles here, and in Europe, to understand the vast mass of
often overlooked evidence which must be understood if we are to
prevent the now financial-crisis-wracked U.S. and the world from being
lured, very soon into an early catastrophe beyond the calculations of
most leading circles among governments still today.
Those critics who do not understand what is really behind Cheney’s
murderous rages and lies, think that the “neo-cons” have ‘ failed in
Iraq, are people simply do not yet understand the real goals of
Cheney’s ongoing policy.
True, the George W. Bush administration has succeeded to an alarming
degree, leaving Iraq in a state of Sunni versus Shi’ite, Kurd versus
Turkmen, and even Shi’ite versus Shi’ite civil war, that could go on
for generations, and which threatens to soon spread to all of the
neighboring states.
No competent strategists are surprised by this result of Bush
administration war-policy. What we are seeing today, is the
foreseeable fiasco of Bush war policy which prompted many leading
American military commanders and diplomats, like Gen. Anthony Zinni
and Ambassador Chas Freeman, to vocally oppose the Cheney/neo-con Iraq
adventure, long before the first American troops crossed into Iraqi
territory.
The neo-Trotskyite neo-cons and their hooligans, typified by Dick
Cheney, were not out simply to establish a stable American imperial
occupation, seize control over the oil fields, and blackmail rival
states like China with the cutoff of petroleum, as many Bush-Cheney
critics presume. Cheney’s gang never intended to end, with some form
of Pax Americana peace. It was intended to be the first of a
succession of permanent wars, engulfing the entire Persian Gulf and
extended Southwest and Central Asian regions in decades of chaos,
fostering a domino of “failed states,” and causing global economic and
political mayhem, all to the benefit of a private financier oligarchy,
largely centered in the City of London and its offshoots based in the
U.S. region of the Gulf of Mexico.
The already ongoing civil war in Iraq, fueled every step along the way
by Bush Administration policy actions, reflected the intentions of the
most hard-core of the neo-con ideologues, a cabal centered out of the
Office of the Vice President, and together with such neo-Trotskyite
“think-tanks” as the American Enterprise Institute and the Hudson
Institute.
Just because President George W. Bush was foolish enough to believe
the kindergarten propaganda of the neo-cons about a “cakewalk”
victory, a flourishing of Iraqi democracy, and the immediate free flow
of Iraqi oil, does not make it true. The President, with his bizarre
Promise Keeper fundamentalist religious dogmas, is, after all, the
perfect Straussian politician, the fool duped by the scheming
“philosophers” who ply him with lies, which he takes as the gospel
truth, and spreads to an equally duped, mindless following.
The intent to foster permanent revolution and permanent war according
to Helphand’s doctrine of throughout Southwest Asia was clearly
spelled out, years before the Iraq war, by a group of American neo-con
“chickenhawks” in the July 1996 “A Clean Break” paper, delivered to
then-Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Authors Richard Perle,
Douglas Feith, David Wurmser, Meyrav Wurmser, Charles Fairbanks
(surrogate and former college roommate of Paul Wolfowitz), et
al. spelled out an unambiguous scheme to spread war from Iraq to
Syria, Lebanon, and Iran, on to Saudi Arabia, and, ultimately, to
Egypt.
According to one well-informed U.S. intelligence source, the essence
of the neo-cons’ “Clean Break” plan was to bust up the “Sunni
Stability Belt,” centered around Saudi Arabia and Egypt, which had
provided a degree of stability to the region throughout the Cold War
era, and had assured the free flow of Persian Gulf oil to the world.
The sequence of pre-meditated steps, taken by the Bush-Cheney
Administration neo-cons, in bringing occupied Iraq to the brink of
chaos and destruction, cannot be credibly written off to bad judgment,
greed, or naive utopianism. This starts with “Clean Break” co-author
Doug Feith’s rejection of all State Department expert plans for the
post-conflict occupation and reconstruction of Iraq; continues through
the Wolfowitz-ordered dismantling of the entire Iraqi Army and
Ba’athist infrastructure; and carries through the fostering of Shi’ite
versus Sunni conflict’what Dr. Phebe Marr described at a recent
Washington event as the “Lebanonization” of Iraq.
On to Damascus and Tehran
Indeed, as this issue of EIR goes to press, Vice President Cheney and
his cohorts have escalated the next phase of their war plans against
both Syria and Iran.
