Comrade Norma Olivia Sanchez has jet black hair and is petite. She’s vaguely malnourished for a Cuban, but still attractive and “dynamico”. Of course! She is and always will be a member of the Committees for Defense of the Revolution. The vigilant internal defense mechanism against Yankee imperialist aggression and unrestrained, insatiable sex tourism. Her mother was a fairly high ranking person in the Party, and told her of the struggles to defend socialism during the Cold War years. Told her of the deprivations and economic siege beginning in 1989 when the Soviet Union collapsed and virtually all proto-communist regimes along with it.
COMRADE NORMA OLIVIA:
“The U.S.S.R. was the sun and we were just a proud and tiny island fortress. When the sun went out, when we lost our greatest, sturdiest ally; we would be in the dark and there were many things in the dark that could ruin us.”
There would be no more petrol for the cars and tractors, buses and power plants. There would not be fertilizer for growing food. There would be shortages of absolutely everything on every level of consumption. There would be long lines and no electricity. There would be no fans or air conditioners, there would be zip-zero-nada. And in this proverbial darkness of our times ahead, our enemy which had sought to ruin us from the very day of our independence would move in, emboldened by the so-called end of history.
I have some understanding that was it not for decisions made during the revolution, if not for our Russian friends and of course the own solid base of our people in the historical context; we could be living in an illiterate and deeply unhealthy place; with a brothel and gambling embankment running from Miramar to Varadero. 500 kilometers long where foreigners could just cheaply, scenically fuck our women, drink our rum and smoke our cigars in the sun.
I knew, the minute I was called to the office that we would not surrender, our great leaders, well the two brothers still alive; would not for one human second consider that the fight was lost.
I was there the day they called us all together. The top nine, the big two; the Ministers and the deputies of industry, defense, finance, agriculture, and espionage later. We had known it was coming, the fall of our protector and benefactor. In embassy cables and diplomatic whispers; we also knew, it was our job to know that when the big bear fell down, died, and became reborn as god only knows what under American guidance! And its brightest, newest oldest and also highly questionable satellites began dropping from the sky; that nothing, not one thing would stop the aggressors to the north from moving in upon us.
We knew this was the beginning of the end of the revolution as we understood it, but what could we do? We suspected the Syrians and the Libyans would not give in easily to them at all. And we watched one after another as communist regimes collapsed in Eastern Europe and Africa. It was really our estimation, that by the time the dust settled; it would be only us, the Vietnamese, the People’s Republic of China (both which had embraced capitalism in most regards five years ago, Laos, and whatever the backwards hell they were doing in North Korea! We assumed Nicaragua, Ethiopia, Namibia and Angola would remember what we did for them but be in no position to reciprocate. And between 1989 and 1994, it would all come tumbling down. The failed architecture of a dystopian dream.
We sat together at a time when even the leaders were hungry and when anyone looked in a mirror they would not always recognize their own faces, for a look of despair had set in, inside oneself. All that we had willed as a people could be undone in just one year. We were all the same outside, for the siege had not begun yet, it would begin tomorrow and the next day and for the next ten or twenty years. And the Yankee enemy in the North, the pale colder place just a few days out by raft or one hour by plane; it would either soon invade, or try and starve us out. The ten million that had refused to defect. And the accomplishments of the last fifty years could go up in smoke, or simply in a long whimper, as the Dominoes began to fall.
But I understood, it was my training from Moscow to understand and my own Cuban sense of putting it together and taking it apart and refashioning. I knew that there was only one thing that could hold the country together, and so did Fidel and Raul. We needed to buy the time it required us to shore up. I am not sure that we prepared adequately for this day, actually. I’m not really sure we believed this day would come.
They drove us out to a farm. Well of course they didn’t tell us and we didn’t ask. And we were told in a meeting this was going to be a “special period in times of peace”, which was to say all the conditions of a siege and a war were to be upon us, and really the only question was how long could we last until the U.S. gets bored, not tired for they have never been in a rush. More until the empire is bored with us, less obsessed with us. Long enough for the opposition to imperialism to recoup.
