Cheney Revives Parvus
`Permanent War' Madness
by Jeffrey Steinberg, Allen Douglas, and Rachel Douglas
It was never a secret that the ranks of today's Washington neo-conservative war-party are filled with former first and second generation Trotskyists—personified by Irving Kristol, the former Shachtmanite Trotskyist, self-described "Godfather" of the entire neo-con apparatus, and the father of Weekly Standard editor William Kristol. What was ignored was the fact that both they and Vice President Dick Cheney are still fanatically committed to former Bolshevik minister of war Leon Trotsky's doctrine of "permanent revolution," and to the kind of permanent war which Cheney has created in Iraq, and is preparing to launch, very soon, as nuclear-armed warfare against Iran, and similarly permanent warfare against Syria, in South America, and elsewhere as soon, and as often as possible. It is this doctrine, which most historians associate with the name of Josef Stalin rival Leon Trotsky and his followers, which is presently the most immediate threat of mass-murderous violence to the world as a whole.
It is also the leading active threat to the continued existence of the U.S.A. as a constitutional republic, here, at home.
That is the root of the wide-spread failure of most leading circles in the U.S. and Europe to grasp the true nature of the menace which has been unleashed as a result of Vice President Cheney's adoption of a doctrine which the Russian-born British intelligence asset Alexander Helphand, also known as "Parvus," dictated to Leon Trotsky's effort to overthrow Russia's Tsar in the revolution of 1905. What Helphand dictated to his dupe Trotsky, in writing, personally, there at that time, is a doctrine of "permanent revolution/permanent war" which Trotsky himself defended up to the moment of his murder by a Soviet assassin, in Mexico in 1940. That is the policy actually being conducted by Cheney's alleged former Trotskyist, neo-conservative advisors today. That is the the policy which has unleashed the monstrous and worsening catastrophe which Cheney's continued policies, and Cheney's lies to the U.S. Congress, have created, which is moving now to the brink of a new disaster, in the entire region of Southwest Asia today. The facts which more than prove all this are not only clear. The greatest threat to the U.S. today, is the failure of most leading circles here, and in Europe, to understand the vast mass of often overlooked evidence which must be understood if we are to prevent the now financial-crisis-wracked U.S. and the world from being lured, very soon, into an early catastrophe beyond the calculations of most leading circles among governments still today.
Those critics who do not understand what is really behind Cheney's murderous rages and lies, and think that the "neo-cons" have failed in Iraq, are people simply do not yet understand the real goals of Cheney's ongoing policy.
True, the George W. Bush Administration has succeeded to an alarming degree, leaving Iraq in a state of Sunni versus Shi'ite, Kurd versus Turkmen, and even Shi'ite versus Shi'ite civil war, that could go on for generations, and which threatens to soon spread to all of the neighboring states.
No competent strategists are surprised by this result of Bush Administration war-policy. What we are seeing today, is the foreseeable fiasco of Bush war policy which prompted many leading American military commanders and diplomats, like Gen. Anthony Zinni and Ambassador Chas Freeman, to vocally oppose the Cheney/neo-con Iraq adventure, long before the first American troops crossed into Iraqi territory.
The neo-Trotskyist neo-cons and their hooligans, typified by Dick Cheney, were not out simply to establish a stable American imperial occupation, seize control over the oil fields, and blackmail rival states like China with the cutoff of petroleum, as many Bush-Cheney critics presume. Cheney's gang never intended to end, with some form of Pax Americana. It was intended to be the first of a succession of permanent wars, engulfing the entire Persian Gulf and extended Southwest and Central Asian regions in decades of chaos, fostering a domino of "failed states," and causing global economic and political mayhem, all to the benefit of a private financier oligarchy, largely centered in the City of London and its offshoots based in the Caribbean region, in such locales as the Cayman Islands.
The already ongoing civil war in Iraq, fueled every step along the way by Bush Administration policy actions, reflected the intentions of the most hard-core of the neo-con ideologues, a cabal centered out of the Office of the Vice President, and together with such neo-Trotskyist "think-tanks" as the American Enterprise Institute and the Hudson Institute.
Just because President George W. Bush was foolish enough to believe the kindergarten propaganda of the neo-cons about a "cakewalk" victory, a flourishing of Iraqi democracy, and the immediate free flow of Iraqi oil, does not make it true. The President, with his bizarre Promise Keeper fundamentalist religious dogmas, is, after all, the perfect Straussian politician, the fool duped by the scheming "philosophers" who ply him with lies, which he takes as the gospel truth, and spreads to an equally duped, mindless following.
