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Lis­ten: MP3

This pro­gram was record­ed in one, 60-minute seg­ment.    

Intro­duc­tion: Much of the pro­gram is a read­ing of a post syn­op­siz­ing part of Peter Lev­en­da’s recent book The Hitler Lega­cy: The Nazi Cult in Dias­po­ra: How it was Orga­nized, How it was Fund­ed, and Why It Remains a Threat to Glob­al Secu­ri­ty in the Age of Ter­ror­ism. (We have not read the book yet. We nei­ther endorse nor crit­i­cize the main body of text for that rea­son.)

AFA #22 is impor­tant for under­stand­ing this broad­cast. Using the mate­r­i­al indi­cat­ed by the many “tags” at the top of this post will flesh out lis­ten­ers’ under­stand­ing to the point of exhaus­tion. Also: check out the video from which the pho­to at left was tak­en.

The arti­cle high­lights impor­tant points made in numer­ous past posts and pro­grams. Dis­cussing the geopo­lit­i­cal con­cept of the Earth Island (or “World Island” as it is some­times known), the pro­gram under­scores the sig­nif­i­cance of the Earth Island and the strategem of using proxy war­riors and asym­met­ri­cal war­fare to accom­plish the feat.

In par­ti­clu­lar, Lev­en­da ana­lyes the Third Reich and Under­ground Reich’s use of Mus­lim proxy war­riors in both World Wars and there­after. Con­tin­u­ing their oper­a­tional exis­tence under the aus­pices of the Gehlen org in its var­i­ous incar­na­tions and, through and, in accor­dance with, that, dom­i­nant ele­ments with­in the CIA.

In FTR #‘s 710, 720, 723 we not­ed that the GOP/Underground Reich fac­tion of the U.S. intel­li­gence estab­lish­ment was pur­su­ing covert oper­a­tions in the Earth Island, par­tic­u­lar­ly in parts of Rus­sia and Chi­na. Part­nered in this is the Mus­lim Broth­er­hood and irre­den­tist Turk­ish ele­ments seek­ing a return to the glo­ry days of the Ottoman Empire.

Fol­low­ing the turn to the Mus­lim Broth­er­hood (for­mal­ized dur­ing Bush’s sec­ond admin­is­tra­tion grow­ing out of the pro­found GOP links to the Broth­er­hood and the al-Taqwa milieu) we wit­nessed the cen­ter piece of this oper­a­tion–the so-called Arab Spring. The Boston Marathon bomb­ing appears to be “blow­back” from this oper­a­tion, with FBI appar­ent­ly hav­ing cut across ele­ments of the covert oper­a­tion men­tioned above.

The Fetul­lah Gulen orga­ni­za­tion appears to be an out­crop­ping of this mas­sive Earth Island “op.”

Before return­ing to the sub­ject of the “Mus­lim Broth­er­hood Spring,” let’s high­light a key para­graph of the Kaplan essay, sum­ming up an all-too famil­iar pat­tern in the oper­a­tions that are bring­ing to pow­er the Ger­man Hand in the Ottoman/Islamist glove:

. . . . Each U. S. mil­i­tary action in Europe and the Mid­dle East since 1990, how­ev­er, with the excep­tion of Iraq, has fol­lowed an overt pat­tern: First there is an armed con­flict with­in the coun­try where the inter­ven­tion will take place. Amer­i­can news media heav­i­ly report this con­flict. The “good guys” in the sto­ry are the rebels. The “bad guys,” to be attacked by Amer­i­can mil­i­tary force, are bru­tal­ly anti-demo­c­ra­t­ic, and com­mit­ters of war crimes, crimes against human­i­ty, and geno­cide. Pres­ti­gious pub­lic fig­ures, NGOs, judi­cial and qua­si-judi­cial bod­ies and inter­na­tion­al orga­ni­za­tions call for sup­port­ing the rebels and attack­ing the regime. Next, the Amer­i­can pres­i­dent orders Amer­i­can logis­ti­cal sup­port and arms sup­plies for the rebels. Final­ly the Amer­i­can pres­i­dent orders mil­i­tary attack under the aus­pices of NATO in sup­port of the rebels. The attack usu­al­ly con­sists of aer­i­al bomb­ing, today’s equiv­a­lent of the nine­teenth and twen­ti­eth cen­turies’ gun­boat which could attack coastal cities of mil­i­tar­i­ly weak coun­tries with­out fear of retal­i­a­tion. The ulti­mate out­come of each Amer­i­can inter­ven­tion is the replace­ment of a sec­u­lar gov­ern­ment with an Islamist regime in an area that had been part of the Ottoman Empire. . . .

Anoth­er fas­ci­nat­ing and very impor­tant part of the arti­cle con­cerns the ICC, much-bal­ly­hooed by the so-called pro­gres­sive sec­tor in this and oth­er coun­tries:

. . . . From that arti­cle, “A Law­less Glob­al Court” by John Rosen­thal (Pol­i­cy Review Feb. 1. 2004 No.123), one learns that the ICC is a project ini­ti­at­ed, pro­mot­ed and, to a con­sid­er­able extent, fund­ed by Ger­many. Giv­en this, the idea that the ICC serves Ger­many’s pur­pos­es is com­mon sense. Through the ICC con­nec­tion, Ger­many’s pro­mo­tion of the “Arab Spring” is clear. Yet it is nev­er or almost nev­er men­tioned. This silence calls for expla­na­tion. . . .

Amen! That silence does indeed call for an expla­na­tion.

Notice, also, the Ger­man method­ol­o­gy here. Under­scor­ing Ger­man pow­er-polit­i­cal method­ol­o­gy pri­or to, and dur­ing, World War I, Kaplan’s analy­sis applies equal­ly well to Nazi Ger­man’s geo-polit­i­cal ori­en­ta­tion. It applies equal­ly well to that of the Fed­er­al Repub­lic, which, like the GOP and a dis­turbing­ly large part of the U.S. nation­al secu­ri­ty estab­lish­ment, is con­trolled by Ger­many:

. . . . In the view of the lead­ers of Ger­many, Turkey was con­trol­lable through a com­bi­na­tion of eco­nom­ic inter­course, gifts of edu­ca­tion­al oppor­tu­ni­ties, pro­vi­sion of tech­ni­cal exper­tise and admin­is­tra­tive aid, as well as bribes to Turk­ish offi­cials. Ger­many saw influ­ence over Turkey as a means of influ­enc­ing Moslems world­wide for its own inter­ests. . . .

Col­lat­ing the two arti­cles in this pro­gram (and descrip­tion) is impor­tant and reveal­ing of dynam­ics cru­cial to an under­stand­ing 0f the and future polit­i­cal land­scapes and to the lines of argu­ment and research on this pro­gram (and web­site). Lis­ten­ers are emphat­i­cal­ly encour­aged to watch the video of accolytes pledg­ing alle­giance to ISIS, from which the pho­to at upper left is tak­en.

