British roots of US Russophobia

[Jun 12, 2015] Tracking the roots of Zionism and imperial russophobia by Laurent Guyénot

February 13, 2015 | Veterans News Now

The Disraeli case is illuminating because the questions raised about him are the same as those that arise today on the relationship between the United States and the Zionist network, questions which divide even the most respected observers.

by Laurent Guyénot

In order to understand the relationship between the Empire, Zionism and Western russophobia, we must go back to the late 19^th century, and focus in particular on British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli. The questions raised by his time and foreign policy are the same that arise today on the relationship between the United States and the Zionist network, questions which divide even the most respected observers.

Which, of the Anglo-American Empire and the international Jewry, steers the other?

Map published in 1900 in Great Britain, showing Russia as an octopus extending its tentacles on Turkey and Central Europe. There are many versions of this map, the first of which dates back to 1877.

In 1853 the Crimean War breaks out between Russia and the Ottoman Empire, the latter receiving the aid of France and the United Kingdom. The war ends in 1856 by the Treaty of Paris, which aims at limiting Russian expansionism for the benefit of the Ottoman Empire. Twenty years later, in 1877, Tsar Alexander II of Russia, declaring himself protector of the Christians, goes to war once more against the Ottoman Empire, which has drowned the uprising of Serbs in the bloodbath of 1875, and likewise that of Bulgarians the following year. With the Russians at the gates of Constantinople, the Ottomans were forced to grant independence to many of the people they previously dominated. By the Treaty of San Stefano, signed in 1878, the Tsar found the autonomous principalities of Bulgaria, Serbia and Romania, and amputates the Ottoman Empire of territories populated by Georgians and Armenians.The Sultan must also commit to ensuring the safety of Christian subjects who remain under his authority.

This treaty, however, displeases Britain and Austria-Hungary, both hostile to the expansion of Russian influence area. This displeases especially England since Alexander II undertook the conquest of territories in Central Asia, where the English own many colonies. In 1878, England and Austria-Hungary convene the Congress of Berlin, which will result in the Berlin Treaty, canceling that of San Stefano: the independence of the Christian states of the Balkans is replaced by a gradual and conditional emancipation. Russian conquests are cut and Armenia is returned, for the most part, to the Ottoman Empire. The independent principalities of the Balkans are fragmented into weak, rival and ethnically divided small states, and part of Bulgaria is put back under Ottoman vassalage. This redistribution raises profound national resentment which will contribute to the sparking of the First World War, as well as the Armenian genocide (one million two hundred thousand victims).

A chessboard drenched in blood — Pepe Escobar

The Treaty of Berlin’s main objective is to save what could be saved from a weakening Ottoman Empire in order to counter panslavism and Russia’s influence. England, the first maritime power, wants to prevent Russia from getting closer to the Bosphorus. She obtains the right to use Cyprus as a naval military base, protecting the colonial roads and monitoring the Suez Canal.Thus was launched the so-called policy of the “Great Game” for colonial rule in Asia, which, for the British Empire, entails containing Russian expansion, and will lead in particular to the creation of Afghanistan as a buffer state.

It is the same policy which will be promoted by Zbigniew Brzezinski 120 years later, on behalf of American hegemony.

Thus is launched as well the means to this policy, which will be called “balkanization”, a perpetual source of wars.

Benjamin Disraeli (1804-1881)

There are several ways to tell this historical episode which carries the seed of all the tragedies of the 20^th century, several possible viewpoints about the forces shaping history at this crucial time. But in the end, history is made by men, and it can be understood only if one identifies its main protagonists. One name stands out among the instigators of this pivotal time’s British imperial policy:

Benjamin Disraeli (1804-1881), Prime Minister under Queen Victoria from 1868 to 1869, and then from 1874 to 1880. Disraeli was the man who made the takeover of the Suez Canal by England possible in 1875, through funding from his friend Lionel Rothschild, son of Nathan (operation which consolidated at the same time the Rothschilds’ control over the Bank of England).

Disraeli is the true inventor of British imperialism, since it was he who, in 1876, had Queen Victoria proclaimed Empress of India by Parliament. What is more, Disraeli is the main inspiration for the Berlin Congress. Lastly, Disraeli can be considered one of the forerunners of Zionism, since, well before Theodor Herzl, he tried to have the “restoration of Israel” entered on the Berlin Congress’ agenda, hoping to convince the Sultan to concede to Palestine as an autonomous province.

