Thursday, October 21, 2010

On the "Global Civil War"

Alternative terms: “world civil war” or “global insurgency”. One possible definition could be that the concept is used to describe simultaneous civil conflict happening at many locations with little regard for national boundaries. There is no comprehensive definition of a civil war. A simple definition is that it is a violent conflict in which organized groups within a country fight against each other for political control or to change government policy (The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Modern World, 2008).

The best discussion on civil war is Professor Reinhhart Kosseleck's and others article "Revolution, Rebellion, Aufruhr, Buergerkrieg" in Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe. Historisches Lexikon zur politisch-sozialen Sprache in Deutschland, Vol. 5 (1984).

Seemingly, global civil war is a contradiction in terms. A civil war must be within a society, because societies are associated with the nation. Thus a civil war should not be global. A global war is normally seen as international. But after 2001 things are different.

Oswald Spengler (1880 – 1936)
This German civilizationist and historian used the term world civil war to explain the fall of the Roman Empire, based on the role of Germanic tribes both within and outside Roman territory.

Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. (1917 – 2007)
This American historian associated world civil war with the promotion of numerous Marxist and Marxist-Leninist anti-colonialist groups often supported by the Soviet Union, a phenomenon the United States and the rest of the West opposed.

Sharad Joshi (1935 - )
This Indian economist and politician after September 11 released an article, “Portends of a World Civil War”, in which he anticipated a possible world civil war different from the world-wide wars of the previous century. It could involve nations internally divided against each other:

It is difficult to say if the radical Seattle leaders contacted Osama Bin Laden or whether it was the other way round. It does not matter, in any case. They appear to work in tandem. The Third World War is unlikely to be a conflict between the US and Afghanistan on the issue of terrorism. It appears it will develop into a much larger conflagration involving most countries.

Buckminster Fuller (1895 – 1983)
This American futurologist discussed the concept of world civil war in Ideas & Integrities (1963).


Dr. Dmytro Dontsov (1883 – 1973)
This Ukrainian great political thinker and publicist-in-exile presented his view on the world civil war in an article published in 1973 (“The Era of Civil Wars and the West”).

Bertil Häggman (1940 - )
This Swedish jurist and author discussed the world civil war in an article in the Swedish publication Contra (in Swedish):

"A civil war between revolution and counter revolution has raged since 1789. The civil war celebrated its bicentennial in 1989 and is still continuing. Already the year after the start of the war in Paris the first resistance emerged in England. But the war goes on."

In a revised version in English Häggman has further presented his views on the global civil war:

"The world civil war started when the kingdom was abolished in France and the prison of the Bastille was stormed on July 14, 1789. After some years of revolutionary rule in France a republic was introduced. The revolutionary Jacobin terror started in 1793 and lasted until 1795 with thousands being executed. Queen Marie Antoinette was among the executed. Royalists and counterrevolutionaries in western France and in many other areas rose in insurgency. The terror regime was lead by the so called Welfare Executive, headed by Maxmilien Robespierre. There was bloody repression against the counterrevolutionary insurgents. A totalitarian regime in France continued with Napoleon’s empire and its policy of conquest in Europe."

Burke and Revolution
Edmund Burke’s book Reflections on the Revolution in France was published in 1790. Burke was a member of the British parliament and warned that the French revolution could have disastrous effects also in England. The talk of human rights and freedom in France was early unmasked in the book. Instead according to Burke the revolution would end in total oppression and terror, which also was the case in 1793.
Edmund Burke before his death in 1797 described the global threat of the Jacobins in a number of letters (one of them was not published until 1812, Letters on a Regicide Peace, 1797). The great Irishman and English philosopher and politician (who was active in Great Britain) before his passing in 1797 the global threat of Jacobinism in a number of letters (one of them was not published posthumously in 1812; Letters on a Regicide Peace, 1797). The quotes underneath are from the brilliant Burke biography by Russell Kirk, Edmund Burke – A Genius Reconsidered (1967).

