Category: Behind the News

From New Dawn Special Issue Vol 15 No 6 (Dec 2021)

If the last two years taught us anything, it’s that humanity is now at its most critical inflection point. We stand at the precipice of a major turning in western civilisation – the culmination of a millennium of human development, seminal events, knowledge, and culture.

It is undeniable, yet not at all clear, the direction we are headed, or what the future holds, and who will be around to see it come to fruition. We are not seers or prophets and cannot peer into the future, but we can read the signposts of the past and present. 

We have a wealth of shared experience and a vast living memory – a collective consciousness updated and added to every day. If we search humanity’s archive, we find answers to many of these questions. Those answers have always been available, gleaned from understanding ourselves, our journey as a family, and the human race.

French novelist Alphonse Karr famously coined the saying, “plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose,” or, the more things change, the more they are the same.

Yes, we have been here before.

Let’s step back to the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries – a time of upheavals and period of great turbulence on many human fronts – politically, spiritually, and technologically. The western world was in the midst of an existential crisis as secularisation brought with it two disruptive forces to the traditional order of knowledge and influence: the rise of the intellectual and mass media. 

It is perhaps no coincidence that the world finds itself in a very similar impasse approximately a century later, with many of the same conditions present today, only on a much more pervasive level.

The parallels between then and now are astonishing. This should not be viewed as ‘history repeating itself’ but rather as a more intense interlude of what had already come to pass – only this time events are unfolding at much greater speed, propelled by advances in communication technology on a global scale inconceivable to previous generations. Such changes were equally profound in 1900, as were the transformations that took place across society.

As the 20^th century approached, theology was supplanted by evolutionary science. An ascendant Darwinian authority presided over existential questions like “Who are we?” and “What is man’s purpose?” 

Undoubtedly, this was a tumultuous time, intellectually and spiritually, with acrimony leading to heated exchanges between clergy and scientists, even leading to violent confrontations. But, with its newfound status, it was inevitable the secular power of Darwinian science would colonise the political and social sciences before giving rise to the sordid science of curative breeding known as eugenics. 

Recent history leaves no doubt that if left unrestrained by morals and ethics, wanton destruction and incredible suffering are wrought in the name of science and progress. These forces of modernity materialise in today’s advances in genetic engineering that have brought us back to that point once again: humanity faces the dilemma of resisting game-changing advances of technology and innovation or surrendering to it and prostrating at the altar of science and progress.

We are an entire century into a fully secularised society in the West. Today’s tech gurus, vaccinologists, and public health officials now occupy positions of prestige and command the reverence once reserved for pontiffs, philosophers, and poet laureates. The divine mysteries have given way to the ‘divine’ algorithm, and timeless sublime prose to the transience of the latest epidemiological model – from Gandhi to Gates, Whitman to Whitty, in just a few generations. How else could a man like Dr Anthony Fauci, an 80-year-old career gatekeeper for the transnational pharmaceutical cartel, still occupy the US government’s highest-paid job, and recently voted People Magazine’s “sexiest man alive”? Albert Camus once said, “Nothing is more despicable than respect based on fear.” Indeed, if not for the wave of mass hysteria and fear that swept over the world in February 2020, few would even know of Dr Fauci, let alone revere him as a demigod. On one level, we may be deluded into believing that today’s gaudy exhibitionists are mere frivolities of pure media spectacle, but behind the facade of political celebrity is an unforgiving ideology called technocracy.

You will often hear the trope that “more people have been killed over religion than anything else.” If only it were true. The 20^th century serves as a potent reminder of the misleading nature of that statement, for no other century witnessed the sheer brutality and crimes against humanity on an industrial scale perpetrated in the name of various despotic interpretations of some variant of social Darwinism or political science, reaching levels of totalitarianism never seen before in human history. There are too many examples: WWI, WWII, Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia, Maoist China, Cambodia, Vietnam, Central America, Afghanistan, and Iraq, to name only a few. In almost every instance, the preservation of secular dogma took precedence over the lives and souls of humans who were unfortunate enough to be caught in the crossfire of ‘progress’. Fascism, socialism, communism, neoliberal capitalism – each would justify collateral damage as a means to achieving the goal of transformation or the formulation of a new order.

In the 21^st century, the forces that inherited the mantle of power – the dynastic families and special interests – are preparing the next act in this worldly saga.

The Grand Narrative

So often it’s been said that in war, history is written by the victors, who impose what is known as the ‘living memory’ of a nation or people, chronicling a shared experience, generally of collective sacrifice undertaken for the greater good, and paying tribute to the martyrs along the way. These become the narratives that post-war orders and worldviews are built upon, a central pillar around which the reorganisation of society and economies occurs. Without marshalling the “narrative,” a ruling establishment cannot lead and steer society in its direction of choice. 

What happens in the absence of a bona fide world war? Can elites still construct an equally compelling living memory which the people can rally around? 

Grand narrative management is precisely what Klaus Schwab’s World Economic Forum (WEF) has been attempting from the onset of the ‘global pandemic’ crisis. In 2021, the WEF announced its “Great Narrative” initiative, although evidence for this project can be traced much further back through a number of their documents and website presentations.

To create the requisite living memory, Schwab and the WEF replaced the usual military war piece with the new war on microbes. “The pandemic has revealed the acute need to focus on the future and long-term health of our societies,” said the globalist luminary.

While the rhetoric sounds innocuous, everything we’ve witnessed over the last 24 months proves beyond any doubt that their hyper-centralised ‘public health’ planning has little to do with the health of the individual and more about how the individual can be more effectively managed to serve the collective, that in turn is to be administered by the new technocracy. The WEF is merely the latest avatar for this elitist ideology whose primary goal is always to meet the ruling oligarchy’s financial and consolidation goals and objectives. This was true 100 years ago as it is today.

Just as with the global financial crash in 2008, when elites privatised their profits and socialised their losses through gargantuan government bailouts, so too will elites seek to consolidate their baronial individual asset wealth portfolios and privileged asset classes while demanding infinite self-sacrifice for everyone else – all for the greater good, of course. It is also about managing expectations, as the WEF states:

“The Great Narrative Meeting [in November 2021] is a linchpin of the Great Narrative initiative, a collaborative effort of the world’s leading thinkers to fashion longer-term perspectives and co-create a narrative that can help guide the creation of a more resilient, inclusive and sustainable vision for our collective future.”

You might be asking: what is their endgame? Put simply, every new world order needs a financial reset, and in the WEF’s Great Reset, the plan is to intentionally overinflate and collapse the current fiat money system, reimagined and replaced by a new globalised economic system backed by a new superficial asset class under the guise of the “financialisation of nature.”

That plan gained a significant foothold in October 2021 when the Rockefeller Foundation and the New York Stock Exchange announced the creation of a new asset class that will effectively monetise the natural world as well as the processes underpinning all life. All in the name of “sustainability.” The lifeblood of this system will be a new Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) which will be fully programmable, meaning that the currency issuer can stipulate how the digital money is spent. 

This is the highest form of social engineering conceivable and can become the payment mechanism for Universal Basic Income, allowing the government issuer power over what you are allowed to purchase. It could limit your transactions to green spending and ‘carbon-neutral’ activities. It’s also a system designed to eliminate upward mobility unless you gain promotion through the political economy.

It could lead to the ultimate victory of the technocracy. However, its Achilles heel might be that it seeks to remake the world in such a short space of time, presumably so these masters of the universe can marvel at their ‘remarkable achievements’ in this lifetime – the ultimate act of hubris by these self-anointed stewards of the planet.

When the technocracy movement first emerged in the early 20^th century, contemporary thinkers raised the alarm that pseudo-intellectualism and the mechanised worldview augured an eventual collapse of western civilisation. The timeframe wasn’t clear, only that it was inevitable. In his historical literary work, The Decline of the West (1928), Oswald Spengler described the event horizon that eventually consumes all major cultures, and which generally have a limited lifespan of roughly one thousand years. He examined eight major civilisations as examples: the Babylonians, Egyptians, Chinese, Indian, Greco-Roman, Mayan-Aztec, Arabian, and European-Western. He envisioned the West being consumed by its intellectual vortex:

Today we live so cowed under the bombardment of this intellectual artillery, the media, that hardly anyone can attain to the inward detachment that is required for a clear view of the monstrous drama. The will-to-power operating under a pure democratic disguise has finished off its masterpiece so well that the object’s sense of freedom is actually flattered by the most thorough-going enslavement that has ever existed.

Now realise what is at stake. The unconstrained vision of Davos elites may become the final revolution within a larger civilisational cycle. The Covid-19 pseudo-pandemic would be one of the catalysing events in this process, followed by global cyberwar, and then finally ending in something more outrageous like a nuclear conflagration before ushering in a New World Order. 

Such a protracted multi-phased upheaval would mark the end of the main features of modern western civilisation: the post-Westphalian nation-state, the era of enlightenment and rational thought, self-governing democracy and republican forms of government. The world would move into what Zbigniew Brzezinski called a Technetronic Era. Compared to the 20^th century, this would more resemble a centralised command and control economy and a highly automated society. In terms of individual rights, it would look like a neo-feudal dark age. 

This cycle was discussed by American writers William Strauss and Neil Howe in their book The Fourth Turning (1997), which illustrated how the development of Anglo-American society is a feature of a much larger centuries-old cycle. Or, as Italian commentator Federico Dezzanidescribes it, “like a snake biting its own tail over the span of a century, Anglo-American societies are born, grow, mature and die, only to rise again and begin a new cycle.”

The Noble Lie

In the end, it all comes back to Malthus – Malthusianism – which is ultimately the ideological standard hoisted by the likes of Schwab, Bill Gates, Stanley Johnson, Prince Charles, and globalist outfits like the Trilateral Commission. These elites believe that the people must bear the brunt of this epic existential predicament of an overcrowded planet in a state of terminal decline due to man and his industrial exploits, which is said to be driving anthropogenic global warming to the point where Earth will be uninhabitable. To save humanity from itself, we must be forced to accept that there are too many of us, so we play their globalist game of musical chairs. We know what they mean, but they won’t state their intentions openly, not yet anyway. Only it’s not true.

In Plato’s Republic, in the dialogue of the myth of the metals (social castes), Socrates explains that to maintain order and social continuity, the ruling class must act under the aegis of “the noble lie.” This is based on the belief that from time to time, the ruling class must feed the general populace an ennobling fiction to maintain order and continuity. The noble lie is noble because it benefits the soul of the person who believes it. From an elite’s perspective, this is done for their own good and that they might feel better about their station in life.

If you think about our living memory, or what happened in the West over the last half-century, it’s been a continuum of such lies, although hardly noble: the assassination of JFK, the Gulf of Tonkin incident, Saddam’s WMDs, 19 Arab hijackers on 9/11, spreading freedom and democracy in Afghanistan, overpopulation, climate chaos, Trump-Russian collusion, Covid-19, the Great Reset, and soon it will be the coming war on China. Each epic yarn spun with the help of a 24/7 mainstream and social media barrage of propaganda and misinformation. By brainwashing the population incessantly, the establishment creates the illusion of a ‘bottom-up consensus’, so much so that the people believe they’ve collectively arrived at a grassroots consensus.

