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This article appears in the January 27, 2009 issue of Executive Intelligence Review.

Parvus, Jabotinsky, and
London's Young Turks

Excerpted from "Cheney Revives Parvus 'Permanent War' Madness," EIR, Sept. 23, 2005. PDF version of this article included in PDF of Netanyahu's Godfather: How British Imperialists Created the Fascist Jabotinsky.

British agent Vladimir Jabotinsky's career would cross that of another of the most important operatives of the Bolshevik revolutionary epoch, Alexander Israel Helphand (a.k.a. "Parvus"). Both Jabotinsky and Parvus edited publications of the British/Venetian-spawned Young Turk movement, which helped instigate London's Balkan Wars and the overthrow of the Ottoman Empire—without which, the entire Anglo-French Sykes-Picot colonial scheme would not have been possible.

Like Jabotinsky, Parvus (1867-1924) came from an Odessa family steeped in the grain trade. By 1886, Helphand/Parvus had already become involved in the Okhrana-spawned Russian socialist scene, travelling to Switzerland to participate in the Emancipation of Labor group.

Once "Bloody Sunday" unleashed the revolutionary destabilizations in St. Petersburg, Parvus appeared on the scene, as a leading collaborator of Leon Trotsky and other leaders of the Petersburg Soviet. Parvus and Trotsky bought a liberal newspaper, Russkaya Gazeta, to rival the Bolshevik publication. It soon had a circulation of 500,000. Parvus and Trotsky turned the newspaper into a radical provocateur organ, much to the delight of the Okhrana, which would soon launch a police crackdown on the entire social democracy.

When the entire leadership of the Petersburg Soviet—including Trotsky—was rounded up and jailed in December 1905, Parvus escaped the police clutches, and next turned up, via Germany, in Constantinople, as a "journalist" covering the Young Turk rebellion against the Ottomans, a crucial prelude to the British-manipulated second Balkan War. It would be at this moment that Parvus's ties to the leading European "Venetian Party" factions—especially to British intelligence—would be publicly shown.

The Young Turks

In 1908, the Committee for Union and Progress, otherwise known as the Young Turks, carried out a military coup, overthrowing the Sultan and seizing power over the Ottoman Empire. Launching ethnic cleansing campaigns against all non-Turkic peoples, including Armenians, Greeks, and Bulgarians, the Young Turk regime played a pivotal role in provoking the 1912-13 Balkan Wars, through its brutality towards the minorities. By their own accounts, the Young Turks based their revolution on a version of Pan-Turkism that had been devised by an advisor to the Sultan in the 1860s who was, in fact, an agent of Britain's Lord Palmerston. The Young Turks also preached a rabid anti-Russian ideology, which was inspired by Wilfred Blunt, a top British Intelligence official, whose own ideas about playing an "Islamic card" to destroy Russia predated those of Britain's Bernard Lewis by a full century.

The actual founder of the Young Turk movement was an Italian Freemason and grain trader named Emmanuel Carasso. Jewish by birth, Carasso had been a leading member of the Italian Masonic lodge in Salonika, called the Macedonia Risorta Lodge. Virtually all of the members of the Young Turk leadership were lodge members. The forerunner of the Macedonia Risorta Lodge was founded by a follower of another Palmerston agent and revolutionary provocateur, Giuseppi Mazzini.

Carasso was a leading financier of the entire Young Turk insurrection, and during the Balkan Wars, he was not only the head of Balkan intelligence operations for the Young Turks; he was in charge of all food supplies for the Ottomans during World War I, a lucrative business which he shared with Parvus.

Carasso also financed a number of newspapers and other propaganda outlets for the Young Turks, among them, the newspaper The Young Turk, which was edited by none other than Vladimir Jabotinsky. Another of Carasso's "business" associates, Parvus, became economics editor of another Young Turk journal, The Turkish Homeland.

The Young Turk operation was headed, from London, by Aubrey Herbert, a grandson of one of Mazzini's controllers, who himself died while leading revolutionary mobs in Italy in 1848. Aubrey Herbert headed all British Intelligence operations in the Middle East during the period of World War I, and no less a figure than Lawrence of Arabia identified Herbert as the actual head of the Young Turk insurrection.

Emmanuel Carasso's pivotal role in the Young Turk movement and the resulting Balkan Wars of 1912-13, is of significance from one additional standpoint. Carasso was a protégé and business partner of Volpi di Misurata, the leading Venetian banker of the early 20th Century, who not only sponsored the Young Turk insurrection, but also promoted the Black Shirt takeover of Rome and went on to run the Mussolini Fascist regime from his various posts as Minister of Finance (1925-28), member of the Grand Council of Fascism, president of the Fascist Confederation of Industrialists, and, most important, as the chief public representative of a group of aristocrats around Count Piero Foscari, of the ancient Venetian dogal family.

The Venetian banker Volpi was closely allied with City of London financiers throughout. And the Young Turks, once they took power, made no secret of their London ties. In 1909 the Ottoman Navy was put under the command of a British admiral; the British Royal Family's own banker, Ernst Cassel, established and managed the National Bank of Turkey; and British officials advised the Ministry of Finance, the Interior Ministry, and the Ministry of Justice. The Young Turks also denounced and blocked further construction of the Berlin-Baghdad Railroad.

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