Pro­gram High­lights Include: The Sko­rzeny mis­sion to Egypt to Naz­i­fy the Egypt­ian gen­er­al staff and intel­li­gence ser­vice; high­light­ing key aspects of the Balka­ns wars of the 1990’s; the role of the Grand Mufti in the devel­op­ment of the Nazi-Islamist con­nec­tion; Sko­rzeny’s rela­tion­ship with Yass­er Arafat; Erdo­gan’s strong rela­tion­ship with the Bank Al-Taqwa milieu and the Mus­lim Broth­er­hood; the fas­cist Third Posi­tion; the Strat­e­gy of Ten­sion.

1. Much of the pro­gram is a read­ing of a post syn­op­siz­ing the last chap­ter of Peter Lev­en­da’s recent book The Hitler Lega­cy: The Nazi Cult in Dias­po­ra: How it was Orga­nized, How it was Fund­ed, and Why It Remains a Threat to Glob­al Secu­ri­ty in the Age of Ter­ror­ism. (We have not read the book yet. We nei­ther endorse nor crit­i­cize the main body of text for that rea­son.)

The arti­cle high­lights impor­tant points made in numer­ous past posts and pro­grams. Dis­cussing the geopo­lit­i­cal con­cept of the Earth Island (or “World Island” as it is some­times known), the pro­gram under­scores the sig­nif­i­cance of the Earth Island and the strategem of using proxy war­riors and asym­met­ri­cal war­fare to accom­plish the feat.

In par­ti­clu­lar, Lev­en­da ana­lyes the Third Reich and Under­ground Reich’s use of Mus­lim proxy war­riors in both World Wars and there­after. Con­tin­u­ing their oper­a­tional exis­tence under the aus­pices of the Gehlen org in its var­i­ous incar­na­tions and, through and, in accor­dance with, that, dom­i­nant ele­ments with­in the CIA.

There is no sub­stan­tive dis­cus­sion of the Mus­lim Broth­er­hood in Lev­en­da’s pre­sen­ta­tion, how­ev­er infor­ma­tion about that vital­ly impor­tant ele­ment of analy­sis is read­i­ly and abun­dant­ly avail­able on this web­site.

“Hitler’s Lega­cy: The Sko­rzeny Syn­drome” by Peter Lev­en­da; disinfo.com; 11/07/2114.

“Ter­ror­ism, the Sko­rzeny Syn­drome, is flour­ish­ing in the mod­ern world, a reminder that Hitler and Nazism are still tak­ing their toll more than three decades after the Third Reich collapsed.”—Glenn B. Infield115

The above quo­ta­tion is from Infield’s biog­ra­phy of Otto Sko­rzeny, pub­lished in 1981, and the facts are as true today as they were then. Infield writes of the rela­tion­ship that exist­ed between Sko­rzeny and Yas­sir Arafat, for instance, and reminds us how Sko­rzeny advised the PLO and Al-Fatah from his base in Cairo. Infield knew and inter­viewed Sko­rzeny, and his biog­ra­phy of “Hitler’s Com­man­do” is rel­e­vant to any con­tem­po­rary study of the ori­gins of mod­ern ter­ror­ism.

What the world has been expe­ri­enc­ing since at least 2001 and cer­tain­ly for years ear­li­er than the attack on the World Trade Cen­ter and the Pen­ta­gon has been what ana­lysts refer to as “asym­met­ri­cal war­fare” con­duct­ed by “non-state actors.” This is a tech­nique that was devel­oped to per­fec­tion by Sko­rzeny and the oth­er lead­ers of what we have called ODESSA. The fact that the West­ern intel­li­gence agen­cies turned a blind eye to Skorzeny’s activ­i­ties has con­tributed to our inabil­i­ty to con­front and defeat what we have called Islamist ter­ror­ism.

Arms deal­ing, covert inter­na­tion­al bank­ing sys­tems, tar­get­ed assas­si­na­tions, ter­ror bomb­ings, the “strat­e­gy of ten­sion” as it was described and defined by fas­cist ter­ror­ist Ste­fano del­la Chi­aie, already exist­ed as part of an under­ground ter­ror net­work long before al-Qae­da was born.

After World War II, the Amer­i­can peo­ple thought that Nazi Ger­many had been defeat­ed and the “war” was over; this book demon­strates that it nev­er was. Instead, we were told that Com­mu­nism was the new threat and we had to pull out all the stops to pre­vent a Com­mu­nist takeover of the coun­try. And so our mil­i­tary and our intel­li­gence agen­cies col­lab­o­rat­ed with sur­viv­ing Nazis to go after Com­mu­nists. We refused to pur­sue world­wide right wing ter­ror groups and assas­sins. After all, they were killing Com­mu­nists and left­ists; they were doing us a ser­vice. Like Hoover and the Mafia, the CIA refused to believe a Nazi Under­ground exist­ed even as they col­lab­o­rat­ed with it (via the Gehlen Orga­ni­za­tion and the like).

The whole thrust of this book has been that Amer­i­can lead­ers in busi­ness, finance, media, and pol­i­tics col­lab­o­rat­ed with Nazis before, dur­ing, and after the war. The West’s share in the “blame” for Al-Qae­da, et al, goes back a long way—before Eisenhower—to a cabal of extrem­ist US Army gen­er­als and emi­gre East­ern Euro­peans who didn’t have much of a prob­lem with Nazism since they feared Com­mu­nism more. The Church, the Tibetans, the Japan­ese, the Ger­mans, the Croa­t­ians—and the Americans—all felt that Com­mu­nism was the greater dan­ger, long before WW II. We enlist­ed war crim­i­nals to fight on our side. We appro­pri­at­ed the idea of glob­al jihad from the Nazis and their WW I pre­de­ces­sors. We amped up their plan to weaponize reli­gion and con­vinced Mus­lims, who hat­ed each oth­er, to band togeth­er to fight Com­mu­nism. And when Afghanistan was lib­er­at­ed and the Sovi­et Union was defeat­ed?

Sep­tem­ber 11, 2001.

Our cyn­i­cal exploita­tion of reli­gion has deliv­ered a hideous stream of blow­back that threat­ens the world still.

With the Nazi dias­po­ra, the lead­ers of the Third Reich who had survived—who were either liv­ing under­ground, or were “denaz­i­fied” and liv­ing freely above ground—constituted a gov­ern­ment-in-exile. They remained in con­tact, rein­forced each other’s beliefs, pro­vid­ed logis­ti­cal sup­port where pos­si­ble, and kept the faith alive. They became involved in polit­i­cal and mil­i­tary intrigues around the globe, always with the goal of caus­ing an imbal­ance in glob­al pow­er struc­tures. Moti­vat­ed by anti-Semi­tism, they col­lab­o­rat­ed with Arab lead­ers and guer­ril­la orga­ni­za­tions in attacks against Israel, even going so far as to devel­op weapons sys­tems in Egypt. They wrote pro­pa­gan­da against Israel and against Jews in gen­er­al, repeat­ing the same libels as before. They formed “neo-Nazi” groups in Europe, Latin Amer­i­ca, North Amer­i­ca, and else­where, cul­ti­vat­ing a fawn­ing new gen­er­a­tion of fol­low­ers on every con­ti­nent. They sup­port Holo­caust deniers and right-wing extrem­ists every­where, even when they do not agree on all points. They found offi­cial posi­tions with­in extrem­ist gov­ern­ments in the Mid­dle East and Latin Amer­i­ca.