Drifting out noble lies in the 21^st century has become a pretty efficient process with the consensus enforced by digital dragnet: dare oppose any noble liedeployed by the globalist caste for your own good to ‘reimagine’ and reorganise socio-economic systems, and you’re treated the same as a blasphemer in medieval times – silenced, excommunicated, banished from view, and no longer permitted to speak in the public commons. Deplatformed, depersoned, cancelled. 

At the same time, however, a very real great awakening is also taking hold with a rising level of political and conscious awareness much broader and wide-ranging than anything before in human history. This is a consequence of the same global panopticon wielded against the people by the elites. Such awareness is the prerequisite to ultimate liberation, or as philosopher G.I. Gurdjieff once said, “If you wish to get out of prison, the first thing you must do is realise that you are in prison. If you think you are free, you can’t escape.”

Which brings us back to the philosophical and existential question: why are we here? What is the purpose of humans on this planet? Darwinian genetic science says we are here to promulgate our genes and advance the species. On a fundamental level, this is what makes us human. But the new green technocracy says this is no longer possible, and we must embrace a higher truth – a new altruism imbued in the Great Reset doctrine. 

The irony is that collectively speaking, humanity might not survive this new ‘empty planet’ initiative. Elite technocrats will contend that only a planned society modelled after Huxley’s vision of a technocracy organised by functional castes and selective breeding in vitro can save the planet from the alleged existential menace of human consumption and climate change. 

Whose compelling future is this? Is this not the ‘scientific dictatorship’ that H.G. Wells foresaw, with a global government run by an elite committee of scientists and technocrats who hold the reins of power over every aspect of life and dictate how society is organised and run minute to minute? This is unconstrained totalitarianism. Under such a system, the individual will have no agency, no conscience, and eventually no soul. 

The last 250 years have been an extraordinary progression from monarchies to democratic nations, in which the state eventually assumed a god-like status. It set the stage for what is heading towards us now: the advent of globalist transhumanism and a one-world unified state.

Far from being its crowning victory, this crescendo of technocracy and the perversion of ‘progress’ exposes how materialism and the scientific priesthood cannot satisfactorily answer the fundamental questions we’ve asked since time immemorial, those eternal questions and divine mysteries pursued by monks, sages, and sannyasi. The forces of modernity cannot resolve this predicament, so people are left searching for something more grounded – where through the natural world they may also know the supernatural. Once again, people reach for religion and spirituality to find meaning and purpose, including (and not surprising as one may think) the younger generation.

We should be under no illusion about the challenges lying before us. But even beyond an awareness of what you face, you need to have a vision of a world you wish to live in. Elites have always been adept at occupying the minds of the people with propaganda, and the latest war or catastrophe, so we never settle long enough to formulate our vision of a compelling future. Instead, our vision is mired in a never-ending procession of reactive emotions, leaving us vulnerable to the power of suggestion – and a ‘compelling future’ is instead continually served up to us by our rulers. They create the problem (a noble lie) that elicits our reaction before they present us with a solution to which there is usually no alternative. 

Make no mistake: the great and the good in Davos are busy designing your ‘compelling future’, and if no other counter-narrative is offered, they will decide your future for you. It’s that simple.

Qui tacet consentit. Translated: your silence is your consent.

There is still much work to be done, but the work is never done. Throughout time, this has always been the case. The more things change, the more they are the same.

[alert type=”general” dismiss=”no”]This article was published in New Dawn Special Issue Vol 15 No 6.[/alert]

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Footnotes

1. Albert Camus (1963), quote from “Carnets: 1935-1942”

2. Wall Street’s New Asset Class Will Put Natural World ‘Up for Sale’, https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/wall-street-new-york-stock-exchange-natural-asset-company

3. Federico Dezzani, www.geopolitica.ru/en/article/covid-destruction-institutions-and-beyond

4. What is a Noble Lie?, https://kenyonreview.org/2007/02/what-is-a-noble-lie/

© New Dawn Magazine and the respective author.
For our reproduction notice, click here.

From New Dawn Special Issue Vol 12 No 1 (Feb 2018)

The Russian thinker and ideologue Alexander Dugin, who has been working to shape Russian political and intellectual life over the course of four decades, has attracted many supporters and detractors. They are deeply divided, and yet they share one thing in common: both see him as an almost mythological figure. 

To his enemies, he is a demon: the dark hand behind Putin’s throne, an occult fascist pushing Russia back into totalitarianism and expansionist aggression, with tentacles reaching into the rising populist nationalism of Europe and especially among the American Alt-Right and the Trump administration [2017-2021]. To his supporters, he is a hero for our age: a master of philosophy and the esoteric who is building the foundations for a new sociopolitical paradigm that will provide true freedom for all the peoples of the world and deliver them from the ravages of globalisation and neoliberalism.

While my own view of him is more sober and nuanced, I confess that it is closer to that of his supporters, given that I was the one who supervised the publication of the first translations of Dr Dugin’s books into English. I’ve been an avid follower of his work since the late 1990s, when I first discovered Arctogaia, the first website to offer his writings in (crude) English translations made by well-meaning Russian volunteers. When I stumbled across this site, I eagerly read the essays, which were an unusual, but thought-provoking, mix of ideas drawn from the European New Right, Traditionalism, Russian Orthodox mysticism, the occult, runology, geopolitics, Soviet Communism, and anarchism, among others. 

It seemed that this thinker was interested in all the same things that I was, but which I had never considered combining as he was doing – and which produced some fascinating results. I have long been of the view that the political categories of ‘Left’ and ‘Right’ are unnecessarily restrictive, for instance, and that the way to discover new paradigms beyond neoliberalism lies in something that would draw on both ‘sides’ – and this is something that Dr Dugin was actually doing.

Indeed, much of the confusion regarding Dr Dugin’s reception in the West stems from his attempt to synthesize many disparate and seemingly contradictory ideas and schools of thought. This is further hampered in the Anglophone world by the fact that, of his many dozens of books and hundreds of articles that have been published in Russian, and which deal not only with politics and philosophy but with topics as diverse as religion, esotericism, anthropology, sociology, and history, only a handful have so far appeared in English translation, leaving enormous gaps for foreign readers. Dr Dugin himself has been attempting to address this problem by presenting a seemingly endless series of websites over the years which present his views and those of his followers, the latest being Geopolitica.ru. 

Regardless of these efforts, however, many in the media continue to depict Dr Dugin as a force threatening the world. One might be tempted to laugh at such hyperbole until one remembers that the US Treasury Department recently placed him on its list of officially sanctioned individuals.

I’m pleased to say that on the one occasion when it was my pleasure to meet Dr Dugin in person, at a sociological conference in New Delhi in 2012 (the topic of which, interestingly, was “After Western Hegemony”), there was nothing obviously demonic about the man. He wasn’t wearing black (only a casual suit), and there were no FSB agents or familiars following in his wake. Indeed, he was quite mild-mannered, amiable, and soft-spoken. The only thing ‘mystical’ about his appearance was his famous beard – which marks him as a raskolnik, or “Old Believer,” that sect of the Russian Orthodox Church which rejected liberalising reforms that were introduced in the seventeenth century. Contrary to those who claim that Dr Dugin’s professed beliefs are nothing more than a show, I can attest that he was diligently following the fasting days, and while I ordered a normal dinner and beer, he restricted himself to nothing more than some fruits, and offered his prayers before eating. But that evening and into the next day, we had many hours of conversation that, like his writings, traversed the entire spectrum of knowledge, from politics and current events to philosophy and religion. 

In order to really understand what he is doing, one has to trace the origins of his ideas back to a rather unorthodox interpretation of the Traditionalism of René Guénon and Julius Evola – and to understand that, one must know something about Dr Dugin’s life.¹

Dr Dugin was born in Moscow in 1962 to a father who was a Colonel-General in Soviet military intelligence and a mother who was a medical doctor. In his book Putin vs Putin, he mentions that one of his ancestors was Savva Dugin, an Old Believer who was beheaded for calling for the restoration of the Orthodox Patriarchate and for condemning secular political authority.² In 1980, while a student at the Moscow Aviation Institute, he discovered Traditionalism, and became embroiled in the tiny Traditionalist subculture which existed in Moscow at that time, having been inspired by those Traditionalist books which, somewhat mysteriously for a Communist-supported institution, had been acquired by the Lenin State Library decades earlier. 

Given that atheism was still the officially prescribed doctrine of the Soviet Union, these activities were obviously restricted to the subversive underground. Dugin produced the first-ever translation of a Traditionalist text into Russian, Julius Evola’s Pagan Imperialism, in 1981, which was circulated in samizdat form. Dugin also formed a band, Hans Zivers, which in today’s terms would be described as dark neofolk – a single album of this music, Blood Libel, has since been released on CD and on YouTube. In 1983, word of these performances reached the KGB (which condemned them as “mystical anti-Communist songs”). As a result, Dugin was briefly detained, and then expelled from the Aviation Institute. Undeterred, he continued to study Traditionalism, supporting himself with a day job as a street sweeper.

After a brief foray into politics in the nationalist party Pamyat during the late 1980s – the first party other than the Communist Party that was tolerated in the Soviet Union – Dugin began associating with the school of thought which has been called the “European New Right,” first established by the Frenchman Alain de Benoist, that was (and is) working to establish a true intellectual and political alternative to neoliberalism in Europe. Although an opponent of the USSR during the 1980s, his earliest trips to Western Europe at this time showed him that, as bad as it was, the West was in far worse shape, having lost its deeper sense of meaning and succumbed to the wiles of American-style consumerism and popular culture. This had the somewhat ironic effect of converting him into a late supporter of the Soviet Union. Although Dr Dugin is not, and has never been, a Communist, he came to recognise at this time that the USSR, as flawed and problematic as it was, had at least protected Russia and its satellite states from the onslaught of neoliberalism and nihilism that had overtaken the West in the post-war years. Likewise, he realised that the demise of the Soviet Union meant that the only significant check on American hegemony had been neutralised, and the United States was now more or less free to have its way with the rest of the world.

During this period, Dugin worked with a number of organisations that opposed the new, democratic Russia that had been brought into being under the auspices of Boris Yeltsin, although in 1993 he began what was to become his defining activity of the 1990s, when he became one of the founders of the National Bolshevik Party (NBP). The National Bolsheviks claimed the legacy of the groups and thinkers which had gone by that name in both Germany and among Russian exiles during the 1920s, who had sought to combine elements of Communism with nationalism and traditional values. In practice, however, the NBP was more of a group of pranksters than a serious contender for political power, and Dugin left it in 1998.

Eurasia

In the 1990s Dugin first embraced the school which was to define the next phase of his political activism: Eurasianism. Eurasianism was a doctrine first developed among the Russian émigrés in Europe during the 1920s. It is a complex theory, but it essentially held that Russia is a unique civilisation more closely associated with Asia than with the West.³ Dr Dugin adopted these ideas and furthered them by claiming that a new Russian empire, comprising the same territories which had formerly been incorporated within the Soviet Union, was required in order to form a bulwark against American and NATO hegemony, which threatened not only Russia but the entire world with the imposition of a monoculture based on nothing more than the values of globalisation and the marketplace. The fundamental conflict for Dugin, as it was for many geopolitical thinkers before him, is between the conservative, land-based powers of the ‘World-Island’ of Eurasia and the liberal, maritime-based powers of the United States and its allies.