The intent to foster permanent revolution and permanent war according to Helphand's doctrine throughout Southwest Asia was clearly spelled out, years before the Iraq war, by a group of American neo-con "chickenhawks" in the July 1996 "A Clean Break" paper, delivered to then-Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Authors Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, David Wurmser, Meyrav Wurmser, Charles Fairbanks (surrogate and former college roommate of Paul Wolfowitz), et al. spelled out an unambiguous scheme to spread war from Iraq to Syria, Lebanon, and Iran, on to Saudi Arabia, and, ultimately, to Egypt. According to one well-informed U.S. intelligence source, the essence of the neo-cons' "Clean Break" plan was to bust up the "Sunni Stability Belt," centered around Saudi Arabia and Egypt, which had provided a degree of stability to the region throughout the Cold War era, and had assured the free flow of Persian Gulf oil to the world.
The sequence of premeditated steps, taken by the Bush-Cheney Administration neo-cons, in bringing occupied Iraq to the brink of chaos and destruction, cannot be credibly written off to bad judgment, greed, or naive utopianism. This starts with "Clean Break" co-author Doug Feith's rejection of all State Department expert plans for the post-conflict occupation and reconstruction of Iraq; continues through the Wolfowitz-ordered dismantling of the entire Iraqi Army and Ba'athist infrastructure; and carries through the fostering of Shi'ite versus Sunni conflict—what Dr. Phebe Marr described at a recent Washington event as the "Lebanonization" of Iraq.
On to Damascus and Tehran
Indeed, as this issue of EIR goes to press, Vice President Cheney and his cohorts have escalated the next phase of their war plans against both Syria and Iran.
On Sept. 14, the Washington Post reported that Bush Administration chief arms control official, Dr. Robert Joseph, has been making Power Point presentations to diplomats from more than a dozen countries, claiming to prove that Iran has been secretly pursuing a nuclear weapons program, and must be confronted. The presentation, "A History of Concealment and Deception," is reminiscent of the same kinds of briefings, conjured up by the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans, to make the case for the preemptive war against Iraq, prior to the March 2003 U.S. and British invasion. Dr. Joseph, the Richard Perle protégé who replaced the neo-conservative acting United Nations Ambassador John Bolton, as the State Department's chief arms control negotiator, was formerly with the Condoleezza Rice National Security Council, where he authored the infamous "sixteen words" in President George W. Bush's January 2003 State of the Union Address, falsely accusing Saddam Hussein of seeking uranium from Africa to build nuclear bombs. That "Saddam has nukes" disinformation campaign was pivotal to bullying the U.S. Congress into acquiescing to the Iraq preemptive war.
Through a series of leaks, including a Sept. 11 Washington Post front-page story by Walter Pincus, it has been confirmed that Vice President Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld are promoting the integration of "mini-nukes" into the conventional arsenal of the U.S. military. As EIR widely exposed in July, Cheney is openly promoting a preventive nuclear strike against scores of targets inside Iran, all ostensibly secret nuclear weapons facilities and related sites. Such a U.S. or U.S.-Israeli air strike against Iran would trigger an out-of-control asymmetric war, soon engulfing the entire planet, and making the United States the number one enemy of more than 1.6 billion Muslims for generations to come. Such precedent-setting U.S. mini-nuke strikes against Iran would usher in a planetary "New Dark Age," highlighted by $150-200 barrels of oil.
On Sept. 14, U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Zalmay Khalilzad raced back to Washington to deliver a press conference, denouncing Syria for its continued involvement in the Iraq insurgency, vowing, on behalf of the Bush Administration, that "no option," including military strikes, was off the table, if Syria continued to back the Iraq insurgents.
To be sure, there are legitimate complaints to be raised with the regimes in both Tehran and Damascus. But the present renewed war drive by Cheney et al. against Iran and Syria is not intended as a "diplomatic stick" aimed at facilitating a diplomatic solution. To comprehend what it is that makes Dick Cheney's handlers tick—like the second generation Anglo-Soviet "Trust" agent George Shultz—it is necessary to dissect the actual history of the doctrine of permanent war/permanent revolution, and then, revisit the events of the past five years of the Bush-Cheney regime from that fresh standpoint.
Permanent Imperialism
In a Sept. 14, 2005 memorandum to colleagues, Lyndon LaRouche wrote: "The use of the interchangeable terms, 'Permanent Revolution' and 'Permanent War' is merely a substitution of labels for the long-standing term 'imperialism'.... 'Permanent Revolution' is an Anglo-Dutch Liberal's neo-Venetian Party term, describing the character and aims of British imperialism as rooted in the reign of a financier-oligarchical system through destroying all prospective sources of patriotic challenge to empire by policies of 'permanent regime-change' ('permanent revolution') and 'permanent warfare.' "
LaRouche continued, "The shift, by the Anglo-Dutch Liberals and their financier-oligarchical rivals and partners, away from emphasis on crown colonies to more or less global financier-oligarchical tyranny, is aptly reflected by a shift of emphasis to the essential predicates of imperialism (e.g., 'permanent regime-change' and 'permanent warfare') from the emphasis on the optional predicate of colonial territory. In both variants, emphasis upon colony, and emphasis on globalized financier-oligarchical power, the sovereign nation-state is the adversary which the imperialist must continually move to subvert and destroy."
