This piece was originally posted on 30 December, but illustrates where we are going as we are now witnessing in Venezuela. It was written for the BNE Community Newsletter that is exclusive for BRAVE NEW EUROPE’s authors and donors.
Mathew D. Rose is an Investigative Journalist specialised in Organised Political Crime in Germany and an editor of BRAVE NEW EUROPE
At the conclusion of the year one is supposed to analyse what has been or predict what will be. I shall do neither, instead looking into the black abyss that is our future. I do not mean to ruin anyone’s New Year and you can take my text or leave it as you see fit, probably, better the latter. All the more so as many of us, and I include myself, are or were involved in this process in one way or another. In my opinion the point of any text is to plant a seed in the mind of the reader, consciously or unconsciously, that will one day may sprout and grow. So here goes.
The inexorable decline of the West is more than a tectonic political, economic shift. We are entering a Dark Age comparable to what followed the decline of Rome following the barbarian invasions. We are witnessing the destruction of our Western institutions and culture, and that at an increasingly rapid pace.
You may ask yourself, who are these barbarians that are destroying our civilization, sowing death and destruction? The Russians? The Chinese? The Muslims? People with dark skin? None of those. The barbarians are among us: our business, political, intellectual “leaders”, and their swarm of vandals that carry out their every wish and command, irrelevant how ruthless. If you look at history, barbarians have been defined by “Smash and Steal”. Their goal is not to build a society, but to destroy and plunder and move on. It is our own oligarchic class, using the corrupt Western political and managerial and professional class, that are leading this systematic pillaging of our Western societies. It is not only the wealth that they are stealing, it has also been the destruction of those institutions that were the basis of a liberal society that we somehow once valued above everything else.
I shall not analyse how we got here, which I have done in previous pieces. There are however two major events that I believe unleashed the barbarian invasion that is overwhelming Western societies today. The one was political: 9/11. Following that event the US began systematically dissolving the rule of law, declaring its own codex of what is right and wrong, what was permitted and not. Might was right. It increased in momentum, ultimately reaching its most blatant, aggressive form with the current Trump presidency. The rest of the West followed, casting all remnants of the rule of law and democracy to the wind. Initially Europe simply assisted the US, but has since grasped the initiative. They piled in in what they thought was going to be the smashing of the Russian nation and stealing its wealth through its NATO proxy war in Ukraine, including the most recent attempt to steal Russia’s deposits at Euroclear. This mind-set reached epic proportions with the West’s open support of the Zionist Nazi genocide in Gaza, which is supposed to open the gate to the destruction and plundering of the whole of the Middle East. Morality and credibility no longer play a role in the West, just naked power. This is manifesting itself domestically as well.
The second element has been economic. Neo-liberalism is nothing less than Smash and Steal. Its four elements deregulation, financialisation, privatisation, and globalisation were based on the destruction of existing economic structures, creating new ones that increase exploitation (leaving out China that has followed a different model). while transferring the wealth from working people to the wealthy, in the meantime the oligarch billionaire class. Its goal was the dissolution of national sovereignty, which was based on democracy, instead enabling the market to rule the state. Bluntly put, neo-liberalism is antisocial economics. The result: Western nations are facing crumbling economies and infrastructures that their own governments have brought about in service of the barbarian oligarch class.
Assuming that none of you belong to the oligarchs, the corrupt political class, or cohorts of the managerial and professional class that administrate this barbarism, we need to ask ourselves what can be done to stop the scourge? This will mean the destruction of all those institutions that have aided and abetted this rapacious rampage. None have set their priorities in terms of the well-being of the common good. So why keep them?
A range of simple measures occur to me, such as ridding the world of international financial institutions like the IMF, World Bank, and World Trade Organisation that operate according to rules written largely in Washington and have been the avant-garde of neo-liberalism. It means dissolving the United Nations that has become an ineffective, corrupt organisation. The same is true of COP, which has become a trade fair for mineral fuel companies. It means disbanding the European Union that has dedicated itself to creating a Europe serving corporate interests, sacrificing all other values. It means ridding ourselves of all the so called think tanks, that are nothing less than lobbying organisations for oligarch interests. The same is true for most NGOs. It will mean revamping the propaganda operations that parade about as “media”, much of it state controlled in Europe, de jure and de facto. Not to forget are the Nobel prizes that have become propaganda tools. The list goes on and on. We shall have to consider what institutions are worth saving and how, such as universities, which have up to recently been the bedrock of our civilisation since the Dark Ages. There is still much intact that needs to be protected from the Vikings of the Free Market. It is otherwise just a question of time until they too are irreparably ransacked, as we are already witnessing. What cannot be commodified will be smashed and forgotten.
I imagine you are thinking on the technical level that this emancipation from the institutions that constitute the barbarian invasion is not possible. Most are already ineffective shells and the few features that have survived can be easily replaced. The BRICs nations are already trying to figure this out as they wisely take leave of the barbarian West.
More difficult will be overcoming the vassal class (managerial and professional class), most voracious and least scrupulous in the service of the oligarch class, true smashers and stealers. Those are the twenty percent that after the oligarchs possess the rest of the national wealth. Those who work in all the above mentioned institutions, among others, that need to be dissolved. Beware however, as we have learnt in Gaza, they have absolutely no scruples and morals anymore. They are the modern day Adolf Eichmanns, the banality of evil as Hannah Arendt termed it. This is not some sort of technocratic elite that has the interests of a nation or the world as its priority and is going to save us. They do what they are asked and buy a second or third home with their wages. To make things worse, probably many of them belong to our circles of friends and acquaintances. Well meaning, but “rules are rules”, which they aren’t anymore. Their blood lust will increase as the threat to their own existence grows. Thus the decline in the West is accelerating.
What comes next? The decline may be a long drawn out affair. It may go much quicker than we imagine. The crisis may be sparked by political upheaval or a war, or by another economic crisis like we saw 2008/2009. New structures will be created, but post-West, probably pragmatically saving that of value that can and should be saved and replacing the rest.
And the barbarians? We shall have to see what we do with them – or they with us should we not finally defy them. Whatever you do, do not assume this is not going to effect you. You believe you have done nothing wrong. The rule of law will protect you. It doesn’t anymore. And if you keep your eyes closed tightly enough, you will not see the barbarian hordes – until they smash in your door (this is meant metaphorically). The barbarians are no longer ante portas. They have long breached our Western defences.
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