Geostrategic Countries

The interview of the year

On February 6, 2024, Tucker Carlson, a popular television star, conducted a two-hour interview with Russia’s President Vladimir Putin. Here are the main take-aways:

[1] The Russian president firmly believes that Russians and Ukrainians are one and the same nation divided by history. He proved this point by giving Tucker Carlson a brief overlook of the past, commencing with medieval Rus’ and ending at the present day. Russia’s president was well conversant with the history not only of his own country, but also with the history of this region in Europe. This lengthy narration was to set the basis for the explanation of anything that followed during the interview.

In this historical narrative President Putin appears to have tried to drive a wedge between several European countries in that he kept saying that before the Second World War Poland collaborated with Hitler (which is why it took part in dismembering Czechoslovakia), and after World War Two was given formerly German territories as compensation for the territories that it lost to the USSR in the east. It could be read by Germans as an invitation to lay a claim to Polish Western territories (formerly German eastern territories). Four times Germany (Prussia) and Russia (USSR) divided between themselves the territory of the Polish state, annihilating it from political maps. Putin’s verbal assault on Poland will most probably have been triggered by the bellicose attitude of Warsaw against Russia and the fact that – as he said – Poles make up the largest contingent of mercenaries in Ukraine, followed by Americans and Georgians.

Similar gestures were made towards Hungary and Romania: these countries, too, lost small chunks of their territories to the then USSR, to be precise to the Ukrainian Socialist Soviet Republic, and as a result they are still held by Kiev.

[2] Then the Russian president retold the events running up to the current hostilities. These included:

[a] the five waves of NATO expansion;

[b] the support given by the United States to separatist forces in Russia;

[c] the deployment of missiles in eastern Europe allegedly to defend it against Iranian missiles;

[d] the invitation of Ukraine and Georgia to join NATO (Bucharest NATO conference);

[e] the support of the Nazi elements in Ukraine by the Western powers; and

[f] the coup d’état carried out in Kiev in 2014 against President Yanukovych.

[3] Being asked by Carlson whether the conflict could be resolved by way of negotiations, President Putin said that:

[a] Russia has been ready to negotiate since day one; as proof he mentioned the Istanbul talks of March 2022, which were prevented from finalization by Boris Johnson;

[b] President Zelensky issued a ban on negotiations;

[c] it was now the West’s turn to come to resume talks as it was the West thwarted the negotiations.

[4] To the question whether Russia was not about to attack Lithuania or especially Poland, the president answered that such an attack was only possible if Poland launched an attack against Russia.

[5] Being asked whether Russia did not fear China more than the United States, Vladimir Putin said that China and Russia had always known how to cooperate and that China had always been presented by the West as a boogeyman, which, however, did not correspond to reality.

Generally, Russia’s president believes that the West overplayed its hand out of conceit and at present does not really know how to solve the problem. The many sanctions did not have the expected effect: worse, Russia is developing while the dollar’s role as a means of international business is diminishing because of the same sanctions. Vladimir Putin quoted from memory that if a few years earlier 50% of Russia’s transactions were conducted in dollars, it is down to 13% nowadays.

The whole talk ended on a somewhat optimistic note: Russia is ready to talk over Ukraine, but the initiative rests with the West. The West has committed the mistake of drawing Ukraine into the war, the West ought to rectify it. There should be found ways, said the Russian president, how to do it with dignity, meaning: how to save the West’s face. 

The United States in death throes

The United States – once such a great country, a great nation – is plummeting with an ever increasing speed to the disbelief, amazement, wonder, surprise of the whole world. What is happening?

The United States is suffering from ailments compounded by other ailments and the nation seems to be on a suicidal path. It involves itself in conflicts around the globe, policing (a polite word) or bullying (the right term for the phenomenon) smaller nations, which is a huge drain on its financial resources and which turns more and more countries into sworn enemies of the United States. The proxy war against Russia in Ukraine is about to be lost, which is a huge loss of prestige and the money invested in it! China is constantly framed by American government propaganda as America’s most formidable rival while Israel, the tail that wags the American dog, demands that Washington commits itself more and more in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. To make things even worse, hawks in Washington are vociferous about launching a punitive attack against Iran. Let us sum it up: the United States is taking on – simultaneously – Russia, China, Palestinians and Iran not to mention the Houthies in Yemen.

