Politico Reports Bush Knew 2001 Terror-Attack Was Imminent And Wanted It

By Eric Zuesse

Condi Rice: Bush’s chosen “fall guy” for the crime of the century.

It can’t get much more damning than that. Bush knew it was going to happen but did nothing to stop it. He didn’t even try to. In other words: His only actual concern at the time was for it to be done in such a way that his prior knowledge of it wouldn’t be provable — that his participation in it, his consciously allowing it to happen, would be deniable. He insisted on that deniability. He has consistently followed through with it.

Whipple then writes:

That morning of July 10, the head of the agency’s Al Qaeda unit, Richard Blee, burst into Black’s office. “And he says, ‘Chief, this is it. Roof’s fallen in,’” recounts Black. “The information that we had compiled was absolutely compelling. It was multiple-sourced. And it was sort of the last straw.” Black and his deputy rushed to the director’s office to brief Tenet. All agreed an urgent meeting at the White House was needed.

This meeting was held in the White House. But it was with Condoleezza Rice, Bush’s National Security Advisor and close friend, not with Bush himself — deniability was Bush’s obsession, and, doing things this way would preserve it; if word of this meeting would ever get out, then Rice would be the only person with explaining to do. Deniability would be preserved; she was protecting the President, from accountability for allowing the attack — whenever it would come. Even an urgent matter like this didn’t draw Bush’s attendance, to speak with Tenet and Black and question them about this urgent matter.

“Bush knew [the attack on the Towers] was going to happen but did nothing to stop it. He didn’t even try to…”

Black and Tenet were stunned by her response. Black told Politico, “To me it remains incomprehensible still. I mean, how is it that you could warn senior people so many times and nothing actually happened? It’s kind of like The Twilight Zone.”

George W. Bush photo op on Sept. 14, 2001, during an impromptu speech at the site of the collapsed World Trade Center towers in New York City. The scoundrel already knew what would happen.

However, when the White House had said “We don’t want the clock to start ticking,” the answer to that mystery was already clear, and both Black and Tenet were intelligent people; they knew what the explanation was, but they also knew they’d be in danger if they were to say it publicly: The White House was planning to assert something like “We didn’t know it was coming,” once it had come. And, of course, that is precisely what the White House did say. And it continues to say: Bush’s successor has no interest in denying it, and President Obama even perpetrates his own lies upon the public, such as by his saying that the 21 August 2013 sarin gas attack in Syria was done by Bashar al-Assad’s forces, instead of by forces that Obama supplied — and knew had actually done it — and such as his saying that the overthrow of Ukraine’s democratically elected (but, like virtually all of recent Ukrainian leaders, corrupt) President Viktor Yanukovych in February 2014 was a democratic revolution there, instead of the American coup that it was, which his own Administration had started organizing in the Spring of 2013.

Bush being told that the deed was done. Not exactly news to him.

[dropcap]G[/dropcap]eorge W. Bush comes from an oil family, and this was an oil-based operation. Another of Bush’s buddies was “Bandar Bush”, Prince Bandar bin Sultan al-Saud, the Saudi royal who was at the time the Kingdom’s Ambassador in Washington, but who, subsequently became the Saud family’s chief international strategist. Wikipedia, for example, notes of him that, “After tensions with Qatar over supplying rebel groups [to take down Assad in Syria], Saudi Arabia (under Bandar’s leadership of its Syria policy) switched its efforts from Turkey to Jordan in 2012, using its financial leverage over Jordan to develop training facilities there, with Bandar sending his half-brother and deputy Salman bin Sultan to oversee them.”

President Obama continues protecting George W. Bush, and protecting the Saud family from being pursued for its being the world’s chief financial backer of jihadists (“terrorists”), by Obama’s keeping incommunicado in a federal prison the man who had served Osama bin Laden throughout as the bookkeeper for Al Qaeda and as the bagman who traveled especially to the Sunni homeland Saudi Arabia, but also to other Sunni Arabic kingdoms, collecting loads of cash multimillion-dollar donations for Al Qaeda’s cause of global jihad —cash from, among other people, Prince Bandar bin Sultan himself. The bookkeeper/bagman said that they paid their fighters high salaries. Those were at least as much mercenaries as they were jihadists. The bookkeeper/bagman also said, “without the money of the — of the Saudi you will have nothing.” The bookkeeper’s/bagman’s testimony became required in a court case that had been filed by 9/11 family members, and even the U.S. President wasn’t able to prevent it, or else was subtly signaling the Saudi King that the U.S. is the boss and can bring him down, if Obama should decide to do that. Only with the continued cooperation of the American press now would the secret of the funding of the interntional jihad movement remain a secret.

But the U.S. aristocracy certainly don’t want the President whom they own to do that; after all, the Sauds have always been extremely profitable for them. As Thalif Deen of Inter Press Service reported on 9 November 2015, “The biggest single arms deal – up to 60 billion dollars worth of weapons to Saudi Arabia — has been described as the largest in U.S. history. According to the Government Accountability Office (GAO), the nonpartisan investigative arm of the U.S. Congress, about $40 billion in arms transfers was authorised to the six Gulf countries between 2005 and 2009, with Saudi Arabia and the UAE as the largest recipients.” The Sauds were buying more than all the other Sunni royal families together, even more than the Thanis, who control Qatar. Those two, and UAE, all being Sunni fundamentalist dictatorships, have contributed the most to bringing down the secular Shiite leader of Syria, Bashar al-Assad. America’s aristocracy also benefits by the Saud family’s long history of assisting the U.S. aristocracy in its long-held dream of taking control of Russia.

