We have seen in “CFG Intro,” “About CFG,” and “CFG Today,” featured on the website, that the world system is “stumbling” towards a world economy driven by Third World development and not American-lead Western consumption.

The world is of course not a person or living thing and cannot “stumble” in a normal sense, since the world has a body politic but not a body.

By “stumble” we mean that the “actors” in the world are themselves only dimly aware of where they are and what they are presiding over and many of them—we call this Zionomics and Judeocentrism—hope to achieve the exact opposite of what we predict, which is precisely why Iraq came to be invaded.

This is of course a case of “unintended consequences” on a macrohistorical scale.

We are not implying any of the following theories:

1. “the long run always wins in the end” (in the way that the great French historian Ferdinand Braudel argues in his Mediterranean, Volume II)
2. the world finds a way to go from sub-optimal pathways to optimal ones (i.e., the world is a “discovery process” that finds a maximal path).
3. “the basic trend of history is always up,” as Franklin Roosevelt used to say in his 1940’s speeches.

What then do we mean?

We mean that current American elites will ultimately “go with the money” and that the current bloodshed is an adolescent “American tantrum and rampage” but that at the end of this mayhem, America will “jump ship,” and begin to leave Judeocentrism and Zionomics on the back burner and get into “developmentalism” since Bush militarism is developmental and not anti-developmental, which is fundamentally the neo-con/Israel agenda.

The Japanese call this syndrome, “same bed, different dreams.”

Developmentalism will involve intensive Western coordination and negotiations with Arabs, Muslims, and OPEC. It will move Islamic finance and banking from the periphery of world policy and practice towards the center.

The BIS (Bank for International Settlements) Geneva, for example, is now intensively exploring Islamic banking and finance and this is a “straw in the wind” that tells you about “tomorrow.”

Blocking all such West/Third World “re-linking” is of course the Palestine problem, which is the microcosm of the world’s current “traffic jam” or impasse.

In 1632, Galileo published one of the founding classics of modern science, “Dialogue of the Two World Systems” which pits Simplicio against Salviati at the weekend seminar of their friend Sagredo, as they discuss the two antipodal views of basic astronomy and cosmology.

In our time, we also have this kind of “dialog” as summed up by these two viewpoints:

1. The Zionist view of the world pushed by Israel, the neocons and both the White House and Congress.  Islam is the enemy in this view and the Third World and the UN agents of this enemy.  The world is always and exclusively seen through Jewish eyes, a process we call Judeocentrism.

   We call Viewpoint 1 Zionomics.

2. The Third World developmental view of the world, as represented by Cambridge Forecast Group, which sees Third World development and Islamic finance and banking together with deep Arab, Muslim and OPEC participation, as the key to the future.

   In this view, Palestine is the central global issue symbolically and the blocking of the Palestinians by Israel is the central “cancer on world politics.”

Viewpoint number 1, given previously, represents therefore the key structural obstacle in the world-system today.

In other words, the whole world, is at a world-historical crossroads where the American-lead world will fundamentally choose one of these views and where Israel’s militarism and calculated disruptions will not allow a straddle of the two, which is what Washington might somewhat prefer.

Introduction

by L. Feiner.

In Jews in the Japanese Mind (1995, Free Press) Goodman and Miyazawa discuss the phenomenon of anti-Semitism in the non-Western world, particularly in countries such as Japan and other East Asian countries where there are very few Jews.

One reason for this phenomenon is that, with the increasing economic, political and social integration of the Western and non-Western worlds, of the developed and developing worlds, Jews are seen as a symbols of Western influence. Anti-Semitism and “Judeophobia” are expressions of fears about Western influence, particularly about US influence.

Below, R. Melson addresses the corresponding phenomenon in the West, namely the phenomenon of “Philo-Semitism” or “Judeocentrism.”

In this case, Jews are seen as talismans against the threats to the West posed by increasing integration with the non-Western and developing worlds.

There are several reasons why the Jews came to be seen as menacing symbols of Western influence in the non-Western world and talismans against non-Western influence in the Western world.