The American System Goes Global
The doctrine of "Permanent Revolution/Permanent War," widely associated with the Bolshevik revolutionary Leon Trotsky, emerged in a very specific historical context—the late 19th- and early 20th-Century period, in which the ideas of the American System of political economy were gaining wide support among leading governments and political circles throughout Eurasia. This posed an existential threat to the British Monarchy/British East India Company-centered Anglo-Dutch empire, and to the head of that cabal, the "Prince of the Isles" Edward Albert, later Britain's King Edward VII.
In the immediate aftermath of the defeat of the British-backed Southern secessionist insurrection known as the American Civil War (1861-65), the United States, despite the British-sponsored assassination of President Abraham Lincoln, emerged as the world's leading industrial power. What was known as the American System of political economy, associated with U.S. Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton, and such later Hamiltonians as Henry Carey, John Quincy Adams, Henry Clay, E. Peshine Smith, the German Careyite Friedrich List, et al., established a system of protective tariffs, national banking, infrastructure investment, the promotion of science and technology, and other measures. The American System was universally known, at the time, to be the deadly, feared enemy of the British System of free trade, private central banking, slave labor, and global cartels.
It was the industrial might of the Federal states—based on the Hamiltonian American System policy—that provided the margin of victory against the Confederate insurrection. Lincoln was also greatly assisted by the vital international support of his close ally, Russia's Tsar Alexander II, who deployed the entire Russian navy to North American to deter Britain and France from entering the war on the side of the Confederacy.
In a fitting celebration of the American System, a Centennial fair was convened in Philadelphia in 1876, which aimed to spread the American System around the world. In this period, these ideas took root in the new unified German state, under Bismarck, which adopted the ideas of Friedrich List, and which established joint industrial ventures between leading American figures like Thomas Alva Edison and German industrialists Walther Rathenau and Werner von Siemens. In Russia, American and Russian engineers collaborated on the construction of the Trans-Siberian Railroad, which was modelled on the U.S. Transcontinental Railroad project, which had helped consolidate a unified continental republic, following the disasters of the Civil War. Under the leadership of Sergei Witte (see accompanying article), Russia emerged, at the end of the 19th Century, as the fastest-growing industrial nation in Eurasia. In Japan, under the Meiji Restoration, the American System was adopted, with Carey protégé E. Peshine Smith serving as a leading economic advisor to the Japanese Emperor. Similar American System ideas were adopted in the France of Gabriel Hanotaux, which launched ambitious plans to build railroads across Africa. In China, Sun Yat-sen was trained by American missionaries in the ideas of Hamilton and Carey, and a Chinese republican movement advanced detailed plans for the integration and modernization of China. Other examples of the spread of the American System abounded in South America and as far away as Australia.
The British Empire Strikes Back
In London, Prince Edward Albert, the son of Queen Victoria, who would later become King Edward VII, viewed this spread of the American System with great alarm. The British response, over the course of the next 40 years, would be to spread perpetual warfare across Eurasia, through an array of manipulations, playing one nationality off against another, assassinating key republican political leaders, fostering the growth of deeply flawed pseudo-political movements and ideologies, conducting each-against-all diplomatic maneuverings, and fomenting "regime changes," ultimately leading to two successive World Wars. In every instance, British agents, often operating under the cover of official diplomatic postings, forged alliances with the most backward feudalist and fundamentalist factions within the targetted nations—often through Freemasonic lodges and other secret societies, created phony "liberation" movements, and recruited and deployed key agents.
Thus, instead of a Eurasia, united behind American System republican ideas and concrete great development projects, the British manipulated the Franco-Prussian, Balkan, Sino-Japanese, and Russo-Japanese wars. The Balkan Wars of 1912-13 led, lawfully, into World War I. The "Young Turk" revolution in Turkey, secured for Britain, and an allied France, the breakup of the Ottoman Empire, and its replacement by an Anglo-French series of protectorates throughout the Near East. In the course of these efforts, British Intelligence fostered the Muslim Brotherhood as a permanent insurrectionist force within the entire Islamic world. The British Freemasonic agent who inspired the launching of the Muslim Brotherhood, Jamal ad-Deen al-Afghani, was himself a collaborator of the French Synarchists, yet another global conspiratorial apparatus that would spawn 20th-Century fascism, and would later be the model on which the current disastrous Maastricht Treaty and the European Monetary Union would be based.