I remember in the car to the ranch which disguised the room for these situations. I remember wondering if this was the end of our experiment and life as we understood it.
“This comes right from Fidel; you’re all going abroad in a week. Some of you will join embassy staff or medical missions, some as private people with foreign passports. You will be going to allied countries and Western countries, you will be going to make some hasty business.”
Well really the whole speech was so much longer. But this was the short of it. We were not told in any specific terms how long supplies and foreign currency reserves could hold out on the island. We were told in no uncertain terms that things were going to run out and that our job was to generate hard currency through the operation of a variety of legal and illegal businesses to shore up the essential purchase; food, fuel, and probably armaments.
“They’re rioting in Moscow, in Warsaw, and in Budapest. It’s all coming down. Even the Chinese are talking about calling it something else.”
I tell you it wasn’t all cigar smoke and mirrors and fake foreign names, Cubans look like everyone and we had trained long ago to act like anyone, and we’d been assimilating for years into the second world and there was a contingency plan for a cut off over time from U.S.S.R. foreign aid, not overnight.
COMRADE NORMA:
“What brought it all down?”
LEADER MAXIMO CASTRO:
“This isn’t a polite or immediate question, comrade.”
But, the answer was several things. First, the West was economically more exploitative and comparatively more ruthless. Second, the Russian Communist Party lost its popular imperative, and third, the endless wars in proxy had sapped its will. But there was something else no one said, which was being said in the West; that Capitalism was simply a better system, no-no no one would say that. But everyone was always hoping blue jeans and popular gringo music would fall off a favela cart or plane hatch back from Miami. And it often did. Luxury carrots for all or for none says the evil murderous and often sloppy C.I.A.! But ours was a hard-won thing that had the support of the people and would not be defeated by American imperialism and temptation.
We will do what we have to do to survive this! Too much is historically on the line, if we fall like the others this idea and all our sacrifices and gains will have been for nothing. We would plot and organize, mobilize and do anything we had to do to secure the revolution. We would survive this coming Special Period in Times of Peace. We will break the grim Yankee blockade and ensure the relevancy of Cuban-style Marxist Leninism for ten thousand years to come! And I will wear blue jeans when I have to. Four people with mixed but exotic features enter the room, two men and two women, clad in loose army green tunics.
Thus declares our jefe:
RAUL CASTRO:
“I would like to introduce the delegation from the Kurdistan Workers Party.”
“They are quite expert in smuggling, establishing European business fronts and of course, they are committed revolutionaries motivated by the same historical forces as our own people.”
That was the very moment that the special relationship between the Cubans and Kurds solidified. Skill in smuggling and commerce would be exchanged for medical specialists and engineers that could design impregnable bunkers. Ten years later, Comrade Norma Sachez’s half Argentine daughter Alina Sanchez would become one of the first Cubans to serve in the Medical and Engineering Brigades attached to PKK guerillas in Turkey. Her Kurdish guerrilla name was Lêgerîn Çiya. One of the longest-serving members of the international brigade mobilized to protect the revolution in Rojava.
“No blind faith or fanatical sentiments, and we may yet win this war!”
– Cirok Apo.
On February 17th, 2015.
We’re at the precipice of civilization. At a hotel roof bar in the world’s oldest, continuously inhabited city. Just me, a good lucking shall we call it’ journalist?’ My friend, Abu Hamza, a Kurdish patriot, and also a waiter chain smoking and watching the telexcreen nervously. I hold a book, well more of a rhetorical report on ‘capitalist modernity’. The order to evacuate Erbil were given just an hour ago.
“Total chaos,” says Abu Hamza.
Just outside the city, to the South West, in the darkness are literally gathering hordes. Bearded men in black hoods, capable of nearly unlimited violence. Perhaps many thousands of them. Actually? allegedly? Who knows. Not coalition military intelligence. With belt fed machine guns mounted on pickup trucks and ferociously sharp blades. The hord is at the gates. The City is understandibly in a total panic. Tens of Thousands have already fled for the mountains.
