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Schiller Institute/ICLC Conference
"The Palmerston Zoo"
Feb. 1994
This report is adapted from presentations delivered to the Conference
of the Schiller Institute/ICLC Conference in suburban Washington, DC.,
on President's Day weekend, 1994. See Solving the Paradox of Current
World History" for the setting of the following articles. It was
published as a special report by EIR, and is available in photocopy.
Contact Schiller Institute at email or phone numbers listed below.
INTRODUCTION
Speaking from the vantage point of Lord Palmerston's British Empire
circa 1850, Schiller Institute U.S. President Webster Tarpley chaired
the panel on ``Lord Palmerston's Multicultural Zoo'' at the Schiller
Institute's conference on Feb. 20. Tarpley served as tour guide
through the centuries, and as the ``choral'' backdrop to the
historical drama, introducing each of the seven speakers in turn and
concluding the panel. What follows is Tarpley's
introduction. Subtitles have been added.
Lord Palmerston
I am now standing in the shadow of the Houses of Parliament in the
part of London called Westminster. It is the year of grace
1850. Around me lies Victorian London, the London of Dickens and
Thackeray, of John Stuart Mill and Thomas Carlyle. This capital city
is now the center of the greatest colonial empire the world has ever
known, shortly to embrace between one-fifth and one-fourth of the
total population and land area of the Earth. Although in theory there
are still empires ruled by the French, the Spanish, the Portuguese,
the Dutch, the Belgians, and the Danes, all of these, in this year of
1850, are but the satellites of the British Empire. Britain is the
mistress of the seas, the empire upon which the sun never sets. It is
the new Rome on the banks of the Thames.
The empress is Queen Victoria, who is largely occupied with Prince
Albert in her business of breeding new litters of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha to
take over the royal houses of Europe. A quarter-century from now
Victoria will be made empress of India to reward her for so much
breeding. But for all of Victoria's wealth and power, Britain is not
really a monarchy; it is an oligarchy on the Venetian model, and the
most powerful leader of the British oligarchy in these times, between
1830 and the end of the American Civil War, is Lord Palmerston.
Henry Temple, the third Viscount Palmerston. Palmerston is the man the
others--the Russells, Disraelis, and Gladstones--simply cannot
match. Palmerston was first a Tory, then a Whig, always a disciple of
Jeremy Bentham, and for 35 years there is scarcely a cabinet without
Palmerston as foreign secretary or prime minister. In London they call
him Lord Cupid, a Regency buck always on the lookout for a new
mistress, perfectly at home in a ménage ô trois. On the continent they
call him Lord Firebrand. The schoolboys of Vienna sing that if the
devil has a son, that son is Lord Palmerston. ``Pam'' is an occultist
who loves Satanism and seances. And here, between Big Ben and the
Foreign Office, are the haunts of this nineteenth-century devil, Lord
Palmerston, old Pam.
A New Roman Empire
It is 1850. Lord Palmerston is engaged in a campaign to make London
the undisputed center of a new, worldwide Roman Empire. He is
attempting to conquer the world in the way that the British have
already conquered India, reducing every other nation to the role of a
puppet, client, and fall-guy for British imperial policy. Lord
Palmerston's campaign is not a secret. He has declared it here in the
Houses of Parliament, saying that wherever in the world a British
subject goes, he can flaunt the laws, secure that the British fleet
will support him. ``Civis Romanus sum, every Briton is a citizen of
this new Rome,'' thundered Lord Palmerston, and with that, the
universal empire was proclaimed.
During the Napoleonic Wars, the British managed to conquer most of the
world outside of Europe, with the exception of the United
States. After 1815, the French--be they restored Bourbons, Orleanists,
or Bonapartists--are generally pliant tools of London.
But in central and eastern Europe, there was Prince Metternich's
Austrian Empire, a very strong land power. There was vast Imperial
Russia, under the autocrat Nicholas I or the reformer Alexander
II. There was the Kingdom of Prussia. Lord Palmerston likes to call
these the ``arbitrary powers.'' Above all, Palmerston hated
Metternich, the embodiment and ideologue of the Congress of Vienna
system. Metternich presided over one of the most pervasive police
states in history. Men said his rule was shored up by a standing army
of soldiers, a sitting army of bureaucrats, a kneeling army of
priests, and a creeping army of informers.
For Britain to rule the world, the Holy Alliance of Austria, Russia,
and Prussia had to be broken up. There is also the matter of the
dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire. Starting with Lord Byron's Greek
Revolution in the 1820s, British policy has been to play the card of
national liberation against each of these rival empires.
The imperial theme was sounded in 1846 with the free trade policy,
Britain's declaration of intent to loot the world in the name of the
pound. Then, in January 1848, Lord Palmerston arranged an insurrection
in Sicily, using British networks that went back to Lord Nelson.
That started the great revolutionary year of 1848, and in the course
of that year, every government in Europe was toppled, and every
monarchy badly shaken, at least for a time. Metternich of Austria and
King Louis Philippe of France fled to London, where they now spend
their time playing cards. There was war in Italy, civil war in
Austria, barricades in Paris, and tumult in Germany.
The only exception to the rule was Russia, and now Lord Palmerston is
preparing to invade Russia, with the help of his strategic catamite,
Napoléon III, also known as Napoléon le Petit. That will start in
about three years, and it will be called the Crimean War. As soon as
the war against Russia is over, Palmerston and John Stuart Mill at the
British East India Company will start the Great Mutiny in India, which
some historians will call the Sepoy Rebellion. Muslim soldiers will be
told that new cartridges are greased with pig fat, Hindu soldiers will
be told the cartridges are greased with cow fat, and the result will
be what you would expect. But in the conflagration the British will
get rid of the Great Mogul and the Mogul Empire, and impose their
direct rule in all of India. Typical John Stuart Mill. He, of course,
is the author of ``On Liberty.''
The British would like to give China the same treatment they are
giving India. Since 1842, Palmerston and the East India Company have
been waging Opium Wars against the Chinese Empire, partly to get them
to open their ports to opium from India, and also as a way to conquer
China. Already the British have Hong Kong and the other treaty
ports. By 1860, the British will be in Beijing, looting and burning
the summer palace of the emperor.
Shortly after that, the British will back Napoléon in his project of
putting a Hapsburg archduke on the throne of an ephemeral Mexican
Empire--the Maximilian Project. These projects will be closely
coordinated with Palmerston's plans to eliminate the only two nations
still able to oppose him--the Russia of Alexander II and the United
States of Abraham Lincoln. Lord Palmerston will be the evil demiurge
of the American Civil War, the mastermind of secession, far more
important for the Confederacy than Jefferson Davis or Robert
E. Lee. And in the midst of that war, Palmerston will detonate a
rebellion in Poland against Russian rule, not for the sake of Poland,
but for the sake of starting a general European war against Russia.
But when the Russian fleets sail into New York and San Francisco, when
Lee's wave breaks at Gettysburg, when the Stars and Bars are lowered
over Vicksburg, the British Empire will be stopped--just short of its
goal. Just short--and yet, British hegemony will still be great enough
to launch the two world wars of the twentieth century, and the third
conflagration that will start in 1991. And as we look forward for a
century and a half from 1850, British geopolitics, despite the
challenges, despite the defeats, despite the putrefaction of Britain
itself, will remain the dominant factor in world affairs.
Palmerston's Three Stooges
How do the British do it? How can a clique of depraved aristocrats on
this tight little island bid to rule the entire world? Don't believe
the stories about the workshop of the world; there are some factories
here, but Britain lives by looting the colonies. The fleet is
formidable, but also overrated, and very vulnerable to serious
challenges. The army is third-rate. But the British have learned from
the Venetians that the greatest force in history is the force of
ideas, and that if you can control culture, you can control the way
people think, and then statesmen and fleets and armies will bend to
your will.
Take our friend Lord Palmerston. Pam has the Foreign Office, the Home
Office, and Whitehall, but when he needed to start the 1848
revolutions, or when the time will come for the American Civil War, he
turns to a troika of agents.
They are Lord Palmerston's Three Stooges. But instead of Moe, Larry,
and Curly, these Three Stooges are named Giuseppe Mazzini, Louis
Napoléon Bonaparte, and David Urquhart. These Three Stooges--far more
than the Union Jack, Victoria, the bulldog breed, the thin gray line
of heroes, and the fleet--are the heart of what is called the British
Empire.
We will get to know Lord Palmerston's Three Stooges better. But first,
one thing must be understood. Moe, Larry, and Curly often had to work
together on this or that project. But their relations were never
exactly placid.
[Slapstick episode from a ``The Three Stooges'' movie is shown to the
audience.]
You understand: Their stock in trade was infantile violence. So do not
be surprised if we find Palmerston's Three Stooges lashing out with
slanders, knives, and bombs against each other, and even against their
august master, Lord Palmerston himself.
Under Lord Palmerston England supports all revolutions--except her
own--and the leading revolutionary in Her Majesty's Secret Service is
Giuseppe Mazzini, our first Stooge.
Mazzini's terrorist revolution
Mazzini has concocted a very effective terrorist belief
structure. Mazzini is a Genoese admirer of the diabolical Venetian
friar Paolo Sarpi. Mazzini's father was a physician to Queen
Victoria's father. For a while Mazzini worked for the Carbonari, one
of Napoléon's freemasonic fronts. Then, in 1831, Mazzini founded his
Young Italy secret society. Louis Napoléon Bonaparte, today's
President of France, sent him articles for his magazine. Mazzini's cry
is ``God and the People,'' ``Dio e Popolo,'' which means that the
people are the new God. Populism becomes an ersatz religion. Mazzini
teaches that Christianity developed the human individual, but that the
era of Christianity, of freedom, of human rights, is now over. From
now on, the protagonists of history are not individuals any more, but
peoples, understood as racial nationalities. Mazzini is adamant that
there are no inalienable human rights. There is only Duty, the duty of
thought and action to serve the destiny of the racial
collectivities. ``Liberty,'' says Mazzini, ``is not the negation of
all authority; it is the negation of every authority that fails to
represent the Collective Aim of the Nation.'' There is no individual
human soul, only a collective soul. According to Mazzini, the Catholic
Church, the papacy, and every other institution which attempts to
bring God to man must be abolished. Every national grouping that can
be identified must be given independence and self-determination in a
centralized dictatorship. In the coming century, Mussolini and the
Italian Fascists will repeat many of Mazzini's ideas verbatim.
