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Speaking from the vantage point of Lord Palmerston's British Empire circa 1850, Schiller Institute U.S. President Webster Tarpley chaired the panel on ``Lord Palmerston's Multicultural Zoo'' at the Schiller Institute's conference on Feb. 20. Tarpley served as tour guide through the centuries, and as the ``choral'' backdrop to the historical drama, introducing each of the seven speakers in turn and concluding the panel. What follows is Tarpley's introduction. Subtitles have been added.
I am now standing in the shadow of the Houses of Parliament in the part of London called Westminster. It is the year of grace 1850. Around me lies Victorian London, the London of Dickens and Thackeray, of John Stuart Mill and Thomas Carlyle. This capital city is now the center of the greatest colonial empire the world has ever known, shortly to embrace between one-fifth and one-fourth of the total population and land area of the Earth. Although in theory there are still empires ruled by the French, the Spanish, the Portuguese, the Dutch, the Belgians, and the Danes, all of these, in this year of 1850, are but the satellites of the British Empire. Britain is the mistress of the seas, the empire upon which the sun never sets. It is the new Rome on the banks of the Thames.
The empress is Queen Victoria, who is largely occupied with Prince Albert in her business of breeding new litters of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha to take over the royal houses of Europe. A quarter-century from now Victoria will be made empress of India to reward her for so much breeding. But for all of Victoria's wealth and power, Britain is not really a monarchy; it is an oligarchy on the Venetian model, and the most powerful leader of the British oligarchy in these times, between 1830 and the end of the American Civil War, is Lord Palmerston.
Henry Temple, the third Viscount Palmerston. Palmerston is the man the others--the Russells, Disraelis, and Gladstones--simply cannot match. Palmerston was first a Tory, then a Whig, always a disciple of Jeremy Bentham, and for 35 years there is scarcely a cabinet without Palmerston as foreign secretary or prime minister. In London they call him Lord Cupid, a Regency buck always on the lookout for a new mistress, perfectly at home in a ménage ô trois. On the continent they call him Lord Firebrand. The schoolboys of Vienna sing that if the devil has a son, that son is Lord Palmerston. ``Pam'' is an occultist who loves Satanism and seances. And here, between Big Ben and the Foreign Office, are the haunts of this nineteenth-century devil, Lord Palmerston, old Pam.
It is 1850. Lord Palmerston is engaged in a campaign to make London the undisputed center of a new, worldwide Roman Empire. He is attempting to conquer the world in the way that the British have already conquered India, reducing every other nation to the role of a puppet, client, and fall-guy for British imperial policy. Lord Palmerston's campaign is not a secret. He has declared it here in the Houses of Parliament, saying that wherever in the world a British subject goes, he can flaunt the laws, secure that the British fleet will support him. ``Civis Romanus sum, every Briton is a citizen of this new Rome,'' thundered Lord Palmerston, and with that, the universal empire was proclaimed.
During the Napoleonic Wars, the British managed to conquer most of the world outside of Europe, with the exception of the United States. After 1815, the French--be they restored Bourbons, Orleanists, or Bonapartists--are generally pliant tools of London.
But in central and eastern Europe, there was Prince Metternich's Austrian Empire, a very strong land power. There was vast Imperial Russia, under the autocrat Nicholas I or the reformer Alexander II. There was the Kingdom of Prussia. Lord Palmerston likes to call these the ``arbitrary powers.'' Above all, Palmerston hated Metternich, the embodiment and ideologue of the Congress of Vienna system. Metternich presided over one of the most pervasive police states in history. Men said his rule was shored up by a standing army of soldiers, a sitting army of bureaucrats, a kneeling army of priests, and a creeping army of informers.
For Britain to rule the world, the Holy Alliance of Austria, Russia, and Prussia had to be broken up. There is also the matter of the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire. Starting with Lord Byron's Greek Revolution in the 1820s, British policy has been to play the card of national liberation against each of these rival empires.
The imperial theme was sounded in 1846 with the free trade policy, Britain's declaration of intent to loot the world in the name of the pound. Then, in January 1848, Lord Palmerston arranged an insurrection in Sicily, using British networks that went back to Lord Nelson.
That started the great revolutionary year of 1848, and in the course of that year, every government in Europe was toppled, and every monarchy badly shaken, at least for a time. Metternich of Austria and King Louis Philippe of France fled to London, where they now spend their time playing cards. There was war in Italy, civil war in Austria, barricades in Paris, and tumult in Germany.
