Indian Defence Review

At the Reykjavik Summit in 1986, Shultz, Ronald Reagan who was a Presbyterian, Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and Soviet Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze had come tantalizingly close to eliminating all nuclear weapons. Reagan’s successors, George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton, too were instinctively inclined to favor cooperation with the Russians even though their opponents within their own administrations eventually succeeded in overturning any improvement in the relationship with Russia. Bush signed an agreement which paved the way for an astronaut to be launched by the Russians and sent to Mir, a cosmonaut to be launched by Americans aboard an American space shuttle, and the space shuttle and Mir to dock with each other. The cooperation in the area of space exploration was extended further in 1993 when Bill Clinton announced that Russia would be a partner in the International Space Station.

However, the relationship with Russia became worse after Madeleine Albright became Bill Clinton’s second Secretary of State, and further deteriorated after George W. Bush became the President, as his administration had overwhelmingly Catholic decision makers and even came to be known as the first truly Catholic presidency[17]. Bush had also outsourced much of his foreign policy to the “neocon” group, Project for the New American Century. Three members of the group, Lewis Libby who was a Catholic, Paul Wolfowitz whose family had a Polish Jewish background, and ZalmayKhalilzad who was a Sunni Muslim had co-authored the controversial Defense Planning Guidance document for the US Department of Defense in 1992. When the New York Times published excerpts from the draft of the document[18], it ruffled feathers in capitals across the world leading to the language in the document being toned down.

The document brazenly declared that the US alone must be a strong power, have control over the world’s raw materials and resources even if they belonged to other countries, and prevent other nations from becoming stronger or forming independent alignments. The document even advocated playing Ukraine against Russia to prevent the Russians from accessing their own resources and termed India as harboring “hegemonic aspirations.” Ironically, the only country the document described in positive terms was the Islamic Republic of Pakistan with which it called for an American military relationship as the country was allegedly the key to stability in Southwest Asia and Central Asia.

In recent times, President Donald Trump, yet another Protestant, wanted a better relationship with Russia, non-interference in other countries’ conflicts, focus on domestic policies along with strengthening the local economy, and for European countries to pay their fair share in NATO. These positions, as well as Trump’s slogan ‘Make America Great Again’ were identical to the policy positions and the slogan used in Ronald Reagan’s 1980 presidential campaign. In response, Trump faced immense opposition from the CIA, and he too has expressed his distrust of the intelligence provided by the CIA.

For a long time, the CIA has been known to be a Catholic institution and has even been nicknamed as ‘Catholics in Action’ and the ‘Catholic Intelligence Agency,’[19] and its intelligence has been suspect. The most famous cases of the American intelligence apparatus planting fake intelligence in order to push the US into taking military action have been the false claims of the Vietnamese attacking American ships in the Gulf of Tonkin in 1964 and its fake claims of Iraq possessing weapons of mass destruction in 2002, a position supported by the then British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, who has now become a Catholic.

Even before their ascendancy in American politics, the loudest proponents of a hawkish policy against the Soviet Union were the Roman Catholics. The shrillest critics of the Russians, Senator Joe McCarthy and Edward Hart who was the first Chairman of the House Un-American Activities Committee after it became a standing committee, were both Catholics, and Henry Luce, the founder of TIME and the author of the American Century which called for a dominant American role in global affairs was Catholic jure uxoris.

The anti-Russian sentiment was the dominant theme among American Catholics during the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s as they held the Russians responsible for the civil war in Catholic Spain. The role of the Catholic church in the break-up of the Soviet Union too has been widely acknowledged with Pope John Paul II being credited[20] for playing an active role against the Soviets during the Cold War, and Catholic Poland playing a key role in shaking up the Communist bloc before Catholic Lithuania became the first country to declare independence from the Soviet Union.

The Cold War itself had been based on the containment strategy of George Kennan, who, as the deputy chief of the American mission in Moscow, pointed out in his famous ‘Long Telegram’[21] of 1946 that it was not necessary to attack the Soviets as they were not risk takers but withdrew when they encountered resistance. According to Kennan, it was enough to have sufficient force and make clear the readiness to use it, but it would be rare to actually require to do so. Kennan, a Protestant, went on to become a critic of American involvement in both the Korean War and the Vietnam War which resulted from a militarization of his containment strategy.

After Kennan was sidelined, many of the later proponents of the Cold War who were responsible for military actions around the world convinced the world that their fight was an ideological war against Communism, but their real target was Russia and not Communism as seen from the fact that they supported the Communist state of China. Besides, the Catholics and Jews have always been the most ardent supporters of socialism in large numbers as they control the most number of educational and healthcare institutions as well as other non-profit organizations which benefit from government largesse based on socialist policies.

