The wars we are witnessing, whether the military war in Ukraine, or soft wars in the China Sea, or cultural wars in what Neo-Liberalism is distorting and charting for humanity, are all manifestations of a strong opposition by the West to the establishment of this multipolar world.
The core problem humanity is facing nowadays can be summed up as follows:
There is no political or moral leader to this world, as the strongest militarily and financially are pursuing additional military and financial powers, and the system that was produced by the Second World War and established by the agreement of so many countries, is truly collapsing, with no alternative yet in place. The BRICS countries, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, and many Asian countries are trying to establish a multipolar system in the world, where no opinion can have an absolute veto over the will of so many countries.
The wars we are witnessing, whether the military war in Ukraine, or soft wars in the China Sea, or cultural wars in what Neo-Liberalism is distorting and charting for humanity, are all manifestations of a strong opposition by the West to the establishment of this multipolar world. While Russia, Iran, India, Latin America, and Africa are trying their best to get rid of the hegemony of the Dollar, the hegemony of NATO’s will, the hegemony of the West that had been looting resources from all over the world over decades, the West is absolutely desperate to establish new alliances through which it may prevent the birth of this multipolar system.
From this very perspective, we can understand the persistent efforts the US is exerting with Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, and Taiwan to establish an alliance in the China Sea to threaten China and prevent whatever steps China wants to make in order to ensure the dawn of a multipolar system. The efforts of the US, and what they called an “echo alliance” with Australia and Canada can also be understood in the same context, in order to frighten China from any serious effort in aligning with other countries who might subvert the hegemony of the West in the world.
From the same perspective, we can understand the current competition in Africa between China, Russia, and the old colonialists: France and the United States, and of course the West is not interested in the rise or equality or prosperity of the Africans. All the West is interested in is what these countries have, how they can loot gold and other precious minerals, and how they can loot this wealth without paying anything in return in order to support their economies and build their countries at the expense of the lives and prosperity of Africans.
Latin America is no exception as well. While Chávez, Lula da Silva and other nationalist leaders tried and succeeded in shaking the fetters of the US off their countries, the United States is intensifying its efforts in Latin America to prevent the liberation of the will of all Latin American countries that had been considered for decades as the backyard of the United States.
As for our region, the Middle East, the United States has lately, or last year, added “Israel”, the Zionist entity, as a member of CENTCOM for the first time in history, which means that the US has appointed “Israel” as its military representative in the region in order to do what it sees fit so as to preserve the hegemony of the US, and extend Zionist hegemony over the will of the Arab and Iranian people in the Arab World and Iran. The issue here is not traditional: the Zionist entity is not launching wars on the border with its army and its tanks and airplanes; it is launching intelligence wars inside countries in an attempt to change the political systems in these countries, and turn them into satellite states that echo the will of the Israelis, and by default the will of the Americans and the West.
This, in essence, was the reason for the terrorist war that has been launched against the Syrian people for the last 12 years. This in essence is the reason why NATO countries destroyed Libya and betrayed Russia (and, in fact, did not fulfill their promise to Russia that it was going to be part of their alliance). The result is that Libyan oil is being divided between Italy, France, and the United States; it has been looted by these countries, while the Libyan people remain impoverished, scattered, and unable to secure their subsistence.
This, again, is what has been happening in Iran since last year. “Israel”, the Zionist entity, is using its intelligence to recruit Iranians and others probably, who will be its agents to fulfill its agenda in Iran, without launching a traditional war, and it is within this context that we can observe what is happening in Iran of claims about women’s freedom or other democratic appeals or whatever. If the Israelis and the Americans believe in freedom for women and women’s rights, then tell me what is happening to the 29 Palestinian women prisoners who are being harassed and subjugated in Israeli jails, in an unprecedented way crackdown on women.
The Israeli entity is the most racist occupation in history after South Africa. It is killing Palestinians Point Blank, it is destroying their houses, robbing their property, looting their lands, and perpetrating the worst crimes humanity is witnessing nowadays. Yet “Israel” is the partner of the West in trying to subjugate other countries and undermine the free will of any government and any person that refuses to be an agent of this power that is only interested in military industry, and accumulating more wealth, and bringing more money to the wealthiest in the world who made their wealth by looting other people and other countries.
Hence it is the duty of every truly free person to stand fast and firm against this horrifying process of the West to try and control the will of other countries. And from this perspective, I can certainly say that the war Russia is fighting in Ukraine against NATO is not only a Russian war; it is a world war, and it is not fair to let Russian soldiers and Russian people fight on their own in a war that the entire humanity needs to fight.
NATO has imposed this war on Russia, and it is desperate to defeat Russia in order to terrify any country that may think of standing up against Western hegemony. Russia is leading the way for a different world, and many Western leaders have announced that they are sending trillions of dollars and armaments in order to prevent Russian victory. Russian victory would mean Western defeat, and Western defeat would mean the end of Western hegemony over the world. This is what the West cannot afford, and this is why the West considers this war an existential war. In fact, it is a war for everyone in the world but for reasons different from those of the West.
Xi‘s China To Be The First Civilization In The Galaxy To Dispense Confidence By Decree
By Thorsten J. Pattberg
Why The Renewed Urgency?
Before we explain Mr. Xi Jinping’s much underreported but now revived ‘Confidence Doctrine’, a word about this week’s anti-lockdown demonstrations in China:
IMAGE 1 White Paper Revolution in China But Probably Not
East Asians declared Corona a state religion. They have a genetic streak for submission and agreeableness. Much like females in the West. They are also lighter than Western females. Then, there is an environmental factor, for East-Asians are trained to be less aggressive, confrontational, and meek in character. There is no threat to the West coming from China. If you check your sources, you will see that all the alleged threats coming from China were in fact written by Western agitators.
IMAGE 2 Western China Experts swarm to Twitter and LinkedIn
We Western people speak for the Asians. It is our duty. Read about the first missions to China. Read George Hegel or Edward Said. Read Immanuel Kant on the End of History, or Bertrand Russell on the Problem of China. It is just a fact that Asians cannot create. God said: Not you, sorry! God then chose the Iews, then said Christians… also good. There are no Chinese in the Bible. Read the American Constitution. It says America, not China.
In Japan, everyone is walking around with their C-membership retard badges. In Taiwan… well… these people have an authoritarian streak and are the descendants of traitors, war criminals, and the triads, so they love cult and fascist masquerading. All this is not reported in the West, because Taiwan and Japan are useful anal toys.
IMAGE 3 Double-Standard Taiwan and Japan are as insane but are not demonized at all
China central of course gets all the hate. Did you see the German President praising the brave demonstrators? Well, he called demonstrators in Germany Nazi-scum and terrorists and destroyed their livelihood. Or did you see the Canadian Premier warning the Chinese government against taking actions against peaceful demonstrators? Well, he prosecuted EVERYONE in Canada for peacefully protesting his tyranny. British unelected Prime Minister, a brown person from India or Pakistan, I forgot, said China was doing genocide. This, while London is genociding white Englishmen and killing their culture.
IMAGE 4 Unbelievable Double Standards Of Our Unelected Leaders
China, like Russia, has no agency in the world any more. It became… autistic? It wants to be left alone from the Western bullies. Had Beijing not declared its Zero-Covid policy and now had 6 million Covid-deaths to mourn (the USA has 1.2 million deaths), the Western hate press would have called Mr. Xi the bloodiest despot since Mr. Mao.
While ugly anti-Western nations cocoon themselves in, hoping enslavement will pass, hoping to transform into new creatures of beauty, Western powers are making all the decisions for them about air, space, water, food, energy, rights, education… that will affect all beings on this planet. So, while the West starts wars in Ukraine and Taiwan, Western planners already make decisions about the cutting up of Russian and China.
No Conquest, No Confidence?
If the Asians do not unite and reign into the Western psychopaths who currently torture the world with bio-weapons and mind-control, above all the puppet regimes in London, Berlin, and Washington, then your funny cocoons will be trampled on and squashed.
Anyway, now to the main thread. Largely ignored by the Western media because it didn’t involve racism, violence, and boobs, China mandated the Chinese to build a giant cocoon of confidence, crawl inside and reform itself as a strong terracotta pot plant army that no criticism can defeat.
Confidence is just a new old discourse that every five years or so concerns Chinese President Xi Jinping and the Communist Party of China (CPC). And just as anticipated, the theme emerged again, in this fall of 2022 in fact, when the 20th National Party Congress revived the discourse about “the ebbs and tides” of what global historians describe as the “Cultural Confidence” of Great nations.
What’s a “Great nation”? Most people don’t care about Great nations because they do not live in one and never belonged to any. They have no idea what it means or what advantages it can give to their lives. For example, the people in the Philippines, also an ex-US-colony, could all just die and the world would probably be better off [because of over-population, food scarcity, and pollution, etc.]. Or, they could apply for a job at MacDonald’s, buy an iPhone with the Google app, watch Elon Musk videos on Youtube, learn American English, get an US college degree, and work for a Western multinational. That is their only way to become useful and participate in World History.
China is obviously more ambitious. It still has…well… City Wok fast food… I guess, Xiaomi phones, Youku, a powerful Mandarin script with 40,000 letters, and excellent schools. It also has plenty of global companies. So, in a way, China hopes to keep its state economy and not be privatized by Western powers like it was in the 17th Century, and then again in the 19th Century, and again in the 20th Century, and is now threatened with regime change again… and it isn’t even a quarter into the 21st Century.
Prove It That You Met Your Maker!
Earlier this year, in May 2022, during the 39th group study session of the Political Bureau of the CPC Central Committee, the government allocated scholarly efforts to the tracing of the origins of the Chinese civilization. The underlying idea is to desperately show the world and prove to the Chinese that they are in fact a pre-Biblical super civilization that was just forgotten to be mentioned in the Bible and during Science.
IMAGE 5 More or Less 5000 Years Trust the Science Or dig for It
Catalysts for the Cultural movement were, among other research findings: the discovery of hundreds of archaeological excavation sites, the human genome project on the origins of the Chinese civilization, and the catalogization of Ancient relics, for example pottery and stone tools from the Zhou Dynasty (770 BC) unearthed in China‘s Guangxi Zhuang autonomous region.
There were no mummies or that kind of reminiscences, just pots and stones. But mass hypnosis shall suffice if you throw in fancy DNA terminology, also a Western invention, that the Chinese, against all negative Western stereotyping, did indeed create and were creators.
The Cultural Confidence discourse [Wenhua Zixin] is a continuation of the ‘Confidence Doctrine’ [Zixin Lun] formulated during the 18th Party Congress in November 2012. President Xi Jinping marked the doctrine of “Confidence in Chinese Culture” as the natural continuation of the doctrines of “Chinese Dream” and the “Rejuvenation of China.”
Now you could argue, what’s left of the “Chinese Dream” when the world is told to hate China, but that is beside the point. What’s there to rejuvenate? Feudalism? The Manchu queue? Pillow girls?
Another tide of Cultural Confidence came in in 2017, during the 19th Party Congress. The doctrine was to expand into “globally recognizable cultural images of China,” “Chinese language teaching through the Confucius Institutes,” the “Key Concepts of Chinese Thought and Culture” program, and “rapid economic and technological development” as the Four Characteristics of Confidence to build, quote: “a multidimensional China for the world.”
Again, not much enthusiasm left from that period either. The West has rejected the Confucius Institutes. Chinese names and concepts are still banned in Europe. Telecom giant Huawei, Social media TikTok, e-commerce Alibaba, super-application WeChat, shipping firm Cosco, drone supplier DJI,… Chinese banks, electric cars, airplanes, newspapers… all blocked.
The Ebbs and Flows of Confidence
China during the last two centuries has experienced both extreme humiliations and extreme successes. Humiliations at the hands of Western Imperialist powers and Japan, which led to chauvinism—a sense of moral superiority even after physical defeat. And Successes under the Leadership of the CPC when China overtook all those Western Imperialist powers and Japan, and became the biggest trading nation in the world, which led to an inferiority complex—a sense of doubt and feeling like an impostor.
The range of Chinese emotions between callousness and grandstanding, between inferiority and hubris, has been matter of Western ‘China Studies’ since its conception as an academic discipline in the 18th Century. Generally speaking, Western missionaries were Western spies who reported back to Rome, Paris, and London that China was backward and needed Christianity and a strong Western Leadership. Did you know that the most famous book that was ever written on China is Mr. Arthur Smith’s Chinese Characteristics? Well, it is pretty much like the Protocol of the Elders of Zion, just from the dip shit end of world conspiracy.
What followed was the coordinated invasion of China and the semi-colonization of several parts and ports, notably Shanghai by the French, Macau by the Portuguese, Formosa by the Japanese, Tsingtau by the Germans, the Canton by the British and so on and so forth. I spare you the details of “a hundred years of humiliation,” as every Asian learns about it. However, few people in the West are taught this history.
Naturally, a strong introspection of the Chinese psyche took place since the fall of the last Chinese Dynasty, the Qing, in 1911. Even in defeat, Chinese sages imagined a spiritual victory. Wrote the poet Gu Hongming: “It is a well-known fact that the liking – you may call it the taste for the Chinese – grows upon the foreigner the longer he lives in this country.” That was in 1922.
In other words, even when their armies were clearly defeated and their nation conquered, their poets turned “a disastrous beating” into some form of spiritual victory and moral triumph. Almost like the biblical “Turning the other cheek…”
An East-West dichotomy reemerged. The ebb must follow the tide, the unjust brings forth the just, and so on. Said the chairman Mao Zedong: “I believe that the international situation has now reached a new turning point. There are two Winds in the world, the East Wind and the West Wind.” That was in 1957.
Without Confidence, a civilization, a nation, a family and even an individual will succumb to the hostile forces of nature and man, and will fall victim to cruelty and conquest.
It is therefore of essence to our survival, that we must combine forces, serve the people, and be assertive and vigilant against outside invaders.
Evolutionary Sciences seems to support this claim. A recent study in ‘Current Biology’ in July 2022 suggests that the now extinct Native Americans had Chinese DNA traces in their bones.
This was 14,000 years ago in North America. The Europeans wiped out the Native Americans as soon as they “discovered” them in 1492. China lost contact with North America, and could not help. The core Chinese Civilization today traces its origins back “only” 5,000 years. But still, it has survived the Ancient Greeks, the Romans, the Egyptians, lived in peaceful coexistence with the Indians and Japanese, and, for the longest time, regarded itself—erroneously—as Zhong Guo, the Center of Nations.
As a Nation Thinks
Today, China’s Cultural Confidence is again caught in between two extremes. The pro-Western forces say China cannot achieve a multipolar world and must accept total Westernization [or suffer US embargo, containment, and military intervention like Europe, Japan, the Middle East, and Russia]. The pro-China forces say China must revive Confucianism, groom its own economic champions, and become a center of the world again.
IMAGE 6 Confidence and The Xin-Civilization
Governments do well by carefully weighing in and listening to the traditionalists as well as the progressives, but ideally, they should never again become push-overs to foreign dictate.
Did you read how the American President’s favorite propaganda media like New York Times or Wall Street Journal reported on China’s “censorship on information about the Covid demonstrations”? Well, America owns or dictates all global media, owns global big tech, and controls the world wide web commonly known as the Internet. It is Americans who control and censor all of us. And if China objects to the American world dictatorship, it will be called a terrorist, a rogue state, and a censorship regime.
Some commentators have argued that Xi Jinping and the CPC still should not subsidize “writers and artists.” They say things like “Art should be for art’s sake” or “Don’t draw a moon, build a spaceship.” In other words, the government in Beijing is believed to focus too much on technology and infrastructure, hard power, not on arts and culture and the mighty word, soft power. To which we reply that all nations in the world want to improve their material circumstances, yet it is only those who seem to stride effortlessly and possess a magnificent Culture who succeed.
There always have been and always will be clashes and tensions between different civilisations. In the words of an old Tom Lehrer song, National Brotherhood Week:
The Protestants hate the Catholics, The Catholics hate the Protestants, The Muslims hate the Hindus, The Hindus hate the Muslims, And everybody hates the Jews.
So sang a Jewish singer, some of whose ancestors, I believe, fled to the USA after the 1905 pogrom in Odessa, a city which for the moment is still in the Ukraine) (1).
This brings us to examining the old saying that: ‘Religion is the cause of all wars’. As a priest, I can in a sense agree with that, as also with Marx’s saying that ‘Religion is the opium of the people’. I can agree with them both because, as a priest, I do not hold with religion and I am not religious. Thank God!
Perhaps I should explain to the confused.
Religion has always been a State manipulation, used in order to control populations. If you have ever visited a Protestant church, you will know this. There, to our astonishment, people have to file in and are directed to sit down in regimented rows in certain seats, and are then told to stand up and sit down, while being bombarded with moralising speeches to make them feel guilty and cough up cash. A clearer case of organised mass manipulation can surely not be found. However, in fairness it must be said that States are capable of doing the same with absolute any ‘religion’.
States use religion to divide and create wars. (So, religion is not the cause of all wars, but it is used as a disguise for the cause of all wars). Why? Because if you openly say, ‘we are going to invade you because we are a different ethnic group and we are extremely greedy and vicious and want to steal and plunder your territory and natural resources’, people may well not follow you. But if, like George Bush, you say ‘God told me to invade Iraq’, or, ‘NATO’s role is to bring freedom and democracy’ (and forget to add, ‘even if it means wiping you off the face of the earth’), you will always find some venal journalists, useful idiots and propagandised zombies to believe you and follow you. In other words, States have always used religion as camouflage to justify their base and basest motives. Hence, religion is indeed the opium of the people.
Why am I, a priest, saying this? Primarily because it is true. But also because I have no interest in religion at all, my only interest is faith. Faith comes from spiritual experience, either you have it, or else you don’t. But it is quite different from State-invented ‘religion’, which is used to manipulate the masses.
Now all civilisations are based on faith, on an original spiritual intuition and experience. It is a historic fact. It does not matter if you are Jewish, Animist, Hindu, Zoroastrian, Buddhist, Confucian, Orthodox Christian, Mayan, Muslim, Shintoist, Catholic, Incan, Aztec, Sikh or, most recently, Protestant, your civilisation, and therefore your culture, depends on your faith. A Civilisation that does not have a spiritual basis, faith, is not a Civilisation, it is an Anti-Civilisation. And of that we shall speak later.
For millennia, civilisations have lived side by side. As we have said, they have from time to time spontaneously clashed and clashed violently about ethnic identity, territory and resources. However, Western Civilisation is quite unique.
Western Civilisation, which has basically existed for a thousand years (meaning that it is quite recent in comparative historical terms) is the only one which claims to be unique and which has consistently implemented its supposed infallibility and resulting intolerance on a systematic and institutionalised basis via organised violence throughout its millennial existence.
Thus, we had the First Crusade (1096-1099), which began by massacring and robbing Jews in the Rhineland and then went on to massacre Orthodox Christians and Muslims, shedding blood, which flowed up to their knees in what they claimed to be the ‘holy’ city of Jerusalem. Should we mention the Inquisition or the Spanish and Portuguese atrocities in what we now call Latin America?
Of course, in fairness, we cannot avoid mentioning the Protestant-Catholic European ‘Wars of Religion’ (sic), in which millions died. The Protestant sects also fought with each other, no doubt in order to prove which was the nastiest-minded and most bigoted. The Protestants, not the Catholics, had witch-hunts, in which they burned to death thousands of poor women, old and young. This was a form of social bullying of those who were in some way different. The Protestants went on to massacre the natives of North America and park the survivors in concentration camps, which they elegantly masked under the name of ‘reservations’ and enslave millions of Africans to work in their labour camps, which they called ‘plantations’. After all, ‘Arbeit macht frei’, ‘Work makes you free’. Though not if you are white, which is why you kindly allow non-whites to work for you.
Much of the witch-hunting goes back to the Protestant hatred and fear of women and so its obsession with sex (‘the only sin’), which it directly inherited from Papacy-imposed obligatory clerical celibacy in eleventh- and twelfth-century Western Europe. Today the old Puritanism of persecuting women has been transformed into the ‘green’ movement. Here, instead of abstention from sexual uncleanness, we now have the equally fanatical abstention from material uncleanness, sexual purity is replaced by environmental purity – ‘green is clean’, the only sin is not recycling. This is just the new Puritanism of such as the clearly clinically depressed and neurotic Greta ‘Funberg’. (What a bundle of laughs she is; it must be the dark Swedish nights). However, the ultimate deviation is the legitimisation of homosexuality: what could be more woman-hating than sodomy?
The great difference between the West and all other civilisations is its unique intolerance because it is convinced that it is infallible. (Papal infallibility may have been dogmatised only in the nineteenth century, but it had already been proclaimed by Hildebrand/Gregory VII in the eleventh century). The West has to impose.
Conversely, President Putin accepts all, as did the USSR, as did the Russian Tsars. Listen again to two parts of his speech on 30 September this year:
‘What, if not racism, is the West’s dogmatic conviction that its civilisation and neoliberal culture is an indisputable model for the entire world to follow? ‘You’re either with us or against us’…. One of the reasons for centuries-old Russophobia, the Western elites’ unconcealed animosity toward Russia, is precisely the fact that we did not allow them to rob us during the age of colonial conquests and we forced the Europeans to trade with us on mutually beneficial terms. This was achieved by creating a strong centralised State in Russia, which grew and got stronger on the basis of the great moral values of Orthodox Christianity, Islam, Judaism and Buddhism, as well as Russian culture and the Russian world that were open to all’.
Let other civilisations have other values. But if we find homosexuality unnatural and abnormal, leave us alone. Those are our values. We let you do what you woke want in your countries, therefore stop imposing it on us. The Ukraine, apart from the recently Hapsburgised and Polonised far west, is not part of the Western world. Stop treating it as if it were part of your world. If Catholic countries like Poland and Slovakia want to join you in your promotion of sodomy, we won’t stop them. If Catholic countries like Hungary don’t agree with you, then let them join us. We have nothing against traditional Catholics. We don’t meddle – unlike you.
This unique intolerance of Western ‘Civilisation’ – if that is what it is – reminds us of a poem written before the new great fall of the West in 1914, by an American poet, perhaps the greatest American poet, Robert Frost. In ‘Mending Wall’ (2) there comes that famous line: ‘Good fences make good neighbours’.
