Layla Anwar-Narrated by an Invisible Thread.

Narrated by an Invisible Thread.

Layla Anwar

January 26, 2012 I am stuck with words, a horrible feeling that feeling of being stuck...with words. Yet at the same time that gut feeling, like some stone, a rock lodged in my plexus needs to be dealt with, needs to be narrated, a short story maybe...that won't give it justice. I do what I can. I am not a passive observer, a detached spectator engaged in some scientific study...even though I try to use "reason", like some safety pad, that will absorb the other's pain....and mine. I like to consider myself a good listener. I am also curious, not because I want to invade the other's person territory, but because I need a complete picture...this need for a complete picture is crucial for me. I am not sure how, or why, but I find it necessary...maybe by forming this complete picture in my mind, the narrative speaks by itself, effortlessly...like a river, like the Tigris, like the Euphrates...maybe also because I need to take that trip myself, with the narrator, down his and her memory lane, and in the process find mine, so all the pieces may fit into a "rational" whole. A process of finding meaning, of tying loose ends, of uncovering secrets, lost hopes, vanquished desires and unfinished grief....but also a process of finding amid the pieces -- the resolve, the resilience, the faith...like some invisible thread that has kept it all together, in the realm of ...of Sanity... there is no better word...yes, a Sanity, that in retrospect, becomes a Life philosophy -- an acceptance of Life as it is. It is only there, in that process of listening and narrating, does one realize, the courage, bravery, fortitude, strength, force, of the ordinary Iraqi. I don't think the word ordinary is befitting but short of a better word, I will keep it. The very imperfect ordinary Iraqi, who has seen and experienced much, way too much...before 2003, after 2003 and until this very day... the hard times, the very hard times, the losses, the displacement, the separation, the abandonment, the neglect, the exile, the daily struggles, on all levels, plus the violence, an indescribable violence, an indescribable brutality, that has ripped through his being, and etched itself there, like some permanent sign post...yet she still manages, he still manages...to function, to interact, to create, to give, to receive... We are not talking here of a couple of years period, we are talking decades...and that ordinary Iraqi is no blank virgin slate, she also has her own personal story, way before you appeared in her life...he also has his own "baggage" as you call it in your jargon...suitcases upon suitcase, trunk upon trunk of accumulated life traumas, shocks, losses, bereavement... You take us for granted and we take ourselves for granted...none of you would have survived sane, none. None of you would have been able to function...I mean just look at you, over 60 years have elapsed since the 2nd World War and it still comes up in your discussions, yet so much is expected of us, encapsulated in that dirty phrase that you so often repeat --- Get on with it. Get on with it - if you had gone through a small percentage of what we go through, you would not even get by, let alone get on with it. But you are not what matters, you are trivia - irrelevant. What matters is us and our story...and you only appear in it to confirm what we already know about you. You are the Devil's facilitator, so to speak...at the end of the story, like the Devil himself, you are nothing but a debased creature that rots in Hell. And your role ends there, miserably so. You story does not interest me, but ours does and it is in these instances, when the story unfolds in its minutest details, that I see that invisible thread keeping it all together...an invisible thread you will never recognize, nor understand...because you simply don't have it in you. An invisible thread that no amount of violence, of losses, of grief can severe, or cut, it is an umbilical cord, it is beyond gut, beyond viscera, beyond mind, beyond logic, something beyond your grasp, beyond your reach...not through invasions, bombs, guns, drones, jets, soldiers, contractors, mercenaries, missionaries, preachers, businessmen, marketeers, traders, politicians, parliaments, councils, committees, NGOs, development, progress, modernity, technology, satellite TV, computers or cell phones... A something, beyond language, beyond words, that made the ordinary Iraqi in ancient times and that keeps him together today...a something that only an Iraqi can narrate -- an invisible something that gives us resilience and in that resilience we find our resistance.