Zionism was for him an old dream: soon after a trip to the Middle East at the age of 26, he published his first novel, The Wondrous Tale of Alroy, and made his hero, an influential Jew of the Middle Ages, say:

“My wish is a national existence which we have not. My wish is the Land of Promise and Jerusalem and the Temple, all we forfeited, all we have yearned after, all for which we have fought, our beauteous country, our holy creed, our simple manners, and our ancient customs.”

Disraeli is descended from a family of Marranos (crypto-Jews of Portuguese origin) converted back to Judaism in Venice. His grandfather moved to London in 1748. Benjamin was baptized at the age of thirteen, when his father, Isaac D’Israeli, converted to Anglican Christianity together with all his family, as much, it seems, to escape the narrowmindedness of the synagogue, as to integrate into British society.

Isaac D’Israeli, however, is the author of a book called The Genius of Judaism (in response to Chateaubriand’s The Genius of Christianity), in which he glorifies the unique qualities of the Jewish people, but violently attacks Talmudic rabbis for “sealing up the national mind of their people” and “corrupting the simplicity of their antique creed”.

Benjamin Disraeli embodies in his own self the contradictions and drama of assimilated Jews in the late 19^th century, which aspired to assimilation to the point that they wanted to personify all the virtues and values of European nations, but whose conversion to an already devitalized Christianity could only be a source of disappointment, and who have developed from it an even stronger and tormented attachment to their Jewishness.

At about the same time as Disraeli, Heinrich Heine (1797-1856) was baptized. He saw baptism as “the entry ticket to European culture”, but complained of still being considered a Jew by the German (and preferred for this reason living in France, where he was regarded as a representative of high German culture). He wrote in his last work Romanzero:

“I do not keep secret my Judaism, to which I have not been back since I have never left it.” Just like the forced conversion of the Spanish and Portuguese Jews in the late 15^th century, the opportunistic conversion of some assimilated Jews in the late 19^th century strengthened in them a non-religious and racialist conception of jewishness: Benjamin Disraeli defined himself as “anglican of Jewish race.”

Coningsby, or The New Generation

For Hannah Arendt, Disraeli is a “race fanatic” who, ever since his first novel Alroy (1833), “sketched the plan of a Jewish empire, in which Jews would be the governing class, strictly separated. […] In his new novel Coningsby (1844), he describes a fantastic plot in which Jewish money makes and unmakes palaces and empires and pulls the strings of diplomacy. […] This idea became the heart of his political philosophy[1]. In a nonfictional work (Lord George Bentinck:

A Political Biography, 1852), Disraeli wrote that Jews “are the most striking living proof of the falsity of this pernicious doctrine in modern times, the natural equality of men […], a principle which, if it were possible to achieve, would deteriorate great races, and destroy all the geniuses of the world. […] The innate tendency of the Jewish race, which is justly proud of its blood, opposes the doctrine of the equality of men[2].” He writes again, shortly before his death, in Endymion (1880): “No-one should treat lightly the race principle, the racial question. It is the key to world history.”

Disraeli is clearly on the same wavelength as Moses Hess, the spiritual father of Theodor Herzl who, after having believed in his friend Karl Marx’s class struggle, converted to the “race war”, considering, in Rome and Jerusalem (1862), that “the Jewish race is a pure race” with “indelible” characteristics, and that a Jew is jewish “by virtue of his racial origin, even though his ancestors may have become apostates”.

What is Disraeli’s motivation behind the foreign policy he imparted to the British Empire?

Is he inhabited by the fate of the British to conquer the world, or, remembering how Ezra and Nehemiah have exploited the Persian authority, does he see the British Empire as the instrument of the Jewish nation’s destiny fulfillment, in other words Zionism’s mule?

In mooring the Suez Canal (drilled between 1859 and 1869 by French Ferdinand de Lesseps) to British interests, does he simply seek to outdo the French, or is he laying the foundation for the future alliance between Israel and the Anglo-American Empire?

