Gefira 72: Weltmacht oder Niedergang

Are we sleepwalking into world war three? Is the prospect of world war three looming large? Actually, it is. Consider:

• the United States is already at war with Russia in Ukraine;
• the United States is poised for war with China over Taiwan,
• Iran is said to be about to manufacture its nuclear weapons,
• Iran, Russia and China seem to be making up an anti-American alliance;
• India refuses to cooperate with the West;
• politicians in Washington and the European Union (especially women driven by feminist madness) are war-mongering like never before;
• the United Nations (i.e. those who pull the strings behind this facade) is preparing a global pact against new outbreaks of pandemics (in plain English: the managers of the world prepare tools to nip in the bud popular riots and suppress revolutions which they expect to soon take place and which they are scared of);
• Third World people are continuously being resettled to white man’s countries, which results in the emergence of parallel societies and enhanced ethnic tensions;
• pervert ideologies of gender reassignment, critical race theory, equity of outcome (communism pure) rather than equality of opportunities are gaining more and more ground, leading to enhanced social tension,
all of these and many more make an impression that we are not years but months or weeks away from a BIG BANG.

Sadly, it is not the common people who control their own destiny: it is the few managers of the world who control the destiny of the whole of humanity. They engage in war games – at first in theory, then in reality – and take utmost pleasure at it. They view ordinary human beings, nations and countries, cultures and religions as chess pieces that they can capture or replace, with which they can castle, mate or checkmate. They carve territories and assign people to states as they please. Truth means nothing to them, solemn promise means nothing to them, human tears mean nothing to them. All they are after is world dominance. They will set the whole globe ablaze to gain global power. WELTMACHT ODER NIEDERGANG, that’s what’s emblazoned on their banners.

 

Gefira Financial Bulletin #72 is available now

  • The Great War for Raw Materials and Bretton Woods III
  • Gamblers on the Potomac and the Thames
  • The emergence of cryptocurrencies
  • Can cryptocurrency brokers, interest rates and liquidity

The fate of client states

In 1968 East Germany, Poland, Hungary and Bulgaria invaded Czechoslovakia. Why? Because they were client states of the Soviet Union and because the Soviet Union needed to defend socialism there. In 2022/23 Germany, Poland, Czechia, Slovakia, Romania and Bulgaria are more than impatient to intervene in Ukraine. Why? Because they are client states of the United States and the United States needs to save democracy and LGTB rights in Ukraine.

In 1968 Romania bravely resisted participation in the intervention in Czechoslovakia and so did not deploy troops there. In 2022/23 Hungary is courageously resisting involvement in the military affray in Ukraine. History can repeat itself, it can! All the other European states – west or east – are compliant.

Such is the fate of client states. The Warsaw Pact countries of eastern Europe wanted badly to liberate themselves from the Soviet – as they put it – yoke. The time came that it was possible. What did they do next? They gladly imposed on their necks the American yoke and continue to comply. What did they do? They changed their overlord. The funny thing is that the fief or territory that they received from their new overlord remained the same as they had received from their old overlord: their own countries.

It has never been different throughout recorded history. When the Third Reich reigned supreme, it had its vassal or client states which were compelled to invade the Soviet Union; when Napoleon Bonaparte appeared to be an invincible god of war, he, too, had his vassal or client states with the help of which he invaded Russia or imposed a total trade blockade (in today’s parlance: sanctions) on the United Kingdom.

The fate of client states! This fate translates into being a stooge of the mighty sovereign to the detriment of the client state’s interests. What imaginable sense did it have for the German Kingdom of Saxony to invade Russia in 1812? What sense did it have for Hungary to deploy its troops somewhere in the vicinity of Stalingrad in 1942/43? What sense did it make for Poland to get involved in the street riots in Minsk, Belarus, in 2022? How could Saxons benefit from helping Napoleon conquer Russia? How could Hungarians benefit from helping Hitler defeat Stalin? How can Poland benefit from – as they put it – regime change in Minsk? Continue reading

Silicon Valley Bank – what is this all about?

It is not inflation, nor the Fed, nor the NFP, and certainly not the hostilities in Ukraine that is attracting investors’ attention, but the major problem that the U.S. banking sector is beset with, rendering especially Silicon Valley Bank barely capable of making payments to its customers. All this reminds us of 2008, although there are no clear signs yet that we are on the verge of collapse.