Toward this aim, in 2001 Dr Dugin established the International Eurasia Movement, the organisation which he continues to lead up to the present. While not uncritical, Dugin has always praised Vladimir Putin as the shepherd who, if he follows the trends he has initiated toward their more radical conclusion, will inaugurate the new Russian imperium. Dugin’s precise relationship with Putin has long been a bone of contention among Russia observers, with some going so far as to claim that Dugin is “Putin’s brain.” While this is certainly an exaggeration, as Dugin has never held any official position at the Kremlin, it is nevertheless true that he has been in the Kremlin’s orbit for many years. 

When I asked Dr Dugin about this relationship when we met in 2012, he told me that he has been in contact with Putin and there are people at the Kremlin who are interested in his geopolitical ideas, but who don’t have any time for his Traditionalist or philosophical ideas. Exactly how much influence he has exerted is difficult to say, but one can definitely detect some very ‘Duginesque’ language when Putin gives speeches extolling Russia’s role as the guardian of conservative values, or calling for a multipolar world, with many nations – Russia being chief among them, of course, but also including other powerful nations such as China, Brazil, and Iran – sharing hegemony over their respective regions, as opposed to the present order, which is viewed as a unipolar world in which the United States holds sway over the entire globe. Such concepts could be taken straight from Dugin’s writings. Similarly, Putin’s geopolitical strategy in the formation of the Eurasian Economic Union, or in his approach to countries such as Georgia, Syria, and Ukraine, very much bear the marks of Dugin’s geopolitical thinking. How much of this is merely coincidence and how much is actual influence is unclear, but political events of recent years have shown that the trajectory of Russian politics is very much in keeping with Dugin’s own prophecies. 

Dugin does not see the political order that he is calling for as something that will benefit only Russia, but something that will in fact save all of humanity from destructive, homogenizing forces. And it is here that we end up returning to the Traditionalism with which he began his career. According to the Traditionalists, each of the world’s major religions is a manifestation of a single metaphysical truth, but expressed differently according to the cultural and geographical demands of each people to which it is revealed. No religion can therefore claim to be the “one true faith,” but at the same time, there is a specific religion that is most appropriate for every people and which was created specifically for them. Dr Dugin has expanded the Traditionalist worldview to politics. For him, it is not simply a matter of religion, but also the case that particular political systems and cultural norms are appropriate for each people of the world, and that these elements cannot be transferred from one people to another without either cutting them off from their metaphysical roots, resulting in alienation and decay, or destroying them altogether.

The political implications of this view should be clear. The United States, using its unprecedented military and economic might, is attempting to export its political and economic systems and its culture to every corner of the globe in the pursuit of a New World Order in which the entire planet will, in effect, become American. (One must hasten to add that Dugin has made it clear in various writings that he does not regard the American people themselves as the enemy, but only the political and economic forces which rule over them, viewing ordinary Americans as being their first victims.)

This Manichean worldview thus pits America, and those who support it, in a fight to the death against those who oppose it – and for Dugin, unsurprisingly, Russia is at the centre of the opposition to their designs, and ideally, should be coordinating it all. In political terms, this means that anyone who opposes the US should be supported, even when their aims do not precisely align with those of Eurasianism. This is not a war between Left and Right as usually understood, since Dugin favours nations, individuals, and groups from both sides of that divide, but rather as a war between neoliberalism and non-neoliberalism. 

Trump & the Alt-Right

In his videos and articles, Dugin has made it clear that he genuinely does think Donald Trump could be the one to banish the globalist elites from Washington, cease America’s overseas military adventures, and reach a new understanding between America and Russia; even if he fails in these efforts, Dugin surely sees him as someone who has thrown the American political establishment into chaos, to the benefit of Russia and other dissenters around the world. 

As for the Alt-Right, Dugin has made it clear in many of his writings that he rejects racialism (he has maintained there is no objective standard by which to measure the value of one race against another), which is so dear to the Alt-Right, and yet, as already mentioned, the crucial factor for him is only whether a given group is for or against the current neoliberal order. Given that, at least at its best, the Alt-Right represents a rejection of neoliberalism and of the foundations of the American order more generally, it is in keeping with Dugin’s usual doctrine to overlook his points of disagreement with them in the hope they might serve to weaken the grip of neoliberalism over America, and in turn the world. Nevertheless, the efforts of some journalists to paint Dugin as some sort of guru to the Alt-Right is nothing more than propaganda – because of his rejection of racialism, Dugin is much more often disparaged than studied by the denizens of the erstwhile Alt-Right ‘movement’.  

This article barely scratches the surface of Dr Dugin’s thought in all its facets, but I have attempted to convey something of his overarching worldview. Dugin is not the sort of thinker we are accustomed to dealing with in the Anglophone world – he is more akin to the apocalyptic Orthodox writers of the nineteenth century, such as Vladimir Soloviev, than he is to a typical Western political theorist. Regardless of what one thinks of his views, understanding him offers a unique perspective on Russia’s actions as well as the hopes and dreams of anti-liberal political dissidents around the world. 

[alert type=”general” dismiss=”no”]This article was published in New Dawn Special Issue Vol 12 No 1.[/alert]

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Footnotes

1. Much of the following account of Dr Dugin’s early life is summarised from Mark Sedgwick, Against the Modern World: Traditionalism and the Secret Intellectual History of the Twentieth Century, Oxford University Press, 2004, 222-237; the rest is from my own research.

2. Alexander Dugin, Putin vs Putin: Vladimir Putin Viewed from the Right, Arktos, 2014, 66

3. An excellent introduction to both historical and present-day Eurasianism was recently published: Charles Clover, Black Wind, White Snow: The Rise of Russia’s New Nationalism, Yale University Press, 2016. The best introduction to Dugin’s own conception of Eurasianism in English to date remains: Alexander Dugin, Eurasian Mission: An Introduction to Neo-Eurasianism, Arktos, 2014.

© New Dawn Magazine and the respective author.
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From New Dawn 188 (Jul-Aug 2021)

We knew the world was changing in radical ways, but we never thought it would happen this fast. 

In 2015, I penned a feature article for this publication entitled “Oceania Forever: Rise of the Global Police State.”¹ After closely following the steady construction of a global control grid after 9/11, it was still difficult to see exactly where it was all going and why. Many of us knew the surveillance infrastructure would be permanent, and there was undoubtedly some speculation of an emerging supranational global government, but still no clear endgame in sight. 

All that changed in 2020, and many of my previous questions were answered. 

With the advent of the global pandemic, the global police state had finally received its marching orders.

Nearly a year later, in 2016, I wrote a follow-up piece in an attempt to visualise what an emerging technocracy might look and feel like – the shape of things to come, underpinned by the technocratic visions of arch globalist Zbigniew Brzezinski. That article, “Technetronic Enslavement: Life Inside the Matrix of Control,” was published in New Dawn 156 (May-June 2016). Since then, my suspicions have been validated and questions answered through the emergence of the globalists’ Great Reset agenda.

So here we are, a full eighteen months down the road of the Great Plague, and looking around we now see what life is like inside a New World Order.

No one expected it would come so fast and on such an international scale.

The shock and awe also signalled the beginning of what looks more and more like a post-democratic era – the ascendency of global fascism with cold technocratic features, orchestrated by an elite cabal of rapacious oligarchs, and remorseless bureaucrats taking their instructions from shadowy cliques of science advisors governing every conceivable aspect of our daily lives… right down to where we are allowed to travel, if we are allowed to work, what we can buy, whether our children can attend school, and even who we are allowed to meet. The level of control even extends to the mandating of masks and what experimental injections we are expected to receive in order to ‘win back our freedoms’ and return to normal life.

We’re told by our leaders that all of this is necessary and permanent, and that it’s for our safety, and the safety of the collective. The new regime is not just national, it’s global.

A New Order: Post-Covid Geopolitics

One thing became clear early on – nearly every government on the planet used the pandemic to tighten its grip on power and its domestic situation and quell any potential uprising or political opposition. Many countries have gone so far as to suspend parliament, delay elections, and impose a semi-permanent state of emergency. 

Countries more authoritarian, or with one-party systems, haven’t felt the same civil strife as many so-called democratic countries whose citizens might resist the removal of individual rights and freedoms. Still, even in those countries, the level of public compliance to public health policy edicts was almost shockingly seamless.

Certainly, in a country like China – the alleged epicentre of the pandemic – the government has managed its pandemic policies and lockdowns without too much pushback from the general population. Somewhat surprisingly, countries like the UK and others appeared to take cues from China early on, copying all of its symbolic policy moves, including the use of lockdowns to supposedly ‘stop the spread’ of the virus.

All of this comes with a very uneasy feeling. Only in preparation for war have we seen this level of rapid societal and economic reorganisation, the shuttering of institutions and services, and suspension of rights. This fact alone is worrying as countries invoked their fusion doctrines, resiliency measures, and international network routes are already prepared for an ongoing global upheaval.

One of the more disturbing features of the Western-centric narrative has been the scapegoating of China for the pandemic. Western politicians and media pundits accuse China, at the very least, of being responsible for a reckless ‘lab leak’ of an engineered coronavirus out of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, or at worst deliberately releasing a viral bioweapon that has killed three million people and devastated the global economy. Regardless of whether any of that is even remotely true, the reality is that a generation of Westerners are now conditioned to view China with suspicion, or worse, as the enemy.

A New Cold War and Return to Bipolarism

Are we being primed for a new Cold War, and if so, what would it look like?

In some ways, it would be much like the previous Cold War; a perpetual affair characterised by long-term, low-intensity conflict, both abroad (against the enemy) as well as at home (against domestic terrorism), carefully designed to hem in populations on both sides of a new global paradigm. 

Elites prefer a bipolar world rather than a multipolar one. For starters, a bipolar Cold War is much easier to physically control and administer. More crucially still is the management of intellectual and political life in a bipolar world order. During the US-led post-WWII liberal world order, political thought and philosophy were built up and maintained around a bipolar worldview and predictable power dynamics. It naturally lent itself to a fairly tight cadre of realist academics and intellectuals who fashioned the global political conversation along East vs West, and Capitalist vs Communist ideological discourse. This same intellectual syndicate, led at the time by international relations scholars like Samuel P. Huntington and Francis Fukuyama, declared “the end of history” following the disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1991. The Western liberal and free-market model had prevailed, they proclaimed, and for another few decades, the bipolarists performed a victory lap which ushered in an era led by a neoconservative and neoliberal unipolar phase of US and NATO-led domination of various global regions.

