The Brzezinski-Albright-Kagan/Nuland Nexus - Part 1

How did neoconservatism infect the Democratic Party? Part one covers the rise of Zbig, the history of Poland and western Ukraine, the source of his worldview, and also the source of today's war.

I was thinking about this question while doing a series of videos related to the cause of the proxywar in Ukraine and a school of thought among various forms of neo-Birchers and other alternative rightwing thinkers on geopolitics and global strategy, that going back to the Great Game and the Mackinder thesis and notions of an Anglo-American Empire. That thread perhaps most tangibly continues into our time in the form of Zbigniew Brzezinski and his 1997 book The Grand Chessboard. At that time Zbig was the Wise Man of Democratic Party foreign policy, a point where the “Judification” of that policy was becoming apparent.

As I have often said, in my view neoconservatism, the official foreign policy philosophy of American Jewry, was born in 1967 out of two things, the psychology-shifting Six Day War and the rise of the anti-war movement on the Democratic left. The original neocons, many of whom were leftists, felt like their newly-elevated concerns over “the security of Israel” were running in opposition to trends within the part of the party with which they might have been most closely aligned previously, and so the beachhead of neoconservatism in government took place in the office of Dem hawk Sen. Henry “Scoop” Jackson of Washington, most notably in the personages (I use that term loosely) of Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle and Douglas Feith.

Over the course of the ‘70s that alliance shifted to the GOP, where the neocons would make their home for more than three decades, and one important event in that process ultimately was the Halloween Massacre in 1975 within the Ford administration. This was Ford’s “shift to the right” in anticipation of the ‘76 nomination challenge from Ronald Reagan, but what it really was under the surface was a shift in the balance within the deep state, in retrospect a rise of the Jewish/Zionist faction and a defeat of the WASP Rockefellerist CFR faction. The main changes involved were the promotion of Ford’s chief of staff Donald Rumsfeld to Sec of Defense, the promotion of Dick Cheney from deputy chief of staff to replace Rumsfeld, and the naming of George H. W. Bush as CIA director, while Henry Kissinger was stripped of his National Security Advisor position (but remained Sec of State) and replaced by Brent Scowcroft (who would return as NSA under Bush in 1989), and Vice President Nelson Rockefeller was told he would not be on the ‘76 ticket, a slot that would ultimately go to attack dog Bob Dole.

Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld would go on to be critical “neocon enablers” over the next three decades. Bush, along with CIA director William Casey, played an important role in reestablishing the deep state into full power under Reagan, and in 1981 for the first time the neocons entered a presidential administration, including Wolfowitz, Perle and Feith.

Once there, they played a role in the revving up of the cold war, patterned on the work of the CIA’s Team B. From the wikipedia entry on that:

“Team B was a competitive analysis exercise commissioned by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to analyze threats the Soviet Union posed to the security of the United States. It was created, in part, due to a 1974 publication by Albert Wohlstetter, who accused the CIA of chronically underestimating Soviet military capability. Years of National Intelligence Estimates (NIE) that were later demonstrated to be very wrong were another motivating factor. President Gerald Ford began the Team B project in May 1976, inviting a group of outside experts to evaluate classified intelligence on the Soviet Union. Team B, approved by then-Director of Central Intelligence George H. W. Bush, was composed of ‘outside experts’ who attempted to counter the arguments of intelligence officials within the CIA.”

So we see the role of Bush here, and Wohlstetter was Wolfowitz’ mentor at the Univ of Chicago, and earlier a friend of his father before they both left Germany - and of course a Jew. Harvard’s Richard Pipes (Jewish natch) headed Team B, which was originally proposed while William Colby was CIA director; he refused to go ahead with it, which led to his replacement by Bush. Bush also was involved with the creation of the Safari Club - from its wiki:

“The Safari Club was a covert alliance of intelligence services formed in 1976 that ran clandestine operations around Africa at a time when the United States Congress had limited the power of the CIA after years of abuses and when Portugal was dismantling its colonial empire in Africa. Its formal members were the pre-revolution (Pahlavi) Iran, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Morocco and France. The group maintained informal connections with the United States, South Africa, Rhodesia and Israel.”

