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Frederick William Engdahl | |
---|---|
Born | (1944-08-09) August 9, 1944 (age 80) Minneapolis, Minnesota, United States |
Occupation | Writer |
Website | williamengdahl.com |
Frederick William Engdahl (born August 9, 1944) is an American writer based in Germany. He identifies himself as an "economic researcher, historian and freelance journalist." He is known for his views that the September 11 attacks, the Arab Spring and the theory of global warming are all conspiracies. He has written extensively for the LaRouche movement, Russia Today and GlobalResearch.
Early life and education
Born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, United States, Engdahl is the son of F. William Engdahl Sr., and Ruth Aalund (b. Rishoff). Engdahl grew up in Texas and earned a degree in politics from Princeton University in 1966 (BA) followed by graduate study in comparative economics at the University of Stockholm from 1969 to 1970. He then worked as an economist and freelance journalist in New York and in Europe.
Career
Engdahl began writing about oil politics with the first oil shock in the early 1970s. He has also been a long-time associate of the LaRouche movement and served as an economics editor for LaRouche's Executive Intelligence Review.
His first book, entitled A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order, discusses the alleged roles of Zbigniew Brzezinski and George Ball and of the USA in the 1979 overthrow of the Shah of Iran, which was meant to manipulate oil prices and to stop Soviet expansion. Engdahl says that Brzezinski and Ball used the Islamic Balkanization model proposed by Bernard Lewis. In 2007, he completed Seeds of Destruction: The Hidden Agenda of Genetic Manipulation, in which he criticized Monsanto's strategy with GMO seeds, such as Roundup Ready soybeans. He has also written for newsmagazines such as the Asia Times.
Engdahl is a contributor to the Global Research website of the conspiracist Centre for Research on Globalization, the Russian website New Eastern Outlook, and Veterans Today (on whose advisory board he sits). He is a regular contributor to RT (formerly Russia Today) and Voice of Russia. He is on the scientific committee of the far right journals Geopolitica, alongside Michel Chossudovsky and others, and Eurasia, alongside Aleksandr Dugin and others. He was a keynote speaker at the conference "Geopolitics of Multipolarity", held at Moscow State University in 2011, alongside Dugin.
Personal life
William Engdahl has been married since 1987 and has been living for more than two decades near Frankfurt am Main, Germany.
Beliefs
George Soros conspiracies and color revolutions
Main article: George Soros conspiracy theoriesEngdahl has written of the alleged secret power of Jewish financiers such as George Soros and the Rothschilds. Author Michael Wohlraich identifies Engdahl as the first US populariser of Soros conspiracy theories, noting that he wrote in the Executive Intelligence Review in 1996 that "The most important of such 'Jews who are not Jews,' are the Rothschilds, who launched Soros’s career. Soros is American only in his passport." This has been described by the anti-fascist group Unicorn Riot as "an example of the anti-Semitic "rootless cosmopolitan" trope. Similarly, historian Ivan Kalmar writes that it is "not clear where the Soros Myth began... A likely candidate for the dubious honour of originating it is the Executive Intelligence Review (EIR)... An article in the 1 November 1996 edition accuses the financier of manipulating the world’s finances in partnership with the Rothschilds, who ‘launched Soros’s career’".
In 2008, Engdahl alleged in GlobalResearch that the 2008 Tibetan uprising against Chinese rule was engineered by the Soros family and US government - "the American government, specifically the US State Department, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), the ‘CIA's Freedom House’ and the Trace Foundation, run by Andrea Soros Colombel, daughter of the financier George Soros, orchestrated an ‘ultra-high risk geopolitical game with Beijing by fanning the flames of violence in Tibet’ through Tibetan NGOs in exile" - an analysis taken up by Chinese media but derided as "‘insinuations’ and ‘simplistic arguments based on “guilt by association”'" by Tibet expert Tsering Shakya. More recently, the geography lecturer Alexander Reid Ross wrote that Engdahl had posited a conspiracy theory that Soros' “oily hands” were involved in the Serbian political group Otpor. Engdahl also alleged that the Euromaidan uprising in Ukraine was the well-orchestrated work of a US-funded organization with its origins in Belgrade.
Abiogenic petroleum
See also: Abiogenic petroleum originEngdahl stated in 2007 that he had come to believe that petroleum is of geological origin, a view contrary to the scientific understanding that it is of biological origin. He believes oil to be produced from carbon, by forces of heat and pressure deep underground. Engdahl calls himself an "ex peak oil believer", stating that peak oil is actually a political phenomenon known as petrodollar warfare.
Skepticism of global warming
Engdahl argued in 2009 that the problem of global warming is much exaggerated. He claims that global warming is merely a "scare" and a "thinly veiled attempt to misuse climate to argue for a new Malthusian reduction of living standards for the majority of the world while a tiny elite gains more power."
