The Reason Behind the Sales-Surge for Nuclear-Proof Bunkers)

On April 15th, Zero Hedge bannered “Doomsday Bunker Sales Soar After Trump’s Military Strikes”, but this growth in the market for nuclear-proof bunkers is hardly new; it started during the Obama Administration, in Obama’s second term, specifically after the Russia-friendly government of Ukraine, next-door to Russia, got taken over in 2014 by a rabidly anti-Russian government that’s backed by the U.S. government. This boom in nuclear-bunker sales is only increasing now, as the new U.S. President, Donald Trump, tries to out-do his predecessor in demonstrating his hostility toward the other nuclear superpower, Russia, and displaying his determination to overthrow the leader of any nation (such as Syria and Iran) that is at all friendly toward Russia. For earlier examples of feature-articles on this booming market for homes that allegedly would enable buyers to survive the first blast effects, and the most immediate nuclear contaminations, of a Third World War, see here, and here, and here, and here, and here, and here, and here, and here, and here, and here.

This surging demand for nuclear bunkers started right after the U.S. government arranged a coup in Ukraine that replaced the existing Moscow-friendly democratically elected President by installing a rabidly anti-Russian Prime Minister and national-security appointees from Ukraine’s two nazi Parties, the Right Sector Party, and the former Social Nationalist Party of Ukraine (which the CIA renamed “Svoboda” meaning”Freedom” so as to enable it to be acceptable to the American public). Then, the intensifying U.S. effort to replace the secular pro-Russian Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad by a sectarian jihadist government that would be dependent upon the Saudi-Qatari-UAE-Turkish-U.S. alliance, has only intensified further the demand for these types of “second homes.”

Whereas all of the purchasers of these bunkers are being kept secret, the U.S. federal government provides, free-of-charge, to top officials, nuclear bunkers, so as to allow the then-dictatorship (continuation of America’s current dictatorship) to function, in order, supposedly, to serve their country, which they’d already have destroyed (along with destroying the rest of the world) by their determination to conquer Russia. No one knows what the reality would actually be in such a post-WW-III world, except that there would be no functioning electrical grid, nights would be totally dark for anyone whose sole reliance is on the grid, and all rivers and other water-sources would be intensely radioactive from the fallout, so that groundwater soon would also be unusable — and, of course, the air itself would also be toxic; so, lifespans would be enormously shortened, and excruciating, not to say extremely depressing. No one has published a computer-model of a U.S.-Russia nuclear war, because doing that would be unacceptable to the “military-industrial complex” including the U.S. government, but in 2014 a “limited, regional nuclear war between India and Pakistan” was computer-modeled and projected to produce global ozone-depletion and “the coldest average surface temperatures in the last 1000 years”, which “could trigger a global nuclear famine.” But such a war would be only 50 bombs instead of the 10,000+ that would be used in a WW III scenario; and, so, everyone who is paying money in order to survive WW III is simply wasting money.

Whereas all of the purchasers of these bunkers are being kept secret, the U.S. federal government provides, free-of-charge, to top officials, nuclear bunkers, so as to allow the then-dictatorship (continuation of America’s current dictatorship) to function, in order, supposedly, to serve their country, which they’d already have destroyed (along with destroying the rest of the world) by their determination to conquer Russia.

But, somehow, there are people who either want a Russia-U.S. war, or else whose preparations for it are directed at surviving in such a world, instead of at ending the current grip on political power in the United States, on the part of the people who are working to bring about this type of (end to the) world. At least the owners of the major U.S. armaments-firms, such as Raytheon Corporation, would have an explosive financial boost during the build-up toward that war, but buying bunkers in order to survive it, would seem to be a dubious follow-up to such an investment-plan. On the other hand, it might appeal to some thrill-seekers who don’t even feel the need for a good computer-simulation of a post-WW-III world; maybe they’ve got money to burn and a craving to experience ‘the ultimate thrill’, and don’t want unpleasant knowledge to spoil the thrill.

After President Trump threw out his National Security Advisor Michael Flynn and replaced him with the rabidly anti-Russian H.R. McMaster, and then lobbed 59 cruise missiles against the Syrian government (which is protected by the Russian government), the cacophony of press that had been calling for President Trump to be impeached and replaced by his rabidly anti-Russian Vice President Mike Pence, considerably quieted down; and, so, the Obama-Trump market for nuclear bunkers seems now to be established on very sound foundations, for the foreseeable immediate future. And, if anyone in the U.S. federal government has been planning to prepare the U.S. for a post-WW-III world, that has not been publicly announced, and no newsmedia have even been inquiring about it — so, nothing can yet be said about it.

The general message, thus far, is that, after World War III, everyone will be on his or her own, but that the dictators will (supposedly) be in a far better position than will anyone outside that ruling group. However, if the survivors end up merely envying the dead, it will be no laughing matter, regardless of how silly those nuclear bunkers are. It would be nothing funny at all.

On April 17th, Scott Humor, the Research Director at the geostrategic site “The Saker,” headlined “Trump has lost control over the Pentagon”, and he listed (and linked-to) the following signs that Trump is following through with his promise to allow the Pentagon to control U.S. international relations:

March 14th, the US National Nuclear Security Administration field tested the modernized B61-12 gravity nuclear bomb in Nevada.

April 7, Liberty Passion, loaded with US military vehicles, moored at Aqaba Main Port, Jordan

On April 7th the Pentagon US bombed Syria’s main command center in fight against terrorists

April 10, United States Deploying Forces At Syrian-Jordanian Border

April 11, The US Air Force might start forcing pilots to stay in the service against their will, according to the chief of the military unit’s Air Mobility Command.

April 12, President Donald Trump has signed the US approval for Montenegro to join NATO

April 13, NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg announced the alliance’s increased deployment in Eastern Europe

On April 13th, the Pentagon bombed Afghanistan. The US military has bombed Afghanistan with its GBU-43/B Massive Ordnance Air Blast Bomb (MOAB)

April 13, the US-led coalition bombed the IS munitions and chemical weapons depot in Deir ez-Zor killing hundreds of people

April 14, The Arleigh Burke-class, guided-missile destroyer USS Stethem (DDG 63) has been deployed to the South China Sea

April 14, the US sent F-35 jets to Europe

April 14, Washington failed to attend the latest international conference hosted by Moscow, where 11 nations discussed ways of bringing peace to Afghanistan. The US branded it a “unilateral Russian attempt to assert influence in the region.”

