Come gather ’round people
Wherever you roam
And admit that the waters
Around you have grown
And accept it that soon
You’ll be drenched to the bone
If your time to you is worth savin’
Then you better start swimmin’ or you’ll sink like a stone
For the times they are a-changin’

Come writers and critics
Who prophesize with your pen
And keep your eyes wide
The chance won’t come again
And don’t speak too soon
For the wheel’s still in spin
And there’s no tellin’ who that it’s namin’
For the loser now will be later to win
For the times they are a-changin’

Come senators, congressmen
Please heed the call
Don’t stand in the doorway
Don’t block up the hall
For he that gets hurt
Will be he who has stalled
There’s a battle outside and it is ragin’
It’ll soon shake your windows and rattle your walls
For the times they are a-changin’

Come mothers and fathers
Throughout the land
And don’t criticize
What you can’t understand
Your sons and your daughters
Are beyond your command
Your old road is rapidly agin’
Please get out of the new one if you can’t lend your hand
For the times they are a-changin’

The line it is drawn
The curse it is cast
The slow one now
Will later be fast
As the present now
Will later be past
The order is rapidly fadin’
And the first one now will later be last
For the times they are a-changin’

Bush House, London, UK.
The Pilgrims Society: A Study of the Anglo-American Establishment

Without going into astrology or eschatology:

1. 
   The British Empire was hegemonic for a century, between 1815 and 1915.
2. 
   The American Empire was hegemonic for a century, between 1915 and 2015.
3. 
   Between 1915 and 2025 the British Empire instrumentalized the American Empire, placing it at its service.
4. 
   The First Trump Administration (January 20, 2017 – January 20, 2021) tried unsuccessfully to free the US from its submission to London.
5. 
   The Second Trump Administration (January 20, 2025 – Present) is again trying to free the US from its submission to London.
   
   

Is the Anglo-American Establishment on the verge of disappearing?

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Lost Your Bearings. A lost compass buried into the sands below makes it hard to find your bearings.

moral compass
a set of beliefs or values that help guide ethical decisions, judgments, and behavior
an internal sense of right and wrong
Merriam-Webster Dictionary

High Treason and Collaboration in Europe

Hans Vogel • The Unz Review • March 4, 2025 • 1,900 Words • Has Comments

At the end of the Second World War, savage reprisals were taken against those who had worked with or for the Germans.

Hans Vogel argues that Europe’s elites lack a moral compass.
However, they do apply moral standards: to their opponents in their zeal to cling to power.

At the end of the Second World War, savage reprisals were taken against those who had worked with or for the Germans. Many who had collaborated were left unharmed, and many who were killed for being collaborationists were not guilty. Therefore, to say the least, it was a very rough and totally arbitrary settling of accounts. The victims, it was asserted, were punished for collaborating with the Germans and for treason and high treason.

In France, at least 100,000 people were murdered, often in the most beastly way, for having been a real or imagined collabo, as collaborationists were called in France. The perpetrators, usually self-described “resistance fighters,” were never made to answer for their crimes and remained unpunished. The postwar outbreak of violent revenge in France has no equal in modern European history. In Western Europe, Belgium comes in second, with thousands of people killed by both “resistance fighters” and hastily appointed officials. At least 700,000 files (for an adult population of a little over four million) were made for collaboration with the Germans. Tens of thousands were convicted, many were sent to state dungeons or to do forced labor in the coal mines. All were deprived of their civil rights. In the Netherlands, more than 100,000 people were sent to concentration camps taking the place of Jews, resistance fighters and dissidents.

Pierre Laval, leader of the French government from 1940 to 1944, known as the “Vichy government,” was dragged before a kangaroo court, sentenced for high treason and executed by firing squad. The leader of the Dutch National Socialist Movement (NSB), Anton Mussert, was also sentenced to death for high treason by a kangaroo court and shot. Both were among the small number of European political leaders killed for what countless others had done also but were not punished for. Other notable figures were Norway’s Vidkun Quisling and Slovakia’s Jozef Tiso. Belgium’s most hunted “collaborator,” Léon Degrelle, who made it to general in the Waffen-SS, managed to escape to Spain at the very last moment.

