MICHAEL HUDSON: Well, for the last few months, we’ve been discussing how the United States and its allied Western neoliberal economies have driven the non-Western world, the global majority, into protecting themselves and breaking away. And they’ve been developing a whole array of how they’re going to go about splitting.
It’s the Shanghai Cooperation Organization that has outlined in the last week or so exactly how the split is going to happen. And the first paragraph of their concluding declaration is absolutely wonderful. It threw down the gauntlet. Tectonic shifts are taking place in world politics, economics, and other areas of international relations.
At the same time, the use of force is intensifying. International law is being systematically violated. Geopolitical confrontation and conflicts are growing, and the risks to stability in the world and the SCO region are multiplying...........
.......NIMA ROSTAMI ALKHORSHID: And right after this SCO summit, there was an article by Pepe Escobar, he was talking about the program, he said they started with the concept of greater Eurasian partnership proposed by Poon in 2015. But it seems the ideology of this plan was elaborated by Russian historian Sergei Karaganov in 2018, as you mentioned to me.
MICHAEL HUDSON: Well, that’s really very interesting. Karaganov has just sort of been in the news recently spelling out a whole strategy. And what Karaganov has done is put this civilizational struggle that we’re seeing today between NATO and Eurasia in the long term perspective.
And he’s quite rightly traced it all the way back to the 1000 years to the Crusades. And the Crusades, starting in the 12th and the 13th century, were basically an attempt by Rome to take over and reverse Christianity.
There were five patriarchates [The Pentarchy] in the 11th century, and Rome was the very bottom of the patriarchates. They called it the “Papacy Of The Harlots”, because the popes were controlled, and the papacy was controlled, by local Italian families.
And Orthodox Christianity, as it survived from the Roman Empire, really, it was in Constantinople, but also in Antioch, in Alexandria, and Jerusalem. And this was the whole center of Christianity.
And starting in, I think, 1075, Rome said, we’ve got to take over all of Christianity. And we’re going to start something that is absolutely unprecedented in civilization. For the last 3000 years, there were many empires. There was a Persian Empire, various Asian empires, [the Islamic Empire], but they had a common denominator. They all were religiously tolerant. You all know in the Bible that King Cyrus of Persia permitted people to worship Judaism there. The Jews that were captured by Babylonia and brought back to Babylonia, he blessed them to go back to Judea.
And other, you had Islam having a tolerance, for instance, in Jerusalem. But you had one of the major Christian patriarchates connected to Constantinople, you also had, that was under Islamic control. They both had their churches there, there was tolerance.
The whole Ottoman Empire that followed the Crusades, very, very tolerant. You had Jewish, Islamic, Christian, all sorts of other religions there. The Romans said, essentially, no, there can only be us. And we’ve got to have a war on the whole rest of the world.
And that followed for many centuries. It tore Europe apart with the war between Catholicism. And finally, the Protestants of Northern Europe broke away in the split.
But that ethic of only one way of thinking, and the intolerance of the Western social organization behavior, the intolerance of its religion, coupled then with the imperialism and the exploitation of England, Holland, France, other countries, all of this was completely new to the world.
Already, I think, as you know, I’ve dealt for a long time with Sumerian and Babylonian history. Already in the fourth millennium, you had the Sumerian city of Uruk sending out attempts to get raw materials. Bronze is made out of copper and tin. There were a few cities, fortified cities, it’s set up in the fourth millennium. But then the fortifications all disappeared.
They said, wait a minute, there’s no way we can have peaceful relations with other countries by essentially fighting them, too much overhead. Let’s have trade, they’ll give us raw materials, we’ll give them our handicrafts, the textiles we make, the rugs, all sorts of manufacturers that we make. And that set the whole stage for what happened.
That’s how Kublai Khan set up his empire as he set about across Russia. Well, Karaganov points out that the sort of founder of Russian independence, Alexander Nevsky, went to China, went to Mongolia, met Kublai Khan. Russia was part of this whole Eurasian open mutual development. And he’s placed the whole consciousness, you could say, of Russia, and by extension, the rest of Asia, in this cultural and even religious context, especially the religious context.