April14, the US has positioned two destroyers armed with Tomahawk cruise missiles close enough to the North Korean nuclear test site to act preemptively

On April 16th, the US army makes largest deployment of troops to Somalia since the 90s.

Mr. Humor drew attention to an article that had been published in “The Daily Beast” a year ago, on 8 April 2016, “CALL OF DUTY: The Secret Movement to Draft General James Mattis for President. Gen. James Mattis doesn’t necessarily want to be president—but that’s not stopping a group of billionaire donors from hatching a plan to get him there.” Though none of the alleged “billionaires” were named there, one prominent voice backing Mattis for the Presidency, in that article, was Bill Kristol, the Rupert Murdoch agent who co-founded the Project for a New American Century, which was the first influential group pushing the “regime-change in Iraq” idea during the late 1990s, and which also advocated for the foreign policies that George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Donald Trump, have since been pursuing, each in his own way. It seems that whomever those “billionaires” were, they’ve now gotten their wish, with a figurehead Donald Trump as President, and James Mattis actually running foreign policy. Humor also noted that Mattis wants to boost the budget of the Pentagon by far more than the 9% that Trump has proposed. Perhaps Trump knew that even to get a 9% Pentagon increase passed this year would be almost impossible to achieve. First, the unleashed Pentagon needs to place the military into an ‘emergency’ situation, so as to persuade the public to clamor for a major invasion. That ‘emergency’ might be the immediate goal, toward which the March-April timeline of events that Humor documented is aiming.

As regards the military comparisons of the personnel and equipment on both sides of a U.S.-Russia war, the key consideration would actually be not the 7,000 nuclear warheads that Russia has versus the 6,800 nuclear warheads that the U.S. has, but the chief motivation on each of the respective sides: conquest on the part of the U.S. aristocracy, defense on the part of the Russian aristocracy. (Obviously, the U.S. having continued its NATO military alliance after the Soviet Union’s Warsaw Pact military alliance ended in 1991, indicates America’s aggressive intent against Russia. That became a hyper-aggressive intent when NATO absorbed Russia’s former Warsaw Pact allies. NATO even brought in some parts of the former USSR itself, when in 2004, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, entered NATO, and in 2014 U.S. President Obama tried to get Ukraine into NATO, and these five countries hadn’t even been Warsaw Pacters, but had instead been parts of the USSR itself. It was as if Russia had grabbed not only America’s allies, but some states in the U.S. itself. This constituted extreme aggression, and shows the U.S. aristocracy’s obsessive intent for global empire — to include Russia.)

Any limited war between the two powers would become a nuclear war once the side that’s losing this limited war becomes faced with the choice of either surrendering that limited territory (now likely Syria) or else going nuclear. On Russia’s side, allowing such military conquest of an ally would be unacceptable; the war would then expand with the U.S. and its allies invading Russian territory for Russia’s continuing refusal to accept the U.S.-Saudi and other allies’ grabbing of Syria (on ‘humanitarian grounds’, of course — as if, for example, the Sauds aren’t far more brutal than Assad). After the traditional-forces’ invasion of Russia, Russia’s yielding its sovereignty over its own land has never been part of Russia’s culture: If Russia were to be invaded by allies of the U.S., then launching all of Russia’s nuclear weapons against the U.S. and America’s invasion-allies, would be a reasonably expected result. Here’s how it would develop: On America’s side, which (very unlike Russia) has no record of any foreign invasion against its own mainland (other than the Sauds’ own 9/11 ‘false flag’ attacks), the likely response in the event of Russia’s crushing its invaders would be for the U.S. President to seek to negotiate a face-saving end to that limited war, just as the American President Richard Nixon did regarding America’s invasion and occupation of Vietnam. However, a reasonable question can be raised as to whether, in such a situation, Russia would accept anything less than America’s total surrender, much as Franklin Delano Roosevelt in WW II was determined to accept nothing less than Germany’s total surrender, at the end of that war. If Trump wants to play Hitler, then Putin (acting in accord with Russian tradition) would probably play both FDR and Stalin, even if it meant the end of the world. For Russia to be conquered, especially by such intense evil as those invaders would be representing, would probably be viewed by Russians as being even worse than ending everything, and this would probably be Putin’s view as well. If America did not simply capitulate, Putin would probably nuclear-blitz-attack the U.S. and its allies, rather than give Trump (or Pence) the opportunity to blitz-attack Russia and to sacrifice all of the U.S. side’s invading troops in Russia so as to ‘win’ the overall war and finally conquer Russia. It would be like WW II, except with nuclear weapons — and thus an entirely different type of historical outcome after the war.

Consequently, either the U.S. will cease its designs on Russia, or there will be WW III. Russia’s sovereignty will never be yielded, especially not to the thuggish gang who have come to rule the U.S. (both as “Republicans” and as “Democrats”). The bipartisan neoconservative dream of America’s aristocrats (world-conquest) will never be achieved. Russia will never accept it. If America’s rulers continue to press it, the result will be even worse than when the Nazis tried. It’s just an ugly pipe-dream, but any attempt to make it real would be even uglier. And nobody who buys a ‘nuclear-proof bunker’ will get what he or she thinks is being bought — safety in such a world as that. It won’t exist.

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They're Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of CHRIST'S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity.

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What will it take to bring America to live according to its own self image?

Top Chinese officials visit Putin in Moscow as China reaffirms its alliance with Russia

BY ALEXANDER MERCOURIS, EDITOR IN CHIEF, THE DURAN

Chinese act to reaffirm alliance with Russia and to quell attempts by Trump administration to make trouble between Russia and China.

The pace of Russian-Chinese contacts has suddenly intensified with Russian President Putin hosting this month no fewer than three senior officials of the Chinese government, each one following the other in quick succession.

The first was Zhang Gaoli, the First Vice-Chairman of China’s State Council (ie. China’s deputy prime minister). He has now been followed by Zhang Dejiang, the Chairman of the Standing Committee of China’s National People’s Congress (China’s parliament), who met with Putin yesterday.

Now comes news of the pending visit of Li Zhanshu, the Director of the General Office of the Communist Party of China, who the Chinese Foreign Ministry says will visit Moscow on 25th April 2017, where he will meet over several days with President Putin and with various other senior Russian officials.

Of these three officials the most important is Li Zhanshu, whose position approximates to that of Anton Vaino, the head of the Russian President’s Executive Office.