Bill Gates/vaccine conspiracy theories
See also: Big Pharma conspiracy theoriesA 2010 article by Engdahl, published by websites including Prison Planet and Voltaire Network and later cited by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Alex Jones, was key to the spread of conspiracy theories about Bill Gates promoting vaccines as part of a secret programme to control population: "it avers that Gates, Buffett, and Turner are driving a ‘Global Eugenics agenda,’ while Gates himself ‘expects vaccines to be used to reduce population growth.’"
Greater Middle East Project theories
According to Engdahl in 2014, the ultimate goal of the US is to take the resources of Africa and Middle East under military control to block economic growth in China and Russia.
Turkey and the CIA role in global politics
Engdahl believes that the CIA is behind several historical revolutions, including the overthrow of the Shah of Iran in 1979 and the 2011 Egyptian revolution. In 2016 an article by Engdahl circulated widely in Turkey which alleged that the 2016 Turkish coup d'état attempt was engineered by Zbigniew Brzezinski, based on an article in by Brzezinki supposedly published in The National Interest but in fact fabricated by Engdahl. Al-Monitor described how in August 2016 Engdahl told a right-wing Russian think tank that "Former vice chairman of the National Intelligence Council of the CIA, Graham E. Fuller, was on Princes' Islands, 20 minutes from Istanbul, the entire night of the coup, monitoring developments until the coup collapsed" - when in fact Fuller was in Washington. Al-Monitor describe Engdahl's intervention as part of a collaborative Russian-Turkish disinformation campaign.
Selected publications
- A Classical KGB Disinformation Campaign: Who Killed Olof Palme?, with Goran Haglund, William Jones, and Paolo Serri. EIR Special Report (1986).
- A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order. London: Pluto (2004), revised ed. ISBN 074532309X; Progressive Press (2012). ISBN 1615774920.
- Seeds of Destruction. The Hidden Agenda of Genetic Manipulation. Centre for Research on Globalization (2007). ISBN 0973714727.
- Full Spectrum Dominance: Totalitarian Democracy in the New World Order. Boxboro, Mass.: Third Millennium Press (2009). ISBN 978-0979560866; Progressive Press (2011). ISBN 1615776540.
- Gods of Money: Wall Street and the Death of the American Century. Wiesbaden: edition.engdahl (2010). ISBN 978-3981326314; Progressive Press (2011). ISBN 1615778055.
- Myths, Lies and Oil Wars. Wiesbaden: edition.engdahl (2012). ISBN 978-3981326369.
- Target: China -- How Washington and Wall Street Plan to Cage the Asian Dragon. San Diego, Calif.: Progressive Press (2014). German and Chinese editions (2013).
- The Lost Hegemon: Whom the Gods Would Destroy. Wiesbaden: mine.books (2016).
- Manifest Destiny: Democracy as Cognitive Dissonance. Wiesbaden: mine.books (2018). ISBN 978-3981723731.
References
- Staff writer (Jun. 2008). "The Seed Barons: How Big Ag, Big Oil & Big Government are Hijacking the World's Food Supply" (interview). Acres U.S.A.: A Voice for Eco-Agriculture, vol. 38, no. 6. ISSN 1076-4968.
- ^ Tsering Shakya, The Gulf Between Tibet and Its Exiles, Far Eastern Economic Review, volume 171, number 4, May 2008
- ^ Akyol, Mustafa (6 September 2016). "Did Zbigniew Brzezinski blame CIA for Turkey's coup?". Hürriyet Daily News. Retrieved 12 June 2024.
- ^ "Die für den Westen sprechen". дekoder (in German). 19 January 2016. Retrieved 12 June 2024.
- Susan Welsh (Sep. 11, 1999). Masthead. Executive Intelligence Review, vol. 26, no. 36. Full issue. Accessed Oct. 3, 2019.
- ^ ""Eat the Children": Decades of Far-Right LaRouche Provocations Renewed". UNICORN RIOT. 2019-10-05. Retrieved 2021-07-09.
- Corporation, Rand (2018). "Russia's Use of Media and Information Operations in Turkey" (PDF). Retrieved 2023-04-04.
- Kirchick, James (22 July 2014). "Inside the Bizarro World of 'Russia Today'". Time. Retrieved 12 August 2018.
- Sanchez, W. Alejandro, "The Russian Media in Latin America." Archived 2021-07-19 at the Wayback Machine (2015). Research Publications. 4. https://digitalcommons.fiu.edu/jgi_research/4
- "Where Foreign "Experts" and "Political Scientists" on Russian Television Come From". SRB Podcast. 2016-01-05. Retrieved 2021-07-19.