And that’s why you have President Putin, in so many of his recent speeches, focusing on the Russian church that the Ukrainians, the first thing they’re doing is saying, you know, we’re Westerners, we’re going to close down and destroy your churches because they’re Russian churches. This is the Western mentality.
And you can imagine for those Russians who still adhere to Russian Orthodox Christianity, you know, they’re saying, wait a minute, Ukraine is trying to force on us the same kind of destructive wars that tore France apart with the Protestant and Catholic wars, that the Catholics drove out the Huguenots, who were the Protestant reformers, and they became the technical class from England to Germany to France to America.
Karaganov has pointed [out that this] is not only an economic break, not only de-dollarization away from the dollar, it’s really not only a conflict of religion, it’s a whole conflict of what civilization and the rules of civilization and a decent world order are all about.............
..........MICHAEL HUDSON: Well, that’s what’s so interesting. You know, most of the historians and I grew up have a materialist view of history. And we think that, well, countries are going to follow their material interest. And usually that means governments are going to represent the economic interests.
Well, certainly the American companies, not only Raytheon, but also Apple, other [companies] saying, wait a minute, all of our production is based in Asia. We’re dependent on China for cobalt, even for rare earth elements, for refined aluminum, for all of these things. And the Americans need Russian takeoff cylinders for outer space. How on earth the business people can say, if there is a break, where does that leave us?
There’s no way that the United States or Europe can somehow rebuild their industry without de-financializing their economy, without getting rid of the whole debt overhead and without raising the wages and the living standards of labor.
And the one thing that holds America and Europe together is their class war against labor. And they’d rather fight than have— this for them would be a civilization shock. So the West has had it. I mean, this is it. And it doesn’t even have a plan B. It only has plan A. We’re going to bomb them until other populations say, stop. Oh dear, we’ve got to change our government because our government makes them bomb us. Let’s have a friendly Western government like our own Boris Yeltsin. And they will stop bombing us and then we’ll have peace and we won’t be bombed anymore. But instead they’re putting all their support behind Boris Yeltsin.
While in the United States, most of the Americans that are pulled are against the war, NATO war. Most Europeans are against the NATO war, but, and they’re completely dispirited now. And that’s another point Karaganov makes. They’re dispirited and there’s lower and lower voter turnout in every election because they realize that it doesn’t matter who they vote for and who their representatives are because European policy is made by NATO and the EU leadership, von der Leyen and the other Russia haters. And they do not represent the views of voters. There’s no referendum on, do you want a war against Russia or not? Do you want further fighting in Ukraine or not? None of the most important occurrences that are happening in the world are put to a vote or any kind of democratic discussion. And if there’s any disagreement in the West’s idea, if we don’t bomb them, they’ll bomb us. You’re called a Putin puppet. You’re saying, well, that’s just what Mr. Putin says. That’s just what President Xi says. Why would you be saying what President Xi says? You want peace? Well, that’s what China and Russia say. Do you really want to be a Russian and Chinese stooge and say, you want peace instead of war? You want prosperity instead of exploitation? You know, that’s unpatriotic. We’re going to have to remove you from YouTube. We’re going to have to remove you from X and the other media. And of course, you won’t have any access to the open publications, the professional publications and media in the West. No more New York Times op-eds, you know, if you believe that kind of thing.
So you have the West. I think I won’t say that the Western voters are in the dark. I think intuitively they know that all this is wrong and most important, self-destructive, but there’s nothing they can do about it. That’s why most of the votes in the Democratic primary were for any other candidate. There’s nothing, that’s all they can do.
That’s why so many parties in Europe were voting for the right-wing parties, because there really isn’t any left anymore. The American interference with domestic politics, the left-wing politics, social democratic politics, Germany, England, Blairism, and the New Labour Party, third-way parties, all of that is largely the product of the mighty Wurlitzer, the careful orchestration of European politics. And that’s really not a democracy. As I said before, Aristotle was right. Most constitutions that say they’re democracies are really oligarchies............
Read full text: https://www.unz.com/mhudson/world-shaking-up-epic-political-economic-earthquakes/