Setting Limits to New Weapons of War and Sophistry:
The Challenge of Synthetic Religions and the Technocratic Narco-Kleptocracies

In his commentary on Plato's outspoken anti-Sophist Dialogue, Phaedrus, Josef Pieper--himself a Roman Catholic--reminds us:

It is in the nature of man as a physical and spiritual being that he be open to shattering emotion, susceptible to being carried away. The passiones animae [the passions--emotion--of the soul] cannot be silenced without leading to inhumanity, either the inhumanity of rigid rationality or of brutish sensuality--both of which have in common the qualities of being "unromantic," "objective," and "safe from emotion." Real man is a being by nature given to shattering emotion. A good deed is better for having been committed with passion. Of course it is also true that a bad deed committed with passion is all the worse. [1]

As with the shattering emotion of love, so, too, with the shattering emotion of war. The artful and seductively alluring manipulations of Sophistry make the intimate subversion of truth even more destructive. CORRUPTIO OPTIMI PESSIMA EST. The best things--or the highest faculties of man--when corrupted have the worst effects, the most intimately destructive and abiding effects.

In addition to being permanently anti-Sophistic, Plato and Plato's Socrates are abidingly anti-Cynic, and especially in the Phaedrus Dialogue, which deals with the theme of love as well as with the theme of true rhetoric, i.e., that whole-hearted art of persuasion which is to lead the soul to the conviction of truth. (For we are only as courageous as we are convinced!)

That is to say, Plato was always opposed to the frigid and heart-subverting "doctrines of the Cynics," such as were advocated by Antisthenes, a companion of Plato! [2] And we, too, in resisting the corruption of Sophistry, must also resist the corruption of Cynicism and the seductive doctrines of the Cynics, which alluringly pander to our fallen human nature. Indeed, Josef Pieper's own insights will make the ancient Cynics "acquire an unexpected contemporaneity for us," amidst our own scurrilous culture of mendacity, manipulation, and intimately broken trust:

For Antisthenes [the Cynic] is an astoundingly modern figure; he might be called the first embodiment of the "worker." Here for the first time we find set forth an ideal characterized by over-evaluation of difficulty and effort; by the lack of receptivity to art; by inadequate responsiveness to love--for emotion is regarded as weakness. Such an ideal in fact seems like a forerunner of the modern functionary, in whose world there is only heroic noise, but no music; only discipline, but no free flow; only manly "bearing," but no natural, unforced gestures; and, consistently, only the naked brutishness of sex separated from love. [3]

In our current and unmistakably expanding context of war, therefore, how should we discerningly and wholeheartedly resist the pervasive and intrusive Sophistry, and also the growing seduction and corrosion of Cynicism, especially that self-sabotaging Cynicism which is indifferent to the setting of limits, and indifferent to the evil of new weapons of "total war"? Many of these new weapons, moreover, are not "firepower weapons"--for example, psycho-tropic and neuro-tropic bio-technologies and fourth-generation chemical agents; nanotechnologies; robotics; laser weapons; applied neuro-science, such as psycho-neuro-linguistics and other new forms of "information warfare," "perception management," and "Sophistry."

Sophistry, Sentimentalism, Cynicism, and Deception are all instruments of war--and so is the subversive promotion of Syncretism: Religious Syncretism.

In our current context of "the global war on terrorism" and our likely widening and protracted war in the Middle East and Central Asia and elsewhere against various religious ideologies, synthetic idolatries, and false religions--syncretic Islamism and Zionism, for example--my general thesis, posed at the outset, will consider a deeper kind of war we are in--especially within and against the Catholic Church.

Therefore, this essay proposes to examine a long-range, strategic sophistic subversion of the Catholic Faith and the Church whose aim is to produce a seductive and sentimental pseudo-order and an irrational religious syncretism. It is a "dissolvent" subversion--based on the metaphysical and revolutionary "dialectical principle" of "solve et coagula"--which would subtly induce and seduce the Church to move toward a new, synthetic religion, as if the law of contradiction or the great apostasy no longer matters, nor even the Christian virtue of hope, the Hope of the Christian Martyrs.

The earlier Popes often said that "religious pluralism leads to religious indifferentism." Religious liberalism itself has always effectively implied that "one religion is as good as another, but none of them is true." That is to say, even though there is, as it were, a God, there is no true religion--which is a very strange and discouraging concept of God. But, now, the pressures of "globalism" and "multi-culturalism" and "promiscuous multi-cultural immigration" and "borderless economies and finance" are going even further, and more intensely so.

More and more, these managed pressures are inducing us and seducing us toward a kind of "religion of interfaith synthesis" and "a vast synthesis of the religious philosophies and cultures of East and West." [4] Indeed, the 1893 World Parliament of Religions in Chicago was an important "pioneer effort in religious synthesis," [5] but the dialectical process and movements toward syncretism and synthesis have continued and increased, all of which constitute "a denial of the Divinity of Christ." In effect, if not always by explicit intention, they are also "planning treason against Christ by playing fast and loose with...false religions." [6]

Back in 1963--the year of the death of Pope John XXIII and of the assassination of President Diem in Viet Nam and of President John F. Kennedy in the U.S.--a keen-minded Protestant heretic himself, Dr. W. A. Visser `t Hooft, wrote a very revealing and sobering book about our coming, syncretistic "Messianic Age." His book was entitled, No Other Name: The Choice Between Syncretism and Christian Universalism. [7] Although Dr. Visser `t Hooft was a leader in The World Council of Churches, which was significantly founded in Amsterdam, Holland after World War II, in 1948, he was very opposed to every emerging tendency toward religious syncretism and its seductive and often cynical Sophistry. He said in his book, for example, that:

The word syncretism should be reserved for another type of religious attitude, which deserves to have its own name because it is such an important, persistent and widespread religious phenomenon. This is the view which holds that there is no unique Revelation in history, that there are many different ways to reach divine reality, that all formulations of religious truth or experience [like the true irreformable doctrines of Catholic dogma!] are by their nature inadequate expressions of that truth and that it is necessary to harmonize as much as possible all religious ideas and experiences so as to create one universal religion for mankind. Professor Oepke puts the matter clearly: "Real syncretism is always based on the presupposition that all positive religions [like the Catholic Faith] are only reflections of a universal original religion and show therefore only gradual differences." [8] [That is to say, only differences in degree.]

