The Origins of Modern Political Communism

The international communist movement started in the nineteenth century and caused massive death, destruction, and misery in the twentieth century. It presented itself as a movement to liberate the working class.

In reality, the founders, leaders, and key figures in communism did not work strenuously in factories or on farms. They inhabited the comfortable libraries and homes of the upper middle class.

Karl Marx was born to a wealthy business class family in 1818. His chief confederate was Friedrich Engels, who was born in 1820 to an even wealthier family, and whose inherited wealth ensured that neither he nor Marx would ever need to labor to earn their bread.

Another communist leader, Vladimir Ilich Lenin, was born 1870 to middle class family. His father was a school administrator. Lenin studied Greek and Latin, and attended the university after completing high school. Many other communist leaders had similar backgrounds: claiming to fight for the lower classes, they actually emerged from comfortable middle class or even upper class settings. As historian John Stormer writes,

The story of communism is a story of contradictions. Despite Marx’s call for the workers of the world to unite, communism has never been a working class movement. Its strength is in the intellectual and thought centers of the world.

Both Joseph Stalin in Russia and Fidel Castro in Cuba, between them responsible for mass executions and torture, never worked at manual labor.

Modern political communism, unlike its ancient nonstate forms, claims to be an uprising of the blue-collar factory or agricultural class, but is in reality an exercise in social engineering carried out by university-educated sociopaths.

Hating the Hand that Feeds

Following the Russian Revolutions in February and October of 1917, and the civil war which engulfed that nation for several years afterward, the agricultural policies of the new Soviet Communist government caused a famine there.

Death by starvation threatened millions. Despite the fact that the new USSR government declared its hatred for the United States, the Americans wanted to provide humanitarian relief for the ordinary Russian citizens, who were victims of their own government.

Food delivered to the Russians from the United States saved lives. The chief organizer of this rescue effort was Republican Party leader Herbert Hoover. As the Encyclopedia Britannica states,

Hoover was the natural choice to head the American Relief Administration. The ARA sent shiploads of food and other life-sustaining supplies to war-ravaged Europe — including Germany and Bolshevik Russia during the famine in that country in 1921–23.

The communist government of the USSR, in the person of Vladimir Lenin, continued its war on the Russian people - its war on its own people.

Instead of thanking the United States for life-saving aid, Lenin continued his accusation that America was a capitalist society. As an excuse for his hostility toward the U.S., Lenin referenced American aid that had been given during the Russian Civil War.

A Bit Less Oppression: A Bit of Hope?

In the Muslim-majority countries of Middle East, life has long been difficult for those who follow Jesus. They’ve been beaten, jailed, and killed when times were bad. When times were good, they were merely confined to the lowest and least-paid jobs, and denied educational opportunities. They don’t even hope for freedom of speech.

Such conditions are not restricted to the Near East; they are found in places like Bangladesh and beyond.

Jesus followers were heartened in 2016, therefore, when at least one small aspect of this harsh oppression was moderated in Egypt. As historian Jayson Casper writes:

“Long live the crescent and the cross!” shouted Egypt’s parliament in joy. All 39 Christian members joined the two-thirds majority to vote to end a 160-year practice instituted by the Ottomans requiring Christians to get permission from the country’s leader before building churches. The long-awaited reform was promised by the 2014 constitution after the overthrow of Muslim Brotherhood president Mohamed Morsi.

For nearly two centuries, Jesus followers had to ask permission simply to gather for prayer or worship. In practice, this meant that the answer was usually ‘no.’

In the late 600s and early 700s, when Islam expanded westward from Arabia across North Africa, in Egypt, as in the other lands conquered by Muslim armies, churches and synagogues were burned, and the construction of new ones was forbidden.

At various points in time over the intervening millennium, brief periods of leniency emerged, and a precious few such worship buildings were constructed, but often only to be again destroyed by a reinvigorated Islam which emerged after these periods of moderation.

Jesus followers are a small fraction of the population in Egypt. After centuries of suffering from Islamic hegemony, will they be allowed to quietly and peacefully gather for prayer? The events of 2016 seem to suggest that they will.

But over the centuries, they’ve seen such moments of toleration quickly evaporate. Will Islam reassert itself, or will tranquility prevail? The Jesus followers of Egypt have seen too much, and experienced too much, to naively raise hope. But perhaps there is cause for cautious optimism.

Assessing U.S./Russian Relations

The diplomatic situation between the United States and Russia decayed steadily after early 2009. Vladimir Putin, who has been alternately the President and the Prime Minister of Russia, managed to outmaneuver the Obama administration.

U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, using a firm diplomatic hand, had kept Putin within some manner of boundaries until January 2009, when she left office.

When Hillary Clinton became Secretary of State in 2009, her ambiguous use of the word ‘reset’ introduced an uncertainty in U.S./Russian relationships, an uncertainty which Putin was quick to exploit.

In short order, Russian behavior became noticeably more aggressive, e.g., in the Crimean Peninsula and in Syria.

One German newspaper, Bild, carried comments by German foreign minister Frank-Walter Steinmeyer. Writing in the UK’s Independent newspaper, Caroline Mortimer reports:

In a piece for German tabloid newspaper Bild, Frank-Walter Steinmeier wrote: “It’s a fallacy to think that this is like the Cold War. The current times are different and more dangerous.”

Putin was able to use, for eight years, the equivocation of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama to foster Russian expansionism. As Steinmeier’s comments reveal, other nations were disappointed that the U.S. had failed to continue managing Putin effectively.

Jews in Spain: the Best of Times, the Worst of Times

From the fall of the Roman Empire in 476 A.D. until the Islamic invasion of the Iberian Peninsula, Spain offered more than mere tolerance to Jews: until 711 A.D., Judaism flourished in Spain.

After the end of Roman rule, Jews and Christians lived in a peaceful and even cooperative coexistence. Spain was governed by Goths, who'd set up a monarchy there. The Goths showed no interest in persecuting Jews.

The Muslim military leader Tariq ibn Ziyad led an invasion force which arrived by boat from northwestern Africa in 711. By 712, his army defeated Spain’s King Roderic at the Battle of Guadalete. Shortly after than, Islam controlled most of Spain, although small pockets of resistance remained in the Northwest.

Soon the Muslims would boast about having burned “thousands” of synagogues and churches. Whether the numbers were that large is not clear, but the fact that they would brag about arson reveals the nature of their occupational forces in Spain.

Conditions for the Jews became even worse in the 12th century. A new wave of Islamic military forces took over Spain. These were, according to historian Ken Spiro, the “cruel Muslim Berber Dynasty” known as the “Almohades.”

Ken Spiro also notes that the Jews “excelled in trade.” Because “the Jews became traders who covered the Far East,” they were directly impacted when Islam effectively blocked most or all land routes between Europe and places like India and China.

With Muslims controlling Egypt, Arabia, Syria, Persia, and the surrounding areas, the traditional caravan routes were blocked.

The great voyages of discovery, many of which launched from Spain or Portugal, were attempts to find alternate routes to connect Europe with India and China, bypassing the obstinate Muslims.

One of these explorers, seeking safer routes to the Far East, was, of course, Christopher Columbus. Many historians now consider it possible or even probable that Columbus was Jewish.

China’s Han Dynasty: Lower Taxes Bring Prosperity

After the collapse of the short-lived Qin Dynasty, a leader named Liu Bang took power as emperor, and took the throne name ‘Gao.’ He founded the Han Dynasty.

Determined to give his reign a reliable foundation, both for his personal popularity and for national prosperity, Liu Bang worked to reduce the intrusiveness of government. As historians Ebrey, Walthall, and Palais write:

Emperor Gao did not disband the centralized government created by the Qin, but he did remove its most unpopular features. He set up his capital at Chang’an, not far from the old Qin capital. He eliminated some laws, cut taxes, and otherwise lessened the burdens on the people. After a century of almost constant war and huge labor mobilizations, China was given several decades to recover. Responding to the desire to restore the old order, Emperor Gao gave out large and nearly autonomous fiefs.

Liu Bang introduced a measure of decentralization by creating these fiefs. In some ways vaguely similar to European feudalism, this system allowed for more local, and therefore more flexible, governance.

The Han Dynasty began, around 202 B.C., with tax cuts, deregulation, and decentralization leading to local control. These measures were wildly popular with the Chinese.

Ironically, the Han would eventually be overthrown, around 9 A.D., by a rebel named Wang Mang, because they had lapsed into high tax rates, regulation, and central control.

Wang Mang’s rebellion caused the Han to reform, and they were able to regain the throne in 23 A.D. by reducing taxes. Tax policy is the key to understanding the history of the Han Dynasty.