They also con­sti­tute an army-in-exile. They trained troops, instruct­ed secu­ri­ty forces in inter­ro­ga­tion and tor­ture, ran guns. They con­spired to assas­si­nate objec­tion­able lead­ers in var­i­ous coun­tries, as well as those who betrayed their own net­work. They devel­oped weapons of mass destruc­tion long before the iden­ti­cal claim was laid at the door of Sad­dam Hus­sein.

They are “non-state actors” like Al-Qae­da, with the dif­fer­ence that they recent­ly had a state. They con­duct “asym­met­ric war­fare” because they can no longer field bat­tal­ions made of tanks and planes and submarines—and no longer real­ly need to do so. Using ter­ror as a weapon has proven to be far more effec­tive. They move mon­ey silent­ly and unseen through the world’s finan­cial insti­tu­tions. Peo­ple like Schacht and Genoud wrote the book.

And they are loose­ly orga­nized. Indi­vid­ual units pos­sess a cer­tain degree of deni­a­bil­i­ty, some­thing that new­er ter­ror groups have copied.

Al-Qae­da, Hamas, Hizbol­lah, Fatah, Jemaah Islamiyyah, Lashkar- e‑Taiba, etc. are all chil­dren of ODESSA. The pact between Nazi anti-Semi­tism and Arab anti-Semi­tism was made with Hajj Amin al-Hus­sei­ni all those years ago—and has been renewed every decade since with refine­ments as nec­es­sary to reflect emerg­ing polit­i­cal real­i­ties in the after­math of the fall of the Sovi­et Union. Sko­rzeny, al-Hus­sei­ni, Genoud: one big hap­py fam­i­ly.

Embold­ened by the defeat of the Red Army in Afghanistan, aid­ed and abet­ted by CIA, the mil­i­tant forces of that remote yet dead­ly land­scape turned their atten­tion on the West. Repu­di­at­ing West­ern deca­dence and lib­er­al­ism, the Tal­iban enforced strict and even idio­syn­crat­ic inter­pre­ta­tions of syari­ah law. Pro­po­nents of the Third Way, the Tal­iban were equal­ly dis­gust­ed with Sovi­et athe­ism and Com­mu­nism, and with Amer­i­can mate­ri­al­ism and lib­er­al­ism. Yet, they won the war against the Sovi­et inva­sion using asym­met­ric war­fare. They were not able to field armored divi­sions, but had to wage a long and exhaust­ing guer­ril­la war against heli­copter gun­ships, tanks, and rock­ets.

Asym­met­ric war­fare is usu­al­ly defined as the con­flict between two, dra­mat­i­cal­ly unequal, forces. The war of the Unit­ed States in Viet­nam is giv­en as one exam­ple, where the vast­ly supe­ri­or (in terms of econ­o­my, num­bers, and mil­i­tary strength) US forces fought the guer­ril­la forces rep­re­sent­ed by the Viet Cong, and the reg­u­lar North Viet­namese forces rep­re­sent­ed by the Viet Minh. Often the Israeli- Pales­tin­ian con­flict is giv­en as anoth­er exam­ple, with the army and air force of the Israeli mil­i­tary opposed to the var­i­ous guer­ril­la fac­tions rep­re­sent­ed by the Pales­tin­ian Lib­er­a­tion Orga­ni­za­tion (PLO), plus those of Hamas and Hizbol­lah.

In most, if not all cas­es, of asym­met­ric war­fare of the last hun­dred years or so, it has often been that of a pow­er­ful west­ern coun­try embroiled in a con­flict with numer­i­cal­ly and eco­nom­i­cal­ly weak­er non-state actors, which the cur­rent prob­lem with Al-Qae­da and ISIL seems to rep­re­sent. In these cas­es, the non-state actors are fight­ing for their own ter­ri­to­ry, lan­guage, eth­nic iden­ti­ty, etc., often against a colo­nial or for­mer colo­nial pow­er, such as Eng­land, France, the Nether­lands, Spain, etc.

There is one type of asym­met­ric war­fare that is usu­al­ly not rec­og­nized or includ­ed in stud­ies of this phe­nom­e­non, how­ev­er: it is when a pow­er­ful state los­es its pow­er yet con­tin­ues to fight the forces that defeat­ed it, using the same means as non-state actors— such as ter­ror­ism and assas­si­na­tion. There is to my knowl­edge only one such exam­ple in the mod­ern world, and that is Nazi Ger­many.

As point­ed out in stud­ies of ter­ror­ism and asym­met­ric war­fare, nation­al­ist and eth­no-nation­al­ist groups are those most like­ly to engage in this type of pro­tract­ed and vio­lent con­flict. That is not to say that left­ist, “inter­na­tion­al­ist” groups do not, and have not, also been involved in asym­met­ric war­fare; of course they have. The num­ber of vio­lent inci­dents involv­ing left­ist groups is actu­al­ly larg­er than those per­pe­trat­ed by nation­al­ist groups; how­ev­er the num­ber of fatal­i­ties is sub­stan­tial­ly greater in those inci­dents per­pe­trat­ed by the nation­al­ists and eth­no-nation­al­ist, anti-colo­nial groups.

Nation­al­ism is a hall­mark of the type of ter­ror­ism we have come to expe­ri­ence in the post-World War Two peri­od. It was actu­al­ly giv­en a form and an agen­da by the Nazis who cre­at­ed the Were­wolf con­cept: a stay-behind guer­ril­la force that would use asym­met­ric tac­tics to wage war against the Allies. This was an exam­ple of a state that refused to cease hos­til­i­ties even after defeat.
Anoth­er type of asym­met­ric actor is the reli­gious ide­o­logue. As has been point­ed out in stud­ies of terrorism—especially since the events of Sep­tem­ber 11, 2001—this new type of adver­sary may not be iden­ti­fied with a sin­gle eth­nic­i­ty or geo­graph­ic ter­ri­to­ry. Even though the ori­gins of the vio­lent reli­gious ter­ror­ist may be found in the post-colo­nial peri­od, the nature of the con­flict has changed con­sid­er­ably since then.

What many fail to real­ize is that the ide­ol­o­gy of the Nazi Par­ty— par­tic­u­lar­ly as refined by the SS—was essen­tial­ly a spir­i­tu­al ide­ol­o­gy. I have made the point else­where that the Nazi Par­ty was a cult. To try to under­stand it as a pure­ly polit­i­cal enti­ty (in a mod­ern, Amer­i­can con­text) is to make a grave mis­take.

The Nazi net­work that was formed in the last days of the war and which has exist­ed, in one form or anoth­er in the sev­en­ty years since then, is com­prised of both a nation­al­ist and a reli­gious agen­da. The Nazi Par­ty has its ori­gins in eso­teric Aryanism, such as rep­re­sent­ed by the writ­ings of Gui­do von List and Lanz von Lieben­fels, as well as occultist groups such as the Arma­nen­schaft, the Ger­ma­nenor­den, and the Thule Gesellschaft. These groups com­bined racist ide­ol­o­gy with spir­i­tu­al, mys­ti­cal ideas and prac­tices, some of which were adapt­ed from more main­stream eso­teric groups such as the Theo­soph­i­cal Soci­ety and the writ­ings of its founder, Hele­na Blavatsky. The Social Dar­win­ism that is one of the hall­marks of the Nazi regime is the “out­er court” of the spir­i­tu­al Dar­win­ism that is clear­ly elu­ci­dat­ed in Blavatsky’s works. What this means is that Nazism is just as much a spir­i­tu­al phi­los­o­phy as it is a polit­i­cal one.