On Sept. 14, the Washington Post reported that Bush Administration
chief arms control official, Dr. Robert Joseph, has been making Power
Point presentations to diplomats from more than a dozen countries,
claiming to prove that Iran has been secretly pursuing a nuclear
weapons program, and must be confronted. The presentation, “A History
of Concealment and Deception,” is reminiscent of the same kinds of
briefings, conjured up by the Pentagon’s Office of Special Plans, to
make the case for the preemptive war against Iraq, prior to the March
2003 U.S. and British invasion. Dr. Joseph, the Richard Perle
protégé who replaced the neo-conservative acting United Nations
Ambassador John Bolton, as the State Department’s chief arms control
negotiator, was formerly with the Condoleezza Rice National Security
Council, where he authored the infamous “sixteen words” in President
George W. Bush’s January 2003 State of the Union Address, falsely
accusing Saddam Hussein of seeking uranium from Africa to build
nuclear bombs. That “Saddam has nukes” disinformation campaign was
pivotal to bullying the U.S. Congress into acquiescing to the Iraq
preemptive war.
Through a series of leaks, including a Sept. 11 Washington Post
front-page story by Walter Pincus, it has been confirmed that Vice
President Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld are
promoting the integration of “mini-nukes” into the conventional
arsenal of the U.S. military. As EIR widely exposed in July, Cheney is
openly promoting a preventive nuclear strike against scores of targets
inside Iran, all ostensibly secret nuclear weapons facilities and
related sites. Such a U.S. or U.S.-Israeli air strike against Iran
would trigger an out-of-control asymmetric war, soon engulfing the
entire planet, and making the United States the number one enemy of
more than 1.6 billion Muslims for generations to come. Such
precedent-setting U.S.A. mini-nuke strikes against Iran would usher in
a planetary “New Dark Age,” highlighted by $150-200 barrels of oil.
On Sept. 14, U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Zalmay Khalilzad raced back to
Washington to deliver a press conference, denouncing Syria for its
continued involvement in the Iraq insurgency, vowing, on behalf of the
Bush Administration, that “no option,” including military strikes, was
off the table, if Syria continued to back the Iraq insurgents.
To be sure, there are legitimate complaints to be raised with the
regimes in both Tehran and Damascus. But the present renewed war
drive by Cheney et al. against Iran and Syria is not intended as a
“diplomatic stick” aimed at facilitating a diplomatic solution. To
comprehend what it is that makes Dick Cheney’s handlers’like the
second generation Anglo-Soviet “Trust” agent George Shultz’tick, it is
necessary to dissect the actual history of the doctrine of permanent
war/permanent revolution, and then, revisit the events of the past
five years of the Bush-Cheney regime from that fresh standpoint.
Permanent Imperialism
In a Sept. 14, 2005 memorandum to colleagues, Lyndon LaRouche wrote:
“The use of the interchangeable terms, ‘Permanent Revolution’ and
‘Permanent War’ is merely a substitution of labels for the
long-standing term ‘imperialism’…. ‘Permanent Revolution’ is an
Anglo-Dutch Liberal’s neo-Venetian Party term, describing the
character and aims of British imperialism as rooted in the reign of a
financier-oligarchical system through destroying all prospective
sources of patriotic challenge to empire by policies of ‘permanent
regime-change’ (‘permanent revolution’) and ‘permanent warfare.’ ”
LaRouche continued, “The shift, by the Anglo-Dutch Liberals and their
financier-oligarchical rivals and partners, away from emphasis on
crown colonies to more or less global financier-oligarchical tyranny,
is aptly reflected by a shift of emphasis to the essential predicates
of imperialism (e.g., ‘permanent regime-change’ and ‘permanent
warfare’) from the emphasis on the optional predicate of colonial
territory. In both variants, emphasis upon colony, and emphasis on
globalized financier-oligarchical power, the sovereign nation-state is
the adversary which the imperialist must continually move to subvert
and destroy.”
The American System Goes Global
The doctrine of “Permanent Revolution/Permanent War,” widely
associated with the Bolshevik revolutionary Leon Trotsky, emerged in a
very specific historical context’the late 19th- and early 20th-Century
period, in which the ideas of the American System of political economy
were gaining wide support among leading governments and political
circles throughout Eurasia. This posed an existential threat to the
British Monarchy/British East India Company-centered Anglo-Dutch
empire, and to the head of that cabal, the “Prince of the Isles”
Edward Albert, later Britain’s King Edward VII.
In the immediate aftermath of the defeat of the British-backed
Southern secessionist insurrection known as the American Civil War
(1861-65), the United States, despite the British-sponsored
assassination of President Abraham Lincoln, emerged as the world’s
leading industrial power. What was known as the American System of
political economy, associated with U.S. Treasury Secretary Alexander
Hamilton, and such later Hamiltonians as Henry Carey, John Quincy
Adams, Henry Clay, E. Peshine Smith, the German Careyite Friedrich
List, et al., established a system of protective tariffs, national
banking, infrastructure investment, the promotion of science and
technology, and other measures. The American System was universally
known, at the time, to be the deadly, feared enemy of the British
System of free trade, private central banking, slave labor, and global
cartels.