The United States is governed – at the face of it at least – by a senior citizen who has become the international butt of unkind jokes. This senior citizen either does not know how to run the country or quite purposefully is hellbent on having it nosedive into a bottomless pit. The country’s southern border has been opened wide for the whole period of Joe Biden’s administration, letting in hundreds of thousands of aliens. It is said they are from Mexico: properly speaking, they cross the border where Mexico neighbours the United States, but they are from all over the Third World: from the whole of Central and South America, from Africa and Asia. What policy is the Hill pursuing? Is Joe Biden following in the footsteps of German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who in 2015 let in roughly a million of Third World aliens? Joe Biden has let in THREE MILLION so far. What purpose can this huge influx of foreigners serve? A possible explanation says the democrats want to enlarge their voting base: grateful immigrants once they are granted US citizenship will always vote for the democrats. If that is true, then the extent of high treason to the nation committed by the American democrats just blows everybody’s mind.

Texas, one of the most prosperous states, has begun to rebel against this policy. Its governor decided to put up razor wire along the border to prevent aliens from entering. This met with the resistance on the part of Washington. Texas is supported in this respect by more than twenty republican states. A run-up to a civil war? We have witnessed the dissolution of the Soviet Union, we may become witnesses to the dissolution of the United States of America.

That’s not all. America is riddled with crime and drug addiction. Crime has been condoned for years by strange forces behind the scenes, forces that incapacitate the police and pass laws that depenalize petty crime: California is a notorious example. Here, one can shoplift up to a certain amount of money and must not be bothered about it by either shop-owners or the police. Fentanyl – a strong drug – is being traded in American cities and towns on a large scale causing ONE HUNDRED THOUSAND DEATHS annually. Due to the open border, the cartels that deal in drugs have easy access to the whole of the United States. This is Mexican organized crime in action. Rumour has it that China has its hand in it as well: an act of revenge for the nineteenth century procedure imposed on the Middle Kingdom by the Western powers (including the United States) of selling drugs to the Chinese population. Two prolonged wars were fought against China (Opium Wars: 1839-1842 and 1856-1860) to force the Chinese authorities to agree to having its own people be put on the dope. So, who knows? Fentanyl is produced in China.

Does all this close the list of ailments that the United States is suffering from? Hell, no! The woke ideology is finishing the job off. God, the morals, tradition, values such as the family or marriage have been for the most part done away with; instead, wokeism is gaining ground. Everything traditional is scorned, derided, frowned upon or destroyed; conversely, everything hitherto abnormal is given a status of something grand, progressive, humane, wonderful.

We have had such societal and moral revolutions in history: the French and the Bolshevik revolutions are the first that come to mind. During those times of upheaval, the then do-gooders or progressivists were also hellbent on destroying everything that they could lay their hands on: the faith, the family, the calendar, even the names of months. Christ was replaced with the cult of wisdom or the adoration of Marx while all the traces of the past had to be demolished, crushed, erased, turned inside out or put upside down. Precisely as it is in today’s Western world in general, and in the United States of America in particular.

Do they who run the United States know what policies they are pursuing? They haven’t finished the war against Russia, and yet they want to bomb Iran; they have the Gaza conflict on their hands, and yet they want to challenge China over Taiwan; they have difficulties drafting sufficient numbers of troops, and yet by putting the US Army on the Woke platform they do everything to discourage patriotic, healthy and mentally sound men from joining the troops; they say they need to fight Russia in Ukraine or else Russia will invade the whole of Europe, and yet they are complicit in the invasion of their own country; for years they have been outsourcing the American industry to China and India, and now they have found out that they have become dependent on the outside world and that people who are flocking inside the United States will find no employment; they have tried to stage colour revolutions here and there around the globe, and now they are about to have a national split on their own turf due to their weird policies; they imposed the dollar as the currency of international business, and now they are facing the budding process of de-dollarization. Are these America’s death throes?