Mazzini thinks that each modern nation has a ``mission'': The British
would take care of Industry and Colonies; the Poles, leadership of the
Slavic world; the Russians, the civilizing of Asia. The French get
Action, the Germans get Thought, and so forth. For some strange
reason, there is no mission for Ireland, so Mazzini does not support
the independence of Ireland. There is only one monarchy which Mazzini
supports, because he says it has deep roots among the people: You
guessed it, Queen Victoria.
Mazzini preaches an Italian revolution for the Third Rome: After the
Rome of the Caesars and the Rome of the Popes comes the Rome of the
People. For this, the pope must be driven out. Mazzini has tried to
put this into practice just last year. In November 1848, armed Young
Italy gangs forced Pope Pius IX to flee from Rome to Naples. From
March to June of 1849, Mazzini ruled the Papal States as one of three
dictators, all Grand Orient Freemasons. During that time, death squads
operated in Rome, Ancona, and other cities. Some churches were sacked,
and many confessionals were burned. For Easter 1849, Mazzini staged a
monstrous mock Eucharist in the Vatican he called the Novum Pascha,
featuring himself, God, and the People. During this time he was
planning to set up his own Italian national church on the Anglican
model.
The defense of Rome was organized by Giuseppe Garibaldi, who had
joined Mazzini's Young Italy in the early 1830s. But a French army
sent by fellow Stooge Louis Napoléon drove out Mazzini, Garibaldi, and
their supporters. Lord Palmerston said that Mazzini's regime in Rome
was ``far better than any the Romans have had for centuries.''
Right now Mazzini is here in London, enjoying the support of Lord
Ashley, the Earl of Shaftesbury, a Protestant fanatic who also happens
to be Lord Palmerston's son-in-law. Mazzini's direct access to the
British government payroll comes through James Stansfeld, a junior
Lord of the Admiralty and a very high official of British
intelligence. Last year, Stansfeld provided the money for Mazzini's
Roman Republic. Stansfeld's father-in-law, William Henry Ashurst, is
another of Mazzini's patrons, as is John Bowring of the Foreign
Office, the man who will provoke the second Opium War against
China. Bowring is Jeremy Bentham's literary executor. John Stuart Mill
of India House is another of Mazzini's friends. Mazzini is close to
the protofascist writer Thomas Carlyle, and has been having an affair
with Carlyle's wife.
One of Metternich's henchmen has said that Palmerston's policy is to
make Italy turbulent, which is bad for Austria, without making her
powerful, which would harm England. Mazzini's role in Italy has been
that of a marplot, a wrecker, a terrorist, an assassin. His specialty
is sending his brainwashed dupes to their deaths in terrorist
attacks. He hides out and always succeeds in saving himself. Mazzini
travels readily on the continent using false passports, posing as an
American, an Englishman, a rabbi.
In the thirties and forties, Mazzini was targeting Piedmont in the
north, and the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies in the south. In 1848, he
rushed to Milan as soon as the Austrians had been driven out and tried
to start trouble. One of Mazzini's agents, General Ramorino, let the
Austrian commander Radetzky outflank the Piedmontese and win the
battle of Novara. Ramorino was executed for treason, but Piedmont had
lost the first war for Italian liberation. The king abdicated, and
Mazzini tried to break up Piedmont with a revolt in Genoa. Three years
from now, Mazzini will stage an abortive revolt against the Austrians
in Milan, mainly to stop Russia from allying with Austria in the
Crimean War. A few years after that Mazzini will try another
insurrection in Genova, still trying to break up Piedmont. In 1860, he
will encourage Garibaldi to sail to Sicily, and then try to provoke a
civil war between Garibaldi's dictatorship in the south and Cavour's
Piedmontese government in the north. In 1860, he will be thrown out of
Naples as a provocateur. By that time, Mazzini will be a hated and
reviled figure, but British propaganda and British support will keep
him going.
Mazzini is also an assassination bureau. In 1848, there was a chance
that Pius IX's very capable reforming minister Pellegrino Rossi could
unify Italy and solve the Roman Question in a constructive way,
through an Italian confederation, chaired by the pope, arranged with
Gioberti, Cavour, and other Piedmontese. Mazzini's agents, members of
Young Italy, stabbed Pellegrino Rossi to death. The killer was in
touch with Lord Minto, Palmerston's special envoy for Italy.
Stooge violence between Mazzini and Napoléon III is always intense,
especially after Napoléon's army finished off Mazzini's Roman
Republic. In 1855, a Mazzini agent named Giovanni Pianori will attempt
to kill Napoléon III, and a French court will convict Mazzini. Have
Napoléon's forces outshone the bungling British in the Crimea? Are the
British nervous about Napoléon's new ironclad battleship, when they
have none? Attempts to kill Napoléon are financed by the Tibaldi Fund,
run by Mazzini and set up by Sir James Stansfeld of the Admiralty.
Later, in February 1858, there will be an attempt to blow up Napoléon
by one of Mazzini's closest and best-known lieutenants from the Roman
Republic, Felice Orsini. Napoléon will get the message that it is time
to get busy and start a war against Austria in 1859.
At other times, Mazzini tried to kill King Carlo Alberto of
Piedmont. Mazzini's Young Italy is always the party of the dagger, of
the stiletto. ``In the hands of Judith, the sword which cut short the
life of Holofernes was holy; holy was the dagger which Harmodius
crowned with roses; holy was the dagger of Brutus; holy the poniard of
the Sicilian who began the Vespers; holy the arrow of Tell.'' Vintage
Mazzini. London's future ability to assassinate men like Walter
Rathenau, Jürgen Ponto, Aldo Moro, Alfred Herrhausen, Detlev
Rohwedder, stretches back in unbroken continuity to the Mazzini
networks of today.
Mazzini is actually doing everything he can to prevent Italian
unity. When unity comes, 20 years from now, it will come in the form
of a highly centralized state dominated by Grand Orient
Freemasons. For 30 years the prime ministers will be Mazzini's agents,
like DePretis and Crispi. Because of the violent liquidation of the
Papal States, the Catholics will refuse to take part in
politics. Italy will remain weak, poor, and divided. After Mussolini,
the Italian Republican Party will identify with Mazzini, and Ugo
LaMalfa and his friends will continue Mazzini's efforts to make sure
that Italy is weak and divided, bringing down one government after
another, and ruining the economy.
Palmerston's London During the 1850's -- A Tour of the Human
Multicultural Zoo
The Ethnic Theme Parks of Mazzini's Zoo
Mazzini's work for the British extends far beyond Italy. Like the
Foreign Office and the Admiralty which he serves, Mazzini encompasses
the world. The Mazzini networks offer us a fascinating array of
movements and personalities. There are agents and dupes, professional
killers, fellow-travelers, and criminal energy types. Mazzini's court
of miracles was a public scandal. Leopold of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, now
the king of Belgium, has been complaining to his niece Queen Victoria
that in London there is maintained ``a sort of menagerie of Kossuths,
Mazzinis, Legranges, Ledru-Rollins, etc. ... to let loose occasionally
on the continent to render its quiet and prosperity impossible.''
Indeed. On Feb. 21, 1854, this crew will come together at the home of
the American consul, George Sanders: Mazzini, Felice Orsini,
Garibaldi, Louis Kossuth, Arnold Ruge, Ledru-Rollin, Stanley Worcell,
Aleksandr Herzen, and U.S. traitor and future President James
Buchanan. There will also be a Peabody from the counting house.
We can think of Mazzini as the zookeeper of a universal human
zoo. Mazzini's human zoo is divided into theme parks or pavilions, one
for each ethnic group. In a normal zoo there is an elephant house, a
monkey house, an alligator pond, and the like. In Mazzini's human zoo
there is an Italian house, a Russian house, a Hungarian house, a
Polish house, an American house. Let us walk through the various theme
parks in the zoo and identify some of the specimens.
Young Italy, as we have seen, was founded in 1831, attracting the
young sailor Giuseppe Garibaldi and Louis Napoléon. Shortly thereafter
there followed Young Poland, whose leaders included the
revolutionaries Lelewel and Worcell. Then came Young Germany,
featuring Arnold Ruge, who had published some material by an obscure
German ``red republican'' named Karl Marx. This is the Young Germany
satirized by Heinrich Heine. In 1834, Mazzini founded ``Young
Europe,'' with Italian, Swiss, German, and Polish components. Young
Europe was billed as the Holy Alliance of the Peoples, opposed to
Metternich's Holy Alliance of despots. By 1835, there was also a Young
Switzerland. In that same year Mazzini launched Young France. The
guiding light here was Ledru-Rollin, who later became the interior
minister in Lamartine's short-lived Second French Republic of
1848. There was also Young Corsica, which was the mafia.
By the end of this century we will have a Young Argentina (founded by
Garibaldi), Young Bosnia, Young India, Young Russia, Young Armenia,
Young Egypt, the Young Czechs, plus similar groupings in Romania,
Hungary, Bulgaria, and Greece. Mazzini is especially interested in
creating a south Slavic federation dominated by Belgrade, and for that
reason, he has a Serbian organization. That will have to wait for
Mazzini's student Woodrow Wilson and the Versailles peace conference
of 1919. Right now, a masonic group in the United States is gearing up
to support the pro-slavery doughface Franklin Pierce for President in
1852; they are the radical wing of the Democratic Party, and they call
themselves Young America. In the future there will be the Young
Turks. And yes, there is also a Palmerston-Mazzini group for Jews,
sometimes called Young Israel, and sometimes called B'nai B'rith.
For Mazzini, a nationality means a race, a fixed array of behavior
like a breed of dog or a species of animal. He is not thinking of a
national community united by a literate language and a classical
culture to which any person can become assimilated through a political
choice. For Mazzini, race is unchangeable, and race is destiny. It is
a matter of blood and soil. Cats fight dogs, French fight Germans,
Germans fight Poles, and so on through all eternity. These hatreds are
the main datum of sensory perception.
