Brexit: a monumental "cock-up", or a "project" designed to destroy Britain? Historical parallels with Russia

There exist two competing schools of thought that try to explain how "Brexit" has been allowed to happen in the uniquely-disruptive way that it has.
On one hand, there's the thinking that the referendum and the government's slide into anarchic paralysis is the result of a gradual accumulation of amassed incompetence over the years, matched with a complacency of their vaunted position: in other words, a chaotic "Brexit" was made inevitable by the mismanagement and dysfunction at the heart of British politics. In this sense, for the ideological supporters of this (delusional) thinking, "Brexit" is a "coup de grace" that sees the final self-destruction of the "elite", to replaced by something "better".
One the other, there's the argument that "Brexit" is the result of malevolent design: the "disaster capitalism" theory, that sees a group of vested interests take advantage of the opportunities presented in the unique circumstances in British politics after the financial crisis. Put in those terms, "Brexit" is an idea that has been introduced from outside the political sphere, like a bacillus uniquely-designed to poison and divide British society, ripping apart its political class in a way that no other issue could. A hundred years ago, a small group of Russian extremists were able to take control of a weak and paralyzed Russian state, turning society against itself in a civil war, and completely re-shape the country in its own image. That same merciless "Marxist" zeal of ideology seems to guide many of those who support "Brexit" in government, where the only solution to any problem is the one that seems designed to cause the most disruption.

The more obvious analysis is that the truth is somewhere in between: the inherent weakness and disconnected elite of Britain, made clear from the financial crisis onward, are taken advantage of by the "Brexit agenda". Able to easily manipulate events due to this weakness and a society already fragmented by a weak economy and an indifferent government, the establishment falls into every trap set for it.


Russian parallels

Going back to Russia a hundred years ago, some of the parallels with Britain today are disconcerting. The "Brexiteers" take the place in contemporary Britain for the Bolsheviks of Russia; modern-day ideologues hell-bent with missionary zeal. The wider social effect that the financial crisis of 2008 had on Britain was not so dissimilar from that of the 1905 revolution in Russia. Granted, 2008 did not of course lead to "revolution" and anarchy in Britain as it did in Russia in 1905, but that was due Gordon Brown's government bailing-out the banks. If that had not happened, the financial sector would have totally collapsed resulting in unprecedented social disorder, like what really happened (under a different set of factors) in Russia 103 years earlier.
Russia's government action deferred unrest and revolt in 1905; in a similar manner, Brown's actions deferred Britain's social collapse in 2008. But deferring a problem doesn't solve it. This author has written before about how the 2011 riots in England brought to mind some uncomfortable parallels with the mass social unrest in Russia in 1905, but that article was written long before "Brexit" raised its head as an issue.
"Brexit" in this way feels like a social "reckoning" for Britain's government not dealing with the many social and economic issues in the country since the financial crisis; in the same way that the social shock of Russia entering the First World War created the circumstances that allowed the Bolsheviks to take advantage of a time of chaos. In the case of modern-day Britain, however, it is the ideological hard-right of the Libertarians that is taking control of events, shaping them to their own ends.
It took twelve years - 1905 to 1917 - for the Russian central apparatus to collapse under the strain of events; in Britain, it is a period of eleven years from the time from the financial crisis to the Brexit "year zero" to come in 2019. All the signs are that the British government has no idea what it is doing when it comes to Brexit, and leaving the EU without any plan in place next year will bring the structural apparatus of the country to its knees. It is this calamity that the Libertarian "Brexiteers" (read "Marxists") plan to take full advantage of.

The "cock-up" narrative of Brexit follows the same historical trends that happened to the creaking apparatus of Imperial Russia in the run-up to the Bolshevik Revolution. Britain's economy has given the phrase "false economy" a double meaning: the government and the private sector both cutting costs, through "austerity" and the "gig economy" respectively. These twin demons have been the result of a pathology of short-term thinking, cutting costs through an ideology that ends up costing far more to society in the long-run. Equally, the other sense of Britain's "false economy" is that the economy is running, effectively, on empty; it just hasn't become obviously apparent to everyone, as long as everyone keeps on pretending otherwise. The only visible sign of the malaise has been the retail casualties on the high street, which do feel like the first victims of this insidious "disease".
Britain's economy since the financial crisis has had the worst level of growth (i.e. the worst "recovery") of all major industrialized economies. On top of that, wages have stagnated relative to inflation, and jobs are less secure than in living memory. Nobody really has any money, while private debt has spiraled. In this way, there is nothing to hold up the British economy in the face of any national crisis. With those in power stuck in their complacency, Brexit is clearly the "crisis" that no-one in the establishment is remotely qualified to handle.
Imperial Russia's economy in the run-up to the First World War was in robust shape, at least on the surface. 1905 had been a shock, but the powers-that-be had been able to keep the economy going, and the social unrest had been effectively suppressed with the heavy hand of the Imperial secret police, the Okhrana. Thus, in spite of high levels of political violence, superficially the Russian state appeared strong. However, this masked the fact that Russia in 1914 was still a backwardly-ran country with a meagre industrial base compared to its rivals, with a highly-centralized state and enormous levels of deprivation for a "major" power. Much the same can be said of Britain even today.
The "cock-up" on Russia's part in the First World War was in having a policy of supporting a wildly-ambitious (and unruly) Serbian state, and when forced into war against Austrian aggression towards Serbia, Tsar Nicholas allowed his army to mobilize against (at the time, still technically neutral) Germany as well. In this way, Russia's muddled military strategy rapidly escalated a regional war into a continental war, leading to Russia's own eventual internal implosion.

The Bolsheviks have been called by historians as a German "bacillus", planted by the Kaiser into Russia to (successfully) knock them out of the war. The "Brexit Agenda" can be called less a grassroots movement than an "astro-turf" project, in many ways also implanted by "outside interests". In the modern, post-national age, those "interests" are corporate and disparate, faceless and yet omnipresent. In the past, such "revolutions" were the cause of mass movements; today they can be the cause of narrow, shadowy interest groups, able to manipulate events behind the scenes.
The Bolshevik Revolution was a shock to the rest of the world as Russia's highly-centralized state was seen as the last place that the Marxist menace could achieve power. In a similar manner, the way in which "Brexit" has come to transform Britain from a land of careful conservative dependability, to one consumed by irrational ideological zealotry, has blind-sided all foreign observers.
The highly-centralized and deeply-unequal nature of both Imperial Russia and the British state were one of the weak points in both powers, exploited by Bolsheviks and Brexiteers respectively. This allowed a deep well of social resentment outside the capital to fester; all that was required was for someone to find a scapegoat to channel that resentment into popular support. For the Bolsheviks the enemy was the "bourgoisie"; for the Brexiteers, it was the EU.
Equally, as stated elsewhere, the cause of the Bolsheviks and the cause of the Brexiteers was only ever, in reality, a marginal cause held by an insignificant minority. It was only a specific set of events that allowed them to come to prominence, and dominate the narrative. It was the weakness of the Russian state a hundred years ago, and the British state today, that allowed this to happen.

A "cock up" by the Tsar led to his downfall by the Bolsheviks; a "cock up" by Westminster has led to the path of its potential downfall by Brexit.   

British psychology, WW2 nostalgia, and Brexit

This blogger recently was reminded of how commonplace events like "WW2 nostalgia" days are in Britain. This got me thinking about how this kind of thing compares with other countries that took part in WW2, and what motivation and psychology is behind these kinds of events in Britain.

"Remembering the past" is important for any country; but equally important, is why and how you're remembering it.

When France remembers its time during WW2, it might not be with a great deal of pride. Of course there are the actions of the "Free French" forces that should never be forgotten, and the unquestioned bravery of the French Resistance during the years of occupation. But for the civilian population itself, much of its memory would be tied up with being under the thumb of Nazi rule, or, in the case of the "Vichy" government, the moral stain of that administration's collaboration. In this sense, WW2 was a national humiliation that was only ended through the actions of their allied American and British "liberators". That memory stuck in the craw for a long time in post-war France.

Conversely, there is the experience of the USA during WW2. Fighting a war on two fronts (like the British Empire), against Japan and Nazi Germany, American involvement nonetheless was, with the significant exception of Pearl Harbor, a typically distant affair. Characterized by the wartime song "Over there", the continental USA was largely unaffected by the war on a day-to-day level. The USA paid dearly in military terms, but the country itself was barely touched by the war.
For this reason, the nostalgia that the USA might have for WW2 may be "justified" from a strict psychological standpoint, as it does not create an overly-misleading perception of that point in the country's history. From a prestige point of view, the Second World War was glorious for the USA, as it was one of the leading victors, and it heralded the beginning of the country's role as a superpower. In this sense, the nostalgia makes a great deal of sense, as they are celebrating the birth of modern idea of the USA.

Then there is the experience of the Soviet Union. Its "nostalgia" for WW2 comes through the context of what they called the Great Patriotic War. Like the USA, their war against Germany starts in 1941, albeit six months earlier than Washington. But the price the Soviet Union paid was enormous, both in manpower, resources and land. Much of European Russia was occupied by the Nazis for at least two years, while its cities, and Leningrad and Stalingrad in particular, suffered appalling civilian casualties, on a scale not seen in Western Europe. While the country did receive allied aid from the Arctic convoys, the country essentially had to fight for itself, and it was only through sheer determination, resourcefulness and strategic errors on the Nazis' side, that allowed them to turn the tide. The Soviet Union paid by far the highest price on the allied side, and its "nostalgia" is about remembering the heroic fight against an existential threat, which they then drove back all the way to Hitler's Chancellery in Berlin.
This blogger makes no comment on the nature of the Soviet Union itself, or its conduct after the war; more on that has been said here.

