With a Ph.D. from Georgia Tech, Dr. Fadi Lama may be a ramblin’ wreck. His book, however, is anything but — a smooth, fast, and powerful look deep within the rot necrotizing the West and afflicting the rest of the world. It would greatly benefit most Westerners, especially most Americans, and particularly those Americans in my Dixie to read Why The West Can’t Win. Therefore, at least to the Americans who need the information and presentation the most, we could safely assume most won’t. I hope that isn’t the case, and I have some irrationally optimistic sense that this might be THE book to finally start driving a little truth home among the masses. Hello, it’s another book review. As much as I mean to cut back on these, we just keep getting so many very good books. Herein we examine and I cite Lama, Fadi, Why The West Can’t Win: From Bretton Woods to a Multipolar World, Atlanta: Clarity Press, 2023 (Kindle Edition). It’s loaded with charts, statistics, notes and citations—usually sure killers of reader connectivity. Yet and still, I think Lama pulls off something amazing with his short, insightful work. In many of my reviews, especially concerning works of non-fiction, I repeatedly stress the importance of how well a book flows. Lama is an engineer so it makes sense he designed a presentation that cleverly posits real information, pairing it with keen discussion in a uniformly interesting fashion. The order goes something like this: 1) an idea is announced, 2) the idea is visually presented via a graph, mathematical operation, or picture, and 3) the information is synthesized with language I think most readers will appreciate and be capable of following. Why The West Can’t Win is a brief history of the corruption of Western Civilization, especially of the Anglo-American variety by a cohort of living demons Lama aptly calls “the Money Powers.” I’ll start where Lama ends, with his final cautionary words on page 357:
Bleak, but appropriate. And to a large degree, self-inflicted. What he means is that with the bifurcation of the world into Sovereign and Clown factions, and the growing inability of the Clowns to directly oppress the majority of the world population, they are now forced to vent their eternal hatred of God and man upon their only remaining victims, the people of their host countries. That hideous process is already underway. What passes for the mainstream media in the West is a poorly reasoned yet hypnotic collection of lies. Vladimir Putin recently warned the people of Kyrgyzstan to avoid reading Western outlets for that reason. I note that he concentrated on the reading part. Most Americans, being dull and barely literate, generally gain their propaganda by staring stupidly at television screens. On page 234, Lama presents a chart showing Money Power ownership of major Western media outlets; by that measure, Fox “News” really is the worst. Americans continue to defy physics, reality, and belief by falling for one set of lies after another. In the wake of the war on “terror,” the financial collapse, the global pandemic bioweapon attacks, the stolen election and coup in DC, and the NATO Nazis’ war on Russia, the dullards have instantly fallen in line with Israel’s and Lispy Graham’s goal of genociding Palestinians and spreading war and misery across the Middle East. Never letting a crisis go to waste, the anti-human wraiths of the ADL, an organization founded to honor a child rapist and murderer, are pushing more and more dystopian censorship on Americans. Not to be outdone, the feeble UK Parliament passed, in September of 2023, a new law to further regulate (read, “censor”) online information. There are many other existing examples, many of which you, dear reader, are probably aware of, and more and worse is coming. A little resistance from the people of the West against their true enemies would be both wise and welcomed. Westerners have almost uniformly come to live under democracies. Drawing on both Republican Roman experience and the traditions of Greece, Cicero believed that democracy was one of the worst forms of governance possible, along with tyranny and oligarchy. Thomas Jefferson, in his own interesting way, expressed a similar sentiment. Listen to any Clown World heathen, like fake US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken, and within two or three minutes some platitude about democracy will be incanted with sacred solemnity. Lama masterfully walks his readers through the history of the Money Powers-driven West and the Powers’ absolute obsession with democracy. He exposes the clear pattern of the ruin of nations by eliminating religious and nationalistic controls and replacing them with democratic perversions, degeneracy, and usury. The end result, in France, America, or India, is a form of slavery and societal pillaging. That is why all attempts to democratize government, such as the US’s 17th Amendment, allowing for the supposedly “free” popular election of Senators, act to subvert freedom, prosperity, and true representation of and for the people. Lama mathematically demonstrates, on page 88, that “from a socioeconomic standpoint, democracy is the worse form of governance throughout history. That is natural, as it was made by the Money Powers for the Money Powers.” As much as the book is a warning to those who need it and might hear it, it is equally an optimistic appraisal of where the majority of humanity stands moving forward in this century. In between and all around, a history is woven—from the ancient world, through the Middle Ages, through the horrors of the Enlightenment, across the financial capitalistic terror of Bretton Woods, ending with the emergence of multipolarity. Lama nicely sums up the where-we-are-now as follows, from page 20: “The current global geopolitical clash is in essence a struggle between the colonial powers wishing to preserve the Bretton Woods system that facilitates siphoning the wealth of nations and sovereign nations striving for independence and an end to a millennium of their oppression.” If that statement confounds one, then there is all the more reason to read the book as the patterns and methods of oppression are pointedly discussed. That discussion raises historical observations seldom called to anyone’s attention. For instance, from pages 89-90: “Wealth pillaged from the colonies was not pillaged for the colonialist nations, but for the bankers and shareholders of the exploiting companies based therein; that is, the Money Powers.” That is why, as English corporations looted African, Asian, and