[dropcap]O[/dropcap]n 9 October 2001, just after 9/11, The New York Times quoted Bandar Bush:

“Bin Laden used to come to us when America, underline, America, through the C.I.A. and Saudi Arabia, were helping our brother mujahedeen in Afghanistan, to get rid of the communist secularist Soviet Union forces,” Prince Bandar said. “Osama bin Laden came and said `Thank you. Thank you for bringing the Americans to help us.’ “

Though communism is over, the secularism in Russia’s government isn’t, and Russia has increasingly become a major competitor to the fundamentalist Sunni oil dictators, competing in international oil and gas markets (especially the European market); so, the jihadist dictatorships, and the United States, share common cause in replacing the government of Russia, for the mutual benefit of all of those nations’ aristocracies.

And, besides, the investors in Lockheed Martin and other Pentagon contractors are greatly profiting from selling the weaponry etc. to do this job. The U.S. President is their best salesman. President Obama’s National Security Strategy 2015 thus points the finger of blame at Russia for 17 of the 18 times it employs the term “aggression.” That’s Obama’s assignment for the U.S. ‘Defense’ Department and they would never participate in aggression; and, so, too, the term “aggression” is never applied there to the U.S. itself. For example, our bombing of Libya to get rid of Muammar Gaddafi, an ally of Russia, was purely defensive, entirely in keeping with the traditions of the U.S. ‘Defense’ Department.

Here’s something else that Bandar Bush said there:

Prince Bandar: a CIA favorite and an evil twit who well represents the corrupt ways of his autocratic clique.

He acknowledged that the root of some of the rage in radical Islamic circles is economic, and that human rights was a luxury some Arab states cannot afford. “We want the right to eat for a lot of people. Let’s first finish that. Then we get to all your fantasies in America,” he said.

The Saudi King is the world’s wealthiest person, by far: he owns the Saudi government, which owns Saudi Aramco, which has oil reserves of 260 million barrels, which at $40/barrel, is, alone, a trillion dollars; and that’s just for starters. And it doesn’t include the purely private wealth of people such as Prince Bandar, or of Prince Al-Waleed Bin Talal bin Abdulaziz al Saud — the latter of whom is among the top stockholders both in Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. and in Citigroup (and in other large corporations). So, with that trillionaire King and those billionaire Princes, “human rights is a luxury Saudi Arabia cannot afford.”

And here’s something else that Bandar Bush said there:

“In a Western democracy, you lose touch with your people, you lose elections,” Prince Bandar said. “In a monarchy, you lose your head.”

So: the reason why Bush’s (and much of the rest of the U.S. aristocracy’s) buddy, Prince Bandar, doesn’t want democracy in Saudi Arabia, is that it’s a monarchy and each of the royals might therefore lose his head if his country were to become democratic. They want “the right to eat for a lot of people” in their Kingdom, but not “all your fantasies in America.” They need to build their own palaces instead. After they’ve had enough of that (which will be never), the Sauds will allow in ‘their’ country “human rights.”

This also is a reason why each one of the royals needs to pay heavily into the funds that the Saudi clerics — the most-fundamentalist of the clergies in any majority-Muslim country — designate as being holy, such as jihadist groups like Al Qaeda and ISIS, which aim to spread their religion throughout the world. This reason had its origin in the deal in the year 1744, that the fanatical anti-Shia cleric Muhammad ibn Abd al Wahhab and the ambitious gang-leader Muhammad ibn Saud (the founder of Saudi Arabia) made, which established simultaneously the Saudi-Wahhabist nation and the Wahhabist sect of Islam, which is joined-at-the-head with Saud’s descendants. This deal was the most clearly and accurately described in the 1992 U.S.-Library-of-Congress-published book by Helen Chapin Metz, Saudi Arabia: A Country Study (and the highlighting of a sentence here is by me, not by Metz):

Lacking political support in Huraymila [where he lived], Muhammad ibn Abd al Wahhab returned to Uyaynah [the town of his birth]where he won over some local leaders. Uyaynah, however, was close to Al Hufuf, one of the Twelver Shia centers in eastern Arabia, and its leaders were understandably alarmed at the anti-Shia tone of the Wahhabi message. Partly as a result of their influence, Muhammad ibn Abd al Wahhab was obliged to leave Uyaynah, and headed for Ad Diriyah. He had earlier made contact with [and won over to his hatred of Shiia] Muhammad ibn Saud, the leader in Ad Diriyah at the time, and two of [Saud’s] brothers had accompanied [Saud] when he [in accord with Wahhab’s hate-Shiia teachings] destroyed tomb shrines [which were holy to Shiia] around Uyaynah.

Accordingly, when Muhammad ibn Abd al Wahhab arrived in Ad Diriyah, the Al Saud was ready to support him. In 1744 Muhammad ibn Saud and Muhammad ibn Abd al Wahhab swore a traditional Muslim oath in which they promised to work together to establish a state run according to Islamic principles. Until that time the Al Saud had been accepted as conventional tribal leaders whose rule was based on longstanding but vaguely defined authority.

