Page 1 of
5 INTERVIEW Business as usual behind the
slaughter By Lars Schall
In this exclusive interview for Asia Times
Online, the economist Guido Preparata reviews how
in the first half of the 20th century
Anglo-American policy was designed from the
beginning to eliminate Germany as an obstacle to
Western domination aspirations. The result: a
division of Eurasia along a specific major fault
line. Preparata also talks about critical aspects
of the current state of affairs in global finance,
economics, and politics. He says: "It is the quest
for power that drives history, not economics."
"Truth would quickly cease to become
stranger than fiction, once we got as used to
it."- H L Mencken
Lars Schall: Mr Preparata,
could you give our readers some
basic idea about
the main thesis of your book Conjuring
Hitler, and also why you took the step to
write it at all?
Guido
Preparata: Originally, when I began to
work at the Bank of Italy, I chose to investigate
Nazi finance as a fancy topic, some kind of
divertissement to add to my future publication
projects. Eventually the whole subject of Nazi
Germany took up a life of its own, and I became
engrossed with it for nearly a decade. The whole
project ended up being very much shaped by the
turn of events following 9/11.
What was
happening to the collective psyche of the West
under the aggressive leadership of the USA filled
me with revulsion. And thus I drafted Conjuring
Hitler also as an anti-war, anti-imperialist
treatise. I somehow thought that if we debunked
one by one the most militant myths of Liberal
imperialism - the sudden and allegedly
inexplicable rise to power of Hitler being the
chief one - one could pull the wool off people's
eyes and fashion thereby, and gradually, a clime
of informed dissent against the terrible mayhem of
this "War on Terror".
LS: At the
beginning of your book you are stating that "there
is something far worse than Nazism, and that is
the hubris of the Anglo-American fraternities,
whose routine is to incite indigenous monsters to
war". (1) How did you come to this conclusion that
has very little in common with the perception of
the general population, particularly in Great
Britain and the United States?
GP:
It's the old dilemma. What is worse: being a
criminal or putting deliberately an arsenal into
the hands of a known criminal? I think the latter
is worse, hence that statement.
LS:
If one does accuse you of being a "conspiracy
theorist" or a "revisionist", what do you reply to
those critics?
GP: It is
notorious and beyond dispute that the
Anglo-American elite - along with the Soviets -
financed and supplied the Nazis before and even
during the war. This fact is obviously so
disturbing and confusing for all those who have
been raised with the complex of Anglo-American
moral superiority that the Establishment has been
at greatest pains to rationalize it. The only
rationale it has been capable of advancing -
whenever it cannot avoid the issue altogether,
which is what it logically prefers to do - is to
assert that a few rotten corporate apples did
business with the Devil (ie the Germans) behind
everybody's (ie, the state's) back. This
"explanation" is clearly untenable, yet anyone
that dares to challenge it is ultimately bound to
face what expresses itself as the wrath of devout
believers. Their instinctive repartee is that
anyone doubting the vulgate is self-evidently an
unreasoning "fascist-revisionist-conspiracist".
The tactic is so inane that it would be
risible if the propagandistic stakes of this
discursive set-up were not as decisive as they
really are. It is their standard inquisitorial
trump. Indeed, it is not directly aimed at the
critic but at whatever audience might be listening
to the debate: it is meant to scare away readers
and potential supporters from the critic's
warnings by tarnishing him with the most unsavory
label the system has devised for the purpose, that
of the truculently stupid crypto-fascist. In the
general arena of public opinion, any skeptical
attack - carried out outside any conventional
party line or schema - on the abuses of the power
structure is likewise resisted by its discursive
custodians (at all levels and of all political
shades), who have been conditioned to brand
reflexively the dissenter as an insufferable
"conspiracy theorist".