What else can we expect? The enmity between the democrats and the republicans is such that one cannot exclude that one of these days Donald Trump will be eliminated from the presidential campaign before he gets elected. America knows how to remove individuals who dare to challenge the powers that be: two Kennedies were murdered, while recently Jeffrey Epstein – the guy who procured teenagers to slake the sexual appetite of the powerful of this world – has been made to kill himself.

I am not original in drawing the comparison between the United States and ancient Rome, but it imposes itself: rising inflation, influx of foreigners, childless families, corrupt morals, reliance on aliens, a deep split within the country (eventually the eastern – Byzantium – and the Western parts of the Roman Empire went their separate ways), the impotence to control borders, the teeming wretches in the big cities with their ever increasing entitlements, the babel of nations and races that was so characteristic of the twilight of the Roman Empire, and, and, and. Are these death throes?

Sure, ancient Rome did not die overnight. It took some time. Yet, once Romans began their suicidal journey, there was no stopping it. Sure, this or that emperor was successful in reversing the downward trend, but only for a while. The general process could not be undone. Remember: it was the foreigners who eventually devastated the cradle of the Roman Empire, the foreigners that the emperors let in.

Psychologists have worked out the concept of five mental stages that precede the death of an individual. These are: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. What stage is the United States in? It is certainly denial: few Americans would agree that their Empire is about to die. It is certainly anger: Washington is throwing its weight about around the globe as if there was no tomorrow. It is bargaining: the Empire is trying to buy time by enlarging its military alliances, by waging proxy wars, by sabre-rattling, by trying to invigorate its decadent population with the influx of foreigners. It is depression: you can see it in terms of decaying morals, low self-esteem, the finances and economy of the Empire. What remains? The very last stage. Once Americans have been convinced that their ancestors were evil people (slave owners, racists, oppressors of women), once Americans have been made to believe that women are better than men (and so should oust men from all their positions, also in the military), once Americans have been induced to dabble in and argue over “gender-reassignment” (boys becoming girls and girls becoming boys, boys and gilrs identifying as a third sex/gender), once Americans have SLAUGHTERED SIXTY MILLION PEOPLE in the wombs of their women since Roe vs Wade (1973), there is no one to fight, there is nothing to fight for, there is nothing to fall back on. The last phase – acceptance – will follow any time soon. 

Re-institute the military draft to fight for Lebensraum!

The piece of news is doing the rounds in the media that the United Kingdom and the United States are considering re-instituting conscription. Why? You guessed it right: because of the threat from Russia (and maybe China) and because the armed forces are short of manpower. There has been no draft in the United States and the United Kingdom for years: both countries have based their military forces on voluntary conscription. Then, year by year, the supply of volunteers has been dropping, which was of ever more concern of the respective governments. Why did voluntary conscription drop, in the first place?

There are a number of important causes that the authorities will by no means address. Where do you recruit soldiers? Well, you recruit them among young, able-bodied men, who – if they are not mercenaries – are of the patriotic cast of mind or who – at worst – want to make a living by serving in the armed forces. You need to recruit men who are tough physically and mentally, who eagerly engage in rivalry and love risk-taking. You need to select from the many candidates because not every man is suitable for any type of military service and some may not be fit to do the military service at all, given their health and mental capabilities, much though they wanted to be soldiers.

Now, all the factors having to do with the recruitment of appropriate human supply have been played havoc with for decades and the outcome is that there are fewer and fewer volunteers. What has been destroyed and continues to be destroyed?

[1] The family and its fertility. In the West, there are fewer and fewer typical families made up of a man and a woman with a bunch of kids – among them boys that can be recruited – with a male father figure that is capable of developing manly features in his sons. All this is gone. Single-mothers are raising at best only sons and they care more about passing onto their offspring the ideas of climate change or equity rather than anything having to do with warfare. Manly features of character such a daring, courage, self-sacrifice, rivalry, dominance have all been suppressed. Boys with feminine casts of mind are not going to serve in the army and if some of them are, they are not going to be anywhere close to becoming warriors in the full sense of the word. Low fertility does not make up for the shortage of soldiers on the ranks. Hence ideas of drafting foreigners, aliens, individuals without citizenship of the country they are supposed to fight for; hence the idea of recruiting foreigners in exchange for… citizenship. Does it not remind us of the late phase of the Roman Empire?

