While history does not repeat itself that is not for want of efforts by people in power to preserve and protect their particular pasts. Actually the statement presumes something that can in fact be repeated indefinitely if imperfectly. Therein lies the substance of historical continuity—the redundancies we call institutions and personalities—that comprise repetition and routines of what can best be called semiotic transformations. History does not repeat itself, people do.

One of the functions of elite education in the West, for which its exclusivity and traditionalism are essential, is to teach youth in the performance of cognitive and behavioural redundancies developed by their parents and ancestors. Exclusivity and traditionalism serve to limit the range of behaviour among the pupils/students to those already accepted, practiced and validated among their peers. Traditionalism is an important mechanism for preserving the orientation, the interest in preserving an existing institution (shared meaning). While intellectual innovation, e.g. scientific research, may be promoted by the elite, care is taken to assure that this innovation does not become deviance. In other words, human variability among elite cohorts has to be channelled in ways that ought to preserve the Establishment. Innovation perceived as potentially destabilizing—except for the most trivial forms—has to be discouraged or isolated from the bulk of the cadre. For this reason a certain degree of radicalism is tolerated but only if the vast majority of pupils can be shielded from it.

That said, it is significant to consider the relationship between the Anglo-American Empire and its continental vassals as one that is contradictory—like all relationships—but guided by a long-standing historical tradition by which the English-speaking peoples have been inculcated since the first independent schools were established in Britain, e.g. Eton, Harrow, etc. This scholastic tradition was continued albeit without monarchical trappings in North America. However unlike Britain, the somewhat more egalitarian (oligarchic) United States came to rely upon its colleges even more than its preparatory schools. The ostensibly meritocratic Americans, led primarily by Non-Conformist evangelical clergy, adopted public elementary and secondary education to discipline an expanding immigrant population. America’s “ancient” universities (aka the Ivy League) were reserved for the Anglo-American elite until the post-WWII era. These collegiate universities, modelled on Oxford and Cambridge, fostered the social base and the cultural-intellectual continuity for the American ruling class. They also promoted identification with the British view of world history. 

This continuity was largely incidental throughout the first century of the republic. However, with the establishment of the Rhodes Scholarship and the Round Table institutions (Royal Institute of International Affairs, aka Chatham House, its US subsidiary Council on Foreign Relations and the sister organizations in the Commonwealth, etc.) the program for a reconstituted Anglo-American Commonwealth under de facto leadership of the United States became a conscious objective. Unlike educational institutions on the Eurasian continent, British and American elite education has always been a private enterprise. The absence of an established church in the US and the Non-Conformist traditions of the original colonial colleges preserved the arm’s length between the ostensibly democratic state and the oligarchical tertiary education system. 

Image: Portrait of Henry John Temple (1784–1865) (Public Domain)

When an Old Etonian like David Cameron spoke about the threat of Russia under Putin he was speaking from the same orientation as his predecessors who fought the Crimean War. Henry Temple, 3d Viscount Palmerston, was educated at Harrow (like Winston Churchill). The Crimean War and the Opium Wars were not only major performances of British imperialism under Palmerston’s ministry, they comprise the “old boy” lore passed on from generation to generation of upper class Englishmen. The attitudes of American and British politicians sound anachronistic or even absurd to those who have not been educated in that culture. Thus both British and American leaders are often chided for naïveté or arrogance in foreign relations. That is a serious mistake. The language of British and American foreign policy, and to a lesser extent that of Canada and Australia, is the product of a worldview that has been inculcate for more than two hundred years. Certainly that is a few minutes in comparison to the duration of Chinese civilization. However, Britain and the United States embody the spirit of industrialization not civilization. 

Industrialization is the mechanisation of the North Atlantic warrior culture. The technology promoted in the past two centuries was intended to compensate or leverage the population deficit of a piratical economic model. This population substitution strategy not only facilitated the Atlantic slave trade it was also a consequence of it. The inability to populate drug producing colonies (sugar, alcohol and tobacco) with surplus population led to reliance on African bonded labour. The increase in the slave populations rapidly exceeded the growth in the master/ managerial class on the islands. The culmination of this disparity was the Haitian Revolution which proved how hazardous chattel slavery was without adequate firepower. Industrialization itself could not compete against huge Asian labour forces. Thus it was necessary to apply massive violence to destroy Asian industry to render machines competitive. These machines had been bought with the wealth accumulated by plantations in the Americas.