The only exception to the rule was Russia, and now Lord Palmerston is preparing to invade Russia, with the help of his strategic catamite, Napoléon III, also known as Napoléon le Petit. That will start in about three years, and it will be called the Crimean War. As soon as the war against Russia is over, Palmerston and John Stuart Mill at the British East India Company will start the Great Mutiny in India, which some historians will call the Sepoy Rebellion. Muslim soldiers will be told that new cartridges are greased with pig fat, Hindu soldiers will be told the cartridges are greased with cow fat, and the result will be what you would expect. But in the conflagration the British will get rid of the Great Mogul and the Mogul Empire, and impose their direct rule in all of India. Typical John Stuart Mill. He, of course, is the author of ``On Liberty.''
The British would like to give China the same treatment they are giving India. Since 1842, Palmerston and the East India Company have been waging Opium Wars against the Chinese Empire, partly to get them to open their ports to opium from India, and also as a way to conquer China. Already the British have Hong Kong and the other treaty ports. By 1860, the British will be in Beijing, looting and burning the summer palace of the emperor.
Shortly after that, the British will back Napoléon in his project of putting a Hapsburg archduke on the throne of an ephemeral Mexican Empire--the Maximilian Project. These projects will be closely coordinated with Palmerston's plans to eliminate the only two nations still able to oppose him--the Russia of Alexander II and the United States of Abraham Lincoln. Lord Palmerston will be the evil demiurge of the American Civil War, the mastermind of secession, far more important for the Confederacy than Jefferson Davis or Robert E. Lee. And in the midst of that war, Palmerston will detonate a rebellion in Poland against Russian rule, not for the sake of Poland, but for the sake of starting a general European war against Russia.
But when the Russian fleets sail into New York and San Francisco, when Lee's wave breaks at Gettysburg, when the Stars and Bars are lowered over Vicksburg, the British Empire will be stopped--just short of its goal. Just short--and yet, British hegemony will still be great enough to launch the two world wars of the twentieth century, and the third conflagration that will start in 1991. And as we look forward for a century and a half from 1850, British geopolitics, despite the challenges, despite the defeats, despite the putrefaction of Britain itself, will remain the dominant factor in world affairs.
How do the British do it? How can a clique of depraved aristocrats on this tight little island bid to rule the entire world? Don't believe the stories about the workshop of the world; there are some factories here, but Britain lives by looting the colonies. The fleet is formidable, but also overrated, and very vulnerable to serious challenges. The army is third-rate. But the British have learned from the Venetians that the greatest force in history is the force of ideas, and that if you can control culture, you can control the way people think, and then statesmen and fleets and armies will bend to your will.
Take our friend Lord Palmerston. Pam has the Foreign Office, the Home Office, and Whitehall, but when he needed to start the 1848 revolutions, or when the time will come for the American Civil War, he turns to a troika of agents.
They are Lord Palmerston's Three Stooges. But instead of Moe, Larry, and Curly, these Three Stooges are named Giuseppe Mazzini, Louis Napoléon Bonaparte, and David Urquhart. These Three Stooges--far more than the Union Jack, Victoria, the bulldog breed, the thin gray line of heroes, and the fleet--are the heart of what is called the British Empire.
We will get to know Lord Palmerston's Three Stooges better. But first, one thing must be understood. Moe, Larry, and Curly often had to work together on this or that project. But their relations were never exactly placid.
[Slapstick episode from a ``The Three Stooges'' movie is shown to the audience.]
You understand: Their stock in trade was infantile violence. So do not be surprised if we find Palmerston's Three Stooges lashing out with slanders, knives, and bombs against each other, and even against their august master, Lord Palmerston himself.
Under Lord Palmerston England supports all revolutions--except her own--and the leading revolutionary in Her Majesty's Secret Service is Giuseppe Mazzini, our first Stooge.
Mazzini thinks that each modern nation has a ``mission'': The British would take care of Industry and Colonies; the Poles, leadership of the Slavic world; the Russians, the civilizing of Asia. The French get Action, the Germans get Thought, and so forth. For some strange reason, there is no mission for Ireland, so Mazzini does not support the independence of Ireland. There is only one monarchy which Mazzini supports, because he says it has deep roots among the people: You guessed it, Queen Victoria.
Mazzini preaches an Italian revolution for the Third Rome: After the Rome of the Caesars and the Rome of the Popes comes the Rome of the People. For this, the pope must be driven out. Mazzini has tried to put this into practice just last year. In November 1848, armed Young Italy gangs forced Pope Pius IX to flee from Rome to Naples. From March to June of 1849, Mazzini ruled the Papal States as one of three dictators, all Grand Orient Freemasons. During that time, death squads operated in Rome, Ancona, and other cities. Some churches were sacked, and many confessionals were burned. For Easter 1849, Mazzini staged a monstrous mock Eucharist in the Vatican he called the Novum Pascha, featuring himself, God, and the People. During this time he was planning to set up his own Italian national church on the Anglican model.