The World Discovers the Role of Women in Muslim Cultures

The first two decades of the twenty-first century have brought Islamic cultures onto the center stage of world history. Islam’s impact on history has been less about a personal faith and more about a political, military, and social agenda.

In late 2010, a wave of social unrest known as the ‘Arab Spring’ swept across North Africa and into the Middle East. Early the next year, this movement metamorphosed into political revolutions, rattling some governments, and overturning others.

Sadly, the revolutionaries were disappointed when the governments they’d overthrown were replaced by even harsher ones. The brief glimpse of an impulse toward a free society and toward individual political liberty was crushed by Islamic dictatorships.

Not only did the Arab Spring turn into an Islamic Winter, but it did so in the realm of civilization in addition to the realm of politics. As Kamel Daoud writes,

The Arab revolutions of 2011 aroused enthusiasm at first, but passions have since waned. Those movements have come to look imperfect, even ugly: For one thing, they have failed to touch ideas, culture, religion or social norms.

The reader should remember that not all Arabs are Muslims, and not all Muslims are Arabs. Arabic hopes were suppressed by Islamic absolutism.

In Egypt, a location known as Tahrir Square became the scene of repeated sexual assaults and rapes. This was a glimpse of how women would be treated after the ‘Arab Spring’ was extinguished.

This attitude followed Muslim immigrants as they made their way into Europe. On New Year’s Eve 2015, a coordinated and planned series of gang-rapes occurred in major cities across Central Europe, as groups of men randomly attacked women who happened to be walking by.

Kamel Daoud shows the underlying cultural connections between the ill-treatment of women in the Islamic nations and the assaults in Central Europe:

The attacks on Western women by Arab migrants in Cologne, Germany, on New Year’s Eve evoked the harassment of women in Tahrir Square itself during the heady days of the Egyptian revolution. The reminder has led people in the West to realize that one of the great miseries plaguing much of the so-called Arab world, and the Muslim world more generally, is its sick relationship with women. In some places, women are veiled, stoned and killed; at a minimum, they are blamed for sowing disorder in the ideal society.

As the data revealed the scope of the attack, and number of victims, a pattern clearly emerged. By mid-2016, police were increasing the official number of victim as more women came forth, and as more evidence was gathered from video cameras which caught attacks in public places.

Women in Muslim nations are largely depersonalized. They lack equality under the law, and are perceived as a source of immoral temptations.

They are allowed access to the public sphere only if they renounce their bodies: To let them go uncovered would be to uncover the desire that the Islamist, the conservative and the idle youth feel and want to deny. Women are seen as a source of destabilization — short skirts trigger earthquakes, some say — and are respected only when defined by a property relationship, as the wife of X or the daughter of Y.

Writing in the New York Times in February 2016, in the wake of New Year's Eve attacks, Kamel Daoud described a global encounter: how the rest of the world was learned about Islamic nations as waves of emigrants left those countries.

Daoud goes on to note that recent massive immigrations into Europe, and into North America, have brought this plight of Muslim women to the attention of the world:

Today, with the latest influx of migrants from the Middle East and Africa, the pathological relationship that some Arab countries have with women is bursting onto the scene in Europe.

For centuries, the degradation of women in Muslim countries was an unseen phenomenon and a rarely-studied topic. For the rest of the world, it was far away.

The transportation and communication of the postmodern era, however, have brought two different cultures in contact. The world is shocked to learn specific details of the way women are treated in Islamic nations, and horrified to learn that Muslim immigrants intend to continue this behavior even after they’ve immigrated into other countries.

Climate Change: Mixed Evidence

The many different claims made about the earth’s climate are confusing and sometimes even contradictory. The thoughtful reader will disentangle each claim from the mass of propositions presented by the popular press, isolate the claim, and evaluate it without reference to other claims.

For example, the proposition that “the climate is changing” and that “climate change in anthropogenic” are separate. One might be false, and the other true, or vice-versa.

Phrases like ‘climate change’ and ‘climatic instability’ also need careful definition. Because the earth’s climate is essentially erratic and unpredictable, it is not clear what would constitute ‘change’ or ‘instability.’

Long before the Industrial Revolution and the widespread use of fossil fuels, droughts and floods appeared without discernable pattern, cause, or predictability. Mild winters and harsh winters arrived capriciously.

If one had unlimited access to data, and sufficient power to construct mathematical models, perhaps some of the historic climate events would have been predictable, or perhaps their causes discernable.

Given however, the data which researchers in fact have, there are at best vague hypotheses about what cause the Medieval Warm Period, an era from around 850 A.D. to around 1250 A.D.

During that era, exceptionally warm temperatures - outliers - are evidenced around the globe. Some data comes from direct observations: records of snowfall or lack thereof, glacial retreat, and harvests. Some of the data is indirect: tree-ring measurements and ice core samples.

Globally, droughts during the Medieval Warm Period seem to be greater in scope than anything observed in the twentieth or twenty-first centuries, as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) notes:

Compelling arguments both for and against significant increases in the land area affected by drought and/or dryness since the mid-20th century have resulted in a low confidence assessment of observed and attributable larges-cale trends. This is due primarily to a lack and quality of direct observations, dependencies of inferred trends on the index choice, geographical inconsistencies in the trends and difficulties in distinguishing decadal scale variability from long term trends. On millennial time scales, there is high confidence that proxy information provides evidence of droughts of greater magnitude and longer duration than observed during the 20th century in many regions. There is medium confidence that more megadroughts occurred in monsoon Asia and wetter conditions prevailed in arid Central Asia and the South American monsoon region during the Little Ice Age (1450 to 1850) compared to the Medieval Climate Anomaly (950 to 1250).

Likewise, the Little Ice Age represents a statistical outlier of lower temperatures than anything recorded in the last century or two.

In sum, change and instability seem to be the defining characteristic of the earth’s climate. It would be truly unusual if the climate were predictable or if it repeated its patterns from one year to the next.

This instability seems to predate the advent of the widespread use of coal, oil, and gas. The instability seems to be no greater after the introduction of fossil fuels, given the major outliers which antedate it.

The Katyn Massacre: Soviets Murder Polish Leaders

Until June 1941, the USSR was an enthusiastic ally of Hitler’s Germany. Stalin eagerly invaded Poland from the east, while Hitler’s troops attacked from the west.

After the Nazis and the Soviets divided the occupied Polish territory, Stalin’s socialists were eager to neutralize any potential leaders. Thousands of Polish military officers, policemen, and priests were rounded up.

The prisoners were taken eastward into Russia, into the Katyn Forest. In an infamous war crime, the Soviets murdered them. An estimated 22,000 victims were brutally killed.

The communists worked to keep the atrocity secret, but in 1943, when the German army entered the area, soldiers discovered the mass graves. The Germans informed the world.

By this time, the Soviets had changed their allegiance, and were now fighting against the Germans. The Germans had no motive to protect the USSR’s reputation by hiding the massacre. The USSR was eager to deny the event.

The Polish government-in-exile asked the Red Cross to conduct an official investigation. They documented the war crimes extensively.

The Western Allies - Britain, France, and the United States - were allied with the both Poland and the USSR. The Western Allies needed the USSR in the war effort against Hitler.

To avoid angering Stalin, and thereby to keep the USSR engaged against Hitler, the Western Allies downplayed the Katyn atrocities. The media in the Western Allies did almost no reporting on the topic. Diplomats from the Western Allies did not confront their Soviet counterparts with the murders.

During the remainder of WW2, and for several decades afterward, the USSR continued to deny that the incident ever happened. In some cases, they were joined by governments, media, and academics from the Western Allies. Historians Stan Evan and Herbert Romerstein write:

At the time of the Hitler-Stalin pact, to take an example earlier noted, the Soviets captured a million-plus Poles and shipped them off to Russia, some to become slave labor in the Gulag, a few recruited as agents, others who disappeared entirely. One vexing question was the fate of fifteen thousand Polish officers who couldn’t be found when efforts were made to form an army-in-exile to fight the Nazis. Nobody could get the facts about these captives, who had in fact been murdered by the Soviets and buried in mass graves in Russia’s Katyn Forest. The truth about the murders would be denied and covered up for years, not only by the Soviets but by Western leaders who knew the facts but kept discreetly silent.

When communism inside the USSR began to crumble in 1989, evidence surfaced, giving shocking details of how the Soviets carried out the massacre. With the communist government gone, the Russians were free to tell the truth about Katyn.

Scholars and researchers from both Poland and Russia have now extensively documented the executions. The priests, policemen, and military officers murdered in the Katyn Forest are officially recognized as victims of communism.

