Is British Imperialism Reinventing Itself – Again?

In the decades after World War II, when the British Empire seemed to die, it actually reinvented itself as a global engine for money laundering and organized crime; recent international developments indicate that something similar is happening now.

Britain achieved its earlier resurrection by forging the much celebrated “special relationship” with the military-industrial complex of the United States and setting off the Cold War.(See here)

That was, in effect, a coup against American democracy, and it gave London free reign in making a host of international rearrangements, including:

• Partitioning India to create Pakistan as a proxy for use in South Asia and, in alliance with Saudi Arabia (an earlier British creation), the Islamic world.

• Developing the Muslim Brotherhood from a social service organization in Egypt into a transnational Middle Eastern support system for terrorists.

• Continuing its colonial control of Africa’s great mineral wealth through apartheid South Africa, a number of other white minority regimes, and continued subversion of independent African States.

• Expanding its colonial era interests in drug trafficking by developing, first, the “Golden Triangle” in Southeast Asia as the world centre for the production of opium and heroin, and after the end of the Vietnam War, shifting operations to Afghanistan under cover of the "Mujaheddin" war against Russian occupation.

• Developing the first large flow of cocaine from Colombia to the United States by providing transit and money laundering facilities in the Bahamas.

• Setting up a global system of off shore “tax havens” where organized crime of every sort could safely deposit income and arrange for London bankers to invest it.

By the end of the 1970s, these initiatives had resulted in Britain controlling a multi-trillion dollar underground economy rivaling the GDP of the United States. It gave Britain an unparalleled capacity to corrupt, subvert, manipulate and punish anyone, including governments, that got in its way.

In the case of India, punitive British action has involved the subversive use of our corrupt "elite" media, the assassinations of Indira and Rajiv Gandhi, and efforts to foment insurrections in several parts of the country, most visibly in West Bengal (the Purulia arms drop case), and in the Khalistan uprising in the Punjab.

In the United States it has involved the brutal early Cold War alliance with the military-industrial establishment that saw the McCarthy black list and the Kennedy/King assassinations, followed by the more nuanced manipulation of politics through proxies, especially the Bush family with its three terms in the presidency, two of which involved rigged elections. 

British influence in the United States eroded after the end of the Cold War and there were increasing transatlantic conflicts of interest, especially in oil-rich Arab States and as a result of American efforts to end money laundering.

The 9/11 attacks at the beginning of the first rigged Bush Jr. presidency ended that erosion by concentrating the power of the military-industrial elite in the deeply undemocratic “Homeland Security” arrangements. New wars followed, and there was rampant growth of domestic surveillance and militarized urban police.

In the last decade, those trends have again been reversed. The Obama administration has drawn down wars and increased pressure on British money laundering. Edward Snowden’s revelations have shone a light on the surveillance State. The “Occupy” movement has focused public attention on the vast gulf between the ultra-rich 1% and the rest of American society. Popular protests have erupted time and again over the actions of storm-trooper police forces.

Meanwhile, the rise of developing countries as a new force in world affairs has put increasing pressure on British drug trafficking and money laundering systems. In recent years Latin American countries have called for a fundamental re-examination of the prohibitionist drug conventions that make trafficking so lucrative to organized crime. African States have called for an end to "tax havens" that drain trillions of dollars from their economies.

British responses to these challenges underlie a number of recent international developments:

• The outbreak of Ebola in Africa, posing as it does, a considerable threat to other regions of the South, will certainly ease pressure from developing countries to end drug trafficking and money laundering. (The statement by former UNAIDS chief Peter Piot that the strain of Ebola in the current outbreaks is different from the one in previous incidents of the disease needs urgent investigation; where did it come from?)

• The sudden appearance of a well-funded and brutal new terrorist “Islamic State” is threatening to reverse the American draw back from foreign wars. Its televised beheading of Westerners has only one purpose, to build public support for American intervention on the ground; if that happens, the old military-industrial set in the United States will quickly regain much of its lost clout.

• The British announcement last week that it will float bonds denominated in Chinese Yuan will undoubtedly undermine the US$ role as the international reserve currency. That is clearly intended to reduce American capacity to challenge Britain's money laundering and other criminal enterprises.

On all fronts, there is an undoubted effort to reverse positive current trends, with Britain the primary beneficiary.