In the autumn of 1970, in the magazine World Faiths (the publication of the World Congress of Faiths), a professor of philosophy, Dr. Donald Bishop, gave the following utopian definition of the pattern of attitudes and religious ideology, called syncretism:

Another pattern, which was a second type of monodeism [sic] appeared on the scene toward the end of the 19th century under the name of syncretism. The intent of its advocates was to create a [synthetic] single world religion by taking the best elements from each religion [the Trinity and the Incarnation and the Reality of Supernatural Grace?] and fusing them into one or picking out what is unique [the Divinity of Christ?] in the different faiths and making one [synthetic] religion out of them. The new religion, since it would contain elements of every [sic] religion, would be universally accepted [Is there also a veiled threat, as well as a wishful prediction?].... One of the events where this alternative was brought to public [!] attention was the 1893 World Parliament of Religions in Chicago [and four years before the First Zionist World Congress, held in Basel, Switzerland, in 1897!]. Unitarian Universalist and Jewish delegates were its more ardent champions. [9]

(In this context, it is noteworthy to recall that that often-alleged forgery, "The Protocols of the (Learned) Elders of Zion," was supposed to have come out of that 1897 Zionist Congress in Basel. However, as it has been wisely observed by one Learned Elder from France: "Even if it is a forgery, it is certainly a prophecy!" And, as a Russian cab driver in Moscow once briefly and bluntly said to my Russian-speaking friend: "A forgery? It happened!"!)

In his excellent and indispensable 1979 book, A Study in Syncretism, John Cotter also quotes many influential people, like Julian Huxley, George Bernard Shaw, and Arnold Toynbee, whose "voices call for syncretism" and a "scientific world humanism" (or the Cult of Man), as well as for "a synthesis of all world religions or religious integration." [10] Adding to this destructive conflation and sentimental irrationality is the sentimental view that "Believers with different opinions and convictions are necessary to each other to work out the larger synthesis," even though it is true that "the man [or lady Theosophist] who calls for syncretism always has in view, however unconsciously, syncretism around the essential core of what is already his own faith." [11] This "passion for universal tolerance and syncretism" [12]--a form of deceit and infidelity--is likely part of what Brother Francis Maluf already so keenly saw, back in the late 1940s, in his analysis of a growing "Sentimental Theology," especially within the Roman Catholic Church. And look how far we have come today. Dialectical sentimentalism seems to be flourishing along with "the subversion of Logos."

In our defense of the Faith and in our persevering fidelity and robust "battle-joy," we must, therefore, sustainingly resist the corrosion of Cynicism and the softer subversive forms of Sentimentalism, which, like the Revolutionary Dialectic of "solve et coagula," always try to conflate and to "reconcile" irreconcilable opposites and to reject the vivid, living tensions of the passions of Life and the higher truths of grace. In the true constitution of created and uncreated Reality, there is a richness and variety that must not be reduced to some homogenous Monism, nor to some amorphous, disordered Syncretism. And the seductive arts of Sophistry that are used to promote Monism and Syncretism and Hopeless Cynicism must be even more attentively and perseveringly combated. For Sophistry is a permanent temptation of the human mind. (And a temptation wouldn't be a temptation, if it weren't attractive!) Just as there is the allure of Hermeticism and the allure of "Liberated" Eroticism, so, too, is there the Allure of Syncretism and the Allure of Sophistry. The Allure of Sophistry is especially potent when it flatters our pride, our spiritual and intellectual pride!

Sophistry itself always presents a twofold corruption. It, first of all, corrupts one's access and relationship to objective reality. (For reality is that which doesn't go away even when you stop thinking about it!) Secondly, Sophistry corrupts the attempted communication of that objective reality to another person. (It will now be clear that I am not a defender of Immanuel Kant's German Philosophical Idealism, nor of Kant's passionate attachment to Rousseau's Philosophic Sentimentalism in mile; nor am I a defender of any Philosophical Subjectivism or Syncretism, much less Reductive Monism!) Sophistry is always interested, moreover, in artful cleverness and what we now call "perception management"--i.e., deception. It tends to make the worse seem better and the better seem worse. Hence, it is adept at "negation," as in the case of Gorgias' famous three-fold negation: (1) there is no truth--that is to say, no manifestation of objective reality to a knowing mind; and, (2) if there were, we could not know it; and, (3) if we could know it, we could not communicate that knowledge to another! Such was Gorgias' nihilism, solipsism, and sophism, which Plato also indefatigably combated--as we should also do in own our current circumstances. For, our Lord would want us to. And to do it with fortitude and a generous heart and with "BATTLE JOY," as befits a Christian soldier, who knows he is vulnerable and not only his heart.

A poem of a poet who died near the end of World War I will further remind us of the difficulty of detecting Sophistic deception, and it will further offer us a good criterion of discernment. The poet himself, Joyce Kilmer, was a Catholic sergeant in the American Army during World War I, and he was killed in action in France on 30 July 1918, just before the end of the war. Knowing himself the mental agony of war and the permanent vulnerability of the wounded hearts on the battlefield, his poem is entitled, "The Man of Lies":

At the foot of the Cross at Calvary
Three soldiers sat and diced,
And one of them was the Devil
And he won the Robe of Christ.

When the Devil comes in his proper form
To the chamber where I dwell
I know him and make the sign of the Cross
Which drives him back to Hell.

I saw him through a thousand veils,
And has not this sufficed?
Now, must I look on the Devil robed
In the radiant Robe of Christ?