Greece Expands: Causes of the Colonization

“We sit around our sea like frogs around a pond,” said Socrates, and thereby described the settlement activity of the Greeks, which lasted for more than three hundred years. It began in the archaic era, in the eighth century B.C., and ended as the sixth century B.C. drew to a close.

Greek cities spread out around almost the entire Mediterranean area, and all around the Black Sea, colonies of Corinth, Phokaia, Rhodos, or Miletus. These daughter-cities, in turn, again founded colonies, so-called grandchild-cities. Their names partly live on today, in modified forms: e.g., Nizza (Nikaia), Marseille (Massilia).

Which causes led to this emigration movement, which the Greeks called “the relocation of home”? In the case of the Samier - people from the Island of Samos - it was political disputes, and a lack of any prospects for success and wealth.

Other reasons were the search for new places to do business, the desire for adventure, and the desire for knowledge. In most cases, however, failed harvests, starvation, poverty, and dense population allowed no other choice than to move on.

Because, according to Greek inheritance laws, property was divided among all sons, the farmer’s fields could, with time, become so small that they could not sustain their owners. Because, in addition, the population grew, the homeland did not offer enough land and chances.

When reports about other lands became known through traders, individual cities began to think about getting some help: they organized the founding of colonies, and these were often so successful, that they, like e.g. Miletus, could themselves send out colonists several times within a generation of their founding.

Communist Brainwashing

The word ‘brainwashing’ became widely used in the 1950s. It was used first to describe how Chinese citizens were subject to ‘thought reform’ inside their government’s ‘re-education camps’ and prisons.

Individuals who had previously been skeptical of communism emerged from these sessions, proclaiming their firm belief in communism and confessing their previous ‘errors’ and even ‘crimes’ in opposing communism.

Robert Lifton described the psychological techniques of such mind control in his book, Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism: A Study of “Brainwashing” in China.

The Chinese used these techniques to help North Korea during the Korean War (1950 to 1953). Captured American soldiers were made to confess to crimes which they had not committed. Edgar Schein documented these instances of ‘thought control’ in his book, Coercive Persuasion: A socio-psychological analysis of the “brainwashing” of American civilian prisoners by the Chinese Communists.

Louis West also analyzed China’s use of undue influence in an article, “Brainwashing, Conditioning, and DDD (Debility, Dependency, and Dread).”

The term ‘brainwashing’ became a permanent part of the popular vocabulary, although specialists prefer phrases like ‘thought control,’ ‘mind control,’ ‘thought reform,’ ‘unethical influence,’ and ‘undue influence.’

Spy novels and movies about secret agents began to regularly feature the ideas of brainwashing.

In The New York Times, Tim Weiner writes that, during the 1950s, China was “a strange enemy driven by an alien ideology, killing Americans abroad, threatening Americans at home.” Bit by bit, the public learned “that China’s Communists had learned how to penetrate and control the minds of American prisoners of war.”

There are at least two variants of brainwashing: the first changes a person’s beliefs and values; the second induces him to make false confessions of crimes he never committed.

The type of brainwashing which changes beliefs and values has wide-ranging implications. The person will view his own past differently: what was good is now bad, and what was bad is now good. The person will act differently: actions are based on values. The person will speak differently: he’ll give up military secrets, or make propaganda statements for the media.

Tim Weiner recalls that Edward Hunter popularized the word:

The Korean War had just begun in 1950 when The Miami News published his article, “‘Brain-Washing’ Tactics Force Chinese Into Ranks of Communist Party.” He determined that “the Reds have specialists available on their brainwashing panels,” experts in the use of “drugs and hypnotism.”

Although forms of mind control had been featured in fiction, like Brave New World and 1984, Weiner notes that

It took Mao’s China — and the forced “confessions” of some American prisoners of war during the Korean conflict — to make brainwashing a centerpiece of 1950s culture.

In the context of the Cold War, China seemed better than the Soviet Union at thought control techniques, and used them more often. Weiner cites “A Dutch psychologist, Joost A. M. Meerloo,” who wrote

in a New York Times Magazine article in 1954: “The totalitarians have misused the knowledge of how the mind works for their own purposes. They have applied the Pavlovian technique — in a far more complex and subtle way, of course — to produce the reflex of mental and political submission of the humans in their power.”

After the Cold War, the practice of mind control is more commonly found in ‘destructive cults’ like the Scientology organization or the Unification Church (known as the ‘Moonies’). Mind control, as unethical influence, can also be found in personal relationships in a family, a group of friends, or a workplace.

The Global Network of Communist Spies

In the mid-1930s, the world was filled with the major tensions which would later become known as World War II.

In 1931, Japan invaded Manchuria, a semi-independent region controlled by China. In 1937, Japan invaded China itself.

Up to that time, a civil war divided China between the communists and the nationalists. Both sides declared a truce and agreed to work together to stop the invading Japanese.

The Soviet Union wanted Manchuria for itself, and was afraid that the Japanese would invade the USSR. The Soviets, who’d already been supporting the communist party in China, helped the Chinese against the Japanese.

The truce in China was an uneasy one. The communists and the nationalists knew that, as soon as the Japanese were gone, they’d fight each other again. Each side was seeking to undermine the other, even before the Japanese were defeated.

In addition to military conflict, all the involved parties employed substantial espionage networks, as historians Stan Evans and Herbert Romerstein write:

To deal with this complex of issues and protect their flank in Asia, the Soviets had on the ground in China a formidable group of undercover agents. Foremost among these was the German Communist Richard Sorge, perhaps the most effective secret agent in Soviet history (enshrined in the Moscow pantheon of intelligence heroes).

The GRU is a Soviet intelligence agency. It is older than the KGB. The GRU was founded in 1918, and still exists today. The KGB didn’t start until 1954, and was disbanded in 1991.

The breadth of the international communist conspiracy can be seen in the GRU, which was active all over the world, and employed people from many different nations. Richard Sorge was a German, employed by the Soviets, working in China against the Japanese, and working with communists from the United States and Britain.

As of the latter 1930s, Sorge was a ten-year veteran of the GRU (military intelligence) and head of an extensive pro-Red network based in Shanghai. His group was a veritable microcosm of the Soviet global project, including as it did the Red Chinese apparatchik Chen Han Seng, the American pro-Soviet writer Agnes Smedley, the German-born naturalized Briton Guenther Stein, and influential Japanese Communists Hotsumi Ozaki and Kinkazu Saionji.

Born in 1895 in Azerbaijan to a German family, Richard Sorge grew up in Berlin, and studied political science and economics at the universities of Berlin, Hamburg, and Kiel, earning a Ph.D.

Like many people of his era, WW1 caused an internal crisis of belief for Sorge. He developed a belief in communism.

Sorge was a battle-wounded German veteran of World War I, disillusioned by the carnage inflicted by that struggle and accompanying economic chaos, who became convinced that capitalism was the source of these social evils. In 1929 he joined the German Communist Party and would later be sent to Moscow for training as an agent of the Comintern, dealing in “political intelligence.” He was subsequently transferred to Soviet military intelligence, specializing in Far Eastern matters.

Because Stalin’s Soviet Socialist government was allied with Hitler at the time, Richard Sorge joined the Nazi party in 1933. The USSR and the Nazis were allied until June 1941, when the Nazis attacked the Soviet Socialist homeland.

Sorge travelled frequently and during the 1930s was in China, Germany, Japan, and the USSR. In 1941, he was discovered in Japan and arrested by the Japanese government. He died in 1944.

Terrorists are Social

Although terrorists often operate in a murky underworld of secret communications, they are by nature networkers. Terrorists inspire and teach other terrorists.

Terrorists plan with, and work with, other terrorists – even if they carry out their attacks alone.

The majority of terrorists meet other terrorists face-to-face. They train together and meet as groups.

Those who don't meet face-to-face do their networking online.

When the media report about an allegedly ‘self-radicalized’ terrorist, such an individual was in fact radicalized by other terrorists. Someone posted the website which instructed him; someone operated the Twitter account which motivated him.

Someone wrote jihadi texts which nudged him toward destructive behavior. The phrase ‘self-radicalized’ is therefore not accurate.

Psychologist Steven Hassan, who studies ‘unethical influence’ and other forms of ‘mind control’ writes:

People are being incorrectly described as “self-radicalized” into becoming terrorists. These folks can be better understood as being on the fringes of a destructive cult – but in the “sphere of influence” of mind control. They are absolutely being recruited – by people in person and online. Cult recruiters are expert at targeting vulnerabilities and activating motivation. Political and religious cults that use terrorist tactics are aggressively recruiting and some people are being sucked into their vortex.

Likewise, the phrase ‘lone wolf’ does not well describe an Islamic terrorist. Far from operating ‘alone,’ these terrorists are under the direction and influence of other terrorists. There are in communication – even if oneway communication – with other terrorists.

