Dear Reader,

I hope that you had a wonderful day and many great things were happening for You in the last two weeks. Although there are many ugly things in our world we should never forget that there are also many beautiful things day in, day out around us.

Today it’s time for my second newsletter and I want to explain the unusual story behind the Lost Hegemon book cover design. The Lost Hegemon is my newest book, an international bestseller and full of insights about:

• How the Pentagon and CIA use radical Islam as an instrument to control world energy
• The true history of al Qaeda and its successor Islamic State
• How Washington backs a death cult called Muslim Brotherhood to control world oil
• The real background to ‘Holy War’ against China and Russia
• Why the US-ISIS strategy cannot succeed

In explaining the unusual story behind the cover I want to share the process I went through in settling on this final design. Please enjoy the reading!

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            The first challenge I faced, together with my dear friend and also graphic artist, Antje Abisch, in creating a meaningful cover image, was to feel right with the title of the book. The book content had largely been written and it took three attempts before I finally felt good with the final title, The Lost Hegemon: Whom the gods would destroy. Why that title and why this cover?

            The content of the book itself, as you might recall from the first newsletter, Author’s Foreward, traces the relationship of US Government agencies–primarily the CIA, State Department and Pentagon–with what is euphemistically called “political Islam,” better said, terrorism with an Islamic veil. It traces the complex relationship between an organization born under suspicious circumstances in 1928 in Egypt called the Muslim Brotherhood and the agencies of the United States Government.

            The book goes on to describe the ensuing discovery by the then-fledgling US Central Intelligence Agency in the early 1950’s in Munich, Germany, of that Muslim Brotherhood. They were a group of seasoned ferociously anti-communist Muslim Islamic terrorists. They had been recruited during the Second World War into special Islamic SS Brigades, Handschar, by the leading figures of the Muslim Brotherhood then in political exile in Berlin.

            The Muslim Handschar Brigadists were recruited and led by the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, a senior member of the secret Muslim Brothers. Al-Husseini collaborated with the dreaded Nazi SS head, Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler, the man entrusted by Hitler with extermination of Jews, gypsies and other enemies of the Reich. In some instances the Grand Mufti was even more radical in demanding extermination of Jews in Eastern Europe than Himmler himself on occasion. In his later memoirs, al-Hussieni states unabashedly,

“Our fundamental condition for cooperating with Germany was a free hand to eradicate every last Jew from Palestine and the Arab world. I asked Hitler for an explicit undertaking to allow us to solve the Jewish problem in a manner befitting our national and racial aspirations and according to the scientific methods innovated by Germany in the handling of its Jews.”

Grand Mufti Al-Hussieni meets with Hitler in Berlin in 1943.

            Beginning the early 1950’s as the Cold war with the Soviet Union was in full bloom, the CIA made what was to be a fateful move to bring that outlawed Muslim Brotherhood leadership out of Egypt and into exile in Saudi Arabia.

            There began a marriage made in Hell–fundamentalist Bedouin Salafist Islam known as Sunni Wahhabism and the secret death cult called the Muslim Brotherhood. With unlimited Saudi oil money, the Brotherhod began a worldwide expansion into Pakistan, Afghanistan and other Sunni Islam regions. By the end of the 1970’s in Pakistan they were building one of the best-financed terror organizations in history, later named Al Qaeda or The Base. The Saudi Wahhabist Muslim Brother who was picked by the CIA and by the head of the Saudi General Intelligence Directorate, Prince Turki Al Faisal, was a scion of one of the most wealthy Saudi families. His name was Osama bin Laden.

            I have traced the origins of the Islamic State (IS) or in Arabic, DAESH,  previously known as the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), itself previously known as Al Qaeda in Iraq and Syria, to Afghan Mujahideen recruited for the CIA to wage its covert wars after the collapse of the Soviet Union in former Soviet and oil-rich Azerbaijan, in Bosnia, in Russian autonomous Chechnya and across the Caucasus and beyond.