This was the creation of a completely off-the-books free-floating operation in anticipation of what would happen to the CIA under a new Dem president after Watergate and the Church Committee, and did happen under Carter and his director Stansfield Turner - “the cowboys” were run out, and they had to have a place to go. And then four years later came Reagan, Bush and Casey, to make things right again.

But Carter did something else, he named Brzezinski as his National Security Advisor who, like Kissinger (who had made the NSA position a household term) defined as a Rockefellerist, a kind of protege of David Rockefeller. Zbig had served under LBJ and had played the lead role in the creation of the Trilateral Commission. Just as Kissinger had done before him, he would battle the Sec of State, in his case Cyrus Vance, for control of US foreign policy, and like Henry he would win.

One of Kissinger’s big accomplishments was detente with the Soviet Union, and that is what Team B was about - its wiki goes on to say:

“President Ford's Chief of Staff Donald Rumsfeld started making speeches arguing that the Soviets were ignoring Secretary of State Henry Kissinger's treaties and secretly building up their weapons so that they could eventually attack the United States. Rumsfeld used his influence to persuade Ford to set up an independent inquiry. Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz wanted to create a much less charitable picture of the Soviet Union, its intentions, and its views about fighting and winning a nuclear war.”

But we didn’t have to wait for the Reagan Revolution to set detente aside and start saber-rattling with the USSR again; Zbig’s wiki gets into his role:

“Major foreign policy events during his time in office included… the United States' encouragement of dissidents in Eastern Europe and championing of human rights in order to undermine the influence of the Soviet Union; supporting the Afghan mujahideen against the Soviet-backed Democratic Republic of Afghanistan and, ultimately, Soviet occupation troops during the Soviet–Afghan War… Brzezinski's personal views have been described as ‘progressive’, ‘international’, political liberal, and ‘strong anti-communist’. He was an advocate for anti-Soviet containment, for human rights organizations, and for ‘cultivating a strong West’. He has been praised for his ability to see ‘the big picture’. Critics described him as hawkish or ‘foreign policy hardliner’ on some issues such as Poland–Russia relations.”

To better understand Zbig, let’s start at the start of his wiki:

“Brzeziński (March 28, 1928 – May 26, 2017), or Zbig, was a Polish-American diplomat and political scientist. He served as a counselor to President Lyndon B. Johnson from 1966 to 1968 and was President Jimmy Carter's National Security Advisor from 1977 to 1981. As a scholar, Brzezinski belonged to the realist school of international relations, standing in the geopolitical tradition of Halford Mackinder and Nicholas J. Spykman, while elements of liberal idealism have also been identified in his outlook. Brzezinski was the primary organizer of The Trilateral Commission.”

So, working back from the end, we have the Trilateral Commission, a major Rockefellerist project, and Mackinder gets us to his Heartland Theory and The Geographical Pivot of History of 1904, focused on what was then the lands of the Russian Empire and with a particular concern over central Asia, the ‘Stans. The realist school can perhaps be better described as practicalist, and stands in opposition to the idealist school, the most promenant founding figure in that outlook perhaps being Woodrow Wilson with his 14 points and League of Nations in rebuilding the world post-WWI. Zbig’s liberal idealist elements can be seen in his championing of human rights in that bit which follows this. But the other thing that is very clear is that the “realism” of Mackinder and Spykman was founded in the Great Game of the 19th century, and takes a “Britain good, Russia bad” predisposition.