Each of Mazzini's organizations demands immediate national liberation
for its own ethnic group on the basis of aggressive chauvinism and
expansionism. Mazzini's warhorse is the Territorial Imperative. Each
is obsessed with borders and territory, and each finds a way to oppose
and sabotage dirigist economic development. Each one is eager to
submerge and repress other national groupings in pursuit of its own
mystical destiny. This is Mazzini's racist gospel of universal ethnic
cleansing.
We have seen some Italian cages; next comes the Hungarian theme park
in the zoo. Our principal specimen here is Louis Kossuth, a leader of
the Hungarian revolution of 1848-49. Kossuth was for free trade. He
wanted equal status for Hungarians in the Austrian Empire--equal with
the Austrians. But within the Hungarian part of the Hapsburg Empire
there were many other national groups--Poles, Ukrainians, Germans,
Serbs, Romanians, Croatians, and others. Would they receive political
and linguistic autonomy? Kossuth's answer was to ban all official use
of the Slavic and Romanian languages in favor of Hungarian. Kossuth
was therefore on course for a bloody collision with the Illyrian
movement for Greater Croatia, and with the military forces of the
Croatian leader Jellacich. There was also conflict with the
Serbs. Mazzini had promised the same territories to Hungary, to the
Illyrian Croatians, and to his Serbian south Slav entity. Then there
was the question of Transylvania, claimed by the Hungarians but also
by the Young Romania of Dimitirie Golescu, another Mazzini
agent. Young Romania's program was to restore the Kingdom of Dacia as
it had existed before the Roman Emperor Trajan. So Young Hungary and
Young Romania were pre-programmed to fight to the death over
Transylvania, which they did, last year. Because of the ceaseless
strife of Hungarians and Croatians, Hungarians and Serbians,
Hungarians and Romanians, it proved possible for the Hapsburgs to save
their police state with the help of a Russian army.
The ethnic theme houses of the zoo thus sally forth to fight, not only
Hapsburgs and Romanovs, but most of all, each other. We will find the
same thing in viewing the Polish and Russian pavilions.
The Young Poland of Lelewel and Worcell demands the re-creation of the
Polish state and rollback of the 1772-95 partitions of Poland. But
they go much further, laying claim to Poland in its old Jagiellonian
borders, stretching from the shores of the Baltic to the shores of the
Black Sea. This includes an explicit denial that any Ukrainian nation
exists. In the orbit of Young Poland is the poet Adam Mickiewicz, a
close friend of Mazzini's who was with him last year during the Roman
Republic. Mickiewicz argues that Poland is special because it has
suffered more than any other nation; Poland is ``the Christ among
nations.'' Mickiewicz dreams of uniting all the west and south Slavs
against the ``tyrant of the north,'' the ``barbarians of the north.''
By this he means Russia, the main target. Young Poland's program also
foreshadows the obvious conflict with Young Germany over Silesia.
Young Russia means the anarchist Mikhail Bakunin and the aristocratic
ideologue Aleksandr Herzen. Herzen is an agent of Baron James
Rothschild of Paris. Right after the Crimean War, Herzen will start
publishing The Polar Star and The Bell, both leak sheets for British
secret intelligence that will build up their readership by divulging
Russian state secrets. Herzen's obvious target is Czar Alexander II,
the ally of Lincoln. Herzen prints the ravings of Bakunin, who
preaches pan-Slavism, meaning that Russia will take over all the other
Slavic nations. ``Out of an ocean of blood and fire there will rise in
Moscow high in the sky the star of the revolution to become the guide
of liberated mankind.'' Vintage Bakunin. If Mazzini relies on the
stiletto, for Bakunin it is ``the peasant's axe'' that will bring down
the ``German'' regime in St. Petersburg.
Herzen is interested in sabotaging Alexander II and his policy of
real, anti-British reform in Russia. To block real industrial
capitalist development, he preaches reliance on the aboriginal Slavic
village, the mir, with ``communal ownership of the land'' plus the
ancient Slavic workshop, the artel. The mir will never build the
Trans-Siberian railway. Herzen sees Russia as the ``center of
crystallization'' for the entire Slavic world. Herzen, although he is
usually called a ``westernizer,'' is totally hostile to western
civilization. He writes of the need for a ``new Attila,'' perhaps
Russian, perhaps American, perhaps both, who will be able to tear down
the old Europe. In the moment when the British will seem so close to
winning everything, Herzen will support Palmerston's Polish
insurrection of 1863, and will lose most of his readers. Once the
American Civil War is over, the British will have little use for
Herzen. By then, London will be betting on the nihilist terrorists of
the Narodnaya Volya (People's Will), who will finally kill Alexander
II, plus the Russian legal Marxists, all British agents. But already
today we can see the conflicts ahead between Young Poland and Young
Russia. In the conflicts among Mazzini's national chauvinist
operations, we can see the roots of the slaughter of World War I.
Now, let us view the cages in the American theme park in Mazzini's
human zoo. This is Young America. The name was popularized in 1845 by
Edwin DeLeon, the son of a Scottish Rite, Jewish slave-trading family
of Charleston, South Carolina. Edwin DeLeon will later be one of the
leaders of the Confederate espionage organization in Europe. The
leader of Young America is George N. Sanders, the future editor of the
Democratic Review. Young America's view of Manifest Destiny is a slave
empire in Mexico and the Caribbean. In the 1852 election, Young
America will back the dark horse doughface Democrat, Franklin Pierce,
against the patriot Winfield Scott. Scott's Whig Party will be
destroyed. Young America operatives will receive important posts in
London, Madrid, Turin, and other European capitals. Here they will
support Mazzini and his gang.
Mazzini's American contacts are either proto-Confederates or strict
abolitionists, such as William Lloyd Garrison. During the American
Civil War, Mazzini will favor both the abolition of slavery and the
destruction of the Union through secessionism--the London line. This
subversion will be showcased during the famous tour of Kossuth in the
United States, next year and the year after. Kossuth will be
accompanied by Mazzini's moneybags, the Tuscan Freemason Adriano
Lemmi. On the eve of the Crimean War, with Palmerston doing everything
to isolate Russia, Kossuth's line will be that the ``tree of evil and
despotism'' in Europe ``is Russia.'' Kossuth will try to blame even
the problems of Italy on Russia. Despite Kossuth's efforts, the United
States will emerge as the only power friendly to Russia during the
Crimean conflict. Kossuth will call for the United States to join with
England and France in war against Russia--Lord Palmerston's dream
scenario.
Kossuth will refuse to call for the abolition of slavery. Kossuth will
get on well with the slaveholders, since he will also be attempting to
mediate a U.S. seizure of Cuba, which meshes perfectly with the
secessionist program.
The Second Stooge: David Urquhart
Mazzini is the zookeeper for all of these theme parks. But there are
other zookeepers, and still more theme parks in the human,
multicultural zoo. The custodians are Palmerston's two other Stooges,
David Urquhart and Napoléon III.
There is also a theme park for the English lower orders. The keeper
here is the strange and eccentric Scot, David Urquhart, the most
aristocratic of Palmerston's Stooges. Urquhart was chosen for his work
directly by Jeremy Bentham, who lavishly praised ``our David'' in his
letters. Urquhart took part in Lord Byron's Greek revolution, but then
found he liked Turks better after all. He secured a post at the
British Embassy in Constantinople and ``went native,'' becoming an
Ottoman pasha in his lifestyle. Urquhart's positive contribution to
civilization was his popularization of the Turkish bath. He also kept
a harem for some time. Urquhart also thought that late Ottoman
feudalism was a model of what civilization ought to be. In Turkey,
Urquhart became convinced that all the evil in the world had a single
root: Russia, the machinations of the court of St. Petersburg. A very
convenient view for Palmerston's Britain, which was always on the
verge of war with Russia. For Urquhart, the unification of Italy is a
Russian plot. He once met Mazzini, and concluded after ten minutes
that Mazzini was a Russian agent! The usual Stooge on Stooge violence
again! For this Russophobe, the problem of Great Britain is that
Palmerston is a Russian agent, having been recruited by one of his
many mistresses, the Russian Countess Lieven. During the years of
Chartist agitation, Urquhart bought up working class leaders and
drilled them in the litany that all of the problems of the English
working man came from Russia via Lord Palmerston. To these workers
Urquhart teaches something he calls dialectics. Urquhart will be a
member of Parliament and he controls a weekly paper, The Free Press.
Palmerston understands that his subversive methods will always
generate opposition from the Tory gentry and the straight-laced
crowd. So he has taken the precaution of institutionalizing that
opposition under his own control, with a raving megalomaniac leader to
discredit it. Urquhart's demonization of Russia foreshadows something
that will be called McCarthyism a century from now.
Urquhart's remedy is to go back to the simplicity of character of
Merrie England, in the sense of retrogression to bucolic medieval
myth. ``The people of England were better clothed and fed when there
was no commerce and when there were no factories.'' That is vintage
Urquhart.
Does this talk of pre-capitalist economic formations strike a familiar
chord? Do you smell a big, fat commie rat?
How interesting that Urquhart should be the controller of British
agent Karl Marx, who earns his keep as a writer for Urquhart's
paper. David Urquhart is the founder of modern communism! It is
Urquhart who will prescribe the plan for Das Kapital. Marx is a
professed admirer of Urquhart--acknowledging his influence more than
that of any other living person. Marx will even compose a Life of Lord
Palmerston, based on Urquhart's wild obsession that Pam is a Russian
agent of influence. This says enough about Marx's acumen as a
political analyst. Marx and Urquhart agree that there is no real
absolute profit in capitalism, and that technological progress causes
a falling rate of profit.
Another of Urquhart's operatives is Lothar Bücher, a confidant of the
German labor leader Lassalle, and later of the Iron Chancellor, Otto
von Bismarck himself. After Gettysburg, Urquhart will move to France,
and open a theme park for right-wing Catholics; he will meet Pius IX
and will join members of Cardinal Newman's Oxford Movement at the
First Vatican Council in 1870.