The fact is that a fault line runs through Europe. That fault line took more or less definitive shape in the eleventh century. It is a thousand years old. It is the fault line that separates the Catholic world (and therefore also the Protestant world – the two things are the two sides of the same coin) from the Orthodox Christian world. It separates Finland, most of the Baltics, most of Poland, the far west corner of the Ukraine, most of Slovakia, perhaps Hungary and certainly Croatia from the rest of Eurasia. Beyond the east and south of that line lies the rest of the world, the Non-Western world, whose faiths, despite their diversity, in many ways have far more in common with one another than with the LGBT Anti-Civilisation of the Western world. Now the New England poet, Robert Frost, goes on to write in his poem:
Before I built a wall I’d ask to know What I was walling in or walling out.
Well, in answer to Robert Frost, once all of the Ukraine is liberated, you will be fenced off, so as to remain good neighbours, you will be walled out behind your Woke Anti-Civilisation. As we said above, a Civilisation that does not have a spiritual basis, faith, is not a Civilisation, it is an Anti-Civilisation, and that is what ‘Western Civilisation’ has step by step become. You can keep it. We take not the slightest pleasure in seeing its degeneration, we are shocked and distressed by it and feel compassion for all its victims. Stop the Empire’s War on Russia, says the Saker, but we would say: Stop the Empire’s War on the World.
Notes:
1. We should perhaps mention here that no pogroms ever took place in Russia, but only in what is now Lithuania, Poland, Moldova and the western Ukraine. (Before 1942 Odessa was essentially a Jewish city). The pogroms were imports from the neighbouring West, where violent pogroms also took place in the nineteenth century, especially in German-speaking countries. The total number of victims over some twenty years in what were basically race riots between poor people and rich Jews (with plenty of poor people of all nationalities getting caught inbetween), sometimes started by Jews, sometimes by the other side, totalled about the same number as the Germans murdered on one average day during the Second World War. Overall, more Non-Jews died than Jews during the pogrom race riots in the Russian Empire. Of course, this is never mentioned in the West. Why? Perhaps because it was the West, and not Russia, which produced Jew-murdering Nazism? And why were there so many Jews living in the Russian Empire in any case? Because they had been expelled in the Middle Ages from racist Western Europe. Just a point of fact.
In all history, there is no instance of a country having benefited from prolonged warfare
– Sun Tzu, ‘The Art of War’
Putin’s West is Satanic Speech
During the signing ceremony on the accession to the Russian Federation of the four new regions on September 30th president Vladimir Putin declared that a ‘revolutionary transformation of the world’ is underway and stated that there will be ‘no return to the old order’. As expected, his oration was largely ignored or distored by Western mainstream media:
“Our compatriots, our brothers and sisters in Ukraine who are part of our united people have seen with their own eyes what the ruling class of the so-called West have prepared for humanity as a whole. They have dropped their masks and shown what they are really made of.
When the Soviet Union collapsed, the West decided that the world and all of us would permanently accede to its dictates. In 1991, the West thought that Russia would never rise after such shocks and would fall to pieces on its own. This had almost happened. We remember the horrible 1990s, hungry, cold and hopeless. But Russia remained standing, revived, grew stronger and occupied its rightful place in the world.”
Signing ceremony for the accession of the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics and the Zaporozhye and Kherson Regions at the Grand Kremlin Palace’s St George Hall
“Meanwhile, the West continued to look for another chance to strike a blow at us, to weaken and break up Russia… to set our peoples against each other and to condemn them to poverty and extinction. They cannot rest easy knowing that there is such a great country with this huge territory and its natural wealth, resources and people who cannot and will not do someone else’s bidding.
Western countries have been saying for centuries that they bring freedom and democracy to other nations. Nothing could be further from the truth. Instead of bringing democracy they suppressed and exploited, and instead of giving freedom they enslaved and oppressed. The unipolar world is inherently anti-democratic and unfree; it is false and hypocritical through and through.
Do we want to have in Russia, ‘Parent number one, parent number two and Parent number three’ instead of Mother and Father? Do we want our schools to impose on our children perversions that lead to degradation and extinction? Do we want to drum into their heads the idea that other genders exist besides Female and Male, and to offer them gender reassignment surgery? This is all unacceptable to us. We have a different future of our own.
Let me repeat that the dictatorship of the Western elites targets all societies, including the citizens of Western countries themselves. This is a challenge for us all. This complete renunciation of what it means to be human, the overthrow of faith and traditional values, and the suppression of freedom are coming to resemble the reverse of religion – pure Satanism. Exposing false messiahs, Jesus Christ preached in the Sermon on the Mount: “By their fruit ye shall know them.” These poisonous fruits are already obvious to people, and not only in our country but in all countries, including many people in the West itself.
The world has entered a period of a fundamental, revolutionary transformation. New centers of power are emerging. They represent the majority of the international community. They are ready not only to declare their interests but also to protect them. They see in multipolarity an opportunity to strengthen their sovereignty, which means gaining genuine freedom, historical prospects, and the right to their own independent, creative and distinctive forms of development, to a harmonious process.
There are many like-minded people in Europe and the United States, and we feel and see their support. An essentially emancipatory, anti-colonial movement against unipolar hegemony is taking shape in the most diverse countries and societies. Its power will only grow with time. It is this force that will determine our future geopolitical reality.“
“The destruction of the Western hegemony is irreversible,“ Putin concluded.
JFK’s Forgotten ‘Peace For All Time Speech’
President John F. Kennedy, under the influence of the Cuban Missile Crisis when the world was brought to the brink of annihilation, made an equally momentous speech at the American University on June 10, 1963:
“I have chosen this time and place to discuss a topic on which ignorance too often abounds and the truth is too rarely perceived – yet it is the most important topic on earth: world peace.
What kind of peace do I mean? What kind of peace do we seek? Not a Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war. Not the peace of the grave or the security of the slave.
I am talking about genuine peace, the kind of peace that makes life on earth worth living, the kind that enables men and nations to grow and to hope and to build a better life for their children – not merely peace for Americans but peace for all men and women – not merely peace in our time but peace for all time.”
“I speak of peace because of the new face of war. Total war makes no sense in an age when great powers can maintain large and relatively invulnerable nuclear forces and refuse to surrender without resort to those forces. It makes no sense in an age when a single nuclear weapon contains almost ten times the explosive force delivered by all the allied air forces in the Second World War. It makes no sense in an age when the deadly poisons produced by a nuclear exchange would be carried by wind and water and soil and seed to the far corners of the globe and to generations yet unborn.
Today the expenditure of billions of dollars every year on weapons acquired for the purpose of making sure we never need to use them is essential to keeping the peace. But surely the acquisition of such idle stockpiles – which can only destroy and never create – is not the only, much less the most efficient, means of assuring peace.
…wherever we are, we must all, in our daily lives, live up to the age-old faith that peace and freedom walk together. In too many of our cities today, the peace is not secure because the freedom is incomplete. It is the responsibility of the executive branch at all levels of government – local, State, and National – to provide and protect that freedom for all of our citizens by all means within their authority…
All this is not unrelated to world peace. ‘When a man’s ways please the Lord,’ the Scriptures tell us, ‘he maketh even his enemies to be at peace with him.’ And is not peace… basically a matter of human rights – the right to live out our lives without fear of devastation…?
The United States, as the world knows, will never start a war. We do not want a war. We do not now expect a war. This generation of Americans has already had enough – more than enough – of war and hate and oppression. We shall be prepared if others wish it. We shall be alert to try to stop it. But we shall also do our part to build a world of peace where the weak are safe and the strong are just. We are not helpless before that task or hopeless of its success. Confident and unafraid, we labor on – not toward a strategy of annihilation but toward a strategy of peace.”
“Man holds in his mortal hands the power to abolish all forms of human poverty and all forms of human life.” – JFK in his 1961 Inaugural Address
Rise and Fall of a Hegemon
Kennedy’s speech was quickly relegated to the memory hole after his assassination only five months later with his successor Lyndon B. Johnson quickly ramping up the war in Vietnam, chosing to ignore painful French colonial lessons there a decade earlier as well as president Charles de Gaulle’s warning that “…you will sink step by step into a bottomless military and political quagmire”. LBJ forged full steam ahead, using a false flag attack in the Gulf of Tonkin in August 1964 to commit a half a million U.S. troops to the jungles of Indochina.
An alleged North Vietnamese attack on the USS Madoxx was used as an excuse to ramp up the Vietnam war which ended up costing 58,220 American and over two million Vietnamese, Laotian and Cambodian lives
Even though it was done under the banner of ‘defending democracy and freedom’, it nevertheless gave the lie to JFK’s assertion that the United States would never start a war.
Shock and Awe on full display in Baghdad, March 2003 at the start of the war to rid the world of Saddam’s non-existent WMD’s; when the kinetic phase of a war is completed it is replaced by an economic shock and awe, when the target country’s economy is plundered
Former Austrian foreign minister Karin Kneissl concurs with Putin’s portrayal of the West’s exploitative colonial mindset:
“The era of the ‘Seven Sisters,’ a cartel of oil companies that divided up the oil market, came to an end (in the 1970’s). However, for US policymakers – at least, psychologically – this era still persists. ‘It’s our oil,’ is an expression I often hear uttered in Washington. Those voices were particularly loud during the illegal US-led 2003 invasion of Iraq. To really understand the core of the conflict in Ukraine – where a proxy war rages – one must break down the confrontation thus: The US and its European allies, who represent and back the global financial sector, are essentially engaged in a battle against the world’s energy sector. “ Kneissl wrote for the The Cradle on October 13th.
“The conflict that the West calls Russia’s invasion of Ukraine… is not a conflict between Ukraine and Russia; it is a phase in the hybrid war that the West has been waging for decades against any country that chooses an economic path other than subordination to the United States. In its current phase, this war takes the form of a US-led NATO war over Ukraine. In this war, Ukraine is the terrain, and a pawn – one that can be sacrificed. This fact is hidden by wall-to-wall Western propaganda portraying Russian President Vladimir Putin as either mad or a devil hell-bent on recreating the Soviet Union. This pre-empts any questions about why Putin might be doing this, about the rationale for Russian actions.
The United States, having sought without success to dominate the world, wages this war to stall its historic decline, the loss of what remains of its power. This decline has accelerated in recent decades as neoliberalism turned its capitalist economic system unproductive, financialised, predatory, speculative, and ecologically destructive, massively diminishing Washington’s already dubious attractions to its allies around the world.“
With an annual budget approaching a trillion dollars, the U.S. military is far removed from its Hollywood image of a ‘mean, lean fighting machine‘, and has turned into a bloated dinosaur mired in monumental corruption. This was confirmed by no less an auhority than the former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld who, on September 10, 2001, revealed that Pentagon auditors found that 25% of the military budget could not be accounted for, and that $2.3 trillion were missing.
The very next day, however, the war on waste was overtaken by the ‘war on terror’ and everything was forgiven and forgotten. Business continued as usual.
The current decrepit state of the U.S. military is aply reflected in its dismal recruitment figures, with the army announcing on October 1st that – despite offering sign-up bonuses of up to $50,000 – it had still managed to miss its enlistment target by 25%.
The most likely causes: one in three Americans are overweight or otherwise unfit, the Covid ‘vaccine’ mandates, and lastly, Pentagon’s advocacy of LGBTQ/transgender ideology which has become the centerpiece of Biden regime’s ‘numerous accomplishments’ but which a priori eliminates potential conservative and religious-minded candidates who usually form the backbone of the military.
After obligatory inoculations recruits must undergo doctrinal inculcation emphasizing ‘equity and minority rights’ prior to being unleashed to sow death and destruction in defense of human rights around the globe
The New Normal: ‘Drag Queens’ are now in charge of teaching biology to kids, including that72 genders exist – according to polls, a third of Generation Z consider themselves ‘gender fluid’ – which is what Putin was referring to in his speech
Winner Takes All
“Ukraine’s Blitzkrieg Means That Russia Cannot Win The War,” runs a typical headline used by the mainstream media as it downplays Russia’s strategic success and amplifies the tactical setbacks in order to make it look like the war is turning into a quagmire for Putin.
This is something which geopolitical analyst Pepe Escobar takes issue with: “ … in only 7 months, Russia annexed 120,000 km2 – or 22% of Ukrainian territory – that produces nearly 90% of GDP and has over 5 million citizens. Along the way, the allied forces basically destroyed the Ukrainian army, which they continue to do 24/7; billions of dollars of NATO equipment; accelerated the demise of most Western economies; and evaporated the notion of American hegemony…”
The U.S. military has shown itself incapable of beating a ragtag Taliban force in Afghanistan and does not stand a chance against Russia, as the military expert Scott Ritter confirmed in 2017:
“NATO would be totally outmatched in a conventional war with Russia… Today, NATO and American anti-armor weapons continue to play catch up to new innovations being fielded by the Russians. The Americans like to quantify the Russian Army as being ‘near peer’ in terms of its capabilities; the fact of the matter is that it is the U.S. and NATO armored forces that are ‘near peer’ to their Russian counterparts, and there are many more Russian tanks in Europe today than there are NATO and American.”
Instead of Russia running out of missiles and ammunition as is often claimed, it is the U.S. and NATO which have emptied out their warehouses and run out of weapons, as reported by CNBC: “In the U.S. weapons industry, the normal production level for artillery rounds for the 155mm howitzer – a long-range heavy artillery weapon currently used on the battlefields of Ukraine – is about 30,000 rounds per year in peacetime. The Ukrainian soldiers… go through that amount in roughly two weeks.” Pentagon is now looking for U.S. companies to build more shells, while new HIMARS systems promised to Ukraine won’t arrive for years.
The painful truth for NATO is that the decades-long offshoring of manufacturing to low-wage countries has left it with insufficient industrial capacity required to wage a protracted war against a ‘near-peer’ adversary.
All this is ignored by the Western media which, through sensationalistic headlines like “In Washington, Putin’s Nuclear Threats Stir Growing Alarm” and “Putin Prepared to Use Nuclear Weapons”, is creating the illusion that Russia is losing badly and will resort to anything to turn things around.
Former CIA director and retired general David Petraeus was thus interviewed by ABC News on October 2nd and stated how Russia is “desperate after a string of setbacks” and then promised that if it used nuclear weapons, the US would destroy the Russian military in Ukraine and sink its naval fleet.
What Petraeus – better known for having lost both ‘surges’ in Iraq and Afghanistan – fails to mention is that the U.S. is the one nuclear superpower with a first strike policy which is defined as an “…attack on an enemy’s nuclear arsenal that effectively prevents retaliation against the attacker. A successful first strike would cripple enemy missiles that are ready to launch and prevent the opponent from readying others for a counterstrike by targeting the enemy’s nuclear stockpiles and launch facilities.”
Under this policy, “The U.S. president has the auhority, without consulting anyone, to order a pre-emptive nuclear strike – not merely in retaliation… Our warheads could be launched in defense of allies, after the onset of a conventional war involving our troops… or in response to a bellicose threat posed by a nuclear state.”
On the other hand, Russia’s Basic Principles doctrine does not allow for unprovoked use of nuclear weapons – tactical or strategic. In any case, Russia has absolutely no need to resort to tactical nukes as it possesses the most powerful conventional weapon in existence, nicknamed FOAB – Father of All Bombs – a thermobaric bomb with a blast yield of 44 tons TNT; more importantly, these weapons do not emit any radiation, as nuclear fallout would pose both an immediate and lingering threat to their troops as well as to local civilians – most of whom are expected to one day become loyal Russian citizens.
FOAB dropped from a Tu-160 bomber at the Opuk training range, Black Sea in 2016; this ordnance is designed to vaporize targets and collapse structures by igniting a fuel-air mixture in midair
Artist Marina Abramovich and Jacob Rotschild posing in front of a painting titled‘Satan Summoning His Legions’ by Thomas Lawrence at the Royal Academy of Arts;Lord Rotschild & Co. control most of the planet’s assets
High Noon for NATO, Midnight for Humanity?
100 Seconds to Midnight according to the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists who now warn that we have never been closer to a nuclear holocaust and find ourseleves at doom’s doorstep
As luck would have it, ‘Steadfast Noon’ will likely coincide with Moscow’s own annual nuclear drills dubbed ‘Grom’, when Russia tests its nuclear-capable bombers, submarines and missiles.
This is a Do-or-Die moment for the western hegemon which is not willing – or rather, cannot – back down under any circumstances. Conscious of its inability to win a conventional war against Russia, it will resort to any measure in order to win, even if it means setting the world ablaze.
The U.S. has managed to convince itself that it can emerge victorious from a pre-emptive nuclear war, but cannot afford be seen as the aggressor in the eyes of the global community; a ‘False Flag’ event is therefore set to be staged in Ukraine using a low-yield device for which Russia would quickly be blamed, triggering an immediate NATO response. As inadvertently confirmed by Ukrainian president Zelensky while addressing the Australian Lowy Institute on October 6th, the scheme involves a ‘decapitation strike’ on Moscow against Putin and his Cabinet, after which the rest of the regime would collapse like a house of cards.
Assuredly, if this suicidal policy is ever applied outside a computer simulation, the world would have to concur with Mr. Putin’s assertion that the collective west is being run by satanists.
Sadly, that realization will have come too late to save humanity.
2017 Deagel.com forecast in which the U.S. is projected to lose two-thirds of its population by 2025; Deagel is a branch of the US military intelligence, preparing briefs for agencies such as the NSA, NATO, UN, and the World Bank. This forecast has been purged after the founder Edwin Deagel passed away in 2021
“There are decades where nothing happens; and then there are weeks where decades happen.”
Decolonisation: The Western Withdrawal from Asia, Africa and Europe
The Western European Empires have gone. The bankrupt Spanish Empire went first, in the century before last, the Germans lost their colonies in 1919 (at the same time as the Austro-Hungarians lost their European colonies), then the Italians lost their fantasies in Africa during the Second World War, the Germans got kicked out of their colonies in Eastern Europe in 1945, but the Portuguese much later, only getting kicked out of Africa in the 1970s. By that time the Dutch, the British, the Belgians and the French had also been kicked out of their colonies. Only the NATO Danes still hold on to Greenland, which is a lot of ice and snow and all of 56,000 people, though both Eisenhower and Trump wanted to buy it. However, since the US has its base at Thule, it effectively controls the country anyhow.
Since 1947 the UK has been kicked out of almost everywhere, infamously from the Indian Subcontinent in 1947, from Palestine in 1948 and humiliatingly, by their Americans ‘allies’, from Suez in 1956. All that remains is, for the moment, a small group of tiny enclaves and islands like Bermuda, the Caymans, Gibraltar, St Helena, the Falklands etc, about 18,000 square kilometres and fewer than 300,000 people in all, plus a lot of ice in the ‘British Antarctic Territory’.
As for France, after its humiliation in South-East Asia in 1954, it has gradually been kicked out of Africa (1946-2022) (Suez in 1956, Algeria in 1962 etc) and soon, even after its decades of assassinating independentist African politicians and military interventions, it will have nothing left there, though it still has a few islands in various oceans here and there.
As for the short-lived US Empire, over the last fifty years it has largely been kicked out of several Asian countries (Vietnam (1975), Iran (1979), Iraq (2011-2021) Afghanistan (2021), now out of Russia (2022), and soon out of China, India and Saudi Arabia. True, it still hangs on in Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and Israel, but not for much longer. Eurasia is to be US-free.
As regards the Western withdrawal from Europe, the UK left Europe in 2020. It still hangs on to Northern Ireland, Scotland, Wales and above all to England, but it will not last. Now it is the turn of the US to be kicked out of Europe. It is happening in the Ukraine at this very moment, but this rejection will later spread to Western Europe. Then it will be the turn of the EU to be kicked out of Europe and ultimately the US will be kicked out of the Americas, especially out of the US.
Do not be surprised by the words ‘the Western withdrawal from Europe’ or ‘the UK being kicked out of the UK, the EU out of the EU and the US out of the US’. This is not gibberish. I am talking about the removal of the three parasitic Establishment elites in all those three manmade unions. Once those elites have gone, those purely manmade unions will fall and the newly sovereign peoples of England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales, the peoples of Continental Western Europe and all those in Northern America can be liberated from their zombification and so will be able to retrieve their roots, their identity, their sovereignty and their selves again.
Desperation
When the USA gets desperate, it always turns to terrorism, much as gunboat Britain did and still, very weakly, attempts to do. Without mentioning the CIA-created quagmires in Latin America or in Asia or mentioning the details of the Gulf of Tonkin (1), we recall its quagmires just in Europe: the installation of the Greek junta in 1967, the CIA overthrow of De Gaulle in France in 1968, the assassination of Aldo Moro in Italy in 1978, the assassination of Olof Palme in 1986, and much more recently MH17, its terrorist attacks on the Nordstream pipelines and the Crimea Bridge, and now its attempt to force Russia to use nuclear weapons, so that the Zionist neocons in Washington can at last find an excuse to use their nuclear toys.
Those who want modern Russia to behave like Stalin’s Soviet Union and blast their brother-people of the Ukraine off the map, as the USSR did in Berlin in 1945 (though in truth most of the damage had already been done by Anglo-American terrorist bombing) need a gentle reminder. Despite US fantasies and intimidation, I have news – the Soviet Union is dead and President Putin definitely does not want it back. He, after all, lived through its end when he was in East Germany and remembers just how awful it was. Russia’s aim has never been either the occupation of the Ukraine (unlike the Soviet aim in Eastern Europe in 1945, which was to create a buffer zone for self-protection from the aggressive West), or the destruction of the Ukraine, or the massacre of its Ukrainian brothers. Let us remind ourselves yet again of Russia’s three aims in this conflict against the US puppet regime in Kiev, that is, of the aims of the Russian campaign for the liberation of Russia’s brothers and sisters in the Ukraine from the Fascist junta. These three aims were, and are, and will be:
1. The Liberation of the Donbass
This has been 75% achieved, indeed, since the liberation has turned out to be not just that of Lugansk (99% achieved) and Donetsk (75% achieved), but also of 99% of Kherson and 75% of Zaporozhie, we could say that it has been 85% achieved. Why has the liberation turned into Donbass x 2, of four provinces instead of two? Simply because the Kiev junta continually threatened the Crimea and the Donbass and they had to be protected. And if Kiev continues to shell Donbass x 2 and occupy its empty fields, the Russian campaign will have to be the liberation of Donbass x 3 or even Donbass x 4.
2. The Demilitarisation of the Ukraine
This is well on its way, at least 50% completed already. In fact, it was completed as regards the NATO-fortified Kiev military by 25 March. However, since, as Russia expected, NATO decided to resupply Kiev with their own military stocks, now already much depleted, demilitarisation is still under way. But it is only a question of time.