Muhammad ibn Abd al Wahhab offered the Al Saud a clearly defined religious mission to which to contribute their leadership and upon which they might base their political authority. This sense of religious purpose remained evident in the political ideology of Saudi Arabia in the 1990s.

Muhammad ibn Saud began by leading armies into Najdi towns and villages to eradicate various popular and Shia practices. The movement helped to rally the towns and tribes of Najd to the Al Saud-Wahhabi standard. By 1765 Muhammad ibn Saud’s forces had established Wahhabism — and with it the Al Saud political authority — over most of Najd.

So: Saudi Arabia was founded upon hatred of Shiia Muslims, and it was founded upon a deal that was made in 1744 between a Shiia-hating fundamentalist Sunni cleric Wahhab and a ruthless gang-leader Saud, in which deal the clergy would grant the Sauds holy legitimacy from the Quran; and, for their part of the deal, the Sauds would finance the spread of Wahhab’s fanatical anti-Shiia sect.

[dropcap]W[/dropcap]hereas the U.S. aristocracy want to conquer Russia, more than anything else, the Saudi aristocracy want to conquer Iran, more than anything else.

Here is how Saudi Prince al-Waleed bin Talal al-Saud was quoted on this matter on 27 October 2015 in Kuwait’s newspaper Al Qabas:

The whole Middle-East dispute is tantamount to life and death for the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia from my vantage point, and I know that Iranians seek to unseat the Saudi regime by playing the Palestinian card, hence to foil their plots Saudi Arabia and Israel must bolster their relations and form a united front to stymie Tehran’s ambitious agenda.

The enemy, to Saudi aristocrats, isn’t Israel; it is Iran. They hate Iranians even more than they hate Russians. In fact, Talal also said there: “I will side with the Jewish nation and its democratic aspirations in case of outbreak of a Palestinian Intifada (uprising).” Israelis hated Iranians as much as Iranians hated Israelis; and Prince Talal was welcoming Israelis aboard his mission to destroy Iran. So: both the Sauds and Israel are on the same side.

George W. Bush continued America’s war against Russia. On 29 March 2004, he proudly brought into the anti-Russian military club, NATO, 7 new members, all of which had previously been allied together with Russia in the U.S.S.R. and its NATO-mirror group, the Warsaw Pact. These 7 are: Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia.

Barack Obama continued that anti-Russia policy, on 1 April 2009, by adding Albania, and Croatia, and then by perpetrating a coup in Ukraine which turned that country rabidly anti-Russian and eager to join NATO. Obama also had the pro-Russian Libyan Muammar Gaddafi killed, and the pro-Russian Syrian Bashar al-Assad invaded by jihadists who are armed by the royal families of Saudi Arabia and Qatar.

The friend of the Arabic royal families, Osama bin Laden, was ultimately sacrificed to the greater goal of the U.S.-Saudi alliance, which has been to eliminate the pro-Russian secular leader of Iraq, Saddam Hussein, and to provide (via 9/11, etc.) the public hysteria that has successfully enabled dictatorial laws to be passed in the United States Congress, and, increasingly throughout the rest of the U.S.-Saudi Empire.

Furthermore, the U.S. military industries have recovered from their stock-market slumps prior to 9/11, largely because of the success of the fear-Russia campaign, and of the increases in terrorism and the resulting public hysteria that enables a ‘democratic’ country to invade and invade so as to kill the jihadist fighters that ‘our friends’ the Sauds and other Sunni Arabic royal families actually finance.

The Saudis became extremely angry at Barack Obama for his negotiating seriously with the Iranians. For the U.S. aristocracy, the target to be destroyed isn’t Iran, but Russia. Obama represents the American aristocracy, not the Saudi aristocracy. Regarding that priority, the U.S. and Saudi aristocracies part ways.

This has been a very productive alliance. Perhaps, when George W. Bush surprised and even shocked his CIA by sending them the message, “We’re not quite ready to consider this. We don’t want the clock to start ticking,” he had already personally and privately discussed with his buddy Bandar Bush, how they might achieve the most important objectives of both the U.S. and Saudi aristocracies; and this was the plan that they mutually arrived at, well before the CIA had any knowledge of it. This seems to be the likeliest explanation of Bush’s puzzling response there, back on 10 July 2001.

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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Iraq: Tony Blair, the Chilcot Inquiry, “Sir Cover Up” – Is the Legal Net Tightening?

Felicity Arbuthnot

“No matter how paranoid or conspiracy minded you are, what the government is doing is worse than you imagine.”—William Blum

Blair and Bush: Two major war criminals still at large. A one-way ticket to the gallows is what they deserve.

Blair and Bush: Two major war criminals still at large. A one-way ticket to the gallows is what they truly deserve.

Just five days after it was revealed ⁽¹⁾ that former British Prime Minster Tony Blair and then President George W. Bush had made a pact to attack Iraq and overthrow the country’s sovereign government a full year before the invasion took place – as Blair continued to mislead government and populace stating that diplomacy was being pursued and no decisions made – another snake has slithered from under the hay (as the Arab saying goes) in the form of Sir Jeremy Heywood.

Sir Jeremy who has been unkindly dubbed “Sir Cover Up” by sections of the media is Prime Minister David Cameron’s Cabinet Secretary, thus the UK’s top Civil Servant.

