Who Will Dominate the World?

Tomdispatch.com has put out a pontification on the “Geopolitics of American Global Decline” by one Alfred W. McCoyon that treats as gospel the early 20th Century ideas of Halford Mackinder, an Englishman who believed that any Power seeking world domination would have to deny rivals control of the “heartland” of Eurasia. In that perspective, China is inevitably the next global hegemon.

In worshipping at the cold altar of a past age McCoyon dismisses equally Harvard’s Joseph Nye, Jr. who sees no rival in the foreseeable future to American military and socio-economic "soft power", and Henry Kissinger, whose proclaimed faith in visionary leaders extends to George W Bush who he extols for initiating the war to remake Iraq.

These varying strategic views ignore the reality that the world today is not obedient to the United States and that it is highly unlikely to bend in the future to the raw fascism of China: in fact, both those countries are victims of the true global hegemon, Uriah Heepish Britain, spreading corruption and false-flag violence to get its way in every region.

That strategy has nothing to do with Mackinder’s speculations.

It has involved a pragmatic, catch-as-catch-can transition from visible Empire to global Organized Crime under cover of the "Cold War" that Winston Churchill launched in cahoots with the American military-industrial elite in the wake of World War II. 

The American war-making elite made enormous profits from cooperating in that strategy but Britain got something far more valuable, the substance of global power.

Its mastery of a global money laundering system that became the backbone of all international organized crime gave Britain the capacity to confront and defeat America's long-standing strategic aim of a democratic world order.

British strategy in this entire effort has remained as simple as in the days of Empire: it has aimed to promote its criminal interests in trafficking dangerous drugs and exploiting the raw materials and labour of victim countries.

Its operations have been brilliantly ingenious.

"Islamic terrorists" have replaced red-coated armies as enforcers of Empire, and instead of colonial Viceroys there are international bankers paid munificent "bonuses" to collect and manage revenues in a global "black market" under London's overall supervision.

That black market is now variously valued from 30 to 60 trillion dollars (compared to current American GDP of some $16 trillion).

India, the world’s undisputed top “soft Power” through most of history, suffered a fate almost exactly parallel to that of the United States after the end of World War II: its experienced national leader was assassinated and its nationhood sabotaged.

In the Indian case, it was not an internal economic element that turned traitor but a Muslim minority provoked into frantic insecurity and kept from rebuilding fraternal ties by the deliberately created “Kashmir dispute.”

In addition, over the last seven decades Britain has manipulated the enormous corruptibility of the Indian Establishment to neutralize nationalist forces, and now, as the Vodafone case exemplifies. practically controls the vital processes of the country.

China is a non-starter in the strategic sweepstakes.

It has been an insular state confined to the eastern third of its current territories through most of history; its majority Han people have looked outward only to perceive threats and build walls; they have expanded control over other lands only under the influence of Mongol conquerors.

The extent of Chinese strategic inability can be read in its history of imported models of statehood, traditionally from India which gave its ruling Mandarins (from the Sanskrit Mantri) their world view, and then from the European netherworld of Marx and Lenin.

It is ridiculous to talk of China as a global Power when it cannot trust its own people to keep their national bearings in an uncensored Internet environment.

No discussion of the global strategic outlook can be meaningful without all this background in view.

In that perspective, it is clear that the unmitigated nightmare of global violence, corruption, crime and environmental disaster will continue unless the world is freed from Britain's underground empire.

To that end, two steps are critically important.

One, the global money laundering system must be dismantled by declaring all “tax havens” and “shell companies” illegal.

Two, all “illicit drugs” must be decriminalized, thus rendering trafficking unprofitable.

World leaders have a golden opportunity to set out these aims clearly in the post-2015 agenda they will adopt at the next session of the United Nations General Assembly.

The first draft of that document, to be discussed by governments in New York in less than a week, contains nothing on those matters.

Unless that is changed, there is little doubt that the world will continue on its violent and criminal course well into the future. 

The World Wars and India

World War anniversary observances in Western Europe, Russia and the United States are efforts to imprint an alien and illusionist history of little significance to India's own national narrative.

The European view that the two world wars were a fight against fascism is prime facie nonsense. Britain and France ruled the two largest slave empires and fought to protect their racist tyrannies.

The United States intervened in both conflicts to help the side it saw as the lesser of two evils and failed both times in its declared aim of promoting the global rule of law.

After World War I, Woodrow Wilson steered the Covenant of the League of Nations to acceptance by other Powers but not by the US Senate.

In World War II Franklin Roosevelt tried to hold the British to the Atlantic Charter’s vision of a free world but after his untimely death Winston Churchill in collusion with the new military-industrial elite of the United States subverted America’s own democracy and launched the Cold War. (See here for an explanation of what happened.)

Russian memories of both conflicts leave out much bitter reality. It was during World War I that a bunch of violent misfits guided by the loony ideas of Karl Marx took over imperial Russia and turned it into one large slave labour camp. World War II was indisputably a great patriotic struggle against a vicious enemy but commemorations gloss over the paranoid Stalinism behind that effort.

Obviously, none of this holds much meaning for India.

What we need to remember about the two world wars is that they had a strong role in aiding our struggle to get rid of British rule.

The million Indians who participated in World War I created a new reality in Indian politics that frightened the British into the overreaction of the Jallianwalla Bagh massacre. That radicalized Indian opinion and filled the sails of Gandhi’s Non-cooperation movement.