How can I tell, who am a fool,
If this be Christ or no?
Those bleeding hands outstretched to me!
Those eyes that love me so!

I see the Robe--I look--I hope--
I fear--but there is one
Who will direct my troubled soul,
Christ's Mother knows her Son.

This is the Man of Lies she says,
Disguised with fearful art;
He has the wounded hands and feet
But not the wounded heart.

We, too, know of the Gethsemane in the Church today as well as the Golgotha of pierced and wounded hearts. And, some of us have been wisely counseled to pray to have "the sentiments of the Sacred Heart." For we who believe in the reality of the Incarnation--the reality of the Humility of God--gratefully acknowledge the implications of the fact that "God has a human heart." The Incarnation happened.

Moreover, the Incarnation is continued in the Church, in the Corpus Christi Mysterium, with her unique, objective "Deposit of Faith" (Depositum Fidei) and thus her unique Sacramental Order of Grace. We do not believe in "Ongoing Revelation" or "Successive Revelation" or "Emerging and Converging Revelation" and "the Unfolding of God or Geist (Spirit) Itself." These are the notions of evolutionary pantheists like Hegel and Teilhard de Chardin. These are the kinds of notions that prepare the way for Syncretism. These are the notions that prepare the way for a purportedly higher and more inclusive Synthesis. These are the notions that should alert us and awaken us to the nature of the deeper psycho-cultural and religious warfare we are in.

The strategic (and grand-strategic) Sophistic subversion of the Catholic Faith today--the deeper and protracted psycho-cultural war we are in against the human mind and human heart (intellectus, ratio, voluntas, et Cor!)--will be clarified in our minds and will inspire our own intelligent counter-strategy and doctrinal counter-action, if we first see its "softly apostatic" drift, from a Faith that is dogmatic and hierarchic to a Fideism that is dialectic and synthetic-syncretic.

That is to say, the intelligently strategic, seductive, sophistic subverters of our historic Faith would have us believe in an ongoing Revelation, a successive and more inclusive Revelation, and in our growing Subjective Consciousness unto a synthetic-syncretic religion, a new universal religion and "ecumenism" for all of mankind. It is as if we should now begin our Creed, not with "Credo in Deum," but with "Credo in Evolutionem." This is also in accord with the various Hegelian (and other hermetic) "process philosophies" and "process theologies"--as if God Himself or the Geist (Spirit) Itself were also developing and unfolding into a higher consciousness and thereby even needed us to complete Himself (Itself)! For a Roman Catholic, this "ontological-dialectical" conception is a blasphemy as well as an intimately destructive (and seductive) deception. This ontological-dialectic dissolution--"solve et coagula"--also promotes "sentimental theology" within the Catholic Church, not just "out in the world" of our temporal "culture wars." And it can also be seen in our historic "World Wars" and accompanying "Revolutionary Wars," at least since the late 18th Century. In all of these wars Sophistry and Strategic Deception was--and still is--involved. In the longer light of history, we have much to learn from these destructive deceptions and sophistic manipulations which produced great evil, and especially the asphyxiation of untruth. As at the end of Alexander Pope's poem, The Dunciad, we see the Dullness of "the Modern Mind" and the "Uncreating Word" and the Subversion of Logos--especially the attempted Subversion of the Incarnate Logos.

Therefore, let us now consider further this important matter of detecting strategic deception in war and in peace--another very consequential form of Sophistry. By providing some historic context, I propose to illuminate our current situation and "the kind of war we are in"--and maybe also the kind of war we likely shall be in the near future.

After World War I and not long after Germany and Soviet Russia signed a treaty of mutual friendship--which was not a military alliance--at Rapallo, Italy on 16 April 1922, a German colleague of General Erich Ludendorff responded to Mrs. Nesta Webster's two critical essays against Germany, which were published in The Morning Post of London on 26 and 27 April 1922 and entitled "Boche and Bolshevik." Mrs. Webster's 26 April essay was further entitled, "The Hidden Hand of Germany--Throwing Dust in the Allies' Eyes"; her 27 April essay was further entitled, "A Deep-Laid Conspiracy--the Deutsche Bank and Communism." Kurt Kerlen's 10 June 1922 response to Mrs. Webster's criticism of Germany was entitled, "Ludendorff's Responsibility--Lenin Not His Agent," wherein he cynically, and very significantly, said:

If Mrs. Webster ... reproaches Germany for having employed seditious propaganda in the countries of the Allies, it may simply be brought to mind that all is fair in love and war. In a war, in a fight concerning life and death, one does not look at the weapons which one takes, nor at the values which are destroyed by using the arms. The only adviser is, first of all, the success of the fight, the salvation of one's independence. The reparation of the damages done has to take place after peace. [13]

Shocked by this cynicism and irrational short-sightedness, Webster made a sharp rejoinder. In her 15 and 16 June 1922 responses to Kerlen's essays (10 and 11 June), Mrs. Nesta Webster says something that is very important also for the imperious United States today. In her first essay, entitled "General Ludendorff Answered--Lenin as a German Emissary," she said:

Herr Kurt Kerlen's interesting articles in The Morning Post should prove of immense service in helping to unveil the intrigues that lay beneath the inauguration of the Bolshevik r‚gime. They should prove clearly to anyone who still entertains any doubts on the matter of Bolshevism that it was in no way a spontaneous or popular movement, but a plan organized by conspirators of the most criminal kind for the destruction of Russia.... Bolshevism as a plan of world revolution has, of course, existed for over a hundred years apart from Pan-Germanism and the ultimate aims of the two are not only different but directly opposed.... Prussia has always made use of this rival force [Bolshevism] ... the leaders of Imperial Germany [in World War I], represented by General Ludendorff and the General Staff, as well as German Jewish finance, successfully employed Bolshevism to further their own ends, and ... the recent alliance [sic] between Germany and the Soviet Government [i.e., Treaty of Rapallo] is a continuation of the same policy ["to wreck the British Empire"-p. 38]. [14]