According to the Daily Mail, Sir Jeremy has: “insisted he did not deserve his reputation as the secretive and manipulative power behind the throne” and was “frustrated” at his public portrayal.

However:

“Sources close to the Iraq Inquiry claim it was held up for months while chairman Sir John Chilcot argued with Sir Jeremy about which documents could be put in the public domain.

They walk among us: Jeremy Heywood is one of the many well educated fops serving the machinery of deception.

They walk among us: Jeremy Heywood is one of the many haughty vermin serving the global machinery of deception.

“In the end, Sir Jeremy insisted that 150 messages between Tony Blair and George Bush in the run-up to the 2003 war must be censored. Only the ‘gists’ of the messages and selected quotes will be released. (Emphasis mine.)

“Former Shadow Home Secretary David Davis said it was ‘wholly inappropriate’ that Sir Jeremy had been involved in decisions on the Iraq Inquiry, given his role as Mr. Blair’s Private Secretary at the time of the war.”⁽²⁾

Sir Jeremy was Principal Private Secretary to Tony Blair from June 1999 to July 2003 and would thus have been party to every step of the scheming and untruths about the invasion and surely the plotting between Bush and Blair to attack, during their April 2002, three day meeting at the Bush ranch in Crawford, Texas. (See 1.)

Subsequently Heywood stepped in to the same position when Gordon Brown became Prime Minister after Blair’s resignation, a post he held between January 2008 and May 2010, so would also have been party to the plans for and structure of the Chilcot Inquiry into the war, which was set up by Brown. Thus those involved in the bloodbath and invasion, convened the Inquiry into the illegality.

Gordon Brown as Blair’s Chancellor of the Exchequer, wrote the cheques for the years of illegal UK bombings of Iraq and for the UK’s participation in “Operation Iraqi Liberation” (OIL.) He also wrote the cheques for Britain’s part in the disastrous invasion of Afghanistan.

According to Ministry of Defence figures, the total cost of UK military operation in Iraq, 2003-2009, was £8.4 Billion – ongoing since they are back bombing, with Special Forces in Northern Iraq – and it would be unsurprising if also elsewhere in the country, given Britain’s duplicitous track record. To 2013 the cost of UK operations in Afghanistan reached £37 Billion, also ongoing.

British Special Forces (SAS): what are they really doing in the Mideast? Men driven by childish notions of manhood and a pathetically misguided idea of patriotism.

David Cameron who voted to attack Iraq told a news programme at the time: “You’ve got to do what you think right, even if it’s unpopular …”, near mirroring Blair’s “I know I’m right” of the same time. Cameron admires Blair, regarding him as a “mentor.” At every level of government past and present, there are vested interests in the truth on Iraq never coming out.

Cameron’s words on his election as Prime Minister come to mind again: “We’re all in it together.”

Of Sir Jeremy, political commentator Peter Oborne has written: “Heywood is a perfect manifestation of everything that has gone so very wrong with the British civil service over the past 15 years.” ⁽³⁾

On Thursday, 22^nd October, in a debate in the House of Lords, Tony Blair’s former Attorney General (May 1997-July 1999) Lord Morris of Aberavon cited the “scandalous delay” in producing the Chilcot Report.

Sir John Chilcot’s Inquiry took evidence between November 2009 and 2^nd February 2011. Costing £10 million (and rising) the final Report is now not expected until summer 2016 and maybe even sometime in 2017.

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]he families and friends of the 179 British service people who died had been “badly let down” by the delays, stated his Lordship. Indeed, but, tragic as the whole Iraq horror is for the UK’s bereaved, their sons, daughters, relatives, signed up to join the armed forces, trained extensively in killing other human beings and had the lawful right, if in conscience they believed it wrong, illegal, to refuse to serve.

In their debate ⁽⁴⁾ their Lordships devoted no time to the grief of the relatives of the over one million Iraqi dead, the 800,000 Iraqi children who have lost one or both parents, the million widows, the maimed, the limbless, those who lost their minds, homes, all, in the horror, who also are “badly let down”, their need for answers paramount. Only Lord Dykes in just two lines referred to: “ … the fate of Iraqi civilians. That should be a substantial part of this report.”

“…[T]ragic as the whole Iraq horror is for the UK’s bereaved, their sons, daughters, relatives, signed up to join the armed forces, trained extensively in killing other human beings and had the lawful right, if in conscience they believed it wrong, illegal, to refuse to serve…”

Lord Dykes also encapsulated the hitherto unspoken questions:

*“Why was it so important for them to turn on Saddam Hussein if regime change was not the main driver?

*”Why did Tony Blair have those embarrassing exchanges in 2002 when there was no question of there being any declaration of war?

*“Why did the then Government ignore the instinct and feelings of 1.5 million people marching down Piccadilly to protest about what was still an illegal war?

*”Why did the Americans and the British ignore the wise advice of the French Government under President Chirac and Foreign Secretary Dominique de Villepin about the mistake of going to war on that occasion?”

In a surely clear reference to Sir Jeremy Heywood, Lord Morris said that: “ … the saddest feature of the inquiry process was the ‘strenuous effort’ of the Cabinet Office to block the committee from having access to ‘swathes of vital documentation,’ including notes from Blair to Bush” adding: “ Respect for good governance is undermined if Reports don’t see the light of day before issues become dimmed in public memory.”