Three million Indian soldiers participated in World War II, and after that Britain had no hope of holding India: the day after the Naval Mutiny of 1946, Clement Attlee announced his government’s intention to transfer power in New Delhi.

I would hazard a guess that most Indians are unaware of these facts and that even our expert analysts have not kept track of how these different narratives have played out over the last seven decades.

For India, there were immediate and heavy repercussions from the British success in engineering an American coup and launching the “Cold War.” It left Britain free to Partition India and create Pakistan as a permanently failed State to be its military proxy in South Asia.

Those realities have shaped our national life ever since, and it is alarming indeed to hear Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar speak of reciprocating Pakistani terrorism. The source of South Asian terrorism is not Islamabad but London and any tit for tat policy on Pakistan will lay us wide open to British manipulation.

That would have been obvious to everyone if our geopolitical pundits had done their work honestly over the years, but they have not, and we must live with the consequences.

The latest example of dishonesty is an edit page piece in BusinessLine (21 May) by former Indian High Commissioner in Pakistan G. Parthasarathy.

Although headlined “India still a pawn on the strategy board.”the article is no more than a review of what Parthsarathy sees as Washington’s various perfidies. This hardly shows that India is a pawn, for it is only because we pursue an independent line that there is room for perfidies.

More importantly, he ignores the fact that Washington has been guided throughout the post-World War II period by the British incubus within its national security system.

That cannot be dismissed as a coffee house “conspiracy theory” because Britain’s strategic role in launching the Cold War is much celebrated in Churchill’s March 1946 “Iron Curtain” speech.

Evidence of British involvement in launching the “war on terror” that followed the end of the Cold War is not equally clear but only because there has been no focused effort to uncover the transatlantic connections behind the 9/11 attacks.

For instance, little attention has been paid to the significance of the rigged election of Bush Jr. that set the scene in Washington a few months before the attacks.

The back story to that election is the friendship between two extremely rich families, the Bushes in the United States and the Gammells in Britain. As George Bush was ambassador in China and CIA Director, Bush Jr. was spending summers at the Gammell farm in Scotland, hanging out with scion Bill, whose college buddy was Tony Blair.

Bill Gammell founded petroleum major Cairn, which became a FTSE 100 firm in a matter of years; meanwhile, Saudi Arabia's long term ambassador in Washington became so close to the Bushes he was generally known as “Bandar Bush.”

That explains why, after a group of Saudis carried out the 9/11 attacks, a plane load of their countrymen was allowed to leave the United States without being questioned and in violation of the nationwide no-fly order then in effect.

Parthasarathy seems oblivious to this whole universe of seamy and dangerous connections underlying the most pivotal events of our time. In making the case that India is a “pawn” he makes not a single mention of Britain, a country that has manipulated us at every turn for the last 158 years (counting from the uprising of 1857).

Why our strategic analysts consistently overlook Britain's profoundly negative role in world affairs (see here and here), and its especially vicious treatment of India, is a question very much in need of an honest answer.

The issue is urgent for we could well be headed for another spate of cataclysmic events as Britain pursues its furious sense of entitlement in India (not to mention Africa, the Middle East and the United States!).

Pakistan and the United States should also pay heed, for we could all be headed for the time foreseen in the Vishnu Purana when the appearance of “eight suns” brings on a great drought.

In fact, the only way to avoid some such catastrophe might be to talk openly about who might be responsible and publicize plans to share the heat.

Dim Witted Strategy

“Pragati: The Indian National Interest Review” is the publishing equivalent of the Flipkart.com commercial in which grotesque kids pretend to be adults.

Although it describes itself as “a publication on strategic affairs, economic policy and governance,” the contents of the monthly tend to be a strange muddle of right-wing ideology and – how can I put it kindly – stupidity. Much of the writing is by NRI academics in Singapore, Canada and Britain, and the funding of the evidently well-endowed non-profit is a mystery.

The magazine’s website currently has a piece that declares, “Food Security Bill and the Bhagwad (sic) Gita: There is a connection between the two.”

What is the connection?

It lies in a quotation from one Pratap Bhanu Mehta who in a 2003 book, The Burden of Democracy “identified” the following “trait” of the Indian State:

“The Indian state almost never evaluated policy by consequences, almost always by its own intent; if the tribunal of its own intentions had been satisfied, nothing else mattered. If it thought rent control helped the poor get housing, or curbs on investment were producing more prosperity, this was so regardless of whether it, in fact, did; particular projects were a success simply because the state had made an allocation for them, not because they reached their intended targets and beneficiaries. The habit of state officials to respond to every query — say why child labour exists — is simply to say that a law exists to deal with the problem. This is not just a last-ditch defensive gesture, it is symptomatic of the way in which the state can become oblivious to the concrete efforts of its own action or inaction. The state has internalized the message of the Bhagwad (sic) Gita: only intentions and not consequences matter.”

An anonymous Pragati editor adds approvingly: “The NAC’s Food Security Bill is in total consonance with the message of the Bhagwad (sic) Gita: only intentions and not consequences matter. How can anyone ever argue with that? The NAC wins. India loses.”

I wonder how many people saw that bit of nonsense before it was immortalized online. Did no one object to the silly caricaturing of the teaching of the Bhagavad Gita, one of humanity’s grandest statements of philosophy and faith?