It was the industrial might of the Federal states’based on the
Hamiltonian American System policy’that provided the margin of victory
against the Confederate insurrection. Lincoln was also greatly
assisted by the vital international support of his close ally,
Russia’s Tsar Alexander II, who deployed the entire Russian navy to
North American to deter Britain and France from entering the war on
the side of the Confederacy.
In a fitting celebration of the American System, a Centennial fair was
convened in Philadelphia in 1876, which aimed to spread the American
System around the world. In this period, these ideas took root in the
new unified German state, under Bismarck, which adopted the ideas of
Friedrich List, and which established joint industrial ventures
between leading American figures like Thomas Alva Edison and German
industrialists Walther Rathenau and Werner von Siemens. In Russia,
American and Russian engineers collaborated on the construction of the
Trans-Siberian Railroad, which was modeled on the U.S.
Transcontinental Railroad project, which had helped consolidate a
unified continental republic, following the disasters of the Civil
War. Under the leadership of Sergei Witte (see accompanying article),
Russia emerged, at the end of the 19th Century, as the fastest-growing
industrial nation in Eurasia. In Japan, under the Meiji Restoration,
the American System was adopted, with Carey protégé
E. Peshine Smith serving as a leading economic advisor to the Japanese
Emperor. Similar American System ideas were adopted in the France of
Gabriel Hanotaux , which launched ambitious plans to build railroads
across Africa. In China, Sun Yat-sen was trained by American
missionaries in the ideas of Hamilton and Carey, and a Chinese
republican movement advanced detailed plans for the integration and
modernization of China. Other examples of the spread of the American
System abounded in South America and as far away as Australia.
The British Empire Strikes Back
In London, Prince Edward Albert, the son of Queen Victoria, who would
later become King Edward VII, viewed this spread of the American
System with great alarm. The British response, over the course of the
next 40 years, would be to spread perpetual warfare across Eurasia,
through an array of manipulations, playing one nationality off against
another, assassinating key republican political leaders, fostering the
growth of deeply flawed pseudo-political movements and ideologies,
conducting each-against-all diplomatic maneuverings, and fomenting
“regime changes,” ultimately leading to two successive World Wars. In
every instance, British agents, often operating under the cover of
official diplomatic postings, forged alliances with the most backward
feudalist and fundamentalist factions within the targeted
nations’often through Freemasonic lodges and other secret societies,
created phony “liberation” movements, and recruited and deployed key
agents.
Thus, instead of a Eurasia, united behind American System republican
ideas and concrete great development projects, the British manipulated
the Franco-Prussian, Balkan, Sino-Japanese and Russo-Japanese
wars. The Balkan Wars of 1912-13 led, lawfully, into World War I. The
“Young Turk” revolution in Turkey, secured for Britain, and an allied
France, the breakup of the Ottoman Empire, and its replacement by an
Anglo-French series of protectorates throughout the Near East. In the
course of these efforts, British Intelligence fostered the Muslim
Brotherhood as a permanent insurrectionist force within the entire
Islamic world. The British Freemasonic agent who inspired the
launching of the Muslim Brotherhood, Jamal ad-Deen al-Afghani, was
himself a collaborator of the French Synarchists, yet another global
conspiratorial apparatus that would spawn 20th-Century fascism, and
would later be the model on which the current disastrous Maastricht
Treaty and the European Monetary Union would be based.
In all of these efforts the British apparatus of Prince Edward Albert
modeled their actions on those of the Venetian republic, which emerged
as the center of the new European rentier financial oligarchic power,
in the wake of the collapse of the Byzantine Empire. As the center of
European power shifted from the Mediterranean northward, Venice
morphed into the Dutch and later Anglo-Dutch liberal system of global
financier dominance, over the course of the 15th-18th Centuries. By
the time that Prince Edward Albert emerged as the heir to the legacy
of Lords Shelburne and Palmerston, London had become the global center
of what came to be known as the “Venetian Party.”