In all of these efforts the British apparatus of Prince Edward Albert modelled their actions on those of the Venetian republic, which emerged as the center of the new European rentier financial oligarchic power, in the wake of the collapse of the Byzantine Empire. As the center of European power shifted from the Mediterranean northward, Venice morphed into the Dutch and later Anglo-Dutch liberal system of global financier dominance, over the course of the 15th-18th Centuries. By the time that Prince Edward Albert emerged as the heir to the legacy of Lords Shelburne and Palmerston, London had become the global center of what came to be known as the "Venetian Party."
The Russian Revolution
The destruction of Russia was of particularly great importance to London's oligarchs. From the time of Catherine the Great, whose League of Armed Neutrality played a pivotal role in securing the victory of Benjamin Franklin and George Washington's American Revolution, the prospect of Russo-American collaboration posed a grave threat to the power of the British Empire. In the aftermath of the American Civil War, in which Russia, once again, was instrumental in an American victory, the spread of American System ideas into Russia was taking on alarming proportions. The great Russian scientist Dmitri Mendeleyev had attended the 1876 Philadelphia Centennial Exposition, and he was collaborating with Russian Minister Witte, in the industrialization of Russia, driven by the eastward expansion of the Trans-Siberian Railroad. American railroad engineers, who had built the Transcontinental Railroad, after serving in the Army Corps of Engineers during the Civil War, were now in Russia, working with their Russian counterparts, on the Trans-Siberian. Upon the completion of the Trans-Siberian Railroad, the first railroad locomotive to traverse the Eurasian line would be build by the Baldwin Company of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
Illustrative of the pro-American outlook of the leading Russian modernizers was an 1899 memo from Minister of Finance Witte to Tsar Nicholas II, in which he wrote: "The welfare of Your Empire is based on national labor. The increase of its productivity and the discovery of new fields for Russian enterprise will always serve as the most reliable way for making the entire nation more prosperous. We have to develop mass-production industries, widely dispersed and variegated. We must give the country such industrial perfection as has been reached by the United States of America, which firmly basis its prosperity on two pillars—agriculture and industry." The eastward development of Siberia, centered on the Trans-Siberian Rail project, was key to Witte's concept of Russian modernization. Among other things, Witte wanted to open Siberia to colonization by Russia's Jews, who remained in terrible ghetto conditions in the Pale of Settlements, and were subject to frequent pogroms.
The British, unfortunately, had their allies and agents inside Russia as well. Indeed, in 1881, Tsar Alexander II, the great ally of Lincoln and the liberator of the serfs, was assassinated by the terrorist Narodnaya Volya (People's Will) group. Their plot against the Tsar was not only not blocked, but was even facilitated by the leaders of the Tsar's own security service, men who profoundly opposed the modernization of Russia, which threatened to break the power of the landed feudal oligarchy. Several of them were direct collaborators of the British Balkan Wars project in the 1870s, as well. In the aftermath of the assassination of Alexander II, this same grouping created a secret society called the Holy Brotherhood, ostensibly to do a better job of protecting the monarch. The Holy Brotherhood would spawn the Okhrana secret police agency, which would be pivotal in fomenting the events leading to the Russian Revolution.
Zubatov and 'Police Socialism'
One of the key figures who would be unleashed against Witte and the modernizers was an Anglophile police agent, Sergei Zubatov. In 1896, despite the fact that he had been earlier jailed for terrorist activities, Zubatov was appointed chief of the Russian secret police, the Okhrana, in Moscow. The Okhrana had been founded by Count N.P. Ignatiev, a military commander of the Russian forces during the first Balkan Wars of 1875-78, which had been orchestrated from London. Ignatiev's close collaborator, V.P. Meshchersky, was Zubatov's immediate patron, securing him the Moscow post. Meshchersky was also a literary patron of Fyodor Dostoevsky, who propagandized for the Balkan wars, and of the German philosopher of nihilism, Friedrich Nietzsche. Zubatov absorbed these philosophical views into his police work.
Prior to taking the Moscow post, Zubatov had spent a dozen years conducting police infiltration of the various leftist and socialist groups that had proliferated inside Russia. He was an avid reader of British Fabian Society literature, and frequently used the writings of Sidney Webb as recruiting tools for his own "revolutionary cells."
Zubatov spelled out his plans in an 1898 memo to another Moscow police official: "While a revolutionary advocates pure socialism, he can be dealt with by means of repressive measures alone, but when he begins to exploit for his purpose minor shortcomings of the existing lawful structure, the repressive measures alone cease to be sufficient. It becomes necessary to take the very ground from underneath his feet."
