How the world really works: the world as The Grand Chessboard.

This is a great video that partially encapsulates what I am writing in my posts. We are often told that World War I started simply because a man was shot in Bosnia, which is, of course, a lie – much like most of our recorded history. This is why it makes me laugh when people say they have ‘studied history’ when, in reality, they have only studied a narrative – a diet of Western propaganda slop.

Often, it is only leftist and Marxist scholars who study ‘real’ history because they take into account the creation of this ‘Western slop’ that is officially labeled as our history. It is through ‘historical materialism,’ as described by Marx, that one can decode this narrative and uncover the actual history of the world.

Historical materialism is a Marxist theory explaining societal change through material and economic factors, particularly the mode of production (how goods are made) and the resulting class struggles, arguing that economic structures shape society’s laws, politics, and culture, driving history through conflicts between exploiting and exploited classes…

You can now watch lectures on this topic, such as this great one by Michael Parenti.

But one of the best short descriptions I found of what it means was by Douglas Valentine, in a video I used in one of my posts.

Douglas Valentine: The CIA and the War in Ukraine (2022) (+ My Views)

Let me ask you one thing: isn't this sort of indoctrination being done to all of us now with the internet? What do you think is the effect of having an entire society that is so ideologically motivated?

Well, that is the end result of decades of military propaganda in the United States. It goes back to the Iliad, where the rulers of society - who own the property and the means of production - hire people like Homer to tell their story. In their story, they only focus on the heroic soldier who goes off to fight in a foreign war and becomes a hero. It is the 'Hero Myth': the idea that you can only become a true hero if you go fight and die for your country overseas.

Supposedly, it is in service of your country, but it is actually in the service of General Electric, Morgan Stanley, pharmaceutical companies, and the big corporations around the country. It has nothing to do with the 90% of the population who do not want to get involved in any wars and do not want to see their sons and daughters go off and die.

However, enough people buy this myth because it is all you see in movies. It is why Ken Burns gets away with calling the Vietnam War a 'noble cause'; otherwise, he would be saying all the men who went there and died did so for nothing. You cannot have that in America. You cannot be a near-imperial power if there isn't a steady conveyor belt of cannon fodder. That is the purpose of military propaganda, which is based on this idea of the 'Hero Myth' ingrained in Western literature.

After the Vietnam War, there were one or two anti-war films, but then Rambo and The Deer Hunter came along. In those, the Vietnamese were characterized as evil, horrible people, and the only victims were American soldiers. That is the way the war has been portrayed ever since. The only thing you ever hear is that American soldiers were victims of the Vietnam War. You never hear about the landmines that are still scattered all over the place, the people who die from Agent Orange, or the sanctions that strangled that country until 1991. You never hear about the suffering of the enemy; you only hear about the suffering of American soldiers because they are the heroes.

That is the nature of military propaganda. It has become more ideological, more fascist, and more ingrained. There are many people who truly believe this myth; the whole purpose of their lives is to join the military and fight in a foreign war, or even become a mercenary. Our whole society is based on violence and the glorification of violence in the defense of the country.

Now, pacifists are vilified. You cannot be a pacifist in Ukraine nowadays; I think Zelenskyy has basically outlawed pacifism. This situation has been evolving for decades and is now playing out on the Ukrainian-Russian board. A lot of it has to do with the mythology of the war hero and the fascist military-industrial state that communism was organized to overcome (though it obviously got off track a long time ago).

It is really hard to fight it. The world is getting smaller, and the fascists have always made a virtue of strength - just like the Nazis did. They value a commitment to the ideology of strength and violence, with no mercy for the enemy. That is what we see playing out now, and that is why Americans get behind it. They have been trained to believe that is the way it is and the way it has to be.

World War I

I will not tackle World War II in this post, as it would take too long and I have already written about it; however, if you wish, I could write another post specifically about that. In this post, I would like to discuss the real motives and reasons behind World War I, which serves as a poignant analogy for today's situation and provides a clear view of how the world actually works.

Officially, we are told that World War I started because 'some guy' was shot in Bosnia. (I am aware it was Archduke Franz Ferdinand, but I am calling him a 'guy' to highlight the absurdity of the claim.) Those who follow my posts know this is not true; they understand the real reason for the war, as I described it in my previous post based on the work of Roy Casagranda.

“A 100-Year History of U.S. Meddling, Coups, and Wars in the Middle East”.

What is described in this video was much more precisely detailed by Roy Casagranda in the video I have attached to this post. While I don’t agree with Casagranda’s views regarding recent events, I still think his work concerning the history of the Middle East and the Muslim world is quite good. It dismantles the myths and "Western slop" we call history, showing us the history we are never told.

