Art as a Window
Seeing outside the cube.
Looking out a Window
It is very possible, once one has studied the history of false flag operations, and the case after case cover ups of major political assassinations to come to the conclusion that there must be some over-arching controlled directions in these things, and thus a single centralised control heirarchy. To this one can add Cecil Rhodes' "kindergarten" and start running away into tenuous territory.
I have no problem with people doing that and publishing whatever they want, with the usual exceptions of deliberate persecution of minorities for ideologically perverse reasons, or incitement to violence when a potentially useful legal system exists to redress grievances. Of course, there are other obvious exceptions to various categories. Can one use violence to defend oneself against an already aggressive opponent? Yes. The question is, are you skilled enough or equipped enough to disarm them and then be able to pass the case onto a competent legal authority? Or, is your only way out their death? Moral philosophy is a depleted Uranium picnic area in southern Iraq.
I have a great scientific interest in boundary conditions. We know from Danish female geophyicist Inge Leaman's 1936 publication P' that the earth has a solid core. The scientific consensus is that outside that is a liquid core, composed similarly of dominantly Iron and a bit of Nickel. When shown in a hypothetical book "The Structure of Earth" these are shown as circles (representing spheres). But, there must be constant interaction at the boundary, and especially when large magnitude earthquakes insert energy across this boundary.
Boundary Conditions
I have just re-read the English version of Stieg Larsson's "The Girl with the Dragon Tatoo". Its a "ripping yarn" and is worth your time, especially if you, as I, have not watched the later film. A film is never a "translation" of a novel, in the same way as a shrub is never a translation of a forest. (I accept that the English translation is a copse of that forest).
It's his sequel I wish to ruminate upon. A little flash occurred to me, that this book (as I am sure are many others) is a nice allegory for the geopolitical power structures as I feel them. It is by no means a "perfect" allegory for my fuzzy feeling of geopolitics, but it has enough in it that I wish to explore my thoughts.
The Girl Who Played with Fire
Go read some other summaries of the plot. I'll try to hyper condense (quoting myself):
Our heroine is seriously emotionally fucked up, almost entirely due to abuse from both general and instituational society, and we are talking about long term serious abuse from just about everywhere. Having developed a very sharp, principled, uncompromising though at times variable morality, during her involvement with the main story of the first book she become insanely rich defrauding the master defrauder villain. After a year abroad, with no goodbye's her morality is confronted. It really is a "growing up" novel exploring the nature of friendship. trust and loyalty, amongst a zillion other topics. A very complex interplay involving numerous elements of society move from her being the absolutely natural major suspect in a triple murder to a different conclusion.
The dominant part of the book on which I wish to focus is the major part of it; the interplay between the different social and institutional elements as the narrative progresses. It is this in which I found an echo of my understanding of the power forces in geopolitics.
The Hidden Belly of Geopolitics
Both this, and the previous novel provide wonderful characters and character development. This is a very strong part of both novels, but is not germane to my ruminations, so they are ignored.
The novel explores the interplay of power relationships between a very wide array of power institutions; law enforcement, justice, military intelligence, media, social society, and parliament. During the main narrative between these institutions it is individual players that are identified, but it is the higher nature of the interrelations between them which I believe the author is trying to illuminate. Its about entrapment and coersion, with opportunistic "shots across the bow".
Entrapment and coersion, with the odd threat, is what's happening at the personal level of power. At the national level, there are other concerns like military capability, influence of neighbors, and most importantly trade relations; aka territorial control and the financial stability (and raw material, manufacturing, technology and defense command structure) to maintain it.
At that "personal" level you get crap like Eppstein and entrapping politician for intelligence services. At the higher level you get the IMF entrapping nations in national debt. Of course you get economies tied up in building things to kill people (called "weapons"), and forcing other nations to buy these products. Alliances these days have nothing to do with political systems, ideals (or "human rights"), but the arms trade. Straight up and simple. The drugs trade is what funds the "covert operations". See, "Opium Wars" as a preface to where this will go. If you're curious, read Alfred McCoy. If you want to deep dive into "intelligence agencies" look into the USA’s recruitment of Gehlen post WWII.
A Kaleidoscope
My call? I haven't put a fixed hierarchy on the interesting interactions. Really, there is none; its a process. They change over time.
But, I think the top of it all is finance. The Bank of International Settlements, Central Banks, and very importantly the Investment Banks (e.g IMF). That is the highest lever of power. Then comes military capability and military technology. Then we get a third tier of often moving influences, national infrastructure, media, public opinion etc..
Time turns the tube, and we see things move.
Sources
Elon Musk, on Twitter, during the Bolivian coup: "We coup wherever we want to.” So says he who needs access to the worlds largest Lithium reserves to build batteries for for his electric car company.
You look it up. But, I'll give Musk a dime for the rhyme.