In her second response to Kerlen on 16 June 1922, entitled, "Efforts to Wreck the British Empire--The Real Purpose," Mrs. Webster said that "General Ludendorff ... believed her [i.e., Germany] to be immune from the contagion" of Bolshevism, and, "for the furtherance of his aims, he was willing to bring on the world the frightful catastrophe of a universal revolution." [15] Furthermore, she says, "Herr Kerlen excuses this in the most illuminating passage of his whole treatise," namely in the eight lines already quoted above from page 18 of the book ("one does not look at the weapons which one takes, nor at the values which are destroyed by using the arms," and the rest of it). She says in response to his myopic cynicism, as follows:

Now this is the rock on which we split, and where the fundamental difference between British and German ethics comes in. All is NOT fair in civilized love-making or in civilized warfare. Poisoning wells, mixing hooks with horses' fodder, firing on ambulances, are not legitimate methods of fighting. They are violations of the laws of warfare. And to poison the minds of whole populations is not legitimate propaganda. [16]

Although I believe Mrs. Webster to be too soft on her own perfidious country, too innocent or uninformed about the deceits and provocative manipulations and turpitude of Britain, she nevertheless makes an important point of principle and just limit. And she adds a sincerely compassionate warning, to boot--which later proved to be all too sadly true:

But Herr Kerlen as a psychologist and philosopher may perhaps in time come to see that the policy he now advocates is suicidal, and that if Germany "does not look at the weapons which she takes, nor at the values which are destroyed by using the arms," she may find those weapons turned against herself, and those values lost to her as to the rest of the world. [17]

In this context, we shall have trenchant confirmation of this far-sighted warning by reading the British Major General J.F.C. Fuller's comments, forty years later, in his profound book, The Conduct of War, 1789-1961: A Study of the Impact of the French, Industrial, and Russian [Bolshevik] Revolutions on War and its Conduct. [18]

General Fuller speaks of the approaching end of World War II and of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's momentous delusions about Stalin and his consequent capitulations to him at the Yalta Conference in the Crimea, a Conference which began on 4 February 1945 (only two months before Roosevelt himself would be dead):

The President left America for the Crimea with high hopes and little preparations; the war was nearing its end and the time had come to assure himself of Stalin's full-hearted collaboration in UNO [the United Nations Organization]. This appeared easy, because he could see no fundamental clash of interests between the Soviet Union and the United States. Also, although Churchill was a full-blooded imperialist, Stalin, so he fondly held, was nothing of the kind, and, in order to liquidate the British, French, and Dutch Asiatic empires, he needed his support. He also needed Stalin's aid to finish off the Japanese, because his Chiefs of Staff had told him that without Russia it might cost the United States "over a million causalities" to conquer Japan. Therefore, before the Conference assembled, he made up his mind to allow Stain a free hand in Europe as a quid pro quo. Because of Stalin's realism and the President's idealism [sic]--he was advised by Harry Hopkins, and among others by Alger Hiss of the State Department and a Soviet underground agent--the Yalta Conference led to a super-Munich [29-30 September 1938--the Conference of "Appeasement" to Hitler]. It was agreed that Germany should be partitioned into zones, and each zone occupied by an allied [sic] army; that unconditional surrender would be enforced; that forced labour would be imposed; and that twenty billion dollars in reparations, of which Russia was to receive half, should be considered. When Stalin agreed to take part in the United Nations San Francisco Conference in April [1945], Poland, for whose integrity Great Britain had entered the war, was then thrown to the Russian wolves. [19]

Moreover, "when, on 13 April [1945], Field-Marshal Model and 325,000 officers and men capitulated in the Ruhr, the road to Berlin was unbarred," and, thus:

It was imperative for Eisenhower to push on at top speed, because the Russians had broken or disregarded every important item of the Yalta Agreement which by then had been put to the test, and with Berlin and Prague in Anglo-American hands, the United States and Great Britain would be in a strong position to insist that the Russians honoured their agreements. [20]

The further tragedy now grows and gravely darkens and the political astigmatisms are exacerbated by America's unstrategic military myopia, inasmuch as:

Eisenhower, the complete non-Clausewitzian soldier, thought otherwise. "Military factors, when the enemy was on the brink of final defeat," he writes in his report, "were more important in my eyes than the political considerations involved in an allied capture of the capital [Berlin]. The function of our forces must be to crush the German armies rather than dissipate our strength in the occupation of empty ruined cities." The outcome was that on 14th April, two days after President Roosevelt's death, Mr. Harry S. Truman, who had succeeded him, instructed Eisenhower to halt his troops on the Elbe, and abandon Berlin and Prague to the Russians. The former was occupied by them on 2nd May, and the latter on the day following the cessation of hostilities at midnight 8th-9th May.
"For the United States and Great Britain, the fruits of the battle of Normandy were apples of Sodom, which turned to ashes as soon as they were plucked. Hitler and his legions were destroyed, and in their stead stood Stalin and his Asiatic hordes. Because 'Victory--victory at all costs' had been the Western Allies aim, and because of their insistence that 'it was to be the defeat, ruin, and slaughter of Hitler, to the exclusion of all other purposes, loyalties and aims,' Stalin, the supreme realist, whose strategy had throughout kept step with his policy, had been able to impose his messianic cult upon Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, part of Finland, Poland, eastern and central Germany, a third of Austria, Yugoslavia, Hungary, Rumania, and Bulgaria. Vienna, Prague and Berlin, the vertebrae of Europe, were his, and, except for Athens, so was every capital city in eastern Europe. The western front of Russia had been advanced from the Pripet Marshes to the Thuringerwald, a distance of 750 miles, and, as in the days of Charlemagne, the Slavs stood on the Elbe and the B”hmerwald. A thousand years of European history had been rolled back." [21]

Then, after World War II, the United States helped prosecute and hang certain German generals, most especially because they had purportedly initiated and waged "aggressive war," as in the German air attack on the city of Belgrade, Yugoslavia. Now, however, in the year 2003, the United States cynically calls its own aggressive actions "preventative war," as well as justifiable "pre-emptive strikes." How will such "Newspeak" and such sophistic logic, we may ask, later (and soon) be used in reprisal against us, not so much, perhaps by the "Red roller" of neo-Trotskyite Bolshevism, but by the "Green roller" of Syncretistic Islamism: the onslaught of the embittered Mohammedans in ardent revenge? And, then what?! In our cynical, sophistical manipulations of the Mohammedans, will we be as delusively myopic as the Germans were in their attempted use and manipulation of Bolshevism? Or, as deluded as FDR and Eisenhower were about the means and aims of Stalin? False theories have destructive practical consequences. They are not pragmatic. They don't work!