It was the duty of England to save Europe from the Jacobin danger. A war had to be carried on until the Jacobin danger stopped and Napoleon was defeated. A war to end in military victory had to be conducted, a long war. It also continued until 1815, long after the death of Edmund Burke:

In international law war was justified…They may be wrong and violent: but also they may be ‘the sole means of justice among nations’…Britain should wage war unrelentingly upon the Jacobins…they were bent on ruining the Christian commonwealth of Europe…Jacobinism was a general evil, not merely a local one; so what was being fought was a civil war, not a foreign war…Britain must strike at the heart of Jacobin power, in France. Should Jacobinism be allowed to retain the core of the European commonwealth, in time Jacobinism would triumph everywhere…It did not rely on numbers, but upon tight organization and fanatic belief.

The late American Paleoconservative Professor Russell Kirk in his brilliant biography of Edmund Burke (Edmund Burke -A Genius Reconsidered, 1967) described not only French despotism. Long after the English genius had died Communism and Nazism threatened the European continent and the world. Over 200 years ago it was described by the Irishborn MP:

By propaganda and terror, the masters of such a total state [will conquer]…Only intervention by a free nation, employing all its resources and faith with a force and spirit equal to that of the radical oligarchy, can work emancipation…
The Jacobin state had to be destroyed wrote this one of Conservatism’s most important thinkers, otherwise it would destroy all of Europe. We can still hear the voice of Burke across the centuries against abstract ideologies: Socialism, Communism, Nazism, Maoism, Anarchism and and Islamism.

The French revolution initiated a long line of socialist theories, which reached their “height” with the Bolshevik revolution in 1917.

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels wrote the Communist Manifesto in 1848 for the first communist party. The main goal was violent revolution and restructuring of society. The communists, they wrote, do not hide their views and intentions. They openly declare that their goal will be reached through violent revolution of all existing societies.

Marx described the Paris commune (the rising in France’s capital 1871) as the first socialist state, which had, he claimed, been initiated by himself. The commune lasted 72 days and cost more than 20,000 lives. The same year Marx published the book The Civil War in France and claimed that the commune was a true dictatorship of the proletariat. In reality it was never socialist. The role of the socialists in the leadership was very limited.

The Model of the French Terror Regime
The Russian revolutionaries had Robespierre and the Jacobins as their models. It was in connection with the Bolshevik revolution in Russia that the mass murder of the European civil war was initiated. This has been described in detail in The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression (in English 1999; in the chapter A State Against Its People: Violence, Repression and Terror in the Soviet Union).
After the taking of power of the Bolsheviks the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) initiated class extermination. The bourgeois was to be exterminated and the European civil war cost more lives. Already in the summer of 1918 European newspapers reported of the terrible crushing of a social class and already in 1921 the losses on the European civil war’s Russian front was reported to be 1, 6 million. Alexander Solzhenitsyn (The Gulag Archipelago, 1974) and Lev Kopelev (To Be Preserved Forever, 1977) have with great insight depicted mass slaughter in the Soviet Union until the death of Stalin in 1953. Karl Radek, who was the CPSU party representative in Germany, wrote in 1919 that the revolution does not debate with its enemies. It crushes them just like counterrevolution (The Development of Socialism from Science to Deed, in German).

German Nazism and Italian Fascism used bourgeois fear that class extermination in Russia would be the model for Germany and Italy if the communists took power. In Germany the Nazis copied the Russian communist technique for extermination of enemies, both political and so called “racial enemies” (Jews).

After a preparatory time in the 1930s a new phase of the European civil war started. Germany and Italy attacked in Europe. Gradually the so called Steel Pact was enlarged to the Anti-Comintern Pact including the Asian great power Japan. After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor the European civil war developed into a world civil war, which ended with allied victory over Germany, Japan and Italy in 1945.

The Cold War
After 1945 the “hot war” developed into a cold world civil war (Stefan T. Possony, A Century of Conflict – Communist Techniques of World Revolution 1848 – 1950, Chicago 1953). The Chinese communists took power on Mainland China in 1949 and a new era of class extermination was initiated. This phase of the world civil war is described in The Black Book of Communism (China A Long March into Darkness) and in Bertil Haggman’s book The Communist Holocaust (in Swedish 1982). The number of victims of Mao (exceeding those in the Soviet Union) have been estimated to be around 80 million in total.