The defense of Rome was organized by Giuseppe Garibaldi, who had joined Mazzini's Young Italy in the early 1830s. But a French army sent by fellow Stooge Louis Napoléon drove out Mazzini, Garibaldi, and their supporters. Lord Palmerston said that Mazzini's regime in Rome was ``far better than any the Romans have had for centuries.''
Right now Mazzini is here in London, enjoying the support of Lord Ashley, the Earl of Shaftesbury, a Protestant fanatic who also happens to be Lord Palmerston's son-in-law. Mazzini's direct access to the British government payroll comes through James Stansfeld, a junior Lord of the Admiralty and a very high official of British intelligence. Last year, Stansfeld provided the money for Mazzini's Roman Republic. Stansfeld's father-in-law, William Henry Ashurst, is another of Mazzini's patrons, as is John Bowring of the Foreign Office, the man who will provoke the second Opium War against China. Bowring is Jeremy Bentham's literary executor. John Stuart Mill of India House is another of Mazzini's friends. Mazzini is close to the protofascist writer Thomas Carlyle, and has been having an affair with Carlyle's wife.
One of Metternich's henchmen has said that Palmerston's policy is to make Italy turbulent, which is bad for Austria, without making her powerful, which would harm England. Mazzini's role in Italy has been that of a marplot, a wrecker, a terrorist, an assassin. His specialty is sending his brainwashed dupes to their deaths in terrorist attacks. He hides out and always succeeds in saving himself. Mazzini travels readily on the continent using false passports, posing as an American, an Englishman, a rabbi.
In the thirties and forties, Mazzini was targeting Piedmont in the north, and the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies in the south. In 1848, he rushed to Milan as soon as the Austrians had been driven out and tried to start trouble. One of Mazzini's agents, General Ramorino, let the Austrian commander Radetzky outflank the Piedmontese and win the battle of Novara. Ramorino was executed for treason, but Piedmont had lost the first war for Italian liberation. The king abdicated, and Mazzini tried to break up Piedmont with a revolt in Genoa. Three years from now, Mazzini will stage an abortive revolt against the Austrians in Milan, mainly to stop Russia from allying with Austria in the Crimean War. A few years after that Mazzini will try another insurrection in Genova, still trying to break up Piedmont. In 1860, he will encourage Garibaldi to sail to Sicily, and then try to provoke a civil war between Garibaldi's dictatorship in the south and Cavour's Piedmontese government in the north. In 1860, he will be thrown out of Naples as a provocateur. By that time, Mazzini will be a hated and reviled figure, but British propaganda and British support will keep him going.
Mazzini is also an assassination bureau. In 1848, there was a chance that Pius IX's very capable reforming minister Pellegrino Rossi could unify Italy and solve the Roman Question in a constructive way, through an Italian confederation, chaired by the pope, arranged with Gioberti, Cavour, and other Piedmontese. Mazzini's agents, members of Young Italy, stabbed Pellegrino Rossi to death. The killer was in touch with Lord Minto, Palmerston's special envoy for Italy.
Stooge violence between Mazzini and Napoléon III is always intense, especially after Napoléon's army finished off Mazzini's Roman Republic. In 1855, a Mazzini agent named Giovanni Pianori will attempt to kill Napoléon III, and a French court will convict Mazzini. Have Napoléon's forces outshone the bungling British in the Crimea? Are the British nervous about Napoléon's new ironclad battleship, when they have none? Attempts to kill Napoléon are financed by the Tibaldi Fund, run by Mazzini and set up by Sir James Stansfeld of the Admiralty.
Later, in February 1858, there will be an attempt to blow up Napoléon by one of Mazzini's closest and best-known lieutenants from the Roman Republic, Felice Orsini. Napoléon will get the message that it is time to get busy and start a war against Austria in 1859.
At other times, Mazzini tried to kill King Carlo Alberto of Piedmont. Mazzini's Young Italy is always the party of the dagger, of the stiletto. ``In the hands of Judith, the sword which cut short the life of Holofernes was holy; holy was the dagger which Harmodius crowned with roses; holy was the dagger of Brutus; holy the poniard of the Sicilian who began the Vespers; holy the arrow of Tell.'' Vintage Mazzini. London's future ability to assassinate men like Walter Rathenau, Jürgen Ponto, Aldo Moro, Alfred Herrhausen, Detlev Rohwedder, stretches back in unbroken continuity to the Mazzini networks of today.