Lord Parekh also referred to the “delay” caused by: “the dispute over access to various documents”, Sir Jeremy’s spectre stalked the Chamber:

“For example, it took nearly a year to obtain the Blair-Bush correspondence and the notes Mr Blair is supposed to have left with Mr Bush, to read them and to decide whether to include them in the report.”

Baroness Falkner was surely also referring to Blair and Cameron’s ally, “Sir Cover Up” when she said:

“Looking at the sequencing of events, it is clear that there was some kind of stand-off between the Cabinet Secretary and the Inquiry team, which lasted for a while … it took from July 2012 to January 2015 to reach an agreement on publishing the Blair-Bush correspondence.” And does that refer to the “censored” version?

Iraqi lives don’t matter.

Lady Falkner made a vital point regarding David Cameron’s desire to emulate Blair in visiting a full scale “Shock and Awe” on another devastated country which poses Britain no threat and which would be as unlawful as Iraq:

“I want to pick up the issue of our continuing intervention in the Middle East. Let us go back to the August 2013 vote on not intervening in Syria. We as a country cannot, and should not, make a decision on that until we know of our hand in setting that region ablaze in the first instance. That is the least we owe the country.”

Earl Attlee had hands on experience having served as a Territorial Army Officer in Iraq during the Invasion had clearly had enough of prevarications:

“I do not believe that democratic leaders can lead a country to war without being held to account for the decisions that they made on our behalf. I could see the ‘dodgy dossier’ for what it was … “

Baroness Williams was equally scathing, demanding: “ … the truest possible account of this, which I think is the second-gravest mistake ever made in the history of the United Kingdom’s foreign policy after the end of the Second World War.”

Comparing the Iraq disaster to the 1956 Suez crisis in “scale” and “effect”, she stated:

“Today, when we look at what has been tragically not only an attempt to try to invade Iraq but, perhaps more crucially, an attempt to see the Middle East fade away into a situation where there is almost no legally available support, let us not forget that an invasion based on the argument that you need regime change has no place in international law and no place in the United Nations.” (Emphasis mine.)

In context, Suez has been described⁽⁵⁾ as: “ … one of the most important and controversial events in British history since the Second World War. Not only did Suez result in deep political and public division in Britain, it also caused international uproar.”

“It has come to be regarded as the end of Britain’s role as one of the world powers and as the beginning of the end for the British Empire.”

Suez led to the downfall of Prime Minister Anthony Eden whom, it was widely believed, had mislead Parliament over the degree of collusion between Britain and Israel.

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]ony Blair also mislead Parliament, including over the extent of his collusion with George W. Bush. Ironically he has also been described as: “having an unremitting record of bias toward Israel.” (Electronic Intifada, 29^th June 2007.) When he was – Orewellianly – appointed “Middle East Peace Envoy”, he was described as: “A true friend of the State of Israel” by then Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and: “a very well appreciated figure in Israel” by then Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni.

Eden and Blair may have more in common regarding their actions in the Middle East than meet the eye. Eden however simply sunk into obscurity whereas the clamour for Blair to account for his actions grows ever louder. The petition to Parliament for his arrest for war crimes and misleading the nation has nearly reached the required 10,000 when it is mandatory for the Prime Minister to respond. At 100,000 a Parliamentary debate can be called.

The Leader of the Labour Party, Jeremy Corbyn told BBC Newsnight that Blair could see a war crimes trial over the “illegal Iraq invasion.”

www.arrestblair.org established by journalist George Monbiot: “offers a reward to people attempting a peaceful citizen’s arrest of the former Prime Minister, Tony Blair, for crimes against the peace.” So far, five credible attempts have been made and around £13,000 paid out.

As events are unfolding there may soon be no more wriggle room for all those involved in the lies and cover ups. Their Nuremberg may yet await. It is owed to those who lost their lives for a pack of lies. For the people of Iraq it is a sacred accounting, a debt of ultimate honour and a woefully inadequate apology which might at least demand reparations.

Arbuthnot is a journalist specialising in social and environmental issues with special knowledge of Iraq, a country which she has visited thirty times since the 1991 Gulf war. Iraq, she describes as: ‘sliding from the impossible, to the apocalyptic.’ For more on Felicity, see our masthead page.

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Submitting to Moral Blackmail? Kristen Ghodsee’s “The Left Side of History”

Stephen Gowans | what’s left > BOOK REVIEWS

[dropcap]K[/dropcap]risten Ghodsee’s “The Left Side of History: World War II and the Unfulfilled Promise of Communism in Eastern Europe,” is a variegated reflection on socialism as practiced in Eastern Europe, and especially Bulgaria, in the four and half decades following WWII. It is, at one and the same time, a meditation on the purpose of official anti-communism; a near hagiography of the British communist Frank Thompson, the elder brother of the famed historian E.P. Thompson, who died fighting with Bulgarian partisans in WWII; a history of the Lagadinovas, three brothers and a sister (the latter of whom would become famous throughout the socialist bloc as the “Amazon”), who joined the ranks of communist partisans struggling against Bulgaria’s Nazi-allied government; a Philippic against the contemporary political left for being comfortable only with opposition, and lacking any clear sense of what it’s for; and paradoxically, given the foregoing, an execration of communism, filled with the crude anti-communist diatribes one would expect from The Black Book of Communism, and not from one who sets out to explore the heroism of communist partisans and a British communist who fought with them.