The Third Stooge: Napoléon III
Our third Stooge is the current President and soon-to-be emperor of
France, Napoléon III. Napoléon le Petit. As we have seen, he started
off as a Carbonaro and terrorist in contact with Mazzini. In 1836,
Napoléon tried to parlay his famous name into a successful putsch; he
failed and was exiled to America. Then Napoléon was given a private
study at the new British Museum reading room and frequented Lord
Palmerston. He began work on his book, Les Idées Napoléoniques. His
main idea was that the original Napoléon was not wrong to be an
imperialist, but only erred in trying to expand his empire at the
expense of Great Britain. There is plenty of room for a French Empire
as a junior partner to the British. The preferred form of government
would be democratic Caesarism, with frequent plebiscites.
In 1848 Napoléon was working for the British as a special constable--a
riot cop--to put down an expected Chartist revolution; he was then
shipped to Paris. There Napoléon III used his name to become
President, and then organized a coup d'état that made him
emperor. Palmerston quickly endorsed the coup, causing hysteria on the
part of the Victoria and Albert palace clique. Palmerston was forced
out, but he was soon back, stronger than ever.
After hundreds of years of warfare, France at last had been broken,
placed under a more or less dependable British puppet regime. The
``western powers,'' the ``Anglo-French,'' were born. Napoléon III gave
Palmerston one indispensable ingredient for his imperial strategy: a
powerful land army. Soon an open Anglo-French entente was in full
swing. When Victoria came to Paris it was the first such visit by an
English sovereign since Henry VI had been crowned King of France in
Notre Dame in 1431. When Napoléon joined Palmerston in attacking
Russia in the Crimea, it was the first war in 400 years to see France
and England on the same side.
The French pavilion of the zoo is being redecorated with a new version
of British empiricism: This is positivism, the miserable outlook of
Auguste Comte and Ernest Renan. This will lead to the French
structuralists, ethnologists, and even deconstructionists of the late
twentieth century.
Napoléon III is Palmerston's strategic catamite, usually with as much
will of his own as an inflatable sex doll. Think of him as a blow-up
British agent. After the Crimea, Palmerston will need a land war
against Austria in northern Italy. Napoléon, egged on by Camillo Benso
di Cavour who knows how to play the interstices, will oblige with the
war of 1859 and the great Battle of Solferino. When the time will come
for Maximilian's Mexican adventure, Napoléon will be eager to send a
fleet and an army. During the American Civil War, Napoléon's
pro-Confederate stance will be even more aggressive than Palmerston's
own. In 1870, Bismarck will defeat Napoléon and send him into exile in
England. Here Napoléon will plan a comeback after the Paris Commune,
but he will need to be seen on horseback, and he has a bladder
ailment. The bladder operation designed to make him a man on horseback
once again will instead kill him.
Napoléon III calls himself a socialist and will style the latter phase
of his regime ``the liberal empire.'' That means all of France as a
theme park in the British zoo. In 1860 Napoléon will sign a free trade
treaty with the British. Along the way, he will pick up a junior
partner colonial empire in Senegal and in Indo-China in 1862,
something that will set the stage for the Vietnam War a century
later. Under Napoléon, France will build the Suez Canal, only to have
it fall under the control of the British. Napoléon III will furnish
the prototype for the fascist dictators of the twentieth century.
After his defeat in the Franco-Prussian war, he will bequeath to
France a party of proto-fascist colonialists and revanchists beating
the drum for Alsace-Lorraine, which Napoléon will lose to
Bismarck. These revanchists will turn up again in Vichy, the Fourth
Republic, and the French Socialist Party of today.
And so it will come to pass that Lord Palmerston will attempt to rule
the world through the agency of a triumvirate of Stooges, each one the
warden of some pavilions of a human zoo.
The reason why must now be confronted.
The ideology of British Imperialism
The British Empire exists in the mind of its victims. This is the
empire of senses, of sense certainty, the empire of empiricism. It is
the empire of British philosophical radicalism, of utilitarianism, of
hedonistic calculus, existentialism, and pragmatism.
Why are the British liberal imperialists called the Venetian Party?
Well, for one thing, they call themselves the Venetian Party. The
future prime minister Benjamin Disraeli will write in his novel
Conningsby that the Whig aristocrats of 1688 wanted ``to establish in
England a high aristocratic republic on the model of [Venice], making
the kings into doges, and with a `Venetian constitution.'|''
During the years after the Council of Florence in 1439, the Venetian
enemies of Nicolaus of Cusa plotted to wage war on the Italian High
Renaissance and Cusa's ecumenical project. To combat Cusa's
Renaissance Platonism, the Venetians of the Rialto and Padua turned to
a new-look Aristotelianism, featuring Aristotle's characteristic
outlook shorn of its medieval-scholastic and Averroist outgrowths.
This was expressed in the work of Pietro Pomponazzi, and in that of
Pomponazzi's pupil, Gasparo Contarini. During the War of the League of
Cambrai of 1509-17, an alliance of virtually every power in Europe
threatened to wipe out the Venetian oligarchy. The Venetians knew that
France or Spain could crush them like so many flies. The Venetians
responded by launching the Protestant Reformation with three
proto-Stooges--Luther, Calvin, and Henry VIII. At the same time,
Contarini and his Jesuits made Aristotle a central component of the
Catholic Counter-Reformation and the Council of Trent, and put Dante
and Piccolomini on the Index of Prohibited Books. The result was a
century and a half of wars of religion, and a ``little dark age,''
culminating in the Great Crisis of the seventeenth century.
Venice was a cancer consciously planning its own metastasis. From
their lagoon, the Venetians chose a swamp and an island facing the
North Atlantic--Holland and the British Isles. Here the hegemomic
Giovani party would relocate their family fortunes, their fondi, and
their characteristic epistemology. France was also colonized, but the
main bets were placed further north. First, Contarini's relative and
neighbor Francesco Zorzi was sent to serve as sex adviser to Henry
VIII, whose raging libido would be the key to Venetian hopes. Zorzi
brought Rosicrucian mysticism and Freemasonry to a land that Venetian
bankers had been looting for centuries. The Venetian Party in England
grew under the early Stuarts as Francis Bacon and his wife Thomas
Hobbes imported the neo-Aristotelianism of Fra Paolo Sarpi, the great
Venetian gamemaster of the early 1600s, the architect of the Thirty
Years' War.
When James I and Charles I disappointed the Venetians in that Thirty
Years' War, Cromwell, Milton, and a menagerie of sectarians were
brought to power in an all-Protestant civil war and Commonwealth. This
was the time of the Irish genocide and the foundation of the overseas
empire in Jamaica. After the depravity of the Restoration, the
``Glorious Revolution'' of 1688 gave birth to the most perfect
imitation of the Venetian oligarchical system ever created. The great
Whig and Tory aristocrats set as their goal a new, world-encompassing
Roman Empire with its center in London. After the defeat of Leibniz's
attempt to save England, Great Britain set off on the path of empire
with its new Hanoverian Guelph dynasty.
The War of the Spanish Succession in 1702-13 was the first war fought
on a world scale and the last gasp for rivals Spain and Holland. The
Peace of Utrecht left the British supreme on the oceans. Louis XIV and
Colbert were defeated by divide-and-conquer Venetian geopolitics, as
British cash was used to hire states like Brandenburg and Savoy to
fight the French. By winning the coveted asiento, the monopoly on
slave commerce with Spanish America, the British became the biggest
slave merchants in the world. The wealth of Bristol and Liverpool
would be built on slaves.
After several decades of Walpole and the Hell-Fire Clubs, there came
the great war of the mid-eighteenth century, the Austrian Succession
followed by the Seven Years' War. This was the end of France as a
naval power and worldwide rival for the British. William Pitt, Earl of
Chatham, subsidized Frederick the Great of Prussia to win an empire on
the plains of Germany. The British took Ft. Louisburg and then seized
Quebec City, driving the French out of Canada. The British became the
paramount power in India. The British oligarchs of the day, like their
successors after 1989, were convinced that they could run wild,
violating the laws of nature without penalty, for nothing could now
stand against them. But, in loading the American colonies with their
prohibitions of settlement and manufacture, their Quebec Act, Stamp
Acts, Townsend Acts, and Intolerable Acts, they set the stage for the
American Revolution.
In these years William Petty, Earl of Shelburne and Marquis of
Lansdowne, gathered a stable of ideologues and operatives, his
stooges. These were Jeremy Bentham, Adam Smith, Edward Gibbon. These
were the founders of British philosophical radicalism, the most
primitive form of Aristotle yet devised, and its Siamese twin, free
trade. Shelburne was defeated by the superior ability of Hamilton,
Franklin, and Washington, but he did succeed in destabilizing and
nearly destroying France. The reign of terror in the French Revolution
was the work of agents and dupes of Shelburne among the Jacobins,
enragés, and sans-culottes.
By now British policy was in the hands of Shelburne's student and
protégé, William Pitt the Younger. After letting the Jacobin horrors
of Bentham's agents brew up for three years, Pitt was able to unite
the continental powers against France in the first, second, and third
coalitions. Using the armies raised by Lazare Carnot, Napoléon
shattered each of these coalitions. Napoléon's final defeat was the
work of Scharnhorst, Gneisenau, and the Prussian reformers, but the
beneficiaries were the British.
At the Congress of Vienna in 1815, the British were clearly the
dominant force, but they were still obliged to make deals with
Metternich, Russia, and Prussia. But under the regimes of Castlereagh
and Canning, the oligarchical stupidity, greed, and incompetence of
Metternich and Co. made possible the revolts and revolutions of 1820,
1825, and 1830. By 1830, Lord Palmerston was ready to take control of
the Foreign Office and begin his direct march to undisputed world
domination. Metternich was still sitting on the lid of the boiling
European cauldron, but Lord Palmerston and his Three Stooges were
stoking the flames underneath.
There was a time when the center of oligarchy, usury, and geopolitics
was Venice, the group of islands in a lagoon at the top of the
Adriatic. In the sixteenth century, in the wake of the war of the
League of Cambrai, Venice was a cancer planning its own
metastasis. These were the years during which the patrician party
known as the Giovani, the Youngsters, began meeting in a salon known
as Ridotto Morosini. It is here that the future course of England and
Britain was charted.