Mazzini is actually doing everything he can to prevent Italian unity. When unity comes, 20 years from now, it will come in the form of a highly centralized state dominated by Grand Orient Freemasons. For 30 years the prime ministers will be Mazzini's agents, like DePretis and Crispi. Because of the violent liquidation of the Papal States, the Catholics will refuse to take part in politics. Italy will remain weak, poor, and divided. After Mussolini, the Italian Republican Party will identify with Mazzini, and Ugo LaMalfa and his friends will continue Mazzini's efforts to make sure that Italy is weak and divided, bringing down one government after another, and ruining the economy.
Mazzini's work for the British extends far beyond Italy. Like the Foreign Office and the Admiralty which he serves, Mazzini encompasses the world. The Mazzini networks offer us a fascinating array of movements and personalities. There are agents and dupes, professional killers, fellow-travelers, and criminal energy types. Mazzini's court of miracles was a public scandal. Leopold of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, now the king of Belgium, has been complaining to his niece Queen Victoria that in London there is maintained ``a sort of menagerie of Kossuths, Mazzinis, Legranges, Ledru-Rollins, etc. ... to let loose occasionally on the continent to render its quiet and prosperity impossible.''
Indeed. On Feb. 21, 1854, this crew will come together at the home of the American consul, George Sanders: Mazzini, Felice Orsini, Garibaldi, Louis Kossuth, Arnold Ruge, Ledru-Rollin, Stanley Worcell, Aleksandr Herzen, and U.S. traitor and future President James Buchanan. There will also be a Peabody from the counting house.
We can think of Mazzini as the zookeeper of a universal human zoo. Mazzini's human zoo is divided into theme parks or pavilions, one for each ethnic group. In a normal zoo there is an elephant house, a monkey house, an alligator pond, and the like. In Mazzini's human zoo there is an Italian house, a Russian house, a Hungarian house, a Polish house, an American house. Let us walk through the various theme parks in the zoo and identify some of the specimens.
Young Italy, as we have seen, was founded in 1831, attracting the young sailor Giuseppe Garibaldi and Louis Napoléon. Shortly thereafter there followed Young Poland, whose leaders included the revolutionaries Lelewel and Worcell. Then came Young Germany, featuring Arnold Ruge, who had published some material by an obscure German ``red republican'' named Karl Marx. This is the Young Germany satirized by Heinrich Heine. In 1834, Mazzini founded ``Young Europe,'' with Italian, Swiss, German, and Polish components. Young Europe was billed as the Holy Alliance of the Peoples, opposed to Metternich's Holy Alliance of despots. By 1835, there was also a Young Switzerland. In that same year Mazzini launched Young France. The guiding light here was Ledru-Rollin, who later became the interior minister in Lamartine's short-lived Second French Republic of 1848. There was also Young Corsica, which was the mafia.
By the end of this century we will have a Young Argentina (founded by Garibaldi), Young Bosnia, Young India, Young Russia, Young Armenia, Young Egypt, the Young Czechs, plus similar groupings in Romania, Hungary, Bulgaria, and Greece. Mazzini is especially interested in creating a south Slavic federation dominated by Belgrade, and for that reason, he has a Serbian organization. That will have to wait for Mazzini's student Woodrow Wilson and the Versailles peace conference of 1919. Right now, a masonic group in the United States is gearing up to support the pro-slavery doughface Franklin Pierce for President in 1852; they are the radical wing of the Democratic Party, and they call themselves Young America. In the future there will be the Young Turks. And yes, there is also a Palmerston-Mazzini group for Jews, sometimes called Young Israel, and sometimes called B'nai B'rith.
For Mazzini, a nationality means a race, a fixed array of behavior like a breed of dog or a species of animal. He is not thinking of a national community united by a literate language and a classical culture to which any person can become assimilated through a political choice. For Mazzini, race is unchangeable, and race is destiny. It is a matter of blood and soil. Cats fight dogs, French fight Germans, Germans fight Poles, and so on through all eternity. These hatreds are the main datum of sensory perception.
Each of Mazzini's organizations demands immediate national liberation for its own ethnic group on the basis of aggressive chauvinism and expansionism. Mazzini's warhorse is the Territorial Imperative. Each is obsessed with borders and territory, and each finds a way to oppose and sabotage dirigist economic development. Each one is eager to submerge and repress other national groupings in pursuit of its own mystical destiny. This is Mazzini's racist gospel of universal ethnic cleansing.