If a bipolar world order is to return, then it will likely be an Anglo-American led Western alliance vs a Chinese-Russian-led alliance. And like the previous Cold War, there will be a contested or disputed zone somewhere in between that serves as a convenient ‘away’ pitch for a protracted ideological, military and proxy conflict between these two great powers. One way to maintain a bipolar world order, and not allow it to develop into an uncontrollable, unpredictable multipolar world order, is to cripple the countries within the contested zones – in effect, weakening and even destroying emerging tiger economies and emerging markets. The object is not necessarily to bomb them into submission, although the West tried this over the last 30 years. Rather, it is to cripple them through economic sanctions or ‘green’ climate change regulations, preventing their development towards first world nation status. Economically weakening a country allows for the creation of a perpetual state of dependency on aid, resource extraction by foreign powers, leading to continuous political instability and a constant brain drain of its best and brightest who would usually form the vanguard of any future populist movement. This has been the neocolonial formula for managing target nations for much of the post-WWII epoch. 

In the context of present-day China, a variation of this Western strategy would aim to takeover or cripple the nations along China’s new Belt and Road Initiative. We’d see a return to Halford Mackinder’s “World Island” theory which saw the strategic imperative of controlling (or disrupting) a unified Eurasian landmass. This might also extend to the BRICS nations bloc (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa), and also the newly codified “Axis of Resistance” comprising the Islamic Republic of Iran, Iraq, Yemen, Syria, Palestine, and Hezbollah in southern Lebanon. While Belt and Road is global and primarily for the benefit of China and stakeholder nations along those trade and transport lines, its emergence serves as unwelcome competition to the predatory Western internationalist model. This could signal a return to Great Game grand strategy, pitting Western sea power against a Chinese-led operational control of the Eurasian landmass – the chief objective being the disruption of resource acquisition by China, and fracturing high-volume Belt and Road travel and commerce routes. In this new bipolar world order, many geopolitical routes and clusters might eventually become part of a “disputed zone,” not unlike the very one depicted in George Orwell’s geopolitical map in the classic dystopian novel 1984. 

This is not to say that an influential Eurasian geopolitical bloc based on traditional values and norms cannot emerge in the way that Russian political analyst and philosopher Alexander Dugin describes in his numerous treatises, such as The Fourth Political Theory, and Last War of the World-Island: The Geopolitics of Contemporary Russia, to name a few. But if the great powers are intent on preventing the unification of the World Island and forcing the world back into a bipolar paradigm, then it’s likely that Eurasia’s shatter-belt nations, the Middle East and Far East, could once again play a part in a cycle of instability and conflict. 

What better way to retain a firm grip on order at home and along the periphery of the contested zone than to declare perpetual war. For the elites ruling the Western bloc, a new cold (or warm) war also benefits them with raison d’état at home. Or, as Orwell famously said, “Oceania was at war with Eastasia. Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia.”

Over the last 40 years, China has been allowed to develop, but only to a point where it does not threaten the global political and cultural stronghold maintained by the Anglo-American control mesh of Five Eyes intelligence and NATO military alliances. From that viewpoint, economic and political gains are acceptable so long as they are confined to Asian wealth creation and prosperity. But the moment those gains are transformed into economic dependence of Western nations on Asian and Eurasian powers like China and Russia – the geopolitical alarm is tripped and the West’s rapid response mechanism springs into action. Western imperialists know that economic dependence would precede political subservience. 

Their fears may be well-founded, but the reaction can often be counterproductive and negatively impact countries and peoples caught in the middle. Certainly, this was a major source of friction throughout the Cold War (1947–1991), with instability from proxy wars of that period still enduring to the present day. Russia’s Nord Stream 2 natural gas pipeline project is a prime example. The United States and its allies made it a top priority to disrupt the joint Russian-German energy venture that will bring clean and affordable Russian gas to Europe. A series of regime change operations, proxy wars, false flag events, and all-out propaganda, was waged against Moscow to trigger economic sanctions and ultimately derail the pipeline. The thought of Germany becoming dependent on Russia and developing good bilateral relations is the stuff of horrors for the Anglo-American alliance which relies on constant East-West tension to keep NATO relevant and well-resourced as a military confab and extend its commercial interests through Europe and into the former Soviet states. 

Beyond this, one should be cognizant of the fact that any significant fossil fuel project will be viewed as a direct threat to the global elites’ Great Reset and UN Agenda 2030, and subsequent transition to a New World Order and Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR).

The Great Reset is very much a Western and European-led project. After WWII, traditional colonial powers became post-colonial powers and took on self-appointed custodial duties of planetary management, including ‘climate’ and environmental oversight of what they refer to as the ‘global commons’. By all accounts, this is Brzezinski’s great Technetronic era, only much more green in its rhetoric and governance, designed, we’re told, to save the planet by stopping anthropogenic (man-made) global warming, otherwise known as climate change.

Dangerous Delusions of Malthusianism

This phase of the New World Order, meant to save humanity from the supposed scourge of CO², conceals a rather disturbing continuance of an older agenda: population management, rooted in 19^th century Malthusian theory, and buttressed by a radical offshoot of Darwinism – a social engineering movement known as eugenics.² 

Thomas Robert Malthus (1766–1834) was an aspiring social engineer who thought the global population would increase geometrically while food production increased arithmetically. What this meant was that humans would be unable to produce enough food to sustain themselves. Fortunately, Malthus was way off on his calculations, but his legacy endures. Historically, wherever you find ‘overpopulation’ discussions, you find eugenicists directing the conversation from the shadows through lavish funding by foundations and civil society organisations, or under the increasingly dubious guise of ‘public health’.

Two leading Malthusian proponents of recent decades are William Gates Sr, father of Bill Gates, and Stanley Johnson, father of current British Prime Minister Boris Johnson. 

As head of the world’s largest private abortion chain organisation, Planned Parenthood, and arguably the driving force behind Bill Gates’ obsession with vaccines, Gates Sr imparted on his son the elite responsibility of planetary management of the masses. Beginning in 2020, Bill Gates Jr has been leading the World Health Organization (WHO), the pharmaceutical industry, and an unprecedented intergovernmental effort, to vaccinate the world’s population with the experimental Covid-19 gene-based jab. When asked about safety concerns, Gates dismissed critics saying that the world did not have time to do proper safety testing and that any collateral damage must be priced-in for the “greater good.” Interestingly, before the pandemic, many of Gates’ media appearances focused on global population management.³ 

Stanley Johnson seems to be an even more staunch population reductionist and authored the novel The Virus (1982) about a pandemic threatening to wipe out Europe. He wrote other books obsessing about overpopulation, including the Population Problem (1970), Life Without Birth (1970), and World Population and the United Nations (1987). In one interview, Johnson opined that he would like to reduce the population of Britain substantially, flatly stating, “Britain’s population should be 10-15 million people. That would do us splendidly. It’s a nonsense that we are confronted with 70 million people. But we have been shunted aside by the rise of liberal correctness.”⁴ To call him a committed Malthusian would be an understatement. It would be useful to know how much of the father’s radical worldview is responsible for son Boris’ enthusiasm for adhering to the UN and World Economic Forum (WEF) Great Reset agenda, adorned with shiny new straplines like “Build Back Better.”

Woke Technocracy of Build Back Better

Invariably, eugenics leads directly to another branch of the elite technocracy movement – transhumanism. During this global pandemic crisis, the ascendancy of Big Tech, Big Pharma and BioTech industries has created an extremely soft-landing pad for transhumanist ideas and the fetishization of an endless array of ‘smart’ technologies, the Internet of Things (IoT), and artificial intelligence (AI) applications. These advances are certainly in development, but adoption is a slow and tedious process. Technocrats are taking advantage of Covid to gain a velocity unattainable outside of a staged crisis like a global pandemic. 

Social engineering, specifically a system of ‘social credit’ scoring, is now ready for implementation in the West. Elite technocrats look enviously at the Chinese social credit system in which citizen behaviour is assigned a score logged on a central database where officials can restrict privileges like air travel, buying property, or taking out a loan.⁵ This is not unlike Oceania’s citizen scoring system depicted in Orwell’s 1984. The idea may already have gained a foothold in the West through the new ‘Vaccine Passport’ system being aggressively pushed by governments and corporate elites. 

If allowed to proceed, this biopower tracking regime spells an end to previous universally held liberties like the individual right to bodily autonomy and freedom of movement. The imposition of such a system is a hard break from the post-enlightenment era of constitutional republican and democratic governments, giving way to the tyrannical proclivities of an increasingly powerful ruling class, draping itself under the veil of the common good to do the collective will – which can be fashioned through the relentless application of weaponised propaganda and applied behavioural psychology. The collective will or greater good can be whatever the state deems it to be, through the same process of manufacturing consent as outlined in Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman’s seminal text of the same title.⁶ The weapons of information warfare used to prosecute wars on foreign soil are now fully deployed against the citizens of Western countries. In this way, Orwell’s dystopian fiction is the playbook for what authorities have done in practice from the beginning of the Covid crisis.

In this context, we can view Klaus Schwab’s Build Back Better (BBB) clarion call for a Great Reset as a re-consolidation of the Western Hemisphere and its satellite properties in the developing world – and in direct conflict with China’s Belt and Road. BBB is pure woke technocracy and seeks to put a cap on any development which is not ‘green’. 

However, BBB goes much deeper than many people realise. At this year’s [2021] G7 Summit in Cornwall, England, British PM Boris Johnson raised a few conservative eyebrows when he declared that BBB would mean, “Build back greener, build back fairer, build back more… gender neutral.”

While this brand of woke identity politics was known to be present in the WEF material, it was still shocking to hear such progressive post-modernist proselytising coming from a Tory PM. This could also be viewed as an attack on the family itself – the fundamental pillar of any community, state or nation. In this regard, the Western-led drive towards a woke reset is an affront to the nation-state and prelude to an amorphous borderless globalist order. Of course, there will be borders, but perhaps only as exclusion zones – and accessible if a global subject is carrying the correct track and trace digital ID or Vaccine Passport.

What’s important to understand is that this kind of world order was not possible before. Only with new advances in digital technology, data sharing, satellite and surveillance networks, could such an insidious web be implemented.

Embryonic Global Government?

As they often say, a global crisis requires a global response.

The Covid crisis has accelerated the mechanisms required to obliterate the DNA of most sovereign countries through the digital systems used to administrate a new global governance regime. This has been achieved in the following ways – the closure of borders, the normalisation of Covid testing and digital IDs, the demonisation of physical cash and adoption of a cashless society, the final goal being the intentional collapse of the real economy leading to Central Bank-issued digital currency.

Under a future uniform technocracy, there’s no longer any need for democratic forms of government – only symbolic leadership elections of pseudo-populist figureheads who provide the public with stylistic or nuanced differences in appearance (age, gender, colour or ethnicity) and rhetoric, but no substantial deviation from technocratic prescriptions. Should an ‘elected’ leader pursue any genuine populist or traditionalist policies, they would be summarily removed by the real power centre – the high committee of technocrats. 

This system will be formally adopted first in the advanced Western regions and then in the developing world. The EU Parliament is the beta test for such a system, with MEPs elected in their respective member states, sent to Brussels, but they have no actual power to propose new laws. Rather, an unelected European Commission (EU civil service) ultimately drafts and proposes legislation, which MEPs are allowed to rubber stamp. Despite the undemocratic nature of the EU, there seems little or no protesting from member states. Under this system, change is not a grassroots or bottom-up political effort but a top-down exercise micro-managed by ‘experts’. To date, this is the closest model of embryonic global government, and they’ve had 30 years to fine-tune it before expanding to other global regions. By definition, it is a functioning technocracy.