Indeed, Disraeli can henceforth argue that a Jewish autonomous government in Palestine would be quite capable of defending the British economic interests in the region. This will be Chaim Weizmann’s pitch to the British thirty years later: the Jews established in Palestine, he assures, “would develop the country, bring back civilisation to it and form a very effective guard for the Suez Canal”[3]. Thus, Disraeli is truly the one who, with the help of Lionel Rothschild, laid the first stone of the new Jewish State. When in 1956 Israel invades the Sinai to take control of the Canal, she does it again promising Britain to return the control of the Canal, nationalized by Nasser, to her. And what of Disraeli’s russophobia, to which, some say, he converted Queen Victoria?

Is it imperial geostrategy, or the old Jewish enmity against the last Christian kingdom, where 70% of world Jews (recently emancipated by Alexander II, but victims of recurrent pogroms) still live?

No-one can answer these questions with certainty; perhaps Disraeli could not himself. His contemporaries, however, were pondering. Disraeli’s displayed hostility against Russia and his defense of the Turks, whose massacres perpetrated against the Serbs and Bulgarians were yet well known, gave rise for some to the fantasy of a Jewish conspiracy. William Ewart Gladstone, a longtime opponent of Disraeli and himself Prime Minister several times (1868-1874, 1880-1885, 1886 and 1892-1894), declared that the former “was holding British foreign policy hostage to his Jewish sympathies, and that he was more interested in relieving the anguish of Jews in Russia and Turkey than in any British interests.” The newspaper The Truth of November 22, 1877, alluding to the intimacy of Disraeli with the Rothschilds suspected “a tacit conspiracy […] on the part of a considerable number of Anglo-Hebrews, to drag us into a war on behalf of the Turks”. It was remembered, moreover, that in a speech in Commons Gallery in 1847, Disraeli had demanded the admission of Jews to eligible functions, on the grounds that “the Jewish mind exercises a vast influence on the affairs of Europe[4]“.

Queen Victoria and Benjamin Disraeli (wiki)

Some complained about the influence of Disraeli on Queen Victoria (influence he explained to a friend in these terms: “Everyone likes flattery, and when it comes to Royalty you should lay it on with a trowel[5]“).

The Queen, it must be said, was already, as much of the aristocracy, under the spell of a theory in vogue assigning an Israelite origin to the Anglo-Saxons (theory which appeared under Oliver Cromwell and was renewed in 1840 by Pastor John Wilson with his Lectures on Ancient Israel and the Israelitish Origin of the Modern Nations of Europe, where he derives the word “Saxon” from “Isaac’s sons”). Ready to believe that her noble lineage descended from King David, the Queen had her sons circumcised, a custom that has continued to this day. Needless to say, this court judeophilia was not to everyone’s liking.

The Disraeli case is illuminating because the questions raised above about him are the same as those that arise today on the relationship between the United States and the Zionist network, questions which divide even the most respected observers. Which, of the Anglo-American Empire and the international Jewry, steers the other?

Answering this question for the half-century preceding the First World War helps answer that of the contemporary times, because the symbiotic relationship between Israel and the Empire built up in that period. The answer depends on the viewpoint taken on. The Zionists naturally have an interest in promoting the view that Israel serves the Anglo-American interests, and not the reverse. The idea sold by Disraeli to his government was to involve the Jews in British colonialism. But the Jewish Zionists really see things from the other end of the telescope, and one would hardly believe that Disraeli did not secretly share this view. When the hero of his Tancred (1847), a Jew who has been promoted Lord Beaconsfield, glorifies the British Empire in these words:

“We wish to conquer the world, led by angels, in order to bring man to happiness, under divine sovereignty,”

who lies behind this ambiguous “we”? Is it the same two-way “we” that the neoconservatives, draped in American patriotism, used in public, when issuing a “Project for a New American Century” (PNAC) whose sole beneficiary is Israel?

