Aug. 31—A report from The Grayzone’s Anya Parampil sums up the situation in the world today. Parampil, who attended the BRICS Summit in Johannesburg last week, spoke to a diplomat from that nation who had recently met Acting US Deputy Secretary of State Victoria Nuland during her recent visit to South Africa. The diplomat, according to Parampil, said Nuland was “demonstrably unprepared to grapple with recent developments on the African continent,” and said further that, “‘In over 20 years working with the Americans, I have never seen them so desperate.’”
The diplomat was, on one level, referring to the military coup that had occurred in Niger in late July, but was certainly referring more broadly to the significant shift underway across the Global South and across the world. This sentiment was best reflected at last week’s BRICS Summit, where a major step was taken towards a new global architecture, focused primarily on the development of nations and a renewed determination to never again be subjected to geopolitical or colonial machinations.
In such a world, it is no wonder that Anglo-American geopoliticians are feeling a little desperate.
This sentiment was also voiced by Hungarian Prime Minister Victor Orban, who insisted that victory by Ukraine over Russia is “a lie, it’s impossible,” and that instead a “new security architecture” with Russia is required to attain peace in Europe into the future. When questioned about the difficulty of going against the US on this issue, Orban reflected this germ of a new idea. Of course it’s better if Hungary has good relations with the US, he said, “but we can do without them, we can survive this period and we can grow.”
Consider also the new set of contracts signed for mineral extraction and processing by Afghanistan—the largest since the Taliban’s takeover in 2021. A nation which previously had been crushed under the weight of NATO’s and Dope Inc.’s twin policies of death, but which has now nearly banned its opium production and is on its way towards creating “thousands of jobs and significantly improv[ing] the economic situation of the country,” as the Deputy Prime Minister for Economic Affairs put it Thursday.
At the same time, it would be foolish to think that those who believe the world is theirs to control will simply relinquish that control easily. Remember, this is the stuff that world wars are fought over, and very likely could ignite a thermonuclear World War III today. As the Anglo-American imperialists become more and more desperate—especially as the Ukrainian counteroffensive is shown to be a flop—expect new crisis points to be ignited.
This now appears to be the plan in regard to Crimea. On Thursday, the head of the Defense Forces of Ukraine ‘South’ press office indicated that the “resistance movement is working” in Crimea to further disrupt water and energy supplies there, exacerbating the humanitarian crisis. Virtually all targets in Crimea are legitimate targets for destruction, she said. Remember the bombing of the Kakhovka Dam in June, whose reservoir is the prime source of clean water for Crimea, and which is now reaching a crisis point nearly three months later.
Tensions are also escalating on the Korean Peninsula and around China, as efforts mount to build a NATO-of-the-East. There are even moves by the US to treat Taiwan as a fully independent country by using a new military assistance program. Far from “defending democracy” these actions are further pushing China into an overt military crisis.
The world is clearly at a moment of great transformation, where ideas—such as were just expressed at last week’s BRICS Summit—possess an unusually large power to change peoples and nations. This is the task before the historic individual, like yourself, today, to learn to wield actual and potent ideas, and deploy them in a meaningful way.
Towards this end, the upcoming September 9 Schiller Institute conference will be a nodal point that everyone sentient should attend.