Green World Order

The Great Reset transition to a Green New Deal and the “financialisation of nature,” paving the way towards automated 4IR, has been exposed in detail by several cutting-edge independent researchers.⁷ These plans are being hatched at the United Nations and Wall Street level (led by BlackRock), with the new multi-trillion dollar green bond markets, carbon credit trading, and other collateralised green futures and instruments, sold to the public by way of celebrities like Greta Thunberg. 

Government policies like lockdowns have accelerated this new green economy, not on its own merits but by wrecking the existing economy and squeezing out what are now deemed nonessential businesses and services, and anything that falls foul of the post-pandemic New Normal. This constriction will continue, and governments will print up even more money for corporate bailouts and to pay the burgeoning ranks of the unemployed and underemployed not to work. This is a price worth paying for the globalists because the inevitable inflationary cycles that are now set in motion will only negatively affect the lower and middle classes by robbing them of their savings and purchasing power. The elite and mobile globalist class will not feel the negative economic impact, and in fact have seen record gains for those in the favoured digital and ‘essential’ industries. Thanks to generous government ‘stimulus’ money over the last year, the net worth of the billionaire class grew by a quarter to well over $10 trillion and counting.⁸

As the culling of the real economy continues, that number could easily double by this time next year. These are the new robber barons of the early 21^st century, the superclass who will have the liquidity and capital to buy up the remaining assets tied to the old economy and invest in and own the ground level of the new green economy. Like the Rockefellers, Morgans, and Carnegies of the last industrial revolution and oil boom, today’s tech lords are set to dominate this New World Order for at least the next 100 years.

For these global oligarchs, things have never been so good. The New Normal helped solidify their position and wipe out prospective competitors for a generation or more. Schwab and the high priests of technocracy are excited about the destruction brought by lockdowns.

“Many of us are pondering when things will return to normal. The short response is: never. Nothing will ever return to the ‘broken’ sense of normalcy that prevailed prior to the crisis because the coronavirus pandemic marks a fundamental inflection point in our global trajectory,” opined the WEF leader in his Great Reset manifesto.

For many, this is a return of feudalism, but on a new global scale. Schwab admits, “We must prepare for a more angry world.”

The WEF technocrats call for a ‘fair’ Great Reset, run under the new banner of ‘stakeholder capitalism’ and always in the woke spirit of ‘equity’ and utopian-sounding global citizenship. The reality is that the top of this new ‘sustainable’ pyramid will be a hardened corporatist fascist layer dominated by top transnational corporations and government bureaucracies, while the bottom majority will have a collectivist, communitarian system imposed upon them. In the words of the Great Reset proponents, “In the future, you will rent everything” and “you will own nothing and be happy.” That is the future which technocrats are planning for.

Fascism & Conformity

After a year and a half, we are left asking ourselves how such an extreme brand of tyranny has been allowed to promulgate so quickly, and with relative ease. The answer to this question may lie in a study of 20^th-century fascism.

The mechanism of control is not necessarily down to flamboyant totalitarian leaders as one might presume. It’s much more subtle and deeper. According to the social psychologist Erich Fromm (1900–1980), the mechanism is found in peoples’ need to exhibit conformity as they harmonise with what he describes as the “authoritarian conscience.”⁹ The authoritarian conscience in its extreme form, he said, is not about following the commands of a charismatic, authoritarian figure. Morality is determined by conformism. “Virtue is to be adjusted and to be like the rest. Vice, to be different.”

The Covid crisis, with its tightly-wound government and corporate partnership prosecuting the pandemic, has elevated the virtue of conformity with religious zeal. This is now fully internalised by traumatised members of the public.

When a person goes against the group, it no longer brings fear of aloneness but also feelings of guilt. Once internalised, it has a powerful hold on people. According to Fromm: “Conscience is a more effective regulator of conduct than fear of external authorities; for, while one can run away from the latter, one cannot escape from oneself nor, therefore from the internalised authority which has become part of oneself.”¹⁰

This explains the power of self-policing behaviour. With individual rights and liberties stripped by the state, the individual is subsumed by the hive. 

Hundred Years War?

When US President George W. Bush famously remarked in 2001, “Our war on terror begins with al Qaeda, but it does not end there,” many thought they’d be digging in for a very long haul. Thus far, the global war on terror has spanned some 20 years.

The stage is now set for a series of new wars.

We are presently engulfed in a new war against another invisible enemy – a biological war against a virus. Or so we’re told. Whether or not SARS-CoV-2 is the bio-threat the government, media and pharma cartels insist that it is, we can be sure that a real war has been waged on our rights and freedoms. We can predict the prospect of a new global war on bio-terror, and an international bioweapons ‘arms race’ which will drive the new cottage bio-terrorism industry.

After the biowar, we can already see the rumblings of a new global cyberwar – complete with endless false flag cyberattacks causing untold chaos and unnecessarily stoking up even more geopolitical tension and animosity between the great powers. Note also that Klaus Schwab cryptically warned the world in 2020 that a cyberwar is coming.

Finally, after the biowar and cyberwar, there remains the final geopolitical spectre, the sum of all fears – thermonuclear war. This could take on a very different tone than the mutually assured destruction (MAD) model that ballasted the US vs USSR Cold War of the 20^th century. Today’s world is one of low yield ‘tactical nukes’ which could spark a number of scenarios with unforeseen reactions and outcomes. An asymmetric tactical nuclear war would be more chaotic and likely converge conventional military conflict and continuous cyberwar and bio-threats. Under these circumstances – real or imagined – locking down whole countries and regions as ‘exclusion zones’ could become routine. 

If the Fourth Industrial Revolution comes to fruition and the AI-run machines challenge the pre-eminence of humans on this planet, this conflict could last for one hundred years.

Overcoming the Illusion

These are scenarios based on the foreshadowing that has been broadcast by elites. Some of this, as undesirable as it sounds, could be possible.

In the end, Great Games and grand strategies are about power – who holds it and who wields it well enough to frighten opponents but still achieve strategic objectives.

In many different ways, the architects of this chaos have declared war on humanity.

Whether humanity prevails depends on if we remain human, and that depends on how well we see through the illusion.

We are here now. This is life inside the New World Order.

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Footnotes

1. Oceania Forever: Rise of the Global Police State by Patrick Henningsen, New Dawn 153 (Nov-Dec 2015).

2. Roles of science in eugenics, https://eugenicsarchive.ca/discover/
encyclopedia/535eee157095aa0000000256

3. Bill Gates on Africa’s population boom, www.youtube.com/watch?v=0MMifQvuN08

4. Zac Goldsmith: climate change pushes other issues off the agenda, www.theguardian.com/environment/2012/jun/06/climate-change-other-issues-goldsmith

5. The complicated truth about China’s social credit system, www.wired.co.uk/article/china-social-credit-system-explained

6. An Animated Introduction to Noam Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent and How the Media Creates the Illusion of Democracy, www.openculture.com/2017/03/an-animated-introduction-to-noam-chomskys-
manufacturing-consent.html

7. For example, the work of Cory Morningstar on www.theartof
annihilation.com

8. Billionaire Wealth Hits $10 Trillion For First Time Ever Thanks To Government Stimulus, www.forbes.com/sites/oliverwilliams1/2020/10/06/billionaire-wealth-hits-10-trillion-for-first-time-ever-thanks-to-
government-stimulous/

9. Conformism, www.sciencedirect.com/topics/social-sciences/conformism

10. Ibid.

© New Dawn Magazine and the respective author.
For our reproduction notice, click here.

From New Dawn Special Issue Vol 15 No 4 (Aug 2021)

In Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell described three competing tyrannies: Oceania, Eastasia, and Eurasia. As the great powers fight endless wars (or so their publics are told), the domestic population of Oceania is suppressed by Big Brother’s omniscient surveillance, the Ministry of Truth’s dictation of reality, and the compliance of the public, who report any dissent to the ruling Ingsoc party. It has long been a cliché to say that we live in Orwellian times.

The first Cold War lasted roughly from 1945 to 1991, with the collapse of the Soviet Union. The second began in 2000 with the election of Russia’s President Vladimir Putin and continues to the present. Examples of events that support a Cold War 2.0 hypothesis include proxy wars on Russia’s borders (Ukraine) and against its allies (Syria), as well as accusations that Russia is interfering in Euro-American politics (election hacking). The mounting war against China can either be seen as part of the overall nexus of Cold War 2.0, perhaps Cold War 2.1, or as a Cold War 3 with an entirely different set of dynamics. For instance, blaming China for the Covid virus is far more serious than accusing Russia of meddling in foreign elections. 

Covid has been used as an excuse by both the US administrative state and the Chinese CCP to push ahead with their respective agendas. The Euro-American plan is called The Great Reset, a World Economic Forum (WEF) initiated project that envisages a major restructuring of the so-called capitalist order to pre-empt revolution by the disenfranchised. China’s long-term plan is the Belt and Road: a series of investment and infrastructure projects across neighbouring states designed to build literal bridges to lucrative trade with Europe via Central Asia. As the WEF wants to “Build Back Better,” emphasising health data and green technologies, China wants to update the Belt and Road with next-generation climate infrastructure. Generally, these developments are known as the Fourth Industrial Revolution. 

Echoing the British colonialists of bygone centuries, US President Jimmy Carter’s National Security Advisor, the late Zbigniew Brzezinski – whose daughter Mika co-hosts a show on MSNBC (an example of the permanent administrative state) – wrote a book about geopolitics entitled The Grand Chessboard. Just as 9/11 put “the pieces… in flux,” as Britain’s then-Prime Minister Tony Blair said, Covid-19 has shaken the chessboard. The pieces are being reset by the major US financial institutions and tech oligarchs. As they seek to crack China’s lucrative, highly populated, data-driven economy, China in the eyes of many – like war-hawk Steven Bannon – seeks to subvert American institutions by stealing intellectual property and funding its cultural programmes under the pretext of outreach projects.

This article examines some of the contours of the new world order and its impact on ordinary working people. 

LOSING CHINA, BUILDING A PERMANENT WAR ECONOMY

After World War II, the US built a perpetual war machine to conquer the world (“full spectrum dominance” the military later called it) and stimulate research and development science and technology that could create a new economy. 

In his farewell address, US President Dwight D. Eisenhower famously described this arrangement as the “military-industrial complex,” under which nuclear energy emerged from US-led atomic weapons development at Los Alamos. Climate science owes its origins to the Pentagon’s ILLIAC IV supercomputer. Modern PCs and Macs take their blueprints from systems developed by the Department of Defense, as does the internet – originally developed under Raytheon contracts with the Advanced Research Projects Agency. The satellites that allow for instantaneous global communications were originally built for the armed forces’ missile guidance systems and surveillance. The cargo ships that transport goods and materials from the third to first worlds are based on designs culled from naval destroyers, just as the jet aeroplanes that transport hundreds of millions of people around the world take their designs from WWII-era bomber planes. The GPS systems that guide such logistics also come from military R&D, as do the touchscreens on iPhones and iPads: touchscreens being originally designed for Air Force pilots. And on and on it goes.