[2] Demise of faith, patriotism and generally higher values. Unless you are a mercenary – i.e. a paid murderer – who fights for wages, you need to believe in the grandeur of your country, your nation and generally in afterlife. On the contrary, if your mind is preoccupied with material things and pleasurable experiences – having sex, travel, having fun, being on the dope – you are incapable of sacrificing not only your life but even a small fraction of it. If all that matters is pleasure and if there is no afterlife, why die for such an abstraction as your nation or country? Haven’t you heard for decades that patriotism is a dirty word? Haven’t you heard for decades that anybody can be a British or American (or French, or German) citizen once he sets his foot on British, American (French, German) soil? Haven’t you heard for decades how terrible, awful, repellent, reprehensible your nation has been for centuries because of its imperialism, racism, because it practised slavery and so on, and so forth? Haven’t you heard for decades that your nation needs to genuflect to the rest of the world for the sins committed by your ancestors, that your nation needs to keep apologizing on and on and dismantling all traces of its past glory? Why should you now want to fight for such a monster? Add to this the culture of shaming and blaming, the resultant emergence of the snowflake generation and your picture is complete. A young man has been showered with entitlements and flooded with the victimhood narrative. If you belong to one of the national-ethnic-sexual minorities that – as you have learned again and again – have been oppressed by your country, why should you fight for this country?

[3] How about ethnic diversity? Diversity was supposed to make the Western nations strong. Why then can’t the Western nations recruit wonderful warriors from all those Pakistanis, Afghanis, Somalis, Kenyans, Mexicans, Colombians and, and, and who have flocked to and keep flocking to the West? They all should be grateful for the opportunity of having a wonderful life in one of the western democracies, they all should readily and willingly join the armed forces. They somehow don’t. Why? The answer is bafflingly obvious. First, you do not relocate to another country, thousands of miles away from your home country, avoiding (as is often claimed) war in your own country, only to take part in another war! Second, it is not people with a patriotic cast of mind who abandon their nationality and adopt a new one. They all do it for economic purposes! If they were not loyal to their own countries or nations why in heaven’s name should they be loyal to the adopyted country or nation? Why should a Muslim Afghan or a Jamaican professing voodoo fight for a (post-)Christian Britain? Why would anyone expect anything like that from them? They did not want to suffer the hardships of life in their country of birth, why should they want to suffer those hardships in an adopted country? Did they immigrate to experience unpleasant things? Why can’t the Western elites understand it?

[4] Wokeism. Even though all the factors enumerated above discourage young, able-bodied men from joining the armed forces, still some of them would do so, but then they are repelled by wokeism. It is drummed into their heads and thrust down their throats that women, lesbians, gays, people of colour they are all better and more desirable in the military ranks than white toxic, racist, sexist and bigoted males. Who in his right sense would like to join any organization in which he is not welcome? If women and homosexuals and Third World people are going to do the job better than white males, why hinder them in that task? Is it not so that the armed forces rather than recruiting able-bodied, higher IQ men, strive to fulfil the diversity quota?

[5] Last but not least, it is all about the policy-making that leaves people astounded. The escalating conflict between the West and Russia is one that has been devised by the Western powers that be. Why all of a sudden is Russia the West’s enemy? What has happened? Do not let yourselves be drawn into the petty news about Mariumpol, Avdievka or Bakhmut. Look at the big picture. What is it?

In 1988 we had two opposing military and economic blocks: in the West it was the EEC and NATO, in the east it was the Comecon and the Warsaw Pact. Two – so to say – empires ready to be at each other’s throats at the drop of a hat.

In the years 1989-1991 the Eastern Empire surrendered, laid down its arms, dissolved itself, abandoned its ideology, opened itself to Western ideological, economic and military penetration. The Cold War came to an end, and it seemed that a new, peaceful era was dawning.

In the year 2022, a war between the Western Empire and the rump of the Eastern Empire broke out. Its battlefield – Ukraine. What happened in between 1991 and 2022, what happened within these thirty years?

