Anyone who has ever lived outside Europe or North America will have experienced the immense damage our “Western” way of life is causing to the rest of the world. Anyone who has spent his holidays outside of Europe and North America will have experienced how convenient and cheap it is to be treated like a feudal colonizer.
If you want to understand how colonialism is working in the 21st century, you only have to walk to the security gate of a “Western” holiday club and watch the world from there: Inside life in abundance, outside life in poverty.
Vladimir Putin is rattling that fence right now. “Russia’s military special operation” in Ukraine, called “Russia’s aggressive war” by the “West”, is an attempt to put an end to the prevailing conditions on the “West’s” border.
Let’s start the story from the beginning: Around the year 1500 of the “Christian” era, white men began to make the decisive leap of human civilization. For the first time in history, human culture, in its westward drive (towards sunset), succeeded in crossing the Atlantic Ocean and settling in “the new world”. During the next 500 years, white men developed their ideas of “freedom” and “democracy” (“rule by the people”) there. The aim of this concern was “the pursuit of happiness”.
Of course, “happiness”, “freedom” and “democracy” applied exclusively to white men. All other people were plunged into misfortune, regardless of whether they were of a different skin color or gender. These people had neither “freedom” nor were they allowed to participate in “democracy.” All this resulted in the greatest mass murder in history, the extermination of “Native Americans”, including the enslavement of “African Americans”. We are seeing the excesses of these crimes to this day.
White men pushed their “culture” of “freedom” and “democracy” to the extreme for 500 years. Since then they have been colonizing the entire world. Initially they used glass beads and guns to subdue their opponents, but over time they developed the US dollar and atomic bombs. Today we are faced with the fact that the national currency of the US is forming the basis of every business in the world and the military of the US costs as much as the armies of the next 10 countries put together and almost twice as much much as the armies of all other countries.
This immense abundance in the US is paid for by the rest of the world. With the basis of the US dollar as global reserve currency, in which every business in the world is transacted, the “United States of America” always ensure its own advantage. The profit is pocketed, the loss shared among everyone else. This is reflected economically in every respect. While the US population makes up 4 percent of the world, these 4 percent of humanity consume 17 percent of the world’s energy. Their number of global US dollar billionaires is 23 percent and their military spending is even 38 percent of the world.
White men have taken their “culture” to the extreme in the US – at the expense of the rest of the world. So ensure this, white men created systems that guarantee the continuation of these conditions. Those are in particular the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund economically, as well as NATO, the “North Atlantic Treaty Organisation“, militarily. The World Bank and the International Monetary Fund provide for the buffets in the club of the rich, while the poor on the other side of the fence collapse under the “burden of debt” again and again. NATO, on the other hand, secures the fence and powers it.
This “holiday club” of the “West” can be observed all over the world. White men are sitting at the table in their air-conditioned executive suites, the rest of the world is serving them at the price of being allowed to making debts in US dollars. After World War II, white men of the Northwest had spread their rule halfway across the world. In direction of the Pacific, this happened via Japan and Korea to Vietnam, in direction of the Atlantic via Western Europe to Israel, Saudi Arabia and Persia.
After these conquests through wars had come to an inglorious end in the 1970s in Vietnam and Iran, subjugation through economic warfare followed in the 1980s. Latin America collapsed in the mid-1980s, followed a few years later by Eastern Europe. The Northwest’s “Holiday Club” had triumphed, the “end of history” seemed to have arrived. Anyone who opposed this club and its rules was destroyed.
Of course, the rules of this club did not apply to everyone. It was always clear who was the master and who was the servant. The criterion continued to be skin color and gender, both expressed in terms of “money.” And this “money“, called US dollar, became the world’s means of extending white men‘s rule, because everyone wanted to have a snack at the table with the rich. However, all this was decided exclusively in Washington D.C., the capital of the USA, named after the successful slave owner.
After the US expanded its influence across the globe in the 1990s, the tide began to turn in the 2000s. Starting in the Muslim world of the Middle East, resistance to the US dollar system slowly arose. Alongside this, the People’s Republic of China closed itself off from this system and Russia began to stabilize under Vladimir Putin after the political, economic and legal vacuum created by the collapse of the Soviet Union a decade earlier.
Few in the “West” can imagine the price the US dollar system is exacting on the world. Like Latin America (and Africa), the former “Eastern Bloc” became a legal vacuum in which the biggest criminals gained the upper hand in mafia-like structures, as they had done in the USA up to the “Wild West” in previous centuries.
While the capitulation of the Soviet Union under Michael Gorbachev was a blessing for the “West”, for Russia itself it was “the greatest catastrophe of the 20th century”, as Vladimir Putin once called it in conversation with Angela Merkel. This is how the “West” with NATO and the EU advanced across the border of the former Soviet Union after the collapse of the “Eastern Bloc”. So we have arrived at the Ukraine war.
In 2007, Vladimir Putin gave a speech at the Munich Security Conference that in retrospect can be described as “historic”. In this speech he clearly and unequivocally criticizes the unilateral supremacy of the USA. And he concluded his speech with the sentence: “And of course we would like to work with equally independent and responsible partners to create a just and democratic world order that guarantees security and prosperity not only for a select few, but for everyone.”
Now we are seeing the consequence. Where does the US sphere of influence end – and where does the world outside start? Where does the territory of the “select few” end – and where does everyone else’s world start? Where does the hegemony of “the West” end – and where does “the rest” start, who has to pay for it?
Is Ukraine on the North Atlantic? The entire Ukraine conflict revolves around this question alone. The US didn’t want to negotiate about. The answer will now be given on the battlefield. I fear, Europe’s gonna be crushed in between.
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philosophic arts 