It is called “Erbil” by the Arabs and “Hewler” by the Kurds.
The citadel is looped by ring roads. And thus, from the air it looks like a target. Newly paved, well lit highways link hotels to malls to mosques to shopping centers. This a city on the very edge of an oblivion. Each tower, each pylon, each bolt, each cocktail; 6,000 years of human civilization brought to the full hilt. To the Maximum.
The defense of the City, managed by two factions of Kurdish Peshmerga and the CIA will revolve around using the hotels as sniper points, and fighting ring by ring.
On the second innermost highway ring, of the 1,000 Meter Road, atop the Dedeman Hotel. Here we find a mixed race European Justine. Her last name is slightly different on several official documents, actually. It’s a little hard to pronounce. She sits for twilight libation. If the defenses don’t hold and the air strikes don’t materialzie, it’s gonna be a real dry town fast.
“A contextual report on the Crisis in Greater Kurdistan”. From Case Officer Justine Tomas Falafarian to her colleagues in the Kurdistan Workers Party. On the eve of the battle for Erbil.
ABU HAMZA:
The temperature went over 114 degrees today in Erbil City Streets. I am on the roof of a newly erected brutalist slab housing tower on the One Thousand Meter Ring Road to the southeast of Hewler. I take a little break. To watch the last lights of the sun dip below the low range to the West of the world’s oldest continuously inhabited city. The whole roof is lit up in white lights. I will continue the broadcast. Any hour now we’ll be going over the border into what’s left of Syria. Into Rojava. Into a Revolution inside a grisly Civil war whose outcome is very much still up in the air. If Erbil falls tonight, sooner than later hopefully.
Abu Hamza looks a little dower. Probably calacualting how defensible the City is, base don how many Pesh Merga militia have fled, or will soon flee.
JUSTINE:
“When you open your paper, turn on your TV, or boot up your smartphone and attempt to understand what is happening; you are already tuned into people paid well to validate a view you already had!”
One such view is that there is a war going on between Islam and the mainly Christian Eastern & Western Bloc that affects China too. Both Russia and the United States have been poorly managing Wahhabi-Salafist terror in their countries since long before the Cold War supposedly ended in 1991. The United States by funding it and Russia by committing war crimes against whoever deploys it against them or their interests. China has been battling Islamic separatists that wish to section off 1/5 of its country to the Northwest in Xinjiang province. Perhaps what you tune into tells you it’s all some massive clash of civilizations. This ridiculous idea was popularized by Samuel Huntington in 1992. Other writers and pundits declare the events all part of a long-running proxy war extending past when Francis Fukuyama ended history after the Cold War. If you’re deeply religious, and much of the human race is, you might periodically wonder if this is the end of times. As humans have wondered many, many times before. Neither the media nor the thought leaders nor your religious intuitions are paid by telling the truth. They are paid because you like how they interpret horrifying, unpredictable events for you. You subscribe to their interpretations because they assist you in rationalizing, wholly irrational human behavior, predatory government malfeasance, and social policies that enable a virtually endless war.
From your house of worship or via your TV screen you might try to rationalize what’s happening here in the killing fields of the Middle East through the prism of your respective prophet’s scriptures or favorite pundit’s words. The news is a nasty circular addiction. A part of religion is a repetitive act of denial. You almost have to always deny that vast portions of the rest of your species are even loved or protected by God. This allows a dynamic whereby you systematically begin to not care as much about whole blocks of other humans, based on something you must have faith is real, but cannot be proved by science or reason. So in many regards, any group of religious practitioners that equate Godly protection to a set of scriptures is always probably re-written and re-translated by a fallible man. It is implicit to accept the belief that your hands are washed off much of humanity’s manifest suffering. But the wretched of the earth are statistically Muslim, Christian, Buddhist, and Hindu in relatively equal proportions. But let’s look at the flood of violence from this phase of this longest war today. Let’s try to be dispassionate! Objective and rational, without losing our solidarity or our souls.