Well, the Western Empire kept expanding, enlarging both the EEC (now rebranded as the European Union) and NATO, encircling the rump Eastern Empire in an attempt to suffocate it, to dismember it (like they did with Yugoslavia) and removing it from the world’s political chessboard once and for all. The victory in the Cold War was regarded as insufficient: the enemy – the rump of the Eastern Empire – needed to be crushed and carved up. Naturally, the rump Eastern Empire began to put up a fight, hence the ongoing war.

Now, why should young men in the United Kingdom, in the United States, in France, Germany, Sweden or the Netherlands take part in this fight? To win the Lebensraum for the likes of Sunak, Biden, or von der Leyen? Why should young males have their limbs amputated, why should they come back home maimed? Because the Western Empire wants to wipe out the Eastern Empire?

To top it all, watch the US Army recruitment video presenting a prospective soldier – a girl raised by “two moms” – and you will understand why a mentally healthy man will avoid joining an “army” like this.

No more lies about migrants

The traffic light coalition (Ampelkoalition) is like a deer caught in headlights: it has been letting migrants in for years and telling its fairy tales, its lies that it benefits the German economy and demography in the long run. Now there is a defiant professor of economics in Freiburg, Bernd Raffelhüschen, who has calculated exactly what the cost of this madness is. In his study for the Market Economy Foundation, he estimates the cost of “immigration” at 5.8 trillion euros. This is due to the fact that immigrants hardly integrate, and even if they are able to operate on the labor market after years of qualification, the taxes that they pay are too low compared to the transfers offered to them by the state and municipalities to be able to call them “profitable” citizens who contribute to prosperity. Without immigration, the financial gap for the tax and social systems would be 13.4 trillion euros instead of 19.2 trillion euros – i.e. 5.8 trillion euros lower, according to Raffelhüschen.

The traffic light coalition expects a rejuvenation dividend from immigration: immigrants are their godless religion, the politicians living in their unrealistic Berlin bubble worship colorful idols, but even if they hold the office of finance minister, they are not financial experts who care about the positive fiscal balance of their undertakings and decisions. The idiotic welfare state, which functions in a socialist way (everyone is equal and on an equal footing), is in danger of collapsing because the traffic light coalition gives the green light to non-taxpayers and imported recipients of benefits. Wouldn’t it make more sense to transfer these funds to the indigenous farmers in Cottbus and other German cities, to make life easier for those who manufacture foodstuffs?

The Errors of Russia

The end of the old year and the beginning of the new year make one think both about the recent past and the not-too-distant future. The conventional borderline separating the 31 of December and the 1st of January (actually not the precise astronomical turning point, which is 24th of December) makes us not only think about the prognostics based on science, but also about prophecies of whatever kind. Why, science has conquered the minds of the modern man, but it does not – and it cannot – answer all the questions. Strictly speaking, science is about repetitive things – occurrences – phenomena i.e. things that can be checked, and rechecked, and double checked. Yet, we know that reality is also made up of one-time events (all of human history) that can only be experienced once by a limited number of people. We cannot reproduce such events – experiences – phenomena, and yet we cannot do away with them, we cannot pretend that they are not part of our life, part of reality. Such are prophecies. They are experienced by very few and are not repeatable. If you want, you believe in them; if you do not want, you deny them. In any way, if you are open-minded, you take them into consideration and remain on the look-out whether they come true. If they do, then – well – then they are worthy of your attention, of reconsideration.

Such was the Fatima prophecy of 1917. The apparition of Saint Mary, the Mother of God in Fatima, Portugal – because that’s what we are talking about – said a few things about the future. The message was not strictly speaking cryptic; conversely, it was fairly compelling. One of the predictions was that the future world would be infected with the “errors of Russia.” It is important to bear in mind that the apparitions occurred in the same year when the two Russian revolutions or – properly speaking – coups d’état broke out. The first was carried out by the Russian bourgeois, while the second by the Russian social-democrats, better known – especially later – as communists. Consequently, hard times descended on Russia that people in the West have rarely been fully cognizant of. Persecution of the church or any religious faith, the empowerment of the uneducated and the slow-minded over the educated and the smart, mass dispossession of the propertied classes, cultural revolution on a large scale, the destruction of the family and the morals, the egalitarian utopia, the re-writing and re-interpretation of history, the devastation of social cohesion by among others the promotion of informants (even children were used to this purpose against their parents), character assassination (people were often forced to confess and accuse themselves before others), condemnation of the memory of persons that fell out of grace with the current authorities (damnatio memoriae: big public figures were removed from all publications as if they had never existed), and so on, and so forth.