Revolution from Above (Kerry Bolton's new book)

ALTERNATIVE RIGHT
  By Alex Kurtagic 

NEW BOOK--

Kerry Bolton
Revolution from Above
London: Arktos Media, 2011

The popular imagination conceives Marxism and capitalism as opposing forces, imagining that—obviously—Marxists want the capitalists’ money and capitalists do not want Marxists to take it from them

.

Kerry Bolton’s Revolution from Above disproves this notion.

As it turns out, and as many readers probably already know, the Marxist revolutions in the East succeeded in many places thanks to the ample funds supplied to them—consciously and voluntarily—by finance-capitalists in the West.

With access to all the money they could wish for and more, the finance-capitalists in Bolton’s narrative were, and are, primarily motivated by a desire for power, and their ultimate aim was not even more money per se, but the enduring ability to shape the world to their convenience, which translates into a collectivised planet of producers and consumers.

Marxism was useful in as much as it was a materialistic ideology that destroyed traditional structures and values and turned citizens into secular, deracinated wage slaves, irrespective of race, gender, age, creed, disability, or sexual orientation.

Capitalism was useful in as much as it made money the measure of all things and created a consumer culture that ultimately turned citizens into debt slaves, also irrespective of race, gender, and so on.

In this manner, Marxism and capitalism were seen as complementary, as well as a method of pacifying the citizenry: too busy labouring in the factory or in the cubicle, and too befuddled by daydreams of shopping and entertainment during their free time, the citizens of this global order, fearful of losing their jobs and not being able to buy things or satisfy their creditors, are left with little inclination to, or energy for, rebellion.

Bolton explains how the finance-capitalist oligarchy is the entity that truly runs our affairs, rather than the national governments. The latter are either financially dependent, or in partnership, with the financiers and the central bankers.

To illustrate this dependency he documents the United States’ government relationship with the Bolsheviks in Russia during the revolution, not to mention the similarity in their goals despite superficial appearances to the contrary and despite alarm or opposition from further down the hierarchy. Bolton shows how genuinely anti-communist efforts were frustrated during the Cold War. And he shows that the close relationship with communist regimes ended when Stalin decided to pursue his own agenda.

The book then goes on to describe the various mechanisms of plutocratic domination. Bolton documents the involvement of a network of prominent, immensely rich, tax-exempt, so-called ‘philanthropic’ organisations in funding subversive movements and think tanks. Marxism has already been mentioned, but it seems these foundations were also interested in promoting feminism and the student revolts of 1968.

Feminism was sold to women as a movement of emancipation. Bolton argues, and documents, that its funders’ real aim was to end women’s independence (from the bankers) and prevent the unregulated education of children: by turning women into wage-slaves they would become dependent on an entity controlled by the plutocrats, double the tax-base, double the size of the market, and create the need for children’s education to be controlled by the government—an entity that is, in turn, controlled by the plutocrats. Betty Friedan, who founded the second wave of feminism with her book The Feminine Mystique, and Gloria Steinem are named as having received avalanches of funding from ‘philanthropic’ foundations.

With regards to the university student revolts of 1968, the book highlights the irony of how, without the activists knowing it, they were backed by the same establishment they thought to be opposing. These students were but ‘useful idiots’ in a covert strategy of subversion and social engineering.