The Russian Revolution
The destruction of Russia was of particularly great importance to
London’s oligarchs. From the time of Catherine the Great, whose League
of Armed Neutrality played a pivotal role in securing the victory of
Benjamin Franklin and George Washington’s American Revolution, the
prospect of Russo-American collaboration posed a grave threat to the
power of the British Empire. In the aftermath of the American Civil
War, in which Russia, once again, was instrumental in an American
victory, the spread of American System ideas into Russia was taking on
alarming proportions. The great Russian scientist Dmitri Mendeleyev
had attended the 1876 Philadelphia Centennial Exposition, and he was
collaborating with Russian Minister Witte, in the industrialization of
Russia, driven by the eastward expansion of the Trans-Siberian
Railroad. American railroad engineers, who had built the
Transcontinental Railroad, after serving in the Army Corps of
Engineers during the Civil War, were now in Russia, working with their
Russian counterparts, on the Trans-Siberian. Upon the completion of
the Trans-Siberian Railroad, the first railroad locomotive to traverse
the Eurasian line would be build by the Baldwin Company of
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
Illustrative of the pro-American outlook of the leading Russian
modernizers was an 1899 memo from Minister of Finance Witte to Tsar
Nicholas II, in which he wrote: “The welfare of Your Empire is based
on national labor. The increase of its productivity and the discovery
of new fields for Russian enterprise will always serve as the most
reliable way for making the entire nation more prosperous. We have to
develop mass-production industries, widely dispersed and
variegated. We must give the country such industrial perfection as has
been reached by the United States of America, which firmly basis its
prosperity on two pillars’agriculture and industry.” The eastward
development of Siberia, centered on the Trans-Siberian Rail project,
was key to Witte’s concept of Russian modernization. Among other
things, Witte wanted to open Siberia to colonization by Russia’s Jews,
who remained in terrible ghetto conditions in the Pale of Settlements,
and were subject to frequent pogroms.
The British, unfortunately, had their allies and agents inside Russia
as well. Indeed, in 1881, Tsar Alexander II, the great ally of Lincoln
and the liberator of the serfs, was assassinated by the terrorist
Narodnaya Volya (People’s Will) group. Their plot against the Tsar was
not only not blocked, but was even facilitated by the leaders of the
Tsar’s own security service, men who profoundly opposed the
modernization of Russia, which threatened to break the power of the
landed feudal oligarchy. Several of them were direct collaborators of
the British Balkan Wars project in the 1870s, as well. In the
aftermath of the assassination of Alexander II, this same grouping
created a secret society called the Holy Brotherhood, ostensibly to do
a better job of protecting the monarch. The Holy Brotherhood would
spawn the Okhrana secret police agency, which would be pivotal in
fomenting the events leading to the Russian Revolution.
Zubatov and ‘Police Socialism’
One of the key figures who would be unleashed against Witte and the
modernizers was an Anglophile police agent, Sergei Zubatov. In 1896,
despite the fact that he had been earlier jailed for terrorist
activities, Zubatov was appointed chief of the Russian secret police,
the Okhrana, in Moscow. The Okhrana had been founded by Count
N.P. Ignatiev, a military commander of the Russian forces during the
first Balkan Wars of 1875-78, which had been orchestrated from
London. Ignatiev’s close collaborator, V.P. Meshchersky, was Zubatov’s
immediate patron, securing him the Moscow post. Meshchersky was also a
literary patron of Fyodor Dostoevsky, who propagandized for the Balkan
wars, and of the German philosopher of nihilism, Friedrich
Nietzsche. Zubatov absorbed these philosophical views into his police
work.
Prior to taking the Moscow post, Zubatov had spent a dozen years
conducting police infiltration of the various leftist and socialist
groups that had proliferated inside Russia. He was an avid reader of
British Fabian Society literature, and frequently used the writings of
Sidney Webb as recruiting tools for his own “revolutionary cells.”
Zubatov spelled out his plans in an 1898 memo to another Moscow police
official: “While a revolutionary advocates pure socialism, he can be
dealt with by means of repressive measures alone, but when he begins
to exploit for his purpose minor shortcomings of the existing lawful
structure, the repressive measures alone cease to be sufficient. It
becomes necessary to take the very ground from underneath his feet.”
While unions were banned in Russia, Zubatov launched his own
“mutual-aid societies” which were among the only legal “mass
movements” in Russia. These Zubatov unions were filled with targets of
Zubatov’s police repression and brainwashing techniques. Socialist
leaders were arrested, and then subjected to indoctrination, often by
Zubatov himself. Workers were taught to distrust the social democrats,
and to focus on purely “economic” self-interests. By 1902, Zubatov had
organized scores of “police unions,” and had successfully orchestrated
attacks against some of the leading Russian manufacturers of the Witte
faction. Zubatov also organized a number of Zionist unions as well,
even as his close Okhrana collaborator, the Paris-based Peter
Rachkovsky, penned the forged “Protocols of the Elders of Zion” to
instigate a new pogrom against the Russian Jews, who had been among
the enthusiastic backers of Witte’s modernization efforts. Zubatov had
also inaugurated his own secret assassination squads, called the
Battle Organizations, which were used to eliminate government
ministers and other enemies of the Holy Brotherhood/Okhrana apparatus.
