History

“Since the days of the Roman Empire”, Daniel Kalder wrote in his book “The Infernal Library”, “dictators have written books, but in the twentieth century there was a Krakatoa-like eruption of despotic verbiage, which continues flowing to this day.” It’s a strange thing but true that many dictators began their working lives as writers “which probably goes a long way towards explain their megalomaniac conviction in the awesome significance of their own thoughts.” Vladimir Lenin was the father of twentieth-century dictator literature. He relied on the inspiration of Marx. Sitting in the comfort of his mother’s big, comfortable, house he translated “The Communist Manifesto”. Marx was then not well known – in 1883 only eleven people had turned up at his funeral. Contrary to Lenin and Stalin’s books and articles, Marx and Engels (his co-writer) had written a mesmerizing piece of work. In contrast Das Kapital was dense and over theoretical....

The International Criminal Court (ICC) which prosecutes crimes against humanity is under attack again by the Trump Administration for pursuing Americans. Bill Clinton and Barack Obama supported it. George W. Bush tried to close it down but then decided to cooperate with it. Donald Trump is against it and encouraged John Bolton, his National Security Advisor, to publically savage it earlier this month. To be published in May is a first-rate book on the CIA, its paramilitary armies, operators and assassins. The book is still under wraps so I can’t break the embargo by telling you its title and author. All I can say is that it’s meat for the ICC. The CIA crosses the moral lines all the time: Surprise your target, torture or kill your enemy, vanish without a trace. Then deny it. That was and is its intent – as described in riveting, well-researched detail. The whole book...

By 1914 Europeans ruled 84% of the globe. How did they do it? Eleven hundred years ago Europe was a backwater. There were no grand cities, apart from Muslim Cordoba in Spain, and the remnants of Rome and Athens. The Middle East, India and China were further ahead. It was the Arabs who kept alive the teachings of the Ancient Greeks’ knowledge of science, medicine, architecture and philosophy. We now have two schools of thought. Two years ago came Professor Philip Hoffman of Caltech University with his book “Why Did Europe Conquer The World?” He argued that Europe’s pace of innovation was driven by a peculiar form of military competition which he called a “tournament” – the sort of competition that under the right conditions can drive contestants to exert enormous efforts in the hope of earning a prize. Europe, unlike the Ottoman Empire and China, was a very un-unified...

By Chas Freeman, Jr. February 20, 2019 Remarks to the St. Petersburg Conference on World Affairs Ambassador Chas W. Freeman, Jr. (USFS, Ret.)Senior Fellow, Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, Brown University St. Petersburg, Florida, 12 February 2019 I’m here at your kind invitation to discuss China, how bad our relations with it may get, and how the contest we’ve initiated with China is likely to play out.  Let me take a minute or two to set the context for this discussion. The context Five hundred years ago this month, Hernán Cortés began the European annihilation of the Mayan, Aztec, and other indigenous civilizations in the Western Hemisphere.  Six months later, in August 1519, Magellan [Fernão de Magalhães] launched his circumnavigation of the globe.  For five centuries thereafter, a series of Western powers – Portugal, Spain, Holland, Great Britain, France, Germany, Russia, and, finally, the United States – overturned...

Many know about Raoul Wallenberg, the Swedish diplomat in Budapest, who led his embassy in a successful attempt to issue “protective passports” to at least 6,000 Hungarian Jews so they could escape the Nazi occupiers and travel to Sweden. He also helped forestall a planned massacre. He became the second person to be given honorary US citizenship.  Many also know about the magnificent effort by the occupied Danes to use small boats to enable around 7,000 Jews to cross the water that separates Denmark and Sweden to get them to neutral Sweden.  And about the German businessman, Oskar Schindler, who later became the star of Stephen Spielberg’s masterpiece film, Schindler’s List, that showed how he used his business in Poland as a means of sheltering a thousand Jews. But how many know about Count Folke Bernadotte, the Swedish aristocrat, who arguably did the most to save people from the concentration...

  “We need jaw jaw not war war”, said Winston Churchill rather hypocritically. Still, he would be glad to see that the number of wars around the world has fallen dramatically since the end of World War 2, despite the wars in Korea, Africa, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Lebanon, Pakistan versus India, Central America, Cyprus, ex-Yugoslavia, Syria and now Yemen. Compared with centuries past this has been a remarkable era, yet one not often acknowledged. Interstate wars, apart from India versus Pakistan, Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia and Yemen, have vanished off the map. The wars that remain are civil wars. The democracies do not go to war with each other, as British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher long ago observed. According to a detailed study made by the Economist last month, analyzed all international wars since 1900, along with the belligerents’ wealth and degree of development. It counted all conflicts in which at...