While unions were banned in Russia, Zubatov launched his own "mutual-aid societies" which were among the only legal "mass movements" in Russia. These Zubatov unions were filled with targets of Zubatov's police repression and brainwashing techniques. Socialist leaders were arrested, and then subjected to indoctrination, often by Zubatov himself. Workers were taught to distrust the social democrats, and to focus on purely "economic" self-interests. By 1902, Zubatov had organized scores of "police unions," and had successfully orchestrated attacks against some of the leading Russian manufacturers of the Witte faction. Zubatov also organized a number of Zionist unions as well, even as his close Okhrana collaborator, the Paris-based Peter Rachkovsky, penned the forged "Protocols of the Elders of Zion" to instigate a new pogrom against the Russian Jews, who had been among the enthusiastic backers of Witte's modernization efforts. Zubatov had also inaugurated his own secret assassination squads, called the Battle Organizations, which were used to eliminate government ministers and other enemies of the Holy Brotherhood/Okhrana apparatus.
In August 1902, Zubatov was transferred from Moscow to St. Petersburg, where he became chief of the Special Section of the police, under police chief Aleksei Lopukhin. A massive expansion of the agent-provocateur recruitment was launched by the duo; within a year, there were over 16,000 paid provocateurs on the police payroll, according to published accounts, based on a review of the police files, following 1917.
Among Zubatov's leading agent-provocateurs was Father Georgi Gapon, a Russian Orthodox rabble-rouser, who organized a number of the Zubatov police unions. It was Father Gapon who led the march on the Tsar's Winter Palace on Jan. 9, 1905, "Bloody Sunday," which launched the first insurrection against the Russian state.
Jabotinsky and Parvus
Another of the Okhrana agent-provocateurs employed by Zubatov in the insurrections against the Russia of Witte and the American System was Vladimir Jabotinsky, later known as the founder of the Revisionist Movement in Zionism and an enthusiastic supporter of Mussolini's Fascism. In the Spring of 1902, Jabotinsky was arrested and spent seven weeks in Okhrana custody, going through the Zubatov indoctrination. He would, according to one biographer, operate "for several years under the supervision of the police," particularly in Odessa, which was the scene of many of Zubatov's most successful labor insurrections against Russia's nascent industrialization. Jabotinsky's activities were also funded directly by Maxim Gorky, a well-documented Okhrana operative and conduit of Zubatov payouts.
Jabotinsky's career would cross that of another of the most important operatives of the Bolshevik revolutionary epoch, Alexander Israel Helphand (a.k.a. "Parvus"). Both Jabotinsky and Parvus edited publications of the British/Venetian-spawned Young Turk movement, which helped instigate London's Balkan Wars and the overthrow of the Ottoman Empire.
Like Jabotinsky, Parvus (1867-1924) came from an Odessa family steeped in the grain trade. By 1886, Helphand/Parvus had already become involved in the Okhrana-spawned Russian socialist scene, travelling to Switzerland to participate in the Emancipation of Labor group, led by a number of documented Okhrana agents, including Lev Deutsch, and suspected Okhrana man Georgi Plekhanov. Parvus would be instrumental, during the 1890s, in shifting the focus of Russian revolutionary socialism from agrarian peasants to industrial workers—in keeping with Zubatov's efforts to target the Russian modernizers through "class warfare" provocations. By 1900, Parvus had joined the inner circle of the Bolsheviks, using his Munich, Germany apartment to house the printing press for the group, and hosting V.I. Lenin and other leaders. According to several biographical accounts, by 1902, Parvus was receiving direct Okhrana funding through Gorky, who gave Parvus the rights to publish his works abroad.
Once "Bloody Sunday" unleashed the revolutionary destabilizations in St. Petersburg, Parvus appeared on the scene, as a leading collaborator of Leon Trotsky and other leaders of the Petersburg Soviet. Parvus and Trotsky bought a liberal newspaper, Russkaya Gazeta, to rival the Bolshevik publication, and soon had a circulation of 500,000. Parvus and Trotsky turned the newspaper into a radical provocateur organ, much to the delight of the Okhrana, which would soon launch a police crackdown on the entire social democratic scene.
When the entire leadership of the Petersburg Soviet—including Trotsky—was rounded up and jailed in December 1905, Parvus escaped the police clutches. When he was later captured, he escaped police custody, courtesy of the Okhrana agent Lev Deutsch. Parvus next turned up, via Germany, in Constantinople, as a "journalist" covering the Young Turk rebellion against the Ottomans, a crucial prelude to the British-manipulated second Balkan War. It would be at this moment that Parvus's ties to the leading European "Venetian Party" factions would be publicly shown.