Indeed, the Muslims might say, "Why not forestall the 'pre-emptive' aggression and the 'preventative' imperial onslaught of the United States itself by hitting the American Empire first, and in its own Homeland?!" "Why not take the war to the Americans and spread the ferment of decomposition there on the 'inner front' of their own Homeland?!" And how would "we" logically and reasonably answer them?! Why would their own preventative--or pre-emptive--strategies against us hereafter be wrong? Do we really believe that we are "immune from the contagion" that we are initiating? And cui bono? Who will profit from this?

Mrs. Webster's earlier words, and her concluding question to the German nation back in 1922, will give us even further cause for reflection, perhaps. She said:

It was on the advice of this Socialist [and Jewish] war profiteer [i.e., Dr. Parvus-Helphand] that Lenin was dispatched in the famous sealed train from Switzerland to Russia [from Zurich to Finland Station in St. Petersburg].... This Israel Lazarevitch, alias Dr. Parvus, alias Helphand, [was] a man who advantageously combined revolutionary with commercial activities.... What most people failed, however, to realize was that a change of government [i.e., Lenin's seizure of power in 1917] in the middle of a war must lead to chaos, that at such a crisis a suddenly "freed" nation must become an undisciplined nation, and, therefore, worse than useless as an ally.... If, therefore, the Rappallo Treaty [five years later in 1922] tends to the advantage of Imperial Germany must we not conclude that "real Germans" [as distinct from "resident aliens"] will support it in spite of the fact that it strengthens the hands of the Jews all over the world, and also provides a fresh impetus to the forces of world revolution? [22]

Mrs. Webster still believed that, as of the year 1922, "the G.H.Q. of revolution [was] in Berlin"[23]--that is to say, Berlin itself was then "the General Headquarters of Revolution." But, the Germans were always speaking of only "Jewish Bolshevism," which was only partly true. Moreover, she was convinced that "these same obnoxious elements working through secret societies can be depended on to undermine the British Empire."[24] She then added the following comment, by way of emphasis, in order to draw our strategic attention to the pervasive, subversive phenomenon of hidden and publicly unaccountable, "Oligarchies" who were themselves very intelligently strategic and very powerful in their manipulative influence:

The most dangerous element I believe to be the Secret Power wielded by no one race or creed, nor only by financiers, and which also[in the year 1922] very probably has its center in Berlin with ramifications all over the world.[25]

By way of contrast today, where do the Muslims now likely believe the "G.H.Q. of Revolution" to be? Where, in their grand-strategic view, is the center--or "center of gravity"--of "the Great Satan" and its own strategic "command post" for the pre-emptive cultural subversion and intended political control of the Muslim World? And how would they understand the phenomenon of "the Secret Power" which often now seems to be so manipulatively influential over "the World's Sole Superpower"? What should we say to them, what would we say, or is it too taboo? Is this last topic now "so taboo," indeed, that "we" can't even say that "it's taboo!"? For, a sign of a group's real power is the extent to which you're allowed to discuss it candidly in public. Real power is also able to impose a cynical "double standard" in its own favor--and especially for its own protection and preservation of "hidden-ness."

The Leftist intellectual historian and Member of the French Academy, Fran‡ois Furet, however, has made a very candid statement about modern Western democracies, a statement which has not only become a classic formulation in itself, but also a further confirmation of Nesta Webster's earlier insight about "the Secret Power" of the "occult Oligarchies." In Furet's own book on the French Revolution, Penser la Revolution fran‡aise, he says:

There is in all democratic power, a fortiori in all pure democratic power, a hidden oligarchy [oligarchie occulte], at the same time contrary to its principles yet indispensable to its functioning.[26]

In other words, modern democracy is based on a deception.

My French friend, Arnaud de Lassus, who first showed me Furet's forthright book, made a very important addition to Furet's candid insight, namely: "While Fran‡ois Furet mentions one oligarchy--one hidden oligarchy--experience tells us that it might be better to speak of several oligarchies."[27] And, these oligarchies do indeed struggle amongst themselves. There are, indeed, "civil wars within the Revolution"--within the destructive "dialectic" of the Revolution! As is the case with the Mafia influence on certain foreign "States" (or "Narco-Kleptocracies") that themselves often resemble a "Criminal Syndicate," it is also more pervasively true that "organized crime" is "protected crime"--i.e., protected by powerful political and financial elites! If it were not protected, it would not be organized for long! And when does toleration itself become a complicity?! Do we agree?

Arnaud de Lassus is also very appreciative of "Augustin Cochin's analysis of the [occult] apparatus of the French Revolution" and his "theory of Jacobinism," or of "Jacobin democracy."[28] "Born in 1876, he [Cochin] died in battle in 1916," in World War I, and "he was a philosopher and Catholic historian," whose views Fran‡ois Furet himself analyses and trenchantly summarizes in the last forty pages of his own book on the French Revolution, which was cited above.