I, myself, was more interested in the history of World War II and know much more about that period than I do about World War I. While I know exactly how and why World War II started, I didn't know much about World War I until I was enlightened by the work of Roy Casagranda. He described the events mentioned in this video by saying:

Okay, so there are a couple of things going on. One of them is oil. They knew there was oil there, and the reason they knew is because the English had been really fretting about this. The English did have an oil company; it was Shell. Now, here’s the really weird thing about Shell: Shell actually started off as an antique dealership and somehow slowly morphed into an oil company. The Dutch bought Shell, so the company became Royal Dutch Shell. When that happened, the Dutch ended up with 51% of the company, and the British ended up with 49%. This was around the 1880s.

The British had already concluded that oil was the new coal, that it was the future. They believed they needed to have their own oil resources because, at some point, oil was going to replace coal. You have to remember that the British Empire was a naval empire; everything was based on ships. So, if they were going to have oil-powered ships and didn’t have access to oil, their empire was finished. They were freaking out when Royal Dutch bought Shell.

They found oil; the Anglo-Persian Oil Company (which became BP) found oil in Persia (now Iran) in 1908. Shortly after getting the concession, they found it. Not long after finding it in Iran, the Ottoman Empire found it in what is today Northern Iraq. The British were eager to get a deal with the Ottoman Empire for that oil, but the Ottomans decided that Germany was their future and made a deal with them. The British then thought that the Ottoman Empire needed to be destroyed and that Germany couldn’t have this oil or this kind of access to it. The reason was simply that they were worried the German Navy would eventually eclipse the British Navy.

So, the First World War started not because some guy was shot, but because the British Empire, which was the world hegemon at the time, "concluded that oil was the new coal." The moment the Ottoman Empire sided with Germany, the war was decided. The British understood that whoever controls the oil controls the world, and they also understood that oil is located in the Middle East so they had to control the region to access it.

That is why World War I was not so much about Germany itself as it was about destroying and controlling the Middle East, which would allow the British to control the world. The British were then what Americans are now: a world hegemon based on maritime control and power. Just as the British wanted to divide and weaken the Middle East to be able to control it, the same logic applies today to America - and that is where Israel comes in.

I wrote before that the "Israel project" was started by the British and later taken over by the Americans. Contrary to what many people think, Israel does not control America; instead, Israel is an "unsinkable aircraft carrier" and a Western beachhead in the Middle East, which is needed to maintain control over the region.

Analogies to today's world and history lessons for us

The video provides a great analogy to today's world, comparing Baghdad railways to the Chinese Belt and Road Initiative by saying:

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Now, fast-forward to the 21st century. The parallels between the era of the Baghdad Railway and our current moment are terrifying.

Today, we have a new rising industrial power that is challenging the dominant naval empire. China is the new Germany, the United States is the new British Empire, and the Belt and Road Initiative is the new Baghdad Railway. Just like Kaiser Wilhelm, the Chinese leadership realizes that they are vulnerable at sea. The US Navy controls the shipping lanes of the Pacific and the Indian Ocean. In the event of a war, the US could blockade China and starve its economy of energy.

Consequently, China is building massive infrastructure projects across the Eurasian continent: high-speed rail lines, pipelines, and highways that connect China to Europe and the Middle East overland.

Look at the map of the Belt and Road Initiative. It looks almost exactly like the map of the Baghdad Railway, but on a much larger scale. It seeks to bypass the choke points controlled by the American Navy. It seeks to unite the economies of Asia, Europe, and the Middle East into a single trading block that excludes the United States.

And just like the British in the 1900s, the Americans are panicking. We see the same headlines in the newspapers: they call the Chinese projects 'debt traps'; they accuse China of supporting dictators; they try to block Chinese companies from buying ports and building 5G networks. The language has barely changed in 100 years. The strategic anxiety is identical.

The story of the Baghdad Railway teaches us that when a declining empire feels threatened by an infrastructure project that could undermine its hegemony, it will lash out. It will use financial warfare, propaganda, and eventually military force to stop the connection from being made.

The Middle East is once again the chessboard where this game is being played. The wars in Iraq and Syria, the tensions in Iran, and the instability in Turkey—all of these conflicts happen along the exact same fault lines where the rails were laid a century ago. It is not a coincidence. It is geography.

The author even mentions a “chessboard,” just as I do in my descriptions of the world. Understanding history can give us predictive abilities and a better grasp of current events, but to achieve that, we must understand true history - not the Western narrative and propaganda "slop" that we officially call history. We can even find a great analogy for what just happened in Venezuela within what this video says.

13:59

We can look at the tragedy of the Ottoman Empire as a warning. The Ottomans thought they could play the Europeans off against each other. They thought they could take German money to build their country while maintaining their independence.