Li and Vaino can be described as the chiefs of the staff of their respective leaders, Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin. Moreover it has been clear for some time that contact between China and Russia does not take place through the foreign ministries of the two countries (their foreign ministers – Wang Yi and Sergey Lavrov – rarely meet), but at some other level, and it is likely that it is conducted by Li and Vaino, who have immediate access to their chiefs, Xi and Putin.

If so then Li’s visit to Moscow is the visit to the Russian capital of the Chinese official in charge of managing China’s relations with its closest ally, Russia.

What explains this visit, coming so soon after the visits of two other high-ranking Chinese officials to Moscow?

At the most basic level it is likely that Li’s visit, like those of Zhang Gaoli and of Zhang Dejiang, is intended to prepare the way for Putin’s visit to China next month. It is clear that this visit is going to be a major visit, and is seen as such by the leaderships of the two countries. It is likely that intense discussions are underway to fine-tune arrangements for this visit, and to complete the details of whatever agreements are expected to be signed during it.

However it is difficult to avoid the impression that at least in Li’s case his visit is in part intended to coordinate with the Russians in light of the Trump administration’s ham-fisted attempts to cause trouble between Beijing and Moscow. What suggests that this is the reason for Li’s visit is that there was so little advanced notice of it, suggesting that unlike the visits by Zhang Gaoli and Zhang Dejiang it was not arranged long ago but was arranged hurriedly at short notice.

That the Trump administration is indeed trying to make trouble between Beijing and Moscow has been all but confirmed by no less a person than President Trump’s National Security Adviser, General H.R. McMaster, who in an interview with ABC television said the following

What we do know is that, in the midst of responding to the mass murder of the Syrian regime, the president (Trump) and the first lady hosted an extraordinarily successful conference, summit, with President Xi and his team. And not only did they establish a very warm relationship, but… they worked together as well in connection with the response to the mass murder on the part of the Assad regime in connection with the U.N. vote. I think President Xi was courageous in distancing himself from the Russians, isolating really the Russians and the Bolivians… And I think the world saw that, and they (Xi) saw, well, what club do you want to be in? The Russian-Bolivian club? Or the — in the club with the United States, working together on our mutual interests and the interests of peace, security

(bold italics added)

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]his comment serves as a further illustration of the inexperience and naivety of US diplomacy in the age of Trump. It confirms that China abstained in the vote in the UN Security Council on 12th April 2017 following a personal request from Trump to Xi Jinping. However it completely misconstrues the meaning of that act.

The Chinese almost certainly cleared their decision to abstain in the UN Security Council vote ahead of the vote with Moscow. From their point of view and that of the Russians a decision by China to abstain would have meant little. There was no possibility that the draft Resolution would pass because Russia had already made known it would veto it, whilst the US had already removed the most offensive words in the draft of the Resolution before it was put to the vote by deleting wording in the draft which blamed the Khan Sheikhoun incident on the Syrian government before any investigation had taken place.

Why would China hurt and humiliate Trump – whom Xi Jinping had met just days before – by refusing his request and voting against a Resolution which was no longer controversial, which did not concern an issue important to China, and which the Chinese knew the Russians were going to veto anyway?

What was undoubtedly intended by the Chinese as a simple diplomatic courtesy to the new US President over an issue which for China is of secondary importance, is however now being misconstrued by the Trump administration as a big step by China against Russia.

To be clear, it would have been an entirely different matter if China had voted for the Resolution after Russia had made known it would vote against it. In that case it would have been legitimate to speak of a serious rift over the Syrian issue between Beijing and Moscow. However an abstention should not be construed in that way.

China has previously abstained on votes in the UN Security Council on Syria and Ukraine, and it is far from unusual for China to sidestep Western criticism by acting in this way over issues which it regards as being of only secondary importance to itself. The Russians understand this fully, and have never shown any concern about it.

It is however fully understandable that in light of the sort of comments that have been coming out of the Trump administration the Chinese leadership should now be pulling out the stops to make clear that China’s alliance with Russia is unaffected and as strong as always.

The result is a series of articles which have appeared in the Chinese media, which have been strongly critical of the Trump administration’s actions (discussed here and here), a strong statement reaffirming support for Russia’s position in Syria rushed out by the BRICS group, which is unofficially led by China and Russia, and the visits by the three important Chinese dignitaries to Moscow.

The statement by the BRICS group is the most public expression of these Chinese steps. It seems to have been hurriedly put together at a meeting of the BRICS special envoys in Visakhapatnam in India, and was published on 12th April 2017 – the same day as the UN Security Council vote – in a way that was obviously intended to offset any misconception arising from China’s decision to abstain in that vote.

Its full text has been published by Russia’s Foreign Ministry, and was undoubtedly agreed in advance following detailed discussions at the highest levels of the Russian and Chinese governments, but also involving the governments of the three other BRICS states: India, Brazil and South Africa.

The statement reaffirms the primacy of international law in settling disputes in the Middle East and elsewhere, and importantly it reaffirms the primary role of the UN Security Council as the only body empowered to authorise the use of force

BRICS Special Envoys on Middle East expressed their concern about internal crises that have emerged in a number of states in the region in recent years. They firmly advocated that these crises should be resolved in accordance with the international law and UN Charter, without resorting to force or external interference and through establishing broad national dialogue with due respect for independence, territorial integrity and sovereignty of the countries of the region…..

….In the course of the meeting, the role of the UN Security Council as the international body bearing the primary responsibility for maintaining international peace and security was underlined. It was also stressed that military interventions that have not been authorized by the Security Council are incompatible with the UN Charter and unacceptable.

(bold italics added)

The highlighted words are straightforward criticisms of the US missile strike on Al-Shayrat air base on 6th April 2017, which was carried out without authorisation from the UN Security Council, though the statement is careful not to refer to the US by name.

Li Zhanshu’s pending visit to Moscow is almost certainly connected to these steps.

The idea that China can be sweet-talked out of an alliance with Russia it has spent 25 years creating as a result of a single meeting between the US and Chinese Presidents during which nothing of substance was agreed, is fanciful in the extreme. It is a further illustration of the lack of understanding or experience of international diplomacy within the Trump administration.

President Trump is right to believe that establishing good personal relations with foreign leaders is critically important for the successful conduct of diplomacy. The fact that he spent time meeting and talking to Xi Jinping and made a serious effort to establish a personal rapport with him promises well for the future. It contrasts with the arrogant disdain towards foreign leaders of Barack Obama, who as President barely communicated with foreign leaders on a personal level at all.

However President Trump has to be realistic about what such personal diplomacy can do. If he over-invests in it, and thinks he can change the entire foreign policy of a superpower like China by a single meeting and a few phone calls, then he is setting himself up for failure and disappointment.