Britain's role in WW2 and its nostalgia come from a somewhat different angle. On the one hand, the nostalgia for celebrating its heroes is genuine and universal. On the other, there is another side to the nostalgia that seems to function as a psychological crutch to support the nation's post-war insecurity. The fact that the post-war situation also saw Britain lose its empire may not be a coincidence.


"British Empire" nostalgia?

It could be argued that in Britain, WW2 nostalgia is for many, in fact, "British Empire" nostalgia.

The manner of Britain's WW2 nostalgia has sometimes seemed vaguely troubling from a psychological point of view, as it is based on historical revisionism. Unlike as is often assumed, Britain did not "win the war"; it was on the winning side as allies of the Soviet Union and the USA. As mentioned earlier, the largest cost in manpower and resources was taken by the Soviet Union, with American resources and manpower proving pivotal to the invasion of France. The Soviet Union and the USA "won" the war; the British Empire, by the end, was unfortunately a worn-out and bankrupt also-ran on the same side (and soon to be shafted by both after the war's end - or even, arguably, during its closing stages). These are facts that have also been conveniently "forgotten".

It is true that Britain was the first of those "allies" to declare war on Germany in 1939, but it quickly found out that it had bitten off more than it could chew. And it was more than pure luck that allowed Britain's armed forces to escape from being captured in 1940. The evidence actually points to the uncomfortable truth that the success of the Dunkirk evacuation in 1940 was in part down to Hitler's desire to reach a peaceful understanding with Britain, as he didn't wish to "humiliate" Britain, with whom he had a lot of personal respect. In fact, his perception of the grit of British forces was so high that he was shocked that they decided to flee from the continent rather than fight.
Evidence from the German archives at the time suggests that the delay at Dunkirk (the "halt order"), that enabled the British forces' escape, was not really to "allow" them to flee with their honour intact, but more through a misunderstanding of Britain's intentions; it seems Hitler was expecting the Brits to dig in for a fightback from the beach-head of Dunkirk. In this way, more generally he saw the British Empire's existence as a bulwark against what he saw as other "barbarian" races.

Hitler in fact looked up to the British Empire as Teutonic cousins whose global empire exemplified the natural superiority of (as he saw it) the wider "Aryan" race. In other words, the domination of that "island race" across the world was merely another pillar of what he saw as an overall German world domination. Defeating the British Empire's military capacity around the globe would have run against this motivation. The uncomfortable truth was that Hitler saw Britain and Germany as kin, with Britain's declaration of war against it judged as a kind of personal affront.
The idea that Hitler would have considered himself and the British Empire to have some kind of "common cause" would have been morally outrageous to Britain's sense of moral superiority (though it could be argued that sense of innate British "superiority" is in itself a kind of racism). Hitler's "unrequited love" of the country sits awkwardly with the self-perception that Britain has of its own moral certitude - how could an empire feel good about itself if it was secretly admired by the Nazis?  The answer, from a psychological point of view, was to destroy any hope Hitler had in thinking Britain would tolerate the existence of Germany under his rule. In this sense, Hitler's war on Britain could be seen as "revenge" for that rejection, with his visceral hatred of Churchill taking on the mantle of a personal vendetta.

Churchill's long animosity towards Hitler and Nazism in general could, it might be argued, have come from even an implicit sense of old English elitist snobbishness; as a member of the Victorian aristocracy, this isn't difficult to imagine. Apart from Nazism's raw hatred of the Jews, it's not hard to see Churchill viewing Hitler as a little more than a "jumped-up corporal", and Fascism in general as an uncouth, mob-culture ideology, anathema to his own sense of "British Empire" values.
And yet, Churchill himself had a career peppered with controversy. His views on the empire were shamelessly racist; more than many of his contemporaries, to the extent that some of his proposals to maintain discipline in the colonies would have been termed war crimes today had they been carried out as he intended.
It was the decision to bomb German cities and civilians during the summer of 1940 by the RAF that caused Hitler to end the "Battle Of Britain" and retaliate with the "Blitz". In these terms, Churchill's decision to bomb German civilians led to Hitler doing the same to Britons, while sparing Britain's air force from destruction. With the distance of time, such decisions now look morally dubious, with common Londoners becoming the targets instead of Britain's pilots (though whether Churchill could have predicted this is debatable). It then became a battle to destroy each other's homeland, and a metaphor for the destruction of each other's values. Churchill later sanctioned the senseless bombing of Dresden in the final weeks of the war, while in 1943 was complicit in causing the Bengal Famine, which led to the death of two million Indians. And yet this is a man that is idolized in British culture. This is the dangerous "false narrative" that uncritical nostalgia can create.
The wider point about Hitler was that - like Kaiser Wilhelm a generation earlier - fundamentally misunderstood Britain and its sense of prestige. Britain could not psychologically tolerate the thought of another nation challenging its own moral world view, and so had to be made out to be an existential threat to Britain's status. Hitler certainly justified the label as the "monster" of popular imagination, but the scale of that monstrosity was unknown in Britain until the end of the war; war against this "monster" was instead considered a kind of moral requirement for Britain's own self-respect, as well as to maintain its reputation and high standing around the world. The fact that some of the colonies began to rebel after the war was "won" supports this viewpoint.

While Britain had "bitten off more than it could chew" in declaring war on Germany, the threat of actual invasion by Hitler was always a very remote prospect; for practical reasons as well as the "ideological" reasons already stated. It suited Hitler more for Britain to believe there to be a threat of invasion, as this would cause it to divert attention from his real aims ("Lebensraum") in the East. He wanted to bring Britain to the peace table by means of gradual deprivation and collateral attrition rather than by wiping out its armed forces, but was fundamentally mistaken in its effects on British psychology. The strategy could never have worked.
And so Britain during WW2 developed into the wartime saga we all recognize: the bombing, the rationing, the "making do". Britain was reliant on the USA for its survival after 1940, but its moral certitude was still intact. And Britain's WW2 nostalgia is more for a moral world-view than anything else: the idea that Britain, besieged from sea and air, was still able to maintain its independence and moral authority. The fact that it was reliant on the USA to preserve its "independence", and its "moral authority" was once admired by Hitler, is quietly forgotten. The nostalgia preserves the illusion.

Using a cultural reference, "Dad's Army" syndrome and Britain's WW2 nostalgia is all about "winning against the odds" while sticking to your principles. In that sense, from an ideological point of view it shares some ground with Ayn Rand's philosophy of Objectivism; the idea that Britain is achieving things without the help of others (self-reliance) while also refusing to compromise (moral purity). These are values also common in the Protestant faith on both sides of the Atlantic. These are values also found, not coincidentally, in the minds of many Brexiteers.
Nothing is ever that simple, of course, and as already stated, this is factually inaccurate in Britain's case anyway. Britain's homeland was effectively an American protectorate after 1940 until the end of the war (and even, arguably, well into the Cold War), while its moral standing must always be put in the context of its imperial status.

WW2 nostalgia also coincides with the point at which the British Empire's reach was arguably at its height. While its influence was waning in the light of the rise of the USA, that country's isolationism left the British Empire as the world's great global potentate at the start of WW2. In this sense, Britain's status as an island meant the British Empire was an "empire of the sea", with its power projected through the Royal Navy. Its land forces were always fairly modest in size by comparison, especially in places like India, where its authority was held more through reputation and skulduggery than brute force. The nature of the empire's scope always meant that keeping it together was a matter of wits over brawn, with the fabled British education system playing a large role. This was one reason why Britain's rivals never considered her to be a power to be trusted; she always seemed to have a trick up her sleeve, as often proved to be the case. You don't get to be a global empire by always "doing things by the book".
Comparisons with the medieval maritime empire of the Venetian Republic come to mind. This was another potentate reliant on sea power, commerce and occasional dirty tricks to maintain and expand its influence, until its possessions sprawled across large tracts of the Mediterranean. Like the British Empire, its reputation preceded itself; from small beginnings, its authority gradually extended further and further afield, quickly taking advantage of opportunities that arose, while allowing a commercial system at home that encouraged adventurism.
When Brexiteers talk of the opportunities in the world outside of the EU they are instilling that same spirit of adventurism that saw Venice expand across the Mediterranean, reaching its zenith around the turn of the 16th century. This was the same time that Spain and Portugal were using seafaring as a route to riches around the world, with the likes of England and France to follow a hundred years later.
While Britain's military role in the Second World War soon became that of "sidekick" to American power, it did use its military intelligence to great effect for the allies. It is this perception of British intelligence overcoming foreign might that feeds into the historical narrative of "plucky" Britain; a narrative that adds to the nostalgia, and feeds the desire to reprise the same story in the modern era of Brexit.
As WW2 was when Britain's empire displayed its last flourish, WW2 nostalgia can also be seen as implicit nostalgia for the British Empire. With modern niceties, such things can never be stated so openly, and it is also true that many people's nostalgia for empire is also something subconscious rather than overt. But that longing for the past, when Britain was truly "great", cannot be understood without its imperial associations. And this raises some very obvious questions about the real psychology at work in WW2 nostalgia, apart from the ideas of independence and moral certitude mentioned before. It speaks of insecurity instead.