But when you invite a superpower to build your critical infrastructure, you are not just buying steel and concrete. You are importing their geopolitical enemies. You are making your land a target. The train that was supposed to bring prosperity brought ruin instead; it brought armies that tore the empire apart.

Today, many developing nations are facing the same choice the Sultan faced. They are hungry for development; they need bridges, trains, and power plants. China offers to build them cheaply and quickly, while the West warns them to stay away. They are caught in the middle of a struggle that is much bigger than they are.

The lesson of the Baghdad Railway is that infrastructure is never neutral. A road is never just a road; it is a vector of power. And the 'powers that be' will burn the world down before they let their rivals control the flow of trade.

Today, Venezuela invited China to build its infrastructure, just as Turkey invited Germany to build its infrastructure in the past. Ultimately, just as Turkey brought the wrath of Britain upon itself, Venezuela has today brought upon itself the wrath of America. Understanding the truth about the past and history gives us an understanding of what is happening today, as the saying goes.

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it

Historical materialism

If you rely on the Western propaganda narrative as history, you won’t understand anything. While you may think that what I am saying is not "true" history - and that all those historians and professors are right while I am wrong (after all, I am no one) - you are trapped in a world of the naive. Let me quote Parenti from the lecture I linked earlier:

33:20

This is a study of 17 widely used high school history texts. If you want to see what happens to history when it is retailed and mass-marketed, you have to look at the history texts covering the period from the Civil War to World War I.

The author of the study, Jean Anyon, notes that all these textbooks are marketed by a publishing industry that is big business, with annual sales of several billion dollars, owned by corporate conglomerates like CBS, IBM, Xerox, and Gulf and Western.

While these textbooks claim objectivity, she notes that they all have ideological slants that tend to be pro-business and anti-labor. They all share a remarkable similarity in vocabulary, and they are remarkably similar in the judgments they reach. Furthermore, there is a remarkable ideological homogenization. The greater the homogenization, the greater the claim to objectivity. This is because they equate homogenization with truth: if everyone is saying the same thing, it is deemed "objective." If you say something different or jarring, it becomes "questionable."

This relates to what Alvin Goldman called "background assumptions." Our tendency to accept an argument as true depends less on its content and substance than on how congruent it is with the background assumptions we already have. Those assumptions are, of course, established by the climate of opinion and the universe of communication in which we are constantly immersed.

This is why dissidents must learn the discipline of fighting and developing their arguments from evidence, while those who work within the safe mainstream can spend a lifetime with unexamined assumptions and presumptions.

All these textbooks that Jean Anyon investigated devoted a lot of space to industrial development and presumed that it was a good thing for the general populace. All of them either completely ignore or gloss lightly over the staggering human costs inflicted upon millions of working women, children, and men. Low wages are attributed in some of the books to the willingness of unskilled immigrants to work for subsistence pay, rather than to the owners' determined power to impose low wages.

Twelve of the books took no notice of the American Socialist Party. Of the remaining, they dismissed the Socialists and said they only had a small number of adherents. However, this was a party that, before World War I, had elected 1,200 socialists to public office in U.S. cities and state legislatures, and even one or two in Congress. They also had 79 mayors in 24 states. The Socialist labor leader Eugene Victor Debs ran for president in 1912 and received almost a million votes—it probably would have been over a million if he had received an honest count. This was the year Woodrow Wilson was elected president with six million votes, so Debs getting a million was significant. Yet, all these textbooks brush off the Socialists as an inconsequential group or a "funny little cult."

By the way, all the industrialists of the late 19th century launched themselves into business either with inherited wealth, by gaining access to large loans, or by "ripping off" the government through profiteering during the Civil War and acquiring government funds and land.

Anyon concluded that the books offer an ideologically and historically false view of how wealth was accumulated. One favorite example given was Andrew Carnegie. A number of texts said he started out on $1.20 a week, supported a whole family on that, and managed to save enough money to invest and make a fortune. In fact, Carnegie’s initial capital came from a loan he received from a very rich friend. The facts are simply not right. Aside from what they omit, what they do say consists of terrible distortions.

During the period covered in the study—Civil War to World War I—there were over 30,000 strikes in the United States. Almost none of them are mentioned in the books. A few mention the Pullman Strike or the Haymarket Riot because there was violence, but the general impression given is that strikes are not good for workers because they are harmful and not in their interests.

These high school history texts are probably the only history most Americans will ever read. Anyon concludes that the books served more as "legitimatizers" for the existing corporate order than as sources of critical and independent investigation. There are similar critical studies done on textbooks and how they treat race relations, racism, and gender relations.

The mass marketing of textbooks reveals the mass marketing of history. Ideas and information are not disseminated democratically in our allegedly democratic society. This is as true of history as it is of current events. History is written and popularized by those who control the communication universe.

