llusions of Superiority. What’s Next?
Strategic Culture Foundation (RSS)

It will need a long catharsis to purge Europe of its illusions of superiority – as perceived by the non-west.

In January 2013, President Xi Jinping gave a speech to the members of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party. His speech gave insight into our world as it ‘is’, and secondly, though its analysis was firmly focused on the causes to the Soviet implosion, Xi’s exposition very clearly had wider meaning. Yes, it is addressed to us – the western construct – too.

Immanuel Wallenstein had already warned, in 1991, against the western ‘false consciousness’ of Cold War triumph: For, as Wallenstein points out, the Soviet collapse was not the demise not of Leninism alone. It was rather the ‘beginning of the end’ for both poles of the great ideological antinomy: That of “the ‘American Century, with God on our side’ construct on the one hand – with the Leninist, equally universalist, eschatologies, on the other”.

Since these two were woven from the same universalist ideological cloth – that is, with each defining (and co-constituting) the ‘other’ – the loss of its Manichaean enemy led to a series of geo-political structures from the Cold War fraying – as the prevailing, lone ideology lacked any satisfactory explanation for its global rule, objectives and purposes – absent the co-constituting ‘enemy’ (i.e. Communism).

In Xi’s address, he attributed the break-up of the Soviet Union to ‘ideological nihilism’: The ruling strata, Xi asserted, had ceased to believe in the advantages and the value of their ‘system’, yet lacking any other ideological coordinates within which to situate their thinking, the élites slid unto nihilism.

“Why did the Soviet Union disintegrate? Why did the Communist Party of the Soviet Union fall to pieces? An important reason is that, in the ideological domain, competition is fierce [and necessary, Xi might have added]! To completely repudiate the historical experience of the Soviet Union, to repudiate the history of the CPSU, to repudiate Lenin, to repudiate Stalin – was to wreck chaos on Soviet ideology and engage in historical nihilism”, Xi said.

Rings any bells? Such as Americans repudiating U.S. history as ‘White Man’s story’? As dismissing America’s former leaders as ‘slave owners’? As dissing the founding fathers, and toppling their statues?

“Once the Party loses the control of the ideology, Xi argued, once it fails to provide a satisfactory explanation for its own rule, objectives and purposes, it dissolves into a party of loosely connected individuals linked only by personal goals of enrichment and power”, (Xi again). The Party is then taken over by ‘ideological nihilism’.

This, however, was not the worst outcome. The worst outcome, Xi noted, was that the country had been taken over by people with no ideology whatsoever, but with an entirely cynical and self-serving desire to rule.

This is Wallenstein’s point: The Cold War’s ‘premature triumphalism’ – paradoxically – has made the ideological Manichaeism on which post-Enlightenment modernity functioned, so much harder to sustain. As one form of universalism – liberalism – eliminated all competition for hegemony, paradoxically in so doing, the consequence has been to lift the mental fog of ideology, permitting the return of particularity, rootedness and civilization.

This...

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 Russia’s Ongoing Great Patriotic War
Strategic Culture Foundation (RSS)

Winning their current Great Patriotic War is as crucial to today’s Russians as was winning those thrust on their forefathers in 1812 and 1941.

Winning their current Great Patriotic War is as crucial to today’s Russians as was winning those thrust on their forefathers in 1812 and 1941. Because Ukraine is but one of several NATO fronts, victory in Ukraine does not ensure anything unless victory is also won in Russia’s economic and cultural wars as well. All these different fronts are, at day’s end, as one.

Think otherwise? Just look at the most recent targets of the EU’s punitive sanctions, where motor cycle enthusiast Aleksandr Zaldostanov and Russian actors Sergey Bezrukov and Vladimir Mashkov join the EU’s naughty list.

The EU criminalizes Zaldostanov for “actively supporting Russian state propaganda through publicly denying Ukraine’s right to statehood and calling for the ‘denazification’ as well as the ‘de-Ukrainization’ of the country.” Leaving aside the patently idiotic question of what, in this contget, does or does not constitute “Russian state propaganda”, Zaldostanov is targeted for opposing the well documented presence of Nazis in Ukraine. The other cited charges against him are EU disinformation: though no one opposes Ukraine’s theoretical right to statehood, tens of millions quite rightly oppose Zelensky’s stalled ethnic cleansing campaign in Eastern Ukraine. As regards ‘de-Ukrainization’, Borrell and that awful von der Leyen woman should check out the laws and actions of the Zelensky junta against Russian speakers and politicians representing them before they next open their mouths to once again prove their roles as empty headed NATO court jesters.

In so far as Zaldostanov is being persecuted for defending the right to life of those whose mother tongue is Russian, all Russophones should take note as, if it is Eastern Ukraine and Zaldostanov today, it will definitely be them tomorrow no matter in what part of Russia they and their grandmothers live.

