Turkey, a NATO member, to join BRICS!

The leftist West is getting a blow back!

– The elections to the European Parliament elevated parties that are maliciously referred to as far-right;

– the war in Ukraine is going badly for the collective West;

– in the United States Donald Trump, maliciously labelled as populist is about to win the presidential election;

– France and the United States are being pushed out of Africa;

– de-dollarization is in progress;

– Slovakia’s Prime Minister Robert Fico has survived the assassination (how the EU commissioners would have wished he had died!);

– Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orbán is openly against the European Union’s policy of confrontation with Russia; and now – to top it all

– Turkey – has announced its willingness to join BRICS!

What a mess! Turkey, which boasts the second largest army in NATO, is about to seriously partner among others with… Russia, a country against which the same NATO is waging war!

The West is getting blow after blow after another blow. How ungrateful the world is! The collective West has been meaning to

– save the planet from the man-made climate change;

– extend the human rights by bringing to the forefront homosexuals and lesbians;

– eradicate racism by coercing races and nationalities to share the same ares, towns and villages, schools and factories,

and it turned out that the world has remained blind and deaf to all those advances… Goodness me!

All of which might suggest one serious suspicion: out of impotence and a thirst for vengeance the collective West might be thinking about retaliatory steps. What are these going to be? The leftist West needs to disrupt BRICS, to keep Russia at bay, to stop the march of the “far-right” through the institutions (a historical irony, indeed), to thwart Donald Trump from winning the elections, to preserve the dollar as the instrument of global exploitation and dominance, and so on, and so forth. What are they going to do? A wounded and hitherto domineering animal can be terribly dangerous.

The legal case of Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s presidency

On May 20 Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s presidential term expired, which poses a very interesting legal and political case. Russia does not recognize Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s authority any more. Which is not a malicious act on her part. The argument is that any agreement, accord, whatever signed by someone who simultaneously is not the head of a country entails grave political problems. Any next president of Ukraine may either feel bound by the agreement that Ukraine entered into with Russia under the presidency of Volodymyr Zelenskyy or may renege on it as signed by someone who did not have the legal authority to act as the country’s leader. Why should the Kremlin even bother to consider any talks with Zelenskyy if such is the case?

As of now, the West recognizes Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s power despite the expiry of his presidential term of office. Yet, the same legal case might be used by the diplomats in Washington, London, or Paris in any later development of events in Ukraine. They, too, might one of these days make a statement that they do not feel bound to honour any international settlement signed by Volodymyr Zelenskyy if only such a political move suits their purposes.

As is known, it is the interaction of the real military and economic factors that are at the disposal of the international players that matters. Diplomacy is merely a reflection of those real factors. Hence, if the West feels coerced to enter into an unfavourable settlement with Russia over Ukraine, it may intentionally make Volodymyr Zelenskyy sign it with the hindsight that the settlement is going to be revoked the moment the balance of powers tilts in the West’s favour. The fact that the legality of Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s presidential authority is questionable might be viewed as a wild card in any future diplomatic dealings between the West and Russia if the latter agrees to honour Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s signature.

At present, Ukrainian jurisprudence might recognize the current Ukrainian leader as the country’s legitimate president. That may change overnight. Particular legal provisions can be construed to mean whatever pleases the powerful. We all know that.

Do not sink in the quagmire of petty facts! Step back and set your sights on the broad picture!

I keep returning to the same topic again and again. Yes, reporters and journalists, analysts and politicians love dealing with petty problems of whatever is happening, has happened or is going to happen. They immerse themselves and their minds in what was said by whom and what significance is to be assigned to this or that gesture. They love discussing the legal questions like whether Volodymyr Zelenskyy is still Ukraine’s legitimate president – his term ran out on 20th of May – or how and when the war in Ukraine will end. They are currently speculating about the outcome of the elections that are planned in June for the European Union and – how otherwise! – are afraid (who told them to be afraid?) of the “far right” winning too much of the vote. They set their sights on Trump and Biden and indulge in the same speculation about the outcome of American presidential election that is to take place later this year. Lots and lots of items of petty information. The term information noise is just the right one here. But why listen to all this petty news and these petty analyses every single day? All we need to do is to step back and see the broad picture. All we need to do is to understand the whole, the overriding trends, the phenomena as such. What are these phenomena? What are these general trends? What does the big picture look like?