Schiller Institute/ICLC Conference
"The Palmerston Zoo"
Feb. 1994
This report is adapted from presentations delivered to the Conference
of the Schiller Institute/ICLC Conference in suburban Washington, DC.,
on President's Day weekend, 1994. See Solving the Paradox of Current
World History" for the setting of the following articles. It was
published as a special report by EIR, and is available in photocopy.
Contact Schiller Institute at email or phone numbers listed below.
INTRODUCTION
Speaking from the vantage point of Lord Palmerston's British Empire
circa 1850, Schiller Institute U.S. President Webster Tarpley chaired
the panel on ``Lord Palmerston's Multicultural Zoo'' at the Schiller
Institute's conference on Feb. 20. Tarpley served as tour guide
through the centuries, and as the ``choral'' backdrop to the
historical drama, introducing each of the seven speakers in turn and
concluding the panel. What follows is Tarpley's
introduction. Subtitles have been added.
Lord Palmerston
I am now standing in the shadow of the Houses of Parliament in the
part of London called Westminster. It is the year of grace
1850. Around me lies Victorian London, the London of Dickens and
Thackeray, of John Stuart Mill and Thomas Carlyle. This capital city
is now the center of the greatest colonial empire the world has ever
known, shortly to embrace between one-fifth and one-fourth of the
total population and land area of the Earth. Although in theory there
are still empires ruled by the French, the Spanish, the Portuguese,
the Dutch, the Belgians, and the Danes, all of these, in this year of
1850, are but the satellites of the British Empire. Britain is the
mistress of the seas, the empire upon which the sun never sets. It is
the new Rome on the banks of the Thames.
The empress is Queen Victoria, who is largely occupied with Prince
Albert in her business of breeding new litters of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha to
take over the royal houses of Europe. A quarter-century from now
Victoria will be made empress of India to reward her for so much
breeding. But for all of Victoria's wealth and power, Britain is not
really a monarchy; it is an oligarchy on the Venetian model, and the
most powerful leader of the British oligarchy in these times, between
1830 and the end of the American Civil War, is Lord Palmerston.
Henry Temple, the third Viscount Palmerston. Palmerston is the man the
others--the Russells, Disraelis, and Gladstones--simply cannot
match. Palmerston was first a Tory, then a Whig, always a disciple of
Jeremy Bentham, and for 35 years there is scarcely a cabinet without
Palmerston as foreign secretary or prime minister. In London they call
him Lord Cupid, a Regency buck always on the lookout for a new
mistress, perfectly at home in a ménage ô trois. On the continent they
call him Lord Firebrand. The schoolboys of Vienna sing that if the
devil has a son, that son is Lord Palmerston. ``Pam'' is an occultist
who loves Satanism and seances. And here, between Big Ben and the
Foreign Office, are the haunts of this nineteenth-century devil, Lord
Palmerston, old Pam.
A New Roman Empire
It is 1850. Lord Palmerston is engaged in a campaign to make London
the undisputed center of a new, worldwide Roman Empire. He is
attempting to conquer the world in the way that the British have
already conquered India, reducing every other nation to the role of a
puppet, client, and fall-guy for British imperial policy. Lord
Palmerston's campaign is not a secret. He has declared it here in the
Houses of Parliament, saying that wherever in the world a British
subject goes, he can flaunt the laws, secure that the British fleet
will support him. ``Civis Romanus sum, every Briton is a citizen of
this new Rome,'' thundered Lord Palmerston, and with that, the
universal empire was proclaimed.
During the Napoleonic Wars, the British managed to conquer most of the
world outside of Europe, with the exception of the United
States. After 1815, the French--be they restored Bourbons, Orleanists,
or Bonapartists--are generally pliant tools of London.
But in central and eastern Europe, there was Prince Metternich's
Austrian Empire, a very strong land power. There was vast Imperial
Russia, under the autocrat Nicholas I or the reformer Alexander
II. There was the Kingdom of Prussia. Lord Palmerston likes to call
these the ``arbitrary powers.'' Above all, Palmerston hated
Metternich, the embodiment and ideologue of the Congress of Vienna
system. Metternich presided over one of the most pervasive police
states in history. Men said his rule was shored up by a standing army
of soldiers, a sitting army of bureaucrats, a kneeling army of
priests, and a creeping army of informers.
For Britain to rule the world, the Holy Alliance of Austria, Russia,
and Prussia had to be broken up. There is also the matter of the
dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire. Starting with Lord Byron's Greek
Revolution in the 1820s, British policy has been to play the card of
national liberation against each of these rival empires.
The imperial theme was sounded in 1846 with the free trade policy,
Britain's declaration of intent to loot the world in the name of the
pound. Then, in January 1848, Lord Palmerston arranged an insurrection
in Sicily, using British networks that went back to Lord Nelson.
That started the great revolutionary year of 1848, and in the course
of that year, every government in Europe was toppled, and every
monarchy badly shaken, at least for a time. Metternich of Austria and
King Louis Philippe of France fled to London, where they now spend
their time playing cards. There was war in Italy, civil war in
Austria, barricades in Paris, and tumult in Germany.
The only exception to the rule was Russia, and now Lord Palmerston is
preparing to invade Russia, with the help of his strategic catamite,
Napoléon III, also known as Napoléon le Petit. That will start in
about three years, and it will be called the Crimean War. As soon as
the war against Russia is over, Palmerston and John Stuart Mill at the
British East India Company will start the Great Mutiny in India, which
some historians will call the Sepoy Rebellion. Muslim soldiers will be
told that new cartridges are greased with pig fat, Hindu soldiers will
be told the cartridges are greased with cow fat, and the result will
be what you would expect. But in the conflagration the British will
get rid of the Great Mogul and the Mogul Empire, and impose their
direct rule in all of India. Typical John Stuart Mill. He, of course,
is the author of ``On Liberty.''
The British would like to give China the same treatment they are
giving India. Since 1842, Palmerston and the East India Company have
been waging Opium Wars against the Chinese Empire, partly to get them
to open their ports to opium from India, and also as a way to conquer
China. Already the British have Hong Kong and the other treaty
ports. By 1860, the British will be in Beijing, looting and burning
the summer palace of the emperor.
Shortly after that, the British will back Napoléon in his project of
putting a Hapsburg archduke on the throne of an ephemeral Mexican
Empire--the Maximilian Project. These projects will be closely
coordinated with Palmerston's plans to eliminate the only two nations
still able to oppose him--the Russia of Alexander II and the United
States of Abraham Lincoln. Lord Palmerston will be the evil demiurge
of the American Civil War, the mastermind of secession, far more
important for the Confederacy than Jefferson Davis or Robert
E. Lee. And in the midst of that war, Palmerston will detonate a
rebellion in Poland against Russian rule, not for the sake of Poland,
but for the sake of starting a general European war against Russia.
But when the Russian fleets sail into New York and San Francisco, when
Lee's wave breaks at Gettysburg, when the Stars and Bars are lowered
over Vicksburg, the British Empire will be stopped--just short of its
goal. Just short--and yet, British hegemony will still be great enough
to launch the two world wars of the twentieth century, and the third
conflagration that will start in 1991. And as we look forward for a
century and a half from 1850, British geopolitics, despite the
challenges, despite the defeats, despite the putrefaction of Britain
itself, will remain the dominant factor in world affairs.
Palmerston's Three Stooges
How do the British do it? How can a clique of depraved aristocrats on
this tight little island bid to rule the entire world? Don't believe
the stories about the workshop of the world; there are some factories
here, but Britain lives by looting the colonies. The fleet is
formidable, but also overrated, and very vulnerable to serious
challenges. The army is third-rate. But the British have learned from
the Venetians that the greatest force in history is the force of
ideas, and that if you can control culture, you can control the way
people think, and then statesmen and fleets and armies will bend to
your will.
Take our friend Lord Palmerston. Pam has the Foreign Office, the Home
Office, and Whitehall, but when he needed to start the 1848
revolutions, or when the time will come for the American Civil War, he
turns to a troika of agents.
They are Lord Palmerston's Three Stooges. But instead of Moe, Larry,
and Curly, these Three Stooges are named Giuseppe Mazzini, Louis
Napoléon Bonaparte, and David Urquhart. These Three Stooges--far more
than the Union Jack, Victoria, the bulldog breed, the thin gray line
of heroes, and the fleet--are the heart of what is called the British
Empire.
We will get to know Lord Palmerston's Three Stooges better. But first,
one thing must be understood. Moe, Larry, and Curly often had to work
together on this or that project. But their relations were never
exactly placid.
[Slapstick episode from a ``The Three Stooges'' movie is shown to the
audience.]
You understand: Their stock in trade was infantile violence. So do not
be surprised if we find Palmerston's Three Stooges lashing out with
slanders, knives, and bombs against each other, and even against their
august master, Lord Palmerston himself.
Under Lord Palmerston England supports all revolutions--except her
own--and the leading revolutionary in Her Majesty's Secret Service is
Giuseppe Mazzini, our first Stooge.
Mazzini's terrorist revolution
Mazzini has concocted a very effective terrorist belief
structure. Mazzini is a Genoese admirer of the diabolical Venetian
friar Paolo Sarpi. Mazzini's father was a physician to Queen
Victoria's father. For a while Mazzini worked for the Carbonari, one
of Napoléon's freemasonic fronts. Then, in 1831, Mazzini founded his
Young Italy secret society. Louis Napoléon Bonaparte, today's
President of France, sent him articles for his magazine. Mazzini's cry
is ``God and the People,'' ``Dio e Popolo,'' which means that the
people are the new God. Populism becomes an ersatz religion. Mazzini
teaches that Christianity developed the human individual, but that the
era of Christianity, of freedom, of human rights, is now over. From
now on, the protagonists of history are not individuals any more, but
peoples, understood as racial nationalities. Mazzini is adamant that
there are no inalienable human rights. There is only Duty, the duty of
thought and action to serve the destiny of the racial
collectivities. ``Liberty,'' says Mazzini, ``is not the negation of
all authority; it is the negation of every authority that fails to
represent the Collective Aim of the Nation.'' There is no individual
human soul, only a collective soul. According to Mazzini, the Catholic
Church, the papacy, and every other institution which attempts to
bring God to man must be abolished. Every national grouping that can
be identified must be given independence and self-determination in a
centralized dictatorship. In the coming century, Mussolini and the
Italian Fascists will repeat many of Mazzini's ideas verbatim.
