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Clash of Religions Underpins Ukraine War and All Politics in the World
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Arvind Kumar | Date:04 Aug , 2022 0 Comments
Arvind Kumar
Arvind Kumar is a writer and an activist. He has analyzed conflicts and assessed geopolitical risks in his professional capacity for trading in the energy market. He lives in Houston, Texas. He can be reached at arvindk@uchicago.edu

The plan was immediately opposed by Stephen Hadley who was a Roman Catholic and who would go on to become the National Security Advisor in the George W. Bush administration, two-time National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft who was a Mormon married to a Catholic, and Arnold Kanter who was yet another Roman Catholic and who had been the Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs. The three of them lost no time in co-authoring an op-ed in the Los Angeles Times denouncing the ‘Partnership for Peace’ proposal and advocating a hawkish militarist role for the NATO which would expand to include Poland, Hungary, Czech Republic, and Ukraine while keeping out Russia and treating it as an enemy[6].

In 1997, during the hearings before the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations[7], John Ashcroft, the son of a Pentecostal minister who was a Senator at that time and would become the U.S. Attorney General in the George W. Bush administration, stated that he was a “bit concerned” about NATO’s enlargement and argued, “I think to allow enlargement, without understanding our relationship to Russia in the context of it, would be in error, and I am sure you are doing that. But in one sense it seems like we are isolating a potential ally in Russia. We are telling them that you are not a part of the European or western oriented group of nations, and that troubles me, particularly when it appears to me that the administration is beginning to, while isolating a potential ally, embrace a new threat – the People’s Republic of China – particularly the administration’s consideration of allowing nuclear cooperation with China.”

Others at the hearing who wanted cooperation with Russia included the last American ambassador to the Soviet Union, Jack Matlock, Jr. and Thomas Pickering who had served as the ambassador to Russia between 1993 and 1996 after being appointed by Bill Clinton. Matlock stated that he “disagree[d] that the enlargement of NATO significantly advance[d] U.S. security interests” and described it as “a misguided policy” that “could go down in history as a profound strategic blunder,” while Pickering wanted NATO enlargement and NATO cooperation with Russia to go hand in hand and argued that “NATO does not need an enemy.”

As proof of Russia’s sincerity, Pickering listed several steps taken by Russia including signing on to the NATO-Russia Founding Act and the Partnership for Peace program, joining the peacekeeping forces in Bosnia side-by-side with NATO, ratifying the START I Treaty and implementing its reductions in arms levels, supporting START II and agreeing to work on START III, and taking the Permanent Joint Council of the Founding Act seriously and working with the Duma to implement its goals. He also stated that “the reintegration of Germany and the other Axis Powers into the community of democracies and the West stands as one of the great diplomatic accomplishments” and wanted to take the same path with Russia.

This position faced a strong push back from Bill Clinton’s second Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, Stephen Hadley, former National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski and former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. Although Kissinger, who is a Germanic Jew, has recently called for a surrender by Ukraine, that is merely pragmatic advice in the face of Russia gnawing away at Ukraine’s territory on the Black Sea coast. In the 1997 Senate Committee hearings, Kissinger had argued in favor of treating Russia as a threat and expanding NATO eastward.

Another Senator, the late Paul Wellstone, who like Kissinger was Jewish, played coy and pretended that he did not know enough about the issue despite being a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and of Ukrainian descent, and extolled Madeleine Albright as the person who was knowledgeable on the issue and deferred to her. In reality, Wellstone had carefully positioned himself as a ‘progressive’ peacenik who opposed wars and had become the darling of the antiwar ‘left’ and had to choose his words carefully to maintain this perception. Brzezinski, a Polish Catholic, claimed that the purpose of “NATO expansion [was] not primarily a moral crusade, meant to undo the injustice the Central European peoples suffered during the half-century long Soviet oppression,” but in his denial was the confirmation that vengeance against Russia was on his mind.

On the Russian side, all its leaders including Mikhail Gorbachev, Boris Yeltsin and Vladimir Putin wanted to join NATO after transforming it from a military alliance into a peaceful coalition. Russia even joined the ‘Partnership for Peace’ program with its Foreign Minister Andrei Kozyrev signing the program’s framework document[8]. Despite this action, in response to a question whether Russia would be welcomed into the NATO if they met the criteria of becoming a democracy, Albright made the false claim that Russia had “said that they do not wish to be a part of it.”

All along, it was Albright and others like Hadley, Kissinger, and Wellstone who wanted to keep the fire burning by treating Russia as a threat and expanding NATO eastwards. While Richard Nixon, James Baker, Warren Christopher, James Matlock, Jr., Thomas Pickering, and John Ashcroft, who were for cooperation with Russia, were all Protestants, Madeleine Albright, like Stephen Hadley and Zbigniew Brzezinski, had a Catholic background, and it is the Catholics who once again prevailed in setting the foreign policy.

In 1993, Albright had displayed her aggressiveness and hostility towards the Orthodox Christian world during a discussion on Bosnia when she demanded of Colin Powell who was then the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, “What’s the point of having this superb military that you’re always talking about if we can’t use it?”[9] Albright’s attitude had resulted in Colin Powell writing that American troops were not “toy soldiers to be moved around on some sort of global chessboard.”[10] When Albright later became the Secretary of State, NATO was transformed from a defensive force to an aggressive outfit that started wars to grab the resources of other cultures and destroy their infrastructure in order to prevent them from prospering. Albright, along with General Wesley Clark who is also a Roman Catholic, relentlessly bombed Belgrade in 1999, and after their bombing campaign, the two of them used their private investment firms to attempt a take over of various industrial sectors in Kosovo[11] which was placed under ‘supervised independence,’[12] a thinly veiled term for ‘control by the conquerors.’