Léon Pinsker, Zionist from Odessa and author in 1882 (one year after the death of Disraeli) of the first Zionist manifesto of global influence, Auto-Emancipation. Letter from a Russian Jew to his Brothers, makes no secret that, to “restore the Jewish nation“, there is no other way than to “manifest irresistible pressure on international politics of the moment.“[6]. This is the program that will implement, after Disraeli, the tireless diplomats Theodor Herlz and Chaim Weizmann, supported by an increasingly broad network of financial sympathisers, including Max Warburg and Jacob Schiff. Like British Disraeli, the Austro-Hungarian Herzl pins high hopes on Turkey. He reports in these terms his proposal to Sultan Abdülhamid II (1876-1909) during a hearing obtained in May 1901:

“Let the Sultan give us this piece of land and, in exchange, we will put his finances in order and we will influence public opinion in his favor in the whole world.” He added: “I may influence European press (in London, in Paris, in Bonn and in Vienna) so that the Armenian issue be addressed in a sense more favorable to the Turks[7].”

In other words, he promised to devote to the service of Ottoman Turkey the two Jewish weapons par excellence: the bank and the press. Like his predecessor at the Congress of Berlin, the Sultan categorically rejected that idea, and even opposed any massive Jewish immigration to Palestine: “I prefer to be penetrated by iron than losing Palestine.”

Co-founders of the (World) Zionist Organisation, Theodore Herzl (left). and Max Nordau

A quarter century after Disraeli saved the Ottoman Empire, the Sultan’s estoppel sealed all hope of getting back Palestine; it was necessary thus that the Ottoman Empire disappear and the cards be redistributed. Herzl understands that “the division of Turkey means a world war”[8], and his partner Max Nordau, speaker with incomparable prophetic talent, predicts before the Zionist Congress of 1903, “the future world war, the peace conference where, with the help of England, a free and Jewish Palestine will be created.”[9].

Writing in 1938, Jewish historian Benzion Netanyahu (father of the current Prime Minister) summarizes the feverish anticipation of this great cataclysm in the Zionist community, with, as is always the case in Jewish historiography, the eyes fixed on the fate of the chosen people and a complete indifference to the collateral victims:

“The great moment came, as he prophesied, bound together with the storm of a world war, and bearing in its wings an exterminating attack on world Jewry, which began with the massacre of the Jews of Ukraine (during the Russian Civil War) and continues to spread to the present day[10].”

Shortly before the outbreak of the World War, in 1908, the sultanate itself would be destroyed from within by the secular revolution of the Young Turks, a movement described by T. E. Lawrence as “50% crypto-Jewish and 95% freemasonic”, and led by the Dönmeh, that is to say, converted Jews of Marrano ancestry, as demonstrated by Rabbi Joachim Prinz in The Secret Jews (1973).

As for Russia, we know what cost her the First World War. The Ottoman Empire suddenly becoming the enemy of the British, Russia is now allied with them, by a complex set of alliances. On April 16, 1917, to get her out of the war, the Germans sent back home thirty-two exiled Bolsheviks including Lenin, soon joined by two hundred Mensheviks, and financed their propaganda organ, Pravda, in exchange for their promise to withdraw from the war. A year later, they signed with Leon Trotsky (his real name being Bronstein) the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, which ended the Eastern Front. Angelo Rappoport, himself a Jewish socialist and author of Pioneers of the Russian Revolution (New York, 1919) estimates that 80% of the Russian revolutionaries were Jews[11]. Many American Jews were seeing Bolshevik Russia favorably.

In September 1920, The American Hebrew declares:

“The Bolshevik Revolution eliminated the most brutal dictatorship in history. This great achievement, destined to figure in history as one of the overshadowing results of the World War, was largely the product of Jewish thinking, Jewish discontent, Jewish effort to reconstruct[12].”

It must be added: “Jewish financing” because U.S. State Department documents prove the “financial support to Bolshevism and the Bolshevik revolution of known American Jews: Jacob Schiff, Felix Warburg, Otto Kahn, Mendel Schiff, Jerome Hanauer, Max Breitung and one of the Guggenheims[13].”

If times were not yet ripe at the time of Disraeli, it is also because Russian Jews were no more attracted to Palestine than European Jews; they just barely knew where it was. Emancipated since 1855 by Tsar Alexander II, who had given them free access to the university, Russian Jews aspired only to migrate to Europe and the United States. Pogroms, including the one in Odessa which lasted three days in 1871, do not convince them of the necessity to establish their own state. It is only after the assassination of Alexander II in 1881 that the increased violence against them make some sensitive to the call of Léon Pinsker published in 1882: “We must reconcile ourselves once and for all to the idea that the other nations, by reason of their inherent natural antagonism, will forever reject us[14].” It was also in 1881, year of Disraeli’s death, that Baron Edmond de Rothschild, from the parisan branch, would start to buy land in Palestine and fund the installation of Jewish settlers, especially in Tel Aviv, under the aegis of his Palestine Jewish Colonization Association (PICA).