A century has passed since the infamous October Bolshevik Revolution. What do we see? We can see the errors of Russia everywhere in the Western world. Survey the list above and put it up against any Western society the way you would put up a mirror against someone’s face. The Christianity in the West is as dead as it was in Russia in the twenties and the thirties of the previous century; the empowerment of the uneducated people of colour and the protection of the slow-minded (so long as they are immigrants) is in full sway; mass dispossession of the propertied classes is under way with the notorious phrase that is doing the rounds to the tune of “you will own nothing and you will be happy”; cancel culture on a large scale; the destruction of the family and the morals complete with cohabitation, childlessness, parades of homosexuals; equity promoted in furtherance of the egalitarian utopia; the re-writing and re-interpretation of history with people of colour being cast in typical historical or mythological roles occupied by white men and women; social cohesion being more and more diluted by larger and larger influxes of Third World people, which translates into the disappearance of societies and nations (understood as people that are genetically related) and the emergence of multiple ethnic communities; censorship based on a network of informants (mendaciously presented as the opinion of mysterious communities), character assassination by means of magic, powerful words like racist, xenophobe, antisemite, misogynist, right-wing, extreme-right; condemnation of the memory of historical persons – especially white males – and the erasure of their names from books, street names and the like. Enough?

These are the errors of Russia that have spread to the Western world as prophesied in Fatima in 1917. Take note of one fact. The errors were not transported to the West after the collapse of the Soviet Union; rather, they had been trickling on and on since 1917, so that by the fifties of the previous century two big Western (and Catholic, at least nominally) countries – France and Italy – were almost taken over by their respective communist parties. Think about Spain that was for a time and would have remained immersed in the errors from Russia even before the outbreak of the Second World War but for the intervention of General Francisco Franco. Notice also the following glaring fact. In 1989, when the Soviet Union disintegrated and relinquished its grip on Eastern Europe, which till that time had been dependent on Moscow, all those countries flocked to the embrace of the European Union, while the most enthusiastic supporters and champions of the membership in the European Union were former communists! If that does not speak volumes, then I don’t know what does. Surely, former communists did not turn capitalist and right-wing overnight, en masse. They desired to become a part of the European Union simply because the European Union was made up and run by their ilk.

And just such as persons as Francisco Franco of Spain and Antonio Salazar of Portugal were officially hated in the USSR, so they are hated by the European Union. And no wonder. These two were opposed to communism that the Soviet Union stood for, and socialism or liberalism that the European Union stands for; they were conservative and nationalist – in other words: they stood for the values that the European Union strives to – and the Soviet Union strove to – obliterate, expunge, stamp out. 

A gaping chasm

“A great chasm has been set in place” between the collective West and Russia, a mutually unbridgeable chasm. President Vladimir Putin’s words addressed to Plenary session of the World Russian People’s Council (November 28, 2023) illustrate this chasm exceedingly well. In his speech President Putin said among others what follows:

① Russia is fighting in Ukraine “not just for Russia’s freedom but for the freedom of the whole world”, against the dictatorship of one hegemon. In this struggle, Russia is blocking “the way of those who aspired to world domination and exceptionalism.” Most of the world understands it.

② Russians make up a “large Russian nation, a triune of Russians, Belarusians and Ukrainians.”

③ Russia is “faced with the daunting task of developing vast areas from the Pacific to the Baltic Sea and the Black Sea.” To this end Russia needs to preserve and increase its population, which is a “goal for the coming decades and even generations ahead. This is the future of the Russian world, the millennium-old, eternal Russia.” This task can only be executed through large families that “become the norm, a way of life for all Russia’s peoples” because the “family is not just the foundation of the state and society, it is a spiritual phenomenon, a source of morality.” This daunting demographic challenge cannot be responded to “solely with money, social benefits, allowances, privileges, or dedicated programmes” because it is a “person’s points of reference in life matter more. Love, trust, and a solid moral foundation are what the family and the birth of a child are built on.” Which is also why

④ though “the Church is separate from the state […] the Church cannot be separated from society or from people.” Emphasis must be put on the “importance of the participation of representatives of all traditional Russian religions in the education and upbringing of our youth, and […] in the consolidation of spiritual, moral, and family values.”