3. Denazification
There is some confusion here. What does this term mean? Does it mean Russia sending out teachers to instruct Ukrainians in the difference between Nazi racism and the normal human acceptance of people from other countries and their cultures? No, it does not. Denazification in today’s Western context is different from that. It is the process by which the infantile Westernised child learns to stop putting its fingers into the flame. In other words, the West has to teach itself and learn from bitter experience. This is how Denazification (and from there regime-change) will be implemented throughout today’s Western world.
For example, over the last three months the yen, the euro and the pound sterling have all been reaching historic lows against the US dollar. This is because US interest rates are higher than elsewhere and so its financial markets are attracting international investment capital. After all, why invest in European countries, which are energy-dependent but forced to boycott their main source of energy? You do not want to invest in self-bankrupting countries, which are set on a suicidal course. The USA is not as yet perceived to be self-bankrupting (though its turn will come). What is the denazifying result of all this? Let us look at the ‘case’ – and it is a ‘case’, in the medical and pathological sense – of the UK.
Hopelessness
Having ditched its drunken loser Johnson, over the summer the UK Establishment wasted two months in the middle of a huge political and economic crisis allowing 80,000 mainly elderly and wealthy people to select an incompetent Prime Minister for 68.7 million people – such is UK democracy, which apparently the rest of the world, especially ‘autocrats’ in Russia and China, urgently need to learn from. Thus, as soon as Truss, the worst possible candidate for Prime Minister, had been carefully selected over the two summer months, many commentators, including myself, doubted that she could last until Christmas. It now seems that that pessimism may have been very optimistic. Some latest estimates reckon that at best she may not last until 1 November.
Truss’ decision to increase government spending – not least to double the UK ‘Defence’ (who is attacking the UK anyway?) budget to £50 billion by 2030 – to send over £3 billion of military supplies to Kiev so far this year, to subsidise 100,000 Ukrainian ‘refugees’, and at the same time to make tax cuts for the rich (what else would you expect the Conservative Party to do?) has not been accepted by Biden, the IMF and, above all, by the markets.
Therefore, on 14 October Truss ditched her own Minister of Finance of 38 days for his decision to carry out her own illiterate economic policy – illiterate, as precisely and prophetically described last July by Truss’ rival as Conservative Prime Minister, the former Finance Minister, Sunak. So, on 14 October, Truss appointed a new British Finance Minister, the fourth in four months, a man notorious for contributing to the destruction the UK’s abysmal Health ‘Service’ (2). He will now do exactly the opposite of everything she had promised just three weeks before and on which impossible promises the intellectually challenged elected her.
Naturally, the hopeless Truss blames all her problems on ‘global factors’ and especially on ‘Putin’s appalling invasion of the Ukraine’. No mention of voluntary and suicidal Western sanctions at all. After all, would she want to admit to her own colossal stupidity? Here we see how Denazification and, as a result regime change, are already happening in the UK, all by themselves, just as they will in the EU and in the USA. All Russia has to do is to sit back and watch Western leaders destroying themselves and dragging down their countries with them, until their peoples rise up in revolt, as is beginning to happen all over Western Europe, and as will happen in the US (we had a presage of this at the Capitol last year) and in its other colonies. This is Denazification, though perhaps more precisely it should be called ‘Auto-Denazification’. Or perhaps it could just be called ‘Hopelessness’? Or maybe just ‘Trussification’?
16 October 2022
Note:
1. A quick read of William Blum’s Killing Hope,US Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II or Stephen Kinzler’s Overthrow,America’s Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq should be enlightening here.
2. A young friend in the UK phoned me on 14 October. He told me how after weeks and weeks of chronic pain, he was eventually diagnosed by a UK hospital doctor as having cancer. He was then told that he had six months to live, but that surgeons would not have enough time to operate, as ‘the waiting list is too long’, and was then given ‘pain-killers’ that did not work as consolation for his death-sentence. The next day, through a friend, he booked a flight to Romania. There, arriving from the airport, he was seen in a clinic at once and given an MRI scan. He was immediately informed that he had a hernia. The surgeon apologised to him that he could not operate on him the next day, but that he would have to wait until the day after. Just another example of the UK’s ‘world class’ health system….Trussification indeed.
مواقف الغرب القائمة على التفوّق العسكري، ظلت ثابتة نحو 500 عام، ومثّلت أساس رفاهيته، ما سمح له بنهب العالم بأسره بشكل مباشر أو خفي.
مع نموّ الهستيريا المعادية لروسيا والصين، كان الغرب يتوطّد فعلاً
عشيّة الاحتفال بيوم روسيا، كثرت الأحاديث حول الأشياء التي يمكن لروسيا أن تفتخر بها، وما الذي نجحت فيه، وماذا الذي يعبّر عن هذا النجاح؟ هل هو توسّع رقعتها الجغرافية، أم اعتماد بعض الصواريخ ذات السرعة الفائقة والقدرة التدميرية الهائلة، أم الحدّ من الفقر مثلاً؟ ما الذي نفخر به حقاً؟
أودّ أن أقترح أن نكون فخورين بأننا نجَونا مرة أخرى. نجَونا من الاضطرابات التي فُرضت علينا جزئياً من الخارج، وقد بدأنا نولد من جديد. لقد أصبحنا أقوى، وعدنا إلى صفوف القوى العظمى. وروسيا لا يسعها إلا أن تكون من بين القوى العظمى، فمن دون ذلك لا تستطيع ببساطة أن تشعر بأنها دولة، لأن ذلك هو طبيعة تاريخها.
على مدار الخمسة عشر عاماً الماضية، ومع نموّ الهستيريا المعادية لروسيا والصين، كان الغرب يتوطّد فعلاً. لكنه يفعل ذلك على وجه التحديد لأنه يدرك أن مواقفه تتداعى. هذه المواقف، القائمة على التفوّق العسكري، ظلت ثابتة نحو 500 عام، ومثّلت أساس رفاهيته، ما سمح له بنهب العالم بأسره – بشكل مباشر أو خفي.
أما اليوم، فلم يعد هناك تفوق عسكري، كما أن الواقع كشف أن القيم السائدة في الغرب هي مناهضة لأوروبا نفسها ومعادية للإنسان، ويرفضها معظم الناس في العالم – كالمثلية، والنسوية المتطرفة، وإنكار الأسرة والتاريخ والوطن.
وفي الغرب، وإن لم يقتصر الأمر عليه، يوجد الكثير من المشاكل الآخذة في الازدياد، ولكن سوى الضجيج الدائر حولها، لم يتم في الواقع حلها، كالتلوث والمشاكل البيئية (جميع الخبراء يؤكدون منذ سنوات عديدة أن تغيّر المناخ، وتقلّص الأراضي الصالحة للزراعة، وضحالة الأنهار في المناطق الزراعية، ستؤدي إلى المجاعة – لكن لم يتم فعل شيء). وهذا إضافة إلى إفقار الطبقة الوسطى، وتنامي التفاوت الطبقي بشكل صارخ (هذا الأخير ينطبق أيضاً على بلدنا).
إن النخب القديمة التي نشأت على الازدهار النسبي، خلال العقود الأربعة الماضية، لا تريد التغيير ولا تستطيع ذلك. لقد بدأت الأرض تنهار تحت أقدامهم، وهذا أحد أسباب المواجهة اليوم: إنهم بحاجة إلى عدو يمكنهم تحويل انتباههم إليه، ولبعض الوقت، لتجنّب المسؤولية عن الفشل.
إلى جانب ذلك، قد يبدو غريباً بالنسبة إلى البعض أن روسيا يمكن أن تعتبر نفسها، إلى جانب الصين – وجزئياً الهند- جزيرة استقرار في عالم يتساقط، بينما بدأ الغرب والعديد من المناطق الأخرى بالانهيار.
فعلًا، إن العالم من حولنا ينهار، وقريباً سيكون هناك مئات الملايين من الجياع والمهاجرين والعديد من النزاعات الجديدة، ومن الأفضل لنا أن نعيش لبعض الوقت في “قلعة روسيا”، المحميّة بشكل موثوق، والتي تعتني بنفسها بالدرجة الأولى، ولكن في الوقت نفسه، منفتحة على التعاون مع أولئك المستعدين لذلك. ينبغي، بأي حال من الأحوال، أن لا نعزل أنفسنا عن العالم فكرياً أو علمياً، وإلا فإننا سنتوقف عن فهمه، كما كانت عليه الحال في العهد السوفياتي.
نحن بحاجة إلى إقامة علاقات مع جميع الدول المستعدة للتعاون معنا، كأفريقيا والعالم العربي، وتقريباً كل آسيا وأميركا اللاتينية.
أما بخصوص الموقف الصيني، فأنا متأكد تماماً من أن بكين ستساعدنا. بطبيعة الحال، هم يحاولون عدم تقويض موقف شركاتهم، التي لا تزال تعتمد بشكل وثيق على الأسواق والتقنيات الغربية. ومن نواحٍ كثيرة، يُنفَّذ هجوم الغرب على روسيا لشطبها كحليف استراتيجي محتمل للصين. وإذا تعثرت روسيا، فإن الموقف الصيني سيضعف بشكل كبير، وهم يفهمون هذا جيداً.
ومن المهم أيضاً التخلّي عن الصور النمطية التي أسرَتنا لعقود. لقد أكلنا العصيدة الفكرية التي طُبخت في الغرب، والتي أصبحت فاسدة منذ زمن طويل، لكننا ما زلنا نمضغها. وهذا ما يحدث في العلوم الاجتماعية والاقتصادية والسياسية والعلاقات الدولية.
لنأخذ هنا على سبيل المثال فكرة التكافؤ العسكري السيّئة السمعة. هذا غباء! لقد أعاق 300 من المقاتلين الاسبارطيين الجيش الفارسي المؤلف من 100 ألف مقاتل في تيرموبيلاي. كما حطم نابليون على الدوام (باستثناء حملته المؤسفة ضد روسيا) الجيوش الأوروبية، التي كان لها تفوّق عددي عليه.
أما نحن فاستوعبنا مفهوم التكافؤ في الحقبة السوفياتية، وقمنا ببناء كمية مجنونة من الصواريخ والدبابات والأسلحة الأخرى – كان لدى الاتحاد السوفياتي دبابات أكثر من بقية العالم! وما زال البعض متمسكاً بهذه الفكرة.
وعلى الرغم من ذلك، لماذا نحتاج إلى الكثير من الصواريخ مثل الأميركيين؟ فإذا افترضنا أن لديهم 5 آلاف صاروخ، ولدينا ألف فقط، وهو أمر مضمون لتحقيق أهدافهم، فإن التهديد حتى باستخدامهم المحدود لها سيبدو مقنعاً ويمنع العدوان والصراع العالمي. لكن قد يكون لدينا المزيد من الأسلحة الأخرى. الشيء الرئيسي هو عدم التورط في سباق تسلح، ولا سيما أن تبنّي مفهوم التوازن العسكري، والحدّ من التسلح أدّى إلى تضخيمهما إلى حدّ كبير.
إن عودة روسيا إلى الوقوف على قدميها، بعد أن تحولت من دون إرادتها إلى بطلة العالم في العقوبات الاقتصادية، ستعتمد على مدى سرعة انتقالها إلى طريق التعبئة في مجال التنمية. حتى الآن هذا يحدث ببطء شديد. أنا لا أتحدّث عن “شيوعية الحرب”. فبالطبع، يجب أن يظل الاقتصاد مختلطاً، مع الملكية الخاصة المتطورة. لكن الصناعات الرئيسية يجب أن تتعامل معها الدولة بشكل مباشر.
نقله إلى العربية: فهيم الصوراني
المؤلف: سيرغي كاراغانوف – المشرف الأكاديمي لكلية الاقتصاد العالمي والشؤون الدولية في الجامعة الوطنية للبحوث.
«لن نقاتل عنكم بعد اليوم ولدينا الكثير ما نفعله لإعادة تأهيل خزائن مجمع الصناعات الحربية وبيوت المال النفطية والغازية لشركاتنا.»
هذا ما سيقوله بايدن الشهر المقبل حين يزور الكيانين المتهالكين «الإسرائيلي» والسعودي.
لن تكون المنظومة التي سيطلق ورشتها اليانكي الأميركي هجوميّة أبداً، بل دفاعية بكلّ معنى الكلمة.
هي محاولة سدّ المنافذ والمسارب التي بدأت تتسلل الى البيت «الإسرائيلي» الغارق في التيه، والبيت السعودي الأعمى!
وكيسنجر في حديثه الصحافي الأخير لم يتحدث عن الحرب أبداً مثلما فسّر البعض، بل إنّ ما قصده من عبارة تحوّلات كبرى تنتظر منطقتنا ليست سوى خرائط النفط والغاز الجديدة التي ستكون نحن من يحدّد شكلها وهي التي سترسم حدود البلدان من الآن فصاعداً وليست الجيوش التقليدية.
إنها معركة إرادات ومقاومات ومعارك من نوع جديد يمكن وصفها بالضربات بين المعارك والحروب وليست حروب جيوش جرارة تفرز حرباً عالمية، كما يهوّل البعض!
وما قرأه كيسنجر كان بعين الخبير المخضرم للنظام العالمي الجديد الذي سيقلب النظام العالمي الحالي على عقبيه من قلب تضاريس بلاد العرب بعد كلّ الهزائم التي تلقاها خلال عقد من الزمان في الكرّ والفرّ عندنا ويتوّج اليوم بالهزيمة الكبرى المرتقبة له في أوكرانيا.
نعم من بحر عكا وبحر صور لبحر بانياس وبحر اللاذقية سيتمّ تظهير الفشل الأميركي وسيتبيّن للعالم أنّ ساكن البيت الأبيض لم يعد شرطيّ العالم، بعد أن تهشمت صورته في أكثر من معركة على بوابات عواصم محورنا المقاوم وسواحل مدننا وبلداتنا من بوابات الشام الى أسوار بغداد وتخوم صنعاء، ومن هرمز الى باب المندب ومن البصرة الى الناقورة…
لا يخطئنّ أحد التقدير بأنّ المعركة الحالية سواء تلك التي ستدار في المضائق والأحواض النفطية والغازية عندنا او تلك التي تدار حالياً في أعالي البحار عند أصدقائنا الروس والصينيين أنها معركة هجومية أميركية…
أبداً ليست كذلك، إنها معركتهم الدفاعية الأخيرة وهم يتجهون بتسارع شديد نحو قعر جهنّم كما يصفهم الصينيون في ردهات مطابخ قرارهم.
انها المعركة التي نحن من يمسك بتلابيبها ونحن الذين فيها في حالة هجوم استراتيجي حتى وانْ كنا نعيش أعلى درجات الضغوط وشظف الحصارات الاقتصادية!
صدقوني انهم يقاتلون القهقرى رغم كلّ استعراضات القوة والضربات الإيذائية هنا وهناك…
انهم يقاتلون بشراسة تكتيكية لتقليل أثمان الانسحاب الاستراتيجي، وتقسيط تكاليف خسائر حروبهم الإقليمية الفاشلة وآخرها تلك التي خاضوها عند بوابات الشام والعالميّة ضدّ أصدقائنا وآخرها تلك التي يخوضونها حالياً في أوكرانيا.
لو كانوا في حالة موازين قوى تصبّ لصالحهم لم يتردّدوا لحظة واحدة لإرسال جيوشهم الجرارة الى بلادنا وقاموا بقصف وتدمير واحتلال مدننا وبلداتنا وجعلوا الموازين عاليها سافلها، لكنهم عاجزون ولا يملكون إلا التسليم بموازين القوى التي باتت لغير صالحهم بكلّ الحسابات.
إنها حسابات إقطاعيّات أوروبا وأميركا التي ترسم ذلك بدقة متناهية للحكومات الحارسة للهيكل العام للشركات المتعددة الجنسية وهي التي توجّههم بهذا الاتجاه او ذاك.
وليست الحكومات في واشنطن وباريس ولندن وغيرها من عواصم المتروبول الا أدوات تنفيذية عند آلهة السلاح والنفط والغاز والمال الحرام!
للأسف طبعاً فإنّ الأغلب الأعمّ من الناس في العالم، انما يظنّ أنّ أميركا، وبالتالي ألمانيا واليابان، وبقية الدول الأوروبية، هي دول كبيرة راسخة، ولديها مؤسساتها الدستورية والقانونية، وجيشها وشرطتها وما الى ذلك،
وانّ فيها حكومات تحافظ على مصالح شعوبها، وأمن أوطانها ومستقبلها، وبقية الأسطوانة المعتادة التي نسمعها من كبار المحللين والكتاب العاملين لديهم…
وهو غش واحتيال وخداع بات مكشوفاً، لمن ألقى السمع وهو بصير، بعد المواجهة الروسية الأطلسية الأميركية في أوكرانيا، خصوصاً مع اشتعال حروب الطاقة ومجمعات الصناعات الحربية.
بنظرة واقعية إجمالية ثبت بالدليل والبرهان إنّ هذه الجغرافية الحكومية الغربية ما هي إلا إقطاعيات من العصور الوسطى، تعود للملك، وحاشيته من الأرستقراطيين والنبلاء، والناس عبيد مملوكة لهم، تعمل باليوميّة، لصالح بضعة أوليغارشيات، في تلك المصانع والمزارع والمناجم والمحاجر والشركات وآبار البترول إلخ…
بينما صار واضحاً لدينا الآن أنّ الشركات العالمية التي ظهرت على سطوح جغرافيا القتال أمثال بوينغ ولوكهيد ورايثون وجنرال اليكتريك وأمازون ومايكروسوفت وبنك إنجلترا وبنك الاحتياطي الفيدرالي ووول استريت ليست شركات حكومية تعود لهذه الدول الكبيرة…
أبداً ليس كذلك، إنها في الحقيقة ليست سوى شركات متعددة الجنسية تعود لبضعة أفراد من بيوت المال العالمية، وهذه الحكومات «الجبارة» مثل حكومة ماكرون وبوريس جونسون وترامب بالأمس وبايدن اليوم ليست سوى حارس يحرس هذه الأموال لأصحابها الأوليغارش.
وإذا كنا نظنّ انّ المنظمات العالمية مثل مجلس الأمن ومنظمة الصحة العالمية والبنك الدولي وصندوق النقد الدولي ومنظمة العدل ومنظمة التجارة الحرة وما يسمّى بالمجتمع الدولي، انما هي منظمات دولية تعمل لأجل شعوب العالم ورفاهيته وأمنه وصحته فنحن مخطئون ايضاً…
لقد اتضح للقاصي والداني الآن بأنها هي الأخرى ليست سوى مجرد حارس مصالح تلك الشركات العالمية المتعددة الجنسيات، ايّ انها مثلها مثل «بلاك واتر» وأمثالها، كلّ ما هنالك أنها تتمظهر بملابس مدنية وياقات بيضاء ويلبس مدراؤها قفازات ناعمة تخفي عن الرأي العام قبضاتها الحديدية وأسلحتها الرشاشة المغطاة بشكل جيد تحت معاطفها ومجملة بربطات عنق ملونة.
هيكلهم يتلاشى رويداً رويداً والعالم يتغيّر بسرعة لصالحنا.
The word ‘Civilisation’ comes from the Latin word ‘civitas’, or city, and so ‘civilised’ simply means to live in cities. This word ‘civitas’ gives us words like civilian, civic and civil. Civilisation means that people no longer live as nomadic hunter-gatherers, but are settled. Although therefore they have organised agriculture, they are not dependent on everyone working in agriculture as there are food surpluses, greater than for the numbers of human-beings working to grow food. This means that not all have to live off the land and many can do other things and live in cities. They can live off agricultural surpluses, traded in markets for other goods, created by technology, such as building materials, clothing, footwear and utensils, as well as being able to buy and sell services such as education and medicine. All civilisations have not only trade, but also a set of sacred or spiritual values which are at the heart of any civilisation, which is called Religion. Religion is at the core of the culture and creates sacred architecture (ziggurats, pyramids, temples, monasteries, cathedrals, mosques…), painting, sculpture, literature and sets the moral values which people live by.
Historians and philosophers of civilisation, such as Christopher Dawson, Arnold Toynbee or Samuel Huntingdon, have pointed out the particularity of Western civilisation. To quote from Christopher Dawson in his work ‘Religion and the Rise of Western Culture’, written nearly a century ago: ‘Why is it that Europe alone among the civilisations of the world has been continually shaken and transformed by an energy of spiritual unrest that refuses to be content with the unchanging law of social tradition which rules the oriental cultures? It is because the religious ideal has not been the worship of timeless and changeless perfection, but a spirit that strives to incorporate itself in humanity and to change the world’. This means that, unlike Chinese, Indian, Buddhist, Amazonian, Orthodox Christian, Muslim or any other civilisation, Western civilisation is unique, as it has continually sought to spread itself aggessively in a missionary way, imposing itself on, meddling in and taking over the rest of the world. In other words, it alone claims to be global. No wonder that today it openly calls itself ‘Globalism’.
Western Civilisation
The Western world has long pretentiously called itself ‘The Civilised World’, as if to say ‘there is no civilisation outside our civilisation’. This is why it condemns all other civilisations, both in the present and in the past, as ‘primitive’, ‘savage’ and ‘barbaric’, and therefore arrogates to itself the right to annihilate them. This is why it uses euphemisms to define itself as, for example, ‘the international community’, when in fact it is anti-international, imposing a one size fits all ideology on all and proposing a world dictatorship subjected to its elite. ‘Western’ has come in its eyes to mean Universal. This is why, ironically, it calls itself ‘Judeo-Christian’. We shall return to the use of the word ‘Christian’ later. The claim to be ‘Judeo’ (a racial religion confessed by fewer than 0.2% of the world population, is particularly curious. However, we must understand that what it means by ‘Judeo’ (1) is actually Zionist, that is universalist. From here we understand the very accurate descriptive term for it of ‘Anglo-Zionist’, as used by The Saker. For it is the Anglo-Saxon (2) world or Anglosphere, initiated by the genocidal Cromwell (who, by the way, was idolised by the monetarist Thatcher), financed by Dutch Jews, and spread to the North American colonies, which is today the ideological centre of ‘the West’.
Western civilisation uses some very twisted definitions. For instance: For it to ‘civilise’ means to massacre the natives, so then it can asset-strip their country. The classic case is North America, but there are dozens of other examples around the world, from Bolivia to Guatemala and the Congo to Afghanistan; justifiers of colonisations claim, ‘yes, but we brought them the benefits of civilisation like the railways’. In fact, railways were built in countries like India so that minerals could be exploited and troops could be transported in order to quell popular wars of liberation against oppressive and exploitative foreign rule; then we have the promise that, in the name of freedom and democracy ‘we shall bomb them back into the Stone Age’ (attributed to US General Curtis ‘Bombs Away’ LeMay, speaking of Vietnam). As for the Viennese Hitler, that great spreader of Western civilisation, he opposed ‘Jewish and Asiatic’ Bolshevism and murdered 27 million in the ultimate Holocaust. He never knew that Asia is the source of advanced civilisations and religions, including Christianity, which was not European, for Christ was hardly some pale, blond-haired Nordic ‘Aryan’.
