BRICS Are of No Use… Unless the Wall is Broken
It is happening. Again. And everyone is scrambling for analysis of the latest Israeli/US barbarism. If you prefer the passionate Brazilian football commentator genre, you can get it from Richard Medhurst. I recall him screaming (figuratively) “Gooooooooooooooooooooal!!” on October 8th, 2023, and I also recall thinking that the situation demanded a more phlegmatic approach for many reasons, one of which was the predictable scale of the retaliation and its consequences for life in Gaza. He’s still doing it. Oh, to be young again!
After five years of hellish accelerationism, I am trying to separate my hopes and fears from the reality that is still unfolding. And if the reality that is unfolding is unclear, as it is now, I make it a goal not to invest too much in either hope or fear.
When war breaks out, the propaganda bubbles we live in become even more difficult to burst. At times like this, I am reminded of Sebastian Haffner’s cautionary account of the effects of war propaganda in 1918 Germany. The almost daily opaque war bulletins led everyone to believe that Germany was winning, right up until the day defeat was announced. He describes the effect on him as an eleven-year-old boy who had been conditioned to treat the war bulletins as a running football score in an interminable game that left spectators relatively untouched by its brutal realities. When the propaganda was finally unmasked by the Truth, he felt like “someone who year after year has deposited large sums of money in his bank, and when one day he asks for a statement, discovers a gigantic overdraft instead of a fortune”.
The lesson for him was that[i]:
“the great game had clearly had other secret rules that I had failed to grasp… Where could one find stability and security, faith and confidence, if world events could be so deceptive? If triumph upon triumph led to ultimate disaster, and the true rules of history are only revealed retrospectively in a shattering outcome?” [emphasis added]
Anyone claiming to know how this latest episode of political psychopathy will end should not be trusted.
Before we get into some sort of analysis, inadequate as I’m sure it will be, I’ll try to nix one of the most irritating talking points that even anti-imperialist alt-media commentators feel the need to discuss at length. I’m referring here to whether Iran was trying to develop a nuclear weapon, and whether or not it was adhering to the terms of the JCPOA (Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action) nuclear deal. The facts that render this debate utterly pointless are as follows.
The most demonstrably irresponsible nations in the world have nuclear weapons, and the leader of this pack, the US, is a rabid dog that has actually used them without justification. Iran, on the other hand, has no record of having illegally started a war, and has been a demonstrably less irresponsible actor on the world stage than any of the current nuclear powers. It does not have a nuclear weapon, but is in the crosshairs of the irresponsible nations who do have them. Therefore, the only sensible and moral position to take is: either we all have them, or we all don’t have them, the latter being the preferable option, but the former being perfectly within Iran’s rights if the latter is unachievable.
On that basis, I think we should all be licensed to carry around small but serviceable mini-nukes in the boots of our cars (not more than 2 per vehicle, in the interests of non-proliferation). And I don’t care one iota if Iran has lied through its teeth to get nuclear-jacked. I will be the first to congratulate them if and when they succeed.
Is it too much to ask everyone in alt-media to sign a pact agreeing to trot off the statement: “either we all have them or we all don’t have them”, whenever the Iran nuclear deal rubbish is raised for discussion? If you don’t want to sign this agreement, you’ll have to offer a cogent (by my standards, not yours) argument as to why only some countries are allowed to blow up the planet but not others.
Right! That this war is yet another manifestation of US-Israeli barbarism, to which all right-thinking people should be opposed, is elementary. I will not waste words on explaining why, because this blog is neither intended to serve as a portal for waking the dead, nor as salvation for the damned. So, let’s start with some of the more common points from commentators who are opposed to the war but still don’t seem to be quite hitting the mark. In my view, their analysis is falling short because 95% of it is of the football commentator variety, obsessed with which targets have been hit today and by whom. The other 5% is impotent rage predicting the collapse of the US empire, when the US empire is not the empire that matters.
Have the US and Israel miscalculated?
If you believe that the sole purpose of the war is a regime-change operation, then perhaps they have miscalculated. Under this objective, it would indeed appear, for now, that the war calculations were outsourced to the ignominious charlatan Neil Ferguson – he whose acceptable margin of error is around 638%, give or take a couple of hundred percent.
The commonly held alt-media view is that this miscalculation, if it is one, may herald the long-awaited collapse of the US empire. You will also see the idea expressed that we are witnessing a manifestation of “late-stage capitalism”. I can’t help thinking that that this sort of “end-of-everything” thinking is a manifestation of impotent rage. It produces statements like “the empire has no plan beyond collapse”. I’m quite sure that ‘the empire’, if we defined it properly, would very much like us to believe that. I’m afraid the real empire always has a plan, and the real empire is not the US.