We are having a big war in the territory that once was a part of the Soviet Union: in Ukraine. We have been having a number of local wars in the Caucasus, that is to say, also in the territory that once belonged to the Soviet Union. We have had successful or attempted coups d’état in Belarus, Kazakhstan, Georgia and elsewhere, also in the territories that were once parts of the Soviet Union. We have been told that hundreds of people have been killed as a result, still more have been maimed, displaced, driven into poverty. We have been witnessing heightened tensions between the West and Russia, with frequent military exercises and an increasingly frequent talk about the use of nuclear weapons. Now, these are the big, hard facts. What do we do with them?

If we view them as subsequent pages of the history book that is being written and has been written since the dawn of mankind, if we – as said above – let the petty facts and data capture our attention, if we – what’s even worse – assimilate and internalize the data for the sake of assimilating and internalizing them without drawing inferences, then we are wasting our time and life energy. We behave like students who attend lectures and classes and even try to memorize and practise things but who fail to grasp the overall picture, the workings of the mechanism; students who never really let the message of the overall body of lectures, classes and handbooks sink in and work its way into their awareness.

Take a step back, rid yourself of all the petty data and useless comments of the analysts or experts. Instead, ask yourselves a few questions and try answering them.

One. Would all those wars have taken place if the Soviet Union still existed? Would all those hundreds of thousands of people have been killed, maimed or driven into poverty if the Soviet Union continued to exist today?

Two. Would the West have ever dreamed about sending troops – mercenaries – military equipment inside the Soviet Union? Would the West have interfered so rabidly with the Soviet Union if it had existed till the present day?

Would Ukraine have lost at least 50% of its population, most of its industry; would Ukraine lost (sold) much of its fertile land to Western companies had the Soviet Union existed till this day? Would the Baltic States have become depopulated as they are (being) depopulated now, had the Soviet Union existed till this day?

Three. Would the still existing Soviet Union be a communist country or, rather, would it have gone the way of China, where capitalism is the base while communism is its ideological superstructure? In other words, is it not true that the Soviet Union, if it continued to exist today, would be communist but in name?

Four. Somehow anachronistically, but still: drawing a lesson from the fate of the post-Soviet area and era, if you have had decisive power before 1991 in the Soviet Union, would you have ever, EVER surrendered to the West? Would you have ever, EVER trusted the West? Would you have ever, EVER laid down your arms to the West?

Five. Again, having done your homework concerning the years 1991-2021, having been attentive during the classes and lectures delivered within the said period, would you ever want to become a part of the global market and manufacturing, doing away with some of your industries? Or, rather, you’d cling to autarchy as much is it is feasible and never relied on one global system of makings payments? As we know it has transpired that by letting your country become a part of the global system, you render your nation very much vulnerable: they – THEY – can cut you off from your own money and they – THEY – can try to starve you out in case you displease THEM.

Six. Do you still believe in free market economy, learning now and again that the United States – an alleged paragon of free market economy, of free economic competition and all those liberties – is going berserk imposing tariffs on Chinese products because they happen to be… better and cheaper? Hey, where do we have this lauded free market economy? Ah yes, we can have it so long as it serves the West’s purposes! The moment it dos not, we cannot have it. But of course, Chinese products are not blocked because they are better or cheaper – far be it from it! Chinese products are blocked because they have been manufactured under the conditions violating the human rights, and the like clap-trap!

By the way, if tariffs are imposed by the United States and the European Union because they protect respectively the American and European markets, why then tariffs among particular European states are viewed as detrimental? Would they not protect national economies? Or national economies are not worth protecting?