In the meantime the way President Trump through his officials has misconstrued the habitual courtesy of the Chinese President, and tried to use it to make trouble between Moscow and Beijing, has almost certainly taught the Chinese of the need to handle him carefully. He may find that in future meetings they are not quite so polite.

(If you haven’t yet, be sure to read this: Experts: “In a nuclear war between the US and Russia, everybody in the world would die.”)

If a nuclear war is to be avoided, the US should not set any preconditions for direct talks with North Korea.

Yea. What to do? There's no quick fix to the damage inflicted on the US population by decades of passivity, massive ignorance, runaway jingoism and constant lies. Gross mendacity issuing practically from the entire political class and the corporate media will not stop tomorrow—or ever. The whole damn corporate system has to be liquidated for that to happen. In fact, it is possible to imagine that even in the aftermath of a devastating nuclear war, the old lies and liars will still be in power. Wars do not exactly bring sudden political lucidity to severely brainwashed people.

That said, it is imperative that those who do see what is going on, what is at stake, try and do something to derail the mad rush to Armageddon. There's no time to organize Third Parties or a new party by normal processes. So we are stuck with the existing whores in the political class, and these abject people respond only to one thing: their own political and (maybe) personal survival. If these bastards see a mighty surge of people calling and demonstrating with clarity in their demands and anger on their lips, they may grow enough of a spine to stem the warmongering and actually begin to isolate the main carriers of this disease, sociopaths like John McCain, Lindsey Graham, the Clintons and their cliques, and of course, the Liar in Chief and his clique of insane billionaires and militarists.

So call, fax, write and demonstrate, and support the long overdue growth of an antiwar movement. Stopping a nuclear war is the foremost issue of our time. Call your Congress buffoon and state in clear terms that you are fed up, and that you want change or else, and that you won't put up with any votes for more wars—anywhere. This may sound counter-intuitive for us, to be advising you that you call your representative in a false democracy, a person obviously most likely doing the bidding of the plutocracy, those who brought humanity to this pass. But for reasons already mentioned, their own sense of short-term political self-preservation and opportunism, they may actually screw up the courage to do the right thing, for once, something these characters should have been doing all along without needing anyone to tell them to do the obvious. While you are at it, and if you can stomach it, also contact MoveOn.org and similarly pseudo democratic orgs, and challenge them to do the right thing or get lost. Please do this today. Or as soon as you can. Time is precious. Start by finding your Congressional (so-called) representative: http://www.house.gov/htbin/findrep

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What will it take to bring America to live according to its own self image?

Donald Trump: Ruling Class President

PAUL STREET

The Ruling Class Reserve Tag

One of the many irritating things about the dominant United States corporate media is the way it repeatedly discovers anew things that are not remotely novel. Take its recent discovery that Donald Trump isn’t really the swamp-draining populist working class champion he pretended to be on the campaign trail.

The evidence for this “news” is solid enough. His cabinet and top advisor circle has been chock full of ruling class swamp creatures like former Goldman Sachs President Gary Cohn (top economic adviser), longtime top Goldman Sachs partner and top executive Steve Mnuchin (Secretary of the Treasury), and billionaire investor Wilbur Ross (Secretary of Commerce). Trump has surrounded himself with super-opulent and planetarily invested financial gatekeepers – the very club he criticized Hillary Clinton for representing.

Trump meets regularly with top corporate and financial CEOs, who have been assured that he will govern in accord with their wishes. He receives applause from business elites for his agenda of significant large scale tax cuts and deregulation for wealthy individuals and for the giant, hyper-parasitic, and largely transnational corporations they milk for obscene profits

Trump’s political strategist Steve Bannon is by numerous reports being pushed aside by Cohn and by Trump’s hedge-fund financier son-in-law Jared Kushner – a longtime neoliberal Democrat – when it comes to holding the president’s ear. Bannon has been reduced to bitterly cursing Kushner as a “globalist cuckservative.”

Bannon’s white-nationalist “populist” bluster was of great electoral use to Trump on his path to the White House. In the real world of world capitalist power, however, the Beast of Breitbart is a liability. His self-declared nationalism does not jibe with the deeply rooted Open Door policy preferences of an American corporate and financial ruling class that has long been deeply invested across national boundaries in the world capitalist system.

There have been differences in the investor class profiles of the two dominant parties through this century. “Defense” (military) and oil and other Big Carbon firms have tended to tilt towards the Republicans. Silicon Valley and Hollywood lean Democratic. Beneath such differences, the 1% is united in neoliberal consensus across both parties around Wall Street-led globalization and a huge Pentagon System to expand and protect global finance capitalism. Both the Republicans and the Democrats are committed to the neoliberal world-capitalist and imperial order.

Trump, it turns out, is not the worker-friendly populist he posed as while running for president. He’s not the great anti-establishment outsider determined to return “power to the people” he claimed to be in his Inauguration Address. His economic program amounts to neo-liberalism on steroids.

You don’t say! Gee, who knew? Anyone who’s paid serious attention to American electoral politics and policy over the course of history, that’s who. Seventeen years ago, the then still left Christopher Hitchens usefully described the “essence of American politics” as “the manipulation of populism by elitism. That elite is most successful,” Hitchens noted:

New York Times Magazine reflection on the chilling extent to which Trump’s rise is consistent with dodgy, fascist-like tendencies in the long history of the American right, the prolific liberal historian Rick Perlstein notes that the irony of a “populist” president who has “placed so many bankers and billionaires in his cabinet, and has relentlessly pursued so many 1-percent-friendly policies” is “far from unique.” The Orange-Tinted Beast is the latest version of what Perlstein calls “The often-cynical negotiation between populist electioneering and plutocratic governance on the right.”

Perlstein is right to note the unoriginality of the phenomenon. But why does Perlstein seem to think the “cynical negotiation” is just a Republican phenomenon? It was no less evident in the presidencies of Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama than it was during the Reagan and Bush presidencies and under Trump today. That is no small part of how and why the ugly Republican right that Perlstein understandably fears gets its recurrent trips into national and state-level power.

And just how mysterious is the tension between “populist electioneering and plutocratic governance”? From Karl Marx’s time and before to the present day, bourgeois “constitutional” states practicing a strictly limited and deceptive form of “democracy” have been torn by a fundamental contradiction. On one hand, victorious candidates have to win enough popular votes to prevail in elections. They can hardly do that by proclaiming their commitment to the rule of the wealthy Capitalist Few. On the other hand, they cannot garner the resources to win elections and govern effectively without the backing and cooperation of the investor/capitalist class, whose control of money and the means of production is critical to political power and policymaking.