But it is the first sentence which gives us a hint at what really matters here, especially when added to the final sentence in the previously quoted segment. So let’s go further for more, to his Early Years section:

“Zbigniew Brzezinski was born in Warsaw, Poland, on March 28, 1928 into an aristocratic Roman Catholic family originally from Brzeżany, Tarnopol Voivodeship (then part of Poland, currently in Ukraine). The town of Brzeżany is thought to be the source of the family name. Brzezinski's parents were Leonia (née Roman) Brzezińska and Tadeusz Brzeziński, a Polish diplomat who was posted to Germany from 1931 to 1935; Zbigniew Brzezinski thus spent some of his earliest years witnessing the rise of the Nazis. From 1936 to 1938, Tadeusz Brzeziński was posted to the Soviet Union during Joseph Stalin's Great Purge, and was later praised by Israel for his work helping Jews escape from the Nazis.

“In 1938, Tadeusz Brzeziński was posted to Montreal as a consul general. The Brzezinski family lived near the Polish Consulate-General, on Stanley Street. In 1939, the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact was agreed to by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union; subsequently the two powers invaded Poland. The 1945 Yalta Conference among the Allies allotted Poland to the Soviet sphere of influence. The Second World War had a profound effect on Brzezinski, who stated in an interview: ‘The extraordinary violence that was perpetrated against Poland did affect my perception of the world, and made me much more sensitive to the fact that a great deal of world politics is a fundamental struggle’.”

This could not give us stronger hints on the personal nature of the development of his worldview, both in terms of allies and enemies. But it’s important to look closer at specifically where his familial roots were and its history, and maps are the best way to do that. [I will spell Zbig’s hometown Berezhany, which I think is a Romanized Ukrainian spelling.] First, a language/dialect map of Ukraine:

So we see here that he is from the heart of an area in western Ukraine where the dialect spoken is described as Galician or “Ukrainian” (differing from Surzhik). In fact the oblast containing Berezhany and the two to its west are the components of eastern Galicia which were absorbed into Ukraine and the USSR during WWII; the two oblasts to the north comprise Volhynia, which shares some important history, including that absorbtion into the USSR. To get another slice of the current apple, let’s look at some presidential election maps, first 2004:

What you can see here is that the oblast containing Berezhany had the largest margin of victory for Yuschenko over Yanukovych, backing the winner in the Orange Revolution; the five oblasts with his highest margins are the five of Galicia and Volhynia. Next up is 2010, when Russia-leaning Yanukovych won, first a simple map:

And a more complex one:

This shows not only more detail on the margins and voting districts, but the history of these areas, specifically related to Poland - Galicia was part of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth until the first partition of Poland, when it became part of the Habsburg or Austro-Hungarian Empire under the Austrian crown. Where it would remain for nearly 150 years, until after WWI when it became part of the reformed Poland along with Volhynia (which had gone to Russia in the second partition).

Before we abandon the current century, let’s look at a 2012 election (non-presidential) map to get a peek at the nationalist angle:

This map shows the percentages of the parliamentary vote received by the right-wing nationalist party Svoboda; the number partially obscured here by Berezhany is 31.22%; again we have Galicia followed by Volhynia. Finally, the 2019 first-round election won by Zelensky:

Here we see Berezhany’s district going to incumbent Poroshenko, and Galicia (and parts of Volhynia) split between him and Tymoshenko, who had won the west overwhelmingly in her 2010 defeat. Poroshenko would go on to be crushed in the runoff, winning only in the Lviv oblast (directly west of Berezhany) and, importantly, in the diaspora, and Zelensky’s largest margins were in the far east.

Now let’s go way back in time, first to 1635 and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and a map that actually marks Berezhany; I have added Warsaw and Kiev as context:

As you can see, the territory in red controlled by the Polish crown was mostly in what is now Ukraine. Next, the partitioning of Poland 1772-1795:

Here for the first time we can see Galicia, the orange-tan color, as it was carved out by Austria in 1772. But the majority of Poland (including Volhynia in 1793) went to Russia, which had already absorbed central Ukraine and later would also absorb the area around Warsaw (Kingdom or Congress Poland) from Austria and Prussia/Germany.