Neither collaboration nor treason were well-defined from a legal point of view. Moreover, with a consistent application of the definitions observed by the authorities, the courts and their minions, so many people would have had to be shot, thrown in jail or sentenced to do forced labor that all of “liberated” Europe would have become a depopulated hellhole. Nevertheless, on this point (as well as on most other issues) both the collective Western historical narrative as well as the various national historical narratives have duly constructed and maintained a version of history that does not take into account any nuances.

What official history (such as taught in the educational system and presented in the media) fails to mention is that some of the most enthusiastic “collaborators” were left untouched after 1945. The reason? They were usually quite rich, powerful and well-connected, such as Frits Fentener van Vlissingen, the single most powerful Dutch businessman, sitting at the boards of all the major Dutch firms. He was appointed president of the state commission set up to purge Dutch business from Nazi collaborators (!).

Now, as regards those war years when the Germans occupied much of Europe, what precisely was collaboration, what was considered treason, what high treason?

Collaboration was considered to be doing work for the Germans, doing business with them, or even having an affair with a German soldier. However, after France the Netherlands and Belgium all surrendered to Germany in the spring of 1940, under international law (the recognized rules of warfare) the Germans then actually constituted completely legitimate power there, albeit with local variations. This meant that it was absolutely neither illegal nor morally wrong to work for or with them and to do business with them. Soon after their governments and armies had surrendered, and their governments and many political leaders had fled to England, Europeans under German occupation realized that in order to live they needed to work, and that often meant working for and with the Germans. Millions of others from those occupied nations went to work in Germany, where salaries and labor conditions were better. That is until the English and Americans began to bomb German cities.

Hundreds of thousands of Europeans joined the Wehrmacht and the SS. From Western Europe, these include 25,000 Dutch, 20,000 French and almost 20,000 Belgian SS volunteers. What few still fail to realize is that even joining the German armed forces did not constitute a clear-cut case of “collaborationism,” since many did so out of a genuine desire to fight communism. Many Europeans loathed Soviet communism and were prepared to risk their lives to prevent a Soviet takeover of Western Europe, which at some point seemed a very real possibility.

Ever since the postwar purges and wave of revenge, a core element of the official narrative has been that as the Germans left, all who had collaborated with them needed to be punished as a requisite for social and economic reconstruction. Anyone who takes the trouble to check the facts will conclude this is a fairy tale. Today the concepts of collaboration, treason and high treason are exclusively mentioned in connection with the German occupation during the Second World War. These are never mentioned with respect to other, comparable historical events, such as the French Revolution and Napoleonic Europe. Between 1793 and 1815, the French occupied much of Europe, enjoying widespread “collaboration” from all social levels of the occupied nations. Yet after Napoleon left the stage, no one in Europe was accused of collaboration, treason or high treason and no one was punished for it. The same goes for other wars in Europe during which a victorious enemy occupied a defeated nation, except the Second World War.

High treason is, of course, a special case, if only because by definition only a very small number of people are able to commit it. One has to have access to classified government info, or be physically near the highest levels of bureaucracy or government. After all, according to Roman Law, where the concept of perduellio (high treason) originated, it is an attempt to oust or kill the highest state officials and thus bring down the national government or the head of state. Treason in wartime is the act of doing things that are detrimental to one’s country, benefiting enemy interests. In peacetime it is doing things detrimental to one’s country, benefiting foreign interests.

If the theory and practice of postwar European treatment of collaborationists, traitors and high traitors were applied to present-day circumstances, what would the result be? Are there any suspects of high treason, treason or collaboration?

Well, yes there are! In the first place, anyone serving his country in a high or official national capacity should and is, in the first place, to be expected to defend the interests of his own nation and his fellow citizens, that is, the people he represents. Acting NATO Gensec Mark Rutte, for instance, when he was prime minister of the Netherlands from 2010 to 2024. Rutte was also intimately associated with the World Economic Forum as a so-called Young Global Leader.

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More and reader's comments here.

A Mindful Moral Compass for Twenty-First Century Leadership: The Noble Eightfold Path

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Raison d’Etat: Richelieu’s Grand Strategy During the Thirty Years’ War

Morality in Geopolitics

By George Friedman at Geopolical Futures on February 26, 2025

The negotiations over a peaceful resolution to the Ukraine war bring to light an uncomfortable truth: In geopolitics, ethics tend to be coincidental, not causal. There are those who argue that it is morally necessary to universally and absolutely oppose aggression in all forms. For them, accommodating Russia would be a moral failure. But for those who value geopolitical imperatives over moral imperatives, accommodation isn’t only preferable – it’s just.