Western War
Western war has always consisted of highly organised violence, aided by the most aggressive high technology. Advances in military technology have all been initiated by the West. It used to be castles against arrows, the lethal crossbow against pikes, cannon against stone walls, the musket against bows, the Maxim gun, invented by the Anglo-American ‘Sir’ Hiram Maxim (3) against spear-throwing Africans, then it was poison gas (as used by Hitler, that is Churchill (sorry for the Bushism, ‘anyway’) against the Kurds), then Agent Orange, cluster bombs and uranium-tipped shells against rifles. To illustrate this, let us think about how those used to the way that such technology is exploited criticise the special operation (not war) in the Ukraine (4). They claim that the progress of the Russian operation, carried out by relatively small numbers of liberation forces from Donetsk and Lugansk and of Confederate Russian troops, is ‘too slow’.
Here they misunderstand how the Allied/Confederate forces use their military technology. It is quite unlike the US and its Union NATO vassals. The latter carpet bomb, they cause ‘collateral damage’ (the NATO euphemism for the mass murder of innocent victims) and are hugely destructive, as though war was all a special effects show, a spectacle for entertainment as in Hollywood films, most of which portray great destruction. This is why nearly 20 years ago the American Rumsfeld spoke of the US destruction of civilian infrastructure in Iraq as ‘shock and awe’, which is just another euphemism – Hitler would have called it ‘Blitzkrieg’. Yes, of course, Russian civilisation conducts military operations ‘slowly’ (5): it is not a US-style special effects operation, it is meant to avoid civilian and military casualties. You cannot translate ‘collateral damage’ into Russian, you can only paraphrase it.
Western Religion
Western religion has a similar story to tell. As we have said, every civilisation has a set of sacred values. The Western too and though it calls its religion ‘Christianity’, it is not. For instance, it insists on calling the Crusaders and Teutonic Knights ‘Christians’. But just because you are a bloodthirsty barbarian who commits genocide with a cross on your uniform, that does not make you a Christian. Just as Nazis wore a belt with ‘Gott mit uns’ (‘God with us’) stamped on it, that did not make them Christian either. And when the Nazis put crosses on their tanks and dive-bombers, it did not make them Christian either (though the crosses did take in some naïve Western Ukrainians in 1941). And just because God ‘told’ George Bush to invade Iraq in 2003, that did not make him or his forces Christian. Frankly, the Western use of the word Christian is blasphemous to Orthodox Christians and the more accurate use of words like ‘Catholic’ and ‘Protestant’ is insulting to those who are of those religions.
It is notable that when Western colonisation took its so-called ‘Christianity’ to its colonies, it did not ‘sell’ in Asia, where they have a more sophisticated sense of religion, whether, Muslim, Hindu or Buddhist. It sold or rather was forced down throats at swordpoint, and then only in specific forms, only to animists in Latin America, Africa and the Philippines. Western religion is a State-organised and manipulated affair, the ‘opium of the people’ (6), more exactly, something, together with football, to keep the toiling masses under control. Even in Western places of worship, people file in under control and are seated in carefully controlled rows like sheeple. Western religion is a subversion of faith, for it is manipulated by Western States into whatever they want it to be. For example, sodomy was once considered outrageous by Western religion; today it is officially approved. After all, the State has spoken. Indeed, today Western religion is secularism, the sense of the sacred is gone, and whatever the politically correct elite has decided is their religion, regardless of whether you still believe in the ‘old superstition’ that God exists. In other words, contemporary Western religion is Anti-Religion.
Anti-Civilisation
This brings us to consider some sort of definition of today’s Western Civilisation. If its Unsacred Religion is Secularism, an Anti-Religion, then surely its Civilisation must be an Anti-Civilisation? The record of ‘Western Civilisation’ does tend to confirm that. The current events in the Ukraine, where the Western elite is intent on destroying as many Ukrainians as possible, both soldiers as well as civilians used as human shields, stationing troops inside hospitals and schools, creating a massive refugee crisis, indebting the country for ever, possibly creating a famine there and in other areas of the world, possibly provoking violent riots and revolts among the impoverished peoples of Western Europe and North America, would suggest that whatever Western Civilisation once was, it is no more.
Notes:
1. Another Western misuse, or rather abuse, is the term ‘Anti-Semitic’. It makes no sense, since the Arab peoples, including the Palestinians, who are dispossessed and oppressed in the Gaza Strip concentration camp and elsewhere, by Jews, are Semites. Anti-Jewish is the correct term.
2. We use the term ‘Anglo-Saxon’ not in its incorrect academic sense of Early English/Old English/pre-Norman, but in its modern sense of Anglo-American, as in the term WASP, ‘White Anglo-Saxon Protestant’.
3. In 1882 in Vienna an American had told Maxim: ‘If you want to make a pile of money, invent something that will enable these Europeans to cut each others’ throats with greater facility’.
4. The 19th century Hapsburg usage of the word ‘Ukraine’, meaning simply ‘borderlands’ in Slavonic languages, that is, in this case the area on the eastern borders of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, is absurd when used for areas far from those borders.
5. Even so, in only some ninety days, of the remaining 24 provinces of the Ukraine (the 25th, the Crimea was returned in 2014), five of the richest Ukrainian provinces under Kiev regime oppression have either completely or else in large part been liberated. These are: Donetsk, Lugansk, Kherson, Zaporozhe and Kharkov. If Allied forces wish to take all of the Eastern Ukraine/Novorossiya, there remain only the three provinces of Dnipropetrovsk, Nikolaev and Odessa. Together these eight heavily-populated provinces have about half of the population of the Ukraine, some 20 million people. Of the other two-thirds of the country, presumably the nine provinces of Central Ukraine will remain as part of the real Ukraine, a future, demilitarised Russian Protectorate, leaving the seven provinces of Western Ukraine to be demilitarised and shared out between Poland, which could perhaps receive five of them, and the other two perhaps shared out between Hungary, Romania and Slovakia. See:
Little wonder that even the failed diplomat Kissinger is calling for the Ukraine to meet at least some of Russia’s demands. Clearly, all of them will have to be met, but at least one 98-year old pensioner can show the beginnings of pragmatism. He shows that some in the West realise that they have lost.
6. Let us not, however, forget the famous saying that Marxism is ‘the opium of the intellectuals’.
In Davos and beyond, NATO’s upbeat narrative plays like a broken record, while on the ground, Russia is stacking up wins that could sink the Atlantic order.
Three months after the start of Russia’s Operation Z in Ukraine, the battle of The West (12 percent) against The Rest (88 percent) keeps metastasizing. Yet the narrative – oddly – remains the same.
Photo Credit: The Cradle
On Monday, from Davos, World Economic Forum Executive Chairman Klaus Schwab introduced Ukrainian comedian-cum-President Volodymyr Zelensky, on the latest leg of his weapons-solicitation-tour, with a glowing tribute. Herr Schwab stressed that an actor impersonating a president defending neo-Nazis is supported by “all of Europe and the international order.”
He means, of course, everyone except the 88 percent of the planet that subscribes to the Rule of Law – instead of the faux construct the west calls a ‘rules-based international order.’
Back in the real world, Russia, slowly but surely has been rewriting the Art of Hybrid War. Yet within the carnival of NATO psyops, aggressive cognitive infiltration, and stunning media sycophancy, much is being made of the new $40 billion US ‘aid’ package to Ukraine, deemed capable of becoming a game-changer in the war.
This ‘game-changing’ narrative comes courtesy of the same people who burned though trillions of dollars to secure Afghanistan and Iraq. And we saw how that went down.
Ukraine is the Holy Grail of international corruption. That $40 billion can be a game-changer for only two classes of people: First, the US military-industrial complex, and second, a bunch of Ukrainian oligarchs and neo-connish NGOs, that will corner the black market for weapons and humanitarian aid, and then launder the profits in the Cayman Islands.
A quick breakdown of the $40 billion reveals $8.7 billion will go to replenish the US weapons stockpile (thus not going to Ukraine at all); $3.9 billion for USEUCOM (the ‘office’ that dictates military tactics to Kiev); $5 billion for a fuzzy, unspecified “global food supply chain”; $6 billion for actual weapons and “training” to Ukraine; $9 billion in “economic assistance” (which will disappear into selected pockets); and $0.9 billion for refugees.
US risk agencies have downgraded Kiev to the dumpster of non-reimbursing-loan entities, so large American investment funds are ditching Ukraine, leaving the European Union (EU) and its member-states as the country’s only option.
Few of those countries, apart from Russophobic entities such as Poland, can justify to their own populations sending huge sums of direct aid to a failed state. So it will fall to the Brussels-based EU machine to do justenough to maintain Ukraine in an economic coma – independent from any input from member-states and institutions.
These EU ‘loans’ – mostly in the form of weapons shipments – can always be reimbursed by Kiev’s wheat exports. This is already happening on a small scale via the port of Constanta in Romania, where Ukrainian wheat arrives in barges over the Danube and is loaded into dozens of cargo ships everyday. Or, via convoys of trucks rolling with the weapons-for-wheat racket. However, Ukrainian wheat will keep feeding the wealthy west, not impoverished Ukrainians.
Moreover, expect NATO this summer to come up with another monster psyop to defend its divine (not legal) right to enter the Black Sea with warships to escort Ukrainian vessels transporting wheat. Pro-NATO media will spin it as the west being ‘saved’ from the global food crisis – which happens to be directly caused by serial, hysterical packages of western sanctions.
Poland goes for soft annexation
NATO is indeed massively ramping up its ‘support’ to Ukraine via the western border with Poland. That’s in synch with Washington’s two overarching targets: First, a ‘long war,’ insurgency-style, just like Afghanistan in the 1980s, with jihadis replaced by mercenaries and neo-Nazis. Second, the sanctions instrumentalized to “weaken” Russia, militarily and economically.
Other targets remain unchanged, but are subordinate to the Top Two: make sure that the Democrats are re-elected in the mid-terms (that’s not going to happen); irrigate the industrial-military complex with funds that are recycled back as kickbacks (already happening); and keep the hegemony of the US dollar by all means (tricky: the multipolar world is getting its act together).
A key target being met with astonishing ease is the destruction of the German – and consequently the EU’s – economy, with a great deal of the surviving companies to be eventually sold off to American interests.
Take, for instance, BMW board member Milan Nedeljkovic telling Reuters that “our industry accounts for about 37 percent of natural gas consumption in Germany” which will sink without Russian gas supplies.
Washington’s plan is to keep the new ‘long war’ going at a not-too-incandescent level – think Syria during the 2010s – fueled by rows of mercenaries, and featuring periodic NATO escalations by anyone from Poland and the Baltic midgets to Germany.
Last week, that pitiful Eurocrat posing as High Representative of the EU for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, Josep Borrell, gave away the game when previewing the upcoming meeting of the EU Foreign Affairs Council.
Borrell admitted that “the conflict will be long” and “the priority of the EU member states” in Ukraine “consists in the supply of heavy weapons.”
Then Polish President Andrzej Duda met with Zelensky in Kiev. The slew of agreements the two signed indicate that Warsaw intends to profit handsomely from the war to enhance its politico-military, economic, and cultural influence in western Ukraine. Polish nationals will be allowed to be elected to Ukrainian government bodies and even aim to become constitutional judges.
In practice, that means Kiev is all but transferring management of the Ukrainian failed state to Poland. Warsaw won’t even have to send troops. Call it a soft annexation.
The steamroller on the move
As it stands, the situation on the battlefield can be examined in this map. Intercepted communications from the Ukrainian command reveal their aim to build a layered defense from Poltava through Dnepropetrovsk, Zaporozhia, Krivoy Rog, and Nikolaev – which happens to be a shield for the already fortified Odessa. None of that guarantees success against the incoming Russian onslaught.
It’s always important to remember that Operation Z started on February 24 with around 150,000 or so fighters – and definitely not Russia’s elite forces. And yet they liberated Mariupol and destroyed the elite neo-Nazi Azov batallion in a matter of only fifty days, cleaning up a city of 400,000 people with minimal casualties.
While fighting a real war on the ground – not those indiscriminate US bombings from the air – in a huge country against a large army, facing multiple technical, financial and logistical challenges, the Russians also managed to liberate Kherson, Zaporizhia and virtually the whole area of the ‘baby twins,’ the popular republics of Donetsk and Luhansk.
Russia’s ground forces commander, General Aleksandr Dvornikov, has turbo-charged missile, artillery and air strikes to a pace five times faster than during the first phase of Operation Z, while the Ukrainians, overall, are low or very low on fuel, ammo for artillery, trained specialists, drones, and radars.
What American armchair and TV generals simply cannot comprehend is that in Russia’s view of this war – which military expert Andrei Martyanov defines as a “combined arms and police operation” – the two top targets are the destruction of all military assets of the enemy while preserving the life of its own soldiers.
So while losing tanks is not a big deal for Moscow, losing lives is. And that accounts for those massive Russian bombings; each military target must be conclusively destroyed. Precision strikes are crucial.
There is a raging debate among Russian military experts on why the Ministry of Defense does not go for a fast strategic victory. They could have reduced Ukraine to rubble – American style – in no time. That’s not going to happen. The Russians prefer to advance slowly and surely, in a sort of steamroller pattern. They only advance after sappers have fully surveilled the terrain; after all there are mines everywhere.
The overall pattern is unmistakable, whatever the NATO spin barrage. Ukrainian losses are becoming exponential – as many as 1,500 killed or wounded each day, everyday. If there are 50,000 Ukrainians in the several Donbass cauldrons, they will be gone by the end of June.
Ukraine must have lost as many as 20,000 soldiers in and around Mariupol alone. That’s a massive military defeat, largely surpassing Debaltsevo in 2015 and previously Ilovaisk in 2014. The losses near Izyum may be even higher than in Mariupol. And now come the losses in the Severodonetsk corner.
We’re talking here about the best Ukrainian forces. It doesn’t even matter that only 70 percent of Western weapons sent by NATO ever make it to the battlefield: the major problem is that the best soldiers are going…going…gone, and won’t be replaced. Azov neo-Nazis, the 24th Brigade, the 36th Brigade, various Air Assault brigades – they all suffered losses of 60+ percent or have been completely demolished.
So the key question, as several Russian military experts have stressed, is not when Kiev will ‘lose’ as a point of no return; it is how many soldiers Moscow is prepared to lose to get to this point.
The entire Ukrainian defense is based on artillery. So the key battles ahead involve long-range artillery. There will be problems, because the US is about to deliver M270 MLRS systems with precision-guided ammunition, capable of hitting targets at a distance of up to 70 kilometers or more.
Russia, though, has a counterpunch: the Hermes Small Operational-Tactical Complex, using high precision munitions, possibility of laser guidance, and a range of more than 100 kilometers. And they can work in conjunction with the already mass-produced Pantsir air defense systems.
The sinking ship
Ukraine, within its current borders, is already a thing of the past. Georgy Muradov, permanent representative of Crimea to the President of Russia and Deputy Prime Minister of the Crimean government, is adamant: “Ukraine in the form in which it was, I think, will no longer remain. This is already the former Ukraine.”
The Sea of Azov has now become a “sea of joint use” by Russia and the Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR), as confirmed by Muradov.
Mariupol will be restored. Russia has had plenty of experience in this business in both Grozny and Crimea. The Russia-Crimea land corridor is on. Four hospitals among five in Mariupol have already reopened and public transportation is back, as well as three gas stations.
The imminent loss of Severodonetsk and Lysichansk will ring serious alarm bells in Washington and Brussels, because that will represent the beginning of the end of the current regime in Kiev. And that, for all practical purposes – and beyond all the lofty rhetoric of “the west stands with you” – means heavy players won’t be exactly encouraged to bet on a sinking ship.
On the sanctions front, Moscow knows exactly what to expect, as detailed by Minister of Economic Development Maxim Reshetnikov: “Russia proceeds from the fact that sanctions against it are a rather long-term trend, and from the fact that the pivot to Asia, the acceleration of reorientation to eastern markets, to Asian markets is a strategic direction for Russia. We will make every effort to integrate into value chains precisely together with Asian countries, together with Arab countries, together with South America.”
On efforts to “intimidate Russia,” players would be wise to listen to the hypersonic sound of 50 Sarmat state-of-the-art missiles ready for combat this autumn, as explained by Roscosmos head Dmitry Rogozin.
This week’s meetings in Davos brings to light another alignment forming in the world’s overarching unipolar vs. multipolar battle. Russia, the baby twins, Chechnya and allies such as Belarus are now pitted against ‘Davos leaders’ – in other words, the combined western elite, with a few exceptions like Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orban.
Zelensky will be fine. He’s protected by British and American special forces. The family is reportedly living in an $8 million mansion in Israel. He owns a $34 million villa in Miami Beach, and another in Tuscany. Average Ukrainians were lied to, robbed, and in many cases, murdered, by the Kiev gang he presides over – oligarchs, security service (SBU) fanatics, neo-Nazis. And those Ukrainians that remain (10 million have already fled) will continue to be treated as expendable.
Meanwhile, Russian President Vladimir “the new Hitler” Putin is in absolutely no hurry to end this larger than life drama that is ruining and rotting the already decaying west to its core. Why should he? He tried everything, since 2007, on the “why can’t we get along” front. Putin was totally rejected. So now it’s time to sit back, relax, and watch the Decline of the West.
The views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of The Cradle.
The decline of the US dollar, the three ‘systems’, the sanctions war on Russia, on the eve of the publication of Prof. Hudson’s new book: The Destiny of Civilization: Finance Capitalism, Industrial Capitalism or Socialism.”
UPDATE: This wonderful transcript is now available just underneath the video
Transcript
BENJAMIN NORTON: Hey, everyone. I’m Ben Norton, and this is the Multipolarista podcast. And I have the great pleasure of being joined today by one of my favorite guests, one of I think the most important economists in the world today. I’m speaking with Professor Michael Hudson.
If you’ve seen any of the interviews I’ve done with Professor Hudson over the past few years, you probably know that he’s a brilliant analyst. He always has, I think, the best analysis to understand what’s going on economically and also politically, geopolitically, in the world today.
And right now is, I think, a very important moment to have Professor Hudson on today. We’re going to talk about the economic war on Russia and the process of economic decoupling between Russia and China and the West, which is something that Professor Hudson has talked about for many years. And that really has accelerated with the Western sanctions on Russia over Ukraine.
We’re also going to talk about the decline in U.S. dollar hegemony. A recent report from the International Monetary Fund, which is dominated by the U.S., acknowledged that the use of the dollar in foreign bank reserves is gradually declining.
Now, it’s not going to disappear overnight. But even the IMF is acknowledging that dollar hegemony is eroding. And, of course, the IMF acknowledged that the Western sanctions on Russia are going to further erode the hegemony of the U.S. dollar.
We now see Russia doing business with China in the Chinese yuan. Russia is also doing business with India with the Indian rupee. And of course Russia has been telling Europe that if it wants to buy Russian energy, it has to do so with Russian rubles.
So there’s so much to talk about today, Professor Hudson, but I want to begin in the first half of this interview today talking about a new book that you’re just about to publish.
Today is Monday, May 9th. You said on Wednesday, May 11th, the book comes out. And it’s called “The Destiny of Civilization: Finance Capitalism, Industrial Capitalism or Socialism.”
And everything that I just prefaced this interview with, discussing the economic war in Russia and sanctions and decoupling, this is all deeply related to what you talk about in this book. And I had the pleasure of getting an early copy and reading through it. It’s a really important book, I think.
And you talk about this fundamental divide internationally – and this is a divide that actually goes back historically as well – between these three models for different economic systems you discuss: finance capitalism, industrial capitalism, and socialism.
And your argument is that the U.S. empire has been a force for imposing neoliberalism, which is a particular form of finance capitalism, which is nonproductive, in which finance capital destroys productive industries in pursuit of rent-seeking, and what you call the rentier class.
So instead of producing, as the classical bourgeois economists had said capitalism would be a productive system instead, finance capitalism is fundamentally a system of destruction and debt.
And your argument is that this is deeply rooted in U.S. foreign policy. This is the U.S. foreign policy strategy for expanding its economic power, is imposing this finance capitalist model on the world.
So can you expand further on your argument about the fight between finance capitalism, industrial capitalism, and socialism, and why you decided to publish this book now?
MICHAEL HUDSON: Well the book came out of a series of 10 lectures that I did for my Chinese audience. I’ve been a professor at Peking University for a number of years in economics, and have professorships at other universities, Wuhan and Hong Kong.
And I have a fairly large audience of about 65,000 people per lecture there. And I was asked to give my general overview, sort of a history of economic development in the West, for the Chinese.
And in order to understand today’s finance capitalism, you have to understand what industrial capitalism was, as it was described in the 19th century.
And it’s often forgotten, or played down, that industrial capitalism was revolutionary. What it was trying to do – from the physiocrats in France in the late 18th century to Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, Marx, and the whole late-19th century flowering of socialism – the ideal of classical value theory and rent theory, was to say what is the actual value, the cost value of producing goods and services?
And what is earned by the capitalist, when he employs labor to make a profit, and what is unearned? And what is unearned was the landlord class. That was the hereditary warrior class that conquered all of the European kingdoms in the Middle Ages.
And the attempt by England’s industrialists was saying, look, we cannot become the workshop of the world; we cannot undersell foreign countries if we have a landlord class ripping off all of the money in land rent.
And if we have predatory banking, or the wealthy people just lend really for buying property, or making distressed loans or predatory loans that have nothing to do with financing actual capital formation.
Well, what made this capitalism revolutionary was the British industrialists and advocates of industry, even the bankers in Ricardo’s time, said, well, in order to overthrow the landlord class, which controls the House of Lords and all of the upper chambers of government in Europe, we have to have democratic reform.
If we have democratic reform and give voting to the people, they’re going to vote against the landlord class, and then we can have an efficient economy where our prices of our exports and our goods and services reflect the actual cost of production, not the rake off for the rentiers class, not the rake off of what landlords take, not the rake off of what predatory bankers take.
And the whole long 19th century leading up to World War One was this revolutionary value theory that depicted land rent and monopoly rent and financial returns as being unearned income and wanting to strip it away.
