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The MoA Week In Review – (Not Ukraine) OT 2023-14
Last week's post on Moon of Alabama:
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Other issues:
Covid:
Zionists:
Europe?
South America:
Use as open (not Ukraine) thread …
Latest from Meyssan …
The world order already changed in 2022
by Thierry Meyssan
excerpt:
It is a constant of History: changes are rare, but sudden. Those who bear the brunt of them are generally the last to see them coming. They perceive them only too late. Contrary to the static image that prevails in the West, international relations have been turned upside down in 2022, mainly to the detriment of the United States, the United Kingdom and France, often to the benefit of China and Russia. With their eyes riveted on Ukraine, Westerners do not perceive the redistribution of the cards.
It is rare for international relations to be shaken as they were in 2022. And it is not over. The process that has begun will not stop, even if events disrupt it and possibly interrupt it for a few years. The domination of the West, both the United States and the former colonial powers of Europe (mainly the United Kingdom, France and Spain) and Asia (Japan), is coming to an end. No one obeys a leader anymore, including the states that remain vassals of Washington. Everyone is now beginning to think for themselves. We are not yet in the multipolar world that Russia and China are trying to bring about, but we are seeing it being built.
skip … In ten months, the rest of the world, that is, the overwhelming majority of it, has opened its eyes. If, on October 13, 143 states followed the Western narrative and condemned the Russian “aggression” [3], they would no longer be in the majority in the UN General Assembly to vote this way today. The vote, on December 30, of a resolution asking the UN’s internal tribunal, the International Court of Justice, to declare Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian Territories an “occupation” is proof of this. The General Assembly is no longer resigned to the Western disorder of the world.
11 African states, previously in the orbit of France, have called on the Russian army or a Russian private military company to ensure their security. They no longer believe in the sincerity of France and the United States. Still others are aware that Western protection against jihadis goes hand in hand with Western covert support for jihadis. They are publicly concerned about the massive transfer of weapons destined for Ukraine to jihadists in the Sahel or to Boko Haram [4], to the point that the US Department of Defense has appointed a monitoring mission to verify what happens to the weapons destined for Ukraine, as a way of burying the problem and preventing Congress from interfering in these dark schemes.
In the Middle East, Turkey, a member of NATO, is playing a subtle game between its US ally and its Russian partner. Ankara realized long ago that it would never join the European Union and, more recently, that it was no longer expected to restore its empire over the Arabs. It is therefore turning to European states (such as the Bulgarians, Hungarians and Kosovars) and Asian states (such as Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan) with a Turkish culture (and not a Turkish language like the Chinese Uighurs). As a result, Ankara is reconciling with Damascus and preparing to leave the West for the East.
China’s arrival in the Gulf at the Riyadh summit has turned the tables in that part of the world. The Arab states saw that Beijing was reasonable, that it was helping them to make peace with their Persian neighbours. Yet Iran is an age-old ally of China, but China defends it without letting it get away with its excesses. They have measured the difference with the West who, on the contrary, have not stopped since 1979 to divide and oppose them.
India and Iran are working hard with Russia to build a transport corridor that will allow them to trade despite the Western economic war (presented in the West as “sanctions”, although these are illegal under international law). Already Mumbai is connected to Southern Russia and soon to Moscow and St. Petersburg. This makes Russia and China complementary. Beijing is building roads in Eurasia from East to West, Moscow along the longitudes.
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full article here https://www.voltairenet.org/article218636.html
Posted by: crone | Jan 15 2023 20:19 utc | 59
‘Let them eat plague!’ is an excellent Marxist critique but it’s by no means the only one. The premise of the article is that capitalism was threatened by COVID, or rather by the social response it properly demanded. You either have labour and capital flow mobility (good for global capital) or you have shutdowns (good for society). Ultimately, it argues, the world has chosen to minimise the danger to prevent interruptions to the growth of global capitalism. This, says the author, is criminal negligence for the sake of profit. ‘So what’s new?’ says the Marxist.