Ghodsee is an ethnographer whose prior works include “three books on how non-elite Bulgarian men and women experienced the economic transition from communism.” (Ghodsee, 2012)

Function of official anti-communism
In writing The Left Side of History, Ghodsee set out to show there was much good about communism in Bulgaria. She felt that the achievements of communist Bulgaria were hidden beneath an avalanche of official anti-communist demonization. In this, she has responded to a danger foretold by the great historian of the Russian Revolution, E.H. Carr. Referring specifically to the Bolshevik revolution, Carr warned in 1978 that there was little danger that a veil would be drawn “over the enormous blots on the record of the Revolution, over its costs in human suffering, over the crimes committed in its name.”

Indeed, every effort has been made by those who would discredit the Bolsheviks and all they stood for to bring these to the fore. The greater danger, warned Carr, was that

“we shall be tempted to forget altogether, and to pass over in silence, (the Revolution’s) immense achievements…I am thinking of the transformation since 1917 in the lives of ordinary people: the transformation of Russia from a country more than eighty per cent of whose population consisted of illiterate or semi-literate peasants into a country with a population more than sixty per cent urban, which is totally literate and is rapidly acquiring the elements of urban culture…and these things have been brought about by rejecting the main criteria of capitalist production—profits and the laws of the market—and substituting a comprehensive economic plan aimed at promoting the common welfare.” (Carr, 1978)

For her part, Ghodsee celebrates the achievements of Bulgarian communism. It “provided support for working mothers and promoted programs to ensure the de jure and de facto equality of men and women. Communism promoted literacy and education and health care and guaranteed full employment for anyone able to work. Communism gave people jobs, homes, and daily routines that were predictable and stable…” (Ghodsee, 2015: 192)

[dropcap]N[/dropcap]owadays, communism is presented, not as a type of society that stressed the common welfare and the end of exploitation of man by man, but as an abomination equal to Nazism. In 2009, the European Union created a new holiday, the European Day of Remembrance for Victims of Stalinism and Nazism. Ghodsee condemns this as an attempt to discredit communism at a time the global financial crisis is inspiring austerity-weary populations to seek political alternatives. She cites also as further evidence of the efforts to blot out the rich contribution communists have made to the progress of humanity, a June 2013 decision by a Madrid court ordering the dismantling of a monument that commemorated the sacrifices of the mainly communist International Brigades, volunteers burning with passion for a new, more humane and democratic world, who fought against Franco’s fascists.

In my country, Canada, plans are afoot to erect a monument to the “victims” of communism, leaving ordinary Canadians puzzled as to why. Canada has never been Communist.

But there is a chance that Canadians, and others in the world, bedevilled by unemployment, economic insecurity, diminished economic opportunity and growing material deprivation, will increasingly look to the model provided by the really-existing socialism of the Soviet bloc as an alternative. “Communism may be making a bit of a comeback in Europe,” Ghodsee writes, “but it is also the case that some political elites are working harder than ever to stop it by blackwashing its history.” (Ghodsee, 2015: viii-xix) She adds, “At the exact moment when ordinary people are searching for political alternatives, many official historical institutes are supported (often with funds from the West) to discredit communism.”

Bulgaria’s King Boris III and friend.

Victims of communism, promoters of fascism

Ghodsee effectively punctures the growing movement to commemorate the ‘victims’ of communism by showing that the ‘victims’ were hardly innocents, but in many cases, were xenophobes, Judeophobes, and fascists responsible for the deaths, oppression and exploitation of numberless people.

Every year some Bulgarians lay wreaths at a wall inscribed with the names of many who died at the hands of communists. “The victims memorialized on the wall include many political opponents of communism executed after September 1944, when Bulgaria’s communists seized power in this tiny Balkan country,” reported the Associated Press. (Ghodsee, 2015: 192) Ghodsee points out that ‘Nowhere was it mentioned, even in passing, that Bulgaria’s ‘political and military elite’ were allied with Nazi Germany.” (Ghodsee, 2015: 192)

“Nowadays, communism is presented, not as a type of society that stressed the common welfare and the end of exploitation of man by man, but as an abomination equal to Nazism…”

The ‘victims’ of communism memorialized in Bulgaria include:

o Bogdan Filov, a passionate and committed ally of Hitler, who as Bulgarian prime minister from 1940 to 1943, deported 11,000 Jews to their deaths at Treblinka;

o Petar Gabrovski, minister of the interior under Filov, and briefly prime minister; a vicious Judeophobe who started his political career as a Nazi;

o Nikola Zhekov, head of the Bulgarian far-right legionnaires and a personal friend of Hitler;

o General Hristo Lukov, the Bulgarian minister of war, who has become an inspiration for today’s neo-Nazis. (Ghodsee, 2015:194-196)

What are we fighting for?

Ghodsee writes of an encounter with students at an Occupy-like encampment.

“I spoke to some students sitting on the ground in front of one of the tents. There was a sign in Bulgarian. It read ‘This is not a protest. This is a process. Revolution for a New Bulgaria.’