And all of this seemed to be moving toward socialism. The industrialists were all in favor of government public utilities, of government enterprise, because they said, if the government doesn’t provide health care, then individuals are going to have to pay it, and it’ll cost a lot of money, like it does in the United States.
And so you had the conservative prime minister of England, Benjamin Disraeli, saying, health, all is health, we’ve got to provide public health for the people.
And it was the conservative Bismarck in Germany that said, we’ve got to provide pensions. If labor has to save up for the pensions, then it’s not going to have enough money to buy the goods and services that we Germans are producing. We have got to make pensions public.
So all of this move towards socialism was not only in favor of increasing living standards, which soared in the 19th century, but also in freeing the economy from the rentier class, from the landlords, from the bankers.
And for the classical economists, a free market was a market free from landlords, free from bankers, free from monopolists.
Well, needless to say, the rentiers fought back. And by after World War Two, we’ve seen a continual anti-classical theory replacing the classical idea of free markets with a value of free theory, saying, well, everybody earns whatever they they have. All wealth is earned, not unearned. And if Goldman Sachs partners are paid more than anyone else, that’s because they’re so productive.
So you had a move rejecting classical economics, a junk economics, and a kind of artificial economics that doesn’t really talk about how finance capitalism has worked.
And as it turns out, the business plan of finance capitalism was so predatory that it was anti-industrial.
That’s why President Clinton in the United States moved to invite China into the International Labor Organization, saying, well, we can fight wage rises in America by a race to the bottom. We can we can hire Asians to do work, and that will cause unemployment here. And that’s wonderful for the industrialists. It will basically cut wages and keep American wages down.
Well, that basically is the strategy of finance capitalism, and the aim of finance capitalism is not to invest in factories, and plant equipment, and research and development, but to live in the short term, but to make money by financial engineering, not industrial engineering.
And it becomes predatory, and so you have the whole ideological attack on public enterprise. You have Frederick Hayek’s “The Road to Serfdom,” where you say, if government provides public healthcare, that’s “the road to serfdom,” where actually it’s finance capitalism that is the road to debt peonage and serfdom.
And you have now a whole disparagement of government. And all of this is a counter-revolution to the revolutionary impetus of industrial capitalism in its early stages.
And it’s true that corporations now are just as right-wing as the the banks and the hedge funds. But that’s because corporate industry has been taken over by the financial sector, and the heads of almost every industrial corporation are rewarded the how high they can push the stock price, to exercise the stock options they’re paid in.
And you increase the stock price not by investing more, not by hiring more labor or increasing productivity or increasing sales, but simply by using whatever income you have to buy back your stocks. And by buying back your stocks, this forces up their price.
And, most of all, by giving political contributions in this country to the Democrats and Republicans alike, who appoint Federal Reserve heads that have spent $7-9 trillion buying up stocks and bonds to increase the price of buying a retirement income, to increase Wall Street prices, to increase housing prices, and make America even less competitive industrially.
So finance capitalism is what has essentially de-industrialized the United States and turned the Midwest into a Rust Belt.
Well, the alternative, obviously, are the societies that have not followed this neoliberal finance capitalist plan. And the most successful economy, obviously, has been China, which is why it has been spending so much time there.
And China has done exactly what 19th-century United States, Germany, England, and France did. It has kept basic utilities, basic needs, housing, and above all, finance and banking, in the public domain, as public utilities.
Instead of having an independent financial sector operating on its own self-interest, the Bank of China creates the money. And the Bank of China lends money by deciding, where do we need to have investment in real estate to provide housing for the population at as low a price as we can make it? How do we build up the industry? How do we provide an educational system with training? How do we provide health?
And the fact is that the central planning in an efficient socialist style, not the Stalinist planning that everybody refers to of Russia, but a mixed economy as you have in China, which is truly a mixed economy, with guidance, like the French planification.
Well, that is obviously the way in which you survive and you avoid the kind of overloading the economy with debt service, with high rents, with high payments to the health-care monopoly in the United States, by avoiding all of this payment to a rentier class that has what the classical economists call unearned income, predatory income.
And instead of unseating them, we’ve put them in charge, and made the banks and Wall Street, and the city of London, and the Paris Bourse, the central planners.
So we do have central planning much more centralized than anything that was dreamed by the socialists. But the planning, the centralized planning is done by the financial sector.
And financial planning is short-termism; it’s short-term planning; it’s take your money and run. And that’s what is stripping and impoverishing the global economy today.
BENJAMIN NORTON: Absolutely. And, in your book, you write about the important distinction between the classical economic idea of a so-called free market, and how, you argue that, neoliberals turn that idea on its head.
So this is what you write in your book. And this is, again, Michael Hudson’s new book, “The Destiny of Civilization,” which is out this week. You write:
“The neoliberal ideology inverts the classical idea of a free market from one that is free from economic rent to one that is free for the rentier classes” – that is the rent-extracting classes – “to extract rent and gain dominance.”
So they they completely flip the idea of what it means to have a free market.
And then you note that, “in contrast to classical political economy, this neoliberal ideology promotes tax favoritism for rentiers, privatization, financialization, and deregulation.” And you discuss all of that.
That is, of course, what we could call the Washington consensus.
And then you argue that “U.S. foreign policy seeks to extend this neoliberal rentier program throughout the world.”
And you have a very interesting section of your book where you discuss this concept as “free-trade imperialism.”
So can you talk about what your idea of “free-trade imperialism” is and how it relates to U.S. foreign policy?
MICHAEL HUDSON: Well, the Nobel Prize is given basically for junk economics. And probably the worst junk economist of the century was Paul Samuelson.
He made the absurd claim that he proved mathematically that, if you have free trade then, and don’t have tariffs, and don’t have any government protection, then everyone will become more equal. At least the proportions between labor and capital will be more equal. Well, the reality is just the opposite.
And the term “free-trade imperialism” was actually created by a British historian of trade theory who pointed out that, wait a minute, when England went for free trade, the idea was, if we have free trade, we can stifle other countries from being able to industrialize, because if we have free trade, then we can tell America, we will open our doors to your markets – meaning the markets of the slave South, that Britain supported – and in exchange, you will open your markets to our industrial goods.
And America followed that until the Civil War, which was fought not only over slavery, but by the Republican Party after 1853 that said very explicitly, if we’re going to win the election – the Whigs never could win – if we, the new party, are going to win the election and industrialize America, we’ve got to integrate ourselves with the anti-slavery issue, with emancipation, but for us, the economic war of America is a war of, either we’re going to have protective tariffs in the North, or we’re going to end up as a non-industrial, raw materials-producing society, as the South wants.
And that was the debate from 1815, when the Napoleonic wars ended and world trade began again, until really the Civil War.
And America became strong in the way that Germany became strong too, by having protective tariffs, in order to have prices large enough to nurture what was called infant industry, to nurture American manufacturing.
And I wrote a long book about this, published some years ago based on my PhD dissertation, “America’s Protectionist Takeoff.”
Well, the English tried to fight against other countries protecting their economy, saying that if you just have free trade, you’ll get rich. Whereas the reality is, if we have free trade, you’ll get poor, if you’re not already able to have industrial and labor productivity and agricultural productivity on par with the most advanced countries.
Free trade was an attempt to prevent other countries from investing government money and building up their agriculture, and building up their industry, and building up their productivity, and creating a school system, to raise wages, to make wages more productive.
And the American protectionists said, well, we’re going to have a high-wage economy because high-wage labor undersells pauper labor. And skilled, well-fed, well-rested American labor can produce much more than the pauper labor of other countries that have free trade.
Well, what the leading American protectionist economist, Erasmus Peshine Smith, went to Japan and helped industrial help Japan break away from British free trade, helped Japan industrialize.
And other American economists, other foreign economists, all picked up the ideas of the American protectionist, like Friedrich List went to Germany promoting protectionism.
And Peshine Smith’s book, “The Manual of Political Economy,” was translated into all the foreign languages – Japanese, Italian, French, German.
And you had Europe realizing that free trade polarizes economies. Well, it was this that after World War One, and especially World War Two, when you had orthodox economics turning into basically propaganda.
That’s where you and Samuelson and others try to convince other countries, governments are bad, leave everything to the wealthy people, to the finance people, trickle-down economies, it’s all going to trickle down, don’t worry, just give more money to the rich, and don’t have any government interference with markets.
Whereas America had got rich by interfering with markets, to shape them in the years leading up to World War One.
But after World War One, America had already achieved its industrial dominance. And it was after World War One that America said, ok, now our protective tariffs have enabled us to outproduce all the other countries, and our protectionist agriculture especially – the most protected sector in America, has always been agriculture, since the 1930s.
Basically it said, well, now we can outproduce other countries, we can undersell them, now we can tell them to go for free trade.
And after World War Two, the Americans created the World Bank for economic impoverishment, and the International Monetary Austerity Fund.
And the World Bank’s leading objective was to prevent other countries from investing in their own food production.
The guiding line of the World Bank was, we’ve got to provide infrastructure for building up plantation agriculture in Latin America, and Africa, and other countries, so that they will grow tropical export crops, but they cannot be permitted to grow grain or wheat to feed themselves; they must be dependent on the United States.
And so the function of free trade, the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund has been to finance dependency, backed up by the American support of dictatorships throughout Latin America who agree to have client oligarchies supporting pro-American trade patterns and avoiding any kind of self-reliance, so that the United States can do what it has recently done to Russia and other countries, impose sanctions – say, well, now that you depended on us for your grain, we can now impose sanctions, and you can’t feed yourself if you don’t follow the policies we want.
That was the policy that America tried to use against China after Mao’s revolution. And fortunately for China, Canada broke that monopoly, and said, well, we’re going to sell grain to China. And China was always very friendly to Canada in those earlier decades.
So basically, free trade means no government, no socialism. It means central planning essentially by Wall Street – countries should let American firms come in, buy control of their raw materials, resources, control of their oil and gas, and mineral rights, and forests and plantations, and basically let other countries send their whole economic surplus to the United States, where it will be duly financialized to buy out other countries’ raw materials and rent yielding resources.
BENJAMIN NORTON: Yeah, and in your book, you have a very funny passage that I think really encapsulates this ideology that you’re talking about here.
You referred to Charles Wilson, who was the secretary of defense under Eisenhower in the U.S., and he was also the former CEO of General Motors.
And he famously said, “What’s good for General Motors is good for the country.” And that idea has morphed into the idea that, “What’s good for Wall Street is good for America.”
And then you note that “this merged with evangelistic U.S. foreign policy that says ‘What’s good for America is good for the world.’ And therefore the logical syllogism is clear: ‘What’s good for Wall Street is good for the world.’”
And you describe this, you link it to the new cold war, this idea that what’s good for the U.S. is good for the world and what’s good for Wall Street is good for the U.S., therefore, what’s good for Wall Street is good for the world.
You argue, “We must recognize how finance capitalism has gained power over industrial economies, above all in the United States, from which it seeks to project itself globally, led by the financialized U.S. economy. Today’s new Cold War is a fight to impose rentier-based finance capitalism on the entire world.”
And this is such an important analysis. Because among those very few people of us who talk about this idea of the new cold war and how dangerous it is, there are very few people who frame it in economic terms.
Usually we frame it in political terms, right, the geopolitical interests between the US and the EU on one side, and China and Russia on the other.
And going back to Brzezinski and The Grand Chessboard, his 1997 book, where he talks about the importance of preventing near strategic competitors from emerging in Eurasia. That’s of course a geopolitical discussion and economics is part of it, but it’s often not at the forefront.
But your analysis I think is even more important, and more accurate, because your argument is not only is it geopolitical, but the geopolitical struggle is rooted in economics. And this is an economic struggle between systems.
So talk talk more about the new cold war and how you see it.
MICHAEL HUDSON: Well, as we’re seeing now, the world is dividing into two parts. We can see that in the fight against Russia, which is also a fight against China, and against India, as you noted. And it seems Indonesia and other countries as well.
The United States is pushing a world that can be controlled by American investors. The ideal of the American neoliberal plan is to do to other countries what it did to Russia after 1991: take all of your public domain, your oil companies, your nickel mines, your electric utilities, give them all to the wealthy oligarchy, that can only make money once it’s taken control of these companies, by selling the stocks to the West.
The West will buy out oil, just like Mikhail Khodorkovsky tried to sell Yukos oil to Standard Oil in the West. And we’ve got to put an oligarchy that will sell all of the national domain, all of the patrimony and natural resources, and all the companies, to American investors on the cheap.
The Russian stock market led all the stock markets in the world from 1994 up to about 1998. This was a huge rip off. The United States wants to be able to do that to the rest of the world.
And it was furious when Russia said, we’ve lost more population as a result of neoliberalism than we did in all of World War Two fighting against Nazism. We’ve got to stop.
And Russia began to say, we’ve got to use Russia’s population, and industry, and natural resources for Russia’s benefit, not for the United States’ benefit.
Well, the United States was absolutely furious with this. And the fury has erupted in the NATO war against Russia in the last few months, and what’s ongoing now.
And the United States says, U.S. State Department officials have said, what we want to do is carve up Russia into maybe four different countries: Siberia, western Russia, southern Russia or Central Asia, maybe northern Russia.
And once we’ve done that, we cut Russia off from China, then we go into China. We finance, we send ISIS and al-Qaeda into the Uyghur areas, the Muslim areas, and we start a color revolution there. And then we break up China, into a northern part, a southern part, a central part.
And once we break them up, we can more or less control them. And we can then come in, buy up their resources, and take over their industry, their labor, and their government, and get richer to obtain from China, Russia, India, Indonesia, and Iran the wealth that we’re no longer producing in the United States, now that we de-industrialized.
So the world is dividing into two parts. And it’s not simply the United States and its European satellites on the one hand versus the non-white population on the other hand; it’s finance capitalism versus the rest of the world, which is protecting itself by socialism, which in many ways fulfills what was the ideal of industrial capitalism during the 19th century, when industrial capitalism was actually progressive.
And it was progressive. That’s part of the whole theme of my book. It was revolutionary. It tried to free economies from the legacy of feudalism, from the legacy of hereditary landlords.
And now the financial class is no longer the landlord class, but the landlord class pays most of its rent to the financial class in the form of mortgage interest, as it borrows money to buy property and housing and commercial sites on credit.
And you have the kind of financialization that has increased housing prices in the United States to over 40% of income, that is officially guaranteed for mortgages. That has priced American labor out of the market.
Privatized health care, 18% of GDP, that is pricing America out of the world market. Debt, auto debt, student debt, which in other countries education is free; that’s pricing America out of the market.
So you have a basically un-competitive economy that’s committing financial suicide, following the same dynamic that destroyed the Roman empire, where a predatory oligarchy took over and maintained power by an assassination policy of its critics, just very similar to what America has been doing in Latin America and other countries.
So you’re having history repeat itself with this same kind of world split. And this split couldn’t have occurred back in the 1970s, with the Bandung Conference in Indonesia. There were other attempts by the Non-Aligned nations to break free of American imperialism, but they didn’t have a critical mass.
So right now, for the first time, you have a critical mass. And you have the ability of China, Iran, Russia, India, other countries together to be self-sufficient. They don’t need relations with the United States.
They can handle their own; they can create their own monetary system outside of the International Monetary Fund, which is basically an arm of the Defense Department. They can give loans to build up the infrastructure of countries outside of the World Bank, which is basically an arm of the Defense Department, the deep state.
So you have the American economy – essentially a merger between the military-industrial complex and the Wall Street FIRE sector, finance, insurance, and real estate – really cannot develop any more than the Roman Empire could develop, by trying to obtain militarily what it could not produce at home anymore.
Well, China and other countries, now that they have their industrial base, the raw materials, the food, the ability to feed themselves, the agriculture, and the technology, they can go their own way.
And so we’re seeing in the last few months the beginning of a war that is going to go on for, I think, 20 years, maybe 30 or 40 years. The world is splitting away.
And it won’t be a pretty sight, because the United States and its European satellites are trying to fight to prevent an inevitable break away they cannot prevent, any more than Europe’s landlord class could prevent industrial capitalism from developing in the 19th century.
BENJAMIN NORTON: Yeah, and this is a good segue to what I wanted to ask you about, Professor Hudson, which is the economic war on Russia.
And I should say, of course, that today is May 9th. Today is Victory Day in Russia, celebrating the Soviet Union’s victory over Nazi Germany in World War Two. Not the US and British victory over Nazi Germany, the Soviet victory, in which 27 million Soviets died.
And actually I should say that, here on YouTube, in the comment section, there are some Russians who are your fans, Professor Hudson, saying they’re thanking you for your cogent analysis of Russia.
But on the subject of Russia, Professor Hudson, we now have seen that since Russia’s military intervention in Ukraine on February 24th, we saw really what could be referred to as financial shock-and-awe. That’s a term that’s been used.
Just as when the U.S. invaded Iraq, it waged a military shock-and-awe campaign on Iraq. Well, now it is waging economic or financial shock-and-awe on Russia.
And Russia has been referred to as the most heavily sanctioned country in history. Which I think is probably accurate, although maybe the DPRK, maybe North Korea, is more sanctioned. But I mean we’re talking about levels of sanctions not seen against a country of this size ever.
And you can also refer to it as the contemporary equivalent of medieval siege warfare against Russia.
Joe Biden, in a speech in Poland, made it clear what Washington’s goal is: it’s regime change. The U.S. wants to overthrow the Russian government, as it did in the Soviet Union in 1991, and clearly install a a pliant alcoholic neoliberal puppet like Boris Yeltsin.
So can you talk about, from an economic perspective, what do you see as the effects of this economic war on Russia?
And specifically in terms of the concept of decoupling, which you have talked about for years, and you have said that the Western sanctions on Russia and China were accelerating that process of decoupling. And this was before the financial shock-and-awe we’ve seen.
So you talked about a move away from this neoliberal globalization where everything is interconnected, or at least capital is interconnected globally, to the creation of a kind of, what you could say is kind of an economic iron curtain.
But how do you see that also in terms of integrating the Eurasian economies more deeply?
And also what is the effect on the European economies, which my impression is that Europe is going to become what you call an economic dead zone, more and more reliant on the U.S., whereas Russia, China, and Iran, and even potentially India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Indonesia – we’re seeing much more economic integration of Asia, which is, of course, where the majority of humanity lives.
MICHAEL HUDSON: Well you have used the words shock-and-awe, picking it up from the U.S. statements of shock-and-awe. There hasn’t been any shock-and-awe; there’s been a self-defeating piffle, and laughter.
That’s not all. There was an attempt to grab $300 billion of Russia’s foreign reserves, saying, well, any country that leaves their reserves in American banks or in the American Monetary Fund to stabilize their currency, we can grab if we don’t like their policy.
So the idea was, now Russia is going to go broke. It can’t afford to buy anything without U.S. dollars. And the people are going to get so angry, they’re going to vote against Putin. And then we can pour in our money to twerps like Navalny and other right-wingers who have promised to be the new Yeltsins.
Well, it didn’t work that way. They did grab the $300 billion of Russia’s reserves. Russia immediately said, ok, we have our own money. We now, fortunately, have enough oil and gas that we don’t have to sell to Europe and Germany. If they want to freeze in the dark and let their pipes burst when the weather gets cold, that’s their problem. We’ll sell to India, and China, and other countries.
And there was, for a few days, the ruble plunged, by saying, uh oh, what is Russia going to do? So all the foreign exchange traders thought, you can trust Biden to have a really brilliant policies.
I think Paul Krugman, the Nobel Prize winner, said Biden is the greatest American president since Roosevelt, or since Truman, that he was so smart. Well, that’s why Krugman got the Nobel Prize, for making statements like that.
So immediately Russia said, well, obviously we can’t get paid in dollars anymore, or in euros, because, you’ll just grab them, so you’ll have to buy oil and gas in rubles. We’re going to price it in our own currency. Just like China had talked about pricing its exports in yuan.
And so what has happened is that immediately the ruble not only recovered, but is now selling at a higher rate than it was before the American sanctions. So there was no shock at all. The Americans felt shock.
The Americans are shocked. The Americans are awed. The Russians are laughing and everything is going their way.
So it’s almost as if – I would not accuse Biden of being on the pay of Russia, and I would not say that the leaders of Congress are the Russian agents, but if they were Russian agents, if they were paid by Russia, they could not have done a better job of helping Russia catalyzing its protectionism that it wouldn’t do itself.
The fact is that President Putin and many of the people around him still were neoliberals. I mean, they began as neoliberals, in the ’90s.
They began by hoping that they could make an arrangement with Germany and Europe, that Europe would develop their industry and make Russia as efficient an economy as Germany or the United States. Well, obviously that hasn’t happened.
All the same, they didn’t think of imposing protective tariffs as the United States did. They didn’t protect their agriculture. They bought grain, and cheese, and other agricultural products from the Baltics, and from other countries.
Well, now that, once the Americans put on the sanctions, beginning already under the Trump administration, all of a sudden Russia had to produce its own food.
And it did. It made the investment. It is now the largest agricultural exporter in the world, not a food-deficit country. It’s not importing any more cheese from Lithuania and the Baltics. It has its own cheese segment.
And the sanctions are forcing Russia to do exactly what the United States, Germany, and other protectionist countries did in the 19th century, developing their own industry by isolating it from low-priced foreign imports that would be priced so low that the Russians otherwise could not afford to make the investment in factories, plants, equipment, research, and development.
So what the United States has done is actually catalyze Russia moving together.
And also, for three or four years, I have been talking with Russians, and with the Chinese, and other countries about the need to de-dollarize. If you want to develop your own economy, you have to develop your economy in your own interest with public spending and planning, independent from the United States.
Well, now everybody thought that, well, in a few years it may take a decade for China, Russia, Iran, all these countries to break away from the U.S. But America said, we’re going to help you, we’re going to speed up the breakaway process. We’re going to isolate you. So you’ve got to band together against us.
So that’s exactly what it has done. You can just imagine how the Russians are crying all the way to the bank about this.
And how China is watching what the Americans are doing to Russia, and listening to President Biden saying, you know, Russia is not our real enemy, our real enemy of China. And when we’re finished with Russia, then we’re going to go against China and do the same thing to it.
Well you can imagine what this is leading the Chinese government to try to plan to be sufficiently independent from the United States, so that similar type sanctions will not hurt it.
And President Xi in the last few weeks has said we’ve got to make China as independent as possible. We’ve got to make our own computer chips. We’ve got to not depend on the United States for anything, except maybe Walt Disney movies. That’s basically about it.