In August 1902, Zubatov was transferred from Moscow to St. Petersburg,
where he became chief of the Special Section of the police, under
police chief Aleksei Lopukhin. A massive expansion of the
agent-provocateur recruitment was launched by the duo; within a year,
there were over 16,000 paid provocateurs on the police payroll,
according to published accounts, based on a review of the police
files, following 1917.
Among Zubatov’s leading agent-provocateurs was Father Georgi Gapon, a
Russian Orthodox rabble-rouser, who organized a number of the Zubatov
police unions. It was Father Gapon who led the march on the Tsar’s
Winter Palace on Jan. 9, 1905, “Bloody Sunday,” which launched the
first insurrection against the Russian state.
Jabotinsky and Parvus
Another of the Okhrana agent-provocateurs employed by Zubatov in the
insurrections against the Russia of Witte and the American System was
Vladimir Jabotinsky, later known as the founder of the Revisionist
Movement in Zionism and an enthusiastic supporter of Mussolini’s
Fascism. In the Spring of 1902, Jabotinsky was arrested and spent
seven weeks in Okhrana custody, going through the Zubatov
indoctrination. He would, according to one biographer, operate “for
several years under the supervision of the police,” particularly in
Odessa, which was the scene of many of Zubatov’s most successful labor
insurrections against Russia’s nascent industrialization. Jabotinsky’s
activities were also funded directly by Maxim Gorky, a well-documented
Okhrana operative and conduit of Zubatov payouts.
Jabotinsky’s career would cross that of another of the most important
operatives of the Bolshevik revolutionary epoch, Alexander Israel
Helphand (a.k.a. “Parvus”). Both Jabotinsky and Parvus edited
publications of the British/Venetian-spawned Young Turks movement,
which helped instigate London’s Balkan Wars and the overthrow of the
Ottoman Empire.
Like Jabotinsky, Parvus (1867-1924) came from an Odessa family steeped
in the grain trade. By 1886, Helphand/Parvus had already become
involved in the Okhrana-spawned Russian socialist scene, traveling to
Switzerland to participate in the Emancipation of Labor group, led by
a number of documented Okhrana agents, including Lev Deutsch, and
suspected Okhrana man Georgi Plekhanov. Parvus would be instrumental,
during the 1890s, in shifting the focus of Russian revolutionary
socialism from agrarian peasants to industrial workers’in keeping with
Zubatov’s efforts to target the Russian modernizers through “class
warfare” provocations. By 1900, Parvus had joined the inner circle of
the Bolsheviks, using his Munich, Germany apartment to house the
printing press for the group, and hosting V.I. Lenin and other
leaders. According to several biographical accounts, by 1902, Parvus
was receiving direct Okhrana funding through Gorky, who gave Parvus
the rights to publish his works abroad.
Once “Bloody Sunday” unleashed the revolutionary destabilizations in
St. Petersburg, Parvus appeared on the scene, as a leading
collaborator of Leon Trotsky and other leaders of the Petersburg
Soviet. Parvus and Trotsky bought a liberal newspaper, Russkaya Gazeta
to rival the Bolshevik publication, and soon had a circulation of
500,000. Parvus and Trotsky turned the newspaper into a radical
provocateur organ, much to the delight of the Okhrana, which would
soon launch a police crackdown on the entire social democratic scene.
When the entire leadership of the Petrograd Soviet’including
Trotsky’was rounded up and jailed in December 1905, Parvus escaped the
police clutches. When he was later captured, he escaped police
custody, courtesy of the Okhrana agent Lev Deutsch. Parvus next turned
up, via Germany, in Constantinople, as a “journalist” covering the
Young Turk rebellion against the Ottomans, a crucial prelude to the
British-manipulated second Balkan War. It would be at this moment that
Parvus’ ties to the leading European “Venetian Party” factions would
be publicly shown.
The Young Turks
In 1908, the Committee for Union and Progress, otherwise known as the
Young Turks, carried out a military coup, overthrowing the Sultan and
seizing power over the Ottoman Empire. Launching ethnic cleansing
campaigns against all non-Turkic peoples, including Armenians, Greeks
and Bulgarians, the Young Turk regime played a pivotal role in
provoking the 1912-13 Balkan Wars, through their brutality towards the
minorities. By their own accounts, the Young Turks based their
revolution on a version of Pan-Turkism that had been devised by an
advisor to the Sultan in the 1860s who was, in fact, an agent of
Britain’s Lord Palmerston. The Young Turks also preached a rabid
anti-Russian ideology, which was inspired by Wilfred Blunt, a top
British Intelligence official, whose own ideas about playing an
“Islamic card” to destroy Russia predated those of Britain’s Bernard
Lewis by a full century.