Furthermore, to influence world affairs, proto-Zionist Disraeli did not yet have at his disposal a sufficiently tighly-knit international network that would act in concert. The international Jewish organizations such as B’nai B’rith (Hebrew for “the sons of the Alliance”) founded in New York in 1843, or the Universal Israelite Alliance, founded in France in 1860 by Isaac Moses Aaron (also know as Adolphe) Crémieux, felt that Israel was doing very well as a scattered nation and had yet no designs on Palestine. This would change during the First World War; it was then that a highly efficient network connecting both sides of the Atlantic set up. Nahum Sokolow, a stakeholder in this deep history, testifies to this in his History of Zionism:

“Between London, New York, and Washington there was constant communication, either by telegraph, or by personal visit, and as a result there was perfect unity among the Zionists of both hemispheres[15].”

Thus was negotiated, behind the scenes of the carnage, the famous Balfour Declaration (a letter sent in November 1917 to the President of the “English Zionist Federation” Lord Lionel Walter Rothschild, declaring the British government favorable to the “establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people”).

Obtained in exchange for the mobilization of American Jews to lead America into the war (by Balfour’s own admission, as well as Rabbi Emanuel Neumann’s, of the Zionist Organization of America, and confirmed by Churchill[16]), this declaration would be incorporated into the Treaty of Versailles at the end of the war to justify the British Mandate of Palestine. And so, while the Germans contrived to pull Russia out of the war by supporting the Bolshevik Revolution, the English were to make America enter it by supporting another Jewish movement, Zionism. If, on the militant field, international revolution and Jewish nationalism were presented as two competing movements, sometimes dividing Eastern European Jewish families, from the perspective of a certain cognitive elite, they are the two jaws of the same pliers; one can find at the levers the same financiers, including Jacob Schiff, sponsor of Herzl and Lenin simultaneously.

Louis Dembitz Brandeis was a lawyer and associate justice on the Supreme Court of the United States from 1916 to 1939.

Among the architects of the secret diplomacy leading to the Balfour Declaration, Nahum Sokolow praises very specifically “the beneficent personal influence of the Honourable Louis D. Brandeis, Judge of the Supreme Court”[17]. Appointed to the highest level of the judiciary in 1916 by President Wilson, Louis Brandeis (1856-1941) was one of the most powerful Zionist schemers, exercising an unparalleled influence on the White House, along with Colonel Mandell House (Wilson called House “my second personality”, and House said of Brandeis: “his mind and mine are in agreement on most issues”)[18]. Brandeis established a formidable tandem with his protégé Felix Frankfurter, who would be his successor in exerting influence on Roosevelt. “Acting together over a period of 25 years, they put in place a network of disciples at influential positions, and worked tirelessly for the accomplishment of their programs,” writes Bruce Allen Murphy in The Brandeis/Frankfurter Connection[19]. Brandeis and Frankfurter belonged to a secret society dedicated to the Zionist cause and named the Parushim (Hebrew word for “Pharisees” or “Separated”). Sarah Schmidt, professor of Jewish history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, described the society as “a secret underground guerilla force determined to influence the course of events in a quiet, anonymous way.”

At the initiation ceremony, each new member received for instruction:

“until our purpose shall be accomplished, you will be fellow of a brotherhood whose bond you will regard as greater than any other in your life—dearer than that of family, of school, of nation. By entering this brotherhood, you become a self-dedicated soldier in the army of Zion.” The insider responded by vowing: “before this council, in the name of all that I hold dear and holy, I hereby vow myself, my life, my fortune, and my honor to the restoration of the Jewish nation. […] I pledge myself utterly to guard and to obey and to keep secret the laws and the labor of the fellowship, its existence and its aims. Amen[20].”

 “Translated by Albert”

END NOTES

[1] Hannah Arendt, Les Origines du totalitarisme, Gallimard, 2002, p. 309-310.