Meanwhile, with Brexiteers seeming to use the same "dirty tricks" that were once so familiar to the British Empire's rivals, the dye seems to be cast as to the direction they want to take Britain. Brexit is about "Empire 2.0", while the country's apparent WW2 nostalgia is a rose-tinted backdrop that acts as the "drug of choice" against the future stark reality of Britain outside the EU, as much as the wistful delusions that many have had about wartime Britain.
The WW2 nostalgia serves a purpose for the Brexiteers. If people can be so willfully delusional about what life was like during the Second World War, then why not about life outside the EU?

Anti-Semitism, and a history of the "International Jewish Conspiracy"

From the USA to the UK, it seems that Anti-Semitism is on the rise (again) in the developed world. Evidence points towards the truism that while not all Donald Trump supporters are Nazis, all Nazis are Trump supporters; and equally, while not all Brexit supporters are Nazis, all Nazis are Brexit supporters.

The history of Anti-Semitism is a long one, and for the purposes of this article, I'll restrict things to the last hundred-and-fifty years or so, as this is when the idea of a "Jewish World Conspiracy" first really came into general parlance.


"A Jewish plot to take over the world"

In a way, it was Marx's misfortune that the founder of Communism was also a Jew, for this has ever since coloured how people (both its supporters and its detractors) saw it: Communism was seen as attractive to some of Jewish extraction (in Russia in particular) precisely because it was international and anti-establishment in its outlook and aims, and offered a political haven from persecution. It is also true that when the successful Bolsheviks took power in Russia, they did include a disproportionate number of Jews. Thus this fed into the belief that Communism was a Jewish plot to take over the world. This was certainly Tsar Nicholas II's point of view when he was forced from power, and was so insidious in enveloping much of political thought across the developed world during and after the First World War, and up to the present day (more on that later).

The odd aspect of this is that Marx himself had ambiguous feelings about his own Jewish heritage, and this then fueled the belief amongst some Anti-Semites at the time that Marx himself saw Capitalism as a kind of "Jewish Conspiracy", and that he was somehow fighting against Jewish domination of Capitalism. How this also squared with the understanding that Communism was also a "Jewish Conspiracy", is hard to understand.

The two main "centres" of Anti-Semitism by the second half of the Nineteenth century were Russia and Germany. Jews had been persecuted for centuries in Russia, being send to live in the "Pale" in the 18th century, and by the late Nineteenth century were trying to flee abroad to places like the USA. In Russia, this period also saw an unprecedented rise in political violence, which culminated in the anarchy of 1905. As an absolutist, deeply religious state, the Russian Empire was deeply paranoid of "Godless" Communism, which was then exacerbated by the document "The Protocols Of The Elders Of Zion", a forgery by a fanatical Russian priest, which tied the anarchy in Russia with a Jewish conspiracy.
In Germany, Anti-Semitism had become almost "fashionable" in the social circles of the upper class and in the arts (such as Richard Wagner), which spread to the paranoia of its emperor, Wilhelm II. It's unclear where exactly this stereotype of the "corrupting Jew" (earlier seen in Grimm's fairly tales) came from, but the fact that Marx's ideas were initially influenced by the 1848 Year Of Revolutions may have been a factor. Again, the fact that Marx himself was German may have sent alarm bells ringing in some people's minds.
Like in Russia, much of Europe held the long belief that as Jews were "stateless" and "heathens", they were therefore deeply suspect in their allegiances (if they had any). The social and political tumult of 1848 had long-lasting effects on many parts of Europe. While many of the revolutions failed, the fact remained that the major European powers (Britain excluded) rolled on through a series of wars and upheaval for the next twenty-odd years, culminating in the Franco-Prussian War of 1871. Not long after this, in 1877-78, there were the wars between Russia and the Ottomans that led to Eastern Europe's boundaries being radically redrawn. And behind all this was the growing paranoia against a "Jewish Conspiracy". So by the time of the Bolshevik Revolution forty years later, and the end of the war in Germany a year after that, blaming the Jews had become a very convenient scapegoat.

Through all of this, its impossible to omit the rise in the influence of Zionism, an idea that largely came from East European (i.e. Russian) Jews who longed for a permanent homeland. With the re-drawing of the Middle Eastern map at the end of the First World War, Britain took control of the former Ottoman territory of Palestine, and the "Balfour Agreement" allowed Jews from Europe to settle in Palestine. The fact that the Jewish population was heavily outnumbered by local Arabs seemed a minor detail. Britain was used to ruling its colonies by "divide and rule", like in its "crown jewel", India.

The Bolshevik Revolution, and the immediate threat of Communism spreading across Europe and the developed world, led to a spike in anti-Semitism infecting political discourse. In Germany alone, political violence spiked dramatically in the years after the war: the short-lived "Munich Soviet" of 1919 eventually led to violence from the other end of the political spectrum; the infamous "Munich putsch" of 1923, which Hitler took part in. In these few years, political assassination became the norm, such as the assassination of Germany's foreign minister, the Jew, Walter Rathenau. A Bolshevik government, ran by Jews, was seen as the main threat to the world order, and thus every Jew became seen as a threat to the world order.
This would have remained a fringe obsession in the developed world, but for the Great Depression. In Germany, the views of the Nazis that were once considered outlandish paranoia were held by many as established fact. When the world was so unstable, it made sense that there must be some complex reason for why it was happening. It couldn't simply be due to simple human greed and arrogance; there had to be a more sinister motive - some kind of Jewish conspiracy. And if some sacrifices had to be made to re-establish order, then it was worth it.
As in Germany in the late Nineteenth century, in the years after the Wall Street Crash, this Anti-Semitic view became common in social circles across the developed world, including in the USA and Britain. Fascism was seen as a "necessary evil" to combat the threat of Communism, which seemed all the more possible after economic chaos of the Great Depression. Besides, it could be argued, not all Fascists were Anti-Semitic; Mussolini wasn't, for instance. These "apologists" argued that fascists were "good people with a few bad ideas", rather than the opposite. We all know how that ended for Europe's Jews.

Anti-Semitism in the Arab world, meanwhile, had long been a part of life, but on the whole the two communities had got on pretty well. The change of rulers in the Middle East, from the Muslim Ottoman dynasty to the Christian British and French "mandates" after the end of the First World War, had caused them to re-think their perspective, which led to the rise of the "Muslim Brotherhood" in Egypt and elsewhere. By the 1930s and the rise of Fascism in Germany as well as already in Italy, Muslim leaders in the Middle East were getting tired with Britain's perceived preferential treatment towards the Jews (regardless of the more complex reality), and began to fraternize with Fascists. This Anti-Semitic connection between Islamic Extremism and the politics of Fascism lives on to this day.


New neighbours, more problems

The end of World War Two began to see a different form of Anti-Semitism coalescing. The Second World War led to the defeat of Fascism in Germany and Italy (Spain's, with its own form of Fascism, lived on to the 1970s). The aftermath of the Second World War also resulted in the implosion of Britain's control over the Middle East, with Palestine's Arabs being evicted and the territory turned into Israel, the Jewish people's first homeland for two thousand years.
For the Arabs of the Middle East, the shock of the Jews being able to carve out a state from the Palestinians was comparable to that which Europe's elite felt with the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia. The Second World War had destroyed the poison of Anti-Semitism in Europe (for a couple of generations, at least), but had inadvertently replanted it in the Middle East with the creation of Israel.

As Bolshevism had become a convenient Jewish "hate figure" in the developed world after the First World War, Israel became a convenient Jewish "hate figure" in the Middle East after the Second World War. This quickly became apparent with the rise to power of Colonel Nasser in Egypt in 1953. Coming to power as part of a cabal that had overthrown the pro-British (and thus, by implication, pro-Israel) King Faruk, Nasser quickly established his credentials with the Arab "street".
Israel's war of independence in 1948 was known simply as "the disaster" to the Arabs. Nasser quickly established himself as the moral leader of the Arab world, and sought to create a united Arab front against the Jewish homeland, by 1967 pushing for combined Arab war to "drive the Jews into the sea". The Six Day War of that year was an Israeli "preventative war" that quickly gathered its own momentum and exceeded their own wildest expectations in massively expanding their territory at their Arab neighbours' expense.
This second Arab humiliation, followed by the failure of the surprise Yom Kippur War of 1973, simply left a gaping hole in Arab self-esteem. The answer was Political Islam and Islamic extremism, which both grew in scope from the 1970s onward, turning the earlier Anti-Semitism of the likes of the "Muslim Brotherhood" into an even more dangerous sort of beast. Like with the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, the Islamic Revolution in Iran was followed by other attempts at uprisings elsewhere: an attempt to take control of Mecca, and the assassination of Egypt's leader, Sadat, by a Muslim radical, due to his policy of peace towards Israel. Using Israel and its support from the "Great Satan", the USA, Arab leaders have sown the belief that world government is controlled from the Jewish homeland.

Since the founding of Israel, we have seen the politics of the Middle East become consumed by Anti-Semitism. Used as a cynical weapon by both secular and Muslim leaders alike, in the modern day, it has become a staple: a "self-evident fact" that doesn't even need to be supported by evidence.
It is the cynical "feeding the crocodile" of Anti-Semitism that has also led to the growth of extremism in the Middle East, and the "Nazis Of The Middle East", ISIS. But now that the genie has been let out of the bottle, no-one knows how to put it back. While they may finally be on the verge of defeat on the battlefield, in the battle of the mind, they are an ever-evolving and tenacious enemy.