The actual founder of the Young Turk movement was an Italian Freemason
and grain trader named Emmanuel Carasso. Jewish by birth, Carasso had
been a founder of the Italian Masonic lodge in Salonika, called the
Macedonia Risorta Lodge. Virtually all of the members of the Young
Turk leadership were lodge members. The forerunner of the Macedonia
Risorta Lodge was founded by a follower of another Palmerston agent
and revolutionary provocateur, Giuseppi Mazzini.
Carasso was a leading financier of the entire Young Turk insurrection,
and during the Balkan Wars, he was not only the head of Balkan
intelligence operations for the Young Turks. He was in charge of all
food supplies for the Ottoman Empire during World War I, a lucrative
business which he shared with Parvus.
Carasso also financed a number of newspapers and other propaganda
outlets for the Young Turks, among them the newspaper The Young Turk,
which was edited by none other than Vladimir Jabotinsky. Another of
Carasso’s “business” associates was Parvus, who became economics
editor of another Young Turk journal, The Turkish Homeland. Parvus
also became a partner of Carasso in the grain trade, and in the arms
business, and became independently wealthy.
The Young Turk operation was headed, from London, by Aubrey Herbert, a
grandson of one of Mazzini’s controllers, who himself died while
leading revolutionary mobs in Italy in 1848. Aubrey Herbert headed all
British Intelligence operations in the Middle East during the period
of World War I, and no less a figure than Lawrence of Arabia
identified Herbert as the actual head of the Young Turk
insurrection. Herbert’s career is the subject of the historical novel,
Greenmantle, by World War I British intelligence official John Buchan.
Emmanuel Carasso’s pivotal role in the Young Turk movement and the
resulting Balkan Wars of 1912-13, is of significance from one
additional standpoint. Carasso was a protégé and business
partner of Volpi di Misurata, the leading Venetian banker of the early
20th Century, who not only sponsored the Young Turk insurrection, but
also promoted the Black Shirt takeover of Rome and went on to run the
Mussolini Fascist regime from his various posts as Minister of Finance
(1925-28), member of the Grand Council of Fascism, president of the
Fascist Confederation of Industrialists, and, most important, as the
chief public representative of a group of aristocrats around Count
Piero Foscari, of the ancient Venetian dogal family.
The Venetian banker Volpi was closely allied with City of London
financiers throughout. And the Young Turks, once they took power, made
no secret of their London ties. In 1909 the Ottoman Navy was put under
the command of a British admiral; the British Royal Family’s own
banker, Ernst Cassel, established and managed the National Bank of
Turkey; and British officials advised the Ministry of Finance, the
Interior Ministry and the Ministry of Justice. The Young Turks also
denounced and blocked further construction of the Berlin-Baghdad
Railroad.
The Parvus Saga Resumed
Parvus’s Young Turk interlude had earned him a large fortune. He had
partnered with Young Turk financier and Macedonia Risorta Lodge
founder Emmanuel Carasso, and had been given the contract to supply
grain to the Turks during the Balkan Wars of 1912-13. According to
some accounts, Parvus also got into the tightly controlled arms
business, probably under the patronage of Sir Basil Zaharoff of the
Vickers Arms cartel, a prominent Anglo-Venetian enterprise.
Once the Balkan Wars had started, leading directly into World War I,
Parvus turned his attention back to Russia, laying plans to finance a
revolution, to be led by Lenin and the Bolsheviks. Parvus set his
scheme for revolution down in a March 9, 1915 memorandum to the German
Foreign Ministry, vowing that the Bolsheviks would take power in
Russia in 1916, and seeking financial support.
The German government was deeply split over the issue of backing a
Russian Bolshevik revolution. Close advisors to the German Kaiser
argued that Germany should push a separate peace with the Tsar, while
a faction, centered in the General Staff and around Foreign Minister
Zimmerman pushed for a “war-to-the-death” with Russia, arguing that
war with Russia was inevitable, and it made sense to get on with it
before Russia became more powerful. One of the key backers of the
Parvus Plan at the German General Staff was Count Bogdan von
Hutten-Czapski, the head of the Political Section and a longtime
business associate of none other than Young Turks financier, the
Venetian Party Synarchist operative Giuseppi Volpi, the future
controller of Mussolini.
According to his own memoirs, von Hutten-Czapski had seen the outbreak
of the Russo-Japanese War as an opportunity “to smash the Tsarist
Empire,” a view shared by Parvus.