[2] Cité dans André Pichot, Aux origines des théories raciales, de la Bible à Darwin, Flammarion, 2008, p. 397

[3] Chaim Weizmann, Trial and Error, Harper & Brothers, 1949, cité dans Alan Hart, Zionism, The Real Ennemies of the Jews, vol. 1, The False Messiah, Clarity Press, 2009, p. 98.

[4] Stanley Weintraub, Disraeli: A Biography, Hamish Hamilton, 1993, p. 579.

[5] Stanley Weintraub, Disraeli: A Biography, Hamish Hamilton, 1993, p. 547.

[6] Cité par Douglas Reed, La Controverse de Sion (1957), Kontre Kulture, p. 248.

[7] Journal de Theodor Herzl, 8 juin 1896 et 21 juin 1896, Tome I, p. 363 et 387 de l’édition anglaise, cité dans Roger Garaudy, Le Procès du sionisme, 1998, p. 51.

[8] Theodor Herzl, Zionism, State edition, 1937, p. 65, cité dans Benzion Netanyahu, The Founding Fathers of Zionism (1938), Balfour Books, 2012, kindle empl. 1456-9.

[9] Chaim Weizmann, Trial and Error, Harper & Brothers, 1949, cité par Douglas Reed, La Controverse de Sion (1957), Kontre Kulture, p. 263.

[10] Benzion Netanyahu, The Founding Fathers of Zionism, Balfour Books, 2012, empl. 1614-20.

[11] Angelo Rappoport, Pioneers of the Russian Revolution, 1919, p. 252, cité par Léon de Poncins, Les Juifs, maîtres du monde, Éditions Bossard, 1932, p. 27.

[12] Michael Jones, The Jewish Revolutionary Spirit and Its Impact on World History, Fidelity Press, 2008, p. 747.

[13] Antony Sutton, Wall Street et la Révolution bolchevique (éd. anglaise 1976), Scribedit, 2012, p. 311.

[14] Benzion Netanyahu, The Founding Fathers of Zionism, Balfour Books, 2012, empl. 761-775.

[15] Nahum Sokolow, History of Zionism (1600-1918), vol. 2, 1919, p. 79-80, cité dans Alison Weir, Against Our Better Judgment: The Hidden History of How the U.S. Was Used to Create Israel, 2014, kindle empl. 387-475. Weir se réfère également à Peter Grose, “Louis Brandeis, Arthur Balfour, and a Declaration That Made History,” Moment 8 (novembre 1983), p. 17-39.

[16] Hart, Zionism, The Real Ennemies of the Jews, vol. 1, Clarity Press, 2009, p. 90.

[17] Nahum Sokolow, History of Zionism (1600-1918), vol. 2, 1919, p. 79-80.

[18] Arthur Howden Smith, The Real Colonel House (1918), Bibliographical Center for Research, 2010, cité dans Aline de Diéguez, Aux Sources du chaos mondial actuel, en ligne sur http://aline.dedieguez.pagesperso-orange.fr/mariali/sommaire_chaos.html ; Douglas Reed, La Controverse de Sion (1957), Kontre Kulture, p. 305.

[19] Bruce Allen Murphy, The Brandeis/Frankfurter Connection: The Secret Political Activities of Two Supreme Court Justices, Oxford University Press, 1982, p. 10, cité dans Alison Weir, Against Our Better Judgment: The Hidden History of How the U.S. Was Used to Create Israel, 2014, kindle e. 260-351.

[20] Sarah Schmidt, “The Parushim: A Secret Episode in American Zionist History,” American Jewish Historical Quarterly n°65, décembre 1975, p. 121-139 (en ligne sur http://ifamericansknew.org/history/parushim.html), et Sarah Schmidt, Horace M. Kallen: Prophet of American Zionism, Carlson, 1995, cités dans Alison Weir, Against Our Better Judgment: The Hidden History of How the U.S. Was Used to Create Israel, 2014, kindle e. 279-351 et 2578-96.

Laurent Guyénot Engineer (National School of Advanced Technology, 1982) and medievalist (PhD in Medieval Studies at Paris IV-Sorbonne, 2009). He has authored numerous books on the subject.His latest book is JFK-9/11: 50 Years of Deep State

He has dedicated the past three years to studying the behind-the-scenes history of the United States, where he lived for five years.