Thirty-three years ago, the left political scientist Charles Lindblom penned a convincing take on American power, likening the capitalist marketplace to a prison. Lindblom’s analysis is aptly summarized in a recent critique of “deep state” discourse by Anthony DiMaggio:

“U.S. corporations exercised power over communities, much like Kings do over feudal serfs, by exercising ownership over the means of production in the U.S. economy. They command worker loyalty due to their ability to hire and fire Americans and provide basic benefits such as health care or 401k and pension benefits. But corporations also possess the power to destroy people’s lives via capital flight. Simply by threatening to leave a community and move factories abroad in pursuit of higher profits and weaker environmental regulations, corporations hold citizens hostage…The marketplace is a prison, Lindblom warned, because these corporations ultimately control the levers of the U.S. economy, and control the life outcomes of American workers.”

Beyond the ownership and investment/disinvestment levers, concentrated capital achieves policy, cultural, and societal outcomes it prefers in numerous other ways: the buying of candidates and election through campaign donations; the flooding of government with armies of well-heeled lobbyists; the drafting and dissemination of Big Business-friendly legislation; massive investment in public relations and propaganda to influence the beliefs and values of citizens, politicians, and other “opinion-shapers”; direct “revolving door” capture of key government positions; the offer of private sector positions to public officials who reasonably expect significantly increased compensation once they exit government; the “cognitive [ideological] capture” (every bit as corrupting as bribery) of state officials, politicians, media personnel, educators, nonprofit managers, and other “influential;” the destruction and undermining of organizations (i.e., labor unions) that might offer some countervailing power to that of big business; the granting of jobs, corporate board memberships, internships, and other perks and payments to public officials’ family members; the control of education and publishing; the ownership, management, and monitoring of mass media (including “entertainment” as well as public affairs news and commentary).

The American philosopher John Dewey put things very well in 1931. He wrote that “politics is the shadow cast on society by big business” and rightly prophesized that U.S. politics would stay that way as long as power resided in “business for private profit through private control of banking, land, industry, reinforced by command of the press, press agents, and other means of publicity and propaganda.”

Ten years later, the U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis made the elementary Aristotelian observation that Americans “must make our choice. We may have democracy,” Brandeis wrote, “or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.” That was an unwitting call for the abolition of capitalism, which is marked among other things by an inherent tendency towards the upward concentration of wealth and power.

Let the People Be Taught

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]he fundamental contradiction between bottom-up democratic pretense and top-down class-rule reality is nothing new in American history. The New England clergyman Jeremy Belknap captured the fundamental idea behind the U.S. Founders’ curious notion of what they liked to call “popular government.” “Let it stand as a principle,” Belknap wrote to an associate in the late 1780s, “that government originates from the people, but let the people be taught…that they are unable to govern themselves.”

Consistent with Belknap’s advice, the U.S. Constitution was structured precisely and quite brilliantly to encode and enforce the impossibility of the Founders’ ultimate nightmare: popular sovereignty. American history remains haunted by the darkly democidal enshrinement of the “first new nation’s” crippling charter. The document invokes “We the people” and “the general welfare” only to set up a government dedicated to the hegemony of the propertied Few.

A Common Masquerade

Dressing elite class and economic interests in popular garb has always been a core function of the U.S. electoral and party system in its various iterations. Its first assignment was to rally ordinary citizens as voters for different factions of the developing nation’s bourgeois class in its recurrent intra-capitalist policy struggles. Across much of the 19th century, some leading U.S. investors sought to advance their interests in the development of the domestic U.S. market and a manufacturing economy by pushing through an “American System” of government-subsidized internal improvements (transportation infrastructure above all), government central banks, and tariffs on imports. These capitalists tended to align with and fund the Whig Party and its anti-slavery successor the Republican Party. More export-, agricultural-, and free trade-oriented investors aligned with the Democratic Party.

These not insignificant differences aside, all these bourgeois parties made feverish electoral appeals to mass constituencies in the name of “the common man” to win votes in a republic with comparatively wide (universal white male across most of the nation by the eve of the Civil War) suffrage. The competing parties needed to “masquerade as commoners” (in the words of the late and great U.S. historian Alfred F. Young) to elected politicians pledged to the “bankrollers and backers” preferred path of capitalist development. The Hitchensian game – the “manipulation of populism by elitism” – first came into own not during the time of Huey Long but a century before in the Andrew Jacksonian so-called “age of the common man.”

“No Way to Vote Against Goldman Sachs”….

[dropcap]P[/dropcap]olicy specifics and party alignments have since shifted more than once in accord with underlying political-economic and demographic factors. Still, the basic manipulative reality captured in Left political scientist Thomas Ferguson’s “investment theory of [U.S. two-] party competition” has continued throughout. During the 1930s and 1940s, Ferguson has shown, the labor-allied New Deal (Franklin Roosevelt) Democratic Party rose to power with critical support from highly capital intensive multinational corporations and internationally oriented investment banks who were less concerned about wage bills than the more nationally oriented, anti-union, and protectionist industrial firms that dominated the reigning (Teddy Roosevelt, William McKinley and Howard Taft) Republican Party at the turn of the 20th century.

The end of rapid growth and of the United States’ short-lived and near-absolute post-World War II global economic hegemony during the late 1960s produced inflation and growing fiscal and trade deficits, leading to sharply raised interest rates, a strengthened dollar, and an unprecedented flow of surplus capital from industry to finance. The resulting new finance capital explosion transformed the American party system, which stabilized around 1980 with high finance atop the “hegemonic bloc” of political (as well as economic) investors. With the arch-neoliberal Clinton presidency of the 1990s, big finance capital had clearly taken over the Democratic Party as well as the Republicans, along with most of the nation’s nonfinancial corporations.

There have been differences in the investor class profiles of the two dominant parties through this century. “Defense” (military) and oil and other Big Carbon firms have tended to tilt towards the Republicans. Silicon Valley and Hollywood lean Democratic. Beneath such differences, the 1% is united in neoliberal consensus across both parties around Wall Street-led globalization and a huge Pentagon System to expand and protect global finance capitalism. Both the Republicans and the Democrats are committed to the neoliberal world-capitalist and imperial order, with big finance calling the shots while unions, the working class, and the poor are relegated to the margins.