When historians like Collingwood, Croce, C. Vann Woodward, or Hexter write about the "making of history," they talk about how the historian should be close to his materials while preserving objectivity. What they don't talk about is how that history is marketed. How do you get it to an audience after you write it?

The assumption is that any history written by any number of historians has an equal chance to reach an audience, but that is not true. Why are Samuel Eliot Morison and Daniel Boorstin celebrated historians? Why do they get rewards? Boorstin was the head of the Library of Congress, and Morison was the head of the AHA (American Historical Association) for years. They are given grants and special contracts to write special kinds of books.

Why has none of that ever gone to Philip Foner, Herbert Aptheker, Jesse Lemisch, or others who have written history "from the bottom up"? It depends on the class interests for which they speak. Foner and Aptheker speak for different class interests; they don't write history for the "powers that be." Consequently, they don't get awards, prestigious positions, lush grants, or media access. Herbert Aptheker, in 60 years, never received a single regular university appointment.

Consider Fogel and Engerman’s book Time on the Cross, which is about slavery. Jules Lester wrote a critique years ago titled "Fun on the Cross," arguing that the book suggested slavery wasn't all that bad, that slaves learned new skills, and that their development was advanced compared to what it had been in Africa. This book received all sorts of rewards around 1979 or 1980. Why did that book get all that celebrity?

Conversely, Herbert Gutman wrote an answer to Fogel and Engerman called Slavery and the Numbers Game, showing how they finessed statistics. He took them apart layer by layer. Why do we never hear of his book? It was published by an obscure little house. Gutman talked about the horrors of slavery.

Similarly, why is Alistair Horne's book The Fall of Paris the only one on the Paris Commune of 1871 that has remained in print for 30 years? It portrays the workers of Paris—who held the city for months against the capitalist class and the Prussians—as a bunch of "confused idiots." It says nothing about what their grievances were or the essence of their struggle.

Finally, there is another teacher of history: the news media. We often say the memory of most news media people goes back only three weeks, but they know how to present history in a certain way. They are corporate-owned and controlled conglomerates that faithfully reflect—through content or omission—the ideological biases and presuppositions of the corporate world of which they are an integral part.

This is historical materialism, which tells us that we need to take into consideration how and by whom history was written. This is something that is omitted from the "Western slop" officially labeled as our history.

That is why I often tell people that those who "studied history" didn’t really study history at all, but rather the Western propaganda and narrative slop that we officially call history. When I hear people saying absurd things about Nixon, claiming they have "studied" him, it doesn’t surprise me. This is exactly what Parenti spoke about in his lecture.

12:03

We saw the fabrication of the point of origin just last week, didn't we, with the canonization of Richard Nixon? Richard Nixon, the "saintly president." We saw representation after representation, image after image, and yet not a mention of the fact that this Richard Nixon carpet-bombed Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam, leading to the deaths of tens of thousands of people.

The brutal B-52 carpet bombings - the relentless bombings - escalated that war. He pursued and prosecuted it with a savagery that made LBJ look mild. Not a word was said about that; they simply said he inherited the Vietnam War and finally ended it in 1973—the "great statesman of peace."

There was not a mention of his destruction of democracy in Chile, the murder of Salvador Allende (a dedicated democratic president), or the backing of the deranged murder machine of the Chilean military. Not a mention of it. We didn’t hear a word, though we did hear that "he wasn't perfect."

"He wasn't perfect; he made mistakes at Watergate." Mistakes? A felony break-in is a "mistake"? Try using that the next time a cop stops you for speeding: "I made a mistake, officer. What is 90 miles an hour in a 50-mile zone? It was a mistake. Okay, I won't do it again."

So, you see right there, history is being filtered out. Fifty years from now, any historian who consults the newspapers regarding Richard Nixon’s death is not going to get even an inkling of that entire dimension of his policies.

As you can see, this was all predicted. This is why it irritates me when I hear people ask, "What has the West become?" The West didn't suddenly become something bad or evil; you are simply seeing the real world for the first time. The veil that created a world of naivety is finally falling away.

I don't want people to say they can't believe what the West has become, because the West didn't "become" anything—it has always been what you see now. It is just that, for the first time, you have opened your eyes.

I will end it here thanks to everyone who stuck with me until the end of my post. And, as always…

“Knowledge will make you be free.”

― Socrates

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“Knowledge isn’t free. You have to pay attention.”

― Richard P. Feynman

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“Freedom is not free, you need to pay attention.”

― Grzegorz Ochman 

"Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past"

― George Orwell

“Who doesn’t respect and value his past, is not worth the honour of the present, and has no right to a future.”

― Józef Piłsudski