The subversion does not end there, for the plutocracy has global reach and is as actively engaged in global planning today as it ever was. Revolution from Above inevitably deals with George Soros’ involvement in the overthrow of governments or regimes not to his liking. According to Bolton’s account, the reader can take it for granted that any of the velvet or ‘colour revolutions’ we have seen in recent years have been funded in some way or another by George Soros through his extended network of instruments. ‘Regime-changes’ in Yugoslavia [ΕΔΩ, ΓΝΩΡΙΖΟΜΕ ΑΠΟ ΠΡΩΤΟ ΧΕΡΙ ΤΟ ΠΩΣ ΟΡΓΑΝΩΘΗΚΕ Η "ΑΝΤΙΣΤΑΣΙ" ΚΑΙ ΤΑ ΑΠΙΘΑΝΑ ΧΡΗΜΑΤΙΚΑ ΠΟΣΑ ΚΑΙ ΤΗΝ ΑΦΑΝΤΑΣΤΗ ΤΕΧΝΙΚΗ ΥΠΟΣΤΗΡΙΞΗ ΚΑΙ ΤΗΝ ΣΥΣΤΗΜΑΤΙΚΗ ΚΑΘΟΔΗΓΗΣΙ ΠΡΟΣ ΤΟΥΣ ΑΝΤΙΦΡΟΝΟΥΝΤΕΣ ΠΡΟΣ ΤΟΝ ΜΙΛΟΣΕΒΙΤΣ ΑΠΟ ΤΑΣ ΕΠΙΣΗΜΟΥΣ ΥΠΗΡΕΣΙΑΣ ΤΩΝ ΗΠΑ], Georgia, Ukraine (orange revolution), Kyrgyszstan (pink revolution), Tunisia (jasmine revolution), Egypt (white revolution), Lybia (red, green, black revolution), and Iran (green revolution) were not the result of spontaneous uprisings. Anti-government parties, think tanks, media, campaigns, demonstrations, and even training courses for political agitation—all and in all cases received vast funding from finance-capitalism overseas, not from local collections of petty sums.

In other words, many a modern revolution has not come from below, but from above. And in the context of governments being in a dependent relationship to the stratospherical plutocracy, this aggregates into a pincer strategy, with pressure coming secretly from above and from below, with the pressure from below—however spontaneous and ‘messy’ it may seem when it hits the headlines—being the result of years of careful planning, financing, and preparation by overseas elites.

The reader must ask himself how it is that whenever we see one of these ‘colour revolutions’ somehow someone is able, almost overnight, to overwhelm the streets with a tsunami of well designed, professionally printed, and colour-coordinated merchandise: flags, scarves, placards, posters, leaflets, balloons, headbands, t-shirts, face-paint, you name it, it all seems very slick, aesthetically consistent, and fashion-conscious for uprisings that are supposedly spontaneous demonstrations of popular rage.

Overall Bolton crams in an enormous mass of information within 250 pages. The lists of names and figures—and some of the sums involved are truly staggering—are endless, and the persistent torrent of footnotes considerably expand on parts of the main narrative. The plutocrats’ web of influence and deceit is immensely complicated, not only as a structure but also as a process, since it thrives in double meaning, double think, and ambiguity. Those interested in a detailed knowledge of the machinations behind current and recent events, or even twentieth-century political history, would do well to read this book more than once—at least if they have ambitions of explaining it all to an educable third party.

One aspect of Bolton’s narrative that seems quite amazing is the superficially inoffensive tone of some of the enemy quotes provided. Were it not because Bolton’s findings flow in the same direction as other books uncovering the machinations of the oligarchs and their partners in Western governments, or because the answer to cui bono is provided unequivocally by the unfolding of current and historical events, it would be easy to think that the statements quoted came from deluded idealists. It may be that some truly believe in the goodness of their cause, yet such selfless altruism is hard to believe given the known absence of ethics among our current elite of super-financiers—the banking system they engineered, not to mention many of the opaque financial instruments we have come to known through the still unfolding financial crisis in the West, is a deception designed to obscure a practice of legalised theft.

The lessons are clear: firstly, modern ‘colour revolutions’ are not instigated by public desires for more democratic or liberal governance, but by private desires for increased global power and control; secondly, subversive movements can be given a name and a face—a name and a face averse that hides behind generic institutional names and orchestrates world events at the end of a complex money trail; and thirdly, the those seeking fundamental change should first become proficient capitalists or learn how to gain access to them. These are all obvious, of course, but Revolution from Above is less about teaching those lessons than about documenting how the world is run, by whom, and for what purpose. In other words, this is material with which to back up assertions likely to be challenged by, or in front of, the unaware. Sober and factual in tone, it is also good gift material for those who may benefit from a bit of education.