The picture you see above is one that the Russians have been assiduously disseminating around the world, since the start of the BRICS summit in Kazan’. That global gathering wrapped up yesterday, and it proved to be every bit as world-changing as we were originally promised.
To be sure, most of the changes are not going to happen immediately. As Alexander Mercouris pointed out in his programme yesterday, the implementation of the entire Bretton Woods architecture, from start to finish, took a total of FOURTEEN YEARS. Given the scale and scope of the changes being discussed in Kazan’, and the immense amount of preparatory work done by the Sherpas of the various countries in the lead-up to the summit itself, we can be sure that it will be several years before the biggest changes promised by the BRICS organisation come to fruition.
You can read the full text of the BRICS Kazan’ Declaration for yourself, to understand just what it is they are proposing. The whole thing is 32 pages in length – not exactly light reading, to say the least – and encompasses a very wide range of topics.
Not all of it, admittedly, is particularly smart or sensible, and quite a lot of the Declaration amounts to fluff.
The BRICS leaders agreed to and signed on for things like:
- A comprehensive reform of the United Abominations, particularly the inSecurity Council, with the specific goal of including more Wakandan representation;
- The rejection of unlawful and random SANKSHUNS;
- The reform of the Bretton Woods system, through new institutions like the New Development Bank;
- A whole lot of guff about UN Sustainable Development Goals and Climate Manbearpig Global Change Cooling Warming, which we can safely ignore, given the pollution that China and India routinely spew out;
- Various feel-good statements about MOAR REPRESENTAYSHUN for WAMMENZES and MUNORITEEZ;
- A clear statement about the need for dialogue and negotiation when resolving armed conflicts around the world, under the auspices of the UN Charter;
- The need for a permanent settlement to the Israel-Palestine conflict (yeah, good luck with that) along the lines of the 1967 borders;
- A rather anodyne statement about the Banderastan War, which is interesting in and of itself;
- Some more stuff about “African solutions to African problems” – translation: LET WAKANDANS DEAL WITH THEIR OWN DINDU SHIT;
- Some interesting points about arms control and nuclear non-proliferation, plus a few clauses about activities in outer space;
… and a great many more things besides.
It is, in other words, a wide-ranging grab-bag of topics that runs the entire gamut of problems facing the world today.
The most interesting thing about it, though, is that it conclusively and totally rejects the Western model of dealing with problems – which is to say, “we do whatever the Amerikhastanis tell us to do”.
Think about what a remarkable achievement this declaration is. You have countries that nominally stand opposed to each other, coming together and making peace both before and during this conference. Just before the Kazan’ summit kicked off, India and China agreed to settle at least part of a border dispute between them that dates all the way back the 1960s, and which has claimed the lives of hundreds of Indian and Chinese soldiers in the intervening decades. At the BRICS summit itself, Armenia and Azerbaijan, who have fought a bloody conflict for 30 years over the disputed territories of Nagorno-Karabakh, got about 90% of the way to a proper peace settlement.
Just today, we saw the announcement that Iran and Saudi Arabia – the world’s premier Shi’ite and Sunni Izzlamick nations – will hold joint naval exercises for, I think, the first time EVER. You have to understand just how deep the divisions are between the two branches of Izzlam, to realise what a colossal development that really is.
In other words – BRICS represents a real hope for dialogue, negotiation, discussion, and PEACE.
That is the actual track record of the organisation, because unlike the entire post-war architecture of the non-Soviet world, it is not focused on what the West wants and needs.
And that is just a roundabout way of saying that BRICS is not about what AMERICA wants and needs.
For that is the true reality of the Bretton Woods system, and everything else that arose out of the ashes of WWII, outside of the Soviet Union. The Americans designed the entire architecture and structure – because they COULD.
America was the only power that emerged out of WWII relatively unscathed. America’s total wartime dead, across both mega-theatres, amounted to around 400,000 – which barely counted as one bad CAMPAIGN for the Soviet Union.
The USSR suffered 27 MILLION dead, including some 14 million soldiers, fighting off the Germans and then the Japanese. Britain suffered some 400,000 or so dead, and the near-total loss of its empire. Germany lay shattered and broken, with millions dead. Japan was utterly crushed, forced to surrender under the combined threat of the Soviet Union to the west, and the annihilation of its cities through atomic fire at the hands of the Americans.
There was literally no power capable of resisting America – EXCEPT the USSR.
And that is how we ended up with the Cold War.
That was basically World War III. It was a continuation of the divisions that sundered the world leading up to WWII. And, as with the previous world wars, that war was fought on every battlefield – moral, political, military, and most importantly, economic.
The Cold War ended because the USSR simply could not keep up economically. This was inevitable. Central planning has ALWAYS been a stupidly inefficient system, for the very simple reason that you cannot appropriately and adequately distribute resources without some sort of pricing mechanism. This has been known since 1922, when Ludwig von Mises proved it beyond any shadow of reasonable doubt in his now-legendary paper, Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth.
Many have tried to refute the ironclad logic of Mises’ paper. All have failed, because his use of deductive logic based on irrefutable axioms was impossible to challenge. And so things eventually proved – all centrally planned economic systems have, without exception, FAILED.