The fact that there
is indeed out there a slew of amateurs who churn
out a profuse amount of extravagant pamphlets full
of wild speculation, referenced by threadbare
bibliographies, certainly helps their case. But
the question at hand does not pertain to those
conspiracy theorists, but to the trahison des
clercs: if you are perceived as breaking ranks
with your former brothers-in-arms, they will make
you pay. I am an Italian bourgeois who was raised
in what used to be a staunchly pro-American
household during the late stage of the Cold War;
it has taken me 30 ears to detox myself (9/11 was
the turning point) - that is what it's about,
allegiance, not "conspiracy theory". Truth be
told, moreover, this game is not without its
comical undersides: I remember once hearing a rant
on Italian TV by some mainstream intellectual who
was pouring scorn on the paranoid imbecility of
these eternal dolts who see complots everywhere,
people, that is, who cannot think in nonlinear
terms while fathoming the work of "the great
forces of history". "There is one in every
family", he concluded with a sneer. Very funny, I
must concede.
So to respond to the
question: what does one reply to the accusation of
being a "conspiracy theorist"? I would answer the
following: let the inquisitors 1) be prepared to
take paper, quill and ink bottle and refute, black
on white, my thesis point by point without the
cover of anonymity, and allow me to reply, point
by point; and 2) be subsequently prepared to argue
their case, facing me, in a public debate. Then
let the audience acclaim the winner.
LS: By and large Otto von Bismarck
is still seen as a genius of foreign policy in
German history. However, at the beginning of your
book you point to the year 1887 and a very crucial
mistake done by von Bismarck related to Russia.
What has this mistake been all about and how was
it exploited by the British going forward?
GP: If there is a spiritual
future for us continental Europeans who believe
not in "free" corporate markets, the prophet
Darwin, and the iPad, but believe in Mozart, peace
and cooperation, it can only come through a
rebirth of an alliance between Germany and Russia
(ideally a Paris - Berlin - Moscow - Beijing
axis), and one approved by the Catholic and
orthodox Churches. And, of course, none of this
will come to proper fruition without the input of
our like-minded brethren in Anglo-America -
minorities all of us everywhere for the time
being.
Bismarck, despite his strategic
genius, failed to see that the Russo-German
embrace was the key: in 1887, for instance, it
seemed that Germany had a decisive chance of tying
Russia's fate to its own by underwriting the
czar's debt. But, again, some kind of damned,
damning myopia made all such attempts abort; even
on the eve of the war, in 1905 - when Bismarck had
been long gone - Wilhelm and Nicholas attempted
one last time some kind of pact, which also came
to nothing. One missed opportunity after another.
The rest, as they say, is history.
LS: At the beginning of the 20th
century, Halford Mackinder from the London School
of Economics stepped up on the scene with a
remarkable geopolitical concept. What was this
concept and why is it important to understand?
GP: As far as I can infer,
Mackinder did not pioneer or invent anything; he
just committed to paper what was plain to see,
namely England's maritime preoccupation: the
imperial fear to lose control of the world if any
kind of extensive political alliance coalesced on
the Eurasian landmass. Mackinder's, in effect, was
but the academic statement of a notion that had
been in the air for some time: a whiff of
England's imperial spirit, so to speak.
LS: Was Hitler's "Drang nach
Osten" ("Drive towards the East") inspired by
Mackinder's concept?
GP: It's a
confounding issue, I cannot say, I doubt it. In
any event, it was the triumph of British
strategists, namely that they could sway the
Germans against the Russians - twice in a row,
most perfectly the second time around.
LS: Is Mackinder's concept still
relevant today?
GP: Of course,
the agenda still stands, unaltered: just look at
the ongoing deployments of the North Atlantic
Treaty Organization (Northern Africa, Middle East,
Persia, Central Asia, China, and, as always,
Eastern Europe and Russia: viz the late missile
controversy). This is the age-old strategy of the
British Empire, pure and simple. Very little's
changed. NATO, quite obviously, is the chief
aggressor, not the so-called rogue nations. But
half the effort consists of staging these
theatrics by which the Western psyche comes to
believe that it is the constant victim of plots
hatched by savage, fanatical brown/yellow people.
Nonetheless the dynamics are subtler.