"Re-branding" Anti-Semitism

In the USA, the onset of the Cold War quickly led to Anti-Semitic paranoia of Communist infiltration of the highest levels of society. Encouraged by Joseph McCarthy and supported by the head of the FBI, J Edgar Hoover, its most infamous case was against the Rosenbergs. As it became an all-consuming obsession for the best part of a decade, it was only truly cauterised by the fall from grace of McCarthy himself and the gradual marginalisation of J Edgar Hoover, who still had an insidious influence on domestic affairs up until his death in 1972.

While the Anti-Semitic hysteria bound up with the "Red Threat" receded, and the USA eventually became a strong supporter of Israel, Anti-Semitism in the developed world, and in Europe in particular, began to be associated with anti-Imperialism. The Soviet Union had already took advantage of this, and struck out into the Middle East. While before the Second World War being linked with the "Jewish Conspiracy", by the 1950s it began to court the Arab powers' campaign against Israel.
Stalin himself had played a large part in gradually purging the Communist Party of its "Jewish" elements, the last act of this being the "Doctor's Plot" in the last years before his death in 1953. In this way, while Anti-Semitism had been an obsession of Fascism's up to the Second World War, after this it increasingly became one of the extreme left's, supported by the Soviet Union under the banner of "anti-Imperialism". This explains how the Anti-Semitism of the Arabs (supported by both secularist governments and Islamists) became to be so strongly associated with the European Leftism: the link was the Soviet Union. Again, this Anti-Semitic link between Arab nationalism, Islamic Radicalism, and radical Leftism, continues to this day; a legacy of the USSR.

We have seen that even after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia still did what it could to maintain its influence in the Middle East, with the common thread of Anti-Semitism. Inside Russia itself, while some of the most powerful "oligarchs" are Jewish, others have been forced into exile if they have been able to escape prison. Since the rule of Russia under Putin, a culture of nativism, nationalism and crude Anti-Semitism has been encouraged, even if not officially endorsed. This explains why so many Russian Jews emigrated to Israel as soon as they could (and radicalising the make-up of Israeli society in the process).
Russia's influence in the Middle East, thanks to the common thread of Anti-Semitism, is now a given. Russia has courted the favour of Iran since the end of the Cold War, thanks to their "common enemy", the USA, and by extension, Israel. This influence in the Middle East has only grown since the Arab Spring; while the initial beneficiary of the "Arab Spring" looked to be Turkey, in the longer-run, this "Great Game Of The Middle East" has turned out better for Russia. While having little obvious historical heritage in the region, unlike Turkey, Russia has played its hand much more cleverly, being on the side of Iran and Syria, and understanding the fluid and fickle nature of the forces that brought about the "Arab Spring". Its Cold War ties served as a good enough bond of trust to its allies, who now look as if they have weathered the worst of the storm.

Coming Full Circle

The modern-day version of the "International Jewish Conspiracy" is meant to be that of the "Imperialist forces" arranged against Muslims, the forces supporting Israel and its "Capitalist stooges" in Washington and elsewhere. This also explains how the EU, in being seen as a supporter of Israel (however easily it is to qualify or debunk that assertion), is part of the conspiracy, and thus considered a legitimate (and "soft") target for Islamic extremists. In a different manner, this linking of Israel with the USA and the EU suits the agenda of Russia, in creating a false equivalence between the growing violence of Islamic extremism and the growth of decadent "Jewish" values in the West.

Those decadent "Jewish" values are what was mentioned earlier: that Jews were seen as "stateless", and "Godless" i.e. people of the world, and thus a threat to national cultures. For the obsession with Israel is only one side to this. In the same way that the Great Depression created the conditions necessary for Anti-Semitism to become prevalent in the developed world, the Financial Crisis helped to create the conditions for its revival in the those same, highly-developed societies. The only reason we didn't have a second Depression in 2008 was that the banks were bailed out. In the same way that a scapegoat was needed for the greed and arrogance that caused the Wall Street Crash, the same is true today. "Globalisation", and its agenda of internationalism, is now seen by the Anti-Semites as the same "Jewish Conspiracy" that was once used when talking about Bolshevism. A hundred years ago people talked darkly of the Federal Reserve; now they talk darkly of Goldman Sachs.

Populism's rhetorical link with Fascism stretches from over a hundred years ago to the present day: it has always been about "country" values versus "city" values, and this is where the link to Anti-Semitism comes in. The Jews were seen as stateless nomads who therefore would thrive in city life, and thus do their best to promote Capitalist values. In this way, returning to "traditional values" is as much about fleeing the "corruption" of the city and all that is "bourgeois". It is a flight from Industrialisation.
The rise in Anti-Semitism in today's society comes from the same re-emergence of "nativist" values in the West; a softening of the Fascist rhetoric of the past, but with the same cultural implications. Theresa May, Britain's Prime Minister, at her party's conference last year, decried "people of the world" who have no national allegiance, and thus are a threat to cultural values. This is the same kind of rhetoric that was used decades earlier against the Jews: it is "Fascism by other means". This is what Brexit represents: a modern reincarnation of nationalist values in Britain. It is for this reason why the strongly Eurosceptic elements of Britain's media lambasted the "EUSSR"; implying it was some kind of quasi-Communist plot, seeing it (like Russia) as a "decadent" organisation that was somehow against "national values". While in Britain and the USA the rhetoric is often more Islamophobic in nature that Anti-Semitic, that simply depends on who you are talking to.
The Anti-Semitism that exists in the developed world today, in an evolution of the term, is often meant by its advocates in an "ironic" sense, so they claim. In this way, the Anti-Semitism of the far-right - with its roots in Fascism - has "plausible deniability", in spite of its earnest hatefulness; meanwhile the Anti-Semitism of the far-left - with its roots in Anti-Imperialism - can be excused as "over-exuberance" coming from a well-meaning intent.  

This is what Britain, the USA, Russia and Turkey all have in common in a different kind of way: their leaders are in hock to the same forces of discord, feeding the same crocodile.

The War in Ukraine, European context and the Minsk II "ceasefire": Putin's power-play

A year ago, the "Euromaidan" protests in Ukraine against the pro-Russian Yanukovich government culminated in a mass shooting in the centre of Kiev, followed by the flight of Yanukovich himself. Since then, Ukraine has been the centre of a 21st-century power-play between the West and Russia.

While some people thought that such games of power, for control of "spheres of influence" were relegated to the European history books, the reality is that, in some ways, the ideological battles that dominated the twentieth century were themselves a historical aberration.
The twentieth century was unique in finding new methods to create mass human suffering, but it was also unique in finding "isms" to use as justification. The First World War was not, despite the use of modern warfare, any different from the pan-European wars of succession that occurred during the 18th century, in terms of the basic human causes. Like most wars, the First World War was sparked by nationalism (Serbian nationalism, in that case) but quickly spiralled out of control to include all other major European "players". The Balkans was the source of the conflict, but the Balkans had been the source of various European conflicts for nearly half a century prior to the First World War. Some people forget that.

"Right, where were we?"

The crisis in Ukraine has been a proxy war for the last eight months. The historical region of Ukraine has been a bone of some contention for at least the last two hundred and fifty years, ever since the Russians conquered the Crimea, creating the region now famously known as "Novorossiya".

The collapse of the Eastern Bloc saw the ideological battles that had dominated Europe (and the world) for most of the twentieth century come to a close. In that sense, with these aberrant ideological conflicts over, the "historical clock" was wound back to 1913, and old historical grievances were "re-discovered". Across the former Soviet Union and former Communist Eastern Europe, ethnic and nationalistic causes that had been on ice for the best part of a century, began to rapidly heat up - in some cases almost instantly. This explains why the wars in former Yugoslavia should perhaps be better seen almost as continuations of the First and Second Balkan Wars that immediately preceded the First World War: once Communism collapsed it was almost a case of: "right, where were we?"...

We could therefore re-phrase Francis Fukuyama's famous quote about the end of the Cold War being not so much the "end of history", but the "resumption of history".

This explains why the territory of modern-day independent Ukraine, itself a creation of the internal politics of the Soviet Union, found itself in an awkward geopolitical position. In effect it is - like Belgium, but much bigger - a country with two linguistic halves, and likewise with people looking in different directions. This was Communism trying to put history to one side for the sake of centralising authority - a very deliberate policy of divide and rule. This was carried out all across the various "republics" of the Soviet Union, including, for example, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan (which explains the inter-ethnic conflict that occurred there some years ago).
In Ukraine, these issues were put on the back-burner during the nineties government of Kuchma, and it was only when the pro-West, "pro-democracy" opposition became more vocal that the problems with Moscow started, ten years ago.

Putin's playground

That is the context. Ukraine is a power-play, and it is clear that Vladimir Putin doesn't want to "let go" of Ukraine. For the past year, people have been trying to fathom the psychology of Putin, and what he is hoping to achieve. Does he want to occupy Ukraine? Does he want to divide Ukraine? Does he want to create a geographical "Greater Russia"?
By now, it seems evident that he does not want to invade every neighbouring country that has a (small) Russian-speaking population. Comparisons with Hitler are unhelpful, crude and very wide of the mark. Vladimir Putin's mind is made of different stuff - he is much more the calculating opportunist, with Ukraine conveniently serving as his "playground". In essence, he does whatever he thinks he can reasonably get away with. And because he has (rightly) calculated that no-one in the West will seriously want to stand up to him militarily, this is why he sends troops and hardware into Eastern Ukraine.