In addition to the German Foreign Ministry and the German General
Staff, Parvus was also given access to an exhaustive amount of funds
for his Russian “regime change” scheme from a leading German
Synarchist industrialist and close associate of Hjalmar Schacht (later
Hitler’s Economics Minister), Hugo Stinnes of the German coal
syndicate. Stinnes granted Parvus control over the shipping and sale
of German coal to Denmark, from which Parvus made millions of gold
marks per month. Stinnes would become a major player in the 1920s
revival of the German military industry, and would continue his
business arrangements with Parvus through to the latter’s
death. Stinnes, too, was tied to Volpi and the Banca Commerciale
Italiana.
Crown Prince Wilhelm, an opponent of the “war now” faction, struck a
vital chord when he wrote to the Russian court in early 1915 that it
was “absolutely necessary to conclude a peace with Russia…. It is
too silly that we should hack each other to pieces so that England
could fish in dark waters.”
Within weeks of receipt of the Parvus memo, the German Foreign
Ministry made the first payment of one million gold marks to Parvus to
launch his scheme. In May 1915, Parvus met with Lenin and Karl Radek
in Switzerland, and then created a string of front groups in Stockholm
and Copenhagen. By February 1916, a series of strikes had begun at
major shipbuilding plants, then working at breakneck speed to produce
new warships for the Russian Navy. The strikes disrupted Russia’s war
mobilization, but did not lead, immediately, to revolutionary regime
change. Parvus spent the next year building his fortune, and, through
his financial largess, his ties to the Bolshevik leadership. Parvus’s
biographers, Z. Zeman and W.B. Sharlau (Merchant of Revolution;
London: W.&J. Mackay & Co., Ltd, 1965) summarized Parvus’s outlook on
the eve of the 1917 Russian Revolution: “Helphand showed that he
believed that any political aim could be realized with sufficient
money, that the elite of the socialist leaders could resist the lure
of mammon no more than any other social group, that friendship, as
much as political support, had to be bought. Such a view informed his
political strategy; it was the essence of his political and human
experience.”
By April 1917, Parvus had pushed the German government to grant secret
safe-passage to the Bolshevik leaders back into Russia, and
arrangements were soon made, through Parvus and Radek, to smuggle
Lenin and 40 other leading Bolsheviks from Switzerland, through
Stockholm, back to Petrograd. Parvus remained in Stockholm, in
constant communication with the International Mission of the Petrograd
Bolshevik Central Committee Abroad. He remained virtually the
exclusive source of funding for the revolution that was about to
rapidly unfold: On July 16-17, the Bolsheviks carried out an armed
insurrection in Petrograd, which was promptly put down by the
Provisional Government. The Russian intelligence services released a
report, proving that the Bolshevik uprising had been funded by the
German government, an act of wartime treason. Lenin and friends fled
Russia. However, a month later, in August 1917, the British backed a
separate military coup attempt against the Kerensky Provisional
Government, and in response, Social Democrat Kerensky brought back the
Bolsheviks and armed them against General Kornilov, the chief coup
plotter. On Oct. 25, 1917, Lenin seized power.
Nazi-Communism and Synarchy
Within less than two months after the Bolshevik coup had installed
Lenin in power in Petrograd, Parvus was setting up a new
anti-Bolshevik infrastructure of news organs and operatives inside
Soviet Russia. The ostensible cause of Parvus’s 180-degree turn was
Lenin’s refusal to allow him to return to Russia, but this account is
dubious. Parvus moved to Switzerland and, while he continued to
provide funds to factions of the Bolsheviks, he became a public enemy
of the new Russian Soviet regime, and would devote much of the
remainder of his life to a concerted effort to organize Europe to
crush Russia.
Parvus’s status in Switzerland was secured by his longtime colleague,
Adolph Muller, the German Ambassador in Berne, and a Munich
publisher. According to authors James and Suzanne Pool (Who Financed
Hitler: The Secret Funding of Hitler’s Rise to Power; New York: Dial
Press, 1978), “The one businessman on whom the Nazi Party was most
dependent was not a great industrialist who contributed money to the
movement, but the Munich printer, Adolph Muller…. He had done
business with the Nazis since before the putsch. When Hitler wanted to
start publishing the Volkischer Beobachter again after his release
from prison in 1924, Muller advanced the editor’s wages and supplied
the paper on credit.” The money that Hitler used to purchase the
newspaper came from a White Russian and former Okhrana associate,
Vasili Biskupsky.
Parvus’s “Nazi-Communist” pedigree was pure Synarchist, as was
befitting an agent of Anglo-Venetian financier interests. At the close
of World War I, Parvus wrote the following profile of the European
situation: “There exist two possibilities only: either the unification
of western Europe, or Russia’s domination. The whole game with the
buffer states will end in their annexation by Russia, unless they are
united with central Europe in an economic community, which would
provide a counter-balance to Russia.” Under any circumstances, Parvus
argued that the era of the nation-state system had ended in Europe.
