John Laughland: Radical globalist ideology has possessed the occupant of the Oval Office and is bringing about the revolution Communism never could
[John Laughland is a London-based writer and lecturer and a trustee of the British Helsinki Human Rights Group.]
...Revolution has now become a completely positive word in the Western political lexicon. Recent years have seen a spate of "people power" revolutions, especially in Eastern Europe. Perhaps authoritarian regimes, rather like the walls of Jericho, really are brought tumbling down by the chanting of a John Lennon song, but it often turns out that things were not as spontaneous as was claimed at the time. In the case of the Orange Revolution in Ukraine last year, it is now a matter of public record that the U.S. poured huge sums into the campaign of Viktor Yushchenko and that the Ukrainian KGB was also heavily involved on the Americans' side, playing a key role in stage-managing the whole charade. Nonetheless, the myth of revolution now wields such a strong hold over the Western mind that, with the compulsiveness of children who beg to be retold the same story, we regularly accept these fairy tales at face value.
Prior to the fall of communism, "revolution" and "people power" were considered just leftish propaganda. We dismissed the Soviet regime's appeal to its own founding event as grotesque political kitsch, masking the sinister reality of power machinations behind the scenes. Now we seem to have become more na ve and have started to take two-dimensional archetypes about "the people" seriously. This is because the West has fallen in love with the myth of revolution. Chairman Mao once said, "Marxism consists of a thousand truths but they all boil down to one sentence: `It is right to rebel.'" That sentiment now forms a central tenet of Western political orthodoxy and U.S.
foreign policy.
George W. Bush is not, of course, a closet Marxist. But many of his closest advisors, especially the neoconservatives, do have post-Trotskyite backgrounds. The original Marxist plan was for the socialist revolution to engulf the whole planet, and this plan was embraced by Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Trotsky. It famously came up against the buffers of Stalin's alternative proposal to build socialism in one country first. In exile, Trotsky kept the idea of world revolution going by setting up the Fourth International in 1938.
Within two years, Irving Kristol-the man who was later to be the founding father of the neoconservative movement that so dominates the Bush administration-joined it. Irving Kristol never renounced or condemned his Trotskyite past: in 1983, he wrote that he was still proud of it. Likewise, in 1996, Michael Ledeen of the American Enterprise Institute-one of the leading ideologues of the war on terror-coined the phrase "global democratic revolution" in the subtitle of a book in which he attacked Bill Clinton for being a "counter-revolutionary." The book's title, Freedom Betrayed, is an obvious allusion to Trotsky's own 1938 account of his break with Stalin, The Revolution Betrayed.
Indeed, when President George H.W. Bush enthusiastically proclaimed the New World Order in his speech to Congress on Sept. 11, 1990 he was in fact using a phrase that had re-entered the political lexicon in the late 1980s purely thanks to Soviet leaders. Bush senior was eagerly heralding the imminent enforcement of international law-specifically, a United Nations Security Council resolution-by military might. "We're now in sight of a United Nations that performs as envisioned by its founders," he said. But this was exactly what the USSR wanted, as it struggled to disentangle itself from its Stalinist heritage. On Dec. 7, 1988, Mikhail Gorbachev-who once said he was going back to Marx and Lenin after the excesses of Stalinism in the same way as modern Catholics were going back to Jesus and the Bible after Richelieu and Mazarin-used the phrase "new world order" when he called for an end to the division of the world economy into different blocs, on the grounds that there was in reality only one world economy, and for the United Nations to assume a central role in world peacekeeping.
Although we normally think of the administration of George W. Bush, and the neoconservatives who surround him, as being viscerally hostile to the United Nations, the fact is that the 1991 Gulf War of Bush senior and the 2003 one of Bush junior are seamlessly linked. Both father and son justified their respective wars in the name of the very same United Nations Security Council resolutions, George W. Bush most recently in his speech on Veterans Day. Bush junior, in other words, adheres to the same internationalist dogma as his father. He has repeatedly said that the purpose of the Iraq War was to save the UN's credibility: on Nov. 19, 2003 in London, Bush said, "America and Great Britain have done, and will do, all in their power to prevent the United Nations from solemnly choosing its own irrelevance and inviting the fate of the League of Nations." He said he was determined that the UN become an instrument of "our collective security." In saying this, Bush junior was expressing the same one-world, pro-UN sentiment that Gorbachev's foreign minister, Eduard Shevardnadze, had advanced in his seminal speech to the 42nd session of the General Assembly in 1987. All talk of "collective security"
during the Cold War had been completely off the agenda, yet Shevardnadze crucially used this very phrase when he first proposed that the Cold War be ended by giving the UN its own "peacekeeping force" under the direct command of the Security Council....