SVB is a very specific bank in the US market. It is a bank that deals mainly with technology companies. Though it provides financial services to them, primarily it takes deposits from them. The bank participates in venture capital projects (venture capital), but it has also invested the surpluses in the US bond market or in MBS. The sharp rise in interest rates and the resulting significant revaluation of bonds resulted in a large financial loss in the bank’s portfolio, which is nothing unusual. In fact, this was something normal across the financial sector. However, this is where the peculiarities of SVB itself come into play. It is a bank that manages hundreds or even thousands of technology companies or start-ups. This sector, in turn, has been struggling for some time to catch its breath after the strong last 2 years. Companies have begun to slow their growth, look for savings and reach for capital from deposits. In order to get liquidity, SVB was forced to sell all liquid assets worth over $20 billion, incurring a loss of almost $2 billion! That’s a sizable hole in the bank’s balance sheet. At the same time, the bank announced an additional equity offering to close the gap, prompting investors to divest themselves of the bank’s shares. Yesterday (March 9, 2023), the shares plunged by as much as about 70%! These problems are still deepening today before the weekend, which is why some have already drawn parallels with 2008.

Of course, it’s important to remember that SVB and the tech industry are a specific sector and may have less overall impact on the overall stock market than the collapse of Lehman Brothers or the problems that occurred at Bear Stearns. The key question is whether this is just an isolated incident or a major problem across the industry. 

America aeterna

What did the Roman Empire look like just before the Goths attacked in 410? What did China look like in the 15th century, when it completely cut itself off from the outside world and insisted on its ideas? The green spaces in front of the Capitol and other buildings in Washington reminiscent of ancient Rome are full of homeless people and their tents.

The Goths of modern America, however, are not the classes impoverished by globalization; rather, they are neo-Marxist movements like Black Lives Matter and Antifa, destructive forces that one day storm the capitals all at once, only to retreat to their ghettos for a few months and attack again like the partisans in World War II. The data on moronic types walking the streets and shooting around in the US is frightening, by the way.

These facts make it clear why 43% of Americans believe their country is at risk of civil war.

What happened to America in the last few years to make things so bad? Americans have lost an ability that sociologists call horizontal solidarity, that is, to communicate across social classes, regardless of how much one owns, in order to achieve “higher things”. And although the official narrative in the US media is still full of hackneyed phrases about inclusivity, tolerance, reparation, building back better, the American nation is ever more deeply divided between the interior of the continent and the coasts, between the people of the post-industrial, virtual world, who don’t care where they live because they can continue to maintain their status in the remotest village via metaverse, and those who have remained down-to-earth and see only doom and a slow but sure demise in the new, beautiful world, the new world of which they have received nothing. The American nation is atomized, has long since become a nation of nomads (or has it always been one?) and is becoming more and more intensely a nation of monads (in Leibniz’s view), of independent, innumerable modes of existence. This crowd of monads, however, is not moving in any consciously planned long-term direction (regarding the great Asian nations, this is probably not the case), but is simply drifting away. Continue reading

Enough is enough

Poland has not yet perished, so long as her reasonable patriots are still alive.*

What impression do you get when you read or hear about Poland’s politics these days? The most striking impression is that Warsaw is among the most war-mongering states within NATO and the European Union. Poland’s president and Prime Minister never tire of morally and politically pressurizing the West to intensify lethal arms supplies to Ukraine, to deploy American nuclear armaments to Poland (yes!) and to wage war against Russia cost it what it may. Poland’s former minister of foreign affairs Radosław Sikorski made the internet headlines when on the day of blowing up the NordStream pipelines he openly congratulated America for the feat, that is, he blabbed about what Americans had done to the whole world, and only later (obviously under American pressure) did he remove the congratulatory text from his twitter account, (just like a few months later Ursula von der Leyen redacted her video piece in which she in turn blabbed about the enormous human losses sustained by the Ukrainian army).

Polish people – as one publicist skilfully put it – cut off from Moscow’s lies and forced to rely on Ukrainian truth, mostly opened their homes wide to accept Ukrainians fleeing their country. Not that Ukrainians had not been present in Poland prior to the outbreak of the hostilities in the east: already before February 24, 2022, Poland ranked among the most refugee-friendly countries in Europe. After February 24, 2022 the number of Ukrainians present in Poland went through the roof: officially there are a million and a half of them, but in reality there must be far, far more: go and take a stroll in any larger Polish city with your ears wide open. If you know Russian and Polish, then you will be surprised to hear Russian (very rarely Ukrainian) spoken around. 

Put an End to the Americanization of Poland

Poland’s foreign policy is American-oriented. In the years 2003-2005 the CIA received permission from Warsaw to have its secret prisons in Poland where Afghan guerrilla fighters and other enemies of the United States were interrogated and (who knows?) tortured. Polish politicians are deeply indebted to the West in general and to the United States in particular. The members of the two main political parties originate from the famed Solidarity Movement of the 1980s, the movement that fought against the communist regime. It was the time when the movement received huge support from Western countries, when many members of the movement stayed in one of the Western countries, which naturally created a relationship of dependency, indebtedness, and gratitude between the anti-Communist fighters and their Western sponsors.

