By Natasha Wright
‘If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face – for ever.’ This is one of the most famous quotations from George Orwell’s 1949 novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four. The words are spoken by O’Brien, the grand inquisitor of the totalitarian regime in Orwell’s novel. I don’t think there has been any other author more quoted as of recent than George Orwell and his 1984 and Animal Farm (add to the cauldron the quotes by Aldous Huxley in his Brave, new world).
If we dwell a little more on the issue of the U.S. global dominance ever since the downfall of Berlin Wall, there follows a bewildering thought how the USA has managed to establish global hegemony for so long in such imperceptible shapes and forms? With a hindsight, an overwhelming number of nations and/or countries have retreated to a cosy solution to welcoming the U.S. (hegemony) with arms wide open. The ways how the U.S. has managed to imperceptibly spread its dominance are via all manner of cultural, educational, economic, financial and political influence of the U.S. seeping through the cracks and fault lines of any societal texture. They invariably have the same mechanisms to apply, the same tactics to deploy, the same strategies to reiterate endlessly which are easy to ‘read’ and ‘see through’ if repeated sufficient number of times. When the perpetrators behind the curtains are asked how is it possible that they always use the same tactics in their coloured revolutions and regime changes, they reply with dismissive frivolity: ‘Because it works. Why change it if it works every time?’
When asked why the Global West doggedly insist on military solutions to the ongoing Ukrainian crisis, some commentators tend to think that most probably because their politics of hegemony and continual warmongering have mercifully started to die down. The politics of imperial dominance and U.S. monopoly is starting to be unsustainable. The U.S. allies from this side of the Atlantic have mostly been unswervingly loyal to and blindly obeyed the global sheriff up until the 2003 and the outright and resolute refusal by Germany and France to join their impending Iraq invasion. On that occasion, the countries which constitute the most powerful pillars of the EU have denied the hegemon its self-righteous arrogance to illegal interventionism. That historic moment can be viewed as the springboard for the creation of a multipolar world in the new millennium yet it did not put an end to unipolarity. The U.S. continued behaving the way it did before. It went on with more meddling in the internal affairs of an overwhelming number of countries, it continued its occupation of Afghanistan most obviously, coupled with the coloured revolutions and ‘Arab springs’ of all sorts and all enveloped into the inexorable NATO expansion.
Then came the year 2018 and a critical moment when Vladimir Putin announced that Russia produced hypersonic weapons which meant that Russia overtook the U.S. for the first time. Russia gained strategic advantage in that respect. That may well have been the end of the unipolarity as we know it yet the issue has remained that the U.S. finds it hard to admit its imminent demise.
In retrospect, there has been a multitude of brutal wars and the downfalls of empires historically due to their decadence and deterioration in any given society or civilization. Let us recall a Russian thinker, Nikolai Danilevsky, a biologist by profession, who adopted an organic view of the world. Human civilizations, he maintained, were organic beings that were born, matured, and died. None could be said to constitute the “End of History.” In his most famous work, titled Russia and Europe, he outlined a theory that Russia and Western Europe were entirely distinct “cultural historical types.” Different cultural historical types, he said, developed in their own separate ways. In opposition to theories of cultural convergence, he compared the world to a town square from which different roads (i.e. different civilizations) moved out in different directions. Each cultural historical type was inherently distinct, and consequently it made no sense to try to force it to develop along the path of another. Oswald Spengler also presented a world view based on the cyclical rise and decline of civilizations in which he argues that a culture blossoms from the soil of a definable landscape and dies when it has exhausted all of its possibilities.
Today the matters seem to be vastly different given that there are two nuclear powers with a vast potential to destroy the world. The world power which is on the steep downward trend is drastically more dangerous in its crushing potential to shatter the world to pieces. The situation seems to be much more dangerous than it has ever been because the U.S. is only too willing to get stuck in the Thycidides Trap with China.
In reality, a new world order is evidently well underway with BRICS and Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) nations offering ample alternatives to the hegemonic Collective West. The budding silhouette of the multipolar world has long emerged and with time it will take a more astable shape. The West has not managed to make a more significant onward march to the Far East and the Global South in generic terms, if we exclude Japan and South Korea from the equation.
One has to just consider for a moment a plethora of sophisticated statements as per the onward marching multipolar world given by Sergey Lavrov up to date:
“Unfortunately, our American colleagues still want to operate only on the basis of dictating policy, issuing ultimatums, they do not want to hear the perspectives of other centres of world politics’
The U.S. is refusing to “acknowledge the reality of the emerging multi-polar world,”
‘Amid the current, serious stage in the history of international relations, Russia and China will move to a multipolar, fair world order’
‘We are going through a very serious stage in the history of international relations. I am convinced that as a result of this stage, the international situation will become clearer significantly and we will move together with you, together with our other like-minded people, towards a multipolar, just, democratic world order’
Some Western commentators argue that Russia is facing further isolation because ‘all’ the ‘democratic’ countries have launched an avalanche of sanctions onto it and condemned it publicly in the UN General Assembly since the onset of the Russian special military operation in Ukraine. All those countries who tend to arbitrarily attribute the ‘democratic’ badge to themselves mostly go on to wrongfully claim that Russia has the support of the countries which know of no liberal democracy in their autocratic regimes. Sadly, the proliferation of these unfounded myths has mostly been allocated to the corporate Western media propaganda
First and foremost, this claim is based on flawed logic. The number of countries which have introduced sanctions on Russia is about 30 and the number of countries which did vote in the UN General Assembly is 140 out of which 110 countries do not plan to place sanctions on Russia and they do not want to gang up on any pressure on it either. If we do some basic mathematics, 6.5 billion people live in the countries which have not introduced sanctions on Russia and they are not planning to. Even these ongoing colossal changes apparently bring about the world dividing into two poles, the other one comprises 6.5 billion people which is in effect, if viewed from another perspective, the whole world without the Collective West
The colossal changes have already happened globally. Now overt economic cooperation up to date has melded into regional and international geopolitical cooperation among BRICS, SOC and beyond. These countries further develop the cooperation with Russia and certainly China.
To get back to the Western (flawed) views of the world divided into the arbitrarily attributed democracies on one hand and randomly ostracized autocracies on the other, the origins for these flawed views are certainly from the divide and conquer Western supremacy and Colonialism. That colonial world view is mirrored in the words of Josep Borrell and his rather arrogantly awkward metaphor ‘EU as a garden vs the rest of the world as a jungle’. No amount of profuse apologies will help this hapless unelected bureaucrat from Brussels with his gauche ‘witticisms’ in his overwhelmingly racist discourse.
Obviously, that is an enormous effort to ‘smother’ the world with an artificial division, an effort of ‘all guns blazing’ ‘all-out war’ against the creation of multipolar world in the most brutal Machiavelli style, though sporting the 21st century ‘outfit’. And yes, lest we forget, the impending doom of the U.S. getting entangled in another Thycidides Trap with China.
In case the ‘(un)democratic’ Europe with its utterly reckless moves loses its monumental market in China as well as abundant and affordable Russian resources and with the prospects of great many companies leaving for more arable pastures for the USA lured by Biden’s Build Back Better incentives, Borrell’s garden instead of letting a hundred flowers blossom will turn into a barren wasteland.