The two major parties have different historical, demographic, ethno-cultural, religious, and geographic profiles that matter. Still, they are united at the end of the day in their shared manipulations of carefully calibrated populist rhetoric and voter and partisan identity on behalf of the bipartisan super-rich and their global empire. As the Left author Chris Hedges noted four years ago:

“Both sides of the political spectrum are manipulated by the same forces. If you’re some right-wing Christian zealot in Georgia, then it’s homosexuals and abortion and all these, you know, wedge issues that are used to whip you up emotionally. If you are a liberal in Manhattan, it’s – you know, they’ll be teaching creationism in your schools or whatever…Yet in fact it’s just a game, because whether it’s Bush or whether it’s Obama, Goldman Sachs always wins. There is no way to vote against the interests of Goldman Sachs.”

…or (Earlier) J.P. Morgan

The Machiavellian ruling class exploitation of what is today called “identity politics” is also less than novel in the American historical experience. Fierce class conflict fueled by intense class consciousness roiled the industrializing United States across the late 19th and early 20th centuries, creating the most violent labor history in the world during those years. But great working class and farmer rebellions against the emergent new corporate plutocracy never translated into national politics thanks to the prior existence of a constitutionally mandated winner-take-all two party and elections system that channeled ballots into one of two reigning capitalist parties – aptly described by Upton Sinclair in 1904 as “two wings of the same bird of prey” – and in accord with differences of race, ethnicity, religion, and region. State and national politics and “voting behavior” were structured around ethnocultural and related geographic (sectional) factors. It’s not for nothing that the Marxist American historian Alan Dawley once referred to the American ballot box as “the coffin of class consciousness.” With all due respect to Eugene Debs’ high water mark returns in 1912 (a mere 6% of the popular vote), there was little way to meaningfully vote against the interests of J.P. Morgan, Averill Harriman, and John Rockefeller.

No Free Pass

It’s become fashionable on both left and right in recent years to think of Wall Street’s untouchable power (along with that of Silicon Valley and the military industrial complex) as a reflection of the rule of the permanent “deep state.” In its more measured and workable (non-conspiratorial) usage, the term refers to the embedded corporate and financial profit and power sectors that co-exist and merge with entrenched government institutions prominently including but not restricted to the ever-mushrooming national security state (we should include the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Federal Reserve alongside the Pentagon, the CIA, and the FBI) to govern the nation behind the electoral and parliamentary “marionette theater” (Mike Lofgren) of the visible state and its pseudo-democratic election rituals.

But, with all due respect for the chilling expansion of the intertwined military, police, and surveillance states, it is hard not to sense behind the notion of the “deep state” the simple and less-than-secretive persistence of the class rule regime called capitalism. The harsh authoritarian reality of what Noam Chomsky has wryly called “really existing capitalist democracy or RECD, pronounced as ‘wrecked’” lives on today as long before. .

American capitalism has an equally evil Siamese twin called imperialism, progenitor of the giant “national security” and “foreign apparatus” that eats up the lion’s share of U.S. federal discretionary spending – at no small cost to social and environmental health even as it provides s rich revenue stream for the nation’s unelected dictatorship of money. “The costs of empire,” Chomsky wrote nearly half a century ago, “are in general distributed over the whole of society, white its profits revert to a few within.”

It is long past time for left thinkers to stop giving the American capitalist ruling class a free pass on Donald Trump, hoping for the neoliberal deep state” to bring about his demise from the top down. Yes, the elite financial campaign finance and speech royalty data suggest that Hillary Clinton was Wall Street’s preferred candidate last year. Still, Trump was never really an anti-establishment candidate beyond the deceptive rhetoric he cynically employed – consistent with the longstanding fake-populist “essence of American [and bourgeois] politics” – to win enough white working class and rural votes to prevail over dismal, dollar-drenched Hillary Clinton. And you don’t have to join the right-wing conspiracy mongers at Zero Hedge to agree with them that “Trump is where the elites want him” and “serves the establishment.”

Militarized Accumulation

A recent teleSur English reflection by the brilliant Marxian sociologist William I. Robinson notes that the transnational capitalist class (TCC) has turned to military investment as a solution to its drastic over-accumulation of capital in an increasingly unequal and poverty-ridden world. As Robinson notes:

“Here there is a convergence around the system’s political need for social control and its economic need to perpetuate accumulation. Unprecedented global inequalities can only be sustained by ever more repressive and ubiquitous systems of social control and repression. Yet quite apart from political considerations, the TCC has acquired a vested interest in war, conflict, and repression as a means of accumulation. CIT has revolutionized warfare and the modalities of state-organized militarized accumulation, including the military application of vast new technologies and the further fusion of private accumulation with state militarization….”

“…The so-called wars on drugs, terrorism, and immigrants; the construction of border walls, immigrant detention centers, and ever-growing prisons; the installation of mass surveillance systems, and the spread of private security guard and mercenary companies, have all become major sources of profit-making… The class interests of the TCC, geo-politics, and economics come together around militarized accumulation. The more the global economy comes to depend on militarization and conflict the greater the drive to war and the higher the stakes for humanity…after…Trump’s….victory, the stock price of Corrections Corporation of America…soared 40 percent, given Trump’s promise to deport millions…Raytheon and Lockheed Martin reports spikes each time there is a new flare up in the Middle East…Within an hour of the April 6^th Tomahawk missile bombardment of Syria, Raytheon’s stock increased by $1 billion. Hundreds of private firms from around the world have put in bids to construct Trump’s infamous…border wall.”

Trump, his team of politicized generals, and his call for a 10 percent increase in the already hyper-bloated Pentagon budget are a perfect match for the militarized accumulation strategy, with its “built-in war drive.”

Waiting for supposedly enlightened and decent elites atop the “deep state” to dump Trump is a fool’s game. As Robinson says, “Only a worldwide push back from below, and ultimately a program to redistribute wealth and power downward, can counter the upward spiral of international conflagration.”

About the author

Paul Street’s latest book is They Rule: The 1% v. Democracy (Paradigm, 2014) .

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SYRIA: POLITICALLY INCORRECT BEAUTIFUL BABIES NEED NOT APPLY

hat goes around, comes around. Fast on the heels of the April 4 false flag gas attack in Syria at Khan Sheikhoun, which was pinned on the Syrian government in a brazen, evidence-free media operation followed by an illegal missile strike, all skeptical objections were vehemently ridiculed and swept aside by Western propaganda agencies as groundless conspiracy theories. Following systematic deconstructions in the alternative media, the official account would have come crashing down even without the welcome assistance of Dr. Theodore Postol’s meticulously written refutation. But several days later, while the controversy over the first alleged chemical exposure was still unsettled, as a result of a US bombing raid on rebel targets in the Deir ez-Zor area, south of the town of Tabqah, the resulting huge and lethal explosion of chemical materials in terrorist facilities caused the death of several hundred innocent Syrian civilians, including dozens of so far unmourned “beautiful babies.”