First of all, as Walter Russell Mead points out in his book Mortal Splendor: The American Empire in Transition, (1987, Houghton Mifflin), the Israeli/Palestinian conflict is a microcosm of the relation between the Western, developed world, and the non-Western, developing world.

The conflict represents a First World and Third World society intertwined and interleaved.

As Mead puts it, “power relations (between the West and the rest) which are usually mercifully obscured by distance, are seen up close (in the Israeli/Palestinian conflict).”

Also because of the Holocaust, the Jews are seen a white Western people who were subjected to the level of exterminist violence usually associated with Western colonization of the non-Western world. They are the one Western ethnicity which has acquired “Third World victim status.”

Therefore, what we are calling “Judeocentrism” allows hostility to be expressed against the non-Western world in a way which assuages the guilt over the history of Western colonialism in the non-Western world.

Dreams and Development: Part I

Judeocentrism

by Richard Melson, October 2004

Jules Michelet, the famous nineteenth century French historian who co-coined the word “Renaissance,” is discussed extensively by both Edmund Wilson in his To the Finland Station, as well as by Walter Benjamin in his classic Arcades Project, Harvard University Press.

Michelet says somewhere: “Every era dreams up the following one” («Chaque époque rêve la suivante»).

Think of the mid-nineties through 2000. The whole world is forced to wonder:

1. When did Madeleine Albright learn that she is Jewish? Is it true? Why all the “dancing around?”
2. Will the Jewish pianist, depicted by Geoffrey Rush in the movie, Shine, come to the USA and play for us at Carnegie Hall or on PBS TV? Might he crack up again?
3. Did Clinton seduce the Jewish intern Monica Lewinsky or was it the other way? Is she an Israeli agent? Was she put up to it?
4. Will his affair with Monica Lewinsky influence Middle East policy? Will it force him to pardon Mark Rich or Jonathan Pollard? (Marc Rich, Netanyahu’s buddy, was of course pardoned by Clinton just before leaving office.)
5. Did Al Gore choose a Jewish running mate in the 2000 presidential electoral contest to trump potential Republican “bribes” to the Jewish pressure groups, in advance?

An honest world-watcher would say the following:

US media and Washington policy-making have become so tangled up with Jewish themes, pressures, personalities and demands that the world finds itself in a kind of bad Zionist dream where rational world political economy is becoming impossible.

Simply put: Washington literally can’t function.

An honest person would say that if we take Michelet’s dictum, “each era dreams of/dreams up the subsequent one,” as our guide to the link between dreams and world political economy, the whole world finds itself in the middle of a Zionist nightmare, of which points 1-5 above are aspects within the larger bad dream.

A Point 6 is the endless rumination now about John Kerry’s Jewish ancestry on his grandfather’s side.

(The New York Times, Sunday, May 16, 2004, page 17 has a boxed story about Kerry’s grandfather, Frederick Kerry, born Fritz Kohn).

Emerging from this bad dream requires Palestine plus Third World Development, which are two sides of a coin: “regime-change” at the world level. This entails the world’s entering a post-Zionist chapter, on the other side of the contemporary nightmare, which now sees Sharon/Kristol/Feith in charge of US policy for the Middle East and indeed, for the whole world.

October 17, 2004 coda

Bush has just announced a new antisemitism law, cooked up by the Zionist pressure groups to harass the Arab and Muslim worlds, which will be enforced globally, thus deepening and extending this nightmare.

Dreams and Development: Part II

by Richard Melson, May 2004

In the first part of “Dreams and Development,” we used Michelet’s dictum, “each era has dreams of the next one,” to frame our discussion of Sharon/Kristol/Feith Zionism and the Israelization of Washington policy, as a kind of macrohistorical nightmare.

By macrohistorical, I mean a level involving not the history of one person, family, region, country or society but the entire world in its transit through the decades.

There is another dimension where one sees a Zionist or “Judeocentric” view of the world, subtly “injected into” the world’s consciousness and affecting its ability to orient itself: PBS ( principally BBC & WGBH/Boston) programs for educational television.

