There’s nothing more intriguing than a glimpse inside the mind of those who have declared themselves your enemies. I’m reading right now a fascinating book called Drunk on Power, by Heinrich Pfeifer — a fervent anti-Communist who fell in with the Nazis and rose high in their ranks. The evils he saw his colleagues commit as early as 1933 led him to turn against the movement, secretly. His Catholic faith wouldn’t let him countenance the Nazis’ brutal tactics, almost ten years before the Holocaust started.

He contacted British and French intelligence, and spent the war years rising ever higher in Nazi circles, while secretly feeding vital information to the Allies. At the war’s end, he wrote a memoir exposing the squalid, bitter internal struggles and secret evils of the Nazis.

The book proved almost impossible to publish, even in Switzerland. Soon after it appeared, pro-Nazis found Pfeiffer and murdered him, then bought up all the copies. Except for one, which a scholar doggedly hunted down, translated and published. I’m only part-way in, but so far it’s incredibly gripping.

For something a little lighter, a satirical glimpse inside an equal evil, I can point to the film The Death of Stalin. It shows the paranoid, stifling atmosphere of the atheist tyranny that Marxist ideology creates, in the wake of the great murderer’s unexpected death. Steve Buscemi’s star turn as the goofball Nikita Khrushchev alone makes it unforgettable. (This R-rated film from 2017 is not for the kids, needless to say!)

The Cracks Dividing the Uniparty That Rules Us

Along similar lines, I was fascinated to find online a piece by a current villain, the globalist population controller (and Pope Francis whisperer) Jeffrey Sachs. You might remember him as one of the Western advisors who helped ruin Russia in the 1990s, advising its Yelstin-era rulers on how to sell all their assets to crooked oligarchs for pennies on the dollar.

Sachs’ essay surprised me, however. It showed the cracks dividing the factions among our ruling elites, the tension lines in the Uniparty that dominates America, from the “Squad Democrats” on the far left, to the Swamp Republicans on the center left. (Everything to the right of that is “Christian Nationalist” toxic racism and “insurrectionism.”)

The leftist Dems see America as almost intrinsically evil, a ravenous “colonial/settler” wolf prone to racist genocide and extractive capitalism. The Swamp Republicans differ. Instead, they view our country as a battered and dying old cow that still has some milk left in it, in the form of highly lucrative military contracts and salaries at companies such as Boeing (which turned Nikki Haley from a cashless ex-diplomat into a multimillionaire). And they plan to squeeze out every last drop.

Jeffrey Sachs Channels Patrick Buchanan

Sachs is outraged at the militarist wing of the Uniparty, and he vents his dudgeon in a piece that is mostly worthy of the great Patrick Buchanan. Indeed, Sachs seems almost as if he’s been reading Pat’s prophetic books. Sachs writes:

On the surface, US foreign policy seems to be utterly irrational. The US gets into one disastrous war after another — Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Ukraine, and Gaza. In recent days, the US stands globally isolated in its support of Israel’s genocidal actions against the Palestinians, voting against a UN General Assembly resolution for a Gaza ceasefire backed by 153 countries with 89% of the world population, and opposed by just the US and 9 small countries with less than 1% of the world population.

In the past 20 years, every major US foreign policy objective has failed. The Taliban returned to power after 20 years of US occupation of Afghanistan. Post-Saddam Iraq became dependent on Iran. Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad stayed in power despite a CIA effort to overthrow him. Libya fell into a protracted civil war after a US-led NATO mission overthrew Muammar Gaddafi. Ukraine was bludgeoned on the battlefield by Russia in 2023 after the US secretly scuttled a peace agreement between Russia and Ukraine in 2022.

How the War Party Squeezes the Milk Out of the Cow

Now let’s not get hung up on the Stupid. Look past Sachs’ morally idiotic comment about Israel — which if it’s committing genocide in Gaza is remarkably bad at its job. (Indeed, I’ve argued here that Israel probably does need to relocate the residents of Gaza who support the genocidal Hamas, as the Croat and Serb governments mutually expelled their restive minorities in the 1990s, with U.S. approval.)

But keep reading, and you’ll see the pieces fall into place:

Despite these remarkable and costly debacles, one following the other, the same cast of characters has remained at the helm of US foreign policy for decades, including Joe Biden, Victoria Nuland, Jake Sullivan, Chuck Schumer, Mitch McConnell, and Hillary Clinton.

What gives?

The puzzle is solved by recognizing that American foreign policy is not at all about the interests of the American people. It is about the interests of the Washington insiders, as they chase campaign contributions and lucrative jobs for themselves, staff, and family members. In short, US foreign policy has been hacked by big money.

As a result, the American people are losing big. The failed wars since 2000 have cost them around $5 trillion in direct outlays, or around $40,000 per household. Another $2 trillion or so will be spent in the coming decades on veterans’ care. Beyond the costs directly incurred by Americans, we should also recognize the horrendously high costs suffered abroad, in millions of lives lost and trillions of dollars of destruction to property and nature in the war zones.

The costs continue to mount. US Military-linked outlays in 2024 will come to around $1.5 trillion, or roughly $12,000 per household, if we add the direct Pentagon spending, the budgets of the CIA and other intelligence agencies, the budget of the Veteran’s Administration, the Department of Energy nuclear weapons program, the State Department’s military-linked “foreign aid” (such as to Israel), and other security-related budget lines. Hundreds of billions of dollars are money down the drain, squandered in useless wars, overseas military bases, and a wholly unnecessary arms build-up that brings the world closer to WWIII.

Republicans Risking World War III to Help al Qaeda Persecute Christians

Can we really argue with any of this? I remember watching the 2016 foreign policy debate among the Republican contenders. Apart from Rand Paul, Ted Cruz, and Donald Trump they all agreed that the U.S. should be ready to shoot down Russian planes, risking World War III, in order to help the “moderate rebels” take over Syria. Apart from the real chance of nuclear Armageddon (but who am I to quibble), this stance had several problems.

First, the rebels in question whom the Swamp Republicans wanted to risk World War III to support weren’t moderate, but were officially linked to al Qaeda. Remember them? They were the ones who crashed planes into the World Trade Center, which according to George W. Bush was just as bad as the demonstrations on January 6. That didn’t stop John McCain from flying to Syria and personally vouching for these jihadi extremists.

Second, Syria is home to more than a million Christians, whose churches were thriving when most of our ancestors were worshiping rocks and trees. The “moderate rebels” pledged to persecute those Christians, who huddled for protection under the rule of the secular dictator Russia supported. So toppling that regime would have caused a real genocide of Christians — as real as the one George W. Bush and Barack Obama yawned at in Iraq.

I welcome Jeffrey Sachs to the coalition of the unwilling. His insights about the callous greed and recklessness of our elites are intriguing as Pfeifer’s disclosures about the SS, and Khrushchev’s famous speech denouncing the crimes of Josef Stalin.

This article has been updated to correct a historical mistake. 

John Zmirak is a senior editor at The Stream and author or co-author of ten books, including The Politically Incorrect Guide to Immigration and The Politically Incorrect Guide to Catholicism. He is co-author with Jason Jones of “God, Guns, & the Government.”