Crucially, these technologies became the very instruments of oppression in “democratic” America and the West generally, as the US National Security Agency used computers, the internet, and satellite signals intelligence to spy on its own citizens, and indeed the world, via the Five Eyes network. Declassified State Department and CIA reports reveal that the main US interest in China was preventing a Sino-Soviet alliance that would create the kind of unified, anti-US “communist” super-region envisaged in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. 

During World War II, Formosa (now Taiwan) was under the occupation of fascist Japan. Between 1945 and 1949, when the Chinese Communist Party fought a civil war to overthrow the ruling Kuomintang, US administrations gave $2bn ($14bn in today’s money) of taxpayer money to the latter. The geostrategic importance of Taiwan was considered to be of utmost importance to the US military because of Taiwan’s potential to host US military bases. After their defeat, the Kuomintang based themselves in Taiwan where they ruled until the 1990s. The US agreed at the Cairo Conference (1943) that Taiwan belonged to China but backtracked in an effort to use Taiwanese sovereignty as a strategic weapon against the CCP. American commentators refer to the CCP victory over the Kuomintang as the “loss of China.” But US fears that China would become a Soviet puppet were unfounded.

There is little to suggest that the US directly involved itself in Chinese affairs until the Nixon administration visited in 1972. Major progress from the US corporate perspective was made after the death of Mao (1976), who was replaced by Deng Xiaoping. The CIA already had an eye on Deng as a counterweight to the Soviets. In 1979, Deng began a series of “reforms.” Mao’s rural collectivism came to an end when the US-led International Monetary Fund issued loans that were serviced, in part, by the expansion of private landlords. Major infrastructure projects triggered mass migration from the rural to new urban areas. The process of privatising China’s healthcare system was initiated, creating what US drug companies called a “China market,” which included flooding the country with the antibiotics that have now caused a global bacteriological resistance crisis.

In 2001, China joined the World Trade Organization (WTO). Many US exports assembled in Mexico and other countries by inexpensive, exploitable labour went to China instead. Pointing to the numbers, some argue that America’s economic decline is a myth. The share of China’s state-owned enterprises in the processing and assembly sectors declined from 40% in 1995 to 6% in 2015, meanwhile 60 per cent of China’s assembly economy is controlled by foreign corporations, like Apple: the world’s first trillion-dollar company. Because US companies own the intellectual property rights to the products they have assembled on the cheap in China, it is the US companies, not the Chinese assembly plants, that make most of the profits.

China aims to redress the imbalance via a domestic production and design initiative called China 2025 that will grow over the next century. The US Council on Foreign Relations has already reacted by asking whether it will negatively impact global trade, which translates as hurt US corporate profits. Empires, be they national or corporate or mixtures of the two, hate competition. 

CHINA RESISTS

But China never fully yielded to US corporate demands. In addition to joining the WTO, it forged international pacts, trade deals, and alliances. In 1991, China joined the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation group (APEC). China is not a member of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) but has associate status through various treaties. One of which is the ASEAN-China Free Trade Area signed in 2002. Members include Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam. 

In 2001, China, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, and Tajikistan formed the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO). In 2017, both India and its enemy Pakistan joined SCO. The project is designed to integrate countries in the region, cooperate on military affairs, and expand infrastructure projects. In 2006, the APEC states entered into negotiating the Free Trade Area of the Asia-Pacific (FTAAP). At the ASEAN Summit in Cambodia 2012, several countries entered into negotiations with China for a Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP). The agreement created one of the biggest economies in the world ($49.5 trillion) and included 3.4bn people. 

In 2013, President Xi Jinping announced China’s new Silk Road Economic Belt (“Belt and Road Initiative”) in a speech delivered in Kazakhstan. The professed aim is to foster economic trade and cultural cooperation across Eurasia and Southeast Asia. This is a rival to America’s Silk Road Strategy Act 1999, which sought to absorb some of the ex-Soviet states into the “free market”: Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan. In 2011, having occupied Afghanistan (a key route along the “Silk Road”) for a decade, US President Barack Obama announced a New Silk Road of America to capture “South Asia’s… population of more than 1.6 billion,” including its “vast energy resources – including oil, gas, and hydropower.”

After 9/11, US government initiatives expanded the R&D-based economy of computers, internet, GPS, etc. to hi-tech and big data. The CIA seed-funded what became Google. Google Maps started life as the CIA’s EarthViewer. The kind of massive data gathering, analysis, sharing, and cybersecurity engaged in by the NSA and other Western intelligence agencies is similar to how tech firms gather blanket data on consumers and sell them to advertisers and brokers. After the millennium, the CCP began constraining some US corporate influence in China, particularly reversing its healthcare privatisation and copying US e-commerce. Where the US has Google, China has Baidu. Where China has Alibaba, America has Amazon.

Like the US, China also started using public money to create a new biotech economy, which will soon be linked to big data. Under its “full spectrum dominance” doctrine, the US is continuing its “dual-use” policy, in which touchscreens that work for the Air Force, for instance, are adapted to commercial iPhones. The phones that allow for personal and business communications also have backdoor technologies that allow the NSA to snoop on private citizens. China recently developed a similar doctrine called “fusion.”

BUILD BACK BETTER VS. BELT AND ROAD

World War II created the military-industrial complex that gave us computers etc. September 11 ballooned the military-intelligence establishment that gave us Total Information Awareness (TIA) and big data. Covid-19 has accelerated the trend towards the merging of the military-industrial complex (infrastructure), the military-intelligence establishment (TIA and big data), and the military-corporate-biotech complex that collects, analyses, modifies, and sells genetic and medical information for profit and social control. 

“We stand on the brink of a technological revolution that will fundamentally alter the way we live, work, and relate to one another,” said Klaus Schwab, founder of the World Economic Forum (WEF), in 2016. WEF is the annual meeting of the Global Power Elite: academics, asset managers, big tech, energy magnates, inventors, investors, the pharmaceutical industry, and politicians. Schwab was talking about the Fourth Industrial Revolution or Industry 4.0. The First Industrial Revolution was mechanic, the Second electric, the Third automated, the Fourth “is characterised by a fusion of technologies that is blurring the lines between the physical, digital, and biological spheres.” 

The technologies that constitute Industry 4.0 include “artificial intelligence, robotics, the Internet of Things, autonomous vehicles, 3-D printing, nanotechnology, biotechnology, materials science, energy storage, and quantum computing.” But monopolies and the military-intelligence-complex control these technologies. “Engineers, designers, and architects are combining computational design, additive manufacturing, materials engineering, and synthetic biology to pioneer a symbiosis between microorganisms, our bodies, the products we consume, and even the buildings we inhabit.” The pandemic gave promoters of Industry 4.0 the perfect opportunity to accelerate their agenda: funding for big pharma, the integration of nanotech with therapeutics, tracking apps synched to geo-locational data as vaccine passports, and more.

Schwab co-authored a book subtitled The Great Reset with the economist Thierry Malleret. They state: “In the post-pandemic era, COVID-19 might be remembered as the turning point that ushered in a ‘new type of cold war’.” The novelty, according to the authors, is that China is not attempting to force its ideology on the world, unlike, they claim, the Soviet Union. “The absolute prerequisite for a proper reset is greater collaboration and cooperation within and between countries.”

The goal of the WEF is not to get rid of the “capitalist” system that they acknowledge had created unprecedented inequality. Rather Build Back Better (B3) will be a way of “future-proofing capitalism,” from demographic changes, revolutions opposing inequality, and push-backs against corporate globalisation. “Despite the tragedy, we must leverage the COVID-19 pandemic, and make sure that it becomes the catalyst for a profoundly positive transformation of the global economy, taking us closer to a world in which everyone can live well, within planetary boundaries.”

Around the same time as the B3 announcement, governments in the West launched what we are supposed to believe are identical initiatives for their supposedly sovereign states. US President Biden announced that – with the kind of fiscal stimulus and state economic planning that he and his Democratic Wall Street puppeteers could have introduced forty years ago – he will “rebuild an economy where every American enjoys a fair return for their work and an equal chance to get ahead.” But B3 will exacerbate the very class divisions that WEF claims to want to reduce. B3 focuses on the middle, not lower, working, or destitute classes. B3 includes the American Families Plan, “an ambitious, once-in-a-generation investment to rebuild the middle class and invest in America’s future.”

It turns out that B3 was part of the Build Back Better World Partnership (B3W), described by the White House. “Through B3W, the G7 and other like-minded partners will coordinate in mobilising private-sector capital in four areas of focus – climate, health and health security, digital technology, and gender equity and equality – with catalytic investments from our respective development finance institutions.” Voice of America (VOA), which used to be – and maybe still is – funded by the CIA, reports that B3W was “presented by Biden as an explicit challenge to China.” VOA notes that B3W’s focus on “climate, health and health security, digital technology, and gender equity and equality… are not really in direct competition with much of what China has been doing through the Belt and Road program.”

Like Western countries, the CCP has also used Covid to accelerate elements of its Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). Over 60 per cent of BRI has been affected by the pandemic. Chinese lenders could face losses in third countries. BRI is shifting instead to the Digital, Green, and Health Silk Roads (as the CCP calls them) of data, environment, and vaccines. The CCP also introduced a dual circulation concept, in which any foreign investment should yield returns for Chinese consumers.

US corporations are pre-empting the “dual circulation” model by tapping into China’s demographically-stalling mega-population of 1.4 billion people. Chinese workers tend to have higher relative personal savings than Westerners, particularly with their wealth tied into property. China’s asset management market is worth an estimated $18.9 trillion (Rmb121.6 trillion). The wealth is locked up in the older generations who are beginning to outnumber the young. Asset firms and private equity companies, such as BlackRock and the financial arms of Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan, are accessing personal wealth as investments and portfolio boosters.

Goldman has partnered with the state-owned Industrial and Commercial Bank of China. The deal could allow the Wall Street firm to draw on the savings of hundreds of millions of the bank’s Chinese customers. BlackRock has partnered with the China Construction Bank, and JPMorgan Asset Management will invest $415m in the China Merchants Bank. To quote the Financial Times: “some investors say the biggest risk is not getting into China quickly enough.”

THE END OF PERSONAL SOVEREIGNTY

Build Back Better following the Great Reset triggered by Covid will lock big data and finance monopolies into the very infrastructure of town and city plans, health and elder-care providers, the Internet of Things, and increasingly intimate surveillance: the Big Brother of Orwell’s novel. Growing numbers of workers will programme apps from their “homes”: tiny, barely-affordable studio apartments for the renting young, and small mortgaged houses for the middle-aged, middle-class. The real wealth is owned by the likes of BlackRock through investments in land, social infrastructure, and even private health and genomic data. 

We’ve heard of the “new normal,” but the WEF introduces the “next normal,” in which the “everything from home” concept confines humans to cell-like dwellings where necessities and luxuries are delivered to the door by robots and humans in the precarious proletariat class (“precariat”). “Work from anywhere” connects the human to endless labour, destroying the boundary between work and leisure. The so-called “integrated response” to health will see private data shared among academics and big data firms. The concept of free healthcare vanishes in a fog of privatisation. To prevent flights to the rural areas where the elites live in mansions and keep property prices high by owning huge tracts, hyperconnectivity will keep “talent” attracted to megacities like New York and Tokyo.

