Shadows, Sovereigns and Civil Wars - Part 1
On the Attempted Destruction of a World of Cooperating Nation States
It is becoming increasingly clear that the stage is currently being set across the USA and broader Trans-Atlantic society for a period of violent self-cannibalizing Civil Wars.
The signs of intelligence agencies grooming radical violent left terror groups and violent right-wing groups have set the stage for a witches brew of chaos.
Soros/CIA antifa woke radicals and eco terrorists risk becoming even more radicalized as top down measures are imposed on these leftist ‘domestic terrorists'.
The opportunities for the abuses of civil liberties should be obvious.
Meanwhile, CIA/Special Operations and FBI affiliated front groups appear to be attempting to radicalize conservative organizations around neo-Templar revivalism and white anti-immigrant tribalism.
So, how do we avoid the traps of a new violent left Antifa-Bolshevik vs violent Crusader-fascist tribal conservative clash that may easily result in a period of bloodbath, followed by a dystopian hellscape?
It would do us well to review how this hellish formula has been applied in the recent past starting with the destruction of the potential alliance of sovereign nation states that was emerging globally in the wake of the Union victory after America’s first Civil War…
Sketching the Principles That Allowed Patriots to Navigate the Storm of the First Civil War
In December 1864, President Abraham Lincoln delivered a State of the Nation address to Congress outlining federal support for extending telegraph lines through the Bering Strait, stating,
“The proposed overland telegraph between America and Europe, by the way of Bering’s Straits and Asiatic Russia, which was sanctioned by Congress at the last session, has been undertaken, under very favorable circumstance… Assurances have been received from most of the South American States of their high appreciation of the enterprise, and their readiness to cooperate in constructing lines tributary to that world-encircling communication.”
Russian Alaska would be sold to the USA in only three years later, explicitly around the notion of facilitating this program.
The USA had just suffered a grave civil war, and had much reason to trust Czar Alexander II’s Russia, which had intervened to protect the Union against the aggressive intervention by English and French imperial powers supporting secession.
In 1863, Czar Alexander II sent Russian battleships to NY and San Francisco as a message of solidarity with Lincoln and a threat to imperial forces of Europe.
Describing his motive for sending the Russian fleet to America, Czar Alexander II said,
“In the Autumn of 1862, the governments of France and Great Britain proposed to Russia, in a formal but not in an official way, the joint recognition by European powers of the independence of the Confederate States of America. My immediate answer was: `I will not cooperate in such action; and I will not acquiesce. On the contrary, I shall accept the recognition of the independence of the Confederate States by France and Great Britain as a casus belli for Russia. And in order that the governments of France and Great Britain may understand that this is no idle threat; I will send a Pacific fleet to San Francisco and an Atlantic fleet to New York.
All this I did because of love for my own dear Russia… I acted thus because I understood that Russia would have a more serious task to perform if the American Republic, with advanced industrial development were broken up and Great Britain should be left in control of most branches of modern industrial development.”
This fact has been literally erased from American history books, but it is better understood in Russia, which has today a statue featuring the two martyred patriots and great emancipators, Czar Alexander II and Lincoln holding hands in Moscow.
In 1890, Lincoln’s friend and first governor of Colorado William Gilpin published his book ‘The Cosmopolitan Railway’ outlining his dream of a world of rail networks, industrial progress and cooperation.
Echoing the win-win philosophy of Xi Jinping’s New Silk Road today, William Gilpin stated,
“The cosmopolitan railway will make the whole world one community. It will reduce the separate nations to families of our great nation… From extended intercommunication will arise a wider intercourse of human ideas and as the result, logical and philosophical reciprocities, which will become the germs for innumerable new developments; for in the track of intercommunication, enterprise and invention invariably follow, and whatever facilitates one stimulates every other agency of progress.”
Gilpin noted the common cultural and geographic properties of both American and Russian societies, with Russia’s Manifest Destiny calling forth a pioneering spirit to ‘go east,’ while America’s Manifest Destiny envisioned a westward expansion.
Gilpin wrote,
“It is a simple and plain proposition that Russia and the United States, each having broad, uninhabited areas and limitless undeveloped resources, would by the expenditure of 2 or 3 hundred millions apiece for a highway of the nations threw their now waste places, add a hundredfold to their wealth and power and influence”
In 1905, Czar Nicholas II following the sage advice of Sergey Witte, gave national support to the Bering Strait tunnel and funded a team of American engineers to carry out feasibility studies.