Who is the real empire?
There are two paradigms on which all the arguments in this piece hinge – who is the real empire, and on whom is it waging war?
My two regular readers of A Plague on Both Houses are bored stiff of hearing me state who I think the primary global hegemon is, and so I apologise to them for reiterating, but it’s important for the purposes of making this piece whole. It is the colonising force embodied in the global financial ruling class – the Owners and Controllers of Global Financial Capital (OCGFC). This is the Empire to which empires with geographical borders are subordinate. Thus, the US/NATO empire is subordinate to the colonising force of the OCGFC.
Sitting at the apex of this colonising force is the unassumingly named Bank for International Settlements (BIS), which is the head of the central banking cartel and the coordinating body of the global financial and monetary system. That all wars are bankers’ wars is now somewhat clichéd, and also only true if you view the banking powers as having a veto power over wars. Provided that the banking cartel’s profit margins and balance sheets grow as a consequence of war or, at the very least, don’t suffer, then governments are free to engage in periodic violent population control programmes. These will in fact become increasingly necessary as public confidence in vaccines wanes. But let me not digress.
That is my first paradigm for the real empire, and it relegates the US empire to a hub of the Financial empire. There’s no question that the military industrial complex, based primarily in the US, is a vital asset of the US empire, and therefore also of the Financial empire.
This paradigm has provided me with a novel way of decoding developments like multipolarity. Seen in the context of a paramount US empire, multipolarity is, mistakenly I believe, viewed as an organic and welcome response to US empire abuse. But seen in the context of a paramount global financial empire, multipolarity can be viewed, more realistically I believe, as a manufactured vehicle of global capital.
The paradigm of global capital as the paramount global hegemon, to which the US is subordinate, also admits a different viewpoint of the primary war. Think of this as a secondary but equally important paradigm. The bigger war is being waged by transnational capital. But on whom?
This is where David Hughes’ elucidation of the Omni War is critical to bringing these two paradigms together. The simple answer is that the bigger, or primary war, is being waged on you, me and everyone on the planet who is not part of the 1%. Sounds a bit theatrical until you are forced to acknowledge that the class war by the ruling class on the working class is as old as the class structure itself. And it has indeed reached an end stage. Which explains the now in-vogue use of the term ‘end-stage capitalism’. But it is not an end stage that necessarily signals its demise, unless we all become conscious of the Omni War.
I think we are witnessing the evolution of capitalism towards its logical end point – an impregnable global totalitarian technocracy geared towards defending its accumulated gains now under threat from working class ire with income inequalities that are intrinsic to wealth concentration by the 1%.
Covid-19 was a military-grade psychological operation against the entire global population with a wide array of goals – medical experimentation with novel injectable technologies; trauma-based mind control to prepare people for future lockdowns on spurious grounds; wealth transfer from small and medium businesses to corporates; and a global economic deflationary effect to offset against a second round of central bank Quantitative Easing that began in 2020, ostensibly under the guise of Covid relief measures.
Lest people doubt who the real global hegemon is, cast your minds back to the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) of 2008-9. The central bank Herr Kommandants across the entire Western World instructed governments to use taxpayer money to bail them out of a hole they had inadvertently dug for themselves. No questions were asked. It was done. Fast forward to the 2020 Covid psyop. An event as big as pressing pause on the global economy simply cannot proceed without the approval of the central banking cartel. Global financial monetary and system impacts simply could not have played second fiddle to a cold virus that was understood not to be the Black Death. No questions were asked. It was done.
Multipolarity and the rise of BRICS
Multipolarity was not a concept invented and driven by the much-vaunted BRICS bloc. It was invented by global capital. The concept exists to manage the West’s decline and the transfer of global capital to productive parts of the world that will generate returns on its capital. To put it very simply, the rise of the BRICS is a plan authored by the OCGFC.
That the West has entered permanent economic decline should not be in question. The key factors driving this decline are its ageing population, coupled with its deliberate decision to de-industrialise. In the UK, the population of retirees (over 65 years of age) is growing faster than the working age population. The ratio of the working age population to retirees is predicted to drop from its current 3.17 to 2.56 in 2050. This is a best case scenario. The worst case scenario is a drop from 3.17 to 2.33. Under the best case scenario, retirees as a percentage of the total population rise from 19.2% to 23.3%. Under the worst case scenario, retirees as a percentage of the total population rise from 19.2% to 25.1%[ii].