This
game of persuasion is best effected when 1) the
target - the ever-mysterious public opinion - is
itself subjected to a studied process of spiritual
debilitation: that is to say, when, as has
conspicuously been the case for the past decade,
it is barbarized by poor education, vanishing
opportunities for self-realization, etc; and, no
less importantly, when 2) the "rogues" lend
themselves to the charade through bombastic
grandstanding and televised bluster, without which
the Anglo-American elites could in no way produce
the show: eg, North Korea's barnstorming and
Mahmud Ahmedinejad's cretinous anti-Israel and
homophobic tirades are, alas, material from the
same miserable screenplay.
So, in a sense
we are in an Orwellian scenario once again.
Possibly, we have never abandoned it. What is
certain is that in this pornographic power-play,
we, the Westerners, are the most obscene thespians
of all - and this is because, if we so wished, we
would have the wealth and the means to bring Eden
to this planet. But, apparently, we do not wish
it. And if that is really the case, maybe we do
not deserve this earth after all.
LS: The path to the two world wars
was never a straight line, but resulted partly
from strange detours - for instance, caused by
terrorists. You call them "useful idiots". Why so?
And did you discover a certain pattern at work
that is still pretty much alive and kicking in our
time?
GP: From Gavrilo Princip
(the Black Hand in Sarajevo) to these bogus
Islamists by way of, say, the Montoneros in
Argentina, the RAF in Germany or the Red Brigades
in Italy, all of them are useful idiots, by
definition. The terrorist's psycho-sociological
typology is fairly consistent across time and
space: s/he generally is of low middle-class/upper
proletarian status, very young (well below 30),
not particularly intelligent, and death-prone.
S/he is by definition, again, an expendable: or,
more specifically a manipulable mediocrity. These
useful idiots may come at certain junctures to
play a critical role, of course. Terrorism is
(elite) politics, never the weapon of the
voiceless, but the very opposite.
LS: Was the reason for the First
World War basically a trap laid by the British and
Russian elites - and the German leadership was
stupid enough to step into that trap?
GP: A siege, yes, a mouse-trap.
Yes, damningly stupid, indeed. Von Moltke's
(German) Chief of Staff had been invested in 1900
with political authority it did not know how to
wield - and, in truth, it was not its role to
exercise such power in the first place: it was as
if by surrendering all might to the (dynastic and
thus unfit) warrior caste of Prussia, Germania as
a whole had spiritually abdicated. And by doing so
it has cursed the whole of Europe ever since. A
tragedy.
LS: How did Germany
finance the war effort - and did this had some
grave consequences later on?
GP:
With its wealth, through debt, which the Allies
left standing at Versailles - as [Thorstein Bunde]
Veblen had understood - deliberately. And that was
done with a view to causing an inflationary
tsunami, which would have in turn occasioned a
major, and strategically critical, bailout.
LS: Had the entry of the United
States into the war something to do with the debts
of the Triple Entente?
GP: Yes,
but not primarily: the US intervened to play the
imperial game as England's junior partner - as the
brawny, eager apprentice; the preservation of its
credits was a solid incentive to embark on this
path, but not the actual cause.
LS:
At the end of that war both Germany and the
Anglo-American allies were heavily influencing
important events in Russia. Which of those forces
gained more benefits from the Bolshevik revolution
that took place in October 1917? And could you
also tell us about the major players involved,
please?
GP: The whole story of
the USSR is a deep mystery, especially its
beginnings. Official (Liberal) historiography has
it that the birth of Bolshevist rule was for the
most part a spontaneous - and wonderful, according
to the Lenin-revering dinosaurs of Western
academia - Russian affair, with just a little bit
of (somewhat embarrassing, but easily dismissible)
German gold. Nothing more. Any intimation that the
Anglo-Americans had been involved in major
"puppeteering" in the Bolshevik theater - to favor
them, that is - is hissed away as conspiratorial
speculation.
Head
Office: Unit B, 16/F, Li Dong Building, No. 9 Li Yuen Street East,
Central, Hong Kong Thailand Bureau:
11/13 Petchkasem Road, Hua Hin, Prachuab Kirikhan, Thailand 77110