Mazzini thinks that each modern nation has a ``mission'': The British
would take care of Industry and Colonies; the Poles, leadership of the
Slavic world; the Russians, the civilizing of Asia. The French get
Action, the Germans get Thought, and so forth. For some strange
reason, there is no mission for Ireland, so Mazzini does not support
the independence of Ireland. There is only one monarchy which Mazzini
supports, because he says it has deep roots among the people: You
guessed it, Queen Victoria.
Mazzini preaches an Italian revolution for the Third Rome: After the
Rome of the Caesars and the Rome of the Popes comes the Rome of the
People. For this, the pope must be driven out. Mazzini has tried to
put this into practice just last year. In November 1848, armed Young
Italy gangs forced Pope Pius IX to flee from Rome to Naples. From
March to June of 1849, Mazzini ruled the Papal States as one of three
dictators, all Grand Orient Freemasons. During that time, death squads
operated in Rome, Ancona, and other cities. Some churches were sacked,
and many confessionals were burned. For Easter 1849, Mazzini staged a
monstrous mock Eucharist in the Vatican he called the Novum Pascha,
featuring himself, God, and the People. During this time he was
planning to set up his own Italian national church on the Anglican
model.
The defense of Rome was organized by Giuseppe Garibaldi, who had
joined Mazzini's Young Italy in the early 1830s. But a French army
sent by fellow Stooge Louis Napoléon drove out Mazzini, Garibaldi, and
their supporters. Lord Palmerston said that Mazzini's regime in Rome
was ``far better than any the Romans have had for centuries.''
Right now Mazzini is here in London, enjoying the support of Lord
Ashley, the Earl of Shaftesbury, a Protestant fanatic who also happens
to be Lord Palmerston's son-in-law. Mazzini's direct access to the
British government payroll comes through James Stansfeld, a junior
Lord of the Admiralty and a very high official of British
intelligence. Last year, Stansfeld provided the money for Mazzini's
Roman Republic. Stansfeld's father-in-law, William Henry Ashurst, is
another of Mazzini's patrons, as is John Bowring of the Foreign
Office, the man who will provoke the second Opium War against
China. Bowring is Jeremy Bentham's literary executor. John Stuart Mill
of India House is another of Mazzini's friends. Mazzini is close to
the protofascist writer Thomas Carlyle, and has been having an affair
with Carlyle's wife.
One of Metternich's henchmen has said that Palmerston's policy is to
make Italy turbulent, which is bad for Austria, without making her
powerful, which would harm England. Mazzini's role in Italy has been
that of a marplot, a wrecker, a terrorist, an assassin. His specialty
is sending his brainwashed dupes to their deaths in terrorist
attacks. He hides out and always succeeds in saving himself. Mazzini
travels readily on the continent using false passports, posing as an
American, an Englishman, a rabbi.
In the thirties and forties, Mazzini was targeting Piedmont in the
north, and the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies in the south. In 1848, he
rushed to Milan as soon as the Austrians had been driven out and tried
to start trouble. One of Mazzini's agents, General Ramorino, let the
Austrian commander Radetzky outflank the Piedmontese and win the
battle of Novara. Ramorino was executed for treason, but Piedmont had
lost the first war for Italian liberation. The king abdicated, and
Mazzini tried to break up Piedmont with a revolt in Genoa. Three years
from now, Mazzini will stage an abortive revolt against the Austrians
in Milan, mainly to stop Russia from allying with Austria in the
Crimean War. A few years after that Mazzini will try another
insurrection in Genova, still trying to break up Piedmont. In 1860, he
will encourage Garibaldi to sail to Sicily, and then try to provoke a
civil war between Garibaldi's dictatorship in the south and Cavour's
Piedmontese government in the north. In 1860, he will be thrown out of
Naples as a provocateur. By that time, Mazzini will be a hated and
reviled figure, but British propaganda and British support will keep
him going.
Mazzini is also an assassination bureau. In 1848, there was a chance
that Pius IX's very capable reforming minister Pellegrino Rossi could
unify Italy and solve the Roman Question in a constructive way,
through an Italian confederation, chaired by the pope, arranged with
Gioberti, Cavour, and other Piedmontese. Mazzini's agents, members of
Young Italy, stabbed Pellegrino Rossi to death. The killer was in
touch with Lord Minto, Palmerston's special envoy for Italy.
Stooge violence between Mazzini and Napoléon III is always intense,
especially after Napoléon's army finished off Mazzini's Roman
Republic. In 1855, a Mazzini agent named Giovanni Pianori will attempt
to kill Napoléon III, and a French court will convict Mazzini. Have
Napoléon's forces outshone the bungling British in the Crimea? Are the
British nervous about Napoléon's new ironclad battleship, when they
have none? Attempts to kill Napoléon are financed by the Tibaldi Fund,
run by Mazzini and set up by Sir James Stansfeld of the Admiralty.
Later, in February 1858, there will be an attempt to blow up Napoléon
by one of Mazzini's closest and best-known lieutenants from the Roman
Republic, Felice Orsini. Napoléon will get the message that it is time
to get busy and start a war against Austria in 1859.
At other times, Mazzini tried to kill King Carlo Alberto of
Piedmont. Mazzini's Young Italy is always the party of the dagger, of
the stiletto. ``In the hands of Judith, the sword which cut short the
life of Holofernes was holy; holy was the dagger which Harmodius
crowned with roses; holy was the dagger of Brutus; holy the poniard of
the Sicilian who began the Vespers; holy the arrow of Tell.'' Vintage
Mazzini. London's future ability to assassinate men like Walter
Rathenau, Jürgen Ponto, Aldo Moro, Alfred Herrhausen, Detlev
Rohwedder, stretches back in unbroken continuity to the Mazzini
networks of today.
Mazzini is actually doing everything he can to prevent Italian
unity. When unity comes, 20 years from now, it will come in the form
of a highly centralized state dominated by Grand Orient
Freemasons. For 30 years the prime ministers will be Mazzini's agents,
like DePretis and Crispi. Because of the violent liquidation of the
Papal States, the Catholics will refuse to take part in
politics. Italy will remain weak, poor, and divided. After Mussolini,
the Italian Republican Party will identify with Mazzini, and Ugo
LaMalfa and his friends will continue Mazzini's efforts to make sure
that Italy is weak and divided, bringing down one government after
another, and ruining the economy.
Palmerston's London During the 1850's -- A Tour of the Human
Multicultural Zoo
The Ethnic Theme Parks of Mazzini's Zoo
Mazzini's work for the British extends far beyond Italy. Like the
Foreign Office and the Admiralty which he serves, Mazzini encompasses
the world. The Mazzini networks offer us a fascinating array of
movements and personalities. There are agents and dupes, professional
killers, fellow-travelers, and criminal energy types. Mazzini's court
of miracles was a public scandal. Leopold of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, now
the king of Belgium, has been complaining to his niece Queen Victoria
that in London there is maintained ``a sort of menagerie of Kossuths,
Mazzinis, Legranges, Ledru-Rollins, etc. ... to let loose occasionally
on the continent to render its quiet and prosperity impossible.''
Indeed. On Feb. 21, 1854, this crew will come together at the home of
the American consul, George Sanders: Mazzini, Felice Orsini,
Garibaldi, Louis Kossuth, Arnold Ruge, Ledru-Rollin, Stanley Worcell,
Aleksandr Herzen, and U.S. traitor and future President James
Buchanan. There will also be a Peabody from the counting house.
We can think of Mazzini as the zookeeper of a universal human
zoo. Mazzini's human zoo is divided into theme parks or pavilions, one
for each ethnic group. In a normal zoo there is an elephant house, a
monkey house, an alligator pond, and the like. In Mazzini's human zoo
there is an Italian house, a Russian house, a Hungarian house, a
Polish house, an American house. Let us walk through the various theme
parks in the zoo and identify some of the specimens.
Young Italy, as we have seen, was founded in 1831, attracting the
young sailor Giuseppe Garibaldi and Louis Napoléon. Shortly thereafter
there followed Young Poland, whose leaders included the
revolutionaries Lelewel and Worcell. Then came Young Germany,
featuring Arnold Ruge, who had published some material by an obscure
German ``red republican'' named Karl Marx. This is the Young Germany
satirized by Heinrich Heine. In 1834, Mazzini founded ``Young
Europe,'' with Italian, Swiss, German, and Polish components. Young
Europe was billed as the Holy Alliance of the Peoples, opposed to
Metternich's Holy Alliance of despots. By 1835, there was also a Young
Switzerland. In that same year Mazzini launched Young France. The
guiding light here was Ledru-Rollin, who later became the interior
minister in Lamartine's short-lived Second French Republic of
1848. There was also Young Corsica, which was the mafia.
By the end of this century we will have a Young Argentina (founded by
Garibaldi), Young Bosnia, Young India, Young Russia, Young Armenia,
Young Egypt, the Young Czechs, plus similar groupings in Romania,
Hungary, Bulgaria, and Greece. Mazzini is especially interested in
creating a south Slavic federation dominated by Belgrade, and for that
reason, he has a Serbian organization. That will have to wait for
Mazzini's student Woodrow Wilson and the Versailles peace conference
of 1919. Right now, a masonic group in the United States is gearing up
to support the pro-slavery doughface Franklin Pierce for President in
1852; they are the radical wing of the Democratic Party, and they call
themselves Young America. In the future there will be the Young
Turks. And yes, there is also a Palmerston-Mazzini group for Jews,
sometimes called Young Israel, and sometimes called B'nai B'rith.
For Mazzini, a nationality means a race, a fixed array of behavior
like a breed of dog or a species of animal. He is not thinking of a
national community united by a literate language and a classical
culture to which any person can become assimilated through a political
choice. For Mazzini, race is unchangeable, and race is destiny. It is
a matter of blood and soil. Cats fight dogs, French fight Germans,
Germans fight Poles, and so on through all eternity. These hatreds are
the main datum of sensory perception.