Furthermore, when dealing with the hidden pressures influencing the modern State, we must also candidly face the "money-power" of oligarchies, or, "more exactly, the power of those who possess money otherwise known as the power of financial dynasties."[29] Arnaud de Lassus then further says:

For an explanation of the political role of these dynasties one need go no further than the recent book by [Leftist Jewish Socialist] Jacques Attali, entitled Sigmund Warburg, a Man of Influence [and a Jewish "Super-Capitalist"!], which is adequately supported by historical references.[30]

Attali, the Socialist, writes about this Financial Capitalist, as follows:

In the last two centuries it is the financier far more than the artist or industrialist whose influence has been unquestionable: the man who directly or indirectly finances princes.[31]

Speaking of their organization, Attali then describes how financiers are:

"Linked to each other in a close and almost dynastic network" and constitute a "parallel aristocracy lodged at the heart of every regime." "A dynastic elite based on culture as well as money." (page 48). "As pioneers of capitalist rationalism and founding witnesses of the merchant order, they are essential links in our history.... They eventually organized themselves into a strange aristocracy, a kind of austere order, with implacable moral laws and savage rituals" (page 6).[32]

Arnaud de Lassus says that, although "financial dynasties are evidently not the only pressure groups attempting to colonise [or enfeoff!] the democratic state," they are very potent:

Describing the influence that these financiers exercise over men in power, Attali shows that they can constitute "a power over the power" ["pouvoir sur le pouvoir"]. Does this last phrase mean that the financial dynasties discreetly dominate the political power? That occurs particularly when the regime is democratic. One can therefore state that the modern state has sold or leased its soul to the bankers. This becomes even more true when the State itself completely abandons to them the power to mint money.[33]

Let us in this context recall that potent "private consortium of banks" in the United States, which is euphemistically known as "the Federal Reserve System"! Who really sets limits to this financial power and to these networked financial dynasties--and for how long? To what extent are they at all accountable to the public, and what sanctions are ever effectively applied to them? (Pope Pius XI, in his 1931 Encyclical, Quadragessimo Anno, warned us about the selfish financial oligarchies and their destructive intractability.)

With further application to the United States and to our own cynically impending, wider war in Iraq and the Middle East, Major General Fuller, once again, will help us understand an unmistakable matter of moment: finance and the banking oligarchies as an instrument and weapon of war and grand-strategy. In his A Military History of the Western World, he concludes his chapter on the 1704 Battle of Blenheim--the decisive battle in the War of Spanish Succession--with the following words:

With the signing of the Treaty of Utrecht [in 1713, at the conclusion of the War], England was left supreme at sea and in the markets of the world, and as Admiral Mahan says, "not only in fact, but in her own consciousness." "This great, but noiseless revolution in sea-power," writes Professor Trevelyan, "was accomplished by the victories of Marlborough's arms and diplomacy on land...it was because Marlborough regarded the naval war as an integral part of the whole effort against Louis [King of France, Louis XIV], that English sea power was fixed between 1702 and 1712 on a basis whence no enemy has since been able to dislodge it." But the revolution went deeper still; for it was the machinery of the Bank of England [founded only in 1691] and the National Debt which enabled England to fight wars with gold as well as iron. William's war [i.e., William of Orange, King William III of England] had lasted for nine years and had cost over œ30,000,000, and the War of the Spanish Succession dragged on for 12 years and cost about œ50,000,000. Only half this vast sum of œ80,000,000 was met out of taxation, the remainder was borrowed and added to the National Debt. Thus a system was devised whereby the prosperity of the future was underwritten in order to ease the poverty of the present, and war was henceforth founded on unpayable debt. The banker merchants of London steadily gained in political power over the landed interests, and, therefore increasingly into their hands went the destinies of the nation and the Empire, whose frontiers had become the oceans and the seas.[34]

The intrinsic end of the Political State is to promote the common good (bonum commune); this is hardly the aim or intrinsic end of the financial oligarchies. To what extent, we may well ask, do such Banker Merchants and their Financial Dynasties--with their own dynastic succession of unmistakably strategical power--control the destinies of the American nation and our tumescently growing Empire? And, what does that imply?

To what extent is it untrue to say that our growing Empire (masquerading as a Nation) is becoming a Narco-Kleptocracy, where drugs (narcotics), as well as oil, are a form of financial currency and an access to liquidity (and profitable money-laundering)? To what extent are we becoming a Technocratic Narco-Kleptocracy run by a network of financial oligarchies and their "multi-media" manipulators" and "chaos managers"? There is, indeed, a "seam" between war and criminality, and not only between the "Narco-Trafficantes" and "NORDEX" and the "Russian" Mafia and the "Spetsnaz"! And "organized crime is protected crime"!

Criminal Networks, I believe, as well as "Special Operations Forces (SOF)" of various forms, will become more prominent in future forms of warfare, especially in "covert irregular warfare" which stealthfully makes use of "special weapons" and "special technical operations," which are often euphemistically called "non-lethal weapons." Many "non-lethal weapons" especially target the human mind--the human intellect and the human will. They are often subtly "psycho-tropic" or "neuro-tropic," as are many advanced forms of biological and chemical agents. Given the effects of many of these "non-lethal" weapons on one's endocrine system, one's reproductive system, one's immune system--as well as on one's brain and eyes--many persons would rather die, instead!

"Narco-Guerrillas," like the FARC in Columbia, combine commando (or SOF) talents, with the talents of narco-criminal syndicates. They are also often found to be in contact with ancient secret societies like the Chinese Triads and the Japanese (often Korean) Yakusa, both of which have characteristics of networked criminal syndicates, as well as the martial qualities of a networked foreign "Special Operations Force."

Another equivocal, multi-functional phenomenon which we shall increasingly encounter are the various para-military "Private Security Services," such as the former "Executive Outcomes," which still operates under euphemistic new names, like "Sand Line." Many of these "Private" Security Groups employ former Special Operations Forces, and they often work for certain International Oligarchies and Cartels (strategic minerals, diamonds, grain, and the like).