The Young Turks
In 1908, the Committee for Union and Progress, otherwise known as the Young Turks, carried out a military coup, overthrowing the Sultan and seizing power over the Ottoman Empire. Launching ethnic cleansing campaigns against all non-Turkic peoples, including Armenians, Greeks, and Bulgarians, the Young Turk regime played a pivotal role in provoking the 1912-13 Balkan Wars, through their brutality towards the minorities. By their own accounts, the Young Turks based their revolution on a version of Pan-Turkism that had been devised by an advisor to the Sultan in the 1860s who was, in fact, an agent of Britain's Lord Palmerston. The Young Turks also preached a rabid anti-Russian ideology, which was inspired by Wilfred Blunt, a top British Intelligence official, whose own ideas about playing an "Islamic card" to destroy Russia predated those of Britain's Bernard Lewis by a full century.
The actual founder of the Young Turk movement was an Italian Freemason and grain trader named Emmanuel Carasso. Jewish by birth, Carasso had been a founder of the Italian Masonic lodge in Salonika, called the Macedonia Risorta Lodge. Virtually all of the members of the Young Turk leadership were lodge members. The forerunner of the Macedonia Risorta Lodge was founded by a follower of another Palmerston agent and revolutionary provocateur, Giuseppi Mazzini.
Carasso was a leading financier of the entire Young Turk insurrection, and during the Balkan Wars, he was not only the head of Balkan intelligence operations for the Young Turks; he was in charge of all food supplies for the Ottoman Empire during World War I, a lucrative business which he shared with Parvus.
Carasso also financed a number of newspapers and other propaganda outlets for the Young Turks, among them the newspaper The Young Turk, which was edited by none other than Vladimir Jabotinsky. Another of Carasso's "business" associates was Parvus, who became economics editor of another Young Turk journal, The Turkish Homeland. Parvus also became a partner of Carasso in the grain trade, and in the arms business, and became independently wealthy.
The Young Turk operation was headed, from London, by Aubrey Herbert, a grandson of one of Mazzini's controllers, who himself died while leading revolutionary mobs in Italy in 1848. Aubrey Herbert headed all British Intelligence operations in the Middle East during the period of World War I, and no less a figure than Lawrence of Arabia identified Herbert as the actual head of the Young Turk insurrection. Herbert's career is the subject of the historical novel, Greenmantle, by World War I British intelligence official John Buchan.
Emmanuel Carasso's pivotal role in the Young Turk movement and the resulting Balkan Wars of 1912-13, is of significance from one additional standpoint. Carasso was a protégé and business partner of Volpi di Misurata, the leading Venetian banker of the early 20th Century, who not only sponsored the Young Turk insurrection, but also promoted the Black Shirt takeover of Rome and went on to run the Mussolini Fascist regime from his various posts as Minister of Finance (1925-28), member of the Grand Council of Fascism, president of the Fascist Confederation of Industrialists, and, most important, as the chief public representative of a group of aristocrats around Count Piero Foscari, of the ancient Venetian dogal family.
The Venetian banker Volpi was closely allied with City of London financiers throughout. And the Young Turks, once they took power, made no secret of their London ties. In 1909 the Ottoman Navy was put under the command of a British admiral; the British Royal Family's own banker, Ernst Cassel, established and managed the National Bank of Turkey; and British officials advised the Ministry of Finance, the Interior Ministry, and the Ministry of Justice. The Young Turks also denounced and blocked further construction of the Berlin-Baghdad Railroad.
The Parvus Saga Resumed
Parvus's Young Turk interlude had earned him a large fortune. He had partnered with Young Turk financier and Macedonia Risorta Lodge founder Emmanuel Carasso, and had been given the contract to supply grain to the Turks during the Balkan Wars of 1912-13. According to some accounts, Parvus also got into the tightly controlled arms business, probably under the patronage of Sir Basil Zaharoff of the Vickers Arms cartel, a prominent Anglo-Venetian enterprise.
Once the Balkan Wars had started, leading directly into World War I, Parvus turned his attention back to Russia, laying plans to finance a revolution, to be led by Lenin and the Bolsheviks. Parvus set his scheme for revolution down in a March 9, 1915 memorandum to the German Foreign Ministry, vowing that the Bolsheviks would take power in Russia in 1916, and seeking financial support.
The German government was deeply split over the issue of backing a Russian Bolshevik revolution. Close advisors to the German Kaiser argued that Germany should push a separate peace with the Tsar, while a faction, centered in the General Staff and around Foreign Minister Zimmerman, pushed for a "war-to-the-death" with Russia, arguing that war with Russia was inevitable, and it made sense to get on with it before Russia became more powerful. One of the key backers of the Parvus Plan at the German General Staff was Count Bogdan von Hutten-Czapski, the head of the Political Section and a longtime business associate of none other than Young Turks financier, the Venetian Party Synarchist operative Giuseppi Volpi, the future controller of Mussolini.