Finally, the phrase ‘homegrown’ is not truly applicable to Muslim extremists, even those found in the areas of Mecca and Medina. The ideas which inhabit the mind of such terrorists have a source in time and space.

The words of the Qur’an – the Koran – and the concepts of the Hadith and Sunnah were compiled in various parts of the Near East over several centuries. They are imported into other parts of the world, and into the modern era.

From some source, terrorists learn destructive ideology. From some source, they learn to yell Allah-hu Akbar.

The existence of some such external source shows that this terror is not ‘homegrown.’

These three phrases, then – ‘homegrown,’ ‘lone wolf,’ and ‘self-radicalized’ – are inaccurate, and should not be used when reporting about terrorism.

Terrorism is, to the contrary, imported from the Middle East, imported from other times, necessarily part of a network, and implanted in the mind of a potential terrorist by another terrorist.

Merkel and Her Germany: Providing Stability in a World Filled with Change

During the second half of the twentieth century, the United States provided a sense of global leadership. It emerged as an unrivaled economic power after WW2, and the only other military superpower asserted itself but did not provide leadership.

At the close of the century, the EU had emerged as another leader. A powerful trading bloc, it had achieved unprecedented economic cooperation.

But early in the twenty-first century, both of these entities faced problems which sapped the energy which they had available to devote to leadership.

The U.S. dealt with a lethargic economy, starting with the 2008 burst of the “real estate bubble.” Attempts by the federal government over the following years to fix the economy only made it worse.

Diplomatically, Obama’s troop surge sent over 100,000 soldiers into Afghanistan – in the previous decade, troop levels there had averaged under 20,000 and peaked at 30,000. The “Obama surge” required getting consent from various allies, which consumed American political capital and left the U.S. with little remaining leverage in other global questions.

U.S.-Russian relations deteriorated after January 2009. American ability to manage Putin departed with outgoing Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, and the incoming Hillary Clinton’s use of the word “reset” created an ambiguity which Vladimir Putin saw as a chance to press his expansionist imperialist agenda.

The EU faced its own problems: dealing with debt crises in the economies of its weaker member states, dealing with Islamic terrorist attacks in Europe, and dealing with flood of immigrants, some of who claimed to be refugees and others of whom were terrorists in disguise.

German foreign minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier describes the situations which hamstrung both the U.S and the EU:

Now, the international order that the United States and Europe helped create and sustain after World War II — an order that generated freedom, peace, and prosperity in much of the world — is under pressure. The increasing fragility of various states — and, in some cases, their complete collapse — has destabilized entire regions, especially Africa and the Middle East, sparked violent conflicts, and provoked ever-greater waves of mass migration. At the same time, state and nonstate actors are increasingly defying the multilateral rules-based system that has preserved peace and stability for so long. The rise of China and India has created new centers of power that are changing the shape of international relations. Russia’s annexation of Crimea has produced a serious rift with Europe and the United States. The rivalry between Iran and Saudi Arabia increasingly dominates the Middle East, as the state order in the region erodes and the Islamic State, or ISIS, attempts to obliterate borders entirely.

With the U.S. and the EU both unable to provide their customary leadership, the nations of the world began to look to Germany as role model. Why Germany? This country had not sought a leadership position, and had arguably worked to avoid one.

Germany’s reliable consistency made its situation enviable. Germany had avoided accumulating large amounts of debt, and had worked its way out of a tough situation – in 2003, its unemployment rate was over 12% – and into a decade of prosperity and economic growth.

Various countries began to see Germany’s chancellor, Angela Merkel, as a world leader. She did not take office expecting to confront a major debt crisis in the EU, but, as Stefan Kornelius writes,

Angela Merkel has been forced to confront this event and try to avert its potentially destructive effects. Unlike Helmut Kohl, she does not have the advantage of governing during a relatively easy period in German history. Kohl made the most of the favorable circumstances and the positive dynamics of European movements of political emancipation, and with a sure instinct led Germany to unification and Europe to a new era of prosperity. Merkel, on the other hand, is fighting a defensive war: she is battling against potential ruin. She cannot promise flourishing landscapes – she can only strive to prevent Europe from becoming a place of desolation.

Merkel has now become a regular figure on the world stage. Her habit of calmly and rationally analyzing situations before acting, and her avoidance of inflammatory rhetoric – especially noticeable in contrast with harsh bombastic blasts issued alternately by Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump – have made her a pole of stability.

The first two decades of the twenty-first century, then, have seen Germany pulled, against its will, into a position of global leadership.

Merkel and Germany Pressed into Leadership Roles as EU and USA Falter

Although we’d like to think that the nations of the world come together as equals, it is also true that they look to certain individual nations to provide global leadership.

Over time, various nations have been seen as providing guidance.

For much of the twentieth century, the United States was a world leader. In the late twentieth century, the collected nations of Europe also emerged as a source of counsel.

Although the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China were powerful in that same era, they were not necessarily leaders.

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, we see a shift in the global community. Those who were leaders are not automatically still leaders, as German foreign minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier notes:

Today both the United States and Europe are struggling to provide global leadership.

The United States has spent some of its political capital in the Middle East. Calling in favors from other nations to support U.S. efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan leaves the U.S. with less leverage in other situations.

Obama initiated a “surge” in Afghanistan, taking troop levels to over 100,000 soldiers. Prior to the Obama administration, troop levels had averaged under 20,000 and peaked around 30,000.

Some other nations were skeptical about Obama’s surge. He failed to stabilize Iraq or Afghanistan. Steinmeier writes:

When U.S. President Barack Obama assumed office in 2009, he began to rethink the United States’ commitment to the Middle East and to global engagements more broadly. His critics say that the president has created power vacuums that other actors, including Iran and Russia, are only too willing to fill.

On a different front, Obama’s Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, mismanaged America’s relationship with Vladimir Putin. The ruthless and clever Putin had been kept in check until Clinton announced a “reset” in U.S.-Russian relations. What the word ‘reset’ was supposed to mean was not clear, but Putin used it as an opportunity for press his expansionist agenda.

As the U.S. faced these challenges in foreign relations, Europe also faced problems. The European Union (EU) struggled with disagreements between its member nations: about immigration policy, about economic policy, about the admission of new member nations, about relations with Russia, and other topics.

As the EU worked on solving its own internal problems, it had less energy to look outward and take a leadership role in global questions. Steinmeier explains:

Meanwhile, the EU has run into struggles of its own. In 2004, the union accepted ten new member states, finally welcoming the former communist countries of eastern Europe. But even as the EU expanded, it lost momentum in its efforts to deepen the foundations of its political union. That same year, the union presented its members with an ambitious draft constitution, created by a team led by former French President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing. But when voters in France and the Netherlands, two of the EU’s founding nations, rejected the document, the ensuing crisis emboldened those Europeans who questioned the need for an “ever-closer union.” This group has grown steadily stronger in the years since, while the integrationists have retreated.

As the U.S. and EU, for their respective reasons, stepped back from influential roles, the nations of the world turned their attention to Germany, and to Angela Merkel.

They looked to Germany because it had maintained an impressive pattern of economic and political stability in the midst of rapid global change. Historian Stefan Kornelius writes:

It was at this moment that Angela Merkel became the focus of attention. Who was this woman who for so long had kept quiet, and who in only a few years had taken control of Germany’s conservative party? Who was this politician who rose almost unnoticed to lead the leaders of Europe? The Germans have been pondering over the mystery of Merkel for many years, trying to interpret her character and the inner workings of her mind. But now the whole world wants to know: how did she get into politics? What is her worldview? What are her values, her yardsticks? Merkel enjoys an interest in her as a person that rarely wanes – yet another reason why she has once more conquered the summit. This time she has come under scrutiny in her capacity as a stateswoman, a foreign-policy expert. What will she do if Germany’s objective increase of power is perceived as a threat? She has managed to make Germany’s dominance seem tolerable so far – but will it stay that way?

Under Merkel’s leadership, Germany has avoided debt and maintained a strong manufacturing and exporting sector.

Merkel’s political thinking is perhaps influenced by her years in chemistry and physics – before she became Germany’s chancellor, she was a researcher. Calm, rational investigation precede her decisions.

Inclined to reticence, her public pronouncements are rarely inflammatory.

Germany, then, has taken a leadership role in dealing both with global economic questions – the loan crisis of 2008 – and with European economic questions – the Greek debt crisis and the “Brexit” vote of 2016.

Islamic Lands Face the Problem of Succession

Disputes over succession have long troubled Islam. The very first such friction arose at the death of the prophet Mohammad: who should succeed him as leader, Ali or Abu-Bakr? The argument continues to this day.