The only thing that can prevent it from succeeding is an informed global public, capable of seeing through the torrents of British propaganda spread by a host of proxies.

Those proxies include such "liberal" founts as The Guardian, Noam Chomsky, Michel Chossudovsky, the International Clearing House and, in India, operators ranging from our "elite Press" to such two-bit outfits as Counter Currents. A sure confirmation of proxy status is their total blindness to the entire scenario outlined above.

What Now for India?

I was dead wrong about the outcome of the elections, but not in my trepidation about what is happening in India.

A great flood of money has washed through our electoral system, empowering forces that are rooted in the divisive communal politics the British introduced during the colonial rule and have fostered through proxies since independence.

Where that money has come from and what it will require the new government to do should be of acute concern to Indians.

All indicators signal that we are headed for a period of undisguised crony capitalism that will see foreign interests in the driving seat, acting through major Indian corporations.

Those alliances are by no means secret, and some are notorious, especially RIL's hookup with BP that has given the most predatory of the energy majors a role in the pricing of our sovereign natural gas resources.

The association of the TATAs with British interests dates back to the opium trade era of colonial rule, and its diversification in recent decades seems to have included, most obviously in the controversy over the allocation of 2-G spectrum licenses, a shadowy role in launching the corruption scandals that tarred the UPA government in its final years.   

The Ruia Brothers of ESSAR and the Vedanta-Cairn India combine also have an earned notoriety.

Beyond the interests of these usual suspects, we can definitely expect the new government to push for foreign/private investment in the Defense Sector, and the forging of an Indian "military-industrial complex."

Such a combination of forces first emerged in the United States after WW-II, and during the Cold War it spread to all major industrial countries, including supposedly "Socialist" countries.

Once created, the arrangement has proved impervious to democratic control, for it thrives on creating and manipulating violent international confrontations, using intelligence agencies subverted from their legitimate roles. "National security" is used to trump all efforts at democratic control. 
 
On the social front, we can expect to see big business profit from an unprecedented alienation of land from small farmers and inattention to environmental concerns.

The outlook overall is thus grim indeed for India, unless by some miracle Narendra Modi in power jettisons those who financed his rise and implements a truly democratic and indigenous agenda. 

The Congress in Opposition

The prospect described above offers the decimated Indian National Congress a golden opportunity to rebuild itself as a broad-based representative of national interests.

If a BJP government follows the negative trajectory described above, it will have to step rough-shod over the interests of millions of Indians, especially small farmers and the economically powerless. It will have to misuse the intelligence and police services.

If the Congress sets out to give a voice to those injured by such policies, it can expect to reap a rich dividend at the next general elections.

To do that, it will have to organize a national network to report on what is happening, and perhaps start its own media organizations to provide fair coverage.

At the very least it should have a website to publicize what is happening in the country.

Intelligent use of social media -- which it seems to have not done at all this time around -- should help the rebuilding process.

The Long View

In the long view of history, the particulars of who, what and why of this election are likely to disappear in the face of one overwhelming fact: a single political party has once again become the representative of the nation as a whole. 

The fact that regional caste-based politics have been shown the door is a major positive development. 

The end of the myth about a "Muslim vote bank" is also something to applaud. 

Perhaps that will begin the process of bringing to an end the regressive idea that religion can be the basis for electoral politics, allowing organizations such as the RSS to reinvent themselves and become truly national in identity and purpose.

 

Journalism in the Age of Snowden

Dianne Feinstein, Chairman of the US Senate Committee on Intelligence, was on CNN deploring Edward Snowden’s decision to flee abroad with his revelations of the NSA’s massive spying program; she said he should have come to the US Congress with the information.

I wonder if she thinks anyone other than junior high-school kids will agree, and perhaps not even them, for most have probably seen the Will Smith Gene Hackman starrer Enemy of the State, in which the NSA bad guy not only lies to Congress but murders one of its members. There are also the Bourne series of movies in which lying to Congress is standard procedure for the CIA bad guys.   

The current Head of the NSA has been caught lying to Congress and there have been no repercussions as yet. That is par for the course. The history of the post-WW II era -- especially the Iran-Contra affair -- has made it clear that the constitutional structures of the United States have been powerless to control those pursuing the interests of the military-industrial complex.(Video of President Eisenhower's famous speech.)