Thus the basic com­po­nents of the non-state actor in asym­met­ric war­fare are present in the Nazi Under­ground (what we have been call­ing ODESSA). The ter­ror­ist acts per­pe­trat­ed by this Under­ground are pre­cise­ly those of the mod­ern non-state actors with which we have all become famil­iar. The moti­va­tion for ODESSA runs par­al­lel to that of “Islamist” ter­ror orga­ni­za­tions: a spir­i­tu­al view­point that both orga­ni­za­tions wish to impose on the world through the medi­um of ter­ror­ism, assas­si­na­tions, and the like. Both ide­olo­gies are exclu­sive rather than inclu­sive; both are anti-Semit­ic; both are anti-Amer­i­can and deplore what they see as West­ern “deca­dence.” (One could make a very good case that Hitler’s objec­tion to mod­ern art, mod­ern music and mod­ern cul­ture in gen­er­al is vir­tu­al­ly iden­ti­cal to the point of view of Islamist crit­ics con­cern­ing the same.)

In addition—and this may be more impor­tant than it seems at first glance—many mem­bers of the SS and the Wehrma­cht con­vert­ed to Islam after the war, and found employ­ment and res­i­dence in Mus­lim coun­tries. In some cas­es, they active­ly sup­port­ed Arab regimes in their oppo­si­tion to the State of Israel by pro­vid­ing tech­ni­cal exper­tise, engi­neers, and train­ing in inter­ro­ga­tion, espi­onage, and relat­ed arts of war.

I believe this pro­vides an impor­tant per­spec­tive into the cur­rent ter­ror­ist phe­nom­e­non, as it shows a con­ti­nu­ity of pur­pose com­bined with tac­ti­cal and oper­a­tional meth­ods that have their ori­gin in the murky world of the first days of the Cold War—when a cyn­i­cal manip­u­la­tion of reli­gion using non-state actors took place under the aegis of a decades-long and often poor­ly thought-out cam­paign of state-spon­sored anti-Com­mu­nism.

Dur­ing the course of many years of research (from about 1968– present) into the ori­gins of reli­gious vio­lence I have come into per­son­al con­tact with both the PLO and Jemaah Islamiyyah (JI), as well as with North Amer­i­can racial­ist and white suprema­cist groups such as the Nation­al Renais­sance Par­ty (NRP) and the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) among oth­ers, as well as with the South Amer­i­can Nazi sanc­tu­ary and nexus for Oper­a­tion Con­dor, Colo­nia Dig­nidad in Chile. I lived in Malaysia for sev­en years, in an apart­ment that was only a few blocks from where the 9/11 attacks were orig­i­nal­ly dis­cussed, and in Indone­sia where I met Abu Bakr Ba’asyir, the archi­tect of the Bali Bomb­ings in 2002, and founder of JI.

I have also been on inti­mate terms with a num­ber of con­ven­tion­al and non-con­ven­tion­al reli­gious orga­ni­za­tions span­ning var­i­ous forms of Judaism, Chris­tian­i­ty and Islam as well as Bud­dhism, the reli­gious of India, Afro-Caribbean reli­gions, and mod­ern so called “New Age” move­ments such as Wic­ca, Satanism, and the secret soci­eties of West­ern Europe and Amer­i­ca. I believe it is this unique per­spec­tive on both reli­gion and pol­i­tics that informs my the­sis that the choic­es we made as a coun­try in the imme­di­ate post-war peri­od have result­ed in the cur­rent state of affairs where ter­ror­ism, “Islamism,” and oth­er forms of asym­met­ric con­flict are con­cerned.

To quote Infield again:

It has become evi­dent dur­ing recent years that major wars in the nuclear age will be few­er than those in the past but indi­vid­ual and group ter­ror­ism will increase steadi­ly. Sko­rzeny and his com­man­dos dur­ing the Third Reich and Sko­rzeny and his ODESSA mem­bers dur­ing the post­war years were lead­ers in mod­ern day ter­ror­is­tic tac­tics. Skorzeny’s fol­low­ers and stu­dents adhere to his teach­ings today.116

It was Sko­rzeny and his col­leagues in ODESSA who, as ear­ly as 1950 and the out­break of the Kore­an War, pro­posed form­ing a bloc of non-aligned nations in Asia, Africa, and Latin Amer­i­ca to stand up to Amer­i­ca and Rus­sia: exact­ly the same posi­tion tak­en by Sukarno five years lat­er. The posi­tion of the Islamist the­o­reti­cians of today is not dis­sim­i­lar: the dif­fer­ence is that the Sovi­et Union has already fall­en.

While Chi­na may devel­op into a threat, Uzbek and oth­er activists in west­ern Chi­na are cre­at­ing anoth­er Mus­lim front with the inten­tion of desta­bi­liz­ing that regime. Seen as both Com­mu­nist and Cap­i­tal­ist, Chi­na could be an inter­est­ing adver­sary for the Third Way posi­tion of con­tem­po­rary Nazism. Chi­na is at least as nation­al­ist as its for­mer ene­my, Japan.

As for Japan itself, it has recov­ered remark­ably since the dev­as­ta­tion of the Sec­ond World War and two atom­ic bombs. Japan and Ger­many are eco­nom­ic pow­er­hous­es. Even though Japan has been strug­gling in recent years, it is still one of the most pros­per­ous nations in the world.

As for Ger­many, it has devel­oped exact­ly as planned so long ago. It is reunit­ed and the leader of the Euro­pean Union, eas­i­ly its most pow­er­ful and influ­en­tial mem­ber. It is true that grow­ing num­bers of immi­grants from East­ern Europe and espe­cial­ly Mus­lim immi­grants from Turkey, the Balka­ns, and North Africa, are pro­vid­ing an envi­ron­ment where ques­tions con­cern­ing Ger­man iden­ti­ty and respon­si­bil­i­ty are being raised. But as Ger­man cities have been rebuilt, indus­tri­al growth is strong, and mem­o­ries of the war are fad­ing with each new gen­er­a­tion, it is doubt­ful whether any seri­ous soul-search­ing will occur. With ten­sions ris­ing in Europe over the fate of Ukraine and the Russ­ian annex­a­tion of Crimea, it may be that the world will look to Ger­many again to pro­vide the buffer between a new­ly-aroused Rus­sia and the much more vul­ner­a­ble nations of East­ern and South­ern Europe.

It is doubt­ful whether the world will once again be con­front­ed with jack-boot­ed storm troop­ers wear­ing swasti­ka arm­bands, singing the Horst Wes­sel song; but that does not mean that Nazism has dis­ap­peared. It has mere­ly changed uni­forms and moved to a dif­fer­ent the­ater of oper­a­tions. I do not wish to deprive the Islam­ic groups of agency in their present con­flict with the West, but it is impor­tant to empha­size that they were as manip­u­lat­ed and exploit­ed by the Ger­mans in two World Wars as they had been by the colo­nial pow­ers.