This is the picture throughout the Western world.
The West is a burgeoning non-productive bureaucracy managed by a Professional Managerial Class (PMC) of Vogons. The good news is that we can expect the PMC Vogons to be replaced. The bad news is what’s replacing them – the Agentic State. The theory of an agentic state as applied to individuals was originally formulated by famous psychologist Stanley Milgram to describe the mental process by which an individual shifts responsibility for their actions to an authority figure. This surrender of individual autonomy relieves the individual of moral strain when performing acts that would otherwise be regarded as wrong.
Fast forward to today, and we see that a theory intended as a warning about how authority reduces moral agency has been repurposed to sell the idea that government functions involving human agency should be replaced with AI algorithms. Whoever controls the algorithm controls society, and the controller will be a ruling class of technocrats.
The entire political class in the West is an asset of transnational global capital. The political class has now twice in the last four years alone consciously chosen a path of action leading to severe economic pain for ordinary people inflicted by energy price inflation – first by cutting itself off from Russian gas during the Ukraine debacle, and now by waging an illegal war on Iran.
At the time of publishing this piece, it would appear that both sides in the conflict are content to escalate by directly targeting energy infrastructure. If the oil price rises to the feared $200/barrel, the likely consequences are global recession or, worse, a long-term global depression.
Naked Capitalism, despairing at the seeming irrationality of it all, seems perplexed by the “arrogance of the belligerents, [which] will produce a long and highly destructive war.” As I write this, I think that’s the whole point – a long and destructive war.
If the real hegemon is global capital, and if global capital does not desire that consequence, we ought to see a de-escalation of the war, or at least a de-escalation that ensures security of energy supplies. If that were to happen, I would be more inclined to buy into the ‘miscalculation’ assessment since a de-escalation would imply correction of the miscalculation.
On the other hand, if the conflict escalates, and energy prices continue to rise, then I am inclined to assume that this is a desired effect of the war.
It will feed into my belief that the BRICS multipolar strategy can only work if the Western wall is broken. And inflicting ferocious energy price inflation is certainly one way of breaking it, not to mention waging war on the 99%.
Killing two birds with one stone
Israel was aided and abetted by the Western political class to commit the most brazen and horrific crimes against Palestinians. I add the word “brazen” since the scale of the terror meted out may have been matched by other US atrocities in Vietnam and North Korea, but those atrocities do not match the Palestinian genocide for its barbaric shamelessness.
Israel has therefore engendered such a strong sense of global revulsion that it is difficult to see how it can continue to imbue itself with any kind of legitimacy in the long run. Even before it committed the genocide, its legitimacy was in any case questioned by most sane and knowledgeable people. Israel has in fact been living on borrowed time since it committed its first act of major terror in its very founding in 1948 – the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. The contrived and immoral legitimacy crafted for it by sinister powers ought now to have passed its shelf life. However, we are not living in normal times, so I am not placing any bets on the end of this apartheid state. Remember, we must separate hopes from a reality still unfolding.
In previous pieces, I have somewhat cautiously theorised that the Middle East (ME), as a regional sphere of influence under the emerging and contrived multipolar order, would fall under the auspices of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) dictatorship led by Saudi Arabia. GCC sovereign wealth money is now partnering with Western transnational global capital, partly to advance the movement of capital to the BRICS bloc, but also to buy influence to control the Middle East.
Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, is leveraging his influence in the Trump administration to secure $5 billion of funding from the Saudi Public Investment Fund (PIF). This is an example of the money swirling around in the GCC’s piggy bank, and being used to secure a GCC-led Middle East.
Under this posited scenario, it becomes less likely that the GCC monarchies would accept playing second fiddle to the current rabid expansion of a Greater Israel in the region, which would appear to be in conflict with the stability in that region that the GCC is seeking. ‘Regional stability’ in the context of the Middle East in today’s geopolitical lexicon essentially means a GCC-led Middle East.
Running alongside the Israeli impediment to ‘regional stability’ is a Shia Iran that the GCC wishes to see playing a more subordinate role. The war on Iran may provide an answer to two related questions: can Israel be sufficiently damaged to subordinate it to GCC leadership in the region? And can competing factions in Iran come to an arrangement with the GCC leadership on what Iran’s role will be in a new ME constellation that significantly demotes the US, Israel and Iran, in order to promote the GCC sovereign wealth fund mafia?