With the headline, “The Drones Were Ready for This Moment,” the New York Times (NYT) sings the praises of autonomous and semi-autonomous vehicles during the pandemic. Smaller versions of the drones that blow children to pieces in the Middle East can enforce pandemic laws, but they can also deliver products to the new “everything from home” class. Companies like San Francisco’s Zipline used the crisis as an opportunity to deliver medicines by drone to self-isolating patients. Echoing earlier observations, the NYT piece notes: “Just as World War II hurried the development of emerging technologies like computers, rocketry, jet aircraft and atomic energy, the pandemic may speed the development, and adoption of, drone technology.”

Much of the above was pioneered in China, so when Wuhan was locked down in early-2020, e-commerce and home-delivery companies already had their logistics coordinated.

At the start of the pandemic, the monopolies Amazon, Google, and Facebook coordinated their data-sharing responses with the World Health Organization. Civil servants, frontline workers, and private employees alike have been obliged by various agencies, governments, and corporations to download health apps onto their phones in order to upload and receive data on their Covid and vaccination statuses, as well as provide their geolocation info to employers, leisure and hospitality services, and federal authorities. This has created a huge private-sector telemedicine/tracking market.

Another dystopian trend hastened by Covid is data brokerage. Since the mid-2010s, the industry has “expanded aggressively in what amounted to a virtual regulatory vacuum,” to quote the Financial Times. By 2020, the industry was worth $200bn. The brokers tracking as much of your life as possible to sell your data to advertisers and insurers include Acxiom, Corelogic, Experian, Equifax, and Nielsen. Guarded by blockchain, wearable health trackers – like watches – coupled with real-time Covid-status monitoring apps synchronised to central healthcare databases could feed intimate information about smart city dwellers. 

As the US and China employ the so-called soft power of investment and hi-tech to absorb states in their respective spheres of orbit, the internal control over their populations increases. One of the most sinister, recent developments is the creation of a market for your very DNA. Biotech giants have been patenting the genes of life for five decades. In more recent years, ancestry tracing companies have acclimatised us to yielding our most intimate and wide-reaching genetic materials: the very keys to our existence. As we have seen with gain-of-function and vaccine research, such technologies can be essentially weaponised to create super-viruses. The other application for this new era of research is selling genomic data to big pharma, big data, and credit brokers. 

Companies like 23&Me analyse customer’s genetic information to screen their clients for diseases. Big pharma is keen to access such information. One report notes of GlaxoSmithKline: “GSK invested $300 million in 23&Me for an exclusive license to their informational database.” It concludes: “The race is now on to gather large biological and clinical datasets with China and the UK sequencing significant cohorts in their population.” The US, too, of course.

WE ARE ALL WINSTON SMITH

In Nineteen Eighty-Four, the antihero Winston Smith thinks that he has evaded Big Brother and broken his employer the Ministry of Truth’s conditioning. But the all-encompassing environment in which he is conditioned proves too overpowering. With internal rebellions in the form of freedom of thought pulverised by the party, Ingsoc remains unopposed in its endless quest to demonise Eurasia and Eastasia led by regimes that, if they exist, also demonise Oceania to justify the internal repression of their own peoples. 

Orwell’s book is an apt metaphor for the present geopolitical struggle and related expansion of the Fourth Industrial Revolution on both sides. Industry 4.0 requires all populations to be held prisoner under a long-planned agenda called “full-spectrum dominance.” The question is: are some strong enough to resist, or will we all meet the same fate as Mr Smith?

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Footnotes

1. George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four, 1949, Secker & Warburg

2. Joseph Smith (1997, 2nd) The Cold War: 1945-1991, Wiley

3. The UN Secretary-General, António Guterres, does not date Cold War 2.0 but stated: “The cold war is back – with a vengeance, but with a difference. The mechanisms and the safeguards to manage the risks of escalation that existed in the past no longer seem to be present.” UN, 13 April 2018, SG/SM/18986-SC/13294 

4. Kees van der Pijl (2018) Flight MH17, Ukraine and the New Cold War: Prism of Disaster, Manchester University Press

5. Dmitri Trenin, “The New Cold War Is Boiling Over in Syria,” Foreign Policy, 14 April 2018

6. Kathleen Hall Jamieson (2018) Cyberwar: How Russian Hackers and Trolls Helped Elect a President: What We Don’t, Can’t, and Do Know, Oxford University Press

7. Few have said Cold War 3, but plenty have said Cold War 2.0, which means simultaneous Cold Wars with Russia. For the latter, see, for instance: Ken Dilanian, “As the U.S. and China spar on the world stage, Cold War 2.0 may already have begun,” NBC News, 15 July 2020

8. Quoted in Andrew Tyrie, “The road to anarchy,” Guardian, 6 November 2001

9. www.ourdocuments.gov/doc.php?flash=false&doc=90&page=transcript

10. Sharon Weinberger, “How Soviet Bomb Tests Paved the Way For U.S. Climate Science,” Smithsonian Magazine, 7 May 2018

11. www.raytheon.com/sites/default/files/rtnwcm/groups/gallery/documents/digitalasset/rtn_224614.pdf

12. Hercules E. Haralambides (2019) “Gigantism in container shipping, ports and global logistics: a time-lapse into the future,” Maritime Economics and Logistics, 21(1): 1-60

13. Stephen Dowling, “The Boeing 747: The plane that shrank the world,” BBC Future, 28 September 2018

14. Mariana Mazzucato, “A strong industrial strategy has many benefits,” Financial Times, 1 December 2016

15. Anthony R. Wells (2020) Between Five Eyes: 50 Years of Intelligence Sharing, Casemate Publishing

16. Binghui Liao, David Der-wei Wang and Dewei Wang (2006) Taiwan Under Japanese Colonial Rule, 1895-1945: History, Culture, Memory, Columbia University Press

17. Cited and quoted in Russell D. Buhite (1978) “‘Major Interests’: American Policy toward China, Taiwan, and Korea, 1945-1950,” Pacific Historical Review, 47(3): 425-51

18. www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/polo-34.pdf

19. Chao Hsiang-ke and Lin Hsiao-ting (2011) “Beyond the carrot and stick: the political economy of US military aid to China, 1945–1951,” Journal of Modern Chinese History, 5(2): 199-216

20. www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/DOC_0001494693.pdf

21. See my President Trump, Inc.: How Big Business and Neoliberalism Empower Populism and the Far-Right, Clairview Books, 139

22. See my Capitalism and Coronavirus: How Institutionalized Greed Turned a Crisis Into a Catastrophe (2020), Ursa Major

23. See my Privatized Planet: “Free Trade” as a Weapon Against Democracy, Healthcare and the Environment, 2019, New Internationalist. 

24. Ibid. 

25. Ibid.

26. Ibid. 

27. Nafeez Ahmed, “How the CIA made Google,” Insurge Intelligence, 22 January 2015, https://medium.com/insurge-intelligence/how-the-cia-made-google-e836451a959e

28. Leanna Garfield, “The CIA’s EarthViewer was basically the original Google Earth,” Business Insider, 30 December 2015

29. www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/01/the-fourth-industrial-revolution-what-it-means-and-how-to-respond

30. Ibid. 

31. Klaus Schwab and Thierry Malleret (2020) COVID-19: The Great Reset, Forum Publishing 

32. www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/07/to-build-back-better-we-must-reinvent-capitalism-heres-how

33. www.whitehouse.gov/build-back-better

34. www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2021/06/12/fact-sheet-president-biden-and-g7-leaders-launch-build-back-better-world-b3w-partnership

35. Rob Garver, “Can Biden’s Build Back Better World Partnership Really Challenge China?,” VOA, 18 June 2021

36. Alice Han and Eyck Freymann, “Coronavirus Hasn’t Killed Belt and Road,” Foreign Policy, 6 January 2021

37. Thomas Hale, Harriet Agnew, Michael Mackenzie and Demetri Sevastopulo, “Wall Street’s new love affair with China,” Financial Times, 28 May 2021

38. Ibid. 

39. www.weforum.org/agenda/2021/04/future-of-smart-cities-covid-19-digital

40. www.nytimes.com/2020/05/23/style/drones-coronavirus.html

41. Capitalism and Coronavirus, op. cit. 

42. HIMSS Media, “Roundup: Tech’s role in tracking, testing, treating COVID-19,” Mobile Health News, 1 May 2020

43. Alex Kulitski, “How COVID-19 reshaped the telemedicine market,” Forbes, 8 June 2021

44. Aliya Ram and Madhumita Murgia, “Data brokers: regulators try to rein in the ‘privacy deathstars’,” FT, 8 January 2019

45. Zack Whittacker, “Data brokers track everywhere you go, but their days may be numbered,” TechCrunch, 8 July 2020

46. www.bernardmarr.com/default.asp?contentID=1177

47. Paul Hawken (2013, revised ed.) The Ecology of Commerce, Harper Business

48. https://reform.uk/sites/default/files/2018-12/Blockchain%20in%20the%20NHS%20-%20VF_1.pdf

© New Dawn Magazine and the respective author.
For our reproduction notice, click here.

From New Dawn 187 (Jul-Aug 2021)

Most people in Western countries receive a distorted and one-sided view of Russia’s long-serving president Vladimir Putin. Mainstream media reflects a clear anti-Russia bias which means we never hear the other side of the story – like in the days of the Soviet Union and Cold War. The following report by returned emigrant Yuriy Smirnov details how after near collapse Russia has been revived under Vladimir Putin. [Please note this article was published in 2021 prior to the start of Russia’s Feb. 2022 ‘Special Military Operation’ in Ukraine.]

Unlike most citizens of Russia, my “acquaintance” with Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin took place in 2008, when I returned after a seven-year absence from the country. I survived in the 90s, and well-remember the period of wild capitalism, widespread banditry, and the ever-drunk president [Boris Yeltsin] dancing to the tune of the United States.

While in exile, I missed the beginning of Putin’s presidency. Life as a new immigrant to New Zealand dictated its own, more urgent goals and objectives. I simply did not care about what was happening in Russia. After a long absence, in 2008 I ended up in Moscow, observing Russia with an unbiased, fresh eye, and eagerly absorbing everything around me, looking for signs of positive change.

The first thing that caught my eye was a lot of social advertising against smoking. A poster in the Moscow subway made a strong impression on me: a very beautiful girl smiling at you, wearing a dress… from cigarette butts! – it felt so disgusting, you could almost smell the unpleasant odour of old cigarette butts in an ashtray.

A little later, I was pleasantly surprised by another fact that spoke of positive changes in the country: both Putin and Dmitry Medvedev [president from 2008 to 2012], during their presidencies, made their traditional New Year’s speech WITHOUT a glass of champagne in hand! The head of state always sets an example to his people, and that was messaging on a subconscious level: alcohol is not at all an obligatory attribute of any holiday in Russia. In the 90s, the behaviour of Boris Yeltsin in public was a clear message and approval of widespread drunkenness and alcoholism. Most people followed that example – alcohol kept flowing and the people were slowly drinking themselves to death.