Thanks to this probably inadvertent Western coalition hit on the terrorist chemical weapons depot, the key controversial issue left from the first explosion attributed to the Syrian air force was finally settled. Indeed, it turns out the terrorists do have quantities of chemical weapons at their disposal. Their established disregard for human life and rules of civilized conduct in general – not just in warfare – actually makes them prime candidates to be the authors of the politically motivated false flag April 4 outrage.

The vicious suicide bombing the other day, on terrorist-occupied territory, of a column of civilian refugees trying to reach the safety of Syrian government lines, should have further clarified the dilemma (if ever there was one) of who are the “bad” and the “good” guys in this conflict. In that terror attack, in fact, in addition to numerous adult refugees, at last count about eighty “beautiful babies” were also snuffed out, a Syrian allegation (documented at least as compellingly, if not more, as the preceding one) that was promptly denied by the “usual suspects”. This outrage not merely did not invite the slightest expression of empathy from the ranks of the First Family but it provoked, rather, a torrent of media disinformation designed to obscure the location and circumstances of the lethal attack and to deflect any thought of attributing responsibility for this crime to the obvious, terrorist suspects, as Moon of Alabama amply documented.

Plans for what is going on in Syria today go as far back as 1984, as recently disclosed intelligence documents demonstrate. As Tyler Durden points out these long before laid plans “prophetically foreshadow the current crisis” and mayhem. It has nothing to do with barrel bombs or “dictators killing their own people” and everything with installing a compliant Syrian government in order to lay oil and gas pipelines under globalist control in order to bring Western-controlled energents to European markets and thus outflank Russia in the field of energy competition.

“It was the Mother of all Hypocrisy,” according to no less an authority than Robert Fisk, an outstanding reporter but known for his extreme reluctance to step outside the prescribed bounds of carefully balanced and politically correct discourse. Just as in his uncommonly outspoken and indignant comments Fisk points out, not a single missile was launched to avenge the gruesome murders of these “beautiful babies,” presumably because they were perceived to be aligned with the wrong side in the conflict.

That is the context in which within two days of the uninvestigated chemical gassing incident the United States may have crossed the Rubicon in the Syrian war (subsequent “one off” claims notwithstanding) by undertaking a belligerent and aggressive act of the first magnitude: the bombing, unauthorized and uninvited, of the air force facility of a sovereign nation supposedly to avenge the murder of its “beautiful babies.” The specific circumstances of this gross and lethal violation of international norms (resulting, incidentally, in the death caused by stray missiles of a Syrian mother and her four babies, apparently judged by Western governments and media to be of minor significance because it occurred on Syrian government territory) were quite ably dissected by Alexander Mercouris and require no reiteration here.

Cutting it to the chase, two questions arise. Why was Syria turned into a slaughterhouse to begin with, where an estimated 400,000 babies and adults have needlessly lost their lives? What does the abrupt intensification of unprovoked belligerence under an Administration elected on a peace platform that apparently never was intended to be implemented portend in terms of international relations?

The first question is easy to answer, and it has been dealt with many times over, but in order to understand the moral darkness of these times the answer always bears repetition in all its stark, shocking, and cynical simplicity. It is a war for the control and marketing of vital resources, in accordance with the principle postulated in the infamous Kissinger Memorandum that whoever controls energy and food is ultimately master of mankind. (“Control oil and you control nations; control food and you control the people.”) Kissinger’s philosophy of global control is but a slight elaboration of the maxim of an earlier fellow German-speaker, Anton Zischka, in his classical “War for Petroleum”: “A drop of petroleum is worth a drop of human blood.” Kissinger and Zischka served competing hegemons, but their amoral mindsets were perfectly aligned.

Plans for what is going on in Syria today go as far back as 1984, as recently disclosed intelligence documents demonstrate. As Tyler Durden points out these long before laid plans “prophetically foreshadow the current crisis” and mayhem. It has nothing to do with barrel bombs or “dictators killing their own people” and everything with installing a compliant Syrian government in order to lay oil and gas pipelines under globalist control in order to bring Western-controlled energents to European markets and thus outflank Russia in the field of energy competition.

That is the logic behind the foreign engineered “regime change” assault in progress since 2011 and all its subsequent variants and modifications, including “Syria balkanization” proposals, various “splinter and control strategies,” and “safe zone” initiatives. Rescuing babies or avenging their callous deaths is not part of that picture.

So far, it has cost 400,000 lives and, down to the last drop of human blood, in the calculus of Madeleine Albright’s eager disciples it was undoubtedly “worth it”.

As for the second question, the answer should give pause to all who would avoid the unnecessary Armageddon that Paul Craig Roberts warns of, and who are rightly shaken by former Ambassador Charles Freeman’s surgically incise diagnosis that the U.S. government is the “foreign relations equivalent of a sociopath – a country indifferent to the rules, the consequences for others of its ignoring them, and the reliability of its word.”

Philip Giraldi has also spelled it out plain and clear:

“What has become completely clear, as a result of the U.S. strike and its aftermath, is that any general reset with Russia has now become unimaginable, meaning among other things that a peace settlement for Syria is for now unattainable. It also has meant that the rebels against al-Assad’s regime will be empowered, possibly deliberately staging more chemical ‘incidents’ and blaming the Damascus government to shift international opinion farther in their direction. ISIS, which was reeling prior to the attack and reprisal, has been given a reprieve by the same United States government that pledged to eradicate it. And Donald Trump has reneged on his two campaign pledges to avoid deeper involvement in Middle Eastern wars and mend fences with Moscow.”

One can sign off on every word of Giraldi’s take on the matter, but correct as it is, it is but half the picture. The critical and ominous question is, what is the take of the other nuclear-armed superpower with a genuinely vital, to be exact – existential, national interest in this and a number of other current, potentially conflict-engendering theaters? That superpower is Russia. Only a fool bent on self-destruction would disregard Russia’s view on these matters.