In recent years we have seen various producers and writers give us the following Judeocentric views of the world:

1. Foyle’s War, BBC multipart series, starring Michael Kitchen, predominantly concerned with Jewish themes set in WW II England.

2. Daniel Deronda, BBC, centering on Daniel Deronda’s self-discovery as Jew and Zionist who “extricates” himself from his British roots and finds his way to Zionism and resettlement in Palestine.

   Based on the George Eliot novel from the nineteenth century.

3. The Way We Live Now, based on the Trollope classic, starring David Suchet and featuring the lives of London Jews in 19th century England, including the character Brehgert played by Jim Carter, the sensitive soul who realizes that his Christian fiancee will never “be on the same page” as he is spiritually and so realizes he has to break with her.

   The lead character played by Suchet, the Jewish financier who cuts too many corners too deeply, is surrounded by efffete and grasping British aristocrats and American go-getters, and their complex interaction drives the story.

4. Ivanhoe, BBC miniseries, based on Walter Scott’s novel, showing how Isaac the Jew and his beauteous daughter Rebecca are finally forced to leave England.
5. Nostromo, BBC/WGBH co-production, showing how intrigues and plots involving Latin American silver mines and political conflicts in “Costaguana” lead to the death of Hirsch, the Jewish character, in Conrad’s novella.

One could give many more examples such as the BBC Disraeli miniseries, Reilly, Ace of Spies, Herman Wouk’s The Winds of War, as well as Christabel with Elizabeth Hurley.

A preponderance of contemporary movies, whether theatrical releases, DVD’s, or VHS videos, such as:

Utz, Bon Voyage, God Is Great, Varian’s War, Me without You, Focus, Monsieur Ibrahim, The Barbarian Invasions, The Governess, etc. all somehow center around Jewish themes or sub-themes.

This of course “blocks out” other ways of looking at the world, such as Arab, Muslim or Iranian ones. For example, the great flowering of today’s Iranian cinema is somehow not really “legitimate” or “kosher.”

The truth is that the Israelization of Washington policy-making, accompanied by the constant flow of such Judeocentric images presented by BBC and BBC/WGBH writers and producers in the various high-quality TV miniseries, taken all together, are close to bringing the world to something like a “nervous breakdown.”

The original Cambridge Forecast Group site featured an image seen to the left. The image depicts three globes touching each other.

Why did this picture anchor the home page?

The answer is that the three globes or worlds, represent, in our schema, the West, the Third World, and the Zionist world.

The West is blocked from a rapprochment with the Third World because of the Zionist “blockage” and the result is what we call a “traffic jam.”

The “cleverness” of Bush-Cheney is that they tried to set up a world where the emerging new relationship between the West and the Third World would have to go via the Zionist World, which is of course against the Third World, against development, against the emergence of Palestine and against any American-Third World rapprochement.

The neo-con/Zionist grouping wanted a dismantling of Middle East states along ethnic and sectarian lines, since, as Cheney’s right-hand man, David Wurmser explained, Arabs and Muslims are basically tribal formations and cannot make use of nation-states. Wurmser and his wife Meyrav are basically working for the Likud and their goal is to “upend” the world for Israel and the neo-cons.

Thus Bush-Cheney tried to square the circle figuring they could perhaps extract benefits from both sides or at worst, find a low-cost way to subjugate the Third World using Zionist leadership and high-tech weapons such as drones, UAV’s, “netcentric warfare,” etc…

Military bases everywhere in coordination with a worldwide skein of oil-and-gas pipelines would make the whole world a “choke point” under American command, control, and domination.

At the deepest level, this is why Iraq was invaded under neo-con/Zionist leadership. All of it is based on a profound Bush-Cheney “Ziono-fear,” plus the sense that the neo-cons constitute an internal think tank that would show them a way to bypass the Third World, via hyperviolence and bullying.

The basic thrust of CFG is that this unbelievable historical “bum steer” and wilful misdirection on the part of the neo-con/Zionist grouping, will lead, in the end, to a developmental new world order and that the Paul Wolfowitz arc of “failing upwards” from principal White House neo-con to World Bank president, is a signal and sign (i.e., of the transition from violent subjugation fantasies to developmental details).