Putin’s subsequent actions confirmed that his sober behaviour in public was not accidental but one of the successive steps to improve the health of the nation. As a result, in Russia today there is a complete ban on advertising of alcohol and tobacco in any form, strict requirements for liquor stores, age restrictions (for tobacco, no sales to anyone below 18 years of age; for alcohol, no sales to people under 21 years of age), a ban on smoking in public places, a ban on the sale of alcohol from 23:00 to 11:00, and tougher penalties for violations.

In subsequent years, it was very interesting for me to observe and track the positive changes initiated by Putin, or occurring with his approval and support, things that contributed to the strengthening of our country and improvement of the quality of life of the people. According to my observations, many of these facts have gone unnoticed by the general public, and that’s why I decided to list them below as opposed to the established philistine habit of blaming Putin for all the troubles occurring in Russia.

So, what good has Putin done for Russia in 20 years, apart from the steps mentioned above to improve the nation’s health?

1. Saving Russia from total collapse

Putin assumed the presidency at a time when the economically dependent and externally controlled country was on the verge of collapse. Due to Putin’s thoughtful and consistent reforms, Russia survived as an independent, sovereign state.

2. Ending the war in Chechnya 

The hotbed of terrorism in the south of Russia was eliminated – the significance of this fact can hardly be overestimated.

3. The Russian economy, destroyed in the 90s, was completely restored 

Thanks to certain successive steps taken by Putin:

3.1: State investments in agriculture, and domestic farm and entrepreneurship support, led to the fact that today the country feeds itself, and we are no longer dependent on imports. Moreover, the ban on the cultivation of GMO products, and Russia’s vast areas and favourable environmental situation, have made the country one of the main suppliers of high-quality food products in the world.

3.2: Creation of funds that stabilise the country’s economy. Anticipating difficult times, Putin created a “safety cushion” in the form of the Stabilization Fund and the National Welfare Fund. This helped the country survive economic trials (for example, a threefold drop in oil prices). Today, social obligations to citizens are fulfilled mainly from the resources of these funds.

3.3: Gold and foreign exchange reserves were created. Gold accounts for 22% of the total value of the reserve, which was 2,295 tons of gold in 2021. For comparison, in 1993 there were only 267 tons, and in 2008, 450 tons. For several years, Russia has been the largest buyer of gold in the world.

3.4: Repayment of government debts. As most people know, an independent state policy is possible only if a country does not have significant debt obligations to other countries and financial institutions. Thus, the very fact that Russia can strongly defend its position in the international arena was made possible through Putin’s strategic genius when he promptly and significantly reduced Russia’s external debt. Today, the external public debt of Russia is one of the lowest in Europe; for many years it has been kept at $50-56 billion and is less than 5% of the country’s GDP. 

4. De-dollarisation

With Putin’s direct assistance/support, organisations such as BRICS (a union of Russia, Brazil, South Africa, China, and India) and Eurasian Economic Union (comprising Kazakhstan, Belarus, Russia, Kyrgyzstan, and Armenia) were created as an alternative to the IMF and Western economic institutions. They agreed to achieve monetary and financial sovereignty, as well as gradually eliminate dependence on the US dollar in regional trade in favour of national currencies. 

5. Re-equipment of the Russian defence complex with new high-tech weapons

In his Presidential Address to the Federal Assembly in 2020, Putin announced that Russia had created new types of weapons which are unmatched in the world. It was one more step in the strengthening of defence capability, and therefore Russian independence from outside pressure.

6. Family support and solving the demographic issue 

In the early nineties, the mortality rate in Russia exceeded the birth rate. With the construction of new children’s institutions, the introduction of additional child benefits and maternity capital, and a general increase in the standard of living, the demographic crisis was overcome. In 2012, population growth exceeded mortality, which speaks for itself.

Putin’s careful attitude to children and family is a special topic. From year to year, in many of his public statements, Putin speaks about the importance of strengthening families and traditional family values. He also believes that the family plays a key role in nurturing a child’s personality. And here I want to emphasise that Putin is referring precisely to the traditional family, where there is a man, a woman, and a child (children). Personally, he has nothing against gays, but when it comes to the future of Russia, he believes that it is the traditional family that is vital for the survival of the nation and essential for the development of the country. “Strengthening the family will ensure the development of Russia as a successful country,” said Putin in his message to the Federal Assembly on 15 January 2020.

7. Return of Crimea to Russia

The reunification was made possible through a referendum where 96% of the inhabitants of the peninsula voted to join Russia. And it was to Putin’s credit that he promptly responded to this referendum and made a politically wise decision to annex Crimea. At the same time, the question of annexing the Donetsk and Luhansk regions was not even considered (despite repeated requests from the leadership of the republics), which undoubtedly was another wise decision by Putin – thus he managed to avoid direct military confrontation between Russia and Ukraine.

8. State support for gifted schoolchildren, students, young scientists

On the initiative of Putin, the presidential program “Gifted Children,” the national initiative “Our New School,” the Federal Target Program “Children of Russia,” and the national priority project “Education,” have all been operating in Russia. Work is also in progress under the Decree of the President of the Russian Federation, “On measures of state support for talented youth.”

In addition, under the national project “Science,” a system of support measures – financial, social, and professional – has been established for young scientists who carry out advanced research. Grants from the President of the Russian Federation are allocated in the form of two-year subsidies to finance the costs of fundamental and applied scientific research.

9. Widespread and consistent de-bureaucratisation in the country

This is another special topic worthy of attention. According to Putin, all senseless procedures and absurd norms in the social sphere that humiliate and exhaust people must be removed. In recent years, social services and government procedures have become convenient and understandable for citizens and entrepreneurs.

10. Free hectare to every Russian citizen

In 2016, with the support of Putin, the Far East Hectare Program was launched that grants the right to every citizen of Russia to receive a land plot of up to one hectare in the Far East for free (10 regions of the Far East occupy 36% of the territory of Russia). In the middle of 2020, the program “Land is Simple” was announced, which will allow registering land plots in ownership remotely, without unnecessary bureaucratic procedures. You can read more about it here https://ecominded.net/land-giveaway-russia.

11. Amendments to the Constitution of Russia 2020

The 1993 Constitution of the Russian Federation was adopted in conditions of acute internal political crisis with the country on the verge of total collapse. Tanks fired at the parliament, and in Moscow there were clashes. The situation has now changed dramatically, and amendments to the Constitution are considered a natural result of 20 years of Putin’s activity. At the all-Russian referendum, 77.92% of Russian citizens voted for the amendments of the Constitution.

The complete list of amendments includes 206 changes in various areas from social guarantees to the judiciary and local governments. Not all of them are equal. Some, in my opinion, are more important, some less. But most of all, I like the fact that the following standards are now set out at the state level:

The priority of the Constitution of the Russian Federation over international law.

Children are the most important priority of Russian state policy.

Protection of the institution of marriage as a union of a man and a woman (that is, a traditional family!)

High officials, deputies and judges are prohibited from having foreign citizenship, residence permit in another country and foreign bank accounts.

Russia ensures the protection of historical truth and does not allow the falsification of history and the belittling of the value of the heroic deed of the people in defence of the Motherland.

Russia is taking measures to maintain and strengthen international peace and security to ensure the peaceful coexistence of states and peoples.

Russia protects the rights and interests of compatriots living abroad.

12. Russian national idea as hope of the world

“Each man will live for his fellow man! The principle has been born. It will take years for it to be crystallised, but out of Russia comes again the hope of the world” – this was the prophecy of the American clairvoyant Edgar Cayce in 1944. I do not know if Vladimir Putin is familiar with Cayce’s prophecies, but for me it is an undoubted fact that he perfectly understands the importance for Russia to have a certain unifying idea, without which the further development of the state is impossible, not to mention that it can bring hope for the rest of the world.

In the 19th century, the national idea of ​​Russia was formulated by Count S.S. Uvarov (in 1833) in the form of three components: “Orthodox Christianity, Autocracy and Communality.” During the Soviet period, communism became the national idea. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the communist idea was rejected and the so-called “de-ideologisation of society” declared. But, as they say, “a holy place is never empty,” and hostile forces – both external and internal – began to actively impose ideologies alien to Russia – the ideology of the Western way of life, individualism, consumerism, profiteering, violence, various sects, etc. Fortunately, the mentality of the people, which forms the basis of any national idea, has been formed for centuries and changes extremely slowly, thanks to which it still successfully resists the forced introduction of the values ​​and morality of the Western world.

Every people have their own special system of thinking, the way of life that determines their view of the world, development of their community; and every person behaves in accordance with his/her national mentality and historical development. What are the main features of the Russian mentality?

First, it is an unusually great kindness. Naturally, there are kind people in every nation. There are peoples who may have a lot of flaws, but it is kindness that comes first. These are the Russians.

Secondly, it is a very humanistic view of things. The common future of mankind takes first place in the human value system, next comes the fate of the people, the fate of the family takes third place, and personal fate comes last.

Third, a highly developed sense of selflessness. A Russian is unequalled when it is necessary to “lift an unliftable” or to “bear an unbearable,” when it is necessary to “dissolve” yourself in the lives of other people or to dedicate your entire life to something you serve.

These three qualities – kindness, a humanistic worldview and selflessness – are united in the concept of spirituality as the distinguishing feature of the Russian mentality.

Then comes the next group of distinctive qualities of the Russian mentality. First, it is communality. It could also be called conciliarity; in the Soviet period it was called collectivism.

Secondly, it is traditionality, which manifests in reliance on, and preservation of, folk culture, folk traditions, folk language, folk pedagogy, folk rituals, folk crafts, etc.

Thirdly, it is openness, i.e. the curiosity of a Russian, the ability of Russian culture to be open to external influences, to absorb the values ​​of different peoples, to spiritually enrich and transform them, while keeping its own originality and unity.

These three features can be combined into a second general concept – the national character of the Russian mentality.

Finally, there is a third group of qualities. Firstly, it is patriotism or love for the Motherland, love for your homestead and the country, the willingness to faithfully serve its prosperity, love the home, and a readiness to defend it.

Secondly, it is a recognition of the need for strong sovereign power. Obviously, Russia needs this to resist under current conditions the external and internal forces trying in every possible way to weaken Russia, to oust it from the ranks of the leading world powers, or even destroy it altogether.

Patriotism and the recognition of the need for strong state power can be united by the third general concept – great power statehood.

These three general concepts – Spirituality, National Character and Great Power Statehood – constitute the core of the national idea of ​​Russia. For me, it is obvious that all these qualities of the Russian mentality are inherent in Vladimir Putin and are clearly expressed in his actions aimed at building strong sovereign power and supporting traditional, cultural Russian values ​​and patriotism.

In conclusion, I would like to emphasise once again that Putin inherited an almost collapsed nation with a lot of problems. Now Russia is again a strong global power with a developed economy. Therefore, even if you don’t like something happening in the country, don’t be so quick to blame Putin. Re-read this impressive list of positive facts again, and then put yourself in the Russian president’s shoes and imagine how much work was required to solve the problems and implement all of these changes, despite pressure from external forces and the resistance of the engorged Russian parliament and financial oligarchs.

For more on Vladimir Putin, see Gary Lachman’s article ‘The Philosopher Tsar’ in New Dawn Special Issue Vol 15 No 3.

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