And then we have award-winning actors Vladimir Mashkov and Sergey Bezrukov, whose equally heinous crime is they verbally opposed Zelensky’s ethnic cleansing campaign in Eastern Ukraine and that Bezrukov, a Russian, had the temerity to quote from ‘To the Slanderers of Russia,’ a poem by Alexander Pushkin, Russia’s national poet. Every literate Russian speaker must take due note: because Bezrukov and Pushkin are in the cross hairs of these barbarians, so, first of all, are you. You and your grandmothers have targets on your backs.

And, secondly, it goes much much further than that. Though recent articles highlighted NATO’s seemingly Quixotic war against such world literary greats as Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, as well as its campaign to ban world class children’s stories for no other reason than they are Russian, renowned NATO flunkey and horror story writer Stephen King put all this NATO depravity in perspective when Russian journalists pranked him to reveal the demons that possess that Satan obsessed war hawk and his fellow golems.

King freely agreed not only to propagate lies about non existent Russian war crimes in Ukraine but also agreed to help demonize Russians, all Russians because this moron believes that fanning the flames of Russophobia is the right thing to do and, as a corollary, that those, like you and your grandmother, who suffer therefrom are of little human consequence. King has there...

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What Legal Sanctions Are Currently in Place Globally
Strategic Culture Foundation (RSS)

Sanctions are imposed by the United Nations Security Council to maintain or restore international peace and security under Chapter VII of the United Nations Charter. What is often referred to as “U.S. sanctions” are unilateral restrictive measures inconsistent with the international law. Today, there are 14 ongoing sanctions regimes which focus on supporting political settlement of conflicts, nuclear non-proliferation, and counter-terrorism. Each regime is administered by a sanctions committee chaired by a non-permanent member of the Security Council.

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 Creating the Capitalocene: Endless Accumulation
Strategic Culture Foundation (RSS)

By Patrick MAZZA

The world system we know today was born in a time roughly from the mid-14th to mid-17th centuries. We understand them as a time when the world came out of the “Dark Ages” into the Renaissance, when the light was breaking through. In truth, writes Fabian Scheidler, it was a time of unprecedented violence in Europe, of wars across the landscape culminating in the genocide of the indigenous of the Americas.

“ . . . why does the early modern period come across as the new era of progress and humanism (?) . . . The reason for cultivating this myth is obvious: it is crucial to the West’s narrative of being the bearer of progress throughout the history of mankind. But what if our present system was actually built on a nightmare, born of naked violence and sheer despair? . . . What if civilization did not make progress, but systematized barbarism instead?”

It is that system which threatens to plunge the world into final nightmares as we confront the consequences, of warfare and ecological destruction.  “  . . . we must thoroughly question the foundations of our economy, our state and much more,” Scheidler writes in his recent work, The End of the Megamachine: A Brief History of a Failing Civilization.

The central drive to accumulate capital

The system, or the Megamachine as Scheidler calls it, consolidated with the restoration of coin taxation, which under Rome and empires preceding it allowed the formation of standing armies. Mercenaries would provide kings the power to put down peasant revolts. Funded by Italian bankers, mercenary armies roamed Europe, consolidating it as a war economy during the Hundred Years War, which actually lasted from 1337-1453.

The invention of the cannon around 1450 drove the economic requirements of warfare much higher. States were driven to accumulate capital to compete. That flipped the emphasis from earlier empires such as Rome and China, the central goal of which was to consolidate state power. In Europe, instead the system became driven by the rationale of endless capital accumulation. The need for capital to build war machines drove wars to re-pay debt in an endless circle. In fact, the brutal colonization of the Americas and enslavement of populations to mine precious metals was driven by the need to pay bankers.

The infrastructure of capital accumulation was created in those centuries. The invention of double entry bookkeeping in 14th century Italy, with its sharp quantification of profit and loss, focused unlimited accumulation as a goal in itself. The authoritarian state was consolidated through draconian poor laws forcing people to work, the Inquisition and religious persecution, which actually intensified compared to the “Dark Ages.” Witch trials proliferated, notably in areas where greatest economic stress was causing peasant revolts.

Then in 1602, the first modern corporation was created, the Dutch East India Company, through which the state provided two vital guarantees. One was practical immortality. No longer would accumulation cease with the death of the individual, but be perpetuated institutionally over generations. The second was limited liability. Shareholders would only be liable for their own holdings in the corporation. The remainder of their wealth would be protected. These were revolutionary developments at the time.

Replacing the organic with the mechanical

Through these centuries, the intellectual infrastructure of the Megamachine was also created in philosophies of absolute control. The rise of...

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Biden reintroducing transgender health protections after judge blocked administration's directives
WION - world News Releases (RSS)

After a federal judge in Tennessee temporarily blocked the Biden administration's directives allowing transgender workers and students to use bathr

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Elon Musk's Tesla increases its capital spending plan by $1 billion
WION - world News Releases (RSS)

In a regulatory filing on Monday, Tesla announced that it has increased its capital spending plan by $1 billion.

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