We have seen some Italian cages; next comes the Hungarian theme park in the zoo. Our principal specimen here is Louis Kossuth, a leader of the Hungarian revolution of 1848-49. Kossuth was for free trade. He wanted equal status for Hungarians in the Austrian Empire--equal with the Austrians. But within the Hungarian part of the Hapsburg Empire there were many other national groups--Poles, Ukrainians, Germans, Serbs, Romanians, Croatians, and others. Would they receive political and linguistic autonomy? Kossuth's answer was to ban all official use of the Slavic and Romanian languages in favor of Hungarian. Kossuth was therefore on course for a bloody collision with the Illyrian movement for Greater Croatia, and with the military forces of the Croatian leader Jellacich. There was also conflict with the Serbs. Mazzini had promised the same territories to Hungary, to the Illyrian Croatians, and to his Serbian south Slav entity. Then there was the question of Transylvania, claimed by the Hungarians but also by the Young Romania of Dimitirie Golescu, another Mazzini agent. Young Romania's program was to restore the Kingdom of Dacia as it had existed before the Roman Emperor Trajan. So Young Hungary and Young Romania were pre-programmed to fight to the death over Transylvania, which they did, last year. Because of the ceaseless strife of Hungarians and Croatians, Hungarians and Serbians, Hungarians and Romanians, it proved possible for the Hapsburgs to save their police state with the help of a Russian army.
The ethnic theme houses of the zoo thus sally forth to fight, not only Hapsburgs and Romanovs, but most of all, each other. We will find the same thing in viewing the Polish and Russian pavilions.
The Young Poland of Lelewel and Worcell demands the re-creation of the Polish state and rollback of the 1772-95 partitions of Poland. But they go much further, laying claim to Poland in its old Jagiellonian borders, stretching from the shores of the Baltic to the shores of the Black Sea. This includes an explicit denial that any Ukrainian nation exists. In the orbit of Young Poland is the poet Adam Mickiewicz, a close friend of Mazzini's who was with him last year during the Roman Republic. Mickiewicz argues that Poland is special because it has suffered more than any other nation; Poland is ``the Christ among nations.'' Mickiewicz dreams of uniting all the west and south Slavs against the ``tyrant of the north,'' the ``barbarians of the north.'' By this he means Russia, the main target. Young Poland's program also foreshadows the obvious conflict with Young Germany over Silesia.
Young Russia means the anarchist Mikhail Bakunin and the aristocratic ideologue Aleksandr Herzen. Herzen is an agent of Baron James Rothschild of Paris. Right after the Crimean War, Herzen will start publishing The Polar Star and The Bell, both leak sheets for British secret intelligence that will build up their readership by divulging Russian state secrets. Herzen's obvious target is Czar Alexander II, the ally of Lincoln. Herzen prints the ravings of Bakunin, who preaches pan-Slavism, meaning that Russia will take over all the other Slavic nations. ``Out of an ocean of blood and fire there will rise in Moscow high in the sky the star of the revolution to become the guide of liberated mankind.'' Vintage Bakunin. If Mazzini relies on the stiletto, for Bakunin it is ``the peasant's axe'' that will bring down the ``German'' regime in St. Petersburg.
Herzen is interested in sabotaging Alexander II and his policy of real, anti-British reform in Russia. To block real industrial capitalist development, he preaches reliance on the aboriginal Slavic village, the mir, with ``communal ownership of the land'' plus the ancient Slavic workshop, the artel. The mir will never build the Trans-Siberian railway. Herzen sees Russia as the ``center of crystallization'' for the entire Slavic world. Herzen, although he is usually called a ``westernizer,'' is totally hostile to western civilization. He writes of the need for a ``new Attila,'' perhaps Russian, perhaps American, perhaps both, who will be able to tear down the old Europe. In the moment when the British will seem so close to winning everything, Herzen will support Palmerston's Polish insurrection of 1863, and will lose most of his readers. Once the American Civil War is over, the British will have little use for Herzen. By then, London will be betting on the nihilist terrorists of the Narodnaya Volya (People's Will), who will finally kill Alexander II, plus the Russian legal Marxists, all British agents. But already today we can see the conflicts ahead between Young Poland and Young Russia. In the conflicts among Mazzini's national chauvinist operations, we can see the roots of the slaughter of World War I.