This was evident back when there was the war with Georgia in 2008. No-one in the West wanted to intervene militarily. It was the diplomatic intervention of France's Sarkozy that helped bring the conflict to a close, and prevent the possibility that Russia would drive its tanks all the way to Georgia's Presidential Palace in Tblisi.
The efforts of Merkel and Hollande in "Minsk II" are noble, but pitiful by comparison. By now, Putin knows that no-one will stop his actions in Ukraine. While the sanctions are hurting Russia, Putin is able to turn this domestically into a "blame the West" action; thus, whatever the West does, Putin wins.

With Ukraine, Putin is really the "puppet-master", able to dictate events. His hope, we assume, is that by dragging out the conflict in Eastern Ukraine, it destablises and destroys the popularity of the Poroshenko government, until he is removed from power, one way or another. Who replaces him is up to debate, but as long as the war continues, and the "Donbass" remains out of Kiev's control, Putin has a mill-stone to hang around the Kiev government's neck, preventing it from ever being truly independent.

"Mr Freeze"?

The result of the Georgia war was a "frozen conflict" in the two break-away regions of Georgia, Abkhazia and South Ossetia. These are now effectively Russian satellites, and since then the then Georgian President, Saakashvili, has gone and been replaced by one who happens to be more amenable to Moscow. Georgia no longer seriously talks about joining NATO or the EU - and even if they did, no-one in the West would ever take up the proposition.

Putin created the "Eurasian Union" to rival the EU. Indeed, it was this institution that Yanukovich had originally agreed to join in late 2013, that was one of the reasons for the protests in the first place. This Russia-centred economic association is another of Putin's power-plays. Initially with just two other members - Belarus and Kazakhstan - it now also includes Armenia, and is likely to include Kyrgyzstan in the near future.
The latter two are both economically reliant on Russia as much of their population are migrant workers in Russia, but also have ethnic problems of their own (Kyrgyzstan's mentioned earlier). Armenia has been locked in a "frozen conflict" with its neighbour Azerbaijan over Armenia's occupation of Karabakh for more than twenty years.

Obviously, this issue pre-dates Putin's rise to power, but the situation in Georgia does not, with the 2008 war seen as a "resolution", and effectively a method of keeping Georgia under Moscow's thumb. With the two "occupied territories", no-one in the West will touch Georgia's status with a barge-pole.
Ukraine now resembles the situation in Georgia, except that Ukraine is a far bigger country, and is part of Europe. With Russia's annexation of Crimea, and Eastern Ukraine locked in warfare over the status of the "Donbass", Ukraine's economy is in free-fall. Ukraine is literally paying the price for going against the Kremlin. As mentioned earlier, having the mill-stone of the Donbass War around Ukraine's neck is Putin's way of keeping the country from escaping Russia's orbit.

Having plucked Ukraine's prize fruit, Crimea, from under their noses, Putin is now clamping a ball and chain around Ukraine's feet, in the form of an unresolved conflict in the "Donbass".

The loss of MH17, Russia and the West's response: a parable of the times

The events leading up to the downing of flight MH17 have the appearance of something from a Hollywood disaster movie. Collating the various bits of information that are known (or strongly suspected, based on circumstantial evidence), the story seems to have run like this:

In the war zone that is eastern Ukraine, rebels boasted in late that June they had succeeded in gaining an advanced anti-aircraft "Buk" missile system from a Ukrainian military base. More recently, the pro-Russian rebels had in the past week acquired some new heavy weaponry, including anti-aircraft hardware. It has been suggested that this was sneaked across the porous border with Russia while Putin was in Brazil watching the world cup final. It is reasonable to assume that either the rebels were trained to use it, or someone trained how to use it was there with them (given what happened with flight MH17, the former still seems more likely - more on why later).
That was last weekend. In the next three days following that, the rebels succeeded in downing Ukrainian military aircraft, with a much higher success rate than had previously been possible.

From what is known so far, Thursday's flight MH17 left Amsterdam and passed through Ukrainian airspace at a lower-than-normal altitude (but above 32,000 feet), as the higher "lanes" were busy. Ukrainian airspace is the most common transit route for Europe-South-east Asia air carriers, as it is the most fuel-efficient. That being said, some airlines had already decided to take a different route due to safety concerns. Malaysia Airlines decided to take the route anyway, as did some others. However, rather than taking the normal, more southerly, route, due to the risk of thunderstorms, the plane took a more unusual, northerly route, passing directly over the war-zone of eastern Ukraine.

Fresh from the success of downing a number of Ukrainian aircraft in a matter of a few days, the circumstantial evidence (as well as the posting on social media, later deleted) suggests that the rebels' "Buk" radar saw a plane on its scope. Eager at the prospect of another "kill", someone pressed a button, without thinking too carefully to properly check the signature of the plane first. They assumed it was a Ukrainian military transport plane. It wasn't. Given the fact that the "someone" seems to have confused a civilian airliner with a military transport plane (or in haste, didn't bother to check), it would be unlikely that a fully-trained individual (i.e. Russian "expert") would make that horrific mistake.

The story above is the one that the Western media agree most easily fits the bill, and given the circumstantial evidence, this is hard to refute.

Russia's defence

On the other hand, Russia's defence (though it is looking shakier by the day) is to bring up the question of motive. The question of "motive" neatly side-steps the actual circumstantial evidence (that the missile-launch was a horrible mistake). As Russia is keen to press: who gains from this? Certainly not Russia; only Ukraine.
The Kremlin's response to the disaster has been to blame Ukraine, while the West blames Russia. Meanwhile, it is faintly absurd to see leaders from both sides talk of the need for a full independent investigation, while they both squarely accuse the other.Russia talks of a conspiracy by Ukraine (with Western involvement?) to "frame" the separatists.
Put in this way, of course Ukraine would have a motive. But there is the problem of actual evidence to support it, which Russia does not have. Russian conspiracy stories have been something of a cultural tradition going back decades, if not centuries, so this is a story that is easy to "sell" to the Russian public. Riding on a wave of nationalist irridentism, Putin is enjoying high levels of popularity. It would be hard to blame him for wanting to do the same with the downing of MH17: it's a Western conspiracy; the West is encircling Russia; Russia is continually being undermined. This talk plays well in the Russian hinterland.

Putin's choice, and the West's nightmare

In some ways, while many the West emotionally blame Putin for the shooting-down of MH17, this tragedy is as much about the choices made by the West as by Putin.

Of course, it's much easier to see the link between Putin's choice to up the stakes in the war in eastern Ukraine. The consequence of giving advanced anti-aircraft systems to people who have been seen to be psychologically-unstable and morally-vacuous, is that events like what happened to MH17 are possible, even likely. Was it only a matter of time?

The West is now the spectator to how the Russia-backed separatists operate. As has been reported, the bodies of the dead were robbed of their valuables; even their credit cards were used. This behaviour was typical in the aftermath of medieval wars - opportunists quickly came to salvage valuables from the dead. Now the West knows first-hand that such behaviour happens in the 21st century as well. As this author has said before, human nature doesn't change: medieval (or feudal) thinking exists in the modern age; we simply have modern technology to mask over it.

In some ways, it almost feels like the actions of the separatists towards the many dead Westerners from the plane crash are deliberately mocking them, and the attitude of the West in general. The remains of them dead were left in the summer heat of the fields for nearly three days before being transferred to a number of train wagons. This feels like some kind of macabre public humiliation of the West's impotence: leaving the remains of rich Westerners to be looted and left to decay like the worthless, leftover corpses from a medieval battle-field; then, having them put into a train wagon, treated almost as though they were just carcasses of meat.

For the West, such behaviour may well be horribly reminiscent of the way victims were treated back in the Second World War, and a savage reminder of the cold-hearted neighbourhood that Europe now co-exists in with Russia and its proxies. This is the nightmare that the West has brought into creation through its own bankrupt morality.

As I said before, this is partially due to the choices of the West as much as Russia. By failing to with-hold to any worthwhile principles or consistency, the West has allowed itself to appear (or become) morally vacuous. In such a situation, this only encourages others to do the same.

There was a time when America and Europe idealistically used their combined moral authority to encourage the same in others; for good or ill, that "moral authority" came to be called "liberal interventionism". There was a time when it was seen as a force for good.

That time has long passed.

What remains is a morally-vacuous world where the various "players" simply do whatever they feel they can get away with. Perhaps it was always like this, and optimists were simply deluding themselves; but the realists are now the ones who are truly in charge.

People like Vladimir Putin are supreme at being ruthless opportunists, and it is people like him who are dictating events. No-one in the West is; no-one in the West has a clue what they are doing.

A real-life "Game Of Thrones": The Multi-polar world of the 21st century

Events of the last five years have displayed the shift in the global centres of power.

Fifteen years ago, the USA was the unchallenged "superpower" (or as the French called it, "hyperpower") in the globe. By 1999, the USA had shown itself to be the world's supreme arbiter of justice, in the Kosovo war using the moral and military support of its NATO allies to bring an end to an attempted genocide and force about a change in government in Serbia (then still calling itself "Yugoslavia").

Today, the limits of America's power abroad are clear to be seen. The reign of George W. Bush displayed the amoral extent of US foreign policy to intervene and change governments in its own interests. The nadir of that was when, in 2003, post-war Iraq was ruled for a year by an American "viceroy", L.Paul Bremer III. In fact, for all his good intentions, Bremer was keen to emphasize his independence from Washington at the time; inadvertently declaring Iraq as his own personal domain. Such comments laid bare the ineptness and ignorance of American understanding of the world beyond its borders, and the lack of understanding of the places they were "intervening" in.