Seven. Being a responsible leader of any country, a patriot of your nation, or simply a good steward of the national economy and the territory that has been entrusted to you, and the security of your people, with the knowledge of the last thirty or so years, would you have ever, EVER signed those migration pacts? As can be seen, they only serve the purpose of diluting the local populations and ultimately destroying nations and states. Why talk about yet another batch of boats reaching this or that part of the European coast? They are coming here EVERY DAY. Why getting excited about it? It’s the huge problem that is important and this is: European and national politics have been hijacked by the powers that be and if you don’t like what is happening to your country – nation – you need to strike at the decision centre. Why in heaven’s name do they do it to us?

Eight. I know, this argument is repeated here and there, but I cannot refrain from rolling it out here again: war in Ukraine erupted because Russia could not tolerate Ukraine as a member of NATO or as a country used by NATO against Russia. Now Russia is of course to blame for the unprovoked aggression, is it not? But hey, if Mexico or Canada were to join a military alliance with Russia or China, if Mexico or Canada held joint military exercises with Russia or China, wouldn’t the United States invade Mexico? Would this invasion – aggression – be unprovoked?

Nine.

[a] Why are im-migrants to the Western world stubbornly referred to as _migrants as if they were to leave the West one of these days like migratory birds? Why is this misnomer applied and why do you – yes, you, my reader – recklessly, thoughtlessly repeat this term while talking about people who have arrived in the Old Continent or the United States to stay?

[b] The powers that be keep telling us that immigrants enrich each European country or the United States or Canada. Hang on for a moment: if the immigrants enrich us, by the same token they impoverish the countries they have left! Have you ever thought about it? So, we keep helping the poor countries by… impoverishing them! Wow!

[c] The powers that be reassure us that immigrants will assimilate and integrate and in the same breath they sermonize about the many human rights some of which guarantee anybody and everybody that his ethnicity, religion, customs and language be inviolable, inalienable, sacrosanct! How then are they going to assimilate and integrate?

[d] The immigrants keep coming to the Western world because of economic reasons, sometimes political ones. They are supposed to be loyal, good, law-abiding citizens in their adoptive countries. Hang on, again! Once such individuals left their own countries – nations – in search of a better life, they will not give two hoots about leaving the adoptive country the moment they figure out there is a better life somewhere else. What kind of loyalty is that? What civic virtues are these? How valuable are they?

Ten. If uniting nations – countries – is a good thing, why then most people approve of the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia? Why did the nations of the three political entities mentioned in the foregoing sentence seek to separate themselves from the union on day one only to apply for membership in another union on day two? Consider, Czechs and Slovaks did not want to live within the same political structure known as Czechoslovakia, but they BOTH entered the European Union and so ARE members of THE SAME political structure. Where’s the sense? The same is true of the nations of former Yugoslavia: they divorced in order to… marry again within a broader family. Why didn’t German Lands divorce prior to collectively joining the European Union?

Eleven. So long as the Soviet Union existed, its citizens were presented to the world as homogeneous people who may have spoken different languages or observed different traditions but who basically were Soviet people. The same was true of Yugoslavia. The country may have been made up of Slovenes, Croats, Serbs; of Catholics, Orthodox Christians and Muslims, but all in all they were known as Yugoslavians. Now it took just a few minutes (from a historical perspective) for the many nations who allegedly were not all that important to be reborn with intense national sentiments and to be at each other’s throat. The BIG question is: why does it not occur to the EU commissioners that precisely the same fate awaits this political superstructure? Why does it not occur to them that by importing Third World people by the millions they add fuel to the fire of the future civil war rampaging across the continent? Whence this hubris? The feuds between particular ex-Soviet republics and the hostilities between ex-Yugoslavian republics are within human memory! What amount of hubris does it take to make the managers of the world and to make common people think that this time things are going to be different? We have assigned ourselves the scientific description of being homines sapientes – reasonable men. Where is our reason? Where is our reasoning?