  Finally, finally, the over-long, ten year trials of the leaders of the murderous Khmer Rouge leadership of Cambodia, are over. The two defendants, Nuon Chea, and Khieu Samphan, were each given a life sentence at the end of the first trial in August 2015 for crimes against humanity. Now last week they were convicted of genocide. Of the other three that were tried, one, the ex-foreign minister, Ieng Sary died in 2013, one, Ieng Thirith, the wife of Ieng Sary, was too ill with Alzheimer’s to appear and one, Kaing Guek Eav (“Duch”), voluntarily confessed three years ago and was sent to jail for 35 years. In the twentieth century, two massacres of hundreds of thousands people compete for second place after Hitler’s extermination of the Jews, Poles, homosexuals and gypsies. One is Cambodia and the other is Rwanda. But Cambodia, where the deaths were between a million and...

  Utterly destructive, self-defeating and spelling the end of the U.S. Empire   By Farhang Jahanpour September 22, 2018 In view of the macro-historical perspective on the Middle East-West relations and the concrete cases referred to in this series – Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria – it is clear that the demonization of Middle Eastern leaders as a prelude to invasion and their downfall has a long history. Such rulers are often used to serve the economic and political interests of various Western countries, in the same way that the Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman and the United Arab Emirates’ Crown Prince Mohammad Bin Zayed are being used at the moment to make them purchase tens of billions of dollars’ worth of US, British and French weapons. When they have outlived their usefulness, they will probably meet the same fate as that of Qadhafi or Saddam Hussein. However, despite...

    By Farhang Jahanpour September 20, 2018   1. An ally in warfare and torture Although the tragic events in Syria are too close to us to pass a definitive judgement about what has happened there and we need some perspective before we can make any definitive statements, nevertheless, some of the outlines of what led to that catastrophe are already clear for all to see. When the United States invaded Kuwait in order to dislodge the Iraqi forces that had occupied that country, Syria was one of the countries that joined the US-led coalition. Shortly after the invasion of Iraq in 2003, Syria was one of the main destinations for rendered suspects to be tortured in Syrian black sites. In the chilling words of former CIA agent Robert Baer in 2004: “If you want a serious interrogation, you send a prisoner to Jordan. If you want them to be tortured,...

    By Farhang Jahanpour September 20, 2018   On 20 March 2018, the former French President Nicolas Sarkozy was taken into police custody in Paris to be questioned over allegations that he received millions of Euros in illegal funding from Qadhafi for his presidential campaign. Investigators were examining claims that Qadhafi’s regime secretly gave Sarkozy €50 million overall for the 2007 campaign. Such a sum would be more than double the legal campaign funding limit and also violates French rules against foreign financing of elections. (See: “Former French President Nicolas Sarkozy in police custody over investigation into Gaddafi funding”, The Independent, 20 March 2018. Sarkozy entertained Qadhafi lavishly at the Elyse Palace, even allowing him to pitch his tent in the grounds of the palace. Yet, later on, Sarkozy was the cheerleader for the attack on Libya, which resulted in the brutal murder of Qadhafi and the destruction of...

    By Farhang Jahanpour September 18, 2018   1. Some omitted facts and perspectives Prior to the Iraq war, the only thing that one heard on most Western channels about that country was Saddam Hussein and his alleged chemical and nuclear weapons. Saddam Hussein became synonymous with Iraq. Nothing was said of Iraq’s long history as a cradle of civilisation or its people who, like people all over the world, simply wished to live in peace and pursue a normal life. The same was done to Afghanistan, Libya and Syria, when the Taliban, Mu’ammar Qadhafi and Bashar al-Assad were continuously demonised – while it was omitted and forgotten that the West had befriended, and in some cases supported, and sponsored those rulers in the past. Initially, Saddam Hussein was supported by the CIA to fight against Abd al-Karim Qasim who had toppled the Hashemite monarchy and had formed an...

    By Farhang Jahanpour September 18, 2018   1. The Carter Doctrine, Brzezinski and the Stinger missiles

 After the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan on Christmas Day 1979, President Jimmy Carter issued his Carter Declaration, stating that the Persian Gulf was part of America’s vital interest and America would defend it by all means possible. A policy proclaimed by President Jimmy Carter in his State of the Union Address on 23 January 1980 stressed that the United States would use military force, if necessary, to defend its “national interests” in the Persian Gulf. The statement that came to be known as the “Carter Doctrine” concluded: “Let our position be absolutely clear: An attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America, and such an assault will be repelled by any...