Albright’s transformation of the NATO into a de facto papal army to wage holy wars and conquer other cultures has resulted in NATO launching wars against Yugoslavia, Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria. Albright’s hostility towards the Eastern Orthodox people was the reason for the US instigating Catholic Slovenia, Catholic Croatia, Muslim Bosnia and Muslim Kosovo to secede from Yugoslavia.

Earlier, as ambassador to the United Nations, a bitter Albright had been responsible for the US vetoing a second term for Boutros Boutros-Ghali as the UN Secretary General as she saw him as an obstacle in her efforts to start an all out war against the Serbian people. She followed up this action by creating the infamous oil-for-food program in which starving the civilian population of Iraq was used as an official policy tool to achieve her ends. In Albright, the Catholics had found a worthy torchbearer who not only advanced their interests with a missionary zeal, but carried out her tasks in a cold-hearted manner as she was always angry and lacked the ability to have empathy for her victims. When CBS anchor Leslie Stahl pointed out that 500,000 children had died in Iraq as a result of the starvation policy, Albright stated that the deaths were “worth it!”[13]

The success of the Catholics, despite comprising just twenty percent of the American population, can be attributed to John F. Kennedy becoming the first Catholic President of the US in 1961. Accusations and rebuttals about Kennedy being more loyal to the Vatican than to the United States had formed a major part of the election campaign in 1960. After Kennedy became the President, the floodgates were opened to the Catholics and their Jewish allies who have completely taken over the institutions and muscled out the Protestants from participating in the shaping of America’s foreign and domestic policies.

Among the institutions the Catholics have taken over from the Protestants are the US Supreme Court where all nine judges are either Jews or Catholics, and various universities and organizations which receive money from the government. Kennedy also created the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) which is known to interfere in global geopolitics. The organization, which is headed by Samantha Power, another Catholic, grants hundreds of millions of American taxpayer dollars to Catholic organizations every year[14], and has been accused of causing strife around the world. In 2012, it was expelled from Russia for meddling in Russian politics.

Catholics also exert their influence through international institutions such as the United Nations which can be readily seen from the fact that Catholic institutions are disproportionately favored as the partner organizations of the UN. The rise of Catholic power in America in the post-Kennedy years coincided with the wane of the power of the White Anglo-Saxon Protestants or WASPs whose peak and decline are described in Gregg Herken’s book, Georgetown Set: Friends and Rivals in Cold War Washington[15].

Since Kennedy became the President, Catholics and their allies have continuously held at least one of the important offices of the Secretary of State, the Secretary of Defense, the National Security Advisor and the head of Central Intelligence Agency which together play a key role in formulating the foreign policy of the US. Robert McNamara, Frank Carlucci, Les Aspin, William Cohen and Lloyd Austin who have served as the Secretary of Defense; Henry Kissinger (who, like Carlucci, also served as the National Security Advisor), Cyrus Vance, Alexander Haig, Madeleine Albright, John Kerry and Antony Blinken who have served as the Secretary of State; Zbignew Brzezinski, Richard Allen, William Clark, Stephen Hadley, Thomas Donilon, Herbert McMaster, Robert O’Brien and Jake Sullivan who have served as the National Security Advisor; John McCone, William Colby, William Casey, John Deutsch, Michael Hayden, Leon Panetta, John Brennan and William Burns who have served as the Director of CIA; and President Joe Biden who had been a key member of the Senate Foreign relations Committee and the Senate Intelligence Committee for more than thirty years, all had either a Roman Catholic or Jewish upbringing. Many others in key decision making roles, like former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, have been affiliated with Georgetown University, a Jesuit institution in Washington, D.C. which is a prime recruiting ground for the CIA.

Additionally, since 1962, when John McCormack became the first Catholic Speaker of the House of Representatives, Catholics have controlled the legislative agenda for both the foreign and domestic policies by holding the speakership for 44 of the past 60 years. During this period, seven out of the ten Speakers – John McCormack, Tip O’Neill, Tom Foley, Newt Gingrich, Nancy Pelosi, John Boehner and Paul Ryan – have been Catholics. Within the House of Representatives and the Senate, Catholics hold thirty percent of the seats while Jews hold an additional eight percent. Together with the minority groups and the Episcopalians on their side, the ‘liberals’ can create a bipartisan majority at will in both chambers of the Congress.

During the Ronald Reagan administration, Catholics even succeeded in making the US enter into a diplomatic relationship with the Vatican after 117 years. In 1867, the US Congress had prohibited funding for diplomats to the Vatican. However, in 1983, despite vocal opposition from Protestants, Clement Zablocki, a Catholic representative from Wisconsin, introduced legislation that resulted in repealing the 1867 ban.

It was during the Reagan administration that Catholics started openly asserting themselves. When the Protestant Secretary of State George Shultz worked towards reducing tensions with the Soviet Union by pursuing a policy of arms reduction and denuclearization, he faced opposition from the Roman Catholic CIA Director William Casey who ganged up with the Episcopalian Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger, a feud that played out in public[16]. Another Catholic in the Reagan administration was Reagan’s Chief of Staff Donald Regan. According to Nancy Reagan’s memoirs, Donald Regan terrorized others in the Reagan administration and tightly controlled access to the president.

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