            In the 1990s that Washington strategy of using the Muslim Brotherhood offshoots to wage their dirty wars seemed to be working brilliantly. The United States could claim innocence as the newly-declared Russian Federation was thrown into the chaos of internal terror wars in Chechnya and Yeltsin-era economic chaos and collapse.

            By 2011 and the launching of the Arab Spring regime change destabilizations, under the tenure of then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, it became clear that the war faction in the United States was using the Muslim Brotherhood secret organizations across the oil-rich Arab world to bring those lands and their oilfields–Egypt, Libya, Syria, Iraq, Bahrain and even Kuwait and Saudi Arabia itself–into direct USA military control. In Egypt they briefly succeeded bringing Muslim Brother member, Mohammed Morsi, in as President. The Obama Administration and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton were fully backing the Muslim Brotherhood as “their” surrogates.

            Yet in the course of events since 2013, it became increasingly clear that Washington’s bold strategy of the Arab Spring and weaponizing their trusted Muslim Brotherhood to secure that aim of oil control, was a manifest failure. With the entry of Russia into the Syria battle in September, 2015 it became starkly obvious to the thinking world that Washington’s “war on ISIS” in Syria was a war for and with ISIS against Syria’s Bashar al Assad. The Washington “democratic” Emperor had no clothes.

            Everywhere by the early days of 2016, Washington’s Islamic Terrorism game was a failure. The Saudi monarchy was becoming estranged and distrustful of Washington as never since the alliance began in 1945. Israel, another trusted US “vassal” in the Mideast, was distancing from the US Obama Administration. Russia and China, far from being disrupted by the CIA’s Islamic terror in Chechnya, Xinjiang and elsewhere, were forging a strategic partnership to resist that US-backed Islam-named terror.

            The Hegemon, the United States that emerged in 1990 as sole Superpower, was by 2016 truly “the lost Hegemon.” She was increasingly unable to find a winning strategy to expand its global hegemony. Everywhere the sole hegemon of 1990 was losing world power, losing influence, losing even its soft power. Its financial system was in ruins after the crisis of 2007 and still had not recovered nine years after. Its economy had been outsourced to the low-cost regions of Asia and elsewhere.

This lost hegemony is the significance of the very feint, fading grey color on white of the main title, The Lost Hegemon.

            Then Antje and I, after much discussion, decided to add an American flag to indicate immediately, visually, to the new reader that the hegemon meant was the United States. We deliberately chose a very ragged, battered almost destroyed American flag. It allegedly had been recovered in the rubble of the downed World Trade towers in September 11, 2001.

            The flag beside the title had a double significance. After the events of September 11, 2001 the United States Congress began to effectively tear up the US Constitution’s Bill of Rights, passing Orwellian laws with names like the Patriots’ Act, the Homeland Security Act, the USA Freedom Act, which among other things allowed the Government agencies to conduct roving wiretaps, searches of business records, and conducting surveillance of “lone wolves”—individuals suspected of terrorist-related activities not linked to terrorist groups. President Obama signed into law a bill permitting  indefinite detention without charge or trial, a clear violation of the US Constitution’s Bill of Rights. Powers of Government, including of the NSA spy agency, were expanded to an unprecedented degree, turning any vestige of American democracy under an order of law into what was becoming a de facto police state.

Most Americans realized not what was happening. They were fear-struck, one might say even traumatized after the events of 911. Under that collective hypnosis of fear and rage, the laws were passed virtually without debate. No Congressman dared to be seen in the emergency days after 911 as “unpatriotic.”

            Then in designing the cover we came to the subtitle, “Whom the gods would destroy…” The quote is attributed to the Greek writer Euripides some 2,400 years ago, as “Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad.” That succinctly captured the growing sense of desperation in Washington and in Wall Street. Not only lost, but also desperate and increasingly mad or insane in a feverish try to regain that fading hegemony. The dropping image like blood in black from the final letter, “y”, in destroy, is meant to capture that vanishing, the self-destruction of the once formidable American Century proclaimed in 1941 by Henry Luce.

            I hope this makes the dramatic image of the final cover Antje Abisch finally created more vivid for you.

—F. William Engdahl