I consider myself a Marxist when it comes to historical explanation, but this interpretation is not the only one from that perspective. For example, just as we can see that the primary beneficiaries of the Ukraine war are the MIC and its financiers/stockholders, it could also be argued that a ‘pharmaceutical-industrial-complex’ was growing increasingly desperate between 2015-2019 in a western world where flu shots were in decline and no other crises presented themselves to maintain their business model. There is, for example, no money in malaria research (or any other diseases of the global South). SARS-CoV-19 was, and continues to be the gift that keeps on giving—Don Draper could not have come up with a better campaign to move a product (Pfizer has reputedly made $75B+ from it). Sell Moderna now and buy Raytheon because Ukraine is serving the same function for the MIC as COVID did for the PIC.
Another argument parallel to this is the ‘controlled demolition’ idea: the US phase of historical capitalism was (and is) in its dying stages, typified by the disappearance of manufacturing (i.e., the creation of value) and the turn to finance and rent-seeking (i.e., the parasitism on real value created elsewhere). Part of this parasitism is the Petrodollar regime, another is the expansion of private debt through credit deregulation (this allows the working poor to imagine they’re middle class by ceding increasingly larger portions of their income to lenders). The US knows it cannot maintain it because future wars can only be won by industrial powers—so how to reindustrialise the mainland USA?
Many have therefore argued that retooling the economy will bring serious social unrest. The working classes have already been made compliant by easy credit and will easily choose to give up unionism rather than lose their mortgages. But state apparatuses need retooling too. In this view, the pandemic offered trial-runs for forced social transformation including the creation of moral panic around public gathering, protests and other expressions of social solidarity. Anywhere humans gathered to talk and be social was demonised and black-banned. This makes state-managed economic engineering a lot easier.
I believe these two latter interpretations make better sense than ‘Let them eat plague!’ for two reasons:
1. Historically, capitalism was (and is) in crisis. In its prior 3 historical phases, capitalism’s crisis has hitherto taken the form of financialisation. It’s right at the sharp end of this now—a point well made by Michael Hudson. As manufacturing declines in profitability capital flows divest from medium-to-long term industry and reinvest in parasitism—toll roads, parking costs, healthcare, housing loans, etc. At some point, however, this will need resetting because finance is unstable, debt even more so, and real power will be ceded to those who actually make and do things (like Russia, China etc)—unless you can restore your manufacturing and energy sector dominance. The US is currently attempting this by sabotaging and dismantling European manufacturing and reassembling it at home. War too is good for business and the working-class (WW2 was the culmination of the New Deal), and finally the COVID scenario showed that biopolitical control over the population can be established through fear and compliance. In fact, the indeterminacy of the virus made it an ideal vector for this control because it existence and character is unverifiable to 99.9% of the population. All that remains is narrative. The article therefore assumes a static and caricatured timeless ‘capitalism’, but in fact we need to be historians first and realise that regimes of surplus expropriation within historical capitalism differ markedly in different epochs.
2. The second reason is that the article assumes an orthodox relationship between science and nature, that is, an active autonomous nature and a passive dependent science. A virus appears, climate change occurs, seal levels rise, etc., and we respond. Capitalism, so it goes, responds in a way that compromises the interests of 99% of the population and the welfare of the natural world. This is true to some extent. But we now also live in a world where ‘nature’ too is governed by capital. Viruses do not ‘just appear’ but are crafted in commercial laboratories. It is assumed in the article that capital’s interests are served by maintaining the status quo. Historically, however, we know that capitalism’s strength is its dynamism. It makes money from wars, but it can also make the wars for that end. If there is no market, create one. Thus, a capitalist science takes the initiative by shaping scenarios before they emerge. One of our contemporary crises is therefore not simply about how to tackle the ‘real’ but the disappearance of the real into an endless sequence of simulacra: it really doesn’t matter if the virus is real so long as it seems real.
Anyway these thoughts will probably be deleted.
Posted by: Patroklos | Jan 15 2023 21:20 utc | 83
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