All things considered, the combination of "networked elite forces" and "special weapons"--even when they are not called "terrorists" or "mercenaries"--will constitute an important and pervasive phenomenon on the "future battlefield" and in the conduct of what the Chinese call "unrestricted warfare." The ends will be clearly defined, the means will be resourcefully and ruthlessly unlimited and shockingly unexpected, often in incongruous combinations!

However, the real battlefield will be, not so much "soft economic or even financial targets" or "agricultural targets" or "demographic and cultural targets," but, rather, the human mind--and ultimately the human soul (the principle of life).

The sub-title of Major General Fuller's 1961 book, The Conduct of War, 1789-1961, should also be a model and guide for us, for our further reflections about future forms of warfare. For, as Trotsky and others have said: "Even if you're not interested in war, war is very interested in you!"

General Fuller's subtitle, as cited earlier, is very significant: A Study of the Impact of the French, Industrial, and Russian Revolutions on War and its Conduct. And, what kind of "Revolutions" would he now likely consider and include, if he were still alive and writing military-strategic (and grand-strategic) studies and candid analyses for us today? I think he would have included at least some of the following phenomena:

1. The Zionist Revolution (to include the supportive Protestant Christian Zionists and their own "Messianic Cult");
   
2. The Neo-Trotskyite Resurgence and their new forms of "Permanent Revolution, especially in Europe;
   
3. The Biological and Neuroscience Revolution (or the Revolution in Molecular Biology and Biotechnologies and Applied Neuroscience);
   
4. The Scientific Revolutions in other Fields and their "Consilience" or "Synergy": e.g., Molecular Electronics; Nanotechnologies; Robotics; Information Science; Fusion Sensors; Psycho-neuro-pharmacology and the like; and
   
5. The Various Forms of "Syncretic-Synthetic Religious Revolutions," to include Old and New "Syncretic Cults": Sufism; Theosophy; the Ramakrishna Movement; the BAHA'I World Faith (a syncretic, heretical Moslem Sect coming out of Persia in 1844 and with links to Israel); the Temple of Understanding; the Vedanta Society; the Reverend Moon Church (which owns the Washington Times and is apparently tied to the Protestant Christian Zionists, who are also in financial debt to them, and likewise in debt also to other Zionists); the syncretic Muslim Brotherhood of Egypt, originally promoted in 1920 by the Imperial British, to "divide and conquer."
   

Even back in 1920, however, J.F.C. Fuller was astonishingly far-sighted. Almost as if he had truly anticipated a kind of strategic and subversive, indirect psycho-cultural and psycho-linguistic warfare, targeted against the human mind, he (then Colonel Fuller) near the end of his unexpectedly strategic 1920 book, Tanks in the Great War, 1914-1918, very farsightedly said the following:

This [overtly coercive mechanical or chemical] method of imposing the will of one man on another may in its turn be replaced by a purely psychological warfare, wherein "weapons" are not even used or battlefields sought or loss of life or limb aimed at; but, in place, the corruption of human reason, the dimming of the human intellect, and the disintegration of the moral and spiritual life of one nation by the influence of the will of another is accomplished.[35]

In 1961, the same year that General Fuller had published his The Conduct of War, 1789-1961, Aldous Huxley also insidiously (and ominously) seemed to support, not just to prophesy, what he slyly called the coming "pharmacological revolution," which is now so obvious to us throughout in the spreading and deepening "narco-democracies" (and narco-kleptocracies) of the West, and, perhaps, even a sign of the West's own servile and incipient "therapeutic collectivism" and "narco-socialisms," or even Goethe's always feared servile (and putatively therapeutic) "Hospital State." In a Voice-of-America-sponsored lecture at the California School of Medicine in San Francisco, Aldous Huxley, who was then himself a user and promoter of mescaline and other psychedelic drugs, as well as being the revolutionary author of The Doors of Perception, said, very certainly and bluntly, as follows:

There will be in the next generation or so a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude and producing dictatorship without tears, so to speak; producing a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies, so that people will in fact have their liberties be taken away from them but will rather enjoy it, because they will be distracted from any desire to rebel--by propaganda, or brainwashing, or brainwashing enhanced by pharmacological methods. And this seems to be the final revolution.[36]

There is also ample evidence that another long-standing strategic technique of rule, which was used not only by the Imperial British, deviously strove to foster, promote, and manipulate various religions, various synthetic (or syncretistic religious-philosophical) sects in those countries or regions that one wanted to dominate. It is but another deceitful form of dialectic and domination: "solve et coagula" or "divide et impera."

Analogously, those who would especially want to weaken the sacramental and hierarchic Roman Catholic Church would also want to promote various forms of "Liberation Theology" and "Syncretic, Antinomian 'Base Communities'," or even the New "Free-and-Voluntary-Association 'Congregationalist' Theologies and Ochlocratic Movements."

Coming not only from without, but also operating within the Church are various "dialectical" and "syncretic" movements that strive to "re-define" or "re-conceptualize" the Church herself and her authoritative irreformable Dogmas, even about Salvation. At root, this is a revolution about the very nature of the Church herself--a Revolution de Ecclesia. The sophistical promotion of syncretism subverts the Church. As a strategic deception, it often masquerades as "Ecumenism," or as "Inclusive Unity" (as if truth does not any longer matter).

The war we are in is quite inclusive, and it is about many intimate and ultimate matters. And (in contrast to love) when someone is at war with you, even if you don't know it, you're at war! The common and converging strategic, political and scholarly movement mounted by Jews, Moslems, and Pre-Columbian Americans in order to "undo 1492" was really a subtle (and sophistic) grand-strategic attack on the Catholic Church. But, do we yet realize that? The Moslems, moreover, are very serious about "getting Granada back!" and even having a "R‚-R‚conquista" of Spain, to help "undo 1492." To what extent do Catholics see that this also is an aspect of "the war we are in," where demography itself--especially the number of new births and quiet migrations and the gradual immigrant implantations within Europe and the United States--is also conceived as a new "weapon of war"? How does a culture repel such a "peaceful invasion"? (Remember Jean Respail's Camp of the Saints.)