The United States was able to achieve industrial prominence after 1945 only because two world wars had destroyed most of the industrial capacity of Western Eurasia and the European colonizers had scrupulously avoided industrializing their non-white possessions. It is worth noting here that the war waged by the US against Korea was so devastating to US Forces because Japanese colonizers had previously industrialized the North, endowing it with a rare capability of arming itself against invasion. With the competitive industrialization of the periphery and the recover of Europe, the US could only compete through war and finance (USD dominance). The expansion of the European Union, originally intended as the frontline against the Soviet Union and as the propaganda against Soviet socialism, reached its zenith in 1989. With the defeat of the Soviet Union, the front subsidy was no longer needed. A rapid expansion of German-led financial conquest absorbed most of what had been the COMECON region. Ukraine was appropriated as a source of cheap grain, allowing Germany to convert farmland to the production of bio-fuel and other non-food uses. The demolition of Yugoslavia eliminated the last island of socialized industry and opened the coal and other reserves to German exploitation. In a sense, 1989 achieved what Gesamtplan Ost could not because of the Red Army. In addition the destruction of Yugoslavia allowed the Anglo-American Empire to seize control over that vital corridor which Germany had sought to exploit before the Great War. The US protectorate in Kosovo occupies the terminal of optimum transit terrain between the Mediterranean and Central Asia. 

An enormous amount of attention is now focussed on the pending formation of Greater Israel. This project is much older than the obnoxious Zionist regime that currently occupies Palestine. On one hand the US-UK-Israel project is a continuation of Anglo-American imperial designs. On the other however, these designs follow a doctrinal and historical tradition going back to the Crusades. The Bible—in whatever version one chooses—was elevated to the paramount historical document of the West a thousand years ago. The contest to control the hub between East and West has been the core of Western (Latin) political – economy since Augustine of Hippo became the spokesman for the Latin Church. The Crusades created the tradition of killing for salvation in the West. The fiction of Palestine as the “holy land” was invented to direct the servants of the Latin Church against those who obstructed control over the world trade hub of the Middle East—then the Caliphate and Patriarchates of the so-called “orthodox” Greek churches.

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The armies raised for the Fourth Crusade under Pope Innocent III were launched against Christianity, which was in fact a Greek religion, and Islam, to seize the channels of trade with India and China and destroy religious-political opposition. This strategic objective survives in the quasi-theocratic regimes of the Anglo-American Empire. The continental population are again seen as fodder to be sacrificed for “freedom” rather than “salvation”. Short of a massive atomic assault, the Anglo-American “homeland” is immune from territorial warfare. The contiguous Eurasian landmass is not. Thus the willingness of the United States to threaten and practice terrorism against the rest of the world is not irrational. Rather it is consistent with the culture, education and indoctrination of its oligarchy and the elite cadre who serve it.

The moral basis for this sacrifice, of common welfare in the European Union and the US itself, is the conviction that the Anglo-American Empire, including its sister state in Tel Aviv, are indispensable and exemplary societies. This moral basis is not rational in the sense of Enlightenment and Reason, it is religious in the sense of the Calvinist fanaticism of the Thirty-Years War and the Jesuit calculation of the Counter-Reformation. It is missionary and militaristic, using every method available for the conversion of the people and the world into its very image. Between the radical application of psychic technologies and the principle of “kill them all, let god sort them out”, there is no rational negotiation framework. In that sense the Anglo-American Empire is truly totalitarian. Repeatedly US presidents have said, “whoever is not with us is against us.” Those are words of conviction not superficial slogans. To the extent that Europe is dominated by the Anglo-American oligarchy it is there to be sacrificed, “old Europe” must find its salvation by pledging to the great Western Crusade. It must relive the decimation of the 11^th century as a condition of entering the 21^st.   

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Dr. T.P. Wilkinson writes, teaches History and English, directs theatre and coaches cricket between the cradles of Heine and Saramago. He is also the author of Church Clothes, Land, Mission and the End of Apartheid in South Africa. He is a regular contributor to Global Research. 

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