So it’s as if – you know, I had mentioned earlier that finance lives in the short term. American policy, being financial policy, lives in the short term. And it’s looking at if it can make a quick, a quick victory, and forget about what’s going to happen next.
I’m told that, years ago, already from the war with Iran, and then Iraq and Syria, in the State Department, if there were Arab specialists who spoke Arabic, they were all fired. Because they said, well, if you can speak Arabic, you must’ve learned Arabic because you’re sympathetic with them. You’re fired. We won’t have anyone who can read Arabic here.
Well, now in the last decade or so, they fired all the Russia specialists from the the State Department and CIA, saying, well, if you can read Russian, why would you want to learn Russian? You must like something in Russia. You wanted to learn it. You’re fired.
So they have people who have no idea of what’s happening in Russia, no idea what’s happening in these other countries. And they’re blinded by their ideology.
And if anyone would say, wait a minute now, public planning and making education a public utility is actually making them more competitive, well, that’s against the ideology. That’s not the corporate type.
And they’re taught, well, we really can’t trust people, maybe they’re tending toward socialism, and they’re out the door.
So you’re having American policy pretty much run by the blind, and the Europeans are simply taking orders, and money in little white envelopes from the United States, to just show their loyalty, and basically are willing to spend three to seven times as much for their energy, for their liquefied natural gas and oil, by buying from the United States, than they are by a long-term contract with Russia.
Europe is willing to spend now $5 trillion on putting together ports that can handle shipping tankers for liquefied natural gas instead of relying on the Russian pipeline, the Nord Stream Two, that’s already there.
So Europe is making an enormous sacrifice. If it doesn’t have Russian gas, and it refuses to pay rubles, it says, if you don’t give us our gas and oil for free, you’re attacking us, because we’ve been getting all of your oil and gas for free, because all the dollars, all the money we pay, you’ve recycled to the United States in your foreign reserves. Thank heavens, the U.S. can grab it all. If you don’t continue to give it to us for free, then you’re attacking us.
To the United States, other countries protecting their economy, other countries trying to raise their living standards, and especially other countries undertaking land reform, are viewed as enemies of the United States, because they’re an enemy of the neoliberal American financial system.
And the idea of the unipolar world where the United States gets all of the profits, and rents, and interests of the world economy, just as ancient Rome stripped its provinces by getting all of their wealth and income for themselves, not producing it at home, while impoverishing their own domestic population. It’s just an exact parallel.
So Europe is willing to say, well, ok, if we don’t have a Russian gas, well, that means that our chemical companies cannot buy the gas to make the fertilizer to make our crops grow, and our agricultural productivity is going to fall by about 50%.
We’re also going to spend a lot more money on America’s military, NATO arms to support NATO. So higher food, higher military spending, higher energy costs.
This ends Europe as an industrial rival to Asia, and Eurasia, I should say, because now the Chinese Belt and Road Initiative and other spending investment, capital investment, throughout Western Asia is creating a new productive plant that is not only self-sufficient, but is leaving the United States and Europe without any industrial competitive power. They’ve priced themselves out of the world market. They’re no longer competitive.
So the world is developing. And I’m sure the only way that the NATO countries can fight against it is militarily, by threatening to bomb. But they can’t fight economically. They can’t fight financially. They tried by disconnecting Russia from the SWIFT system. It put it in its own system very quickly.
It really is left without a strategy, except that it’s done a wonderful job of controlling the public relations dimension of this war, making it appear as if somehow other countries are the aggressors, in not letting America exploit them, and making it appear as if Russia is the aggressor in Ukraine, instead of NATO prodding and prodding Russia to say, we’re going to capture your port at Crimea, and we’re going to attack the Russian-speakers if you don’t fight back, and we’re going to keep bombing them year after year, from 2014 on, we’re going to keep bombing them until you protect them.
So all of this is treated as if America is purely defending itself. Well, this is what the Nazis said in World War Two. Hitler and Goebbels said, we can always mobilize a population to support our war by saying it’s a war to defend ourselves.
And that’s how the United States in Europe are doing it. Not only are they pulling a strategy out of Goebbels’ Nazi book, but a few weeks ago, Germany went to the museums, the military museums, where they had the old Panzer tanks from World War Two, and they sent the Panzer tanks, the Nazi tanks from World War II, to Ukraine, saying this is symbolic, now we can fight Russia with the same German Nazi tanks run by the neo-Nazi groups, that Zelensky is supporting, the same Nazi fight against Russia. We can reenact World War Two with the same tanks, even symbolically, to show that this is a fight of Naziism, and neoliberalism, against Eurasia.
BENJAMIN NORTON: We’ve also seen Germany not only re-militarizing, but also boosting its relations with Japan. There are some terrifying echoes of of World War Two.
But you mentioned something that I want to analyze a little bit more, which is the strength of the Russian ruble. I talked about the concept of financial shock-and-awe that was waged on Russia. And President Biden said, “the Russian ruble has become rubble,” he joked. He said the Russian ruble has become rubble.
Well, that’s actually not at all what happened. This is the value of the dollar to Russian rubles, right now [showing a graph]. Russian rubles are at 69 to the dollar. A few days ago, it was at 64, or 65 to the dollar, which is actually better than it was even before the Russian war in Ukraine, which began in February 24th.
And it did spike, and there was a peak here, at which it was devalued to 139 to the dollar, about half the value it has now. But in the months leading up to the Russian military intervention, in November and December, it was around 75 to the dollar.
So the ruble has actually strengthened despite these sanctions. And here’s a report from Reuters from five days ago, that was May 4th: the “Rouble leaps to over 2-year high vs dollar, euro as EU ups sanctions.” So the ruble is doing quite well.
And you talked about the Russian mechanism to force Europe to buy energy exports from Russia in the Russian ruble. And this graphic here, for people watching, it’s in Russian, but really it just shows this mechanism in which a European firm that wants to buy gas from Russia’s state owned gas giant Gazprom, it has to send the money in euros to the Gazprombank, which is the obviously the bank that works with Gazprom, and then it puts it in a special account in euros, and then that is sold in the Moscow exchange for Russian rubles.
And then those rubles are put in another special account, called a K account, that belongs to that European firm. It has two accounts, two special accounts with Gazprombank, one in euros, one in rubles. And then this special ruble account sends that money to Gazprom. And then once the money reaches Gazprom, that’s when Russia considers that the payment officially went through.
So this is the mechanism by which Russia is getting paid in rubles. And much of Europe claimed at first that they would not do so, but eventually they gave in. So that’s an incredible development.
And related to that, what I wanted to ask you about, is I think another reason that the Russian ruble has strengthened and stabilized is not only because Russia continues to maintain constant exports of energy to Europe and other parts of the world.
You can talk about the central bank policies. But one of the policies is that the Russian central bank has basically put the ruble on gold, which I think is a very interesting and historic development.
And we saw that from the beginning of April until the end of June, the Bank of Russia says that it’s going to buy gold at a fixed price of 5000 rubles per gram of gold. And then the question is whether or not in July, when this policy ends, if it’s going to continue, and if the ruble will basically become fixed, it become pegged to gold like the U.S. dollar was up until 1971.
So you don’t think it will be? So talk about this policy. Do you think that that the gold standard is going to come back? Or apparently you don’t think so.
MICHAEL HUDSON: No, Russia is not going on on the gold standard. What it is doing is investing, its foreign exchange in the only way that is not grabbable. It’s investing it in gold; it’s putting gold in its reserves.
It is not setting its exchange rate according to the price of gold, but it is buying gold with what it has been getting.
I want to go back to your talk about rubble. You talked about, “from ruble to rubble,” what President Biden said.
There have been a lot of pictures of rubble in the news for the last few days. For instance, there are talks of, here’s a Ukrainian picture, and look at this picture of a Russian tank, we shot it down, it’s rubble. Turns out it’s a Ukrainian tank, that they just say it was the Russian tank we shot down.
So basically, they’re taking their own destruction, and they’re saying that, while they’re being destroyed, they’re saying, no, this is a picture of Russia being destroyed, Russian assets, not Ukrainian assets being destroyed.
Well, the similar thing is with the Russian ruble. America says, look, we’ve isolated the the ruble. Well, what has happened? If you isolate the ruble and you say we’re not going to export anything more to Russia, so it’s not going to be able to spend any of its rubles on buying American or European products.
Well, meanwhile, Russia can continue to earn rubles from Germany and Europe, and it can continue to earn foreign exchange from other countries that it’s selling its agriculture to at rising prices, its oil and gas at rising prices, too. So obviously, the balance of payments is going way up.
And they believe that what is in store is a new monetary system that is an alternative to the dollar IMF system.
And in this system other countries will hold their reserves in each other’s currencies. In other words, Russia will hold Indian rupees and Chinese yuan. China will hold rupees and Russian rubles.
There will be the equivalent of what Keynes thought of as something like artificial special drawing rights that the banks will be able to create to help fund governments to undertake capital investment.
But for settlements settling balance of payments deficits among countries, once they don’t have enough foreign exchange to make a swap, they will use gold as the means of settlement, because gold is a pure asset. It’s not a liability.
Any foreign currency basically is held in a foreign country that has the power to do what America did to Russia and just grab it all, and say, we’re just wiping it all out.
It’s as if you have a bank account, and the bank says, we’ve just emptied out your account to give it to one of our friends, and you don’t have it anymore. You can’t do that if gold is held in your own country.
Venezuela made the problem of keeping its gold in England, trusting England, saying that, even if there is war, they’ll never interrupt gold and finance. And England just grabbed Venezuela’s gold.
So, obviously, countries are not going to leave their gold in other countries. Even little Germany has asked America to begin sending back the gold that it has in the Federal Reserve Bank of America because it’s worried that what if it ever buys Russian gas again? America will grab all of Germany’s gold, grab all the German money, and it’ll be like World War One all over again.
So this act that America did of grabbing Russian money, Afghanistan’s foreign reserves it grabbed, this is telling all the other countries, pull all your money out of dollars. What are they going to put it in? There’s not that much they can put it in that it is absolutely safe.
So gold is a flight to safety today, because it’s one of the things that all of the world realizes as having an international value for settling balance of payments deficits, that is independent of world politics.
So that’s the explanation. Russia is not going on gold. It’s going on an independent standard from the United States with gold as an element of its foreign reserve, just as it’s holding Chinese yuan and Indian rupees.
It’s not going on the rupee standard. It’s not going on the yuan standard. And it’s not going on the gold standard. But these are elements of its foreign reserves.
BENJAMIN NORTON: I have a question for you. It’s kind of a more technical question that I’ve always wondered. And I’ve tried to do research on this, because there’s not much information.
So we know that that the U.S. and European Union have frozen over $300 billion from Russia’s central bank foreign exchange reserves. And of course they did this after doing the same to Iran, to Venezuela, to Afghanistan, which is now threatening a famine in Afghanistan that could kill more people than died in the 20-year NATO-U.S. military occupation of Afghanistan, which is another topic that really needs to get more coverage.
And I should add, by the way, that the US and the EU, they’ve frozen nearly half of Russia’s central bank’s foreign exchange reserves, and are now saying they’re not going to give it back. So they stole it. I mean, they stole half of its reserves.
My question is, what is the mechanism by which they effectively freeze and steal those reserves?
Because my understanding is that there is of course a physical element of those reserves, which you’re talking about, which is gold. But not all of the $640 billion in Russia’s central bank reserves is physical currency, right? A lot of it is just computerized? It’s number in computers and bank accounts.
So when when the U.S. and the EU steal this money from central banks like in Russia or Afghanistan – obviously in the case of Venezuela, as you mentioned, they physically stole the gold. But if it’s not gold, is it physical cash stored in Moscow, like physical dollars and euros? Or it’s mostly just numbers in a computer, which is why they can steal it?
MICHAEL HUDSON: Every country needs to manage its exchange rates, and there’s always like an up-and-down and a zigzag in the flow of payments for imports and exports, investment, capital movements, debt service, all of that.
So countries want to stabilize their exchange rate. How do they do that? Well, most of the big exchange markets are in New York and in London.
So countries would leave their money in correspondent banks. Like when Iran, at the time under the shah, kept that foreign reserve in the Chase Manhattan Bank. So when Iran, after the revolution and Khomeini came in, and Iran wanted to pay interest on the foreign debt that the shah had run up, they told Chase, please, here’s our bondholders, please pay them.
Well Chase was told by the Treasury, don’t pay them, just take the money and hold it. So Chase said, we put a freeze on your account. And so Iran defaulted, and then Chase and the State Department said, oh, Iran defaulted, it missed the payment. Now, all the money that it’s due for foreign debt has to be paid all at once. And Chase paid all of the bondholders off. No more money in the account. It was all emptied out.
Suppose you had an account in Chase Manhattan. And they said, ok, now you’ve done something really bad, you put Michael Hudson on the show. We’re going to grab your account. We’re going to give it to Mr. Guaidó, because he needs the money in Venezuela because the people still are not voting for him. So all of a sudden, you won’t have money in your account. It’ll go to Mr. Guaidó’s account.
Well, that’s what happened with Russia. They took the money. They grabbed the money from Russia’s account. And they said, half the money we’re going to give to, I think, to the 9/11 people, because we all know that it was Russia that bombed the World Trade Center on 9/11.
And we’re going to give it to all sorts of other people who suffered all over the world. It’s all Russia’s fault.
BENJAMIN NORTON: But Professor Hudson, when you say that they seized Russia’s assets, you mean the assets held by the Russian central bank in foreign bank accounts?
MICHAEL HUDSON: Yes, yes.
BENJAMIN NORTON: And these are not physical assets, these are numbers in a computer, right?
MICHAEL HUDSON: In Venezuela’s case, Venezuela had used some of its oil company earnings to buy oil stations and refining companies and the United States actually grabbed the ownership of the gas stations and the refineries and distribution system that Venezuela had in America.
BENJAMIN NORTON: It’s called Citgo.
MICHAEL HUDSON: Citgo, yeah. Russia doesn’t really have any capital investments in the United States. It did have bank accounts, and that was all that the United States could grab.
BENJAMIN NORTON: So when you say that, when Russia, at least for now, the central bank is allowing convertibility of rubles at a set rate into gold, that’s a temporary policy to make sure that they have a physical asset that their central bank can hold on to, because if they have dollars or euros in their reserves, my understanding is that’s not physical cash, it’s actually just numbers in a computer, so they don’t have it physically in their bank reserves, so it’s easy to steal that money.
Obviously, if they had billions of dollars worth of cash, of paper cash, it would be much harder to steal it, but if it’s just on a bank account, if it’s numbers in a computer, then they can just freeze it.
So I think this is also a reflection of a point that you’ve also made about the financialization of the economy, is it’s also just a lot of this capital is not even physical capital.
MICHAEL HUDSON: Yes. Savings take the form – one person’s savings is another person’s debt. So these are Russia’s deposits in American banks that it used to buy or sell rubles, or to buy goods from America, or to receive payments in, if Russia exports something such as oil. Americans buyers of Russian oil would put the money into the Russian bank account.
They never dreamed that this would be grabbed. But now Russia says, ok, you’ve grabbed our money, now that means that we get to grab all of your assets in Russia. This is great! All of your stock holdings in nickel, and Yukos, and all these other companies, ok, you’ve got the money, we have the assets, look at us as just buying the assets on the cheap.
And the Western investors in Russia have all been selling their Russian assets to show that they’re good American citizens in NATO, and the Russians are buying up these European and American assets on the cheap, largely by borrowing money from the banks, that get the money from the central bank, now that they’re so wealthy, and all of the foreign exchange reserves is a result of the American shock-and-awe statement, that’s sort of shock-and-awe in reverse.
So Russia is coming through just fine. And you can imagine how the American strategists are gnashing the teeth. They don’t understand how Russia was able to avoid being bankrupted by this.
They really are not economists. They’re not really financiers. They’re foreign-policy strategists. They’re ideologues that are not very well educated in how to think about the future and how to recognize the fact that the world can actually change from what it is today into something else. And sometimes that change is not in America’s interests. That is sort of not a permitted thought over here.
So essentially, Americans and Europe are operating in the blind, and Russia and China, and Iran, and India, are all looking at how are we going to restructure the world so that we come out of it more prosperous than we were before, not more impoverished. That’s really what the world is dividing into.
BENJAMIN NORTON: Professor Hudson, I don’t know if this is directly related, but it’s it’s something that’s always been a very curious question in my mind.
Germany, back in 2016 and 2017, it moved, physically moved, its central bank’s gold reserves, which had been stored in New York, London, and Paris, and it physically moved those reserves, those gold reserves, to Frankfurt.
Now this was before the U.S. and Britain stole Venezuela’s gold reserves and other reserves. But do you know anything about what motivated Germany’s central bank to move the physical location of its gold reserves into Germany itself?
MICHAEL HUDSON: I don’t think it’s all moved yet. It’s still going on. Gold is very heavy, as heavy has lead, basically. And America said, well, we can only do a little bit, trickle by trickle. So America has been returning the gold very slowly.
So I think Germany, with all of its history of hyper inflation, I think just realizes that, now that gold is not used to settle balance of payments deficits anymore – the gold that Germany had in America was all of the exports that it made to the United States during the Vietnam War. This is Vietnam War gold.
You remember that President de Gaulle would every month cash in, the dollars that America spent in Vietnam would all be spent from Vietnam to Paris, the dollars would end up there, the central bank of Paris would essentially buy gold on the London exchange and keep the gold either in New York or in London.
Well, Germany, because America defeated Germany, and it wasn’t going to keep its gold in Russia, that defeated it even more, it said, well, ok, we’re cashing in our surplus dollars for gold, but we’re going to hold the gold in America.
But now it says, well, America is never going to settle its balance of payments deficits and its foreign debt in gold again, because it doesn’t have any balance of payments surplus, any ability to do that.
It’s going to spend its export surplus and its investment surplus on war. So it’s never going to be able to pay. That’s obvious. Let’s get the gold back.
That was the calculation that every country was making already a decade ago. They realized that America can never repay its foreign debt, unlike other countries.
When other countries can’t pay their foreign debt, they have to go to the International Monetary Fund, that tells them, well, we’ll make you a loan, but you have to sell off your natural resource reserves to the Americans, or we won’t lend you the money.
Well, basically, that’s not going to happen anymore. They realized that America is just going to say, haha, we’re just not going to pay.
Well, now other countries are saying, wait a minute, if America’s never going to repay its foreign debt, why do the Global South countries have to pay their debt to the IMF and the World Bank, all this dollar debt to dollar bondholders?
If America won’t pay, we don’t have to pay. Let’s have a clean slate. Let’s start from the beginning. And we’re only going to have debt and credit relations with friendly countries, not countries that want to go to war with us like America did in Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq, Iran, and now Russia.
So that’s basically what’s happening.
BENJAMIN NORTON: Great. And just to wrap up here, I have another question. And I know your time is limited, so I really appreciate you being here.
I have a quick question about the decline in U.S. dollar hegemony. We were talking about the strength of the ruble, the economic war on Russia; we talked about the bilateral trade that’s growing between Russia and China using the Chinese yuan, between Russia and India using the Indian rupee. And Iran also is talking about doing business with a basket of currencies.
I want to point to a report that was recently published by economists who work with the IMF. And I published an article about this over at Multipolarista.com, “IMF admits US dollar hegemony declining due to rise of Chinese yuan and sanctions on Russia.”
And there is this report that was published by the IMF, by these economists, and I cite you, Professor Hudson, in this report. It’s a working paper from the IMF, published in March, titled “The Stealth Erosion of Dollar Dominance.”
And here’s a graph, for people watching, here’s a graph from the report. And it shows not a large, but a noticeable and consistent decline in the use of the holding of the U.S. dollar in the foreign exchange reserves of central banks around the world. So this is around the world.
And it has declined in the past years from about 70% of central bank exchange reserves to about 60%. So a 10% decline. That’s not massive, but it’s steady and I think it’s going to accelerate.
And at the same time they’ve also found an increase in the use of what they call “non-traditional currencies” in the foreign exchange reserves of central banks around the world.
And here you can see this graph. I mean it looks like a significant influence because if you look at the y-axis it’s only from 90 to 100. But there is a significant increase in the use of other currencies in foreign exchange reserves, aside from the U.S. dollar, the euro, the Japanese yen, and the British pound. And the currency that is increasingly popular is the Chinese yuan.
So that’s one half of my question. The other half is about this interesting report that was published in the Financial Times, and it’s titled “Russia Sanctions Threaten to Erode Dominance of Dollar, says IMF.”
And the FT interviewed the IMF’s first deputy managing director, Gita Gopinath, who acknowledged that the sanctions imposed on Russia over its military intervention in Ukraine could lead to what she says “fragmentation at a smaller level.”
And she did say that the dollar is eroding influence, but “would remain the major global currency.”
So, that’s a two part question. I’m wondering if you could talk about the decline in U.S. dollar hegemony and how the sanctions will potentially erode that. And then the other half of the question is, can you comment on the declining use of dollars in foreign exchange reserves?
MICHAEL HUDSON: Well, this is what my book “Super Imperialism” was all about. When I first published it in 1972, I could see how the whole thing was unfolding for the next 50 years. And we just published last year a third edition of it, bringing it up to date.
Dollar hegemony means America’s entire balance of payments deficit in the ’50s, ’60s, and ’70s was military. So the dollars that were being pumped into the world economy were the result of military spending.
But the dollars would end up in foreign central banks, especially from Asia to France, Germany, others. What were they going to do with it? Well after 1971 they could not buy gold anymore, so all they could do was buy U.S. Treasury securities. IOUs.
And so they re-lent to the Treasury all the money that America was spending militarily. And the more money America spent in waging its cold war militarily against the world, the more money central banks would lend to the U.S. government to finance the U.S. deficit that was spent largely on the military-industrial complex and foreign military operations.
So dollar hegemony was a free lunch financing America’s almost 800 military bases across the world, to fight against communism, defined as any country that doesn’t let American industry and finance buy control of its raw materials, agriculture, resources.
And this has now come to an end. Right now America has grabbed Afghanistan’s, and Russia’s gold. All of a sudden it’s obvious that, this summer, there’s going to be an enormous squeeze on Third World countries, on the Global South.
Their energy prices are going to go way up, and that’s going to hurt them just like the oil shock of 1974 and 1975 did.
They’re going to have to pay higher food costs, because of food prices are going to go way up now that the Ukraine war is erupting.
And a lot of their foreign debt, dollarized debt service, is coming due. And they’re facing a choice: if they pay the foreign debt, they can’t afford to buy the oil and energy that they need to run their factories and heat their homes. They can’t afford to buy the food to feed their people. Whose interests are they going to put first?