The history of American Jewish groups lobbying Washington, D.C. to take an anti-Russian position goes back to the time before the Bolsheviks came to power, and after the Bolsheviks overthrew the Mensheviks in the October Revolution of 1917, American forces even participated in the Russian civil war. A tract entitled “An address to their fellow-Jewish citizens by American Jewish organizations” dated December 1, 1920, and which was published in the Annual Report of the American Jewish Committee[22], pointed out that Leon Trotsky and YakovSverdlov, who were Jewish, were among the leadership of the Bolsheviks (although in a minority), and “the leaders of the Mensheviki, who are the sworn foes of Bolshevism, are to a large extent Jews.” Many East European Jews migrated to the US in the early twentieth century both before and after the Jewish Mensheviks were overthrown from power in Russia, and it is the descendants of these East European Jews who control the politics of American Jewry even today.

Although the arrival of the Sephardic Jews and the Germanic Jews to America pre-dated the arrival of East European Jews, the East European Jews outnumber the other Jews and hence dictate the politics of the Jewish Americans. Until the early twentieth century, the Germanic Jews, who saw themselves as polished intellectuals, wanted to be accepted by the Christian mainstream in Europe as well as in the US and worked towards assimilation. They set up various institutions such as the American Jewish Committee, had a presence in politics and the banking industry, viewed the East European Jews as ghetto Jews who needed to be civilized and promoted Reform Judaism for this purpose.

However, once the East European Jews became numerically superior, the Germanic Jews were forced to appease them and accommodate their political positions – which were primarily focused on the destruction of Russia – in order to not split the American Jewry and lose their influence over American Jews in general.

The feud of the East European Jews with the Russians goes back to 1595 when the church in the Polish-Lithuanian Empire broke off relations with the Orthodox church and became Catholic by placing itself under the authority of the Pope. The Jews had been on good terms with the Muslim rulers of Spain but when they were expelled by the Catholics under the Alhambra Decree of the Vatican after the fall of the Islamic rulers, they sought asylum among the Orthodox Christians. When the Polish-Lithuanian empire became Catholic and started persecuting the followers of the Russian Orthodox churches in what was called Little Russia, an area that encompassed today’s Ukraine, the Jews were put in charge of levying taxes on these churches on behalf of the Polish rulers.

The Jews also held the keys to the churches and collected a fee to permit any ceremony to be performed in the Orthodox churches. Subsequently, when Russia defeated the Polish empire and took over Little Russia, the Jews, faced retaliation and have been repeatedly persecuted ever since.

The actions of Joe Biden’s Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs, Victoria Nuland, are an extension of this conflict between the Jews and Russians. Nuland brings a 117-year old family resentment to policy-making, as her grandfather left the Russian empire to escape the pogroms against Jews in 1907. Nuland, who harbors religious hatred against the Russian Orthodox Church, advocates a very aggressive foreign policy against Russia and is one of those responsible for the covert action which resulted in the overthrow of the democratically elected Ukrainian government in 2014[23]. Her husband, Robert Kagan, is a co-founder of the “neocon” outfit Project for the New American Century[24].

European politics too is based on religious divisions with most of the hostility directed at the Orthodox Christians. In the 2021 elections in Germany, one of the key issues was the nature of Germany’s relationship with Russia. While many elements in the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) took a belligerent stance against a closer relationship with Russia and even threatened Russia with sanctions for taking away business from Ukraine by building the Nord Stream 2 natural gas pipeline[25], the Social Democratic Party (SPD) has traditionally argued for friendlier relationship with Russia[26]. While it is widely known that the CDU is the party of the Catholics and SPD has its voter base among the Protestants, the startling similarities between the religious demographic map of Germany and the map of the electoral results of the 2021 German elections shows that religion is the primary basis of political divisions.

In Hungary and France too, it is the Protestant Prime Minister Viktor Orban and the Protestant President Emmanuel Macron respectively who want to sue for peace with Russia. Macron’s position is consistent with the history of French politics being defined vis-a-vis the status of political interference by the Catholic Church. One of the defining characteristics of each of the Republics of France after the French Revolution has been to be either pro-Catholic or anti-Catholic.

Although the term ‘left’ today signifies the alliance between Catholics and Jews of European descent, and the term ‘right’ is used as a slur against everyone else, it was in France during the French Revolution that the political terms ‘left’ and ‘right’ originated with the Catholics sitting on the right of the President in the National Assembly and the Protestants sitting on the left. The French Revolution itself was a movement by the Protestants and the Jews against the power of the Catholics. The terms ‘liberal’ and ‘conservative’ started being used interchangeably with ‘left’ and ‘right’ after nineteenth century Britain had the Liberal Party and the Conservative Party as the two major parties.

