I concluded Roads to WW3 Part 4: ‘Only connect’ with an observation applicable to all posts in this series:
none of earth’s plethora of flash points and weeping sores should be be viewed in isolation. Not Ukraine, not the cancer that is Israel. Not Syria nor Sahel nor Venezuela … Iran nor Xinjiang nor drillings in the Arctic. None can be truly understood outside the context of so far undeclared war between US empire and axis of resistance.
But this one picks up where Part 3: capturing minds left off. That had shown Western leaders, Europe’s in particular, groomed over decades to prioritise US agendas over the interests of their own citizens and economies, and had featured a 7,000 word essay – Elite Capture & European Self-Destruction: The Hidden Architecture of Transatlantic Hegemony – in which Nel Bonilla argued that when we ask why those leaders committed to Washington’s exorbitantly costly war on Russia, and by extension China: 1
… the answer does not lie in pure and straightforward corruption or ideological fervor. Far more banal and effective, it also lies in biographies, networks, and institutions; in hegemony on the level of the functional elite: when ruling ideas become common sense. And in this case, hegemony is not enforced solely through violence but through education, elite recruitment, and ritualized repetition.
This post stays with the theme of cultural hegemony but shifts from the imperialist bloc, known as the collective West and implicitly mistaken – so blinkered is its media induced perspective – for the whole wide world as mapped here …
… to the global south. It is nevertheless related to Part 3 by the truth that, the two prime checks on its dominance being too powerful for head-on military attack (which does not, alas, rule out Armageddon by miscalculation) the US pours billions into soft power, where it still has a real if diminishing advantage, 2 to bring states on China’s and Russia’s periphery into the US orbit by usurping their information space. Through ownership patterns in news, entertainment and an American Dream packaged in global brands from Cola to Clooney, through CIA cut-outs like the National Endowment for Democracy and ostensibly charitable Foundations 3 which channel funding to capitalise on grievances real or manufactured, the US grooms and co-opts dissent to subvert state sovereignty and engineer Ukraine/Bangladesh/Honduras style colour revolutions sold to the West as democracy on the march.
No one has done more to document and alert us to such subversions than the Bangkok based podcaster, Brian Berletic. A week ago he took three Asian countries – Thailand, Nepal and the Philippines – to show how the playbook of so-called Arab Spring was transplanted, in the wake of Obama’s “pivot to Asia”, to put the squeeze on Beijing … 4
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- Costs to Europe are not confined to the $billions in arms to Kiev to prolong (where not resold with no questions asked on global black markets) Ukraine’s agony as pawn in a greater game, nor to the economically suicidal sacrifice of cheap Russian energy that had kept German manufacturing competitive.
Less dramatic but in the long term even more sensationally stupid (if we’re being kind) is the loss of lucrative trade with Eurasia for decades to come. Decades which will make it even clearer than it already is to those with eyes to see that the US puppets who govern Europe have in just over ten years – taking the Maidan coup of 2014 as my somewhat arbitrary baseline – hastened a decline whose seeds were sown half a century ago when real wealth creation was, for the gain of rentiers, exported to the global south while their home economies saw a GDP-boosting but non productive FIRE (finance, insurance, real estate) bonanza now careering from crisis to crisis – with the ‘solution’ to each preparing the ground for the next, and more severe, financial calamity.
- There’s reason to suppose however that even in soft power, a combination of BRICS, Belt & Road, AIIB and SCO on the one hand, blowback from US military, economic and fiscal overreach on the other, are making inroads into America’s lead.
- Two such Foundations being that of the close pal of Jeffrey Epstein who gave name and ill-gotten to the Gates Foundation; and the Open Society of a George Soros who in 1992 trousered a cool $billion by shorting sterling when “The Markets” forced PM John Major to take Britain out of the ERM just two years after joining it.
- For a study in US meddling prior to Obama’s “pivot”, sold as popular discontent taking spontaneously to the streets, see my post of four years ago, Those nights in Tiananmen Square. For good measure it houses links to a “Uighur genocide” later debunked in part because China’s crackdown on Islamist terror in Xinjiang pales into insignificance at side of America’s “war on terror”; in part as the work of a far-Right born-again Christian, his ‘evidence’ subsequently discredited. But as the saying has it, a lie can have sped round the planet twice before truth is even out of bed and putting on its shoes …
… the more so when the lie in question is amplified and repeated 24/7 by interests with near limitless resources at their disposal, and by media systemically answerable, on matters crucial to ruling elites, to power.
There’s a more general point to be made. China learned from Western misrepresentation of what happened at Tiananmen, strengthening its defences against foreign interference; not least by tightly controlling entities, like Google and Amazon, intimately linked to US psy-ops (and, since the g-word has been used, to genocide in Gaza). For her part Russia learned from US meddling; whether in the form of the trojan NGOs mentioned above, a violently racist but empire-useful Alexei Navalny …
Putin poisons hotel water; Navalny is taken to Omsk hospital. No one kills him there – because poll ratings for this far right xenophobe are a fraction of Putin’s? – though a hospital is an ideal rub-out venue. The authorities approve transfer to Berlin, medics find Novichok. Merkel accuses Russia, EU imposes sanctions. Makes perfect sense doesn’t it?
Footnote to DeepSeek and Mandy Rice-Davies
… or a UK-backed Pussy Riot whose talentless obscenities in Orthodox churches would have drawn outrage at Notre-Dame or York Minster. China and Russia are strong, their citizens sufficiently contented – witness Vladimir Putin’s landslide re-election last year – in conditions of phoenix-like recovery from 90s disaster capitalism under Boris Yeltsin, to see off such interference. (See this piece, wherein a Human Rights Watch tarnished by proximity to Washington laments an ‘authoritarianism’ which, belatedly it seems to me, is seeing Russia, Georgia, Hungary and some of the Central Asian “Stans” reining in foreign NGOs for precisely the reasons discussed here.) But for those countries on their periphery it’s a mixed picture, footnote 2 notwithstanding. Brian insists with mounting urgency that Beijing and Moscow do more to help vulnerable neighbours protect their information space.