Each of Mazzini's organizations demands immediate national liberation
for its own ethnic group on the basis of aggressive chauvinism and
expansionism. Mazzini's warhorse is the Territorial Imperative. Each
is obsessed with borders and territory, and each finds a way to oppose
and sabotage dirigist economic development. Each one is eager to
submerge and repress other national groupings in pursuit of its own
mystical destiny. This is Mazzini's racist gospel of universal ethnic
cleansing.
We have seen some Italian cages; next comes the Hungarian theme park
in the zoo. Our principal specimen here is Louis Kossuth, a leader of
the Hungarian revolution of 1848-49. Kossuth was for free trade. He
wanted equal status for Hungarians in the Austrian Empire--equal with
the Austrians. But within the Hungarian part of the Hapsburg Empire
there were many other national groups--Poles, Ukrainians, Germans,
Serbs, Romanians, Croatians, and others. Would they receive political
and linguistic autonomy? Kossuth's answer was to ban all official use
of the Slavic and Romanian languages in favor of Hungarian. Kossuth
was therefore on course for a bloody collision with the Illyrian
movement for Greater Croatia, and with the military forces of the
Croatian leader Jellacich. There was also conflict with the
Serbs. Mazzini had promised the same territories to Hungary, to the
Illyrian Croatians, and to his Serbian south Slav entity. Then there
was the question of Transylvania, claimed by the Hungarians but also
by the Young Romania of Dimitirie Golescu, another Mazzini
agent. Young Romania's program was to restore the Kingdom of Dacia as
it had existed before the Roman Emperor Trajan. So Young Hungary and
Young Romania were pre-programmed to fight to the death over
Transylvania, which they did, last year. Because of the ceaseless
strife of Hungarians and Croatians, Hungarians and Serbians,
Hungarians and Romanians, it proved possible for the Hapsburgs to save
their police state with the help of a Russian army.
The ethnic theme houses of the zoo thus sally forth to fight, not only
Hapsburgs and Romanovs, but most of all, each other. We will find the
same thing in viewing the Polish and Russian pavilions.
The Young Poland of Lelewel and Worcell demands the re-creation of the
Polish state and rollback of the 1772-95 partitions of Poland. But
they go much further, laying claim to Poland in its old Jagiellonian
borders, stretching from the shores of the Baltic to the shores of the
Black Sea. This includes an explicit denial that any Ukrainian nation
exists. In the orbit of Young Poland is the poet Adam Mickiewicz, a
close friend of Mazzini's who was with him last year during the Roman
Republic. Mickiewicz argues that Poland is special because it has
suffered more than any other nation; Poland is ``the Christ among
nations.'' Mickiewicz dreams of uniting all the west and south Slavs
against the ``tyrant of the north,'' the ``barbarians of the north.''
By this he means Russia, the main target. Young Poland's program also
foreshadows the obvious conflict with Young Germany over Silesia.
Young Russia means the anarchist Mikhail Bakunin and the aristocratic
ideologue Aleksandr Herzen. Herzen is an agent of Baron James
Rothschild of Paris. Right after the Crimean War, Herzen will start
publishing The Polar Star and The Bell, both leak sheets for British
secret intelligence that will build up their readership by divulging
Russian state secrets. Herzen's obvious target is Czar Alexander II,
the ally of Lincoln. Herzen prints the ravings of Bakunin, who
preaches pan-Slavism, meaning that Russia will take over all the other
Slavic nations. ``Out of an ocean of blood and fire there will rise in
Moscow high in the sky the star of the revolution to become the guide
of liberated mankind.'' Vintage Bakunin. If Mazzini relies on the
stiletto, for Bakunin it is ``the peasant's axe'' that will bring down
the ``German'' regime in St. Petersburg.
Herzen is interested in sabotaging Alexander II and his policy of
real, anti-British reform in Russia. To block real industrial
capitalist development, he preaches reliance on the aboriginal Slavic
village, the mir, with ``communal ownership of the land'' plus the
ancient Slavic workshop, the artel. The mir will never build the
Trans-Siberian railway. Herzen sees Russia as the ``center of
crystallization'' for the entire Slavic world. Herzen, although he is
usually called a ``westernizer,'' is totally hostile to western
civilization. He writes of the need for a ``new Attila,'' perhaps
Russian, perhaps American, perhaps both, who will be able to tear down
the old Europe. In the moment when the British will seem so close to
winning everything, Herzen will support Palmerston's Polish
insurrection of 1863, and will lose most of his readers. Once the
American Civil War is over, the British will have little use for
Herzen. By then, London will be betting on the nihilist terrorists of
the Narodnaya Volya (People's Will), who will finally kill Alexander
II, plus the Russian legal Marxists, all British agents. But already
today we can see the conflicts ahead between Young Poland and Young
Russia. In the conflicts among Mazzini's national chauvinist
operations, we can see the roots of the slaughter of World War I.
Now, let us view the cages in the American theme park in Mazzini's
human zoo. This is Young America. The name was popularized in 1845 by
Edwin DeLeon, the son of a Scottish Rite, Jewish slave-trading family
of Charleston, South Carolina. Edwin DeLeon will later be one of the
leaders of the Confederate espionage organization in Europe. The
leader of Young America is George N. Sanders, the future editor of the
Democratic Review. Young America's view of Manifest Destiny is a slave
empire in Mexico and the Caribbean. In the 1852 election, Young
America will back the dark horse doughface Democrat, Franklin Pierce,
against the patriot Winfield Scott. Scott's Whig Party will be
destroyed. Young America operatives will receive important posts in
London, Madrid, Turin, and other European capitals. Here they will
support Mazzini and his gang.
Mazzini's American contacts are either proto-Confederates or strict
abolitionists, such as William Lloyd Garrison. During the American
Civil War, Mazzini will favor both the abolition of slavery and the
destruction of the Union through secessionism--the London line. This
subversion will be showcased during the famous tour of Kossuth in the
United States, next year and the year after. Kossuth will be
accompanied by Mazzini's moneybags, the Tuscan Freemason Adriano
Lemmi. On the eve of the Crimean War, with Palmerston doing everything
to isolate Russia, Kossuth's line will be that the ``tree of evil and
despotism'' in Europe ``is Russia.'' Kossuth will try to blame even
the problems of Italy on Russia. Despite Kossuth's efforts, the United
States will emerge as the only power friendly to Russia during the
Crimean conflict. Kossuth will call for the United States to join with
England and France in war against Russia--Lord Palmerston's dream
scenario.
Kossuth will refuse to call for the abolition of slavery. Kossuth will
get on well with the slaveholders, since he will also be attempting to
mediate a U.S. seizure of Cuba, which meshes perfectly with the
secessionist program.
The Second Stooge: David Urquhart
Mazzini is the zookeeper for all of these theme parks. But there are
other zookeepers, and still more theme parks in the human,
multicultural zoo. The custodians are Palmerston's two other Stooges,
David Urquhart and Napoléon III.
There is also a theme park for the English lower orders. The keeper
here is the strange and eccentric Scot, David Urquhart, the most
aristocratic of Palmerston's Stooges. Urquhart was chosen for his work
directly by Jeremy Bentham, who lavishly praised ``our David'' in his
letters. Urquhart took part in Lord Byron's Greek revolution, but then
found he liked Turks better after all. He secured a post at the
British Embassy in Constantinople and ``went native,'' becoming an
Ottoman pasha in his lifestyle. Urquhart's positive contribution to
civilization was his popularization of the Turkish bath. He also kept
a harem for some time. Urquhart also thought that late Ottoman
feudalism was a model of what civilization ought to be. In Turkey,
Urquhart became convinced that all the evil in the world had a single
root: Russia, the machinations of the court of St. Petersburg. A very
convenient view for Palmerston's Britain, which was always on the
verge of war with Russia. For Urquhart, the unification of Italy is a
Russian plot. He once met Mazzini, and concluded after ten minutes
that Mazzini was a Russian agent! The usual Stooge on Stooge violence
again! For this Russophobe, the problem of Great Britain is that
Palmerston is a Russian agent, having been recruited by one of his
many mistresses, the Russian Countess Lieven. During the years of
Chartist agitation, Urquhart bought up working class leaders and
drilled them in the litany that all of the problems of the English
working man came from Russia via Lord Palmerston. To these workers
Urquhart teaches something he calls dialectics. Urquhart will be a
member of Parliament and he controls a weekly paper, The Free Press.
Palmerston understands that his subversive methods will always
generate opposition from the Tory gentry and the straight-laced
crowd. So he has taken the precaution of institutionalizing that
opposition under his own control, with a raving megalomaniac leader to
discredit it. Urquhart's demonization of Russia foreshadows something
that will be called McCarthyism a century from now.
Urquhart's remedy is to go back to the simplicity of character of
Merrie England, in the sense of retrogression to bucolic medieval
myth. ``The people of England were better clothed and fed when there
was no commerce and when there were no factories.'' That is vintage
Urquhart.
Does this talk of pre-capitalist economic formations strike a familiar
chord? Do you smell a big, fat commie rat?
How interesting that Urquhart should be the controller of British
agent Karl Marx, who earns his keep as a writer for Urquhart's
paper. David Urquhart is the founder of modern communism! It is
Urquhart who will prescribe the plan for Das Kapital. Marx is a
professed admirer of Urquhart--acknowledging his influence more than
that of any other living person. Marx will even compose a Life of Lord
Palmerston, based on Urquhart's wild obsession that Pam is a Russian
agent of influence. This says enough about Marx's acumen as a
political analyst. Marx and Urquhart agree that there is no real
absolute profit in capitalism, and that technological progress causes
a falling rate of profit.
Another of Urquhart's operatives is Lothar Bücher, a confidant of the
German labor leader Lassalle, and later of the Iron Chancellor, Otto
von Bismarck himself. After Gettysburg, Urquhart will move to France,
and open a theme park for right-wing Catholics; he will meet Pius IX
and will join members of Cardinal Newman's Oxford Movement at the
First Vatican Council in 1870.