Well of course their leaders are going to put America’s interests first, and their own interests second, because their leaders, if they’re a client oligarchy, are put in power by the U.S. military, as sort of miniature Pinochets, throughout Latin America and other countries.
So suppose other countries decide, well, we’re going to feed ourselves and we’re not going to wreck our economy just to pay foreign bondholders. We’re a sovereign country. We’re going to put our national interests first.
Well, then the United States can say, aha, we’re going to grab all of your foreign assets in the United States.
Well, other countries can say, oh, they’re going to do to us just what they did to Afghanistan and Russia. Let’s move our money out of the United States quickly. If we don’t have dollars, well, it’s true, we can’t pay our dollar bondholders, but at least we can, in international markets, we can buy the food and the energy we need.
And so the tensions, the disruption of world prices, and inflation, and trade that is a result of the NATO attack on Russia, now threatens to drive all of the southern hemisphere countries into an alliance with Russia, China, India, and all the rest.
So America basically is creating a new Berlin Wall, but the wall is isolating itself from other countries, and driving other countries all together into what I hope will be a happy, self-sufficient, non-U.S. globalized economy.
BENJAMIN NORTON: Well, I want to thank you, Professor Michael Hudson. It’s always a real pleasure having you. I know you’re very busy, so thank you for giving us so much of your time.
I’ll say that the comment section here on YouTube has been very vibrant, with some interesting conversation. And what’s nice is there are people from all over the world, from the U.S., Latin America, Europe, and from Russia. So it’s good to see a mix of people.
And for anyone who wants to listen to this, you can check out the podcast version if you look up Multipolarista on Spotify, and iTunes, and all the other podcast platforms.
And I’ll just say, while I wrap up here, that today we were talking about, at the beginning of this discussion, a new book that Michael Hudson is publishing this week. It is called “The Destiny of Civilization: Finance Capitalism, Industrial Capitalism, or Socialism.”
It’s a very good book. I had the privilege of getting a review copy early. So definitely check out that book.
You can also find all of Professor Hudson’s writings at michael-hudson.com.
Thanks, Professor Hudson.
MICHAEL HUDSON: It’s really good to be here. It was a good discussion.
The Westminster Magistrate’s Court has issued an order to extradite journalist and Wikileaks founder Julian Assange to the United States.
The order was sent to Home Secretary Priti Patel who has to sign off on extraditions. Assange’s defense has until May 18 to make submissions to Patel against extradition.
Meanwhile Assange will remain in custody. He can only appeal once Patel has made a decision.
Rostislav Ishchenko develops his theme first posted here: Russian World as a global project into global multipolarity and covers why and how the West ran into a dead end, and where the multipolar situation may lead.
Please note it is a machine translation with some human assistance, and it is not a perfect document. It however makes his points clear enough, for the discussion on this massive global change.
Today we are in a unique situation – for the first time in the history of mankind, a global empire is breaking up.
Humanity is constantly living in an era of decay. At the same time, humanity is constantly living in an era of centralization. The dialectic of history works simply: the centers of disintegration and centralization are constantly changing places both horizontally (some states are weakening, others are strengthening) and vertically (against the background of a weakening center, power in the shires is always strengthening, and the weakness of the regions leads to the strengthening of the center). The art of leading a state is to correctly determine its internal and external state.
Accordingly, you need to move the control center of gravity from the regional level to the central level and back. In the field of foreign policy, in an era of weakness, try not to be too active in order to suffer as few losses as possible (and it is better not to lose anything at all), while at the time of strength, try to carefully acquire additional resources. Depending on the era, this resource can be nominated in terms of land, people, industrial power, market access, ideological leadership, information superiority, and other resources. As a rule, several interrelated factors from among the above play an important role.
The Empire of the Collective West
Today we are in a unique situation. This has never happened before in the history of mankind. For the first time, a global empire is breaking up. We used to call it the American world, because after the collapse of the USSR, the United States remained the only superpower for twenty or twenty – five years (who thinks so) and became a symbol of Western dominance. But in reality, it was the empire of the collective West.
The United States did not share the profits made by robbing the rest of humanity with Canada and Australia, New Zealand and South Korea, Japan and the EU out of a love of art or an innate desire for charity. It’s just that without the support of these vassal regimes, Washington was unable to manage the globalized world.
And, as has been known since classical feudalism, the vassal owes the master exactly the same amount as the master owes the vassal. If a prince or duke does not dress his retinue luxuriously, does not provide it with expensive horses and weapons, does not feed it to the brim and does not drink it to the point of drunkenness, then the retinue has every right to abandon such a leader and
look for a new master (the right to leave).
COMECON collapsed when the Soviet Union could no longer provide Eastern Europe with an additional resource.
In politics, these relations are expressed in a change of allies. For example, when the USSR could no longer provide Eastern Europe with an influx of additional resources (at the expense of its own population) The ATS and COMECON instantly disappeared in time and space, and their yesterday’s members lined up in NATO and the EU. Next in line were the Union republics, which fled the Union in full confidence that they were feeding Russia and would live better on their own. At the same time, the republics did not really think about any independence either. They took the queue “to the West” for Eastern Europeans, fully confident that they only need to join the EU and NATO and everything will be like in the USSR, only even more satisfying and better.
Some managed to join, some did not, but everyone was disappointed. And not at all because, as some think, the West did not want to feed freeloaders. The EU and the US were well aware of their responsibilities to their vassal countries, and they also understood that spending on their “weapons, horses, clothing, food and drink” would pay off by strengthening Western dominance around the world. The annexation of Eastern Europe and the post-Soviet states (except for Russia and the Asian republics) was supposed to significantly improve the geopolitical position of the West, strengthen its military capabilities and make its political and economic dictates insurmountable.
The sale of weapons to Eastern Europe was supposed to lead to the strengthening of Western dominance throughout the world.
When the West overestimated its strength
At first, it worked that way. The costs of maintaining Poland and demonstrating the success of the Baltic Tigers were more than repaid by predatory exploitation of Russia (in the 1990s, the West established direct or indirect control over most of Russia’s resources through local oligarchs) and outright piracy in the rest of the world (Iraq, Afghanistan, Yugoslavia, and after it Serbia).
Economically booming, China was unable to stand up to the collective West militarily. Russia seemed completely destroyed and only temporarily preserved the appearance of unity. At this point, the West overestimated its strength.
In any society, there are always different groups that see the purpose and meaning of existence and the direction of development of the corresponding society in different ways. And as long as there is an obvious external danger, these groups reject internal contradictions, rallying against the external enemy. If, for some reason, the authorities lose the ability to reconcile and balance internal contradictions, a catastrophe of the 1917 model occurs.
After the fall of the Berlin Wall, many in the West believed they had won the Cold War.
In the 1990s, the collective West believed in the “end of history”, that the world is forever Westernized, that the roles of governors and governed are assigned to different countries forever. Being in a state of euphoria, the Western left liberals launched an ideological offensive not only on the external front, but also on the internal one, trying to make their “tolerant new world” mandatory for everyone, not only in the conquered countries, but also among those who, in their opinion, “won the Third world war (cold war).”
As long as the leftists did not dig in, the resistance to their expansion in Western society was provided by certain marginal groups of conservatives, who were branded fascists by the” new left”. Broad strata of Western society were virtually untouched by the confrontation between these groups until the mid-noughties of the third millennium. Moreover, the main ideological expansion of the West was aimed at the development of “conquered territories”. It was there that the most “advanced” “public organizations” were created, spreading the propaganda of equality of norm and perversion to Western grants, even the advantages of perversion over the norm, because it “suffered for a long time”.
There, on the” new lands”, the” Soros funds ” and their many similarities worked. And left-liberal ideas, having fallen into the post-communist ideological void accustomed to the presence of a” leading and guiding ” people, were in the greatest demand. The additional appeal of these ideas was given by the fact that their local adherents, due to the support of Western funds, instantly became super-successful people against the background of the rapidly impoverished (in the 1990s) post-Soviet society.
The main ideological expansion of the West was aimed at the development of “conquered territories”, where the “Soros funds” and their numerous similarities worked.
It is difficult to say how all this would have ended if the West had had the wit and patience to wait, not to immediately cut the post-Soviet “chicken”, but to give the liberals the opportunity to demonstrate at least some success. Then it was inexpensive. But, having invested in a thin layer of people temporarily in power, the West decided that all the problems were solved. The elites will cope with educating the masses. And it was seriously mistaken.
Split in the Western family
I don’t know if Russia and China would have had a chance to stand up to the united West, which by the end of the 1990s was totally superior to them in all indicators, except for Chinese industrial growth (but it is not enough to grow quickly, you need to have time to grow), if the expansion of Western neolithic ideas would have remained exclusively external. But the left-wing liberals, sensing that they had significantly strengthened their positions due to external expansion, launched an offensive against conservatives inside the West. This was the beginning of the end, for” Every kingdom divided against itself will become desolate; and every city or house divided against itself will not stand ” (Matthew 12: 25).
The West faced several divisions at once. First, there were divisions between conservatives and liberals within each individual country. Second, there is a split between conservative Eastern Europe and liberal Western Europe within the EU. Third, a split has emerged between the European bureaucracy and national Governments.
Moreover, since the European bureaucracy came out from radical left-liberal positions, in the fight against it, even liberal national governments were forced to seek the support of conservatives, which weakened the position of liberals in each individual country.
An increasing amount of Western resources began to be directed not to maintain the hegemony of the West, but to the internal struggle of liberals for an ideological monopoly. The West has lost the ability to control planetary processes, but, being in euphoria, on the wave of success, it did not immediately notice this. When it noticed, it was too late. The divided Western society could no longer unite and was increasingly slipping into a state of cold, and then almost hot, civil war. The struggle between liberals and conservatives, like any struggle of roughly equal forces, began to devour almost all available resources, and the West began to feel resource hunger.
The struggle between liberals and conservatives began to devour almost all available resources, and the West began to feel resource hunger.
Since the opportunity to pay off the resource shortage at the expense of Russia and/or China was lost (the West thought it was temporary, but in fact it turned out to be forever), cannibalism had to be engaged: the stronger countries of the West began to redirect resources that had previously been used to support weaker and poorer countries in their favor. Immediately, the internal split deepened. In Europe, in addition to the division into West and East, there was a problem of “rich North” and “poor South”. These two parts of the EU had different views not only on the prospects of economic and financial policy of the European Union, but also set different foreign policy goals for themselves.
Divisions between the US and the EU, the US and Israel, the US and Turkey, Turkey and Israel, Israel and the EU, and the EU and Turkey have emerged and begun to deepen. Washington’s position began to weaken even in the traditionally loyal monarchies of the Arabian Peninsula.
Political laws are inexorable
The West is still trying to present a united front. In particular, the United States is forming an all-Western coalition against China and is trying to bind Russia’s forces in the European direction by forming a single pan-European anti-Russian front. In the statements of government officials, on the paper of signed agreements and according to the estimates of expert offices funded from Western budgets, it seems to work, but not so much in terms of the self-perception of the population of Western countries, which the press is increasingly forced to reflect with minimal objectivity.
The US is using NATO to form an all-Western coalition against China and Russia.
The collective West still retains a sense of civilizational unity, but in the face of growing resource scarcity, this cannot help it in any way. Still, the strong, in order to survive, is forced to withdraw resources from the weak. At the same time, even if the weak does not rebel, but allows themselves to be robbed to the end, the weakening of the West will progress at an increasing pace. On the example of Ukraine, Moldova, Bulgaria, and the former “Baltic tigers”, we see that sooner or later there comes a time when the robbed statehood loses the ability to support itself. Starting from this period, it is necessary either to pump additional resources into it just for the sake of preserving it, or to accept that it will de facto disappear, first as an economic unit, and then as a political one, which will reduce the amount of available resources, respectively aggravating the problem.
Today, the West is already clearly divided into three clusters: the American one (the main one, torn apart in the United States by the struggle of right-wing conservative Trumpists and left-wing radical Bidenites); the European one (whose economic interests require cooperation with Russia, but the ruling elites of most countries are afraid that they will not be able to retain power if they leave the American umbrella); and the Asia-Pacific one (which has already fallen into the sphere of Chinese economic influence, but does not want to admit it for the same reason that modern Europe does not want to break with America).
Historical experience shows that political laws are inexorable. If you try to slow down the development of natural processes, then the longer you delay, the more terrible the final catastrophe will be. In the 1990s, the West could still win, in the noughties conclude a compromise peace, being in a favorable position, in the tenth it was still possible to talk about a compromise, but the main bonuses were already received by Russia and China.
At this stage, the West can only count on a complete and unconditional surrender. Further delay will lead to the fact that there will be no one to capitulate. People, houses and cities will remain, but the western system will disappear.
In the 2010s, Russia and China already received the main bonuses.
Yet the United States is trying to continue playing the game of victory, and its allies have no strength to step out of the American shadow. Further decisions should be made in the next three to five years. Either the United States will risk starting a war against China (then it should be started as early as possible, since it may be too late), or they will have to admit defeat in the global confrontation. For the collective West, this will be a greater shock than the one that shook the Soviet sphere of influence during the collapse of the USSR. The wreckage of the collective West in the form of junior partners of the United States will start looking for new patrons even more frantically than the post-socialist countries did in the 1990s.
At this point, the question will arise: where is the new assemblage point, around whom will the new centralization take place?
The square trinomial and its political roots
So far, we believe that such an assemblage point can be the Russian-Chinese Eurasia based on the SCO, the EAEU, the CSTO and other structures created and being created by Russia and China. However, China, which is trying to protect itself against a sudden (but more than likely) collapse of Western markets, has recently taken several cautious steps to establish its own control over the Trans-Eurasian trade routes under Russian control. A possible clash of interests is in Africa and Latin America, where both powers are actively increasing their economic expansion.
The Russian-Chinese Eurasia based on the SCO, EAEU, and CSTO can become an assembly point.
Finally, while not yet obvious, but in the long run, the most dangerous contradiction is that the fragments of the collective West that fall into the Chinese sphere of influence (the Republic of Korea, Australia, and New Zealand), along with the Southeast Asian states already located there, have interests diametrically opposed to the interests of Europe that potentially falls into the Russian sphere of influence. Plus, India and Japan are too big a prize for Beijing and Moscow to allow each other’s sole influence there.
These contradictions are objective, and whether they can be overcome depends on the collective will of Russia and China. Today, we cannot say unequivocally that this will be achieved, if only because we do not know in what geopolitical conditions we will have to move on to building a “beautiful new world”. One thing is clear: Washington’s belated recognition of multipolarity in the form of a statement that there are three centers of power in today’s world (Russia, the United States, and China), although formally true, cannot satisfy anyone, because the dynamics of global processes are negative for the United States, and they will still try to change it, which means that the three-member structure will not be stable due to American opportunism.
In general, today the crisis is developing, the catastrophe of the collective West seems inevitable, but the subsequent catharsis does not promise peace.
تقول القرون الثلاثة الماضية أنّ الدول الغربية التي تولت بالتتابع قيادة الغرب بمشاريع استعمارية لم تبنِ قوتها العسكرية لحفظ أمنها، أو الدفاع عن جغرافيتها، أو ردع من يستهدفها، فالبرتغال وهولندا وإسبانيا وبريطانيا وفرنسا، وقد ورثتهم جميعاً وتولت توحيدهم وقيادتهم أميركا، بنوا قواهم العسكرية وحرصوا على فائض قوة هائل، لمنح المشروع الاستعماري الذي ظهر مع النهضة الصناعية كتتمة لا بد منها للسيطرة على مصادر المواد الخام، والمعادن خصوصاً والنفط والغاز لاحقاً، والإمساك بالأسواق الاستهلاكية ولاحقاً باليد العاملة المهنية الرخيصة، وبدا واضحاً أيضاً أنّ كل تغيير شهدناه كان في شكل المشروع الاستعماري وعناوينه وليس في جوهره، فالحديث عن تصدير الديمقراطية هو تتمة الحديث عن تعمير بلدان ما وراء البحار، والقوة العسكرية كانت دائماً هي أداة الإخضاع والردع وبناء الحكومات التابعة، وحول هذه القوة تمّ بناء الأحلاف، ورُسمت السياسات، وجرى تحديد الاستراتيجيات.
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عندما يقف الرئيس الأميركي ومن خلفه النخبة الحاكمة للإعلان عن أنّ الانسحاب من أفغانستان هو إيذان بنهاية زمن صناعة السياسة بواسطة القوة العسكرية، وأن هذا الانسحاب يترجم معادلة جديدة قوامها عدم استعمال القوة العسكرية لبناء دول تتبع النموذج الغربي، فهو يعلن نهاية قرون شكلت خلالها هذه القوة العسكرية صانع السياسة الأول، وكانت مهمّتها الرئيسية بناء حكومات تابعة في دول العالم، وهذه النهاية ستطرح أسئلة كبرى حول نوع القوة التي يحتاجها الغرب الذي تقوده أميركا للمهمة الجديدة التي قال الرئيس الأميركي أنها تنحصر بحماية الأمن القومي من خطر الإرهاب، وردع أي محاولة للاعتداء على الداخل الأميركي، كما يطرح السؤال حول مبرر الاحتفاظ بتلك القوة التي كانت لازمة لإخضاع العالم وخوض حروب السيطرة والهيمنة، واستطراداً ما هو مبرّر بقاء حلف الأطلسي الذي قال قادته أنه يحصد أكبر هزيمة في تاريخه، وقال قادته أنّ زعيمة الحلف قد خذلتهم، وأنهم عاجزون عن رسم سياسات بديلة من دونها، والسؤال حول مستقبل حلف الأطلسي ليس مبالغة، فالدول المنضوية في الحلف لا تخشى من غزو خارجي بل كانت تتطلع لغزو بلاد الآخرين، فإذا كان هذا زمن مضى فلم تحتفظ بتمويل ولم تخصص الجهود والجنود للحفاظ على هذا الحلف؟
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في الولايات المتحدة الأميركية ستتم عملية فكّ وتركيب اقتصادية وسياسية وفقاً للمنظور الاستراتيجي الذي فرضته الهزيمة في أفغانستان، فالقطاعات الاقتصادية المرتبطة ببناء الجيوش وتجهيزها وتخديمها، غير تلك الخاصة بالأسلحة النووية، باتت بلا جدوى، وحجم الجيوش صار موضع نقاش، والانتشار العسكري في العالم صار بحاجة إلى تدقيق، لصالح نظرية الحفاظ على بعض الوجود النوعي المتحرك بحرياً لحماية الملاحة في الممرات والمضائق، وترك اليابسة، وفي ظل فشل حروب السيطرة والصعود الروسي العسكري التقليدي، والصعود الصيني الاقتصادي، بالإضافة لذلك وتداعياته البنوية، وفي ظلّ هذه التحولات، يحقّ للشركات الأميركية التي كانت تستثمر على القوة العسكرية طلباً للسيطرة على المواد الخام والأسواق، وفرض معادلات التسعير في هذين المجالين بما يناسبها ويضعف فرص منافسة خصومها، أن تسأل عن مبرر مواصلة ذلك، وبمثل ما كانت عملية نهب المستعمرات وتحويلها إلى أسواق استهلاكية، مصدر الرفاه الداخلي في بلدان الغرب، ستخرج الولايات الغنية في أميركا ومثلها الولايات البيضاء العنصرية، لتسأل عن مبرّر البقاء تحت ظل الدولة الفدرالية والقيام بتمويلها، طالما أن هذه الدولة الفدرالية تستقيل من المهمة الرئيسية التي كانت تبرّر وجودها، وهي مهمة الهيمنة على العالم، تحت شعارات الديمقراطية.
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الهزيمة الأميركية والغربية في أفغانستان زلزال عالمي أكبر من زلزال فييتنام، وتداعياته على الداخل الغربي والأميركي، أكبر من تداعيات الانسحاب على أفغانستان ودول الجوار، فالتداعيات الإقليمية تبدو تكتيكية وقابلة للاحتواء من القيادات الأفغانية ودول الجوار، بخلاف التداعيات الغربية والأميركية التي تبدو استراتيجية إن لم تكن وجودية أصلاً، ويبقى السؤال الكبير الذي يطرحه قادة كيان الاحتلال هل يشمل هذا التغيير فرضية القتال الأميركي دفاعاً عن الكيان إذا ظهر مهدّداً بالزوال ومعرضاً للتفكك؟
Washington Post recently ran an article with headline which contained the two phrases “civilized nations” and “deter Beijing and Moscow” (see a review here). Use of the latter phrase in the headline shows clearly that the phrase “civilized nations” here has undisguised, in-your-face geopolitical motivation.
But “civilized” and “deter” is in fact a very strange combination of words, tempting and encouraging us to dig deeper into the matter.
One must assume that, in geopolitics, it is “just another day at the office” for one power to attempt to deter another. If two powers are in a state of unstable equilibrium, but not yet openly at war, attempts to deter one another would go on. Such is life. Certain lines – red or otherwise! – must not be crossed, weighty pronouncements must be made, and “swords must be banged against shields”. All this is standard stuff which foreign office trainees must learn, and upon which their “superiors” must base their upward mobility.
Clearly physical power is the one deterrent we all know about, starting from our experiences in school. But what has “being civilized” got to do with all that? Makes you wonder.
Surely I would be deterred by a big guy carrying a big stick – regardless of whether or not he seems to be “civilized”. In the same way, I am also deterred by a growling dog – regardless of whether or not it is fed and groomed by a rich owner! Chengiz Khan attacked other countries with brutal physical force, without any claims of possessing “higher civilization”. Before the sack of Rome, Alaric behaved far more sensibly than the “civilized” ruling elite of Rome.
Around the same time, another article also appeared, this one on the subject of Russian history and civilization (a review here). This article was an honest attempt to educate others, but there was no sign of any attempt to deter anyone. Indeed a resplendent, vibrant, creative civilization attracts others, does not deter them. If a “civilization” is aiming to deter others, then what happens to all the talk of “civilizational values” and “soft power”?
We know that power flows through the barrel of a gun, but today do culture and civilization also flow through the barrel of a gun? Something is surely wrong here! Historically, have the “civilized” always won wars? How do we explain the very recent history of Afghanistan? Which “civilization” has been gaining the upper hand there? What did the “civilized nations” achieve there? Whom did they manage to deter? For how long?
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What follows is a brief history of how we have got to where we now find ourselves. This is not a work of “academic scholarship” – but rather it connects various “dots” discovered by scholars. The connections are based on the play of human nature we see all around us today.
