GEOPOLITICS: THE WEST'S DECLINE IS A SELF-INFLICTED WOUND
Yesterday we reported on the summit of the BRICS countries opening today in Durban, South Africa (link). Which is all very interesting from the monetary perspective, but the more pressing news is the paradigm shift brought about by the West's unmistakable decline of which the BRICS summit is a symptom. Let's be brutally honest. The decline is not caused by Russia or President Putin, or the abuse of Ukraine by NATO for it's own interests, but by the West's own reaction to Russia's Special Op in Ukraine. It is a self inflicted wound and part of the cultural suicide process that has been going on since roughly the turn of the millennium (read also Woke Ideology: the West is Becoming a Leper Colony (link). It's start was probably earlier, but such processes have the nature of a reversing super tanker and can only by determined by history with plenty of hindsight. In it's hatred of Russia, (we are producing a longread essay on this psychological phenomenon) Western politicians did not stop to realize that sanctions are a double edged sword. They hurt the santioned as much as the sanctioners, if not more so as indeed was the case here.
Ep. 18 Into the abyss: Colonel Douglas Macgregor tells us why the Ukraine war must end now. pic.twitter.com/a3bGLvJC4s
— Tucker Carlson (@TuckerCarlson) August 21, 2023
Western elites are in a state of 'hypnosis' that is perhaps best explained by the Flemish professor of Clinical Psychology, Mattias Desmet in his book on the Covid-19 madness, "The Psychology of Totalitarianism" (link). Desmet ultimately reduces this type of mindset to mechanistic metaphysics, dominant since the era of the Enlightenment.
The other explanation -- Gnosticism -- is even more esoteric, but very well explains the moral perversions as effects of the view of the universe as an evil creation. But the dualism of Platonism, culturally endemic in the West for at least two millennia, would equally explain this perverse mindset.
This 'hypnosis', or psychology or morality seems to exclude all rational thought processes. The demoralization and projection that are visible everywhere around us, are effects rather than causes. Whatever the case, Western politicians are living in a world known to the prophet Isaiah since the year 742BC:
"Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light, and light for darkness; that put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter!" Isaiah 5:20.
The verse condemns Judah's wickedness that led them to proclaim sinful things as good. So we see that this mentality is not unique in world history.
The Globalists in charge thought they could profit from the situation in Ukraine. Environmentalists have always hated the economic freedom and prosperity of the Wes, they refer to as capitalism. So the Green cabal currently ruling Germany was not at all distraught when their lifeline to cheap Russian gas was cut off by the sabotage of the Nord Stream pipe lines.
It was precisely what the doctor ordered in order to enforce by necessity the energy transition from cheap, reliable fossil fuel to expensive, unreliable green energy. That was one perversion.
Another perversion is the economic devastation on the ground that is the result of these policies: deindustrialization and monetary destruction. Not only is the West getting poorer because knowledge and production are leaking away; its consumers are hemorrhaging purchasing power through money printing, inflation and depressed wages caused by hyper immigration and its social costs on societies.
It is, as it were a perfect storm of self inflicted misery. Simultaneously Western rulers are waging a war on opposition parties and their leaders by any means at their disposal. In the US the Biden deep state is besieging Donald Trump and his associates with unprecedented and 'republic-ending' lawfare.
In Germany and in the Netherlands the ruling elites simply want to ban opposition parties so as to 'save democracy', while in other parts of Europe ruling parties have formed cartels to exclude Populist opposition parties from Government.
On the geopolitical level the world is moving from a unipolar world to a multipolar paradigm. This is a good thing. Power corrupts and Super Power corrupts absolutely. Every monopoly is unhealthy, even if it is a benign one (which it never is for very long).
The bi-polar, post World War 2 world was a different cup of tea. It pitted the free world against Communism. But since economic Communism collapsed in 1991 we are seeing a different dichotomy developing: an increasingly tyrannical form of universal liberalism versus states that may not always live up to the West's exacting democratic standards, but that go internationally by the principle of non interference in other states' internal affairs.
They are in fact adhering to the principles that led to the very successful expansion of the national state since the Peace of Westphalia of 1648. That treaty ended the Thirty Years' War of 1618–1648 in which the Holy Roman Empire tried to prevent other nations from choosing their own state religion. The military interventions of the universalist Holy Roman Empire resulted in the deaths of some eight million people (Wiki).
The Peace of Westphalia embodied the principle that each and every nation has the right to a free homeland and to self-determination. Indeed by now every nation has its own homeland, a few anomalies caused by imperialism excepted, such as the Kurds of Turkey, Iran and Iraq.
But under the pressure of the Postmodern Globalists the principle of the autonomous nation state has been greatly undermined, as borders got stigmatized as evil and nation states were slandered as the cause of war. In fact the opposite is true.
Comments
Post a Comment