According to his own memoirs, von Hutten-Czapski had seen the outbreak of the Russo-Japanese War as an opportunity "to smash the Tsarist Empire," a view shared by Parvus.
In addition to the German Foreign Ministry and the German General Staff, Parvus was also given access to an exhaustive amount of funds for his Russian "regime change" scheme from a leading German Synarchist industrialist and close associate of Hjalmar Schacht (later Hitler's Economics Minister), Hugo Stinnes of the German coal syndicate. Stinnes granted Parvus control over the shipping and sale of German coal to Denmark, from which Parvus made millions of gold marks per month. Stinnes would become a major player in the 1920s revival of the German military industry, and would continue his business arrangements with Parvus through to the latter's death. Stinnes, too, was tied to Volpi and the Banca Commerciale Italiana.
Crown Prince Wilhelm, an opponent of the "war now" faction, struck a vital chord when he wrote to the Russian court in early 1915 that it was "absolutely necessary to conclude a peace with Russia.... It is too silly that we should hack each other to pieces so that England could fish in dark waters."
Within weeks of receipt of the Parvus memo, the German Foreign Ministry made the first payment of one million gold marks to Parvus to launch his scheme. In May 1915, Parvus met with Lenin and Karl Radek in Switzerland, and then created a string of front groups in Stockholm and Copenhagen. By February 1916, a series of strikes had begun at major shipbuilding plants, then working at breakneck speed to produce new warships for the Russian Navy. The strikes disrupted Russia's war mobilization, but did not lead, immediately, to revolutionary regime change. Parvus spent the next year building his fortune, and, through his financial largess, his ties to the Bolshevik leadership. Parvus's biographers, Z. Zeman and W.B. Sharlau (Merchant of Revolution; London: W.&J. Mackay & Co., Ltd, 1965) summarized Parvus's outlook on the eve of the 1917 Russian Revolution: "Helphand showed that he believed that any political aim could be realized with sufficient money, that the elite of the socialist leaders could resist the lure of mammon no more than any other social group, that friendship, as much as political support, had to be bought. Such a view informed his political strategy; it was the essence of his political and human experience."
By April 1917, Parvus had pushed the German government to grant secret safe-passage to the Bolshevik leaders back into Russia, and arrangements were soon made, through Parvus and Radek, to smuggle Lenin and 40 other leading Bolsheviks from Switzerland, through Stockholm, back to Petrograd. Parvus remained in Stockholm, in constant communication with the International Mission of the Petrograd Bolshevik Central Committee Abroad. He remained virtually the exclusive source of funding for the revolution that was about to rapidly unfold.
On July 16-17, the Bolsheviks carried out an armed insurrection in Petrograd, which was promptly put down by the Provisional Government. The Russian intelligence services released a report, proving that the Bolshevik uprising had been funded by the German government, an act of wartime treason. Lenin and friends fled Russia. However, a month later, in August 1917, the British backed a separate military coup attempt against the Kerensky Provisional Government, and in response, Social Democrat Kerensky brought back the Bolsheviks and armed them against General Kornilov, the chief coup plotter. On Oct. 25, 1917, Lenin seized power.
Nazi-Communism and Synarchy
Within less than two months after the Bolshevik coup had installed Lenin in power in Petrograd, Parvus was setting up a new anti-Bolshevik infrastructure of news organs and operatives inside Soviet Russia. The ostensible cause of Parvus's 180-degree turn was Lenin's refusal to allow him to return to Russia, but this account is dubious. Parvus moved to Switzerland and, while he continued to provide funds to factions of the Bolsheviks, he became a public enemy of the new Russian Soviet regime, and would devote much of the remainder of his life to a concerted effort to organize Europe to crush Russia.
Parvus's status in Switzerland was secured by his longtime colleague, Adolph Muller, the German Ambassador in Berne, and a Munich publisher. According to authors James and Suzanne Pool (Who Financed Hitler: The Secret Funding of Hitler's Rise to Power; New York: Dial Press, 1978), "The one businessman on whom the Nazi Party was most dependent was not a great industrialist who contributed money to the movement, but the Munich printer, Adolph Muller.... He had done business with the Nazis since before the putsch. When Hitler wanted to start publishing the Volkischer Beobachter again after his release from prison in 1924, Muller advanced the editor's wages and supplied the paper on credit." The money that Hitler used to purchase the newspaper came from a White Russian and former Okhrana associate, Vasili Biskupsky.