Now, let us view the cages in the American theme park in Mazzini's human zoo. This is Young America. The name was popularized in 1845 by Edwin DeLeon, the son of a Scottish Rite, Jewish slave-trading family of Charleston, South Carolina. Edwin DeLeon will later be one of the leaders of the Confederate espionage organization in Europe. The leader of Young America is George N. Sanders, the future editor of the Democratic Review. Young America's view of Manifest Destiny is a slave empire in Mexico and the Caribbean. In the 1852 election, Young America will back the dark horse doughface Democrat, Franklin Pierce, against the patriot Winfield Scott. Scott's Whig Party will be destroyed. Young America operatives will receive important posts in London, Madrid, Turin, and other European capitals. Here they will support Mazzini and his gang.
Mazzini's American contacts are either proto-Confederates or strict abolitionists, such as William Lloyd Garrison. During the American Civil War, Mazzini will favor both the abolition of slavery and the destruction of the Union through secessionism--the London line. This subversion will be showcased during the famous tour of Kossuth in the United States, next year and the year after. Kossuth will be accompanied by Mazzini's moneybags, the Tuscan Freemason Adriano Lemmi. On the eve of the Crimean War, with Palmerston doing everything to isolate Russia, Kossuth's line will be that the ``tree of evil and despotism'' in Europe ``is Russia.'' Kossuth will try to blame even the problems of Italy on Russia. Despite Kossuth's efforts, the United States will emerge as the only power friendly to Russia during the Crimean conflict. Kossuth will call for the United States to join with England and France in war against Russia--Lord Palmerston's dream scenario.
Kossuth will refuse to call for the abolition of slavery. Kossuth will get on well with the slaveholders, since he will also be attempting to mediate a U.S. seizure of Cuba, which meshes perfectly with the secessionist program.
Mazzini is the zookeeper for all of these theme parks. But there are other zookeepers, and still more theme parks in the human, multicultural zoo. The custodians are Palmerston's two other Stooges, David Urquhart and Napoléon III.
There is also a theme park for the English lower orders. The keeper here is the strange and eccentric Scot, David Urquhart, the most aristocratic of Palmerston's Stooges. Urquhart was chosen for his work directly by Jeremy Bentham, who lavishly praised ``our David'' in his letters. Urquhart took part in Lord Byron's Greek revolution, but then found he liked Turks better after all. He secured a post at the British Embassy in Constantinople and ``went native,'' becoming an Ottoman pasha in his lifestyle. Urquhart's positive contribution to civilization was his popularization of the Turkish bath. He also kept a harem for some time. Urquhart also thought that late Ottoman feudalism was a model of what civilization ought to be. In Turkey, Urquhart became convinced that all the evil in the world had a single root: Russia, the machinations of the court of St. Petersburg. A very convenient view for Palmerston's Britain, which was always on the verge of war with Russia. For Urquhart, the unification of Italy is a Russian plot. He once met Mazzini, and concluded after ten minutes that Mazzini was a Russian agent! The usual Stooge on Stooge violence again! For this Russophobe, the problem of Great Britain is that Palmerston is a Russian agent, having been recruited by one of his many mistresses, the Russian Countess Lieven. During the years of Chartist agitation, Urquhart bought up working class leaders and drilled them in the litany that all of the problems of the English working man came from Russia via Lord Palmerston. To these workers Urquhart teaches something he calls dialectics. Urquhart will be a member of Parliament and he controls a weekly paper, The Free Press.
Palmerston understands that his subversive methods will always generate opposition from the Tory gentry and the straight-laced crowd. So he has taken the precaution of institutionalizing that opposition under his own control, with a raving megalomaniac leader to discredit it. Urquhart's demonization of Russia foreshadows something that will be called McCarthyism a century from now.
Urquhart's remedy is to go back to the simplicity of character of Merrie England, in the sense of retrogression to bucolic medieval myth. ``The people of England were better clothed and fed when there was no commerce and when there were no factories.'' That is vintage Urquhart.
Does this talk of pre-capitalist economic formations strike a familiar chord? Do you smell a big, fat commie rat?
How interesting that Urquhart should be the controller of British agent Karl Marx, who earns his keep as a writer for Urquhart's paper. David Urquhart is the founder of modern communism! It is Urquhart who will prescribe the plan for Das Kapital. Marx is a professed admirer of Urquhart--acknowledging his influence more than that of any other living person. Marx will even compose a Life of Lord Palmerston, based on Urquhart's wild obsession that Pam is a Russian agent of influence. This says enough about Marx's acumen as a political analyst. Marx and Urquhart agree that there is no real absolute profit in capitalism, and that technological progress causes a falling rate of profit.
Another of Urquhart's operatives is Lothar Bücher, a confidant of the German labor leader Lassalle, and later of the Iron Chancellor, Otto von Bismarck himself. After Gettysburg, Urquhart will move to France, and open a theme park for right-wing Catholics; he will meet Pius IX and will join members of Cardinal Newman's Oxford Movement at the First Vatican Council in 1870.
