New Cold War

By the common consent of researchers of the past, historical eras are marked by speeches that later came down as famous, as hallmarks or watersheds, as harbingers of the events to come. Such was the case with the Fulton speech given by Winston Churchill, which announced the beginning of a cold war. Such was Vladimir Putin’s speech in Munich, in which the Russian President signalled a turn in the relations between Moscow and the Western world. Such was the (plagiarized) speech delivered by Martin Luther King that put the United States on the way to sloughing off its white majority. Was Joe Biden’s ABC interview – fraught with unbridled, wild accusations – the opening salvo of a new cold war?

In this short interview President Biden managed to call Putin names and threaten Russia with a ‘price to pay’. True, the word ‘killer’ in reference to Vladimir Putin was said by the interviewer while the interviewee merely said his affirmative yes, but still. Joe Biden enriched his compliments to his Russian counterpart, stating that the Russian leader had no soul. To make things worse, the administration’s spokeswoman upon being asked whether President Biden regretted his words replied that he did not.

A few days prior to the interview, the British authorities made a statement that Russia was a national threat to the Isles. Were these two events a planned, orchestrated attack on Moscow or just a coincidence? Russia is held responsible for an ever-growing list of instances of bad conduct. Now its secret services attempt an assassination of a dissident, now they meddle in American elections; now they denigrate Western politicians, now they give support to dictators, and so on. The political world stage reminds one of a children’s story, where we have eternally innocent rabbits and eternally rapacious wolves; where we have the good guys – the United States and the European Union – and the bad guys – Russia, Iran and China plus their satellites. The world would have long been in the state of universal bliss but for Russia, but for this or that dictator, it is commonly understood.

It is strange that Moscow has not yet been held responsible for all the recent black riots in America. If the Russian tentacles are allegedly so operative as to meddle in the elections held within the borders of the only superpower, why, they should as well be capable of staging street riots and – why not? – unleashing the never-ending columns of refugees/escapees/immigrants on their way to cross the southern US border, settle down in the States and thus destabilize the socioeconomic status quo.

The topic of immigrants was also broached in the interview. American soil is being inundated by an ever increasing human avalanche. Yes, the Biden administration ostentatiously reversed the anti-immigration course of the Trump administration, but even the do-gooders like Nancy Pelosi must feel that the welfare system is going to be overwhelmed. With the pandemic restrictions and the rising debt, the future looks bleak. Who knows, maybe the establishment needs an international conflict with no less an enemy than a nuclear power? American society might be consolidated around its leader, while under such extraordinary circumstances all his domestic failures might be forgiven and forgotten. The President might also gain in popularity even among those who did not vote for him. That might be a plan.

And yet, “something is rotten in the state of America”.The great racial and ethnic replacement (nonwhites are already a majority among the school-goers), the sweeping revolution in the morals, the soaring debt, the rise of China, the failure in Syria, the return of Russia as a global player, plus the president whose senile conduct resembles that of Comrade Chernenko and Comrade Andropov – all of those bode ill for the Land of the Free. A video clip showing Joe Biden clumsily climbing the steps to Air Force One is doing the rounds. A mirror image of the United States.

President Biden falls on Air Force One stairs, YouTube.

Gefira 52: What has gone wrong with our society?

Gefira 52 concerns itself with the question of what has gone wrong with our society. Things that at least superficially are generally regarded as beneficial have turned or are being turned into their opposite. The dream about a society where differences are based on merit and merit alone and where law is the same for everyone has degenerated into a fantasy about not merely equality of chances but equity of outcomes! The farther we progress as humankind, the more numerous calamities afflict us. It is not only racism, xeno- or homophobia; these have been supplemented with such alleged ills as objectivity, paternalism, ableism, ageism, mentalism, perfectionism, power hoarding, individualism, microaggressions, and so on, and so forth, the list has no end. Some of the items enumerated above (ableism, ageism, mentalism) are words that you will have difficulties finding in a thick dictionary; the use of others, those positive words that we are all familiar with (objectivity, paternalism, perfectionism, individualism), inverted in their meaning and applied to describe social drawbacks, perplex us in their new overtones and render us dumbfounded. All these phenomena very often ending in ism are said to be ubiquitous, pervade all human activities not excepting state or social institutions, from school to government, from family to community. We all are believed to be psychologically flawed in one way or another without having the slightest awareness of it. Especially white people are a sitting duck for all manner of attackers and their detractors. White people are held to be responsible for all vileness, malevolence, iniquity and baseness of social life. Conversely, people of colour are without blemish: the eternal victims of white racism, vehicles of moral high ground. People of colour are to be elevated and placed on plinths and apologised to, genuflected to and adored. Conversely, traces of white people’s grandeour are systematically obliterated.