I find Iran’s ceasefire terms interesting in that they accord with what a reshaped ME region might look like with the US in retreat: reparations, closure of all US bases in the GCC, guarantees against future aggression.
There are two main reasons why I am unsure of this theory. The first is that there is a faction in Israel whose objective is, at the very least, complete ME domination. That faction is …Israel. The second reason is that it’s possible that powerful OCGFC factions are aligned with Israel. But, as I say, I can’t see how an Israeli-dominated ME would lead to real stability or the desired ‘regional stability’ sought by the GCC.
The bigger war on humanity
The transition that is taking place in the Middle East, and indeed the entire transition of transnational capital to a BRICS bloc, is underpinned by the war for technocracy – the primary class war against humanity. All the major powers on both sides of the fake BRICS wall are unanimous in their agreement on a global financial digitalised platform using programmable currencies paired with digital ID surveillance technology. Chinese, Russian, US, UK, European, South American central banks are all coordinating feverishly with the world’s diabolical central-bank brain – the BIS – to bring this about.
What is crucial to understand is that multipolarity will not confront the war for technocracy on humanity. Only we can do that. BRICS is designed to advance it in regions that would reflexively reject it by virtue of it originating from the West. China and Russia as BRICS leaders are more advanced in their technocracy agendas than the West is. BRICS populations are being primed to welcome Chinese and Russian leadership that will empower economic growth in the hitherto impoverished regions of the world. This empowerment is the sugar that is intended to help the bitter medicine of technocracy go down in the Global South.
Seeing China’s and Russia’s support for Iran, such as it is, as a multipolar constraint on US action is wishful thinking. Russia has never acted decisively to challenge US power, and Iurie Rosca’s elucidation of Russia’s mercantilist oriented approach to the Ukraine war is a perfect example. Likewise, China is deeply embedded with Israel, both militarily and economically. If you accept the paradigm of the global financial hegemon, China’s and Russia’s role is to shepherd both Israel and Iran into a new Middle East fake multipolar constellation.
In the context of the current war on Iran, Western leaders like Trump are getting their cue cards from the Money Powers. I scream indignities when I hear respected geopolitical analysts talking in a serious way about Trump as if he was capable of autonomous brain activity that could in any way shape the outcome of events unfolding.
It is perfectly clear to the average six-year-old that Trump is Zaphod Beeblebrox incarnate. For those unfamiliar with the Zaphod Beeblebrox analogy, here is the explanation from Douglas Adams, author of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and creator of the Beeblebrox character:
“[Beeblebrox’s] job is not to wield power but to draw attention away from it. On those criteria Zaphod Beeblebrox is one of the most successful Presidents the Galaxy has ever had”. [emphasis added]
To get even slightly upset with Trump’s interminable veering into verbal ditches and logical cul-de-sacs is an admission that you have been fooled into thinking that he is anything other than a well-paid and highly compromised actor.
Every single Western leader is a Beeblebrox, and Trump, as the leader of the ‘free world’, is required to be the best Beeblebrox that money can buy. And the buyers are definitely getting their money’s worth.
Likewise, I find it extremely difficult to argue with the proposition that Russia has been fully integrated into the central bank approved global financial architecture. Iurie Rosca, in conversation with Edward Slavsquat, points out that, in Russia’s case, “it is not the head of state who governs the country, but the private entities, big business, the clique of oligarchs who control the national economy, first of all the energy resources and the banking system.”
Rosca puts it far more politely than I am capable of:
“Let us not confuse political theatre with the act of decision-making, the spectacle for the general public with real political power.”
That said, there really is an axis of resistance and it consists of countries like Iran and Cuba. You don’t have to idealise Iran in order to accept this. As flawed as Iran’s leadership is, there is a reason why it is now in the crosshairs of the colonising force. It is the same reason why brute force was brought to bear on Libya and Syria. It has not yet been colonised.
Iran’s central bank is not a BIS member central bank, but I am willing to bet that if this war achieves its objectives, Iranian membership will follow in due course. That will be a defeat for all of us.
The war for technocracy is the war against humanity, and the war against Iran is a subset of that war. The Iran war has seemingly different objectives, but if it results in Iran being beaten into a subordinate role in a GCC-led ME region, it will by definition become more aligned with the war for technocracy.
[i] Sebastian Haffner, Defying Hitler: A Memoir, Phoenix Orion Books Ltd., London, 2003, Pg. 23-4
[ii] Forecast obtained from Institute of Chartered Accountants England and Wales.
Source: A Plague On Both Houses
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