Again, Russia had good reason to trust the USA, as the Trans Siberian railway built between 1890 to 1905 benefited immensely through Baldwin Locomotives made in Philadelphia and the support of hundreds of American technicians and engineers.
Sadly, history unfolded in another direction from the beautiful vision laid out by Czar Alexander II, Abraham Lincoln and William Gilpin.
An age of bankers wars, anarchist assassinations, and economic turmoil disrupted this new age of progress and cooperation among civilizational states.
The True Origins of Bolshevism
In 1905, just as the Trans-Siberian railway was completed and just as American engineers were completing their plans for the Bering Strait rail project, Wall Street financier Jacob Schiff had given $200 million to the Japanese to assist their victory against the Russians during the 1904-05 Russo Japanese war.
This generosity ultimately earned the banker the Medal of the Rising Sun in the Meiji Palace in 1907.
After crippling the Russian state and military (its navy was wiped out during the war), Schiff turned his attention to financing revolutionary activities within Russia itself.
How money was spent by Schiff was difficult to say until 1949, when Schiff’s grandson John Schiff bragged to the New York Journal that his grandfather had given $20 million “for the triumph of communism in Russia.”
American journalist and Schiff asset George Kennan, played an instrumental role as perception manager of the revolution and bragged that he had converted 52,000 Russian soldiers imprisoned in Japan into Bolshevik revolutionaries.
A March 24, 1917 interview recorded in The New York Times celebrating the revolution read,
“Mr. Kennan told of the work of the Friends of Russian Freedom in the revolution. He said that during the Russian-Japanese war he was in Tokyo, and that he was permitted to make visits among the 12,000 Russian prisoners in Japanese hands at the end of the first year of the war. He had conceived the idea of putting revolutionary propaganda into the hands of the Russian army.
The Japanese authorities favoured it and gave him permission. After which he sent to America for all the Russian revolutionary literature to be had…
‘The movement was financed by a New York banker you all know and love,’ he said, referring to Mr Schiff, ‘and soon we received a ton and a half of Russian revolutionary propaganda.
At the end of the war, 50,000 Russian officers and men went back to their country ardent revolutionists. The Friends of Russian Freedom had sowed 50,000 seeds of liberty in 100 Russian regiments.
I do not know how many of these officers and men were in the Petrograd fortress last week, but we do know what part the army took in the revolution.’”
Schiff himself jubilantly stated to the New York Times, March 18, 1917:
“May I through your columns give expression to my joy that the Russian nation, a great and good people, have at last effected their deliverance from centuries of autocratic oppression and through an almost bloodless revolution have now come into their own. Praised be God on high!”
Historian Kerry Bolton wrote of New York Federal Reserve director William Boyce Thompson, who had been installed as head of the American Red Cross during the 1917 revolution, and was largely recognized as the true U.S. ambassador to the government, saying,
“Thompson set himself up in royal manner in Petrograd reporting directly to Pres. Wilson and bypassing U.S. Ambassador Francis. Thompson provided funds from his own money, first to the Social Revolutionaries, to whom he gave one million rubles, and shortly after $1,000,000 to the Bolsheviks to spread their propaganda to Germany and Austria.”
Writing in 1962, historian Arsene de Goulevitch, who experienced the events of 1917 firsthand, wrote,
“In private interviews, I have been told that over 21 million rubles were spent by Lord Alfred Milner in financing the Russian Revolution… The financier just mentioned was by no means alone among the British to support the Russian revolution with large financial donations.” (1)
According to his own accounts, during the four months Leon Trotsky spent in New York in 1917, much of it was spent hobnobbing with the upper crust of Wall Street and being driven around in limousines (2).
It is also noteworthy that after Trotsky was arrested by Canadian authorities while en route back to Russia with tens of thousands of dollars of Wall Street money, it was none other than Claude Dansey (Cecil Rhodes disciple, deputy chief of the new MI6 and founder of US military intelligence in 1917!!) that directly intervened to liberate Trotsky and company.
Leon Trotsky’s Immortal Treachery
Leon Trotsky, who Lord Milner, Schiff, Paul Warburg etc., always intended to be the leader of the movement that would take control over the dead bodies of the Romanovs, was fortunately ousted by the saner forces around Joseph Stalin in 1927.
As historian Grover Furr masterfully documents using recently declassified material, testimonies, and other evidence from archives in the USA and Russia, Leon Trotsky made several attempts to return to power in Russia after his expulsion.
He didn’t do this alone, however, but largely with the help of fascist forces in Britain, Japan, Ukraine, and Germany all the way until the moment he met his untimely end in 1940.