- "Comitato Scientifico | Geopolitica // La Rivista dell'IsAG". Archived from the original on 2012-01-12. Retrieved 2012-01-12.
- Schechowtsow, Anton (21 February 2014). "Ukraine: Das Netzwerk der Euromaidan-Verleumder". Die Zeit (in German). Retrieved 12 June 2024.
- "Comitato Scientifico". eurasia-rivista.org (in Italian). 2014-11-04. Archived from the original on 2014-11-04. Retrieved 2021-07-19.
- ^ Schechowtsow, Anton (21 February 2014). "Ukraine: Das Netzwerk der Euromaidan-Verleumder". Die Zeit (in German). Retrieved 12 June 2024.
- "ЕВРАЗИЯ :: Многополярность наносит ответный удар". archive.is (in Russian). 2017-12-25. Archived from the original on 2017-12-25. Retrieved 2021-07-19.
{{cite web}}
: CS1 maint: bot: original URL status unknown (link) - "Foreign propagandists of the Russian Federation". OSINT-аґенція Molfar. 28 April 2023. Retrieved 12 June 2024.
- "Archived copy" (PDF). larouchepub.com. Archived from the original (PDF) on 31 May 2015. Retrieved 12 January 2022.
{{cite web}}
: CS1 maint: archived copy as title (link) - Wolraich, Michael (2010). Blowing smoke : why the right keeps serving up whack-job fantasies about the plot to euthanize grandma, outlaw Christmas, and turn junior into a raging homosexual. Cambridge, Mass: Da Capo Press. ISBN 978-0-306-81937-7. OCLC 668208755.
- Kalmar, Ivan (14 March 2020). "Islamophobia and anti-antisemitism: the case of Hungary and the 'Soros plot'". Patterns of Prejudice. 54 (1–2): 182–198. doi:10.1080/0031322X.2019.1705014. ISSN 0031-322X.
- Topgyal, Tsering (2011). "Insecurity Dilemma and the Tibetan Uprising in 2008". Journal of Contemporary China. 20 (69): 183–203. doi:10.1080/10670564.2011.541627. ISSN 1067-0564.
William Engdahl, 'Why Washington plays "Tibet roulette" with China', China Daily, (16 April 2008). This article was originally posted on the website of the Canadian Think Tank 'Centre for Research on Globalisation' (CRG). Immediately, it was splashed all over the Chinese media. Well-known Chinese journalist Ching Cheong peddled this argument, almost verbatim in: Ching Cheong, 'The crimson revolution's true colours', Straits Times, (22 April 2008). Engdahl's original piece has since been taken off both his personal and CRG websites, possibly due to Tsering Shakya's detailed refutation in: Tsering Shakya, 'The gulf between Tibet and its exiles', Far Eastern Economic Review (FEER), (2 May 2008).
- Alexander Reid Ross (2019-11-08). "Fooling the Nation: Extremism and the Pro-Russia Disinformation Ecosystem". b2o: an online journal. Retrieved 2021-07-19.
- Glasby, Geoffrey P. (2006). "Abiogenic origin of hydrocarbons: an historical overview" (PDF). Resource Geology. 56 (1): 83–96. Bibcode:2006ReGeo..56...83G. doi:10.1111/j.1751-3928.2006.tb00271.x. S2CID 17968123. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2008-02-26. Retrieved 2008-02-17.
- Engdahl, F. William (September 25, 2007). "Editorial: "Confessions of an 'Ex' Peak Oil Believer"". Retrieved 2009-02-08.
- ^ ""Global Warming or Global Freezing: is the ice really melting?" by F. William Engdahl. FSO Editorial 09/24/2009". www.financialsense.com. Archived from the original on 2009-09-27. Retrieved 2009-09-25.
- Siraki, Arby Ted; Mohammad, Malek H. (3 April 2023). "Bill Gates and the 'new normal' COVID-19 conspiracy theories: 'it's a new thing' or nothing new under the sun?". Journal for Cultural Research. 27 (2): 136–153. doi:10.1080/14797585.2023.2207129. ISSN 1479-7585.
- Engdahl, F. William; Zhen, Wang (2014-04-03). "The Rise of China and World Order: An Interview with F. William Engdahl". International Critical Thought. 4 (2): 131–141. doi:10.1080/21598282.2014.906536. ISSN 2159-8282. S2CID 143691671.
- Costello, Katherine (2018). Russia̓s Use of Media and Information Operations in Turkey: Implications for the United States (Technical report). JSTOR resrep19906. Retrieved 12 June 2024.
- "Turks accuse CIA of engineering failed coup". Al-Monitor: The Pulse of the Middle East. 2017-12-03. Retrieved 2021-07-19.