The tragedy of Poland consists in its ruling circles being indebted to foreign powers. Before 1989, when Poland was governed by the communists, it was Moscow; after 1989, it is the collective West, with some factions of the former Solidarity movement leaning more towards Europe (Germany), and others – to the United States (or the Anglophere). Independent the Polish authorities are not.

Since the beginning of the 1990s, Warsaw has always been engaged in interfering with Belorussian internal affairs: Poland harbours a special TV station broadcasting to Belarus, and nurtures Belorussian dissidents. Of late, Warsaw has been deeply involved in Ukrainian matters, supporting all the Maidans there and the membership of Ukraine in the European Union and possibly NATO. Why does Warsaw behave like this? The answer to this question is partially easy to find, and partially it is baffling. Continue reading

The inflation of terms

The Roman emperors called themselves gods. The gods were men, and the men were like fathers to their nations. Hence the later term “The Father-State,” which became a thorn in the side of feminists and anti-nationalists after 1968. The fight of the son against the father described by Sigmund Freud, nowadays of the left-green scene against the state, found its expression in the term “Mutti” in reference to the German Chancellor, who had no children, which she compensated by taking in thousands of “children” from all over the world. Thus, intentionally or subconsciously, both terms “father” and “mother” became unwords. The future belongs after all to the “children”, the X and Y and other letter salad like L, G, B, T, Q.

There are so many scandals in the EU and among German politicians who wrote their diploma and doctoral theses in droves using “cut” and “paste” that the general public no longer even reacts to them. The word “scandal” now sounds like “normal.” EU vice president’s suitcase full of money? A German minister resigns from her post because she has no qualifications for it? Boring to the point of yawning. The brain naturally resists the boredom, the repetitive information and starts to stop reacting to the scandals. The boredom is compensated by new challenges.

In former times one said: throw away garbage. Today: dispose of garbage. Garbage is a problem? No, garbage is a challenge. In modern language, in the modern world, there are no problems, there are only ever greater challenges. Be it climate change, energy crisis. Well, Putin is maybe the last problem that needs to be disposed of.

The state has higher and higher expenses. But they are not a problem, they are a challenge. The citizen has been told so much for decades about inflation, mountains of debt of the state, of countries that went bankrupt because they and their complicit citizens didn’t want to save, that he doesn’t even react anymore in the face of new expenditures – for weapons to a foreign country as nowadays or for the banks of a foreign country as in the past (bailouts). The concept of debt became tolerable because the state pays its debts and challenges of today with our money, the money of our children and our grandchildren. And we save, save and lose, lose on our accounts.

How do you react now to the term “virus” and “a new wave” and how did you react to them two years ago? These terms also suffered profound inflation. They depreciated as our savings did in the last few years.

Whither is fled the visionary gleam? Where is it now, the glory and the dream?*

   His aide comes up to him and (confidentially) repeats what has already been agreed upon and mentally rehearsed: “Mr President, we are flying over Germany. In a couple of hours we’ll be landing in Poland and then changing for the train. Within hours we arrive in Kiev, where you will have talks with President Zelensky.”

   They are on board Air Force One. Below, Europe: a gathering of nations that his country may always rely on, a gathering of countries whose governments habitually swear allegiance to him and his predecessors and his successors. Sometimes they strain at the leash they are held on, but then they are quickly brought to toe the line.

   “In Kiev?” the President expresses his doubts out loud though he has long given his consent to the whole plan. It may be he doesn’t remember.

   ”No need to worry,” reassures him one of his aides. “The Russians have been notified of your visit to Ukraine’s capital. The skies will be as clear as on day one after the Creation. President Zelensky will wear his usual khaki costume to show that he is a tough soldier and shares the hard life of the citizens he represents. That’s something we’ve all been accustomed to..”

   The President has some vague recollections. Who was it who said he would not don ordinary clothes till the war was won? He cannot recall, but he feels somehow ill at ease.

   “Do the Poles know that rather than in Warsaw I will first arrive in Kiev?” he asks.

   “The Poles?” His aide is puzzled. Why the heck should they know in advance? They are not to be reckoned with. “No, Mr President,” the aide answers. “They will be informed in the last moment. The fewer people know, the better.”

   Still, the Russians have been notified. Isn’t it weird! thinks the President.

   “Will the Poles not take offence?” the President voices his doubts.

   His aide cannot help smiling. Offence? The Poles? At Americans?

   “No, Mr President. They owe us too much. We guarantee their sovereignty and security, as you know. They want more troops from us, more military lethal equipment. How could they take offence?”

   True, how could they? thinks that president and peeks through the oval window.

   “One more thing, Mr President,” he hears his aide. “Remember, while in Kiev,” the aide stops in mid-sentence, obviously searching for appropriate words, “we will hear an air-raid siren.”

   The President suddenly remembers. Yes, that’s what they have agreed upon!

   “Is that necessary?” he asks.  Continue reading