Twelve. If Ukraine had not flirted with the Western military, if it had not provoked Russia, wouldn’t it have now ALL its 1991 territory INTACT? Even more interesting: if Ukraine had had a “dictator” like Belarus has had and continues to have, would Ukraine have experienced [a] war, [b] loss of territory, [c] loss of lives, [d] massive emigration (read depopulation), and [e] destruction of its infrastructure? Answer the following question with all sincerity you can muster: would you rather have been a citizen of Ukraine or Belarus for the last twenty or so years? Would you rather have a string of “democratic” presidents and war or a “dictator” and peace? I dare you to answer!

God and Satan or the Bipolar World

Some say the world in between 1991 and 2022 was a unipolar world, while prior to that time it had been a two-polar world, and after 2022 it has again become a two- if not or multi-polar world. Wrong. We have always had a bi-polar world and this bipolarity has always been viewed religiously. Surprised?

The world has always been divided – politically speaking – into us and them, into the in-group and the out-group, and – religiously speaking – the world has always been arranged along the axis of heaven and hell, Olympus and Hades, God and Satan. In the antiquity it was Greece and the rest of the world – the barbarians. Then it was the Roman Empire and the rest of the world – the barbarians. Then it was Christianity and the rest of the world – the pagans, the heathens. Starting with the the Enlightenment it was civilization against savages and cannibals. Today it is democracy against autocracy, despotism, fascism – you name it.

It has always been arranged along this religious axis: Mount Olympus, seat of the gods, the seat of those who are always right; at the foot of Olympus flocks of divine servants (quasi saints), demigods or heroes. And then, vertically opposite Olympus we have Hades or Hell, with Satan and his helpers – lesser devils or demons. In between we have the earth’s nations that are torn between the two.

Yes, you guessed it right. From the West’s perspective Washington is Olympus while the successive presidents are incarnations of Zeus, God himself, holding up a torch of all virtues with which they try to illuminate the world. Zeus is accompanied by helpmates – assistants – smaller gods and demigods or – to use Christian terminology – (patron) saints who are assigned diverse tasks. These are all the countries that make up the collective West: Europe, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Smaller gods, demigods or saints are not by any means equal in their clout and leverage: unquestionably France or the United Kingdom are higher up in the celestial hierarchy than Poland or Bulgaria. And there are – mind you! – individual nations that spend time in purgatory, individuals – nations – countries – that aspire to be admitted in the celestial circles but need yet to be cleansed of their sins. Serbia might be regarded as such an entity or Georgia.

Then we have hell, hades, the underworld of evil, wickedness and what not. Russia is present-day Satan while China impersonates Mephistopheles, with Belarus, North Korea, Iran and some others being assigned the roles of smaller princes of darkness, demons or moral counterparts of demigods or saints. The world is really arranged along the lines of this simple axial design of plus and minus, of good and evil, of the good ones and the bad ones, of saints and demons.

No need to add those who are viewed through the Western lens as demons and devils have an entirely opposite perspective in which the positive and the negative poles are reversed, in which the alleged Satan is God and the alleged God is Satan. There can be no reconciliation between the two. It is a struggle for life and death, a conflict of cosmic dimensions, with no compromise possible, no give-and-take attitude, with no middle ground. The feud is as cosmic as cosmic can be. There can be no rapprochement between God and Satan.

Make your own evaluation and tick off √

Rather than being presented with the data or an opinion of an expert or a pundit, we invite you to make your own evaluation of the state of the affairs. Drawing on your knowledge, tick off the boxes wherever you see fit and arrive at your own conclusions.

– What would you say about the entity that has gathered the largest number of ticks?

– What would you say about the entity that has gathered the smallest number of ticks?

Let us know.