The Third Stooge: Napoléon III
Our third Stooge is the current President and soon-to-be emperor of
France, Napoléon III. Napoléon le Petit. As we have seen, he started
off as a Carbonaro and terrorist in contact with Mazzini. In 1836,
Napoléon tried to parlay his famous name into a successful putsch; he
failed and was exiled to America. Then Napoléon was given a private
study at the new British Museum reading room and frequented Lord
Palmerston. He began work on his book, Les Idées Napoléoniques. His
main idea was that the original Napoléon was not wrong to be an
imperialist, but only erred in trying to expand his empire at the
expense of Great Britain. There is plenty of room for a French Empire
as a junior partner to the British. The preferred form of government
would be democratic Caesarism, with frequent plebiscites.
In 1848 Napoléon was working for the British as a special constable--a
riot cop--to put down an expected Chartist revolution; he was then
shipped to Paris. There Napoléon III used his name to become
President, and then organized a coup d'état that made him
emperor. Palmerston quickly endorsed the coup, causing hysteria on the
part of the Victoria and Albert palace clique. Palmerston was forced
out, but he was soon back, stronger than ever.
After hundreds of years of warfare, France at last had been broken,
placed under a more or less dependable British puppet regime. The
``western powers,'' the ``Anglo-French,'' were born. Napoléon III gave
Palmerston one indispensable ingredient for his imperial strategy: a
powerful land army. Soon an open Anglo-French entente was in full
swing. When Victoria came to Paris it was the first such visit by an
English sovereign since Henry VI had been crowned King of France in
Notre Dame in 1431. When Napoléon joined Palmerston in attacking
Russia in the Crimea, it was the first war in 400 years to see France
and England on the same side.
The French pavilion of the zoo is being redecorated with a new version
of British empiricism: This is positivism, the miserable outlook of
Auguste Comte and Ernest Renan. This will lead to the French
structuralists, ethnologists, and even deconstructionists of the late
twentieth century.
Napoléon III is Palmerston's strategic catamite, usually with as much
will of his own as an inflatable sex doll. Think of him as a blow-up
British agent. After the Crimea, Palmerston will need a land war
against Austria in northern Italy. Napoléon, egged on by Camillo Benso
di Cavour who knows how to play the interstices, will oblige with the
war of 1859 and the great Battle of Solferino. When the time will come
for Maximilian's Mexican adventure, Napoléon will be eager to send a
fleet and an army. During the American Civil War, Napoléon's
pro-Confederate stance will be even more aggressive than Palmerston's
own. In 1870, Bismarck will defeat Napoléon and send him into exile in
England. Here Napoléon will plan a comeback after the Paris Commune,
but he will need to be seen on horseback, and he has a bladder
ailment. The bladder operation designed to make him a man on horseback
once again will instead kill him.
Napoléon III calls himself a socialist and will style the latter phase
of his regime ``the liberal empire.'' That means all of France as a
theme park in the British zoo. In 1860 Napoléon will sign a free trade
treaty with the British. Along the way, he will pick up a junior
partner colonial empire in Senegal and in Indo-China in 1862,
something that will set the stage for the Vietnam War a century
later. Under Napoléon, France will build the Suez Canal, only to have
it fall under the control of the British. Napoléon III will furnish
the prototype for the fascist dictators of the twentieth century.
After his defeat in the Franco-Prussian war, he will bequeath to
France a party of proto-fascist colonialists and revanchists beating
the drum for Alsace-Lorraine, which Napoléon will lose to
Bismarck. These revanchists will turn up again in Vichy, the Fourth
Republic, and the French Socialist Party of today.
And so it will come to pass that Lord Palmerston will attempt to rule
the world through the agency of a triumvirate of Stooges, each one the
warden of some pavilions of a human zoo.
The reason why must now be confronted.
The ideology of British Imperialism
The British Empire exists in the mind of its victims. This is the
empire of senses, of sense certainty, the empire of empiricism. It is
the empire of British philosophical radicalism, of utilitarianism, of
hedonistic calculus, existentialism, and pragmatism.
Why are the British liberal imperialists called the Venetian Party?
Well, for one thing, they call themselves the Venetian Party. The
future prime minister Benjamin Disraeli will write in his novel
Conningsby that the Whig aristocrats of 1688 wanted ``to establish in
England a high aristocratic republic on the model of [Venice], making
the kings into doges, and with a `Venetian constitution.'|''
During the years after the Council of Florence in 1439, the Venetian
enemies of Nicolaus of Cusa plotted to wage war on the Italian High
Renaissance and Cusa's ecumenical project. To combat Cusa's
Renaissance Platonism, the Venetians of the Rialto and Padua turned to
a new-look Aristotelianism, featuring Aristotle's characteristic
outlook shorn of its medieval-scholastic and Averroist outgrowths.
This was expressed in the work of Pietro Pomponazzi, and in that of
Pomponazzi's pupil, Gasparo Contarini. During the War of the League of
Cambrai of 1509-17, an alliance of virtually every power in Europe
threatened to wipe out the Venetian oligarchy. The Venetians knew that
France or Spain could crush them like so many flies. The Venetians
responded by launching the Protestant Reformation with three
proto-Stooges--Luther, Calvin, and Henry VIII. At the same time,
Contarini and his Jesuits made Aristotle a central component of the
Catholic Counter-Reformation and the Council of Trent, and put Dante
and Piccolomini on the Index of Prohibited Books. The result was a
century and a half of wars of religion, and a ``little dark age,''
culminating in the Great Crisis of the seventeenth century.
Venice was a cancer consciously planning its own metastasis. From
their lagoon, the Venetians chose a swamp and an island facing the
North Atlantic--Holland and the British Isles. Here the hegemomic
Giovani party would relocate their family fortunes, their fondi, and
their characteristic epistemology. France was also colonized, but the
main bets were placed further north. First, Contarini's relative and
neighbor Francesco Zorzi was sent to serve as sex adviser to Henry
VIII, whose raging libido would be the key to Venetian hopes. Zorzi
brought Rosicrucian mysticism and Freemasonry to a land that Venetian
bankers had been looting for centuries. The Venetian Party in England
grew under the early Stuarts as Francis Bacon and his wife Thomas
Hobbes imported the neo-Aristotelianism of Fra Paolo Sarpi, the great
Venetian gamemaster of the early 1600s, the architect of the Thirty
Years' War.
When James I and Charles I disappointed the Venetians in that Thirty
Years' War, Cromwell, Milton, and a menagerie of sectarians were
brought to power in an all-Protestant civil war and Commonwealth. This
was the time of the Irish genocide and the foundation of the overseas
empire in Jamaica. After the depravity of the Restoration, the
``Glorious Revolution'' of 1688 gave birth to the most perfect
imitation of the Venetian oligarchical system ever created. The great
Whig and Tory aristocrats set as their goal a new, world-encompassing
Roman Empire with its center in London. After the defeat of Leibniz's
attempt to save England, Great Britain set off on the path of empire
with its new Hanoverian Guelph dynasty.
The War of the Spanish Succession in 1702-13 was the first war fought
on a world scale and the last gasp for rivals Spain and Holland. The
Peace of Utrecht left the British supreme on the oceans. Louis XIV and
Colbert were defeated by divide-and-conquer Venetian geopolitics, as
British cash was used to hire states like Brandenburg and Savoy to
fight the French. By winning the coveted asiento, the monopoly on
slave commerce with Spanish America, the British became the biggest
slave merchants in the world. The wealth of Bristol and Liverpool
would be built on slaves.
After several decades of Walpole and the Hell-Fire Clubs, there came
the great war of the mid-eighteenth century, the Austrian Succession
followed by the Seven Years' War. This was the end of France as a
naval power and worldwide rival for the British. William Pitt, Earl of
Chatham, subsidized Frederick the Great of Prussia to win an empire on
the plains of Germany. The British took Ft. Louisburg and then seized
Quebec City, driving the French out of Canada. The British became the
paramount power in India. The British oligarchs of the day, like their
successors after 1989, were convinced that they could run wild,
violating the laws of nature without penalty, for nothing could now
stand against them. But, in loading the American colonies with their
prohibitions of settlement and manufacture, their Quebec Act, Stamp
Acts, Townsend Acts, and Intolerable Acts, they set the stage for the
American Revolution.
In these years William Petty, Earl of Shelburne and Marquis of
Lansdowne, gathered a stable of ideologues and operatives, his
stooges. These were Jeremy Bentham, Adam Smith, Edward Gibbon. These
were the founders of British philosophical radicalism, the most
primitive form of Aristotle yet devised, and its Siamese twin, free
trade. Shelburne was defeated by the superior ability of Hamilton,
Franklin, and Washington, but he did succeed in destabilizing and
nearly destroying France. The reign of terror in the French Revolution
was the work of agents and dupes of Shelburne among the Jacobins,
enragés, and sans-culottes.
By now British policy was in the hands of Shelburne's student and
protégé, William Pitt the Younger. After letting the Jacobin horrors
of Bentham's agents brew up for three years, Pitt was able to unite
the continental powers against France in the first, second, and third
coalitions. Using the armies raised by Lazare Carnot, Napoléon
shattered each of these coalitions. Napoléon's final defeat was the
work of Scharnhorst, Gneisenau, and the Prussian reformers, but the
beneficiaries were the British.
At the Congress of Vienna in 1815, the British were clearly the
dominant force, but they were still obliged to make deals with
Metternich, Russia, and Prussia. But under the regimes of Castlereagh
and Canning, the oligarchical stupidity, greed, and incompetence of
Metternich and Co. made possible the revolts and revolutions of 1820,
1825, and 1830. By 1830, Lord Palmerston was ready to take control of
the Foreign Office and begin his direct march to undisputed world
domination. Metternich was still sitting on the lid of the boiling
European cauldron, but Lord Palmerston and his Three Stooges were
stoking the flames underneath.
There was a time when the center of oligarchy, usury, and geopolitics
was Venice, the group of islands in a lagoon at the top of the
Adriatic. In the sixteenth century, in the wake of the war of the
League of Cambrai, Venice was a cancer planning its own
metastasis. These were the years during which the patrician party
known as the Giovani, the Youngsters, began meeting in a salon known
as Ridotto Morosini. It is here that the future course of England and
Britain was charted.