Religious divisions have been the main driver of not just politics but also the wars of Europe and America. The Napoleonic wars and the rule of Napoleon were based on hostilities as well as agreements with the Catholic Church, the Crimean war started off as a war against Russia when France asserted the rights of the Catholics in the Russian empire and joined forces with the Ottoman Empire which asserted the rights of the Sunni Muslims, the Irish civil war was a war between Catholics and Protestants, and both the world wars saw the Catholic powers on one side with the Protestants joining the anti-Catholics and the Orthodox Christians on the other side. During the first world war, Vatican actively lobbied Italy to join the war on the side of the Catholic powers of Austria-Hungary and Germany, but the Italian Foreign Minister who was an Anglican signed a deal to get Italy to fight on the side of the Allied Powers, an action that led to anti-war street protests by the Italian people who were Catholics. The Third Republic of France, which was opposed to Vatican’s interference in its politics and was an anti-Catholic Republic, too joined the Allied Powers as it was led by a virulently anti-Catholic President.

Religion played a key role during the Second World War too with Vatican being heavily involved. British journalist John Cornwell uncovered the fact that the rise of Adolf Hitler had been facilitated by Pope Pius XII[27] who was instrumental in the Vatican signing a deal with Hitler which allowed the Vatican to directly control German Catholics in various ways including by collecting a tax from them in exchange for the withdrawal of the Catholic Church from involvement in German politics. That act resulted in dismantling the main opposition party that could have challenged Hitler.

The Pope also trivialized the holocaust of Jews. After the Second World War, Vatican was the main driver of American involvement in Vietnam, and the Catholic Church was the only beneficiary of the Vietnam War as several villages in the country converted en masse to Catholicism during the war. It was John F. Kennedy who increased the number of American troops in Vietnam and started an active war, but even earlier, according to Jason Henderson of the US Army, Cardinal Francis Spellman, an influential leader in the Catholic church, played a key role in persuading the Eisenhower administration to get involved in Vietnam, and the Secretary of State John Foster Dulles took his son Avery, who was a Cardinal in Spellman’s diocese, for a three day meeting with Pope Pius XII[28].

Henderson also points out that Allen Dulles, the head of the CIA and brother of John Foster Dulles, took Spellman’s help to overthrow the democratically elected government in Guatemala in a coup in 1954. That coup had the support of the Catholic Church and resulted in the replacement of the Presbyterian Jacobo Arbenz by a Roman Catholic military officer Elfeg oMonzon. Later, Spellman was an important participant in the Second Vatican Council. In recent times, apart from the ongoing war in Ukraine, NATO’s war against Yugoslavia in the 1990s was a war by the Catholics against the Orthodox Christians of Eastern Europe.

Like the Episcopalian Church in the US, one exception among the Orthodox Christian churches of Europe is the Greek Orthodox Church which was brought into the fold of the West as a result of the Second Vatican Council[29], an act that resulted in a protest by the Russian Orthodox Church[30]. Greece was also ‘westernized’ by the military junta between 1967 and 1973 when the government eliminated the cultural influences of the eastern world. Like the Catholic and Protestant dominated countries, Greece has been admitted to the European Union, but others like Turkey, Bulgaria, Romania and Serbia are kept waiting endlessly on account of their populations not belonging to the “correct” religions. The Sunni Muslims of Turkey and the people of various Orthodox faiths such as Romanians and Bulgarians are viewed as being useful allies of NATO who can supply soldiers during wartime, but are treated as unwanted people who should not be part of European society during peacetime.

Attempts by Turkey and Serbia to build energy independence or a strong economy independent of the EU and its currency have been met with false accusations of these countries perpetrating human rights violations. NATO also expects Turkish people to defend the West European nations, but should Turkey find itself in a war with Syria or another country, NATO will only safeguard the Bosporus, the Dardanelles and other parts of Turkey which are of strategic importance to Europe but will not defend the lives of the Turkish people.

Over the years, the Catholic-Ostjuden coalition within the US government and the European Union along with their junior partners, the Sunni Muslims, have waged several wars to prevent the Orthodox Christian world and the Shia Muslim nations from embarking on even peaceful infrastructure projects that would benefit ordinary people. They launched a war against Yugoslavia when Russia was building an oil pipeline from the Caspian Sea to Europe through Yugoslavia, they tried cutting off Russia’s access to the Caspian Sea by instigating Chechnya and Georgia against Russia, they started a war in Syria when Qatar wanted to build a natural gas pipeline to Turkey transiting through Syria, they accused Shia countries of building the Shia Corridor which was nothing but a road from Iran to Lebanon as though building roads was a crime, and they have now caused a war by trying to expand NATO into Ukraine.

The Catholic-Ostjuden leaders in the West want to escalate the Ukraine War into a world war, but a key ingredient for any world war is the use of India as the source of cannon fodder. Opposing Russia in the UN would have played right into the hands of the West and led to India being trapped into a commitment to send troops to spill their blood for what would effectively be another Crusade against the Orthodox Christians. That is why India’s neutrality in the UN frustrated the West and led to resentment in Washington, D.C., Brussels and Rome. It is high time that others in the world too woke up to political realities and set themselves free by refusing to cater to the perpetual-war machine of powerful religious groups.