Legal trap

In case you were wondering, a political entity may be ill-served by the international law once it becomes a signatory to it. In the power struggle that has always taken place and continues to take place, also the most noble ideas – like the introduction of international law – are wielded in the hands of politicians as weapons. You need to be on your guard also – or especially – when you are asked to agree to a piece of legal text to be later bound by it. Take the provision that makes culpable the party which begins a military aggression. Is that an irreproachable provision? At the face of it, we tend to answer approvingly. Yes, aggressors need to be condemned and need to be prevented from acting. Consequently, signatories to such a provision tend to think that this piece of legislations will serve them right. Not by any means!

One of the signatories may figure out the following: we can carry out attack after attack and so long as it is no physical – military attack – we are not going to be labelled as aggressor, while the other party is going to sustain political and economic or social losses. Thus, such attacks are carried out by one party to the detriment of the other party. Party A begins poking Party B in the eye, in the stomach, in the arm, Party A launches verbal attacks and only waits for Party B to either patiently accept such blows and sustain further losses or punch back. In either case Party A is holding the winning hand. It either continues tormenting its opponent, or provokes the opponent into pouncing back, in which case the opponent is internationally recognized as an aggressor. A nice legal trap.

Picture to yourself an ordinary circumstance: you intend to behave in a peaceful manner but someone keeps verbally abusing you, keeps ridiculing you and poking you now and again. We all understand: even if your patience and self-control equals that of an angel, sooner or later (some sooner, some later) you will punch back, and that’s it: you become an aggressor!

A wise man said: war ought not to be blamed on the one who began it, but on the one who made it unavoidable.

What will 2024 bring us?

The economy is overheated. Or perhaps underheated? Efficiently networked or shackled by fragile supply chains? How can you not lose in a trade war and how can you make money in a conventional war? But only effectively and in the spirit of ESG (taking into consideration environmental, social, government facets). We will be saved by technology, the educated proclaim. Artificial intelligence will destroy us, proclaim the apostles of mainstream wisdom.

In 2024, for the first time in human history, elections will be held in 76 countries with more than half the world’s population, including eight of the ten most populous countries in the world: India, the United States, Indonesia, Pakistan, Brazil, Bangladesh, Russia and Mexico. Every second adult on our globe will be taking politicians to task for the way they have governed in a time of decline, inflation, bloody conflict and widespread disinformation. In place of the shocks that tested the maturity of the political class, more black swans are sure to appear. There has been a pandemic, there is a war in Europe and, to make the end of 2023 even more stark, there is the eruption of a dormant volcano of savagery in the Middle East. The smaller, smouldering armed conflicts that have been going on for years are no longer noticed because they are no longer on our holiday or business agenda. On the other hand, we suppress the threat of war either unintentionally or deliberately.

It will be a year brimming with surprises, in which more than 4 billion voters worldwide will dance to the tune of the new media. Never before has social media been better placed to politically dominate such a large public sphere and supplant the authority of traditional mass media. This seemingly most democratic form of direct contact with the electorate has simultaneously become fuel for manipulation, disinformation, panic and the stigmatisation of opponents. Opinion leaders on Twitter now have infinitely more power to reach and mobilise the electorate than the dinosaurs of old-fashioned campaigning methods. Unverified sources of knowledge, non-existent opinion leaders, ubiquitous fake news driven by the vast capabilities of artificial intelligence…

On Europe’s socio-political radar, the boats of another violent wave of migration can be seen. The EU is supposedly testing new instruments to send people back to where they came from. However, they will prove to be as ineffective as all the previous ones. You don’t have to be a fortune teller to predict this. The EU’s external borders should be impermeable to migrants and solidarity regulations will only deepen the divide between Western and Eastern Europe because coherent Eastern European countries with their traditional societies did not and do not want immigrants.

The countries where elections will be held in 2024 generate more than half of global GDP. This is where the partners and customers who supply us create, produce and employ: with components, raw materials, food, services and expertise. And this is precisely where the economic systems will have to drift to the right or left. And you, as an entrepreneur, have to ask yourself the question: do you prefer a free market that leans to the right or to the left?

Whether we like it or not, we are living in interesting times.