Non-governmental organisations, too, once conceived as auxiliary organs which would step in where governments proved to be absent or ineffective have been taken over by the world’s movers and shakers. Now NGOs are implementing and amplifying the agenda of the powers that be and, indeed, at times so brazenly and unashamedly, that state authorities are beginning to see things through and bridle or ban these organisations.

Why are social ills piling up and multiplying? Why, despite so much effort to the contrary, all the isms that we have listed above (and many more!) allegedly persist and metastasize? Are these isms natural phenomena or instruments with which a group of powerful individuals are attaining their goals through creating manageable chaos? Are the people who commit themselves to the combat against all those isms (and many that have not yet been invented!) in their right senses? Are they useful idiots, misty-eyed individuals, well-meaning trendsetters or cynical careerists? What has gone wrong?

Gefira Financial Bulletin #52 is available now

What has gone wrong with our society?
Racism, Racism Everywhere, White Supremacy Never Shrinks
NGOs and Foundations
Why Google is harmful or why you should invest in artificial intelligence

The University of Amsterdam wants to get rid of a research report on the cost of immigration

When social peace is based on people’s ability to believe in something they don’t actually believe in, paradoxical thinking prevails. In 2006, above an article in the Financial Times, the following curious headline read: “The troubled cosmopolitan: how migrants enrich an increasingly concerned host.” While there is high unemployment among non-Western immigrants in Western countries, Western intellectuals still believe that overall non Western immigration is economically beneficial to white European countries. Probably it was because of this conviction that the University of Amsterdam agreed to contribute to an extensive research on the cost or benefits of immigration.

After 3 years of extensive data analysis the researchers published their results in a report called: “Boundless Welfare State”. The report examined the public cost, like social security and public income such as taxes collected from immigrants. It turned out that especially non-Western immigration is a huge burden for Dutch society. Immigrants have cost the Dutch people 400 billion euro over the last few decades. If the Dutch state continues to accept more immigrants, the expenditure will only go up further. The report not only estimated the enormous burden of mass-immigration for the Dutch population, it also did away with the belief that education could elevate poor immigrants from Africa and Central Asia.

It came as no surprise that the academic community of Amsterdam was unhappy with the outcome. Facts are only facts whether or not they are in line with the current political and religious convictions. That was as much the case in Galileo’s day as it is now. The report was produced with the full cooperation of the University of Amsterdam, which demanded that the researchers remove the university’s name and logo from the report and all references to the sponsor of the survey.
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The future of the immigration debate

Over the last decades the immigration debate has focused on the clash of civilizations. Christian Europe, versus the Islamic migrants from the Middle-East. Algerians in France, Pakistanis in the United Kingdom, and Turks in Germany. The major groups that disturbed that demographics of Western Europe have all had in common that they are Islamic. The anti-immigration political parties have embraced this, and have portrayed Islam, rather than immigration, as being the problem. Most immigration challenges focus around religion and the barrier it forms to successful integration. Right-wing parties have been able to use this as a defense against claims of racism. Islam, clearly, is not a race, it is an ideology. This becomes apparent when we look at one of the quotes from the Dutch Party for Freedom’s leader Geert Wilders, “Islam is the Trojan Horse in Europe. If we do not stop Islamification now, Eurabia and Netherabia will just be a matter of time. One century ago, there were approximately 50 Muslims in the Netherlands, today, there are about 1 million. Where will it end? We are heading for the end of European and Dutch civilisation as we know it.” Wilders does not talk about falling birth rates or the percentage of the population that is foreign half as much as he talks about the problem of Islam.