The problem of succession has troubled many societies, from Rome and Greece to China and Cuba. When one leader dies, is there a clearly understood procedure for determining who should be the next leader?

Each civilization must confront this question. Some have answered it successfully. Other have failed.

For several generations, these succession disputes were solved by a policy imposed by Mehmed II in the mid-1400s. Michael Farquhar describes the Muslim’s solution to the riddle of “who should be the next ruler?”

Sultan Mehmed II, “the Conqueror,” devised a simple solution in the mid-15th century for the fierce sibling quarrels that had long plagued the succession to the Ottoman throne: fratricide. “And to whomsoever of my sons the Sultanate shall pass, it is fitting that for the order of the world he shall kill his brothers,” Mehmed II decreed (after having his own infant brother strangled). Nearly a century and a half later, the murderous policy had a particularly devastating effect on Mehmed III’s brothers — all 19 of them! — when he came to the throne on January 27, 1595. The young men, some of them still babies, were ritually strangled with a bowstring and then buried with all due solemnity in the same tomb as their recently deceased father.

This solution to the succession problem was, after more than a century, so thoroughly ingrained in Islamic lands that the British poet Alexander Pope, in giving advice to would-be ruler, wrote, “Bear, like the Turk, no brother near the throne.”

The Peopling of the World: Prehistory – 2500 B.C. (Foundational Concepts for the Study of History)

History begins with texts and writing. Prior to earliest texts, there is no history. Hypotheses about prehistoric times are not part of history, but rather of paleontology. Archeology serves both history and paleontology; archaeologists often find artifacts. Artifacts are man-made objects.

Historians take the data of past events and construct narratives. History is narrative.

Anthropologists study culture. A culture has six common practices: food, clothing, sports, tools, social customs, and work. A culture has six shared understandings: language, symbols, religious beliefs, values, art, and political beliefs. A culture has six ways to organize society: family, class structures, government, economic systems, view of authority, and the relationships between the individual and the community. Culture is learned in two ways: direct teaching, and observation and imitation. Culture is learned in seven settings: media, family, friends, government, religion, school, and workplace.

History begins in the paleolithic age; ‘paleolithic age’ means ‘old stone age’ – in this era, people made tools, jewelry, arrowheads, and other objects from chopped stone. Written records from this era are rare. The Dispilio tablet was found by archaeologists in Greece and dates to approximately 5260 B.C.; the Tartaria tablets date to approximately 5300 B.C. and were found in Romania; the Jiahu writings date to approximately 6600 B.C. in China. The people during the paleolithic age were nomadic hunter-gatherers, who made tools not only from stone, but also from wood and bone. They also began painting pictures.

The transition from paleolithic to neolithic included the emergence of professional record keepers or ‘scribes’ as a defined class: people who could read and write, spent most of their time recording data about their societies.

During the new stone age – the ‘neolithic age’ – people developed techniques for polishing stone, making pottery, and domesticating crops and animals. ‘Domesticating’ means making something not wild. Neolithic people ceased being nomadic, and began to farm. In regions with many trees, agriculture required that the land first be cleared. Trees were cut down for their useful wood, and grass and smaller plants burned off to empty the fields for planting – hence the name ‘slash and burn farming.’

As people stopped being nomadic, civilization developed with five elements: cities, specialized workers, complex institutions, record keeping, and advanced technology. Around 3500 B.C., in the city of Ur, for example, skilled craftsmen called ‘artisans’ invented both the mixture of copper and tin called ‘bronze’ and the potter’s wheel. Around 3000 B.C., the ‘bronze age’ began as this alloy became widely used.

Ur is located near where the Euphrates river flows into the Persian Gulf in the region called Sumer. The Tigris river flows parallel to the Euphrates, and the area around and between them is called ‘Mesopotamia’ – which means ‘the land between the rivers.’ Like all early civilizations, Ur conducted human sacrifices. Young men and women were killed as an offering to the city’s idols, in hopes of gaining good weather for farming or military victories. Mesopotamian rivers flooded unpredictably, and starvation could easily result from bad weather.

Mesopotamia is part of a larger geographical region. The eastern end of the Mediterranean forms, together with Mesopotamia, the Fertile Crescent.

Ur, and other Mesopotamian cities, had pyramid-like structures called ‘ziggurats’ for ceremonies and sacrifices. They did not yet have religions, instead having beliefs which were polytheistic and magical. Most buildings were constructed out of mud-clay bricks. Buying and selling in the city was done with barter, exchanging one item for another – coins had not yet been invented. Most of the population lived in the surrounding countryside and did farming. Reading and writing progressed as the ‘cuneiform’ alphabet was invented, used first for business records, and then for recording events in the city.

These cities are called ‘city-states’ because they functioned as independent countries. They were not part of larger countries. As the rulers handed power to their children, generation after generation, ‘dynasties’ or royal families emerged.

Early Mesopotamian societies faced several challenges: the cuneiform system of writing was cumbersome, keeping literacy rates low; the river flooded unpredictably and rain was unreliable, keeping famines and starvation as constant threats; some social classes engaged in polygamy, keeping social structures less stable; beliefs in magic and polytheism focused on manipulating nature, preventing religion from arising until later.

Many early civilizations focused their magical and polytheistic beliefs on fertility – the ability of farmland to yield plentiful crops and animals; these belief systems are often called ‘fertility religions’ although they are not religions – they are superstitions. Such belief systems are magic, because they are an attempt to manipulate nature – to determine the outcome of a course of events. Along with agriculture, they also attempted to manipulate military victories. Civilizations will move from ‘magic’ to ‘religion’ as the belief system is less about manipulating events and more about forming a relationship with the deity.

This pre-religious phase included mythology. A ‘myth’ is a story designed to explain.

In these earliest phases of history, individual political liberty, in the forms of property rights and in the forms of freedom of speech and thought, had not yet appeared, and was not even clearly articulated as a goal. Liberty was, however, a driving force, if a subconscious one, in historical development and is an innate feature of human beings.

The obstacles which humanity had to overcome at this stage were polytheism, polygamy, the lack of an alphabet, and the ubiquitous practice of human sacrifice.

As these obstacles were removed, societies embraced monotheism, monogamy, alphabetic writing systems, and a respect for human life which replaced human sacrifice.

Mind Control: Cases in Mainland China and North Korea

During the second half of the twentieth century, a bizarre and terrifying phenomenon emerged onto the stage of world history: governments and political movements using the findings of modern psychology to engage in ‘thought reform.’

In 1949, mainland China fell under the oppression of the communists. To obtain not merely the compliance, but rather the willing support of the population, the communists actively applied techniques which are sometimes termed ‘mind control.’

In 1950, when both mainland China and the USSR were assisting North Korea in attacking South Korea, Chinese military officers used ‘thought control’ techniques on soldiers and officers who had been taken captive by the North Koreans.

The startling effectiveness of these techniques have since attracted the attention of psychologists like Steven Hassan and Robert Lifton. In China, formerly free people were ‘rewired’ to embrace Mao’s dictatorship and publicly confess their previously-held affection for liberty as a crime.

The power of ‘thought control’ techniques ‘programmed’ POWs to appeared in propaganda films, praising China and North Korea. The POWs also confessed, apparently sincerely, to nonexistent war crimes.

Louis West, Harry Harlow, and I.E. Farber wrote:

Few aspects of Communism have been more puzzling and disturbing to the Western world than the widely publicized collaboration, conversion, and self-denunciation in individuals - communist and noncommunist, innocent and guilty alike - who have suffered Communist imprisonment. Such behavior in persons whose intelligence, integrity, or patriotism can scarcely be doubted has suggested to many a mysterious power or knowledge that enables Communists to manipulate the thoughts and actions of others in a manner ordinarily reserved to characters in the more lurid sorts of science fiction. Accordingly, such terms as “brainwashing,” “thought control,” “menticide,” and so on, have been applied to the process or product of this manipulation.

The ‘mind control’ techniques developed by the Chinese in the late 1940s and early 1950s became the foundation for further advances in this field, now often called ‘undue influence’ or ‘unethical influence.’

The ability of the international communist conspiracy to ‘turn’ or ‘flip’ a person’s mind in a relatively short period of time meant that individuals who had previously opposed communism could be made, against their wills, to support, and act on behalf of, the global communist movement.

At that time, the communist conspiracy was not a political movement, aimed at changing opinions. It was a terrorist organization and an espionage network. It worked to foment ‘violent’ revolution - it explicitly used that word in its documents. The communists were stealing military secrets from various nations around the world, and infiltrating governments to plant pro-communist advisors among the world’s leaders.

Some of this spy work was carried out by people who were under a form of mind control, acting involuntarily against their own wills. They were under the control of a false persona which had been installed inside their minds.