The Obama administration has gone to the other extreme, declaring a mostly "hands off" approach to foreign policy. The result has been an inconsistent application of that approach, in some ways similar to the foreign policy decisions made by Bill Clinton  - intervening in some cases (such as Kosovo), in a half-hearted way in others (such as Bosnia and Somalia), and sometimes not at all (such as Rwanda). Clinton's approach could be explained as a steep learning curve, from the disaster in Somalia at the start of his tenure, to the success in Kosovo at the tail end of it.
But Obama's inconsistency has more been a victim to events and the political reality of the world around him. America is no longer able to act as the "supreme arbiter of justice" as it did at the end of Clinton administration, and much of the way through the Bush administration. Nowadays, America's power has been leeched off by other rising powers, such as China and a resurgent Russia. All its actions have to be tempered by what the reaction will be from its rivals. If the USA can intervene in Libya, then why can't Russia "intervene" in Ukraine? America's inconsistent and morally-ambiguous foreign policy is now coming back to bite it where it hurts.

In the popular TV series "Game Of Thrones", the land of Westeros is the setting for the "War Of Seven Kingdoms". In many ways, the globe can be effectively carved up into seven similar spheres of influence: The USA, China, Europe (the EU), Russia, The Arab World, Latin America, and India. Like in "Game Of Thrones", each of these centres of power is competing with the others for control, using both fair means and foul.
Going through them alphabetically, these "centres of power" can be summarised like this:

The Arab World

The "Arab World" stretches from the Straights of Gibraltar to the Persian Gulf. An excellent article and graphic by the "Economist" summarises its current status. Historically, the Arab World hasn't been united into anything approaching a coherent political entity for nearly five hundred years. The current collection of states owe their borders due to agreements and lines on a map drawn up by Europeans over the last hundred years, much of it as a result of the break-up of the Ottoman Empire, their former masters. The result is something like a squabbling group of feudalistic satraps (some of whom claim to believe in "democracy") who control varying degrees of territory, resources and population. Collectively, they belong to a loose alliance that calls itself the "Arab League". Much of the wealth in this part of the world is focused at the eastern extremity, on the oil-rich lands around the Persian Gulf.
In the years since the Arab Spring, the relative stability that occurred between these many "players" has been disturbed, and in some parts, completely destroyed. Syria and now Iraq are in a state of civil war; Libya is teetering quite close to one; Yemen likewise. Within the Arab World, different (and surprising) alliances have been formed due to the rise of Islamic extremism; the one true beneficiary of the Arab Spring.

The USA and Europe look on, trying to make sense of the confusion and fluid allegiances, and make a mess of trying to choose the "right" sort of ally (Egypt? Saudi Arabia? Qatar?). Russia looks on with interest, plotting its own allegiances with duplicitous cunning; China, like a true merchant, always follows where the money is.

China

These days, China is at its pinnacle of development and potential in world history. China has been one of the world's pre-eminent powers for the last two thousand years, the chaos and relative decline of most of 19th and 20th centuries notwithstanding.
China today is ran as a highly-organised (and efficient) hierarchical capitalist state. While the powers of the USA and Europe disapprove of its human rights record and the fact that it is not a democracy, China's internal political system tends to reward efficiency and (on the whole) punishes bad organisation and corruption. While many critics call Russia a "modern feudal state", China's hierarchy rewards efficiency above anything else; in Russia, the system rewards loyalty to the centre above anything else. As a result of this, China's population understands how to get on; a simple work ethic is rewarded. It may not look pretty to Western eyes, but it works. China's government is popular with its people for the simple fact that living standards and a Chinese person's way of life has changed beyond imagining in the last twenty years; for example, China's thriving middle class is the same size as the entire population of Europe, or the USA or the Arab World. Words like "democracy" are meaningless in such a context. China has always been a strong state, and will continue to be so.

China's attitude to the abroad seems very straightforward: what it can get out of it. Like any great power, what China looks for above all is one thing: security. Having a natural merchant's mindset, China sees security in money, trade and resources. It is for this reason that it has gained larger economic control over some the resource-heavy parts of Africa, as well as a larger stake in the energy market in Central Asia and the Middle East.
Its "String Of Pearls" policy may look like an act of aggression to Western eyes, but this tells us more about Western insecurity about the USA and Europe's relative decline. Angry rhetoric about its claims over the South and East China Seas may also be a combination of nationalism at home and territorial security of its "near abroad". In this sense, it looks somewhat comparable with Russia, but minus the psychological insecurity.

Europe (The EU)

Like the Arab World, Europe is a collection of states; the difference is that most of them sit together as part of a super-national entity that has legal and economic authority over them, called the EU. Most of the EU shares the same currency, which is effectively controlled by Germany, the EU's biggest economic power. In many ways, the modern-day EU shares the same characteristics of the former European empire, Austria-Hungary: as a multi-national super-state with a parliament full of different languages, ruled by a unaccountable and essentially autocratic government that struggles to adapt to changing circumstances.
While the individual states of the EU are all recognised as democracies (though some far from perfect), the legal authority in Brussels that rules over them and dictates law to them, is not a democratic entity in the real sense of the word. Its "government" is appointed through opaque negotiation, while the "parliament" has little real control on the executive. In essence, the various nation-states that are part of the EU have given up many of their legal powers to a centralised European autocracy.

The contradiction here is that while the many nation-states of Europe have willingly surrendered power over their internal affairs to the EU, these nation-states still have almost complete independence in foreign affairs. While this works fine for the likes of Germany, it makes smaller countries look ridiculous on the world stage when they have to balance their commitments; rather like how the original Thirteen Colonies that made up the USA after their independence all had their own foreign affairs between gaining independence in 1783, and becoming a proper federal state, in 1789.
Of course, the EU does have its own foreign policy (and foreign minister, Catherine Ashton, since 2009), but when it has tried to create a combined front (such as over Ukraine), it has not taken long for the individual states' whims to take over, or be manipulated by outside "players". Just like with the Arab League.

India

In many ways, India is the polar opposite to China. While India is the "world power" with easily the second-biggest population, it is a democracy compared to China's one-party state. The other major difference is that while China is a highly-organised, centralised state, India is a highly corrupt, disorganised state. While in China, everyone knows who is in control, in India, it often appears that no-one is in control. The culture of corruption that infiltrates all levels of the government means that it is almost impossible to get things done. While China has leapt forward economically in the last twenty years, India's pace of growth has been far more modest; and that is down to a combination of corruption and inefficiency. While India's middle class has been growing in an impressive manner, without reforms in the basics of how the state is governed, this is simply a detail.

The talk of India becoming one of the "big players" on the world stage (as the USA would like to see) still looks like a far-off pipe-dream. There's being a democracy, and then there's "democracy" that paralyzes the decision-making process. This, combined with corruption and inefficiency, is what is keeping India on the lower rankings of the "players" on the world stage.
This compares to, say, Turkey: a nation with a population many times smaller than India, but has an efficiently-organised economy and a very well-structured government agenda that has allowed Turkey far greater influence with other (bigger) world powers than would have been thought possible.
India's "foreign policy", if it can be seriously called that, seems an incoherent tangle of ideas. Different politicians from the main parties have contradictory ideas about the future direction of the country; without a coherent sense of purpose, India will be going nowhere quickly, and will be prey to the designs of other, more powerful, rivals.

Latin America

Within Latin America (the American continent south of the Rio Grande), Brazil is by far the biggest power. Brazil's rise in the past ten years has been impressive, and has been helped with its growing energy market. Like India, Latin America is a "rising power", not a "risen power" like China, or to a much lesser extent, Russia. The main advantage that LatAm (primarily a result of Brazil's success, and to a lesser extent, Mexico's economic growth) has over India is that LatAm's foundations are firmer.
Brazil as the largest power in the region has recently started to tap into its potential: using its growing oil sector, and wealth, it has begun to build its economic independence on assertive foreign relations. The USA once considered LatAm to be its backyard, and historically claimed rights to the Western hemisphere. That changed with the more assertive Socialist government of "Lula" DaSilva a decade ago, and has continued with his successor, Dilma Rousseff.

This realignment of LatAm relations (essentially an assertion of independence) coincided with the first years of the Bush administration. A rising China was seen as a useful partner, LatAm welcomed China's hands-off approach, and a new economic alliance was born. By the end of the decade - and coinciding with the financial crisis - Brazil's oil independence meant that it had also become more assertive. This meant that Brazil became one of China's main rivals for influence and resources in sub-Saharan Africa.
With Europe consumed with its own economic problems, and the new Obama administration taking a more hands-off approach to some areas of foreign relations, much of Africa's resources were effectively up for grabs. Some African nations looked to Brazil as a more "European-like" partner to deal with, with the advantage of being geographically closer than Europe itself or China.
In other areas, LatAm's foreign policy has generally been to go against whatever the USA (or Europe) were doing. This explains the economic closeness to China, as well as healthy relations with Russia. In a primitive sense, some voices in the West would see LatAm as going from being on the side of the "good guys" to that of the "bad guys".