“I asked the students why they were protesting. One young woman said, ‘I love my country, but I have no future here. While the Mafia governments stay in power, Bulgaria will never develop, I don’t want to leave. I want to stay and fight and make my country a better place.’

“’Do you have any concrete proposals?” I said. The protestors I had spoken to thus far all had very different ideas about what needed to be done.

“’Free university education,’ she said. The other students nodded. ‘And practical training placements for three years after you graduate.’

“’You mean like it was before?’ I said. Before 1989, the state paid for all university education, and all students completed three years of national service upon graduation. The state guaranteed a job in the student’s area of speciality…

“’Yes,’ the woman said…

“A second woman in the group waited until there was a lull in the conversation before she spoke. ‘There should be more kindergartens,’ she said. ‘Every mother should have a safe place for her child when she works.’

“’You mean like they had under communism?’ I said.

“At the word ‘communism,’ the students tensed.

“’We don’t want communism back,” the first young woman said. ‘We just want a normal country.” (Ghodsee, 2015:166-168)

In a similar vein, Ghodsee recounts a conversation between two elderly Bulgarian women, Elena Lagadinova, who joined the Bulgarian partisans at age 14 and later became a member of the Bulgarian Communist Party Central Committee, and Maria Zneopolska, author of a book on Frank Thompson.

“’Look at these protestors,’ Elena said, ‘They are against the monopolies and the corruption and the foreign capitalists. These are the same things (the communist partisans) were against.’

‘It’s the same fight,” Maria agreed. She looked to Elena and then back at me. ‘But it’s not enough to protest against. Nothing ever changes until the people have something to fight for.’” (Ghodsee, 2015: 175)

Ghodsee’s anticommunism

[dropcap]W[/dropcap]hile Ghodsee laments that “strident anticommunist rhetoric demonizes anyone who once called himself or herself a ‘communist’ or who believed in the communist ideal” (Ghodsee, 2015: xvi) and regrets the hegemony of an anti-communist ideology that makes it “easier to assert that the moon landing was staged than it would be to argue that there was anything good about the communist past,” (Ghodsee, 2015: 133) she, herself, reinforces the anti-communism she deplores.

Stalin: Always the man to flog when accusing communism of its putative excesses and failures. Rather than examining the history of Stalin’s Soviet Union from the perspective of the multiple and almost insuperable challenges the country’s leadership faced, Ghodsee offers a strident sophomoric psychological reductionism, transforming Stalin into a kind of cartoon character Dr. Evil, who she depicts as a “megalomaniac” who “hijacked the communist cause” to pursue his “dreams of world domination.”

This, she does, subtly, in earlier publications, through the use of language that implicitly accepts communism as a danger implanted from without. For example, in

Ghodsee: Examining the important phenomenon of “red nostalgia” with less than sufficient moral integrity.

In The Left Side of History Ghodsee abandons subtle anti-communist language for crude, and shockingly puerile, anti-communist rhetoric. After touting the achievements of Bulgaria’s communism, she brands communist Bulgaria “a brutal dystopia ruled by paranoid dictators.” (Ghodsee, 2015: 129) Rather than examining the history of Stalin’s Soviet Union from the perspective of the multiple and almost insuperable challenges the country’s leadership faced, she offers a sophomoric psychological reductionism, transforming Stalin into a kind of cartoon character Dr. Evil, who she depicts as a “megalomaniac” who “hijacked the communist cause” (Ghodsee, 2015: 129) to pursue his “dreams of world domination.” (Ghodsee, 2015; 128) It appears that it is not only the European Union that has drawn an equal sign between Hitler and Stalin.

Against the Stalinist Beelzebub Ghodsee juxtaposes the pure and angelic heroes of her book, Frank Thompson and the Lagadinovas, the ‘good’ communists betrayed by their iniquitous leaders. “I needed to remind myself,” she writes, “that not all who fought or found themselves on the left side of history were radical Marxist zealots bent on world domination.” (Ghodsee, 2015: 199) Ghodsee wants us to believe that everything good about communism in Bulgaria is traceable to Thompson, the Lagadinovas, and the good communists, and all the bad is due to “Stalinists.”

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]his, however, is completely indefensible. The Bulgarian partisans and Frank Thompson had very little to do with the gains communism implanted in Bulgaria. The Bulgarian partisans were, by Ghodsee’s own admission, largely ineffective. They spent most of their time eking out a bare existence, frequently betrayed by peasants who didn’t support them. Unlike in neighboring Greece and Yugoslavia, where foreign occupations galvanized people to support the communist-led guerrilla resistance, Bulgaria was allied with Nazi Germany and endured no foreign occupation. The lives of most Bulgarians during the war were quiet, and they did not support the communist guerrillas. It was the Red Army, under Stalin’s leadership, that ultimately toppled Hitler’s allies in Sofia, and brought communism to Bulgaria. Stalin, far more than the Lagadinovas, and especially the hapless (though admirable) Frank Thompson, is responsible for the immense social gains Bulgaria enjoyed during the communist period.