In later decades, these psychological techniques would be employed not only by communist governments, but also by ‘cults’ - groups like the Scientology movement and the ‘moonies’ of the Unification Church.

Hitler Coerces Support from Reluctant Social Classes

The German aristocrats, capitalists, and artists found Adolf Hitler to be boorish and oafish. Yet Hitler knew that he needed them, and that he would somehow have to bully them into supporting his political ambitions.

Historians have long pondered the mystery of how, and why, members of various German social classes eventually allowed Hitler to build his National Socialist government.

Getting industrialists to support a socialist like Hitler was indeed quite a challenge. As historian Jonah Goldberg writes,

While there’s a big debate about how much of the working and lower classes supported the Nazis, it is now largely settled that very significant chunks of both constituted the Nazi base. Nazism and Fascism were both popular movements.

The masses marching in the streets, carrying torches, starting fistfights, and throwing rocks weren’t from royal families or the nobility. They were the populist base of the Nazi Party.

The word ‘Nazi’ is an abbreviation for ‘National Socialism.’ The upper classes were opposed to both nationalism and socialism. The aristocracy had historically opposed nationalism, both because it placed the people’s allegiance to the nation above their allegiance to dynastic families, and because ‘nationalizing’ industries and economic sectors was a sure route to poverty.

The upper classes opposed both of Hitler’s ideological foundations, nationalism and socialism, and they opposed his tactics of intimidation, as Jonah Goldberg notes:

In Germany the aristocratic and business elite were generally repulsed by Hitler and the Nazis.

From 1919 to 1933, when Hitler and the Nazis finally seized power, it was largely a working-class mob who supported them. The ‘Brownshirts’ were not from elite classes.

After 1933, the underground opposition, which sought to hinder the Nazis and even to assassinate Hitler, had a disproportionately large number of members from the aristocracy.

Colonel von Stauffenberg, a key figure in the April 1944 assassination attempt on Hitler, came from a historic noble family.

Hitler was, simply, a populist:

The Nazis rose to power exploiting anticapitalist rhetoric they indisputably believed. Even if Hitler was the nihilistic cipher many portray him as, it is impossible to deny the sincerity of the Nazi rank and file who saw themselves as mounting a revolutionary assault on the forces of capitalism.

The Nazis exploited feelings of class envy. They had no desire to allow any type of free market. They intended to burden the people with crushing taxes.

Because Hitler wanted to crush freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of the press, and the freedom of thought, it was a logical and necessary extension of the Nazi program that he would also crush economic freedom.

The Nazis had no respect for the centuries-old heritage of the aristocratic families, and in fact, the Nazis harbored bitter resentment toward such families. That resentment would have, for many of the nobles, a murderous outcome.

Deciding the Future of Poland and Yugoslavia: the Teheran Conference

In November and December of 1943, the three leaders of the Allies - Winston Churchill, Joseph Stalin, and Franklin Roosevelt - met at Teheran in Iran to discuss both the next phase of the war as well as how they would organize large parts of the world after the war was over.

(Teheran is also sometimes spelled ‘Tehran.’)

World War II didn’t end until late 1945, but it was already clear in late 1943 that the Allies would win, so they began to make plans for a postwar world.

Eastern Europe was a topic at this meeting. Instead of wanting to liberate these countries from Nazi oppression, the Soviet Union wanted to keep them under socialist dictatorships. In the end, these countries would not enjoy freedom at war’s end. They would simply be ruled by a different regime.

Two cases were especially important at Teheran: Poland and Yugoslavia. In order to dominate these countries, Stalin had to trick Churchill into thinking that the USSR enslaving millions of Poles and Yugoslavs was a good idea.

Churchill was typically anti-Communist and pro-liberty. But in this case, the Soviet espionage agencies had managed to plant ‘moles’ inside the government of the UK.

These Soviet agents controlled and shaped the reports about Yugoslavia: reports which went to the key policy-makers inside England.

Inside Yugoslavia during WW2, the resistance effort against the Nazis was led by General Draza Mihailovich. His men used guerilla tactics against the occupying Nazi troops.

Toward the war’s end, a second would-be resistance leader emerged: Josip Broz Tito, a communist. Tito’s forces competed with Mihailovic’s, but Mihailovic’s troops did far more damage to the Nazis than Tito’s.

Tito wanted to be the unchallenged dictator of Yugoslavia at war’s end, while Mihailovic wanted a republic with freely-elected representatives. To ensure his chances at power, Tito started spending more time fighting against Mihailovic than against the Nazis.

Stalin gave Tito some help: Stalin’s spies inside the British government began falsifying reports about the Yugoslav situation and about the Polish situation. As historian Stan Evans writes,

In both states, fierce internal conflicts were developing between Communist and non-Communist factions for supremacy when the war was over, identical in key respects to the struggle shaping up in China. At the era of Teheran, the Yugoslav battle was the more advanced, though Poland wasn’t far behind it. Making the Yugoslav contest still more distinctive, the case for Communist victory there would be not merely accepted by the Western powers, but promoted by them, with Churchill incongruously in the forefront. The way this was accomplished provides a classic study in disinformation tactics and the vulnerability of the Western allies to such deceptions.

Churchill, who normally favored liberty over communism, had been fed misinformation by the Soviets. The communist spies inside the British government told Churchill that Tito was a more effective fighter, and would establish a free nation after the war. They told him, too, that Mihailovic was actually sympathetic to the Nazis, and would establish a dictatorship after the war.

Churchill was being played.

Eventually, the misled Churchill would consent to Tito’s rise to power. Yugoslavia would not be freed, but would suffer under communism as it had suffered under the Nazis.

Stalin’s network of intelligence operatives had done their job: Stalin had tricked Churchill into giving Yugoslavia to a murderous socialist dictator, and casting aside Mihailovic, the leader who could have achieved political liberty in that nation.

This is the type of fateful dealing which happened at Teheran in late 1943.

The War after the War: Liberating Eastern Europe

The series of conferences during WW2 - including Cairo and Tehran in late 1944, Malta and Yalta in early 1945, and Potsdam in late 1945 - included among their agenda items the future of eastern Europe. Once Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Germany had been liberated from Nazi control, who would govern them? And how would they be governed?

While it was clear that the advancing Soviet army gave Stalin a chance to exercise his imperialistic ambitions, the other Allies felt the need to give him some leeway, because they wanted to keep the anti-Nazi coalition strongly together.

The Allies knew that, if they did not appease Stalin, there remained the possibility that he would switch sides again, and the massive resources of the Soviet Socialist dictatorship would be placed at Hitler’s disposal. Additionally, the Allies wanted Stalin’s support in the Pacific, where the fight against the Japanese was even more brutal than the fighting in Europe.

The capital city of Iran can be spelled either ‘Tehran’ or ‘Teheran,’ and it was in this city that the Allies met in late November and early December 1943, as historians Herb Romerstein and Stan Evans write:

While military matters were the immediate topics at Teheran, postwar political and diplomatic issues would be considered also. Of special interest were the states of Eastern Europe that lay in the path of the Red Army advancing west from Russia, and what would happen to them when they were “liberated” by Soviet forces. Foremost among the nations getting notice in this context were Yugoslavia and Poland, the first the subject of extended comment by Churchill, the second stressed by Stalin as a security issue for Moscow.

At Tehran, then, Churchill backed Stalin’s man in Yugoslavia: Josip Broz Tito. The nickname ‘Tito’ had appeared when Josip Broz began a Soviet-backed communist group which hoped eventually to govern Yugoslavia.

From the time the Nazis had invaded Yugoslavia, Draza Mihailovich had been leading an underground resistance group in an effort to push the Nazis back out of Yugoslavia. The group was called the Chetniks, and Mihailovic - his surname is sometimes spelled without the final ‘h’ - rallied the cause of freeing Yugoslavia.

Because Hitler and Stalin were allies until June 1941, Tito, as Stalin’s agent, offered no resistance to the occupying Nazis until Hitler broke his alliance with Stalin.

In a stunning and masterful propaganda effort, Stalin suddenly directed his radio and print media to portray Tito as a resistance leader, and to denounce Mihailovic as a traitor who’d collaborated with the Nazis. The effort was so successful that even Churchill and the British government were fooled.

While Mihailovic continued his efforts against the occupying Nazis, Tito’s guerrillas attacked Mihailovic’s fighters. Tito conducted occasional token raids against the Nazis to support the propaganda effort portraying Tito as the true resistance hero.

Churchill agreed, at Teheran, that Tito would be the postwar leader of Yugoslavia, and so unwittingly delivered the Yugoslavs from Hitler’s dictatorship into Stalin’s dictatorship. Tito would function as Stalin’s puppet from 1941 until 1948/1949.