Which gets us to the start of the 20th century:

This is a map of Jewish communities in 1900 and 1930, and what we can see is that Berezhany is right in the heart of the lands of the shtetl, the homeland of the Ashkenazim, which corresponds with the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the “Paradisus Judaeorum”, the paradise of the Jews. It also shows the increasing urbanization of the Jews over that period, and some of the post-revolutionary movement into the cities not only of Russia but also eastern Ukraine. For a bit more context in this regard, Berezhany relative to the 19th century Pale of Settlement, the homelands of the Jews in the Russian Empire:

Now Berezhany before and after WWI:

So here we see Galicia switching hands between Austria and the newly-reformed Poland, with Russia/USSR always looming just to the east. More detail on Poland between the wars, liguistically:

What we can see here is that southeastern Poland was ethnically largely Ukrainian, particularly rurally - although Yiddish is missing from this map. The population of the largest city in this region, Lvov (Lviv), was in terms of size Polish, Jewish and Ukrainian, in that order. Galicia in total before WWI was more than 10% Jewish, and Poles outnumbered Ukrainians.

Then at the start of WWII Poland was once again wiped off the map, by Germany and the USSR, per the terms of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. This is when the Brzezinskis were in Canada, and there they would stay, until Zbig moved to the US for graduate school. After WWII Poland would find itself moved westward, due to the USSR’s defeat of Germany, leaving behind all those Belarusians and Ukrainians, and Lvov/Lviv and Berezhany:

This history lesson is important regarding Brzezinski’s worldview, particularly related to Russia and the Soviet Union, but it’s also important related to the development of Democratic Party foreign policy in eastern Europe and the eventual alliance with neoconservatism, which of course means with the Ashkenazi Jews.

From Zbig’s standpoint it’s important to understand that his geographic source in Poland was never part of Russia or the USSR until after WWII, when it was absorbed into Ukraine, while Poland itself was becoming a Soviet satellite. But Russia had been knocking on the door for centuries before that.

With regard to the war, far western Ukraine has been the part with the least history regarding Russia. So it has been the source of right-wing Ukrainian nationalism, whether you choose to label that neo-nazism or not. It also had the greatest concentration of Jews prior to WWII, and both of these elements in the Ukrainian diaspora have played important roles in the fomentation of this war. If one wants to try to comprehend the incomprehensible, the apparent alliance between Jews and these nationalists, they need to understand the history of western Ukraine. It’s more than just the enemy of my enemy is my friend.

Another aspect of that history relates to another bit of information in Zbig’s wiki, that he comes from an aristocratic Polish family. So we should go all the way back to 1500 and the start of Second or Neo-Serfdom in Poland, and the relationship between the land-holding aristocracy, the serfs and the middlemen Jews. For that I link part of a discussion involving Ukrainian/Polish-American historian JP Himka; this piece goes on for more than 10 minutes but it’s very much worth listening to (as is the part on languages that follows):

From this one can get a sense of the alliance between Polish aristocrats and the Jews coming out of serfdom, and the animosity between Ukrainian serfs (mostly, where Zbig’s family comes from) and the Jews. So we should layer that on top of the feelings that Zbig must have had toward not only Russia but also Germany (and perhaps in part because Austria was a Germanic state).

To show balance here, if you are interested, another take on all this from a Jewish standpoint, focused on Galicia, mainly under Austrian rule:

So we have seen Brzezinski’s cultural history and foundation of his fundamental worldview, his rise to his governmental height under Carter as NSA in the late ‘70s, just as the neocons were sinking their teeth into the GOP, and the start of the reversal of fellow Rockefellerist Kissinger’s detente with the USSR. The Reagan Revolution in 1980 would end Zbig’s primacy over US foreign policy, but the incoming neocons would pick up that baton and help sustain his program in the 1980s as a key component to GOP foreign policy and supporters of the heated-up cold war.

But overreach and conflict related to Rockefellerist Bush and the other side of the neocon war policy, that in beloved Israel’s middle east, would lead to the end of Reagan-Bush in 1992 and the beginning of stage two of the slide toward neoconservatism within the Clinton administration, that featuring Zbig as the Wise Man behind the scenes and his successor in the government, Madeleine Albright. I will cover the 1990s in part two.