Ghodsee’s politics

Ghodsee’s political ideal, revealed in her various other writings, is “a more socially oriented state akin to the Scandinavian welfare state—states that combine democracy with social security.” (Ghodsee, 2004) She doesn’t say what she means by ‘democracy,” though it appears that she means a multiparty state, or at least, not the socialist states of central and eastern Europe in which one party, that of the Communists, was hegemonic. What she’s against is “the overly-individualistic, savage capitalism of the United States and the United Kingdom,” (Ghodsee, 2004) but is also against “one-party rule and leaders who remained unchallenged for thirty-five years” (Ghodsee, 2015: 191). She favors a combining of the full-employment, social welfare, egalitarian politics of the communist states (democracy as a type of society) with the procedural democracies of North America and Western Europe (democracy as a set of rules for electing representatives.) In this she is guilty of what she faults the contemporary left for: being clear on what she’s against (‘savage’ capitalism* and the one-party state), but having no concrete proposal for how to bring about the implied alternative, namely, socialism within a multi-party state—nor any sense, one suspects, of whether a socialist state with a Western-style parliamentary democracy is at all possible in a world profoundly dominated politically, economically, militarily and ideologically by a capitalist elite, who will no more accept a “democratic” socialism than an “undemocratic” one. The only difference between the socialism Ghodsee lionizes and the socialism she deplores is that the first has never existed. It’s as if, like the supporters of Syriza, Ghodsee believes that all one has to do is vote against capitalism (or austerity) and the capitalist elite, its institutions, and imperatives will meekly step aside. Jean Bricmont offers a refreshing corrective to Ghodsee’s naiveté. “If it is true, as often said, that most socialist regimes turn out to be dictatorships that is largely because a dictatorship is much harder to overthrow or subvert than a democracy.” (Bricmont, 2006)

Conclusion

The Left Side of History is not without its charms. Ghodsee does stress the importance for the left of having a clear idea of what it’s for and concrete proposals for how to get there. She makes the case, cogently I think, that the upsurge in official anticommunism is linked to the financial crisis and austerity and the need of ruling elites to eclipse, what from their point of view, is a danger that in a searching for political alternatives, people will turn to the really-existing socialism of the Soviet bloc for inspiration. She has shown that many of the so-called victims of communism were hardly innocent, but instead were victimizers—often fascists, racists and xenophobes, responsible for the persecution, oppression and deaths of numberless people. And in exploring the lives of Frank Thomson and the Lagadinovas, she challenges official anti-communism by pointing to communists who were not the “red scum” of official anticommunist demonology but selfless heroes with a burning passion for a more humane, democratic world.

The weakness of The Left Side of History lies in Ghodsee’s occasional substitution of anti-communist slogans for critical analysis, as in her portrayal of Stalin as a paranoid bent on world domination who hijacked a good cause and turned it to evil ends. In this she concedes to the official demonology. To be sure, in her view, Thompson and the Lagadinovas were communist heroes but Stalin and Stalinists were red scum. What Ghodsee loses sight of was that Thompson and the Lagadinovas were members of a movement in which Stalin played a central role, and could therefore, themselves, be called “Stalinists.” What’s more, Stalin, to far greater degree than Ghodsee’s chosen heroes, brought the achievements of communism to Eastern Europe.

Another weakness is Ghodsee’s depiction of communist Eastern Europe as a brutal dystopia. Indeed, this borders on bizarre, considering that she attributes the rise in official anticommunism to a need on the part of ruling elites to discredit communism as a model. Why would anyone feel compelled to discredit a brutal dystopia?

One could speculate that in writing The Left Side of History, Ghodsee was filled with a dread that her favorable assessments of communism would inevitably mean she would be denounced as a Stalinist. Could it be that as a prophylaxis, she armored herself with anti-Stalinist rhetoric? Her rhetoric is fevered, of a more rabid variety than even conservatives are capable of. I’m not sure I’ve ever heard anyone seriously accuse Stalin—the champion of socialism in one country, the man who dismantled the Comintern and pursued what his leftist critics called an overly cautious foreign policy–of having had an agenda of world domination.

If indeed fear of being denounced as a Stalinist led Ghodsee to the missteps that have almost fatally weakened The Left Side of History, she might have looked to E.H. Carr for inspiration. After publicly declaring his concern that the achievements of communism would be expunged from history, Carr acknowledged that, “Of course, I know that anyone who speaks of the achievements of the Revolution will at once be branded as a Stalinist. But I am not prepared to submit to this kind of moral blackmail.” (Carr, 1978)

*Savage capitalism implies there’s some other kind of capitalism, perhaps a gentle one. But this is tantamount to distinguishing a gentle slavery from a savage slavery, as if indeed, a gentle slavery (or a gentle capitalism) is anything but an oxymoron.

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References

Jean Bricmont. Humanitarian Imperialism: Using Human Rights to Sell War. 2006

Kristen Ghodsee, “The Specter Still Haunts: Revisiting 1989,” Dissent, Spring 2012

E.H. Carr, “The Russian Revolution and the West,” New Left Review 1/111/ September-October 1978.

Kristen Ghodsee, “Red Nostalgia? Communism, Women’s Emancipation, and Economic Transformation in Bulgaria,” L,Homme Z. F. G. 15, 1 (2004)

Kristen Ghodsee, Lost in Transition: Ethnographies of Everyday Life after Communism. Duke University Press Books, 2011.

Kristen Ghodsee. The Left Side of History: World War II and the Unfulfilled Promise of Communism in Eastern Europe. Duke University Press. 2015.

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