The con­cept of glob­al jihad was for­eign to Islam until cre­at­ed by a Ger­man spy—of Jew­ish ances­try, no less—with a view towards using Mus­lims as proxy sol­diers in Germany’s fight with the Allied forces of Eng­land, France, and Rus­sia. And when the Cold War began, they were manip­u­lat­ed once again: this time by Amer­i­can intel­li­gence efforts to weaponize Islam against the Sovi­et Union.

To con­tin­ue the strug­gle against the West­ern world that was begun by West­ern­ers them­selves for motives that had noth­ing to do with Islam or with gen­uine jihad is to coop­er­ate in West­ern strate­gies that only will result in the destruc­tion of more Mus­lim lives and the des­o­la­tion of more Arab lands.

This is espe­cial­ly true with regards to Pales­tine. The Pales­tini­ans them­selves must real­ize that no assis­tance is com­ing their way from the vast­ly wealth­i­er and pop­u­lous Arab world. The dev­as­ta­tion of Gaza and the ongo­ing occu­pa­tion of the West Bank is the lega­cy of decades of Arab inde­ci­sion and manip­u­la­tion. It is obvi­ous­ly far more ben­e­fi­cial to have the Pales­tini­ans live in squalor and die in refugee camps than to have the Arab nations work togeth­er to cre­ate a more pro­duc­tive solu­tion. The Arab lead­ers have long since real­ized that the Nazi and Zen ideals of hero­ic death on the bat­tle­field are dat­ed notions, sui­ci­dal and non-pro­duc­tive, that can only end in anni­hi­la­tion. Yet they tol­er­ate and even encour­age the rag­ing anti-Semi­tism of Hitler, Goebbels, and von Leers because it directs Pales­tin­ian anger towards Israel (and the Unit­ed States), and away from the Arab lead­ers them­selves who have found them­selves in an increas­ing­ly vul­ner­a­ble sit­u­a­tion since the revolts of the Arab Spring.

Pales­tin­ian sui­cide bombers, how­ev­er, have looked towards Hitler and Hajj Amin al-Hus­sei­ni as avatars of the New Islam, of the desire to cre­ate a caliphate that will stretch from Jerusalem and Mec­ca all the way to South­east Asia. To Kuala Lumpur, and Jakar­ta.

And, yes, even to Sum­bawa.

We are still fight­ing World War One, and we will con­tin­ue to fight it. We are redraw­ing the world map once again in lines of blood and steel. Amer­i­ca should be at the fore­front of the fight to end these con­flicts, but our moral lead­er­ship has been called into ques­tion again and again. We made mis­takes at the end of World War Two: we sided with the colo­nial pow­ers when we should have made com­mon cause with the indige­nous peo­ples of the Mid­dle East, Africa, and Asia who looked to us as their nat­ur­al allies. We enlist­ed the aid of Nazis and Nazi war crim­i­nals to accel­er­ate our space pro­gram and to field espi­onage agents against the Sovi­et Union. We allowed ded­i­cat­ed and com­mit­ted anti-Semi­tes with a his­to­ry of vio­lence and blood­shed against civil­ian pop­u­la­tions to run freely in the devel­op­ing nations, train­ing tor­tur­ers and assas­sins.

We act­ed out of fear; we co-opt­ed our val­ues, trad­ing them for greater secu­ri­ty.

This, too, is the Hitler Lega­cy. We thought we could con­trol the Dev­il that was the Nazi Par­ty and the SS, using them to pro­tect our­selves against Rus­sia. We used the strate­gies devel­oped by the Ger­mans in two world wars to coerce and cajole Mus­lim believ­ers to declare a holy war—a holy war that would one day be aimed at us.

We lived up to the charges made against us by the Islamists— that we were with­out faith, bereft of spir­i­tu­al­i­ty, obsessed with mate­ri­al­ism, cold enough to the sum­mons of the soul that we could con­tem­plate weaponiz­ing reli­gion: see­ing it as just one more tool, one more ele­ment in our ever grow­ing arse­nal of destruc­tion. We could urge Mus­lims and Bud­dhists to risk their lives in attacks against our ene­mies, will­ing to fight to the last drop of their blood, using their faith—and clum­sy, awk­ward protes­ta­tions of our own— as the moti­va­tion for dead­ly, vio­lent action when we had no moral, no legit­i­mate right at all, to demand this of them.

Is it any won­der, then, that the blow­back was so severe, the hatred so con­cen­trat­ed?

The net­works still exist, trans­form­ing soft­ly from time to time, chang­ing with every new polit­i­cal devel­op­ment on the world stage. There are names in the address book of ODESSA chief Hans- Ulrich Rudel of peo­ple who are still alive as this is being writ­ten: peo­ple scat­tered all over the world, devo­tees, true believ­ers, car­ry­ing the torch in a vir­tu­al Nurem­berg Ral­ly, feel­ing more and more com­fort­able by the day.

New groups are being formed, new lead­ers cho­sen from among the faith­ful. Xeno­pho­bia is at an all-time high in Europe and increas­ing­ly in Amer­i­ca. The Inter­net has pro­vid­ed new and improved means of com­mu­ni­ca­tion. Arab sys­tems of mon­ey trans­fer such as hawala are used to defeat the stric­tures of the inter­na­tion­al bank­ing sys­tem, made more severe after the events of 2001. The hys­te­ria we used to feel about secret Com­mu­nists has been replaced by hys­te­ria over ter­ror­ism. We lost our way, briefly, in the 1950s over Com­mu­nism; and inno­cent peo­ple were ruined, rep­u­ta­tions destroyed. Now again we are equal­ly para­noid to the extent that TSA agents pat down the elder­ly and infants in strollers. We are increas­ing­ly made to dis­robe before we can board a plane, and we are thank­ful because this means we will be safer.

But, if we want to, we can walk across the bor­der into Cana­da or Mex­i­co.

As the polit­i­cal life of every coun­try becomes more and more polar­ized between “right” and “left,” the men of ODESSA can only laugh at our dis­com­fort. When the Berlin Wall came down many thought that the world had become a safer place. They did not real­ize that this was only phase one of the over­all plan, the one that might have been hatched in Stras­bourg in 1944 at the Mai­son Rouge Hotel. Or not. But it was the plan.

And when the Sovi­et Union fell, many pat­ted them­selves on the back think­ing that his­to­ry was at an end, that all seri­ous con­flict was over, except maybe for a lit­tle clean-up here and there. Noth­ing to wor­ry about. Our side won.

Dream on. . . .

2. Next, we present a very impor­tant post that dis­tills a line of inquiry we’ve been pur­su­ing for years. Cor­nell Uni­ver­si­ty pro­fes­sor Robert Kaplan notes that U.S. mil­i­tary inter­ven­tion in the Mus­lim world occurs in for­mer ter­ri­to­ries of the Ottoman Empire and results in Islamists com­ing to pow­er for the ulti­mate ben­e­fit of–Germany!