This will be the subject of a future review of Grover Furr’s work (3).
For all of Lenin’s many problems, he differed from Trotsky on two interconnected points:
1) a general belief in voluntarism, and
2) a rejection of the theory of permanent revolution.
Where Lenin believed that productive labor could be channeled towards the improvement of productive forces of society, Trotsky believed that any such effort at peaceful productive improvement would lead only to decadence.
“Permanent revolution” was thus needed to keep workers from falling into sloth amidst the eternal striving for global class struggle.
In 1914, a frustrated Lenin spoke of Trotsky’s fetish, saying,
“he [Trotsky] deserted the Mensheviks and occupied a vacillating position, now co-operating with Martynov (the economist), now proclaiming his absurdly Left ‘permanent revolution’ theory.”
Another point of conflict between Lenin on the one side and Trotsky on the other centered on whether or not Russia should continue to participate in WWI.
Where Lenin wanted to bring Russia out of the insane conflict in the first moments of their coup in 1917, Trotsky and his close ally Bukharin demanded that Russia stay in the war with the aim of converting it into a total pan European (and ultimately global) revolution.
Trotsky’s commitment to global socialist revolution vs. Stalin’s commitment to “socialism in one country” was at the heart of an unbridgeable divide between the two revolutionaries throughout the years.
Upon taking charge of the Russian economy, Trotsky and Lenin unleashed a destructive wave of economic reforms titled ‘The New Economic Policy’ (NEP) that saw vast liberalization of the entire state, with western corporate powers sweeping in to buy up former national utilities for pennies on the dollar.
The most powerful figure of the western magnates to be granted full access to buy up Russia under this new policy was Occidental Petroleum’s Armand Hammer (1898-1990,) who was only forced to leave Russia the moment Trotsky was kicked out (and returning to dominance in Russia only after Stalin’s 1953 death).
Later on in life, Hammer described how Lenin told him, ”We do not need doctors, we need businessmen… communism is not working, and we must change to a New Economic Policy.”
Working closely with Lenin and especially Trotsky, Hammer became the principal moderator of nearly every business deal made between the Soviet government and western corporations during the 1920s, which saw Russia sink into brutal economic enslavement to foreign powers at a pace which would not be seen again for over 60 years.
The vast liberalization of the Russian economy during the dark 1920s paralleled closely the Perestroika program of free trade/privatization of the 1990s, and it is no coincidence that George Bush Sr. dubbed this program of Balkanized looting of Russia, ‘Operation Hammer’,
If one saw a proto-George Soros in the figure of Armand Hammer, he would not be far off …
In the next article, I will evaluate Trotsky’s affiliation with Coudenhove Kalergi’s Pan Europa, Parvus, Jabotinsky and the roots of the Neonconservatives.
Footnotes
(1) Czarism and Revolution, published by Omni Publications in Hawthorne, 1962 French edition, pp. 224, 230)
(2) Leon Trotsky: My Life, New York publisher: Scribner’s, 1930, p. 277
(3) One of the best and more recent among Furr’s pioneering writing on this topic can be found in his New Evidence of Trotsky’s Conspiracy, Erythos Press, 2020. Furr’s website is also an invaluable resource.
(4) Parvus’s association with the Pan European Union and broader fascist operations across Turkey and the Middle East is laid out in Jeffrey Steinberg’s 2005 report “Cheney Revives Parvus’ Permanent War Madness”
Badlands Media articles and features represent the opinions of the contributing authors and do not necessarily represent the views of Badlands Media itself.
Matt is the editor-in-chief of The Canadian Patriot Review, Senior Fellow of the American University in Moscow and Director of the Rising Tide Foundation. He has written the four volume Untold History of Canada series, four volume Clash of the Two Americas series, the Revenge of the Mystery Cult Trilogy and Science Unshackled: Restoring Causality to a World in Chaos. He is also co-host of the weekly Breaking History on Badlands Media and host of Pluralia Dialogos (which airs every second Sunday at 11am ET here).
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Thanks for your clear writing of history. I realize from former info that there was a idea to make a railway from Siberia to Alaska. I wonder if that will happen now? I never knew the difference in Russian history, Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin. A friend's mother had a father who worked in embassy of Russia from Poland, she knew what happened at that time. Her English wasn't enough to explain it to me. But there was a film on TV about those prewar times and she knew the history and managed to tell us she was in Russia as a young girl! Thanks, Matt.
I wonder if the Schiff's back then are related to the Adam Schiff today..I can see some similarities in Character..Great Read..enjoyed every word