Read entire article at American Conservative
...Revolution has now become a completely positive word in the Western political lexicon. Recent years have seen a spate of "people power" revolutions, especially in Eastern Europe. Perhaps authoritarian regimes, rather like the walls of Jericho, really are brought tumbling down by the chanting of a John Lennon song, but it often turns out that things were not as spontaneous as was claimed at the time. In the case of the Orange Revolution in Ukraine last year, it is now a matter of public record that the U.S. poured huge sums into the campaign of Viktor Yushchenko and that the Ukrainian KGB was also heavily involved on the Americans' side, playing a key role in stage-managing the whole charade. Nonetheless, the myth of revolution now wields such a strong hold over the Western mind that, with the compulsiveness of children who beg to be retold the same story, we regularly accept these fairy tales at face value.
Prior to the fall of communism, "revolution" and "people power" were considered just leftish propaganda. We dismissed the Soviet regime's appeal to its own founding event as grotesque political kitsch, masking the sinister reality of power machinations behind the scenes. Now we seem to have become more na ve and have started to take two-dimensional archetypes about "the people" seriously. This is because the West has fallen in love with the myth of revolution. Chairman Mao once said, "Marxism consists of a thousand truths but they all boil down to one sentence: `It is right to rebel.'" That sentiment now forms a central tenet of Western political orthodoxy and U.S.
foreign policy.
George W. Bush is not, of course, a closet Marxist. But many of his closest advisors, especially the neoconservatives, do have post-Trotskyite backgrounds. The original Marxist plan was for the socialist revolution to engulf the whole planet, and this plan was embraced by Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Trotsky. It famously came up against the buffers of Stalin's alternative proposal to build socialism in one country first. In exile, Trotsky kept the idea of world revolution going by setting up the Fourth International in 1938.
Within two years, Irving Kristol-the man who was later to be the founding father of the neoconservative movement that so dominates the Bush administration-joined it. Irving Kristol never renounced or condemned his Trotskyite past: in 1983, he wrote that he was still proud of it. Likewise, in 1996, Michael Ledeen of the American Enterprise Institute-one of the leading ideologues of the war on terror-coined the phrase "global democratic revolution" in the subtitle of a book in which he attacked Bill Clinton for being a "counter-revolutionary." The book's title, Freedom Betrayed, is an obvious allusion to Trotsky's own 1938 account of his break with Stalin, The Revolution Betrayed.
Indeed, when President George H.W. Bush enthusiastically proclaimed the New World Order in his speech to Congress on Sept. 11, 1990 he was in fact using a phrase that had re-entered the political lexicon in the late 1980s purely thanks to Soviet leaders. Bush senior was eagerly heralding the imminent enforcement of international law-specifically, a United Nations Security Council resolution-by military might. "We're now in sight of a United Nations that performs as envisioned by its founders," he said. But this was exactly what the USSR wanted, as it struggled to disentangle itself from its Stalinist heritage. On Dec. 7, 1988, Mikhail Gorbachev-who once said he was going back to Marx and Lenin after the excesses of Stalinism in the same way as modern Catholics were going back to Jesus and the Bible after Richelieu and Mazarin-used the phrase "new world order" when he called for an end to the division of the world economy into different blocs, on the grounds that there was in reality only one world economy, and for the United Nations to assume a central role in world peacekeeping.
Although we normally think of the administration of George W. Bush, and the neoconservatives who surround him, as being viscerally hostile to the United Nations, the fact is that the 1991 Gulf War of Bush senior and the 2003 one of Bush junior are seamlessly linked. Both father and son justified their respective wars in the name of the very same United Nations Security Council resolutions, George W. Bush most recently in his speech on Veterans Day. Bush junior, in other words, adheres to the same internationalist dogma as his father. He has repeatedly said that the purpose of the Iraq War was to save the UN's credibility: on Nov. 19, 2003 in London, Bush said, "America and Great Britain have done, and will do, all in their power to prevent the United Nations from solemnly choosing its own irrelevance and inviting the fate of the League of Nations." He said he was determined that the UN become an instrument of "our collective security." In saying this, Bush junior was expressing the same one-world, pro-UN sentiment that Gorbachev's foreign minister, Eduard Shevardnadze, had advanced in his seminal speech to the 42nd session of the General Assembly in 1987. All talk of "collective security"
during the Cold War had been completely off the agenda, yet Shevardnadze crucially used this very phrase when he first proposed that the Cold War be ended by giving the UN its own "peacekeeping force" under the direct command of the Security Council....