In FTR #‘s 710, 720, 723 we not­ed that the GOP/Underground Reich fac­tion of the U.S. intel­li­gence estab­lish­ment was pur­su­ing covert oper­a­tions in the Earth Island, par­tic­u­lar­ly in parts of Rus­sia and Chi­na. Part­nered in this is the Mus­lim Broth­er­hood and irre­den­tist Turk­ish ele­ments seek­ing a return to the glo­ry days of the Ottoman Empire.

Fol­low­ing the turn to the Mus­lim Broth­er­hood (for­mal­ized dur­ing Bush’s sec­ond admin­is­tra­tion grow­ing out of the pro­found GOP links to the Broth­er­hood and the al-Taqwa milieu) we wit­nessed the cen­ter piece of this oper­a­tion–the so-called Arab Spring. The Boston Marathon bomb­ing appears to be “blow­back” from this oper­a­tion, with FBI appar­ent­ly hav­ing cut across ele­ments of the covert oper­a­tion men­tioned above.

The Fetul­lah Gulen orga­ni­za­tion appears to be an out­crop­ping of this mas­sive Earth Island “op.”

Before return­ing to the sub­ject of the “Mus­lim Broth­er­hood Spring,” let’s high­light a key para­graph of the Kaplan essay, sum­ming up an all-too famil­iar pat­tern in the oper­a­tions that are bring­ing to pow­er the Ger­man Hand in the Ottoman/Islamist glove:

. . . . Each U. S. mil­i­tary action in Europe and the Mid­dle East since 1990, how­ev­er, with the excep­tion of Iraq, has fol­lowed an overt pat­tern: First there is an armed con­flict with­in the coun­try where the inter­ven­tion will take place. Amer­i­can news media heav­i­ly report this con­flict. The “good guys” in the sto­ry are the rebels. The “bad guys,” to be attacked by Amer­i­can mil­i­tary force, are bru­tal­ly anti-demo­c­ra­t­ic, and com­mit­ters of war crimes, crimes against human­i­ty, and geno­cide. Pres­ti­gious pub­lic fig­ures, NGOs, judi­cial and qua­si-judi­cial bod­ies and inter­na­tion­al orga­ni­za­tions call for sup­port­ing the rebels and attack­ing the regime. Next, the Amer­i­can pres­i­dent orders Amer­i­can logis­ti­cal sup­port and arms sup­plies for the rebels. Final­ly the Amer­i­can pres­i­dent orders mil­i­tary attack under the aus­pices of NATO in sup­port of the rebels. The attack usu­al­ly con­sists of aer­i­al bomb­ing, today’s equiv­a­lent of the nine­teenth and twen­ti­eth cen­turies’ gun­boat which could attack coastal cities of mil­i­tar­i­ly weak coun­tries with­out fear of retal­i­a­tion. The ulti­mate out­come of each Amer­i­can inter­ven­tion is the replace­ment of a sec­u­lar gov­ern­ment with an Islamist regime in an area that had been part of the Ottoman Empire. . . .

Anoth­er fas­ci­nat­ing and very impor­tant part of the arti­cle con­cerns the ICC, much-bal­ly­hooed by the so-called pro­gres­sive sec­tor in this and oth­er coun­tries:

. . . . From that arti­cle, “A Law­less Glob­al Court” by John Rosen­thal (Pol­i­cy Review Feb. 1. 2004 No.123), one learns that the ICC is a project ini­ti­at­ed, pro­mot­ed and, to a con­sid­er­able extent, fund­ed by Ger­many. Giv­en this, the idea that the ICC serves Ger­many’s pur­pos­es is com­mon sense. Through the ICC con­nec­tion, Ger­many’s pro­mo­tion of the “Arab Spring” is clear. Yet it is nev­er or almost nev­er men­tioned. This silence calls for expla­na­tion. . . .

Amen! That silence does indeed call for an expla­na­tion.

Notice, also, the Ger­man method­ol­o­gy here. Under­scor­ing Ger­man pow­er-polit­i­cal method­ol­o­gy pri­or to, and dur­ing, World War I, Kaplan’s analy­sis applies equal­ly well to Nazi Ger­man’s geo-polit­i­cal ori­en­ta­tion. It applies equal­ly well to that of the Fed­er­al Repub­lic, which, like the GOP and a dis­turbing­ly large part of the U.S. nation­al secu­ri­ty estab­lish­ment, is con­trolled by Ger­many:

. . . . In the view of the lead­ers of Ger­many, Turkey was con­trol­lable through a com­bi­na­tion of eco­nom­ic inter­course, gifts of edu­ca­tion­al oppor­tu­ni­ties, pro­vi­sion of tech­ni­cal exper­tise and admin­is­tra­tive aid, as well as bribes to Turk­ish offi­cials. Ger­many saw influ­ence over Turkey as a means of influ­enc­ing Moslems world­wide for its own inter­ests. . . .

Let’s review the bul­let points from the descrip­tion of FTR #737 (record­ed on 4/2/2011.):