We are nevertheless experiencing a shift. The Middle East and North Africa have a relatively small population, countries like Libya and Lebanon have under seven million inhabitants each. The most populous country in that group is Egypt, but that is not the country where immigrants are coming from. A country like Syria only has seventeen million inhabitants. We shouldn’t jump to the wrong conclusion that immigrants will continue to arrive in Europe from these areas. There is a bigger source. Yes, we’re talking about Africa. Sub-Saharan Africa.
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Eternal tilting at windmills

On February 18, UN Secretary General António Guterres graced the world with another of his many uplifting speeches. Of the limited range of topics that are routinely broached – climate change, discrimination, the pandemic and racism – he chose to focus on the last of the mentioned. It went something like this: Ladies and gentlemen, in case you have not noticed, (which is even absurd to assume but never mind) racism plagues our world. Then António Guterres – in the Alfred Hitchcock style: first an earthquake, then the tension rises – hyporbelised this breathtaking gambit with the usual adjectives to the tune of “abhorrent”, “ugly”, and the noun “repudiation”. Racism – despite decades of reeducating the humanity and despite the Charter of the United Nations – is !everywhere! and so it will take a long time to combat it. The top representative of humanity went on to appealing to his worldwide audience that it must – without reservation, without hesitation, without qualification – reject and condemn racism which still permeates institutions, social structures and everyday life. Furthermore, António Guterres said that although racism, a repudiation of our common humanity, is deeply entrenched in centuries of colonialism and slavery and is a complex cultural phenomenon, especially because our world is letting go of the primacy of reason, tolerance and mutual respect, leaving place for – yes, of course – growing anti-Semitism, anti-Muslim hatred (some undefined minority Christian groups have also been thrown in), intolerance and – yes, again an easy guess – xenophobia, which, again is everywhere, around the world. António Guterres coupled the above mentioned phenomena with the COVID-19 pandemic, which exposed the inequalities, systematic prejudice and discrimination against marginalized, racial and ethnic groups, against – surprise, surprise – gender, age, class, caste, religion, disability, sexual orientation as if we all did not know this string of adjectives by heart by now.

The solution? There you have it. António Guterres says that we must build a better world (since the dawn of history we are nothing but engaged in building a better world), forge a new social contract (is António Guterres another embodiment of Jean-Jacques Rousseau?) based on – now the usual fashionable buzz words – inclusivity and sustainability; we must invest in social cohesion (obviously by) making societies more and more diverse, more and more multi-ethnic, multi-religious and multi-cultural. People must be made to see the benefits of diversity rather than perceiving it as a threat.
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Gefira 51: Financial and Ideological Foundations of the World

Precious metals have given rise to money as we know it. It all began with pieces of silver, copper and gold, later normalised in the form of coins of various sizes, with effigies of mighty men and various legend on the obverse and the reverse. Right from the start, the economic pressure made rulers – monarchs or democratic leaders alike – tamper with the gold or silver content of the coins in circulation, which gradually prompted financiers to divorce money from precious metals. Eventually, money could be multiplied in infinite amounts. Present-day technology makes it even easier: you can create new money by clicking the computer mouse! Precious metals have apparently lost in meaning, or have they?

Financial matters are but one of the pillars supporting our civilisation; ideology is the other. Its impact cannot be overestimated. It shapes the collective mind with which it controls human behaviour. Recently three spheres of life have become targets of this unrivalled ideological attack: the planet earth, sex or gender and race. We may not be fully aware of the changes that the world has undergone and is undergoing, but we have simple means with which to investigate this enormous societal, moral and political transformation. Everyone can afford it on an individual basis and draw a comparison. The current issue of Gefira reveals how and gathers the vocabulary which shows the profound and startling though not yet complete transformation of the collective psyche that has taken place.

Gefira Financial Bulletin #51 is available now

Financial and Ideological Foundations of the World
Money glut in America, precious metals and uranium on the rise
The Profound Change in Collective Mentality
What makes the gold and silver markets tick?

The euro failed during the pandemic

Responsible entrepreneurship by Central and Eastern European companies protected the countries of this part of Europe during the pandemic. Eurozone countries did much worse and are recovering more slowly. What or who is responsible for this?

Polish economy recovered from the misery of the previous year in such a way that 97.2% of the state of the economy before the pandemic was reached again. President of the Polish Stock Exchange Marek Dietl said it was thanks to the unique adaptability of Polish entrepreneurs. According to Dietl, the entrepreneurs knew how to make clever use of state aid, among other things. Industrial production in Poland in December 2020 actually rose by 11.2% compared to the previous year.The fact is: Poland’s export surplus is increasing. Fact is: the Czech Republic has the lowest unemployment in the EU at the moment. Fact is: the country’s own currency limits potential trade deficits. During the same period, the Eurozone economy, which is 10 times larger than Poland’s, only recovered to 93.2% of its pre-Covid state (after all, judging by the figures, you would never guess how much larger the Eurozone is than Poland).
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