The word “civilize” derives from the Latin root “civis”, meaning “citizen”, and in this way it is predicated on the idea of a “city”. Nomadic tribes of a period earlier than, say, 10,000 years BC would not have such a word in their language, even while the concept of “fellow tribesman” would be internalized very well.
The earliest cities were in fact trading centres for the surplus primary produce of nearby hamlets and villages. Trading – that is, eminently sensible economic exchanges – happened long before the invention of writing and of money. People were smart even then.
Trade generated surplus wealth. Thus people in cities – that is, traders of one sort or another – were free to explore aspects of life other than the hard work of primary production. Philosophy, religion, politics, law, “higher” arts and literature … all these flourished. Individuals in the city cultivated themselves, while their fellow human beings “out there” cultivated the land. Paeans and hymns were dutifully sung to the glory of the city and her various “gods”.
It was not long before the cultivated ones thought of themselves as “superior” to the others. In any one-on-one interaction with a simpler human being, they could easily run circles around the latter – and probably also justify charging a fee for the privilege!
Aided by writing and money, political power of cities grew rapidly, and it soon reached a point at which cities deemed themselves to be “proud city states”. Thence arose class differentiation between “civilized” city dwellers and the rustic population outside, which was by then economically and politically dependent on the cities. City states eventually grew into empires, following the all-too-familiar dynamic of unlimited human greed and brutality.
The simpler rustic folk were divided into “subjects”, “serfs”, “slaves” … and so on; but when the rustic folk got into friction or warfare with the “civilized” ones, they were dubbed “barbarians”. The preferred words nowadays are “deplorable”, “backward”, “lower caste” et cetera.
This phenomenon has played out repeatedly in recorded history. The phenomenon is grounded in economic motivations, and therefore it also has huge economic consequences.
Before “civilizations” came into being – and therefore before the invention of money and writing – the relationships between primary producers and traders were simple and direct, as depicted below.
Even huge geographical distances could not block trade, since ships and caravans could be used. Traders were brave and ingenious. For probably a couple of millennia, mankind experienced a “golden age of trading”, during which benefits of trade accrued but without onerous economic exploitation, slavery, human trafficking, and so on.
Things changed after the emergence of money, writing and “civilizations”. Multiple layers of political, social, financial, legal and other services emerged, giving opportunity to every “citizen” to climb the hierarchy of choice, depending on his or her aptitude and talent. Of course the two most useful talents would be greed and cunning – but clearly any other talent could be put to use, for example physical beauty, or the ability to declaim in public.
Ever since then, members of the “civilized elite” of most “civilizations” have wanted to get into the act and take their cut. The main goal of such “civilized elite” is to grab every opportunity for easy money, with the view: “After me, the deluge!”
The situation thus evolved to what is shown below, in what is projected as “progress” or the “unstoppable march of human advancement”. Men and women high up in the “pecking order” of a “civilization”, puffed up with their own social position and self-importance, feel free to make profound pronouncements about “the masses” or “the common people”.
[Incidentally, how “civilized” can a society be in which we use the phrase “pecking order”? The verb “peck” applies to poultry birds, and is also seen in the phrase “hen-pecked husband”.]
So much for “civilized”, the word wrongly used in the Washington Post article.
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Surprisingly, this discussion brings us close to Saker’s recent decision to write and share with us short vignettes about the teachings of Jesus Christ. How so?
Jesus Christ lived through a period of great turmoil in the region, as the ruthless might of the Roman empire came into contact with independent minded Hebrews. His message was of love and charity, rather than greed. He promised deliverance to his followers, mostly poor folk.
When does a poor person cry out for deliverance? For the many poor people that I know, a bit of poverty is alright if only they are allowed to live on in peace. None of them demands perfect economic equality. Many earn their livelihood working for richer people. “I am alright, Jack. Let me be!”, they say – as they adapt, cope and share.
But turmoil most definitely does occur when even the otherwise forbearing poor are in unbearable distress; that possibility can never be ruled out.
Turmoil did occur in the period when Jesus lived and taught. Therefore, his teachings include useful, practical sayings addressing the daily economic and political reality of the poor people who were his followers. We may consider just three of his many profound sayings:
Man shall not live by bread alone …
It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the Kingdom of God.
Render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s …
By the way, these themes are not readily found in Gautam Buddha’s teachings. Why? Buddha lived in pre-Alexander India. Specific instances of suffering which moved him, when he was a young prince, were disease, old age, death … All of which is really kid stuff compared to what the Romans and other people of the time did on a regular basis.
Gautam Buddha traced the roots of suffering to desire, whereas the followers of Jesus Christ suffered from extreme deprivation and cruelty. It would be inhuman to say that desire was at the root of their suffering, when in fact they desired only deliverance from extreme deprivation and cruelty. Buddha and Jesus Christ addressed two totally different audiences, separated greatly in time, space and economic/political conditions.
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It’s time to turn our attention back to some economic and political realities.
It is much easier to make money otherwise than by being a primary producer, and typically every human being seeks the easier path rather than the harder one. Primary producers are therefore left further and further behind in the headlong societal rush towards material well-being. However, no self-respecting community or country should accept such a dire economic fate for a significant fraction of its hard-working members.
Political and economic measures must therefore address this issue in a fair manner, and also provide avenues open to all members to benefit from training, education and economic mobility. Any ideology – “capitalism”, “neo-liberalism” or whatever else – which violates this fairness criterion will enrich a very few but also doom the society. Any talk of “trickle down wealth” is no more than false propaganda; “trickle down” just does not happen.
The attitude of “civilizational upper-hand” displayed in the Washington Post headline leads to a bargaining tactic which goes something like this:
Hey, you! Every time we engage in any transaction, negotiation, discussion or collaboration, do keep in mind that – since I am more “civilized” – I am by definition superior to you. Is it not enough for you that I even deign to sit and talk with you?
As against this, realistic bargaining between parties must proceed only on the basis of specific strong and weak points of each party. Any presumed and self-proclaimed – but meaningless! – “civilizational superiority” has nothing to do with any real-life negotiation. Why introduce such a red herring of into “real-politik”? In today’s intellectually multi-polar, competitive world, the adversary easily sees through all such false pretences anyway.
The reality of being “civilized” – if indeed there is such reality! – must not depend on haughty self-proclamation. The word “civilized” must be defined in terms which are universal.
Our only “city” now is the entire Planet Earth. There are no outsiders, and therefore the word “civilized” has to have meaning not limited by this or that so-called great city of the past or present – whether that be Rome, Athens, Washington, Beijing, Jerusalem or Varanasi.
In that spirit, a simple test is proposed here for the reader’s consideration:
Regardless of how highly accomplished an individual may be – in music, literature, politics, law, science, wealth, beauty or any combination thereof – does the person “get it” and accept that the most deprived individual is also a human being deserving of dignity and respect?
Note that the word “charity” does not even occur here. Acknowledgement of the other person’s humanity is far more fundamental that any outward act of “charity”. It follows that laughing at deprived individuals or pouring scorn over them is not civilized behaviour.
Only if the above test is satisfied should a person today be considered “civilized”. Loud, self-serving proclamations do not count. This is a matter not of “politics” or “ideology”, but of humanity. Nobody need fly off at the handle shrieking “Buddha”, “Jesus Christ”, “capitalism”, “communism” or “socialism”! Humanity does not dwell in a person’s brain, wealth or loquacity, but deep inside the heart – or perhaps not even there.
Lest anybody misunderstand, none of the above is a justification for what does or does not happen in my own country. Wherever there are human beings, certain behaviour patterns are bound to be seen. Most of what is described here has gone on blatantly in India for many centuries, and at present there is an intense internal struggle in progress.
The point here is that any “civilization” worth its name should help temper economic injustice rather than exacerbate it. In times of huge diversity and change, an attitude amongst people of “us” versus “them” is inevitable. The key questions ask must be such as these:
What are the terms under which societal injustices and resentments are resolved? How exploitative are these terms? How is extreme deprivation avoided?
No society can be strong if brutal economic exploitation runs rampant amongst its people. The following paradox is too glaring to be missed:
“Leaders” who declaim the loudest about being “civilized”, and try to impose their “civilizational values” on others, represent the very same societies which are going through relatively rapid exacerbation of internal fissures. A recent extensive survey carried out in the UK reported that, according to most younger respondents, the number one priority of the government should be to protect the poorest, weakest and the most vulnerable. An overwhelming majority said “F**k them all” about their own political leaders. (A summary of the survey can be found here.)
Much should be expected from anyone claiming to be “civilized” today.
One of Israel’s most respected rabbis, Rabbi Shmuel Eliyahu, has released a statement on the status of America as a waning world superpower and a message of hope for Israel to fill the void. Rabbi Eliyahu is the Chief Rabbi of Safed and a member of the Chief Rabbinate Council
The big crisis that is currently happening in America
Regarding the outcome of the US elections, Rabbi Eliyahu explains that the schism is deeper than last week’s incident on Capitol Hill saying: “The big crisis that is currently happening in America didn’t start with the storming of Capitol Hill. It started with the Democratic party’s’ lack of confidence in Trump’s presidency expressed in fiery protests across the United States, and his being labeled in every possible derogatory manner.”
The rabbi added that the lack of Republican trust in America’s election process also contributes to the crisis.
“With tremendous sorrow we can recall this event as part of the process of the US descending from the stage of world history. It’s a sad moment, but it’s happening.”
Pharaoh fell too
Recalling the fall of ancient Egypt, the rabbi uses historic precedent to back up his claim saying: “This is not the first time a superpower fell because of a crisis of values and returns to being an ordinary country among other nations. That is what happened to Egypt and Rome in the old days. That is what happened to the Ottoman Empire approximately a century ago, all the way to the Russian Empire that collapsed 30 years ago, both of whom collapsed due to a failure of values that led to their demise as well as a decline in their great power as world leaders.”
Rabbi Eliyahu also recalled the collapse of France and Great Britain who were once “considered part of the four powers that rule the world,” He added that they collapsed just as Europe as a whole is collapsing because of values…or lack thereof.
Values of political correctness
“The values of justice were replaced with those of political correctness. The family values have been replaced with those of hedonism. The birthrate that fell below the red line caused European leaders to open the floodgates to mass Muslim migration that would fill the void, and Europe started to totally lose its character.”
Rabbi Eliyahu sees the developments unfolding as an opportunity for Israel to step up and take America’s place as the world superpower. He supports his proposition by calling Israel a world leader in family values saying: “We’ve been called upon to fill this vacuum. There are problems inside the State of Israel as well, but unlike Europe, Israel leads the world in the stability of family values. The average amount of children per Israeli woman is double the average of the Western world, and this is what propels Israel’s economy and creativity forward. Israel also leads the globe in the least amount of children from single mothers.”
Regarding a potential insurrection, Rabbi Eliyahu refers to the destruction of the second Temple as evidence that a similar situation cannot reoccur saying “As far as governmental stability is concerned, we are not similar in any way. There cannot be an antigovernmental revolution in Israel. With all the allegations we have regarding this and that corruption in the system of government, none of us have aspirations of a military revolt. We all recall the heavy price of the destruction of the 2nd Temple and it can’t be repeated.”
The rabbi also said that because Israel trails the western world in alcohol and drug consumption.
Not Pretentious, but Torah
Acknowledging that his proclamation could come across as condescending, the rabbi explains that it’s all part of God’s plan saying: “Israel is stable and is called upon to take its place as a world leader in values. I realize that to many people this sounds very pretentious, but this is the template that G-d promised our forefather Abraham.”
And all the families of the earth Shall bless themselves by you (Genesis 12:3)
Reflecting on the Jewish people who he says don’t recognize the opportunity, the Rabbi notes: “The only ones who do not see this is us, and the time has come for us to recall our destiny. We need to prepare for it so that we can fulfill it with all the necessary responsibilities and not make the mistakes that they made.”
كلّ المؤشرات والقرائن والوقائع الميدانيّة على أكثر من صعيد إقليمي ودولي باتت تؤكد انعدام الرؤية الاستراتيجية لدى الدولة التي كانت يوماً الأعظم في العالم وهي الولايات المتحدة الأميركية…!
بايدن يطلب اللقاء مع بوتين على عجل لوقف تدهور العلاقات بين بلديهما، وإجراء تهدئة تمنع تقدم الحليفين الاستراتيجيبن الصين وروسيا على حساب الدولة التي تهشّمت صورتها في أكثر من ساحة دولية رغم ظاهرها المخادع كدولة عظمى!
محاولة بايدن هذه لا تحمل أيّ معالم صفقة او اتفاقيات بين البلدين، بل تهدف اساساً الى منع موسكو من توظيف كل من الصين والهند وايران كمجال حيوي لتنشيط المقدرات الروسية الهائلة في هذه البلدان بديلاً عن أوروبا التي تحاول واشنطن إغلاقها بوجه موسكو قدر الإمكان…
وفي سياق مثل هذه الأولوية الاستراتيجية فقط يمكن فهم محاولات واشنطن المتعثرة لكنها المصرّة على وقف تهوّرات حليفيها التاريخيين جنوب وغرب إيران، ايّ الكيانين السعودي و»الإسرائيلي»!
وقف حرب اليمن حتى على سبيل الخدعة والمناورة تحتاج اليها واشنطن حتى تتمكن من وقف التمدّد الإيراني الذي يزداد اندفاعه مع كلّ يوم يمرّ على تخبّط إدارة محمد بن سلمان الغارقة في مستنقع حرب اليمن الآسن والذي لم يعد يجلب للرياض سوى سرعة أفول القبيلة السعودية الحاكمة، وإنْ على مراحل…
هكذا تفهم أيضاً خطوات حكومة بايدن التي تتخلّى شيئاً فشيئاً عن تهوّرات نتن ياهو وتحاول استبداله بالثنائي بينيت – ليبيد الأميركيّي النزعة والجنسية الثانية…
ثمّة رعب خفي يحكم كلّ تصرفات إدارة بايدن من أمر تعتبره ربما نهاية التاريخ الأميركي الحقيقية وليست نهاية تاريخ فوكوياما الشهيرة.
فمركز ثقل العالم يُسرع في الانتقال من الغرب الى الشرق وكلّ العلائم في المعلوماتية والتقنيات وحروب الجيل الخامس والاقتصاد والثقافة والفنون وعالم ما بعد الدولار تفيد بأنّ الغرب لم يعد مركز العالم ولا حتى النموذج المحبّب أو الجاذب لغالبية سكان الكرة الأرضية كما كان في القرن الماضي.
إنّ القرن الذي أنهينا عشريّتين منه بات قرن الصين وروسيا وإيران بامتياز، وكلّ قوى الحرية والتمرّد على الهيمنة الغربية في العالم لا سيما الهيمنة الأميركية منها باتت ترنو لرؤية عالم ما بعد أميركا.
حتى ربيبة أميركا الصهيونية في حرب الـ 11 يوماً الأخيرة على فلسطين – سيف القدس – لم تتمكّن من تحقيق ولو صورة نصر بل على العكس تماماً، 4 أيام متتالية تقوم نحو 200 طائرة عسكرية إسرائيلية (ايّ نحو ثلثي الطيران الحربي) بقصف شريط لا يتجاوز نحو 30 كلم من البحر غرباً حتى الشجاعية شرقاً، ولا نتيجة تذكر سوى تهديم أبنية وقتل أطفال ونساء وفشل عسكري تامّ، وانقلاب الصورة لدى الرأي العام حتى الغربي ضدّ تل أبيب ووضعها في صورة قاتلة المدنيين ولا غير…
كلّ هذا من علامات جغرافيا آخر الزمان وانحطاط القوة الغربية وضياع الرؤية لدى الأميركي الذي ظنّ يوماً انه سيد العالم، فإذا به يكتشف انه بات محاطاً بقوى تفوقه بكلّ شيء تقريباً إلا القتل والمخاتلة والخديعة طبعاً!
حتى الاتفاق النووي وليالي الأنس في فيبنا باتت سراباً في سراب بالنسبة للأميركي فلا هو قادر على إعادة إحياء الاتفاق كما يريد ولا هو قادر على إعادة إيران الى المربع الذي يرغب…
إيران الجديدة القادمة بسرعة خلال الأشهر الثلاثة المقبلة لم تعد أصلاً بحاجة الى إحياء الاتفاق النووي، بعد أن دخل في دور المحاق داخلياً في زمن انتخابات مصيرية ستنقل إيران مباشرة الى نادي الدول العظمى من دون حتى رفع العقوبات…
تذكروا ماذا قال الإمام السيد علي الخامنئي في أكثر من خطاب:
إنّ مفتاح اقتصاد إيران ليس في لوزان ولا جنيف ولا نيويورك… إنه في داخل إيران…
جاء الوقت لتتمّ ترجمة هذا الشعار على يد الرباعي (رئيسي – جليلي – زاكاني – قاضي زاده هاشمي)، في إطار حكومة شبابية ثورية مبدئية هي أيضاً جزء من تحالف «شرق أوسطي إسلامي» يقف خلفه سور الصين العظيم وسيف القيصر الروسي.
ووجهته القدس دائماً وأبداً…
في مثل هذه الأجواء والفضاءات يمكن فهم ما تفضّل به القائد التاريخيّ المشرقيّ الشجاع سماحة السيد حسن نصر الله في ثلاثينية المنار لتحرير فلسطين عندما قال :
استيراد البنزين والمازوت والفيول من الجمهورية الإسلامية في إيران من قبل حزب الله مباشرة أو شركات خاصة تابعة هو خيار سياسي واقتصادي واجتماعي للأكثرية اللبنانية التي تعاني المذلة لأنّ بعض السياسيين يؤثرون رضى الأميركي على مصلحة المواطنين، والشروع بهذا الخيار سيؤدّي إلى جهود أميركية علنية لمنع وصول البواخر، وبالتالي سيفضح كلّ الدعاية السخيفة والكاذبة التي تقول إنّ أميركا تقف إلى جانب الشعب اللبناني، ولذلك قد يؤدي التهديد وحده إلى حلّ المشكلة ولو بشكل جزئي…
ولكن يبقى خيار الاتجاه الفعلي إلى الشرق هو الحلّ الجذري لكلّ مشكلات دول وقوى التحرر العربية والإسلامية من جبال الأطلس الكبير غرباً الى سور الصين العظيم شرقاً…
All indicators, evidence and facts on the ground on more than one regional and international level now confirm the lack of strategic vision of the country that was once the greatest in the world, the United States of America…
Biden urgently requests a meeting with Putin to stop the deterioration of relations between their two countries, and to conduct a calm that prevents the progress of the two strategic allies, China and Russia, at the expense of the country, whose image has been shattered in more than one international arena, despite its deceptive appearance as a superpower!
Biden’s attempt does not bear any features of a deal or agreements between the two countries, but rather aims mainly to prevent Moscow from employing China, India and Iran as a vital area to stimulate Russia’s enormous capabilities in these countries as an alternative to Europe, which Washington is trying to close to Moscow as much as possible…
It is only in the context of such a strategic priority that it is possible to understand Washington’s faltering attempts, but it is determined to stop the recklessness of its two historical allies, south and west of Iran, that is, the Saudi and “Israeli” entities!
Stopping the Yemen war, even as a trick and maneuver, is needed by Washington in order to be able to stop the Iranian expansion, which is getting more and more motivated with each passing day, as the Mohammed bin Salman administration floundered in the bitter quagmire of the Yemen war, which no longer brings Riyadh only the speed of the demise of the ruling Saudi tribe, albeit in stages…
This is also how to understand the steps of the Biden administration, which is gradually abandoning Netanyahu’s stinking recklessness and trying to replace him with Bennett-Lapid American duo of American Behavior and second nationality.
There is a hidden horror governing all the actions of the Biden administration from something it considers perhaps the true end of American history, not the end of Fukuyama’s history.
The center of weight of the world is accelerating the transition from west to east and all the signs in informatics, technology, 5G wars, economy, culture, the arts and the post-dollar world indicate that the West is no longer the center of the world, nor is it even the beloved or attractive model of the majority of the earth’s population as it was in the last century.
The century from which we have finished is the century of China, Russia and Iran with distinction, and all the forces of freedom and rebellion against Western hegemony in the world, particularly American hegemony, are now looking forward to seeing the post-American world.
Even the Zionist America’s 11-day war on Palestine , the Sword of Jerusalem, has not been able to achieve even a victory image, quite the contrary, four consecutive days in which some 200 Israeli military aircraft (about two-thirds of the military aviation) bomb a strip not more than 30 km from the sea west to Shujaiya to the east, and the result is little but the destruction of buildings and the killing of children and women and a complete military failure, and the reversal of the image in public opinion even western against Tel Aviv and putting it in the form of a deadly civilian and nothing else…
All this is a sign of the geography of the end of time, the decline of Western power and the loss of vision of the American, who once thought he was the master of the world, so he discovers that he is surrounded by forces that surpass him with almost everything but killing, imagination and deception of course!
Even the nuclear deal and the nights of the people of Our Country have become a mirage for the American, he is not able to revive the agreement as he wants and he is not able to return Iran to the square he wants…
The new Iran coming quickly over the next three months no longer needs to revive the nuclear deal, after it entered the role of internal catch-up in the time of crucial elections will move Iran directly to the club of the great powers without even lifting sanctions…
Remember what Imam Ali Khamenei said in more than one speech: The key to Iran’s economy is not in Lausanne, Geneva, nor New York… It is inside Iran…
The time has come for this slogan to be translated by the Quartet (Main – Jalili- Zakani – Qazizadeh Hashemi), within the framework of an initial revolutionary youth government that is also part of the “Middle Eastern Islamic” alliance behind which the Great Wall and the Sword of the Russian Tsarstand.
Jerusalem is always and never directed…
In such an atmosphere and space, it is possible to understand what the courageous, levantine historical leader, His Eminence Hassan Nasrallah, preferred in the 1930s to liberate Palestine when he said:
The import of gasoline, gasoline and fuel from the Islamic Republic of Iran directly by Hezbollah or private subsidiaries is a political, economic and social choice for the lebanese majority, which suffers humiliation because some politicians influence the satisfaction of the American on the interest of the citizens, and initiating this option will lead to public U.S. efforts to prevent the arrival of ships, and therefore will expose all the silly and false propaganda that says that America stands with the Lebanese people, so the threat alone may solve the problem even partially…
But the option of the actual direction to the east remains the radical solution to all the problems of arab and Islamic liberation countries and forces from the Great Atlas Mountains to the Great Wall to the east…
UPROOTED PALESTINIANS: SALAM ALQUDS ALAYKUM 