American colonies, the lives of many Londoners were little better than those of the poor natives in Africa, Asia, and the Americas, as expressed through the eyes and words of many Dickensian characters. It’s a concept perhaps many American Millennials and Zoomers can relate to today. Lama explains the mechanisms of this universally immiserating phenomenon in much the same way Michael Hudson, Steve Keen, David Graeber, Alexander Macris, and other authors do. At present, in a desperate bid to save their empire, the Money Powers rely on the postmodern versions of three time-tested tactics: fake money (the Petrodollar), “virtual reality” (the deceptions of the media), and fading US military power (CVN-78 to Palestine, etc.). As Lama illustrates very well, the events of the past two years have dispelled the myth of American military invincibility and the necessity of the Dollar as the world reserve currency. All that really remains are the lies of Clown World virtual reality. And those necessarily collapse upon crashing into actual reality. Page 40: “When virtual reality meets reality on the battleground, T-Bills and ETFs stand little chance against flying missiles and artillery shells.” I mention CVN-78, the USS Gerald Ford aircraft carrier, for a timely reason. In between the publication of Lama’s book and my review, the US Empire dispatched the Ford, the Ike, and other ships, planes, weapons, and troops toward Occupied Palestine to assist Israel in potentially exterminating some of the poorest people in the world. (The virtual reality liars may tell it otherwise.) Yet, given the condition of the Ford, one almost wonders if its true mission isn’t more in keeping with that of the Lusitania, the Maine, the Arizona, or the Liberty. From page 244: “The $13 billion Gerald R. Ford ‘has yet to demonstrate that it can effectively’ defend the aircraft carrier from anti-ship missiles and other threats, according to the Pentagon’s testing office.” There is, one supposes, nothing like live testing. There’s a healthy supply of many other examples of Western evil like that. I leave most for the delighted discovery of the reader. Here’s one more. Russia’s SMO in Ukraine, forced by NATO, the US, and the Money Powers, revealed many things the virtual realists would prefer people forget about. Following a brief mention of the horrors of Imperial Japan’s Unit 731, Lama comes to a natural conclusion on page 196: “Not surprisingly, with the head start acquired from ‘research’ of Unit 731, the U.S. is today the leader in bio warfare, with its bio labs dotting the globe. U.S.-controlled bio labs in Ukraine have performed experiments similar to those of Japan’s Unit 731.” One is reminded of the nature of many of those experiments as told by JRK, Jr. in his excellent book on Tony Fauci’s miserable life and work. The COVID+ evil from those labs was but one of hundreds of examples of illicit US biowarfare necromancy, a legacy that predates the empire’s acquisition of the 731 war criminals (“paperclipped” into the fold like so many SS Nazis). In the reading, should a Westerner begin to feel a pang of slight guilt, it is because, while he himself might be blameless, extreme wickedness has been perpetrated in his name and on his watch. Again, now would be a grand time to turn guilt into cleansing action, letting the suffering of Oliver Twist give way to the resistance of a Gaza or Donbass freedom fighter. But whether anyone finally awakens in the West, the changes in the world already proceed apace. Much of Why The West Can’t Win is an exemplifying comparison of factors and a recitation of exactly why the West can’t. Much or most of it comes down to sovereignty versus slavery and reality versus fantasy. Lama does much in the way of contrasting the hype for and the reality of the West with that of Russia and China, perhaps the two best examples of the free multipolar domain. On page 129, Table 5, Lama makes a quick comparison of the financial condition of the Russian and US economies. While Russia is, in a word, “healthy,” the US is a basket case. Yet, in Table 6, he shows that the fake Western ratings agencies assign the greater risk of investment to Russia, with the US, of course, being “AAA” and “Prime.” This is but one of many exposures of the prime, AAA, exceptional bullshit that underpins postmodern Western existence. The captive West cannot win and has really already lost because of factors such as money and monetary policy, technology, human rights, manufacturing capacity, education, and healthcare—all of which are covered in detail. These deficiencies are generally interrelated as Lama demonstrates in various places, including his take on education in the US. On page 123 he writes (emphasis mine): “Many individuals who have great potential are effectively discarded. The consequences of this can already be observed in the Military Industrial Complex (MIC), which since 2000 has been unable to develop any competitive weapons system.” In addition to boondoggle false flag fodder like the Ford, the discarding of talent speaks to a large part of the character (or lack thereof) of the postmodern American nation. Richard Hofstadter correctly titled his 1963 book about anti-intellectualism in mid-20th Century America. Since then, things have continued to shift towards outright hostility against genuine higher intelligence. There is a reason why China wisely and officially embraced Wang Huning and why America stupidly but effectively shunned Chris Langan. Already, the results of this shift speak for themselves. While I cannot nail down an exact religious affiliation, Lama’s book is replete with positive morality. It would behoove Christians to read the book and take stock of where they ontologically and physically stand in several areas—particularly areas imbued with a creeping sense of discomfort. While we cannot control the past or the actions of others, we can and must live today as we plan for tomorrow, all while accounting for the intentions of other parties. Those of us in the West must realize that the centuries-long malfeasance of our hijacked culture is losing and will lose, as it deserves to; we, however, need not go down with the sinking ship. Imagine our boot resting upon the throat of a wicked little parasite. Fadi Lama is to be praised for his insight, research, wit, and bravery in assembling an outstanding volume dedicated to intelligence, truth, dignity, and justice. Please buy and read Why The West Can’t Win. This piece was originally published at PerrinLovett on October 18, 2023. |