As soon as he consolidated power at the war’s end, Tito ordered Mihailovic to be arrested and executed after a show trial. Stalin’s misinformation effort had succeeded, and the western Allies had support Tito, a communist dictator, over Mihailovic, who had been the authentic leader of the anti-Nazi resistance.

China and the USSR: Unstable Alliances

The motives of the international communist conspiracy often caused it to make moves which surprised observers during its heyday between 1917 and 1991. In hindsight, there is an underlying logic to what seemed like unexpected changes.

Leaders like Lenin, Stalin, and Mao were balancing ideology and opportunism. In borderline situations, the winner was usually whichever policy option did the most to obtain, retain, and maintain power for the Soviet Socialist dictatorship.

Allies of the USSR and enemies of the USSR could exchange roles in an instant. As historians Herb Romerstein and Stan Evans write,

Understanding who stood where in the often confusing propaganda battles of the Cold War depends on knowing what the interests of the Soviet Union were at any given moment and how these could abruptly change when the global balance of forces shifted.

The most notable example, of course, was the “Hitler-Stalin Pact,” a treaty of nonaggression between the Nazis and the USSR. Also known as the “Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact” or the “Nazi-Soviet Pact,” the treaty was signed in August 1939. The Soviets and the Nazis were then allies, and cooperated in the invasion and oppression of Poland.

This came as a surprise to the rest of the world because Hitler and Stalin had publicly opposed each other prior to August 1939. Stalin had decried Hitler as an imperialist. Hitler had denounced Stalin as a communist.

Just as the Hitler-Stalin Pact reversed, in a moment, the previous opposition between the two, so in June 1941, the situation reversed itself again in a flash. Hitler and Stalin, who’d been allies only a few days before, were now at war with each other.

This was not the only situation in which the USSR’s allegiances reversed themselves suddenly. Stalin, needing an organized China to prevent Japan from attacking the USSR, backed Chiang Kai-shek, even though Chiang was sustaining free China against Mao’s communist revolutionaries.

While Stalin’s ideology should have dictated him to befriend Mao, Stalin’s instinct for power directed him to ally with Chiang:

Less often noted but equally telling was the zigzagging Communist line on China. As seen, a main Soviet concern of the later 1930s was the danger of invasion from Japan, then on the march in Asia and long hostile to the USSR. This threat dictated a temporarily friendly view of China’s Chiang Kai-shek, then pinning down a million or so Japanese who might otherwise have invaded Russia. The same Soviet interest meant blocking an American modus vivendi with Japan concerning China, as this too could have freed up the empire for an assault on Soviet Asia. In both respects, Chiang’s then-high standing with U.S. opinion trumped notions of accommodation with Tokyo in the Pacific.

As in the case of Germany, so also in the case of China. In mid-1943, Stalin would suddenly drop his relationship with Chiang, support Mao, and direct the USSR’s efforts against Chiang.

When Mao Tse-Tung, whose name is also spelled ‘Mao Zedong,’ finally defeated free China in 1949, Stalin formed an official alliance with the communist dictator of China. But like all other communist alliances, it was an arrangement of convenience, which ended in the early 1960s, when the Soviets and the Maoists decided that they didn’t need each other.

Global Alienation: Governments and Their Citizens

The first decades of the twenty-first century have brought terrorism, erratic financial patterns, waves of international migration, and - in response - bizarre political movements. Traditional political groupings and coalitions are dissolving, and new constellations arising.

Around the world, political candidates are endorsing policy options previously thought to belong to mutually exclusive camps. Writing in London’s Financial Times, Martin Wolf notes that “Marine Le Pen of the National Front in France or Nigel Farage of the UK Independence party” are “politicians who combine the nativism of the hard right, the statism of the hard left and the authoritarianism of both.”

Wolf argues that national political processes have abandoned their responsibilities to the citizens of their respective nations, and have instead become part of a global constellation of political views:

The projects of the rightwing elite have long been low marginal tax rates, liberal immigration, globalisation, curbs on costly “entitlement programmes”, deregulated labour markets and maximisation of shareholder value. The projects of the leftwing elite have been liberal immigration (again), multiculturalism, secularism, diversity, choice on abortion, and racial and gender equality. Libertarians embrace the causes of the elites of both sides; that is why they are a tiny minority.

In the process, elites have become detached from domestic loyalties and concerns, forming instead a global super-elite

One of the foundational principles of the modern nation-state is that civil rights are for citizens. When non-citizens begin to consume a growing part of the nation’s material and political resources, voting citizens

are alienated. They are losers, at least relatively; they do not share equally in the gains. They feel used and abused. After the financial crisis and slow recovery in standards of living, they see elites as incompetent and predatory. The surprise is not that many are angry but that so many are not.

The argument can be made, and Martin Wolf cites lots of statistics in making it, that working-class wages have been stagnant for several decades across the industrialized world. If incomes in the upper lower class and the lower middle class lag behind the productivity of the total economy, and non-citizens are consuming a growing share of a nation’s wealth in the forms of social benefit programs from the government, the result is the rise of “populist” candidates, like “Ms. le Pen or Mr. Farage.”

The net effect of this shift is to draw attention to the concept of citizenship, a concept which has been neglected in recent decades. There is a difference between a citizen and someone who merely happens to live in a particular country.

Elections across Europe manifest the growing attractiveness of political parties who emphasize the rights of citizens. Wolf writes that:

Western countries are democracies. These states still provide the legal and institutional underpinnings of the global economic order. If western elites despise the concerns of the many, the latter will withdraw their consent for the elite’s projects.

Democracy takes various forms. In modern nation-states, its form is a republic with freely elected representatives.

Direct democracies, as schoolchildren know, work, at most, only in small villages. The structure of a republic not only deals better with larger populations spread over larger territories, but it also prevents a majority from abusing a minority.

But in any form of democracy, the foundational concept is that of citizenship. Without a clear understanding of citizenship, democracy is impossible.

Wolf argues that the growing resentment among citizen voters against the global elite is the result of emerging evidence that this elite has lost the vision that the purpose of a government is to protect the lives, freedoms, and properties of its citizens.

Feeling abandoned, feeling that the traditional political elites no longer seek to protect civil rights, voters look elsewhere. Populists are gaining followers, while the

Elites of the left have lost the allegiance of swaths of the native middle classes. Not least, democracy means government by all citizens. If rights of abode, still more of citizenship, are not protected, this dangerous resentment will grow. Indeed, it already has in too many places.

In Germany, chancellor Angela Merkel squandered her popularity by admitting into the country an immense flood of “Syrian refugees” - many of whom turned out to be neither Syrians nor refugees. When groups of Muslim men orchestrated gangrapes of German women in different cities at the same time, much of Merkel’s political capital evaporated.

Those political parties which are viewed as a part of the new populist wave, and not part of the old elite establishment, gained against Merkel’s party, the CDU/CSU, in subsequent elections. The party known as Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) is one such party.

From Britain to France to Germany, populist parties emerge in response to the perception that citizenship has been devalued. This is happening in other nations as well. Voters are posing a question: what is the meaning of national citizenship in the twenty-first century?

Is the Planet in the Midst of Rebounding from the Little Ice Age?

Two events dominate the history, as opposed to prehistory, of the planet’s climate: the ‘Medieval Warm Period’ and the ‘Little Ice Age.’ These represent statistical outliers, the high points and the low points of measured global temperature.

These measurements are based on tree-rings, the recorded advance and retreat of glaciers, written records of rainfall and of snowfall, written records about when rivers and lakes froze over, etc.

For its purposes, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) defines the ‘Little Ice Age’ as lasting from 1450 to 1850, while the ‘Medieval Climate Anomaly’ runs from 950 to 1250.

These two eras both occurred before significant industrialization and before the use of fossil fuels in significant quantities, and can therefore be said to be non-anthropogenic.

The IPCC notes that “most glaciers around the globe have been shrinking since the end of the Little Ice Age.” If the Little Ice Age lasted approximately 400 years, and we are now a little more than a century since its end, current glacial retreat patterns may be attributed, in part, to the plant’s return to its equilibrium, i.e., to temperatures held prior to the Little Ice Age.

Beginning and ending points for the Little Ice Age cannot be precisely determined. It was a generalized trend. Some scholars mark the endpoint nearer to 1800 than 1850.

But, although an exact endpoint cannot be given, it nonetheless makes sense that the end of the Little Ice Age would mark the beginning of a non-anthropogenic warming trend around the globe. The IPCC reports that “most permafrost has been degrading since the Little Ice Age.”

It would be remarkable if, at the end of a four-century-long cold era, the plant did not warm. Tautologically, that is the definition of the end of a cold age: planetary warming.