• Wik­iLeaks appears to have played a role in the events, with a pur­port­ed “leaked” State Depart­ment memo hav­ing helped spur the upris­ing in Tunisia which, in turn, helped to gal­va­nize events in Egypt. Far from being the “pro­gres­sive,” “whis­tle-blow­ing” enti­ty it pur­ports to be, Wik­iLeaks is a far-right, Nazi-influ­enced pro­pa­gan­da and data min­ing oper­a­tion.
• Karl Rove’s dom­i­nant pres­ence in Swe­den as the Wik­iLeaks “op” was gain­ing momen­tum may well have much to do with the “leak­ing” of State Depart­ment cables from the Oba­ma admin­is­tra­tion that are undoubt­ed­ly mak­ing the suc­cess­ful exe­cu­tion of state­craft even more dif­fi­cult under the cir­cum­stances.
• Far from being a spon­ta­neous event, the Mid­dle East upris­ings appear to have stemmed, in part at least, from a covert oper­a­tion begun under the Bush admin­is­tra­tion and con­tin­ued under Oba­ma’s tenure. (Oba­ma may well have been set up to take the fall for neg­a­tive con­se­quences of the event. It is unclear just how “on top of it” his admin­is­tra­tion is. In this regard, the event is very much like the Bay of Pigs oper­a­tion, begun under Eisen­how­er’s admin­is­tra­tion and con­tin­ued under JFK.)
• The oper­a­tion may well be intend­ed to desta­bi­lize the Oba­ma admin­is­tra­tion, paving the way for the ascent of the GOP in the Unit­ed States. In this respect, it is very much like what has come to be known as the Octo­ber Sur­prise.
• Cour­tesy of Wik­iLeaks, the oper­a­tion’s exis­tence was “blown”–con­tacts between U.S. Embassy per­son­nel in Cairo and lead­ers of the April 6 move­ment dur­ing the last months of the Bush admin­is­tra­tion came to light cour­tesy of more alleged­ly “leaked” State Depart­ment mem­os made pub­lic by Wik­Leaks. Pre­vi­ous­ly, the U.S. embassy in Cairo had been in con­tact with lead­ers of the Egypt­ian Mus­lim Broth­er­hood.
• Loom­ing large in the unfold­ing sce­nario are the the­o­ries of non-vio­lent the­o­reti­cian Gene Sharp, who held posi­tions asso­ci­at­ed with the “lib­er­al” ele­ment of the U.S. intel­li­gence appa­ra­tus.
• Sharp’s activ­i­ties have been under­writ­ten by junk bond king Michael Milken’s for­mer right-hand man Peter Ack­er­man, who has served as an advi­sor to the Unit­ed States Insti­tute of Peace, an agency of the U.S. gov­ern­ment.
• The Unit­ed States Insti­tute of Peace’s Mus­lim World Ini­tia­tive–charged by crit­ics with legit­imiz­ing jihadists–may well have been the ini­ti­at­ing ele­ment in these devel­op­ments.
• High tech firms with links to the U.S. intel­li­gence estab­lish­ment appear to have facil­i­tat­ed the Pig­gy-Back Coup.
• The Mus­lim Broth­er­hood’s free-mar­ket eco­nom­ic per­spec­tive has endeared it to lais­sez-faire the­o­reti­cians around the world. Amer­i­can Uni­ver­si­ty in Cairo, at which Broth­er­hood affil­i­at­ed the­o­reti­cians hold forth, is an epi­cen­ter of the eco­nom­ic phi­los­o­phy of Ibn Khal­dun, the Ikhwan’s eco­nom­ic god­fa­ther.
• Despite assur­ances from many “expert” sources, the Mus­lim Broth­er­hood seems poised to ben­e­fit the most from the unfold­ing events in the Mid­dle East.
• The Mus­lim Broth­er­hood-con­trolled Al Jazeera net­work has also had much to do with the upris­ings.
• The youth­ful ide­al­ists of the Anonymous/Pirate Bay/Pirate Par­ty milieu appear to have been cyn­i­cal­ly deceived and manip­u­lat­ed into sup­port­ing an oper­a­tion that fig­ures to empow­er some tru­ly dark forces. Those dark forces are fun­da­men­tal­ly opposed to the Utopi­an val­ues dear to the Anonymous/Pirate Bay folks.
• Those same reas­sur­ing voic­es have told us that the Broth­er­hood aspires to a polit­i­cal agen­da to the “mod­er­ate” agen­da of the Turk­ish AK par­ty. That par­ty is close­ly affil­i­at­ed with the Mus­lim Broth­er­hood. The “mod­er­a­tion” of the AK Par­ty may be weighed in the dis­cus­sion below.
• Pre­cip­i­tat­ing the ascent of the fas­cist Mus­lim Broth­er­hood in the Mid­dle East may well be an attempt at using the Mus­lim pop­u­la­tion of the Earth Island as a proxy force against Rus­sia and Chi­na. The goal, ulti­mate­ly, is to peel away strate­gic, resource-rich areas such, as the petro­le­um-rich areas of the Cau­ca­sus and Xin­jiang province.

The Robert E. Kaplan post epit­o­mizes the argu­ments we’ve been advanc­ing for many years. Please digest it and dis­sem­i­nate the infor­ma­tion to oth­ers. Although he does not men­tion it, vet­er­an lis­ten­ers and read­ers will no doubt rec­og­nize the pres­ence of the Under­ground Reich in the con­cate­na­tion that Kaplan presents. Detail­ing the evo­lu­tion of the Under­ground Reich is beyond the scope of this post.

The wealth of infor­ma­tion con­tained on this web­site will pro­vide the nec­es­sary intel­lec­tu­al under­pin­ning for inter­est­ed and curi­ous readers/listeners.

Suf­fice it to say here, that the proxy war­riors of the neo-Ottoman caliphate will, ulti­mate­ly, be used to destroy the U.S. and the U.K., as well as Israel.

With Oba­ma respond­ing to his long-fore­cast (in these quar­ters) desta­bi­liza­tion by con­tin­u­ing to build bi-par­ti­san bridges and com­mit­ting polit­i­cal sui­cide in the process, this should be rel­a­tive­ly easy to accom­plish.

“The U.S. Helps Recon­struct the Ottoman Empire” by Robert E. Kaplan; The Gate­stone Insti­tute; 5/29/2013.

Since the mid-1990s the Unit­ed States has inter­vened mil­i­tar­i­ly in sev­er­al inter­nal armed con­flicts in Europe and the Mid­dle East: bomb­ing Serbs and Ser­bia in sup­port of Izetbe­gov­ic’s Moslem Regime in Bosnia in 1995, bomb­ing Serbs and Ser­bia in sup­port of KLA Moslems of Koso­vo in 1999, bomb­ing Libya’s Gaddafi regime in sup­port of rebels in 2010. Each inter­ven­tion was jus­ti­fied to Amer­i­cans as moti­vat­ed by human­i­tar­i­an con­cerns: to pro­tect Bosn­ian Moslems from geno­ci­dal Serbs, to pro­tect Koso­vo Moslems from geno­ci­dal Serbs, and to pro­tect Libyans from their mur­der­ous dic­ta­tor Muam­mar Gaddafi.

Oth­er rea­sons for these inter­ven­tions were also offered: to gain for the Unit­ed States a strate­gic foothold in the Balka­ns, to defeat com­mu­nism in Yugoslavia, to demon­strate to the world’s Moslems that the Unit­ed States is not anti-Moslem, to rede­fine the role of NATO in the post-Cold War era, among oth­ers.

Each of these Unit­ed States mil­i­tary inter­ven­tions occurred in an area that had been part of the Ottoman Empire. In each, a sec­u­lar regime was ulti­mate­ly replaced by an Islamist one favor­ing sharia law and the cre­ation of a world-wide Caliphate. The coun­tries that expe­ri­enced the “Arab Spring” of the 2010s with­out the help of Amer­i­can mil­i­tary inter­ven­tion, Tunisia and Egypt, had also been part of the Ottoman Empire, and also end­ed up with Islamist regimes.

In the Unit­ed States most dis­cus­sions of the mil­i­tary con­flicts of the 1990s in the Balka­ns and the “Arab Spring” of the 2010s do not men­tion that the areas involved had been part of the Ottoman Empire; these includ­ed Turkey, the Moslem-pop­u­lat­ed areas around the Mediter­ranean, Iraq, the coastal regions of the Ara­bi­an Penin­su­la and parts of the Balka­ns. In the areas that expe­ri­enced the Arab Spring Turkey’s role in every instance has been to sup­port the rebels and quick­ly rec­og­nize them as the legit­i­mate gov­ern­ment of the coun­try in upheaval.

Turk­ish lead­ers do make the con­nec­tion between the con­flicts in the Bosnia, the “Arab Spring” and the Ottoman Empire. Harold Rhode, an Amer­i­can expert on Turkey, has report­ed:

[Pres­i­dent of Turkey] Erdo­gan’s recent [2011] elec­toral vic­to­ry speech puts his true inten­tions regard­ing Turkey’s for­eign pol­i­cy goals in per­spec­tive. He said that this vic­to­ry is as impor­tant in Ankara as it is in the cap­i­tal of Bosnia-Herze­gov­ina, Sara­je­vo, under Ottoman times, an impor­tant Ottoman city; that his par­ty’s vic­to­ry was as impor­tant in a large Turk­ish city Izmir, on the West­ern Ana­to­lian coast, as it is in Dam­as­cus, and as impor­tant in Istan­bul as it is in Jerusalem….