Here is the view of Russia’s influential, superbly informed geopolitical expert and analyst Andrei Akulov, in whose otherwise sparse blurb we merely find that he is “Colonel, retired, Moscow-based expert on international security issues”. Those proficient at deciphering code words will find this modest introduction sufficient and informative, especially in conjunction with Akulov’s voluminous and serious disquisitions on the topics of his expertise.

Ominously, Akulov sees the April 7 retaliatory raid on Syria not as a “one off” event but “as a new phase in the ongoing war preparations (…) Alleged chemical attacks and other things are obviously used as a pretext to justify large-scale military presence in the entire region. The war in Syria has not been provoked by the recent events. It began long before Donald Trump took office. The incumbent president has not done anything new. He just decided to continue what his predecessor started. In general, the US administration is taking over where George W. Bush, Jr, left off. The president, who called for keeping away from foreign conflicts during the election campaign, has shifted his stance from ‘America First’ to ‘America Omnipresent’.”

The clear implication is that Russia – in whose name Akulov presumes to speak – does not take those pretensions to omnipresence either lightly or benignly. His exposition presents a very reasonable case why that is so and many would agree that it raises some sensible concerns:

“The United States has already entered Syria. Its military is there right now. The US Air Force has recently expanded an air base in northern Syria. The base is near Kobani, which is about 90 miles north of Raqqa, the last urban stronghold for the Islamic State (IS).

“It’s not Syria only. After initially reinforcing the residual forces remaining in-country, America’s military presence (Operation Inherent Resolve) was restored in Iraq in the summer of 2014, commencing a campaign, dominated by air and special operations, allegedly targeting the Islamic State (IS) group. In 2016, US military established the Kobani airfield in Syria and also set up an airfield at Qayarrah West in northern Iraq. The Kobani airstrip has been modified to support C-17s, the largest cargo aircraft which need hardened runway to support their weight, and other planes. In March alone, the airfield was used for at least 50 landings by C-17s and more than 100 landings by C-130 military cargo planes.

“The United States is accessing another airstrip near the newly retaken Tabqa Dam, north of Raqqa that was taken by the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces on March 26. The capture of Tabqa airfield about 110 kilometers north of Raqqa would be used in the same way as Qayyarah Airfield West in Iraq is being used for operations to retake Mosul. When finished, Tabka airfield will enable the US to deploy twice as many warplanes and helicopters in Syria as the Russians currently maintain. It is already dubbed «Incirlik 2» or «Qayyarah-2».

“The new base is designed to accommodate the 2,500 US military personnel housed at Incirlik, Turkey. The administration is on the way to pull US air force units out of Turkey, to the five new and expanded air bases in Syria. In 2003, Ankara refused to let the US and its allies use its airspace when the invasion of Iraq started. The decision on airspace was reversed later but the Turkish parliament voted against the use of military bases on Turkish soil. As a result, the US operations in Iraq were significantly hindered. Now the US will not depend on Turkey anymore if Syria’s airspace is open for American flights. This is part of broader plans …

“Escalation is considered elsewhere. Another 2,500 paratroopers have been placed at a staging base in Kuwait. The military leaders have petitioned Congress and the White House for more troops, and the White House is considering loosening the rules of engagement in Afghanistan and Somalia. Add to this the reported plans to escalate US military involvement in Yemen.”

Faced with such a strategic panorama, in Russia it is considered entirely reasonable to ask: What is going on here? Where is this headed? Are we taking all reasonable measures to ensure our country’s and our children’s safety in the face of these rampaging Rambos?

Indeed, evidence is mounting of a growing consensus, not just in the Kremlin but throughout Russia, that “Trumpomania” is over and that having to pick the more dangerous of two apparently unstable leaders – Kim Jong-Un or Donald Trump – Russians in droves are voting for the American candidate.

Russia’s most influential television commentator Dmitry Kiselyov declared on Sunday, upon the departure of Secretary Rex Tillerson from Moscow, that “the world is a hair’s breadth from nuclear war. War can break out as a result of confrontation between two personalities: Donald Trump and Kim Jong-Un. Both are dangerous, but who is more dangerous? Trump is.”

Many will find the reasons for Kiselyov’s analysis, shall we say, interesting. According to him, “Trump was ‘more impulsive and unpredictable’ than the North Korean and both men share some of the same negative traits: ‘Limited international experience, unpredictability, and a readiness to go to war.’”

No compliments there for the chief American “partner.” As for the Kremlin’s perspective, Presidential press secretary Dmitry Peskov was most ambiguous and diplomatic about it. Kiselyov’s views weren’t necessarily always interchangeable with the official position, however “his position is close, but not every time.”

Interpret as one will Peskov’s cryptic words, it does not seem to be very distant from the stance of a growing body of the Russian public:

“A survey by state pollster VTsIOM showed on Monday that the percentage of Russians who hold a negative view of Trump has jumped to 39 from seven percent in a month, and that feelings of distrust and disappointment towards him have grown too (…) “The U.S. missile strike on Syria was a ‘cold shower’ for many Russians,” said Valery Fedorov, the pollster’s general director.”

And to add just one more nuance of complexity to this increasingly eschatological brew, it so happens that, according to the Ku’ran, Syria is situated in the very heart of the end of history. According to Islamic scriptures, when history comes to an end the False Messiah (The Antichrist) will be challenged by Jesus Christ, who will descend from heaven, and the place of their final encounter will be – Damascus. The Last Judgment, we are told by Islamic teaching, will also occur there.

I wanted to check the authenticity of these portents and I asked my good friend Sheikh Imran Hossein, the foremost authority on Islamic eschatology, to enlighten me. This is his response:

“Dear Stefan,

Greetings of peace and love!

There are 3 main actors in the world in the End-time and they are:

The advent of the False Messiah (al-Masih al-Dajjal)

The advent of the Prince (Imam al-Mahdi)

The return of the True Messiah (al-Masih ‘Isa ibn Maryam)

Islamic eschatology locates all three in Damascus in Syria at the same time – hence the End-time importance of Syria.

Also, Islamic eschatology locates the Great War commencing in the region of Syria north of Damascus.

With love,

Imran”

In view of these cheerful End-time prognoses, President Trump would perform a great public service if he took some eschatology lessons with Sheikh Imran before ordering his next missile strike, in Syria or anywhere.

About the author

Stefan Karganovic is a Serbian-American historian and researcher specializing in Balkans and Middle Eastern history.

(If you haven’t yet, be sure to read this: Experts: “In a nuclear war between the US and Russia, everybody in the world would die.”)

If a nuclear war is to be avoided, the US should not set any preconditions for direct talks with North Korea.

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