Parvus's "Nazi-Communist" pedigree was pure Synarchist, as was befitting an agent of Anglo-Venetian financier interests. At the close of World War I, Parvus wrote the following profile of the European situation: "There exist two possibilities only: either the unification of western Europe, or Russia's domination. The whole game with the buffer states will end in their annexation by Russia, unless they are united with central Europe in an economic community, which would provide a counter-balance to Russia." Under any circumstances, Parvus argued that the era of the nation-state system had ended in Europe.
To pursue this goal of further "regime change" all across the European continent, replacing the sovereign governments of the continent with a new European super-state, to wage war against Bolshevik Russia, Parvus joined with another Anglo-Venetian schemer, Count Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi, to push the Pan-European Union.
In this final intrigue, Parvus once again got the financial backing of the German coal magnate Hugo Stinnes, who would make a killing, courtesy of his friend Schacht, on the collapse of the German mark, during the hyperinflation of 1923, and move back into Germany to buy up scores of bankrupt industries and coal mines at a fraction of their worth. Coudenhove-Kalergi, for his part, was bankrolled by Max Warburg of the original Venetian Del Banco clan. Warburg had earlier bankrolled Parvus and Leon Trotsky, in the run-up to the Bolshevik Revolution.
Coudenhove-Kalergi argued that Pan-Europa would emerge out of the fight against Bolshevism, just as "Young Europe arose out of the struggle against the Holy Alliance, as the Holy Alliance had issued out of the struggle against Napoleon." At the first congress of the Pan-European Union, in Vienna, four portraits adorned the wall behind the speakers' podium: Immanuel Kant, Napoleon Bonaparte, Giuseppi Mazzini, and Friedrich Nietzsche.
In a 1932 Pan-Europa propaganda tract, Coudenhove-Kalergi out-Parvused Parvus, in restating the permanent war/permanent revolution thesis: "This eternal war," he wrote, "can end only with the constitution of a world republic.... The only way left to save the peace seems to be a politic of peaceful strength, on the model of the Roman Empire, that succeeded in having the longest period of peace in the west thanks to the supremacy of his legions."
Eight years after Parvus's death, leading Pan-Europa proponent Hjalmar Schacht, now the German representative at the Bank for International Settlements and soon to be Hitler's Economics Minister, announced to a major gathering of Coudenhove-Kalergi's group in Berlin, "In three months Hitler will be in power.... Hitler will create PanEuropa! Only Hitler can create PanEuropa!"
Schacht and Parvus, parenthetically, had first come into contact during the Young Turk revolt at the beginning of the century. In his post-World War II autobiography, Confessions of the Old Wizard (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1956), Schacht had reminisced about his visit in 1909 to Salonika and Constantinople, arranged through his Berlin Freemasonic Lodge, during which he was hosted by the Macedonia Lodge and met with the entire Young Turk leadership.
Permanent War/Permanent Revolution Revisited
While Parvus protégé Leon Trotsky is widely credited with the authorship of the concept of "permanent revolution," Trotsky himself attributed the idea to Parvus, his closest ally during the period of the 1905 St. Petersburg Soviet revolt. Parvus argued, as the neo-cons do today, that revolutionary social change is only possible under conditions of general warfare. Parvus, the Anglo-Venetian oligarchical intriguer, played a pivotal role in King Edward VII's orchestration of the Eurasian wars of the early 20th Century, which led into World War I. Following the war, Parvus helped plant the seeds for the next war, promoting the same "universal fascism" embraced today by neo-con theoretician Michael Ledeen, and put into practice at the end of Parvus's life by his sponsor Volpi's Mussolini.
Trotsky codified the Parvus outlook, in his two famous works, Permanent Revolution and Results and Prospects. In the first of those works, Trotsky wrote, "The permanent revolution, in the sense which Marx attached to this concept, means a revolution which makes no compromise with any single form of class rule, which does not stop at the democratic stage, which goes over to socialist measures and to war against reaction from without; that is, a revolution whose every successive stage is rooted in the preceding one and which can end only in complete liquidation."
But Parvus himself said it best. In an article in his magazine Iskra, on the eve of World War I and the Revolution, he boasted, "The Russo-Japanese War is the blood-red dawn of coming great events." And in The Class Warfare of the Proletariat (Berlin, 1911), Parvus wrote in praise of war: "The war sharpens all capitalist contradictions. A world war may therefore be concluded only by a world revolution."
This article was based on an exhaustive study by Allen and Rachel Douglas, "The Roots of the Trust: From Volpe to Volpi, and Beyond—The Venetian Dragomans of the Russian Empire," an unpublished EIR manuscript, June 1987; and on published and unpublished research by Scott Thompson, Marjorie Mazel Hecht, and Joseph Brewda.