I could only assure you on the political science and international development level it is wholly rational what is happening in the world today. Outside of wars for diminishing resources, prophetic revelations, and clashing civilizations. It is the product of high-level planning and an absence of low-level care. We might extend that to the human tragedy generally and the Middle East Highly specifically.
The steak is just as tender in New York, London, Geneva, Paris, Rome, Berlin, Beijing, Shanghai, St. Petersburg, and Moscow!
The politicians in these places and those who manage them live in a similar style of homes. People who own energy companies, big financial firms, manage banks, own the arms, or information tech companies; their mansions and yachts have similar styles and elite luxury amenities. The suits that their businessmen wear are of similar styles and fine materials. The sports cars their kids drive are all around the same speeds, and costs since luxury items are all price fixed. The women for sale in all three power blocks have the same price tags and services for sale.
Thank G-d the “Cold War” is supposedly over because, for a cold war, a kind of hot series of medium-scale wars, civil wars, and highly bloody armed events occurred in almost every single country on earth between 1945 and 1991. Although most respective national histories are total propaganda by omission, it has been agreed in the West that Communism was soundly disproven and defeated and of course, the West allegedly ended history and “won.” But the Pax American of 1989 to 2001 was short-lived.
We are supposedly all very democratic in the West. We have Republican or Parliamentary governments with generally only two major opposing parties and free-market economies. The Russians supposedly are that thing called Democracy as well. After all the looting that happened in the gangland 90s under the Shock Doctrines. Nigeria will tell you it’s a democracy and so will a lot of other people. It’s hard to find a Kurdish political party without the word Democracy in it. The absolute most war town, brutal, depraved place on earth is called the Democratic Republic of Congo.
In reality, we all have highly Managed-Democracies. Scripted even. They are managed differently in Russia than in the West. Also generally with two parties of angry, loud ambitious lawyers, technocrats and oligarchs trying their hands at populism. In European social democracies, after looting the entire earth, they raised taxes and funded social services. Well certainly in Russia with only one relevant Party Yedinaya Rossiya (United Russia), democracy is slightly easier to implement. In Russia, the Communist Party is still the second-biggest party. Anyone effectively opposing United Russia or even writing about it in a negative way is promptly killed. Its corruption is referred to as the “party of crooks and thieves.” But most Russians agree that Vladimir Putin has restored security and dignity to Russia. So America is a back and forth two-party state and Russia is a multiple-party, one-party state. Designer consumer goods are readily available in both places. Russians as the losers of the Cold War are demographically poorer than Americans, but Russians have higher rates of university graduation and literacy. Both have pretty enormous domestic reserves of fossil fuels. This is why their ferocious Middle Eastern proxy war can’t be just about oil at all.
China has a strong one-party state, and it is run by the Communist Party. Its impressive economic growth since embracing State Capitalism in 1986 has propelled it to be a clear contender to the Western Hegemony. China is disinterested in both military interventions and experiments in the Middle East. All three powers have increasing energy needs that America and Russia can meet within their borders and China cannot, who therefore has elected to colonize every country in Africa. However, energy resources; oil and natural gas are the engines of both war and development.
America in 2017 has willing proxies in Egypt, Jordan, and Israel. Its base for all Central Command, Military operations is in Qatar. The U.S. invaded Iraq in 2003, as some may recall. It mostly withdrew in 2011 but returned to contain ISIS in 2014. Saudi Arabia and all the Gulf States are Western oil clients, but all of them have intrinsic ties to the propagation of radical Islam.
Russia has a long-term client relationship with Syria and its only Mediterranean naval base there. Along with Crimea which it annexed in 2014 on the black sea, this is one of only two warm-water ports. The key Russian regional ally is Iran. Iran as a result of the American invasion of Iraq controls everything in Iraq that is not Iraqi Kurdistan, the Sunni Triangle, and the remains of the ISIS-held areas (Ar Raqqah, Anbar, Al-Hawijja, Deir-Ez-Zor). Most people here call them Daesh, the pejorative using the acronym.