As far as I can see, Snowden took the only honorable option he had as someone sworn to preserve and protect the Constitution of the United States.

Feinstein at 80 is the oldest member of Congress, and a Liberal Democrat from California; she would have risked nothing by calling for public hearings and getting the NSA to clean house.   

Instead, she has framed a bill to “reform” the NSA that the Electronic Frontier Foundation says will merely codify the worst abuses and extend the mass surveillance of Americans. Typically, Feinstein’s Committee negotiated the bill behind closed doors and has not responded to critics.

All this indicates the strength of the body of lies that has come to be accepted as reality over the past 60 years; but as I have been reporting, its underpinnings are now disintegrating..

How the current situation develops will depend on where the American media Establishment locates its loyalties. If it acknowledges that the unconstitutional power nexus created in Washington by the Ismay-Churchill coup is coming apart at the seams, we could be looking at a transatlantic version of Soviet de-Stalinization.

If United States media begin telling the truth about the British role in subverting American democracy, the effect across the Atlantic will be profound. The British elite will be forced to abandon its elaborate self-aggrandizing fictions and admit that its criminal policies have driven the country into an unprecedented crisis.

As strong pressure from German and American bank regulators has made the international movement of illicit money increasingly difficult, the elite British custodians of the global black market have been obliged to guarantee the trillions under their management by offering up concrete national assets. Unbeknownst to the British people, large chunks of their country have passed into the hands of foreign owners, many of them drug lords and mafiosi masquerading as nebulous corporations.

That process is set to become much more obtrusive under recently announced initiatives ostensibly aimed at facilitating Chinese and Arab investment in Britain. As The Guardian reported on 17 October, Britain faces the prospect that under a recently announced agreement with Beijing, “Chinese entities will hold important stakes in water in the UK, airports, IT infrastructure and now nuclear power generation, all without a serious national debate on any potential risks such involvement might bring.”

Ironically, the paper did not note the reason why this is happening, for silence about Britain’s criminal involvement in the international economy continues to be the cost of survival in the British journalistic Establishment.

Truth telling will also revolutionize American politics.

If American journalists examine how Britain undermined constitutional rule in the world's most powerful country they will bring into the light the treachery of many who chose to promote their own interests over those of their country. The "religious Right," a long-standing pawn of and supporter of the military-industrial nexus, will lose much energy. The Bush wing of the Republican Party could be decimated.

The logistics of such change remain to be worked out, but the atmospherics indicate that it is only a matter of time. Consider what Adam Gopnik had to say in The New Yorker last week about the forthcoming 50th anniversary of Jack Kennedy’s assassination.

The murder marked the beginning of “the postmodern suspicion that the more we see, the less we know;” it highlighted an overlay of two truths. “The first truth is that the evidence that the American security services gathered, within the first hours and weeks and months, to persuade the world of the sole guilt of Lee Harvey Oswald remains formidable: ballistics evidence, eyewitness evidence, ear-witness evidence, fingerprint evidence, firearms evidence, circumstantial evidence, fibre evidence. The second truth of the assassination, just as inarguable, is that the security services collecting that evidence were themselves up to their armpits in sinister behavior, even conspiring with some of the worst people in the world to kill the Presidents of other countries. The accepted division of American life into two orders—an official one of rectitude, a seedy lower order of crime—collapses under scrutiny, like the alibi in a classic film noir.”

Britain and Hinduism 6: Empire of Crime

 In 1916, the third year of Europe's Great War, Grigory Efimovich Rasputin the “mad monk” from Siberia, who had gained access to the Tsar’s family as a faith-healer, was brutally murdered in St. Petersburg, the capital of Tsarist Russia.

A clique at court was blamed for the crime but although its members fed him large amounts of potassium cyanide, bashed in his head with a heavy candlestick, stabbed and shot him, none of them actually did the killing. That was done by a young British Cavalry officer sent from London; he shot Rasputin in the head as the bleeding coatless cleric fled into the freezing night. The British government had anticipated that the Russian amateurs would need help. London wanted Rasputin dead because his pacific influence on Tsar Nicholas II was raising the possibility of a unilateral Russian withdrawal from World War I, and that would have been disastrous for Britain.