by R. Schleyer, Eugene, Oregon, USA".
Posted: 21 March, 2000
Ronald Schleyer has a master's degree in journalism from the University of Montana. He is a former news writer and editor and has worked across the northern half of the United States, as well as in Europe and the Middle East.
Many people suspect a deep strategic reason behind
NATO's seemingly facile attack on the Federal Republic of
Yugoslavia. In fact, there is a certain rationale for the Balkans war, a closely
held view entertained by its instigators. They know this conflict as a necessary
thrust in an ongoing, aggressive, long-term, strategic World War conceived
almost a century ago by a British imperialist and cunning sophist of formidable
rank. His name was Halford John Mackinder (1861-1947).
Mackinder, a
rather clever geographer with a murderous Mission, had an idea so beguiling
that, even today it animates the likes of Madeleine Albright, Wesley Clark,
Samuel R. Berger, William Cohen, Richard Holbrooke, and others who take what
they imagine is an "intellectual" view of statecraft.
Mackinder proudly
defended British imperial power and is accurately characterized as an
Imperialist. He was knighted for his contributions, chiefly intellectual, to its
maintenance and advancement. However, Mackinder consciously directed his
writings toward the U.S. audience right from the start because he deeply
believed that his own theory called for this.
Mackinder's homicidal
geopolitics now lies at the core of U.S. military indoctrination (more on this
below). The theory specifically cultivates the goal of subjugating the world. It
postulates and persuasively argues the supposed necessity for continuous war of
"enlightened" Seamen against
"autocratic" Landsmen for domination of the
Landsmen's "Heartland," thereby attaining the power to "command" the world! In a
typically arrogant British manner, it claims all wisdom and innate "democratic
ideals" for itself.
The Serbians, of course, perceived NATO's countrywide
rain of bombs on roads, bridges, industrial plants, schools, and hospitals as a
grave and unbelievably insane crime, and often asserted that the war was
"demented." They never suspected the war's rational explanation in longstanding
western
geopolitical strategy. It is true that the intellectual sham and
humbug of the Heartland theory has been convincingly exposed in the English
language only in academic circles. Still, it seems incredible that the
professors at Belgrade University never discerned Yugoslavia's unfortunate place
as the doormat of the Heartland until the bombs began to fall.
It should
be borne in mind that, in prosecuting Mackinder's "all for
the Heartland" theory, Yugoslavia's enemies are philosophically ignorant.
They think atomistically and abstractly and are utterly unaware that their
conception of "democratic" (the title of Mackinder's principal work begins with
this word) is thoroughly non-organic. Thus, they totally misconceive the true
idea of the Nation-State, which is exhibited only in Continental philosophy.
As is well known, the dominant American philosophy has been a bald-faced
Pragmatism for more than a century. The country's leading lights were thus
prepared to be deceived by Mackinder's mechanistic historical geography and
clever sophistical powers in 1919 on first introduction to the Heartland theory.
Hence they have entertained the mad professor's dangerous ideas over and over
again, as proven by the periodic republication of Mackinder's writings over an
eighty-year period, and now for the first time (see below) by the U.S. National
Defense University.
WORLD WAR AGAINST WORLD PEACE
British
intellectuals call Mackinder the "father of modern British geography." In
"Democratic Ideals and Reality" (1919), with rhetorical skill and deft use of
brilliantly constructed maps, Mackinder advanced his theory of geopolitical
aggression, declaring a supposed necessity for continuous World War of maritime
"democratic" against "national" land powers.
Mackinder especially
focused on East Europe for strategic control of what he called "The Heartland"
and on the Heartland (including much of the territory of the Slavic nations) for
domination of the "World Island" (Europe, the Near East, Asia, and Africa). Here
is a characteristically catchy aphorism,
taken from the book:
"Who
Rules East Europe Commands the Heartland
Who Rules the Heartland Commands the
World-Island
Who Rules the World-Island Commands the World"
Left-wing
academic analysts who advised the Serbian people (e.g., Michel Collon, "Secret
Strategies on Kosovo" (SMISAO #6 (1/99)) negligently failed to point out the
ultimate danger of the geopolitical theory behind the decade-long aggression
against Federal Yugoslavia. Though entering the intellectual life of the world
as long ago as 1904, Mackinder's conceptions enjoyed a resurgence in United
States military circles especially after the fall of the Soviet Union. Steps in
the Balkans aggression, with its
strategic goal clear only to the
perpetrators in Washington, London, and Bonn, began shortly thereafter. Major
milestones were reached in 1992, 1995, and 1998.
The U.S. "National
Defense University" in 1996 republished the main body of Mackinder's work (under
the same title as given above) with a foreword by U.S Air Force Lt. Gen. Ervin
Rokke, President of that institution. The book is currently for sale by the U.S.
Government Printing Office (GPO) in Washington, D.C., and is being used to
indoctrinate military officers in Mackinder's fratricidal exhortation to
geopolitical conquest.
"In 1942," Rokke says, "Allied strategic planners
. . . recognized the value of Mackinder's work, which they used in engineering
the defeat of Germany" (!). Rokke states that the entire anti-Soviet Cold War
(1947-1991) was merely an interlude, freely admitting the greater struggle for
supremacy over the World Island by the maritime powers. "Regional strategic
concerns," he says, force the NATO powers "to once again rely" on Mackinder's
"classic" formulation of geopolitical war for world
domination.
Mackinder's book was translated into German shortly after its
first publication in 1919, because in it he acknowledges the desire of what was
then an independent Germany to unite German-speaking peoples of East Europe.
Mackinder was subsequently blamed for the Lebensraum strategy of the Third
Reich, which actually was founded on the work of German master political
geographer Gen. Karl Haushofer, who of course had read
Mackinder.
Haushofer, a university professor, was styled in a post-WWII
biography as "a sheep in wolf's clothing" because he kept aloof from the NSDAP
and was not a career officer. None of Haushofer's many German works has been
translated into English, which may be indirect proof that the current
interpreters of Mackinder's wisdom retain their desire to continue to
subordinate Germany under British and U.S. control for their own
purposes.
The people of the whole world, first of all in Europe, face
grave dangers in the escalating geopolitical war pursued by the Mackinderlings
in Washington. Opinion leaders therefore must confront the long-departed mind of
the great imperialist Mackinder and his continuing influence on those who would
risk
universal destruction for a strictly partial, grossly non-organic,
merely superficial conception of democratic ideals and the nature of the modern
Nation-State. In fact, a clearer illustration can hardly be found that all
gravely misanthropic ideas--in this case conceived for avowedly Imperialist
ends--have a devilish life of their own and must be throttled and buried by
those who have the power to do so.
Tragically, the atrocious U.S./NATO
bombardment of Yugoslavia promoted the same type of vicious war-craft denounced
so eloquently a half-century ago by F.J.P. Veale in his memorable book "Advance
to Barbarism." The continuing NATO aggression behind the mask of KFOR, led by
the United States of America, perpetuates and accentuates the world tragedy by
wrecking confidence in the United Nations.
Meanwhile, even today, the
Serbians barely realize that in defending their country's sovereignty and
territorial integrity, they are most of all preserving the very concept of
freedom from otherwise certain death. Hence one of the anti-war movement's most
striking slogans: "God save Serbia from her unholy enemies! She defends
the World!" The historical proof of this lies just around the corner,
as the nations in a bright new century confront the dark legacy of Halford
Mackinder's fratricidal cogitations.
http://www.context.co.nz/contributors/RS1.htm
THE END
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