Russia

The author has spoken before about Russia's place in the world: its mentality is due to a combination of geography and history. It has been called a "modern-day feudal state" by some (although that term can be used about many places in the world). Historically, it has always been a "resource exporter": a hundred years ago and more, it was a grain exporter; now it is an oil and gas exporter. In many ways, the Kremlin is one of the archetypal "courts" of world power, as it has been for centuries. The fact that the current resident is not a "tsar" but there by popular will is a historical detail.
Russia has always been a country needed to be ruled by will-power. Its greatest time of weakness, in the late 16th and early 17th century (called the "Time Of Troubles"), was when the country was overrun by foreign powers, eventually leading to the rise of the Romanov family, who ruled the empire for the next three hundred years. The 1990s are seen by contemporary Russians in something of a similar light: a time of weakness and anarchy. Vladimir Putin changed all that.

Russia's foreign policy has always been to defend its interests in whatever way it can: if it means siding with butchers, so be it. Is the USA so very different, in spite of its claim to the highest motives? From Chechnya to Syria, Russia's interests are the Kremlin's interests, and vice versa.
Russia's historic antipathy towards the USA, and pragmatism elsewhere, have meant that Russia has made allies of China and Latin America, while following a policy of divide-and-rule in the Arab World and Europe. This has left the USA at perhaps its weakest moment in foreign relations in decades, perhaps since the start of the Second World War.

The USA

The USA's geo-political situation is well-known, as summarised at the start of the article. The USA's internal situation is akin to being divided between two factions (red and blue), managed by an kleptocratic elite - calling the USA a properly-functioning democracy is a bad joke. While productive and rich, the "empire" is going through a period of introspection, not seen since before the Second World War. Tired after fighting wars in Afghanistan and Iraq for thirteen years, the American people now see that war abroad creates more problems than solutions. As I write, Iraq is effectively divided in three by sectarian and ethnic divisions, and Afghanistan looks like it may go the same way, de facto divided into a north and south along ethnic lines after a disputed presidential election. Karzai was the "strongman" that held the US-occupied country together; with him gone, the motivation to stay together becomes tenuous.
This would be the nightmare scenario for American foreign policy makers and military planners, with so much blood and treasure poured into a bottomless pit of chaos.

To be fair, I have omitted Japan, which is a huge oversight considering its economic might (if negligible military might). Somehow, Japan appears to carry less obvious geo-political influence over its neighbours than, say, Germany has over the rest of Europe. This has more to do with Japan's reliance on the USA as a military ally, lending itself to being a "pygmy" on the military round-table. Even in this globalised world of economics, military spending and prestige count for a lot. And while Germany's military spending is also modest, it has a lot more economic muscle it can leverage when it needs to; with huge China facing it across the sea, Japan's economic power can only be compared in respects to its neighbourhood. The behemoth of China dwarfs even the advanced economy of Japan.

These are the "players" in the game of global power. Right now, things bear a worrying similarity to things a hundred years ago, when Europe was divided into a variety of alliances.

More specifically, the Middle East looks like it has the most spontaneous likelihood to explode into a regional war. And no-one can predict where that could lead...

The nature of power: from Feudalism to 21st century Capitalism

The word "feudalism" evokes images of slavery: medieval serfdom, peasants bound to serve a class of landed gentry. By definition, feudalism was a form of slavery. In the modern world, "feudalism" is considered as dead as the age of knights that is associated with it. But perceptions can be misleading.

Feudalism was mainly concerned with two things: property, and freedom of movement. As land was considered property, so were the people who tilled the land of the person who owned the land. These "serfs", or slaves in other words, were bound to the landowner, and any attempts by serfs to flee their fate could be punishable by death.

The first part of the world that began to change this system was Europe, with the growth of the professional merchant class, skilled professions that allowed individuals freedom of property, movement and so on. The Republic Of Venice was an early medieval example of this. Gradually, more and more European states moved in this direction: the last major European power to formally abolish serfdom was the Russian Empire in the middle of the nineteenth century; over in North America around the same time, the southern states of the USA fought for secession from the USA in order to continue their own form of serfdom on African slaves and their descendants. They lost.

A land of milk and honey?

Karl Marx famously wrote about the path of feudalism to Capitalism, in the end equating the "satanic mills" to a form of "industrialised serfdom".

Industrialisation brought a transformation of society to those it affected. The serfdom of the land was transformed into the subservience to the factory. Proponents of Capitalism would argue that this was an inevitable stage of the process of mankind's advancement, and unless people wish to live in tree-houses and tilling the fields in an agrarian commune, this logic is hard to refute.

In a more basic way, feudalism was about power, who controlled what, and how. And this is where the argument for feudalism's death becomes more complicated.

In the 21st century, in 2014, who holds power, and how? In a great many cases, the way that nation-states are ran is really not so very different from five hundred years ago, or a thousand years ago, or more. Certainly, technology has changed life in many ways beyond recognition, but human nature is unchanged, and the nature of power is fundamentally unchanged also. This is a point that Jonathon Swift explained very well in the last part of his famous novel, "Gulliver's Travels", all the way back in the early 18th century. The TV series "Game Of Thrones" is famous across the world, but one of the main reasons is that human nature and the use of power is represented by the characters in a very accessible way for the viewer. In other words, medieval politics and power are fundamentally no different from the modern-day.

A handful of examples can easily express the point.

The UK is held up as an exemplar for the rest of the world to follow. As the mother of modern democracy (apologies, Greece...), the rule of law, and a sensible balance of power, an education system that is the envy of the world, and so on. And yet, this "exemplar" is one of the most feudalistic modern states in the developed world.
While the UK has no "serfs", its "citizens" are still legally subjects to the crown. The UK has no constitution. The British crown is one of the biggest landowners in the world. While the British royal family may well seem harmless enough, one half of the electoral system (The House Of Lords) still consists of individuals who are either from centuries-old landed gentry (i.e. landowners), or are there by the favour of a bygone government. The House Of Lords has few contemporaries in the developed world as a temple for feudal values. The British establishment also propagates itself through the UK's education system, which is one of the best methods in the developed world for maintaining the untouchable position of Britain's peculiarly-modern form of feudalism. This system has done wonders for preserving the elite, while the lot of the average Briton has suffered, especially since the financial crisis. Needless to say, like any feudalistic institutions, this system isn't even very efficient; it is simply is very good at doing the best for those in positions of power.

Aside from the UK, many of the most developed countries in Europe are still monarchies: in Scandinavia, Sweden, Denmark and Norway; the Low Countries are all monarchies; as is Spain. Yes, they are "constitutional monarchies", but while the power they wield is only theoretical, it tells us more about the psychology of the people themselves: they like having a monarch. The interesting question is "why?", and this tells us that while many people in the modern world are far more educated (and the world they live in technologically-advanced) they still want to believe in fairy tales.

Modern-day feudalism?

Crossing the pond, many political commentators like comparing the modern-day USA to the Roman Empire of the past. The "Land Of The Free". Few objective economists would argue that the USA is the most unequal nation-state in the developed world, and that is a result of the way it is managed. While health care is considered a human right in the rest of the developed world, in the USA it is considered something you can only have if you can afford it. While Obama's controversial health care reform has claimed to have helped (a little), any objective observer would look at the private health care system as a grossly-inefficient and amoral answer to the world superpower's health problems.

But the American model of running the country was never meant to be "fair": it was meant to be "laissez-faire". Ayn Rand was the most famous proponent of modern-day neoliberalism, which idolised the gains of the rich as a way to motivate the poor. The rich in the USA, in the last thirty years have reached a level of wealth so far from that of the average person that they may as well be considered aristocracy in their own right. No-one in the know seriously doubts that the elite of America are the ones who decide how the game of power is played every four years for the White House. The Koch brothers, who funded the "Tea Party", are simply the newest (and most polarising) set of characters on the scene.
While the USA rid itself of legal slavery, it advocated an economic model that created a new riddle: a slave may be fed and housed, but has no freedom; a freed slave has freedom, but no house nor food to eat. Since the the USA became an imperial power at the turn of the 20th century, it has been exporting this riddle across the world, spreading its own "riddle of freedom".

The USA's "riddle of freedom" was taken in by the UK under the tutelage of Margeret Thatcher, which is these days known as the "Anglo-Saxon Model" by some, and has been implemented ruthlessly by the Conservative government since 2010 under the excuse that "there is no alternative"(!). Since 1979, the UK has been ran like a multinational company, if symbolically headed by a feudalistic establishment: the asset-stripping mentality has turned the UK into a vulture market even for foreign governments.

Since 2008, in the Euro-zone, it's "Club Med" that are being treated to a similar kind of treatment. As Germany holds the purse-strings, it has the right to dictate the economic affairs of Southern Europe. It has already toppled governments in Greece and Italy to do so. While in the latter case, the sitting premier (Silvio Berlusconi) was hardly going to be missed by most Italians, it is hard to deny that the European Union itself is an unaccountable bureaucratic behemoth (not unlike empires of old) that seems to grow with ambition year-on-year. The EU's ambition has been laid bare with its efforts to bring Ukraine into the fold.

At the end of the Cold War, the "Anglo-Saxon Model" was exported to Russia and the former Communist bloc.
Some commentators have described Putin's Russia as a "modern feudal state", or worse. But in reality it was always likely that once the Soviet Union was gone, Russians would revert back to their old way of thinking. Modern Russia and the battle for who controlled the Kremlin in the 1990s became another version of the "Game Of Thrones" seen on TV. Putin was simply in the right place at the right time, and was the most effective player of that oldest of games: power. "Capitalism" in Russia simply became a battle for who controlled the most property, and who controlled the most had the most leverage (or so he hoped). The Kremlin is run as the supreme "court" that it has been for centuries, ruling the largest realm in the globe. Technology is just a detail; all freedom is relative.