In 1848 Napoléon was working for the British as a special constable--a riot cop--to put down an expected Chartist revolution; he was then shipped to Paris. There Napoléon III used his name to become President, and then organized a coup d'état that made him emperor. Palmerston quickly endorsed the coup, causing hysteria on the part of the Victoria and Albert palace clique. Palmerston was forced out, but he was soon back, stronger than ever.
After hundreds of years of warfare, France at last had been broken, placed under a more or less dependable British puppet regime. The ``western powers,'' the ``Anglo-French,'' were born. Napoléon III gave Palmerston one indispensable ingredient for his imperial strategy: a powerful land army. Soon an open Anglo-French entente was in full swing. When Victoria came to Paris it was the first such visit by an English sovereign since Henry VI had been crowned King of France in Notre Dame in 1431. When Napoléon joined Palmerston in attacking Russia in the Crimea, it was the first war in 400 years to see France and England on the same side.
The French pavilion of the zoo is being redecorated with a new version of British empiricism: This is positivism, the miserable outlook of Auguste Comte and Ernest Renan. This will lead to the French structuralists, ethnologists, and even deconstructionists of the late twentieth century.
Napoléon III is Palmerston's strategic catamite, usually with as much will of his own as an inflatable sex doll. Think of him as a blow-up British agent. After the Crimea, Palmerston will need a land war against Austria in northern Italy. Napoléon, egged on by Camillo Benso di Cavour who knows how to play the interstices, will oblige with the war of 1859 and the great Battle of Solferino. When the time will come for Maximilian's Mexican adventure, Napoléon will be eager to send a fleet and an army. During the American Civil War, Napoléon's pro-Confederate stance will be even more aggressive than Palmerston's own. In 1870, Bismarck will defeat Napoléon and send him into exile in England. Here Napoléon will plan a comeback after the Paris Commune, but he will need to be seen on horseback, and he has a bladder ailment. The bladder operation designed to make him a man on horseback once again will instead kill him.
Napoléon III calls himself a socialist and will style the latter phase of his regime ``the liberal empire.'' That means all of France as a theme park in the British zoo. In 1860 Napoléon will sign a free trade treaty with the British. Along the way, he will pick up a junior partner colonial empire in Senegal and in Indo-China in 1862, something that will set the stage for the Vietnam War a century later. Under Napoléon, France will build the Suez Canal, only to have it fall under the control of the British. Napoléon III will furnish the prototype for the fascist dictators of the twentieth century. After his defeat in the Franco-Prussian war, he will bequeath to France a party of proto-fascist colonialists and revanchists beating the drum for Alsace-Lorraine, which Napoléon will lose to Bismarck. These revanchists will turn up again in Vichy, the Fourth Republic, and the French Socialist Party of today.
And so it will come to pass that Lord Palmerston will attempt to rule the world through the agency of a triumvirate of Stooges, each one the warden of some pavilions of a human zoo.
The reason why must now be confronted.
Why are the British liberal imperialists called the Venetian Party?
Well, for one thing, they call themselves the Venetian Party. The future prime minister Benjamin Disraeli will write in his novel Conningsby that the Whig aristocrats of 1688 wanted ``to establish in England a high aristocratic republic on the model of [Venice], making the kings into doges, and with a `Venetian constitution.'|''
During the years after the Council of Florence in 1439, the Venetian enemies of Nicolaus of Cusa plotted to wage war on the Italian High Renaissance and Cusa's ecumenical project. To combat Cusa's Renaissance Platonism, the Venetians of the Rialto and Padua turned to a new-look Aristotelianism, featuring Aristotle's characteristic outlook shorn of its medieval-scholastic and Averroist outgrowths.
This was expressed in the work of Pietro Pomponazzi, and in that of Pomponazzi's pupil, Gasparo Contarini. During the War of the League of Cambrai of 1509-17, an alliance of virtually every power in Europe threatened to wipe out the Venetian oligarchy. The Venetians knew that France or Spain could crush them like so many flies. The Venetians responded by launching the Protestant Reformation with three proto-Stooges--Luther, Calvin, and Henry VIII. At the same time, Contarini and his Jesuits made Aristotle a central component of the Catholic Counter-Reformation and the Council of Trent, and put Dante and Piccolomini on the Index of Prohibited Books. The result was a century and a half of wars of religion, and a ``little dark age,'' culminating in the Great Crisis of the seventeenth century.