⑤ Russia is a continuity and a total of “Ancient Rus, the Tsardom of Muscovy, the Russian Empire, the Soviet Union, and modern Russia.” 

A great chasm, indeed. Rather than inviting and promoting immigration, the Russian leader calls on his people to “be fruitful and multiply [and] populate the earth abundantly”; rather than promoting patch-work, or single-mother families, or same-sex marriages, the Russian leader encourages the revival of the traditional multi-child family; rather than promoting secularism, the Russian president stresses the importance of religion; rather than promoting cancel culture, Vladimir Putin holds in high regard historical continuity.

Of note are Vladimir Putin’s words heralding and lauding Russia as a freedom fighter for the whole world or at least its majority i.e. the countries that do not make up, roughly, the G7 mutual admiration society. These words are reminiscent of the roles that both the Soviet Union and imperial Russia played while liberating Europe from, respectively, Hitler’s and Napoleon’s yokes. Notable is also the description of Russians, Ukrainians and Belorussians as a triune large nation, words that act like a red rag to the Western bull(y).

Indeed, Russia is everything that the collective West is not, the collective West is everything that Russia is not. A deep chasm is gaping, an unbridgeable chasm, such that does not allow either of the opponents to even understand the opposing party. A civilizational rift.

 

The real background to the dispute between China and the USA

It is not about politics. It’s not about the eternal struggle between Chinese pseudo-communism (with the capitalist tinge) and American pseudo-capitalism (with the neo-Marxist face). It’s all about raw materials and semiconductors.

Last week, a meeting took place between US President Joe Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping. Among other things, it was agreed that contacts between the US military and the Middle Kingdom should be resumed.

It should be remembered that the military dialog was broken off following the visit of Nancy Pelosi (then Speaker of the House of Representatives) to Taiwan at the beginning of August last year. This was the first visit by such a senior US politician to Taiwan in 25 years. China protested strongly against the visit and even threatened the US with a military response. Well, Biden’s team has always behaved like a bull in a china shop when it comes to diplomacy (see the flight of US soldiers from Afghanistan and their approach to Russia).

Although a few gestures are now being made after the meeting between Xi and Biden that could indicate a de-escalation in mutual relations, the war on the semiconductor front continues. In the middle of the year, for example, China decided to restrict exports of gallium and germanium, two important raw materials for the semiconductor industry. This was in response to the American decision to deny China access to the equipment needed for chip production. Incidentally, China is the world’s leading producer of gallium and germanium. The Middle Kingdom controls no less than 98% of the supply of gallium and 68% of the supply of germanium.

In October, Joe Biden’s administration announced that the United States would shorten the list of semiconductor types that US companies are allowed to sell to China. With this move, Washington wanted to further cut off Beijing from chips, which triggered an immediate reaction in the Middle Kingdom. This time, however, China decided to strike on a different front by announcing a restriction on the export of graphite, a raw material that is essential for the production of batteries for electric vehicles, among other things. It is worth remembering that China controls 2/3 of the world’s graphite supply. This raw material is the largest component of electric car batteries by weight. Each vehicle contains an average of 50 to even 100 kg of graphite. That is about twice as much as lithium, the processing of which is also controlled by the Chinese worldwide.


Quelle: constructafrica.com

Since many of the raw materials that are indispensable for the green revolution preached by Western decision-makers are mined in Africa, China has been focusing on colonizing the Dark Continent with the help of cheap loans and direct investments since the New Silk Road initiative began in 2013. The regimes of black dictators are happy to go into debt to their Chinese friends because they don’t talk about human rights and environmental protection. Meanwhile, Americans are investing billions in AI and high-tech, which cannot function without Asian and African raw materials. They disregard the potential collapse of supply chains that has been underway since the start of this trade war and which the Chinese can exploit as a weapon.