To pursue this goal of further “regime change” all across the European
continent, replacing the sovereign governments of the continent with a
new European super-state, to wage war against Bolshevik Russia, Parvus
joined with another Anglo-Venetian schemer, Count Richard
Coudenhove-Kalergi, to push the Pan-European Union.
In this final intrigue, Parvus once again got the financial backing of
the German coal magnate Hugo Stinnes, who would make a killing,
courtesy of his friend Schacht, on the collapse of the German mark,
during the hyperinflation of 1923, and move back into Germany to buy
up scores of bankrupt industries and coal mines at a fraction of their
worth. Cudenhove-Kalergi, for his part, was bankrolled by Max Warburg
of the original Venetian Del Banco clan. Warburg had earlier
bankrolled Parvus and Leon Trotsky, in the run-up to the Bolshevik
Revolution.
Coudenhove-Kalergi argued that Pan-Europa would emerge out of the
fight against Bolshevism, just as “Young Europe arose out of the
struggle against the Holy Alliance, as the Holy Alliance had issued
out of the struggle against Napoleon.” At the first congress of the
Pan European Union, in Vienna, four portraits adorned the wall behind
the speakers’ podium: Immanuel Kant, Napoleon Bonaparte, Giuseppi
Mazzini, and Friedrich Nietzsche.
In a 1932 Pan-Europa propaganda tract, Coudenhove-Kalergi out-Parvus’d
Parvus, in restating the permanent war/permanent revolution thesis:
“This eternal war,” he wrote, “can end only with the constitution of a
world republic…. The only way left to save the peace seems to be a
politic of peaceful strength, on the model of the Roman Empire, that
succeeded in having the longest period of peace in the west thanks to
the supremacy of his legions.”
Eight years after Parvus’s death, leading Pan-Europa proponent Hjalmar
Schacht, now the German representative at the Bank for International
Settlements and soon to be Hitler’s Finance Minister, announced to a
major gathering of Coudenhove-Kalergi’s group in Berlin, “In three
months Hitler will be in power…. Hitler will create PanEuropa! Only
Hitler can create PanEuropa!” Schacht and Parvus, parenthetically,
had first come into contact during the Young Turk revolt at the
beginning of the century. In his post-World War II autobiography,
Confessions of the Old Wizard (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1956),
Schacht had reminisced about his visit in 1909 to Salonika and
Constantinople, arranged through his Berlin Freemasonic Lodge, during
which he was hosted by the Macedonia Lodge and met with the entire
Young Turk leadership.
Permanent War/Permanent Revolution Revisited
While Parvus protégé Leon Trotsky is widely credited with the
authorship of the concept of “permanent revolution,” Trotsky himself
attributed the idea to Parvus, his closest ally during the period of
the 1905 St. Petersburg Soviet revolt. Parvus argued, as the neo-cons
do today, that revolutionary social change is only possible under
conditions of general warfare. Parvus, the Anglo-Venetian oligarchical
intriguer, played a pivotal role in King Edward VII’s orchestration of
the Eurasian wars of the early 20th century, which led into World War
I. Following the war, Parvus helped plant the seeds for the next war,
promoting the same “universal fascism” embraced today by neo-con
theoretician Michael Ledeen, and put into practice at the end of
Parvus’s life by his sponsor Volpi’s Mussolini.
Trotsky codified the Parvus outlook, in his two famous works,
Permanent Revolution and Results and Prospects. In the first of those
works, Trotsky wrote, “The permanent revolution, in the sense which
Marx attached to this concept, means a revolution which makes no
compromise with any single form of class rule, which does not stop at
the democratic stage, which goes over to socialist measures and to war
against reaction from without; that is, a revolution whose every
successive stage is rooted in the preceding one and which can end only
in complete liquidation.”
But Parvus himself said it best. In an article in his magazine Iskra,
on the eve of World War I and the Revolution, he boasted, “The
Russo-Japanese War is the blood-red dawn of coming great events.” And
in The Class Warfare of the Proletariat (Berlin, 1911), Parvus wrote
in praise of war: “The war sharpens all capitalist contradictions. A
world war may therefore be concluded only by a world revolution.”
This article was based on an exhaustive study by Allen and Rachel
Douglas, “The Roots of the Trust: From Volpe to Volpi, and Beyond’The
Venetian Dragomans of the Russian Empire,” an unpublished EIR
manuscript, June 1987; and on published and unpublished research by
Scott Thompson, Marjorie Mazel Hecht, and Joseph Brewda.