Venice was a cancer consciously planning its own metastasis. From their lagoon, the Venetians chose a swamp and an island facing the North Atlantic--Holland and the British Isles. Here the hegemomic Giovani party would relocate their family fortunes, their fondi, and their characteristic epistemology. France was also colonized, but the main bets were placed further north. First, Contarini's relative and neighbor Francesco Zorzi was sent to serve as sex adviser to Henry VIII, whose raging libido would be the key to Venetian hopes. Zorzi brought Rosicrucian mysticism and Freemasonry to a land that Venetian bankers had been looting for centuries. The Venetian Party in England grew under the early Stuarts as Francis Bacon and his wife Thomas Hobbes imported the neo-Aristotelianism of Fra Paolo Sarpi, the great Venetian gamemaster of the early 1600s, the architect of the Thirty Years' War.
When James I and Charles I disappointed the Venetians in that Thirty Years' War, Cromwell, Milton, and a menagerie of sectarians were brought to power in an all-Protestant civil war and Commonwealth. This was the time of the Irish genocide and the foundation of the overseas empire in Jamaica. After the depravity of the Restoration, the ``Glorious Revolution'' of 1688 gave birth to the most perfect imitation of the Venetian oligarchical system ever created. The great Whig and Tory aristocrats set as their goal a new, world-encompassing Roman Empire with its center in London. After the defeat of Leibniz's attempt to save England, Great Britain set off on the path of empire with its new Hanoverian Guelph dynasty.
The War of the Spanish Succession in 1702-13 was the first war fought on a world scale and the last gasp for rivals Spain and Holland. The Peace of Utrecht left the British supreme on the oceans. Louis XIV and Colbert were defeated by divide-and-conquer Venetian geopolitics, as British cash was used to hire states like Brandenburg and Savoy to fight the French. By winning the coveted asiento, the monopoly on slave commerce with Spanish America, the British became the biggest slave merchants in the world. The wealth of Bristol and Liverpool would be built on slaves.
After several decades of Walpole and the Hell-Fire Clubs, there came the great war of the mid-eighteenth century, the Austrian Succession followed by the Seven Years' War. This was the end of France as a naval power and worldwide rival for the British. William Pitt, Earl of Chatham, subsidized Frederick the Great of Prussia to win an empire on the plains of Germany. The British took Ft. Louisburg and then seized Quebec City, driving the French out of Canada. The British became the paramount power in India. The British oligarchs of the day, like their successors after 1989, were convinced that they could run wild, violating the laws of nature without penalty, for nothing could now stand against them. But, in loading the American colonies with their prohibitions of settlement and manufacture, their Quebec Act, Stamp Acts, Townsend Acts, and Intolerable Acts, they set the stage for the American Revolution.
In these years William Petty, Earl of Shelburne and Marquis of Lansdowne, gathered a stable of ideologues and operatives, his stooges. These were Jeremy Bentham, Adam Smith, Edward Gibbon. These were the founders of British philosophical radicalism, the most primitive form of Aristotle yet devised, and its Siamese twin, free trade. Shelburne was defeated by the superior ability of Hamilton, Franklin, and Washington, but he did succeed in destabilizing and nearly destroying France. The reign of terror in the French Revolution was the work of agents and dupes of Shelburne among the Jacobins, enragés, and sans-culottes.
By now British policy was in the hands of Shelburne's student and protégé, William Pitt the Younger. After letting the Jacobin horrors of Bentham's agents brew up for three years, Pitt was able to unite the continental powers against France in the first, second, and third coalitions. Using the armies raised by Lazare Carnot, Napoléon shattered each of these coalitions. Napoléon's final defeat was the work of Scharnhorst, Gneisenau, and the Prussian reformers, but the beneficiaries were the British.
At the Congress of Vienna in 1815, the British were clearly the dominant force, but they were still obliged to make deals with Metternich, Russia, and Prussia. But under the regimes of Castlereagh and Canning, the oligarchical stupidity, greed, and incompetence of Metternich and Co. made possible the revolts and revolutions of 1820, 1825, and 1830. By 1830, Lord Palmerston was ready to take control of the Foreign Office and begin his direct march to undisputed world domination. Metternich was still sitting on the lid of the boiling European cauldron, but Lord Palmerston and his Three Stooges were stoking the flames underneath.
There was a time when the center of oligarchy, usury, and geopolitics was Venice, the group of islands in a lagoon at the top of the Adriatic. In the sixteenth century, in the wake of the war of the League of Cambrai, Venice was a cancer planning its own metastasis. These were the years during which the patrician party known as the Giovani, the Youngsters, began meeting in a salon known as Ridotto Morosini. It is here that the future course of England and Britain was charted.
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