The Rhodes Colossus: Caricature of Cecil Rhodes 1892
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The first thing an academic tells you when you mention the mystical side of the Afghanistan story is that you shouldn't talk about that. The study of foreign policy cannot be seen as having been motivated by anything other than rational and objective reasons and measured by the metrics of quantitative analysis.
How then to explain 'Wild Bill' Donovan, the first director of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) and the father of today's CIA calling his agents Knights Templars? How then to explain the American military's fascination with medieval knighthoods? How then to explain the use of New Testament biblical passages engraved on the gunsights of American and British troops in Afghanistan? How then to explain American exceptionalism whereby the United States gets to do anything it pleases because America is right no matter what it does or how it does it?
Afghanistan's most famous 'Holy Warrior' Gulbuddin Hekmatyar
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People have heard about the holy warriors of the Muslim world, but what most Americans are unaware of is the mystical component of the warriors who fight for America and how that component has been setting the agenda for American politics from behind the scenes with no public scrutiny.
In Maine they use the expression "You can't get there from here," to explain this sort of disconnect. It's being used to make the point that you can't get exoteric Afghanistan unless you understand the esoteric and you can't understand the esoteric without accepting your own personal motivations.
In researching for our books, we discovered a trove of esoteric history surrounding the West's attraction to Afghanistan starting with the British. It revolves around Mystical Imperialism, a term first used to describe 19th century British imperial efforts to colonize the non-Christian world by applying Judeo Christian ethics and philosophies.
Simply put, Mystical imperialism rationalizes the expansion of a nation's authority by conquest over other nations by infusing a sense of the divine into the raw politics of empire building. Today's practitioners of American mystical imperialism are a hardened core of ideological defense intellectuals and military officers who combine their own esoteric and religious beliefs with Washington policy making.
These individuals can trace their philosophical DNA back to 19th century European secret esoteric societies who were known to be heavily involved in espionage on both British and Russian sides. Reflected in the fictional quasi-Masonic exploits of Rudyard Kipling's two soldiers in The Man Who Would be King, the "hidden" or occult game for control of Afghanistan and Central Asia was a factor in the foreign policy of the 19th century for the British and the Russians, and continues to this day through the United States.
As the ancient home of Zoroaster and the Avesta, the foundation document for the Judeo/Christian war of light against dark, of good versus evil, 19th century Afghanistan and its surroundings provided a mystical underpinning to what today is dryly regarded as geopolitics.
Described as the "World-Island" by early 20th century British geo-strategist Halford Mackinder, Russia's geographic position at the center of the Eurasian land mass rivaled Britain's as an island fortress. Mackinder foresaw Russia expanding with ferocity beyond its borders. From the outset - a Russian dominance of Central Asia spawned nightmares for the British of an apocalyptic horde sweeping from the Russian steppe across Europe which had to be stopped at any cost.
Henry Wallace, Franklin Roosevelt's vice president, supported an expedition in 1934 with the intention of establishing a spiritual settlement in the Himalayas. Wallace expressed his enthusiasm for the plan known as the Shambhala Project, stating that, "the political situation in this part of the world is always rendered especially intriguing by the effect on it, of ancient prophecies, traditions and the like." Wallace anticipated that those prophecies were at last coming due.
Hidden to human eyes, Shambhala was said, by Tibetan Buddhists, to lie somewhere near Tibet and would finally be revealed at the end of time. Others believed it was hidden in the valleys of the Pamir mountain range in Northeastern Afghanistan. This was the Shambhala that concealed the lost wisdom, the secrets of immortality and the beginnings of the human race. Adolph Hitler sent an expedition to Tibet and Afghanistan in 1939 in the hopes of uncovering proof of Aryan links to modern German society in the soil of Central Asia.
From Halford Mackinder at the beginning of the 20th century to the American Cold Warrior James Burnham, the godfather of Neo-conservatism to Zbigniew Brzezinski, the Grand Master of Geostrategic American foreign policy, Eurasia represented the central basis for American global primacy, in a world defined by Manichean opposites.
In a 1945 Partisan Review article titled "Lenin's Heir" Burnham, while still at the OSS, infused his apocalyptic political views with mystical allusions to the Eurasian heartland as "the magnetic core" of Soviet power, comparing it to the mystical "reality of the One-of-Neo-Platonism," whose inexorable and unstoppable " progression" descends through the stages of Mind, Soul, and Matter" towards its ultimate destination beyond the Eurasian boundaries and through "Appeasement and Infiltration England and the United States."
As an "anti-Communist ideology" Burnham's apocalyptic warnings about the inevitability of Soviet expansion from Eurasia's magnetic core ring like a medieval theologian's incantation throughout Winston Churchill's 1946 "Iron Curtain" speech which set the terms of the Cold War.
Twenty six years later, Senator William Fulbright would realize that only because of the disastrous outcome of Vietnam was there any willingness to reexamine the basic assumptions of the Cold War. The 1972 Strategic Arms Limitation Talks know as SALT, would spring from this rational re-assessment, as would the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and eventually SALT II.
President Jimmy Carter and Soviet General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev sign the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT II) treaty, June 18, 1979, in Vienna.
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