In say­ing that this vic­to­ry is as impor­tant in all of these for­mer Ottoman cities, Erdo­gan appar­ent­ly sees him­self as try­ing to reclaim Turkey’s full Ottoman past.

The occur­rence that since 1990 each Euro­pean and Mid­dle East­ern coun­try that expe­ri­enced Amer­i­can mil­i­tary inter­ven­tion in an inter­nal mil­i­tary con­flict or an “Arab Spring” has end­ed up with a gov­ern­ment dom­i­nat­ed by Islamists of the Moslem Broth­er­hood or al-Qae­da vari­ety fits nice­ly with the idea that these events rep­re­sent a return to Ottoman rule. Besides being a polit­i­cal empire rul­ing a ter­ri­to­ry and its pop­u­la­tion, the Ottoman Empire claimed to be a Caliphate with spir­i­tu­al suzerain­ty over all Moslems – those with­in its bor­ders and those beyond. Though it might seem strange at first, the idea of advanc­ing the renew­al of the Ottoman Empire on two tracks – break­ing down the post-Ottoman polit­i­cal struc­ture and pro­mot­ing a Caliphate which Islamists say they long for – is real­ly quite rea­son­able.

Just as the Balkan con­flicts of the 1990s and the “Arab Spring” of the 2010s con­sid­ered in his­tor­i­cal per­spec­tive sug­gests that Turkey might be attempt­ing to recre­ate its for­mer empire, con­sid­er­a­tion of the Turk­ish Empire in his­tor­i­cal per­spec­tive sug­gests the pos­si­ble part­ner­ship of Ger­many with Turkey in the project giv­en that, from its cre­ation in 1870, Ger­many viewed Turkey with its empire as a most valu­able client and ally. In the view of the lead­ers of Ger­many, Turkey was con­trol­lable through a com­bi­na­tion of eco­nom­ic inter­course, gifts of edu­ca­tion­al oppor­tu­ni­ties, pro­vi­sion of tech­ni­cal exper­tise and admin­is­tra­tive aid, as well as bribes to Turk­ish offi­cials. Ger­many saw influ­ence over Turkey as a means of influ­enc­ing Moslems world­wide for its own inter­ests. Thus as the Ger­man schol­ar Wolf­gang Schwanitz has shown, dur­ing World War I Ger­many employed the Turk­ish Caliphate to pro­mote jihad – riot and rebel­lion – in areas where Moslem pop­u­la­tions were ruled by its ene­mies Rus­sia, France, Britain and Ser­bia.

Yet in the 50-odd arti­cles col­lect­ed in an explo­ration of the aware­ness on the part of Amer­i­cans of a pos­si­ble Turk­ish con­nec­tion with the “Arab Spring,” I found not a sin­gle men­tion of “Ger­many.” Only from a link in one of those arti­cles – to an arti­cle on the Inter­na­tion­al Crim­i­nal Court (ICC) which, with its indict­ment of Muam­mar Gaddafi and issue of a war­rant for his arrest, pro­vid­ed the “legal” basis legit­imiz­ing NATO’s bomb­ing of Libya — which gave the rebels their vic­to­ry and end­ed the Gaddafi regime – did I find men­tion of Ger­many. From that arti­cle, “A Law­less Glob­al Court” by John Rosen­thal (Pol­i­cy Review Feb. 1. 2004 No.123), one learns that the ICC is a project ini­ti­at­ed, pro­mot­ed and, to a con­sid­er­able extent, fund­ed by Ger­many. Giv­en this, the idea that the ICC serves Ger­many’s pur­pos­es is com­mon sense. Through the ICC con­nec­tion, Ger­many’s pro­mo­tion of the “Arab Spring” is clear. Yet it is nev­er or almost nev­er men­tioned. This silence calls for expla­na­tion.

Lat­er, I did come across an explic­it ref­er­ence to Ger­many’s role in it — specif­i­cal­ly in the war against the Assad regime in Syr­ia — in John Rosen­thal’s arti­cle “Ger­man Intel­li­gence: al-Qae­da all over Syr­ia” in the online Asia Times ­­­­­­­­­­­­ — which reports that the Ger­man gov­ern­ment sup­ports the rebels and their polit­i­cal arm, the Syr­i­an Nation­al Coun­cil (SNC), against Assad; that the Ger­man gov­ern­ment clas­si­fied [made secret] “by rea­son of nation­al inter­est” the con­tents of sev­er­al BND (Ger­man for­eign intel­li­gence) reports that the May 25, 2012 mas­sacre of civil­ians in the Syr­i­an town of Houla, for which Assad has been blamed, was in fact per­pe­trat­ed by rebel forces; and that “the Ger­man for­eign office is work­ing with rep­re­sen­ta­tives of the Syr­i­an oppo­si­tion to devel­op ‘con­crete plans’ for a ‘polit­i­cal tran­si­tion’ in Syr­ia after the fall of Assad.” So far the Ger­man pol­i­cy of keep­ing hid­den its lead­er­ship role in the attempt to recon­sti­tute the Ottoman Empire seems to have suc­ceed­ed.

Each U. S. mil­i­tary action in Europe and the Mid­dle East since 1990, how­ev­er, with the excep­tion of Iraq, has fol­lowed an overt pat­tern: First there is an armed con­flict with­in the coun­try where the inter­ven­tion will take place. Amer­i­can news media heav­i­ly report this con­flict. The “good guys” in the sto­ry are the rebels. The “bad guys,” to be attacked by Amer­i­can mil­i­tary force, are bru­tal­ly anti-demo­c­ra­t­ic, and com­mit­ters of war crimes, crimes against human­i­ty, and geno­cide. Pres­ti­gious pub­lic fig­ures, NGOs, judi­cial and qua­si-judi­cial bod­ies and inter­na­tion­al orga­ni­za­tions call for sup­port­ing the rebels and attack­ing the regime. Next, the Amer­i­can pres­i­dent orders Amer­i­can logis­ti­cal sup­port and arms sup­plies for the rebels. Final­ly the Amer­i­can pres­i­dent orders mil­i­tary attack under the aus­pices of NATO in sup­port of the rebels. The attack usu­al­ly con­sists of aer­i­al bomb­ing, today’s equiv­a­lent of the nine­teenth and twen­ti­eth cen­turies’ gun­boat which could attack coastal cities of mil­i­tar­i­ly weak coun­tries with­out fear of retal­i­a­tion. The ulti­mate out­come of each Amer­i­can inter­ven­tion is the replace­ment of a sec­u­lar gov­ern­ment with an Islamist regime in an area that had been part of the Ottoman Empire.

Why the gov­ern­ment of the Unit­ed States would active­ly pro­mote Ger­man aims — the destruc­tion of Yugoslavia (both World Wars I and II saw Ger­many invade Ser­bia) and the re-cre­ation of the Ottoman Empire — is a ques­tion that needs to be answered.