As the two extremes of measured historic planetary temperature, the Medieval Climate Anomaly and the Little Ice Age constitute reference points for other eras, including the current one.

By contrast, previous Ice Ages were not historic, but prehistoric, there being no direct observations and written records of them.

What caused these two outliers? Any answer must be merely speculative, but some scholars note that ice core samples from polar regions show that wide swings in atmospheric carbon dioxide levels, non-anthropogenic in origin, may have accompanied both the Little Ice Age and the Medieval Warm Period.

The Little Ice Age: the Implications of an Outlier

In the historical examination of climate change, two events form reference points in world history: the Little Ice Age and the Medieval Warm Period.

The Little Ice Age was a period of global cooling. Scholars are unable to give precise beginning and ending dates for such time segments, but it seems to have include a century or two both before and after the year 1600.

The Medieval Warm Period was also global in scope, and represented an extreme warming trend. Beginning shortly after the reign of Charlemagne, this era lasted several centuries.

Because both of these events - the term ‘singularity’ is justified - occurred prior to the recording of daily temperatures around the globe, they are documented by evidence such as the advance and retreat of glaciers, tree ring measurements, written observations of snowfall, and other data.

These two time spans are indeed outliers, as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) notes in its report:

There is high confidence for droughts during the last millennium of greater magnitude and longer duration than those observed since the beginning of the 20th century in many regions. There is medium confidence that more megadroughts occurred in monsoon Asia and wetter conditions prevailed in arid Central Asia and the South American monsoon region during the Little Ice Age (1450–1850) compared to the Medieval Climate Anomaly (950–1250).

The Little Ice Age, then, represents an extreme condition, an outlier well beyond any data points which have been observed in the last two or three centuries.

It also represents a condition with significant duration.

Both the Medieval Warm Period - which the IPCC calls the ‘Medieval Climate Anomaly’ - and the Little Ice Age occurred prior to industrialization and prior to the use of coal and other fossil fuels in significant quantity. There is, then, no possibility of either time segment being anthropogenic.

If these two outliers - one much warmer, and one much cooler, than anything observed in recent centuries - are clearly not anthropogenic, then lesser variations in temperature can also be naturally occurring.

The Economic and Political Glories of Habsburg Vienna

The twentieth century seemed, to many observers, to host the triumph of democracy. When the century began, hereditary dynasties directly governed many nations, and indirectly governed other nations as colonies.

Two world wars and the end of most global empires saw the emergence of newly independent states, some of which fell prey to socialist dictatorships, but others of which did indeed establish themselves as democracies of one sort or another.

The word ‘democracy’ can refer to a spectrum of governmental structures, the most effective of which is a republic with freely-elected representatives.

Those who rejoiced at the rise of democracy in the twentieth century assumed that it would effectively usher in an era of sustained personal freedom for nearly everyone in a society, and that it would foster an increase in opportunities, allowing more members of the lower classes to move into the middle classes.

Toward the end of the twentieth century, however, some of the anticipated benefits of democracy did not appear, or at least not to the extent expected.

The economies of the world’s democracies don’t always run smoothly. Inflation and unemployment, which appear cyclically in any economy, linger longer. The governments of the democratic nations accumulate public debt.

‘Safety net’ and ‘redistribution programs’ - like those designed to support the elderly or provide health care - have exacerbated government debt. Such programs transfer costs to the government, create an ever-growing dependency class among the lower classes, create a politics of entitlement among the middle classes, and are unsustainable in the long run, as individuals find ways to maximize received benefits while avoiding taxes, and as the recipient class grows while the productive class shrinks - which is the result of incentivizing membership in the recipient class, and the result of penalizing productivity.

Personal freedom and political liberty were the anticipated benefits of democracy, but Balkanization and tribalization have damaged both. As competing cultural groups sharpen their mutual enmity, they demand increasing conformity both from the their own members and from members of their opposition. Governments, seeking to moderate these tensions, reduce free speech, free press, and free expression. This is one source of what we now call ‘political correctness.’

Whereas ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’ were once regarded as nearly synonymous, it is now clear that democracy can, and does, damage freedom.

This, in turn, gives rise to a reappraisal of history. Monarchies and other pre-democratic forms of government were once seen as the oppressive enemies of freedom. Now, however, historians note the amazing diversity and creativity of many monarchical societies. Economist Hans-Hermann Hoppe writes:

Meanwhile, Habsburg-Austria and the proto-typical pre-democratic Austrian experience assumed no more than historical interest. To be sure, it was not that Austria had not achieved any recognition. Even democratic intellectuals and artists from any field of intellectual and cultural endeavor could not ignore the enormous level of productivity of Austro-Hungarian and in particular Viennese culture. Indeed, the list of great names associated with late nineteenth and early twentieth century Vienna is seemingly endless. However, rarely has this enormous intellectual and cultural productivity been brought in a systematic connection with the pre-democratic tradition of the Habsburg monarchy. Instead, if it has not been considered a mere coincidence, the productivity of Austrian-Viennese culture has been presented “politically correctly” as proof of the positive synergistic effects of a multi-ethnic society and of multi-culturalism.

The impressive list of composers, poets, painters, architects, physicists, chemists, mathematicians, and philosophers who worked and thrived in Habsburg centers like Vienna and Prague is indeed long.

Democracy’s more simplistic enthusiasts are confounded by this result: they anticipate a gray uniformity in the absence of democracy, but instead they find an ingenuity and inventiveness exceeding that of many modern democratic societies. They anticipate a rigidly imposed uniformity in thought and worldview, but instead find a diversity of religious, economic, and political perspectives.

Once a host to Metternich’s suspicious view of free markets in 1814 and 1815, Vienna transformed itself into a thriving import-export economy a century later. Although the Kaiserlich und Königlich beaurocracy did represent an obstacle to economic flexibility, the imperial government was generally content to allow merchants to operate freely, and did not impose wage and price controls.

It is a mistake to institute democracy and anticipate that it will automatically produce personal freedom, political liberty, free markets, and prosperity.

It is possible, in any one context, that democracy can give rise to these benefits, but it is not necessary that it will do so.

Democracy was seen as desirable, not in and of itself, but rather because it was assumed that it was a means to these benefits. A wiser course may be to forsake the pursuit of democracy, and instead directly seek personal freedom, political liberty, free markets, and prosperity.

Korea's Child Shortage

A population group which has fewer than 2.5 children per couple is in the process of self-extinction. Korea is facing this problem.

Any population which is not growing at a slow but steady rate is subject to predictable economic difficulties. A population which is shrinking is unstable.

Interestingly, a shrinking population is also harmful to the planet. Environmentally sustainable practices are not possible in a community whose demographics skew away from statistical pattern sometimes called the ‘population pyramid’ graph.

The pyramid shape of the graph indicates that there are more middle-age people than old people, and more young people than middle-age.

Describing the harm which low birth rates are causing in Korea, Patrick Buchanan writes:

In 2050, the median age of South Koreans will have risen from thirty-eight today to fifty-four and a third of all South Koreans will be over sixty-five, an immense burden of retirees for the working population to carry. “Korea may lose out in the global economic competition due to a lack of manpower,” Health Minister Jeon Jae-hee told the Korea Times. “It is actually the most urgent and important issue the country is facing.”

Children and young people are the most valuable resource a nation has. Parents are stewards of the country’s future.

If a society fails to provide a nurturing and stable environment in which men and women marry, form loving and lasting homes, and raise an average of between two and three children per couple, then that society is simply dying out.

When History Began

Human civilization, and recorded human history, began roughly 7,000 to 12,000 years ago.

Although these numbers are approximate, they still allow us to ask a question: why did history begin then, and not earlier, and not later?

History begins with writing. Before the introduction of writing, there is no history. From the times prior to writing, there are the findings of archeology and paleontology, but history itself is and requires written records.

Writing is a product of civilization. Civilization arises when human have excess production beyond what is needed for mere survival: extra time and extra materials.

Civilization arises on the basis of physical structures (buildings), agriculture, and the domestication of animals. Civilization requires at least a modicum of stability - physical, economic, political, military.

Of the various types of stability needed for civilization, physical stability is the most pressing.

At a certain point in time, the earth was not as physically steady as it is now. Tectonic plates, which now move only inches in a year, moved miles in the same timespan.

Volcanic activity, which is now rare, caused entire mountains to rise or fall in a single day.

The humans who lived during that time were unable to organize any lasting form of civilization.

One of the preconditions, then, which was necessary for history to begin was the physical calming and settling of the earth’s crust. Only with the increase of material steadiness could civilization begin.

That’s why history and civilization began when they did, and not earlier.