The outcome of this – the struggle between geopolitics and morality – is national policy, however discordant it may be. The geopolitical is built around national interest – the safety and the well-being of the nation. The geopolitical sees morality as subordinate to national interest, and to think otherwise is irrelevant or, worse, counterproductive. In the pursuit of geopolitical imperatives, morality is useful insofar as it binds the nation together culturally or subverts and dominates another nation.

Morality defines the good, and threats to the good, whatever it might be. A moral code is not the exclusive purview of any nation or society, and many, if not most, nations juggle various moral codes within their respective societies. Religion can influence these codes but is not always their point of origin. There are moral codes that frown on war and those that regard war as a moral necessity. Unsurprisingly, morality has been invoked to wage war on nations with different moral codes and even similar ones.

Geopolitics regards the nation as an absolute to be protected. National power is a necessary adjunct to this end. It is also necessary to uphold moral codes and to advance national interests using political, economic and military tools. Geopolitics understands that wars have been fought for moral reasons but argues that moral imperatives were the nation’s interests.

World War II was fought by nations with generally similar moral codes, but as those codes shifted, the war became as much a geopolitical enterprise as a moral one. This extended into the Cold War, which was seen as a fight between a coalition of liberal democracies and communism. Each side saw moral action in different ways and, to varying degrees, sought to convert the citizens of its opponents to its moral code. Some in the United States and Europe converted to Marxism, while others in Russia converted to liberal democracy, a political philosophy that evolved from Christian doctrine. Russia’s moral code was undermined by the failure of the Soviet Union to honor its promise to eliminate inequality, poverty and war. It was a moral and geopolitical collapse, caused in part by the subordination of geopolitics to morality.

During the Cold War, the West was not a moral concept but a geopolitical one. It comprised the European nations that had not been occupied by the Russians but were heavily dependent on the U.S., which revived or imposed its own moral code on Europe. It was a doctrine that originated in Europe during the Enlightenment. Liberal democracy held all men to be equal and to have equal legal rights. It did not guarantee equal economic outcomes. It guaranteed political rights, including freedom of speech and a free market. It did not guarantee political equality or democracy. Monarchs continued to rule after the Enlightenment, supported as it often was by the Catholic Church, which didn’t necessarily see equality in those terms. The governing moral principle was “Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s.” Protestantism was a revolt against the Catholic Church and the midwife to the Enlightenment, which, in turn, set the stage for republics to replace kingdoms, freeing individuals and challenging norms along the way.

Moralities tend to have two similarities. One is the need to convert the unconverted. The other is to crush those who refuse to convert. True liberal democracies are unique in that they don’t proselytize or see dissent as a threat. In them, dissent is crushed by popular wisdom. Liberal democracies do, however, generate factions that compete for political power and frequently seek to demonize and marginalize those who don’t agree with them. Repression is social, left in the hands of the public factions.

Nations are like individuals, filled as they are with lust and fear. They lust for prosperity and fear threats to prosperity. Regardless of their moral character, they will take all steps necessary to increase their wealth and power. World War II was a war against tyranny. But the Soviet Union was allowed to join the coalition of liberal democracies out of geopolitical necessity.

The moral claims of liberal democracy, like the moral claims of all tribes and nations, must be based on survival. It cannot be moral. Liberal democrats are troubled by the price that must be paid to be moral, for the price is immorality. Liberal democracies must ally with nations with differing moral codes when necessary, just as they did with the Soviet Union. To many in the West, this was an abomination. But they did what they knew to be unsavory because more was at stake than moral purity: Germany had the power to conquer other nations.

World War II proved it was better to avoid war than to wage it. That lesson was the foundation of the Cold War – geopolitics on the edge of war but never a world war. The moral nature of the nation mattered but was not decisive. Geopolitics avoids absolutes in favor of flexibility and moral relativity. It can accommodate what seems morally reprehensible. Geopolitics regards the moral absolute as dangerous to the national interest. Morality is not the sole domain of formal religions but a dimension of secularism alongside geopolitics. But the deep divide between what is right and what is necessary still defines the human condition.

This moral imperative relativity of geopolitics and the moral absoluteness of ethics make reconciliation difficult but not impossible. It falls to political structure to narrow the gap. The current argument over the absolutism of repelling aggression and the geopolitical understanding of accommodating the reality of Russo-American relations necessarily triggers a crisis between and within nations.

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