That is the reason why the Cold War actually ended – it was not WON, it ENDED, in an equitable and reasonable peace between the two powers. The true end of the Cold War was not the collapse of the Soviet Union in late 1991 – it really happened during the seminal speech Secretary Gorbachyov gave at the United Abominations in 1988, in which he announced the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact and the pulling back of Soviet troops from the borders of western Europe.
Why did this happen? Because the USSR simply could not afford to maintain its colossal empire any longer.
The numbers bear witness to this fact. By 1991, the total GDP of the entire USSR was something on the order of US$2.1T at contemporary exchange rates – and keep in mind, the Soviets artificially suppressed the exchange rate for their ruble at 1:2 to the USD.
However, the USA, all on its own, produced a full US$6.1T in goods and services at the same point. The state of California, by itself, produced nearly as much as all of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic did, back in the day. The US economy produced more than the entire Warsaw Pact COMBINED.
It is an axiomatic truth that, in war, economic power dictates success. So it was with WWIII – the Cold War. The power with the greatest economic dynamism, strength, manufacturing capability, and innovation, settled that war on its own terms.
That brings us to the present day, when BRICS represents a new way forward for the world.
We are now in a new Cold War, in which the G7 and the collective West – which includes Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Israel, and most (not all) of the nations of the European Union – find themselves pitted against the combined economic power and might of China, Russia, India, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and various others.
Accepting as axiomatic the dictum that economic power determines the outcomes of Great Power conflicts, the conclusion is inevitable:
The West is going to LOSE this new Cold War.
It is inevitable. The very same factors which doomed the Soviet Union – economic stagnation, social upheaval, the loss of hope and any kind of faith in a better future for people’s children, the ossification of the political structures, the inability of the elites to connect with the common people and represent their interest – are running rampant in the modern West.
These problems DO NOT exist in most BRICS states, to anything like the same degree.
Since I know Russia best, having visited it many times in the past 7 years, I can state with considerable authority that Russia has many problems – but the loss of hope and faith is not one of them. Nor is there a serious disconnect between the people and the elites. The economy is not merely booming – it is THUNDERING ahead, at rates that defy comprehension.
Russia today is the world’s fourth largest economy on the basis of purchasing power parity (PPP). If you look at the other global economies, and you strip out the effects of debt, you will quickly find that the FUSA’s economy is FAR smaller than its supposed US$27T or so – it probably rates at somewhere around US$15-18T. Doing the same to China’s economy probably strips it back to somewhere around the US$25-30T mark, because of all the bad debt in their state-owned banks and municipalities.
Russia, on the other hand, has very little debt, an extremely robust manufacturing sector, a highly skilled labour force, a superb education system, and – most importantly, from a human capital perspective – a rapid and widespread renewal of faith. There is an extraordinary religious revival underway in Russia – the Orthodox Christian faith is resurgent across the entire country.
None of these things is true in the West. Indeed, Europe is de-industrialising – living standards are dropping precipitously across the entire continent. There will come a time, not too far away from now, when Europe will be merely a museum of beautiful old buildings, crumbling to dust, because the Wakandans and Muzzies who replaced the native-born White Europeans have neither the intellectual capacity, capability, nor interest in maintaining them.
All the relevant factors point to the terminal decline and collapse of the West – just as they once did to that of the Soviet Union, and for the same reasons.
None of this is to say that the BRICS nations are perfect. They assuredly are not. I would NEVER want to live in China – I cannot stand their government’s approach to the ordinary people, I do not much like their culture, and I have little patience for the extreme racism and low-trust mentality of the Han Chinese.
Russia has plenty of problems of its own – I love the country, but I do my best to present as honest an account of their issues as I can.
India is… well, INDIA, and the less said about that, the better.
South Africa is far, FAR worse – there is a REASON why the Wakandans there cannot keep the lights on for more than a few hours a day.
Iran has severe demographic issues which will seriously constrain its Great Power ambitions before they get off the ground.
Saudi Arabia is still trying to figure out how to reconcile the 7th Century with the 21st, and is not doing a particularly good job of it.
The list goes on and on. Not ONE of the BRICS nations is particularly sound or solid.
None of that changes the fact that, when it comes to raw economic power and output, they have the West beat all hollow.
The future course of the world is set. It will be the BRICS nations, united and cooperating actively with each other in every sphere, against the ossified and increasingly desperate nations of the New Evil Empire.
That Empire That Never Ended will eventually collapse, just as the USSR did. The (((Tribe))) that flees from the collapse of that empire will do their level best to settle in the BRICS states, and start the cycle all over again. If the BRICS nations have the sense God gave a honey badger, they will lock the gates and bar them from entry.
But, for now, it is clear where the world is heading – into a locked-down, dying, closed-off West, that replicates everything that made the old Soviet Union such an awful place, and a hopeful and forward-looking BRICS organisation that seeks negotiation, dialogue, compromise, and diplomacy as the means to settle arguments.
It is not difficult to figure out which model is the more appealing, for those of us who call ourselves nationalists.
1 Comment
There are three countries that, if they were ever able to really get their act together, would be real powers in hhuman capital… Philippines, Mexico and Indonesia.
Actually most of South America. Tremendous natural resources and human potential; much more promising than Wakanda. What’s your predicitions there?