A number of other post-Soviet states are also ran as "modern feudal states" in the same manner, with ruling families or oligarchies; come to think of it, almost all the the Middle East is run in such a manner. Given the blessing of oil, and what does an emir need to keep power over his modern-day feudal state than sprinkling a little of his wealth around? Give enough of the population enough money to afford an "iPad" or an off-road vehicle for the desert, and what would any person care about "democracy"? China is living proof of that logic, and both it and Russia are the two biggest countries in the world, by population and area respectively. The USA's dominance looks transient compared to the many centuries that these two states have thrived.

The third world (e.g. most of Africa) is hopelessly corrupt, inefficient and sunk deep in poverty. Investment by aid charities will not change that. Some say you get the government you deserve. But you cannot change human nature, and for all the technological advances made since the time of "real" feudalism, some people still want to live in a "real" feudal society (with "wifi", of course!). The establishment of a trans-national "caliphate" in the heart of the Middle East by the Islamic extremists of ISIS (regardless of how long it lasts) is a very definitive endorsement of that view. Feudalism and power struggles will be around in one form or another as long as people have a feudal mentality.

And that doesn't look like it will disappear very soon.

American foreign policy, the Ukraine Crisis and ISIS in Iraq: is nihilism the "new normal"?

Nature abhors a vacuum.

If you look through periods of history over the last two thousand years or so, every so often you see periods of time when the predominant power in a region loses its influence. This may be through internal dissent or strife, economic overstretch, or a lack of will to govern.

Historians often call these blips in history "periods of transition", between one state of affairs and another. This is when the "dialectic" of the time is in dispute, before another narrative appears that fuses together the old and the new.

A short history of nearly everything

Pretensions aside, history is full of these examples. Alexander The Great conquered the Middle East and beyond due as much to the relative weakness of other powers at the time as his own organisation. His Greek-speaking empire fragmented after his death, whose division of power bases lead in time to the rise of Rome.
Rome then became a victim of its own success, when it was financially overwhelmed by the inefficiency of its state and the many tribes that occupied the empire from the Eurasian steppe; what we call today "imperial over-stretch".
The result of this was the so-called "Dark Ages", when the remainder of the Roman Empire in the East morphed in the thousand-year Byzantine Empire, while the Western half of Europe became a patchwork of weak and fluid national entities until the largest and most stable part became, in time, the Holy Roman Empire.

The weakness and fluidity of the "Dark Ages" was one factor for the rise of Islam, which was fortunate to have a good sense of timing. Islam conquered the Middle East, North Africa and the Iberian peninsula due to the relative weakness of the other main powers at that time: in the Middle East and North Africa, the Byzantines were weakened from fighting a long war with Persia. The Muslim Arabs took full advantage. Pushing west, the Arabs crossed into Iberia and pushed north, over the Pyrenees until they were pushed back in the middle of France, and left to consolidate their position in modern-day Spin for the next five hundred years.

Skipping forward, the spread of the Mongol Empire (more about them here) was also due to key factors such as the relative weakness of their rivals at the time. The Mongols quickly overwhelmed the embryonic Russian state, and got as far as Eastern and Central Europe, devastating half of the continent and wiping out the armies put before it. Only the untimely (but for Europe, fortunate) death of the Mongol khan put a halt to the advance. With the death of the khan, the Mongols became pre-occupied with the battle for succession, and Europe was never again a serious priority for them. Instead, Asia and the Middle East bore the brunt of their attention.

In time, the Mongols also lost their pre-eminence. The story of the next five hundred years, from the end of Mongol rule in China towards the end of the 14th century (which coincided with the renaissance in Europe) to the end of the 19th century (which coincided with the rise of the modern democratic state), we see a common pattern. We see the rise and fall of imperial powers like waves in the sea. And we see the rise of new powers happening on the back of the weakness of others.

Stepping into the breach

When the influence of an imperial power (or state actor, to use a modern term) recedes like a wave, it leaves an empty space; a stretch of virgin beach, if you like, ready to be inhabited by a new set of occupiers. In 2014, the two events of the year so far have been the Ukraine Crisis and, more recently, the sudden rise to power of ISIS in the Middle East, an al-Qaeda-inspired extremist force.

The factors that led to the Ukraine Crisis include, as always, the relative weakness of the imperial actor, which is exploited by another (opportunistic) power. In the case of Ukraine, the "imperial actor" was jointly the USA and the EU; on an economic level the EU was driving for Ukraine to enter under its wing, while on a political and diplomatic level, the USA saw a chance to bring Ukraine closer to its orbit.
The problem here was the weakness of both the EU and the USA's position. They had misread (and underestimated) Russia's position (and therefore response). Due to the weakness of both the EU and the USA, they failed to back up their rhetoric with firm actions; relying on the power of threats alone, their actions turned out to be predictably toothless. Ukraine now has a weak central government supported by a toothless West.

It is the weakness of the EU and the USA that is responsible for Russia's response. Putin correctly calculated that the the West lacked the collective will to follow up its words with actions. The West is now at least partly to blame for encouraging the Ukrainian opposition into a position that requires a forceful Russian response.
Now Ukraine is divided in almost the same manner as the USA was back its Civil War, with a separatist region fighting against a government of the north. In this narrative, Kiev is the new Washington, with Donetsk acting as the "southern capital". By a ironic twist of fate, the southern separatists even have a flag that closely resembles that of the old Confederacy, and call their unified "state" the "Confederation of New Russia". This "CNR" is bankrolled and militarily supported by Russia, in the same way that France supported the Americans during the War of Independence. The old Confederacy never got the real support from Britain or others that would have given it a fighting chance during the civil war; the modern-day CNR, however, stands a much better chance of frustrating and wearing-down Kiev through sheer attrition and a mounting cost in blood and treasure, with the support of Russia. Kiev cannot afford a war in the long-term. Russia can.

In the war-zone of east Ukraine, it is the drip-drip of military casualties that may wear down Kiev over time. Moscow's support for the separatists is covert, but consistent. Moscow looks unlikely to back down from its covert military support as long as the West is weak. In the psychology of the Kremlin, if Ukraine is weak, then the West is weak. This gives Moscow all the reason to continue doing what it is doing; the weakness of Kiev demonstrates the strength of Moscow, with Russia stepping into the breach left behind by the West's geo-political weakness.

The army of Islam

The Arab Spring has had many consequences. The most worrying (yet predictable) is the increased power that Islamic extremism has across the the Middle East. The dictatorial states of the Middle East are generally awful, but brought (imposed) stability to the region, to the benefit of the West. In many cases, most of all Syria and Iraq, that stability is effectively destroyed.

The Syrian Civil War is now more than three years old. Few people predicted it would last this long, including this writer. There is now a kind of "unstable stability" with Syria, with the government controlling roughly the south, centre and the west, the pro-Western Sunni rebels controlling the north, and the Sunni Muslim extremists controlling the east. The war is now bogged-down into a stalemate of attrition, with neither side looking close to making any significant advances for the foreseeable future.

Except for the extremists. ISIS, an al-Qaeda-inspired militia, has now evolved from being a "mere" terror group into something like an army. The breakneck speed with which they took control of Mosul, Iraq's biggest city in the north, and a swathe of Sunni-inhabited territory across northern and western Iraq, seemed to come out of the blue. As a result of this, ISIS now control a "de facto" state encompassing eastern Syria, and northern and western Iraq, straddling both sides of the Euphrates valley for hundreds of miles.
One of the most stunning successes was looting Mosul's banks after they took the city; in what must surely be the biggest collective bank robbery in history, ISIS wiped Mosul's banks clean of half a billion dollars in gold and money.
This event compares historically with how the Bolsheviks financed their agenda with bank robberies and other means in the years before they came to power; the most famous was the 1907 Tbilisi robbery in broad daylight in what is now Freedom Square, orchestrated by Stalin (more on his early years here). That robbery was the largest ever at that time.

Their success in Iraq is due to the weakness of support for the government in Sunni-inhabited areas of Iraq. The USA military left Iraq more than two years ago, to be defended by an army comprised of Shias, for the government comprised of Shias. While Kurds more-or-less run their own affairs in their own territory in the north, the Sunni are left powerless, and at the whim of the Shia-led government. ISIS has now stepped into this breach, with evidence that former Baathist officers had done some kind of deal with ISIS, and may also account for the swelling of ISIS's ranks in Iraq. This would also explain why there was no resistance to ISIS taking control of many Sunni-inhabited cities. In other words, the Sunnis of Iraq now have an army of their own to match the "government" Shia army, and the Kurdish peshmergas.
The ingredients are all there for a full-blown civil war like in Syria.

Where does this leave American foreign policy? 

Obama's strategy after the reign of George W Bush had been to repair diplomacy and restore America's reputation as a "peacemaker" rather than a warmonger.
Ignoring the ratcheting-up of the "drone wars" under Obama's watch, it's hard for other "state actors" to ignore the impression that America has now become more consumed by internal politics and introspection (given the rise of The Tea Party - see here and here), and that Obama sees the USA's relative decline as inevitable given the rise of China.

Putting this into consideration, the result is a moral "free-for-all". The UN has become an open joke among the more belligerent powers of the world, to be used as a theatre more than a diplomatic space. With the relative isolationism of the USA under Obama's watch (and likely to continue under his successor, regardless of which party they are from), the world resembles those periods of transition in history gone by, where other powers race to fill in the space left behind by the receding imperial power.

On the evidence so far, Russia, China and Islamic extremists seem to be the beneficiaries of this.