What will be our own standard of love and strategic intelligence, so as to defend the integrity of the historic Faith today, and to help and console the Church herself in her Gethsemane? When our commander is wounded on the battlefield that is when he especially needs our fidelity!

Will we be galley slaves or free men? Will we submit to the new "Servile State" and its dissipating "multi-culturalism" and "syncretism"?

Josef Pieper, speaking profoundly, once again, in his analysis of the Phaedrus, Plato's eloquently anti-Sophist Dialogue, reminds us of something important. He says:

Is it necessary to point out that this contrast between galley slaves and free men has nothing to do with the social phenomenon of slavery? In Plato (and in Aristotle also, who for example speaks of forms of music which impress slaves and animals) there is a concept of slavery [mental and spiritual slavery] which no social changes, no emancipation of the slaves, can wipe off the face of the earth. This conception is rooted in the belief that what is truly human is never the average. The standard by which truth and falsehood, good and evil, are measured, is not alone the divine, but also the human. To put it more exactly: the standard is what man is capable of being [the ultimum potentiae, both by virtue of his creation and as perfected in his own more abundant and growing life of virtue], and what he is called upon [as his true vocation in grace] to be.[37]

Therefore, in light of the reality of grace--and of all the accompanying gifts of the infused cardinal and theological virtues--let us defend the Faith and Holy Mother Church with all our heart.

We, for sure, would not have wanted to have abandoned our Lord in His Gethsemane. Let us not abandon the Church in hers. The wounded Sacred Heart and the Higher Chivalry of Christ will inspire us. And His Mother, too. And maybe even an Angel of Consolation sent to us in our need, like the one who supported our Lord in Gethsemane, when He trembled. That consolation significantly came, however, before our Lord sweated blood. Do we remember? And are we grateful? And will we thus, if we can, make our own lives--and especially our own death (however or whenever it comes)--an oblation of gratitude? Or, will we, God forbid, die in the desolation of ingratitude?

Footnotes:

1 Josef Pieper, Enthusiasm and Divine Madness [the original 1962 German title, Begeisterung und G”ttlicher Wahnsinn] (South Bend, Indiana: St. Augustine's Press, 2000), p. 23. N.B.: Throughout this paper, emphasis in the original shall be noted in bold; emphasis added by the author of this essay shall be underlined.

Moreover, by "Kleptocracy" I mean "rule or governance--really misgovernance--by greed and corruption, to include the permeating corruption of bribery and theft and the pervasive, sophistic abuse of language." ("Rule by brigandage" is what St. Augustine called "rule by injustice.") By "technocratic" I mean "inordinate trust and dependence on and dominance by technique and technology, or applied science, to include the managerial techniques of applied electronics, psychology, information science, and multi-media perception-management." By the prefix "narco-"I mean "the narcotic, mind-numbing attention-shortened, opiate, hedonistic inclinations of our permeating and circumambient culture, which includes the advertising and athletic and entertainment industries, not just those persons or groups who put certain illegal or legal narcotic substances in their body!" See also the Appendix for further elaborations and illustrations.

2 Ibid., p. 32

3 Ibid., pp. 32-33

4 John Cotter, A Study in Syncretism: The Background and Apparatus of the Emerging One World Church (Flesherton, Ontario: Canadian Intelligence Publications, 1979), p. 16.

5 Ibid., p. 15.

6 Ibid., p. 22 and 25, respectively.

7 (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1963)

8 Ibid., p. 11

9 John Cotter, A Study in Syncretism, pp. 7-8.

10 Ibid., pp. 2,3,4.

11 Ibid., pp. 4 and 5.

12 Ibid., p. 4.

13 Nesta Webster and Kurt Kerlen, Boche and Bolshevik (New York City: The Beckwith Company, 1923), p. 18.

14 Ibid., pp. 31-32.

15 Ibid, pp. 38-39.

16 Ibid, p. 39

17 Ibid., p. 44

18 Major General J.F.C. Fuller, The Conduct of War, 1789-1961. (New York: Da Capo Press, 1992), 352 pages--first published in 1961, five years before his death. Many consider this book to be his best, as well as his culminating, work.

19 Ibid, pp. 294-295.

20 Ibid., p. 295.

21 Ibid., p. 296--the last paragraph is also a citation from General Fuller's 1956 book, The Decisive Battles of the Western World, Vol. III, p. 589.

22 Ibid., pp 5, 20, and 44.

23Ibid., p. 43.

24 Ibid., pp. 43-44.

25 Ibid., p. 43.

26 Fran‡ois Furet, Penser la Revolution franaise (Paris: ditions Gallimard, 1978), p. 241.

27 See Arnaud de Lassus and Michel Berger, Fundamentals of Democracy--an English translation of the Original French Study, in Apropos (Inverness, Scotland, Pentecost 1999), pp. 182-288.

28 Ibid., p. 228.

29 Ibid., p. 201.

30 Ibid., p. 202.

31 Ibid., p. 202. These quoted lines are from page 5 of Attali's book on Sigmund Warburg, a Man of Influence.

32 Ibid., p. 202.

33 Ibid.

34 J.F.C. Fuller, A Military History of the Western World (3 volumes)--(New York: Da Capo Press, 1955), Vol. II--Chapter 4--"The Battle of Blenheim," pp. 154-155.

35 J.F.C. Fuller, Tanks in the Great War, 1914-1918 (London: John Murray, 1920), p. 320.

36 Cited in Jeffrey Steinberg, "Pharmacological Revolution Sweeps Europe, America," Executive Intelligence Review (Vol. 23, No 30, 26 July 1996), pp. 32-34. Steinberg links the new "synthetic drugs" with "computer-generated techno-music."

37 Josef Pieper, Enthusiasm and Divine Madness, p. 42.