The communist regime in Moscow collapsed in 1991 after the United States under President Ronald Reagan had changed American foreign policy from containment of the Soviet Union and communism to liberation of the peoples enslaved by Soviets in Eastern and Central Europe. A period of economic and political warfare was initiated in 1982-83 by the United States and led to freedom for a number of oppressed peoples.
The Cold War was a world-encompassing revolutionary attack on the West. The communists in Moscow and all over the world waged a total war to destroy the social structure of the enemy. The goal was to eliminate the leading classes in the West and distribute their property (especially to communists). There was no other goal in this phase of the world civil war named the Cold War. Subversion was the method. The use of military or non-military means was coincidental to circumstances and both legal and illegal methods were used to take power in the West.

The Continuing World Civil War
When France celebrated the 200th anniversary of the French revolution the French historian Francois Furet presented communism going back to the revolution in Paris (his book The Passing of an Illusion. The Idea of Communism in the Twentieth Century, in English 2000 and to be published in Swedish in 2010).

The author of this article is claiming that from 1789 to 1991 first a European civil war and then a world civil war has raged. It has continued after 1991 and especially from September 11, 2001 when radical Islam started war on the West in the spirit of the French revolution. A remaining threat is also the Chinese communist regime ruling over more than 1 billion people, and revolutionaries in West and East supporting continued struggle. This new phase of the world civil war is a great threat to the West. Radical Islam wants, in cooperation with evil and rogue states (like Iran and North Korea), to crush the West or at least weaken it. The risk now is that evil regimes cooperate with Muslim terrorists to transfer weapons of mass destruction (North Korea is believed to have 5,000 tons of biological and chemical weapons).

The terrorists are prepared to attack the United States (“the main enemy”) and other countries in the West to achieve a maximum number of victims. Since September 11, 2001, there is a new phase of the world civil war. The victims will in this century not be counted in the thousands, as during the French revolution. The new enemy of the West in the world civil war is planning millions of victims. The 21st century could become just as bloody as the 20th century, when Communists and Nazis made mass extermination the main element of the ongoing global civil war.

Gautic01
Globalcivilwar.wordpress.com

Tuesday, October 12, 2010

An Interesting “Eternal Truth”

On Wednesday, October 6, 2010, the BBC’s Gavin Hewitt reported the following with regard to legal authority being given over by Parliament to the EU, and Parliament’s ability as a sovereign body to take it back:

Today the Foreign Secretary, William Hague, promised them that the sovereignty of the British Parliament would be placed on the statute book for the first time. He told the Conservative Party conference that the clause on EU Law would underline "this eternal truth: what a sovereign parliament can do, a sovereign parliament can also undo".

The German Constitutional Court has also reached essentially the same conclusion. Given the fact that our American legal system is based on and descended from English common law, Mr. Hague’s comments are particularly interesting and raise the question: “How do Mr. Hague’s comments relate to American constitutional law?”

Perhaps the best way to answer that question is with another one: “In 1861, would Mr. Hague have supported secession or not?” Well, an “eternal truth” would be just as true in 1861 as it is today. Furthermore, the various “sovereign” state legislatures ratified the U.S. Constitution, so under Mr. Hague’s analysis, those same states could also undo what they had done, and secede.

Obviously, Mr. Hague’s comments are not going to settle the debate among constitutional lawyers on the right to secede from the Union; that debate was settled rather effectively by what Southerners sometimes used to refer to as “The Late Unpleasantness.” As a legal point, however, it is telling that both the common law British and the civil law Germans have reached the conclusion that sovereignty requires—presumes--the power of the sovereign body to undo what the sovereign body has previously done.

Furthermore, from a civilizational perspective, Mr. Hague’s comments and the German Constitutional Court’s decision serve as reminders that the Western nation-state is not dead: not quite yet.

W. Reed Smith