For over 2/3rds of the human race, the very events critical to their respective, overlapping, and at times contradictory faiths took place in Egypt, the Levant, and Mesopotamia. For followers of Zoroastrianism, Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Baha’i, and numerous sub-sects of each, this is where their very prophets were all born, raised, and communicated with the source. From the very moment, according to their own religious texts, that the Israelites arrived out of Egypt there has never, except for several long authoritarian periods of Islamic Caliphate rule, been one even year of continuous peace. The Crusades were a several hundred-year series of barbaric attempts to establish a genocidal, white supremacist Roman Catholic foothold in an area only slightly larger than modern Israel. When not seeking to expand Islam into ¼ of the earth or repulsing Christian incursions; the Abbasids, the Umayyads, and the Ottomans were fighting constant wars with Mongol hordes, each other, or the long-running Sunni v. Shia wars.
There is nothing that can be written academically or rhetorically, presented on any medium to give the West or the East a new conscience. It is now a simple matter of public record that the developed world has accepted that the only obligations it has to the maldeveloped world is periodic mitigation. Famines, wars, floods, and disease epidemics are to be poorly managed by direct aid. Multilateral efforts through the United Nations are to be the extent of collaboration. NGOs will proliferate as donor trends determine. Regular military intervention will remove or shore up state systems intrinsically hostile to any of the three centers of global power; named Washington, Moscow and Beijing.
The World Wars and Cold Wars brought humanity closer than it ever has come to total self-destruction. But, there was nothing particularly stable about the Pax-Americana from 1991 to 2001. The Russian and Chinese embrace of free-market capitalism has not altered in the slightest way how they maneuver as states toward their citizens and world. Albeit with fewer disasters, periods of social engineering. There is nothing particularly comforting about the Chinese hegemony when it fully arrives.
Consistent for nearly 100 years has been the Middle Eastern theater of a war that changes locations, ideologies, factions, and names. But, it is all in fact a singular ongoing war.
If we accept the validity of real politics being intrinsically hostile and equity in the international order; if we excuse every type of growing human rights violation as explained in the national interest; the center cannot hold. The earth has only so much capacity for economic pillage. The weapons of war are exponentially more destructive. The exodus toward the West is overwhelming. We cannot prove broad conspiracy nor do we have to. We cannot confirm or deny that something in human nature is self-interested, violent, and cruel. But, we can truly verify a coherent, consistent willingness for wealthy nations to prey on the developing ones and keep them deliberately dependent and maldeveloped.
The Middle East has been in flames since 1919 and it is irresponsible to pretend that it has something to do with civilization, religion, or cultural clashes. It fundamentally has to do with two forces pushing from the East and the West toward an energy resource. But that is in itself simplistic since both the United States and Russia have some of the largest proven reserves under their own territory. A Middle Eastern market for the weapons needed for constant warfare is a vital aspect. Both the Western and Eastern Blocs are seeking to control the oil in the ground and sell the dozens of Middle Eastern players’ advanced and simple tools for defense but mostly more killing. The various holy sites for the numerous religious believers convolute the basic thesis but are the third pillar of the equation. Were there no oil, there would be no willingness to arm so many opposing players. Observe Somalia where Muslims are in a desert and absolutely no Western powers really care until high-profile piracy occurs.
Were there no arms racing there could only be very small wars. Without political actors in Moscow as well as Washington, London and Berlin there couldn’t be such a cauldron of bloodshed. There have been countless stated rationales for intervention, proxy arming, and invasion. It is nearly impossible to convince the democracies they ever did anything to escalate this. The war with the Islamic State has become a focal point, almost an obsession for everyone, but it is the latest manifestation of a long-running problem.
Before there was ever such a thing as the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria; the usual pundits and politicians screamed Cold War. Then East and West heavily armed everyone. Israel then tripled its landmass, Syria became the Russian proxy, and Egypt changed opportunistically sides. Next, they screamed about the containment of the Iranian Revolution rather than the West-armed Saddam Hussain. A gruesome eight-year war later Iraq genocided the Kurds. During this period to give the USSR their own Vietnam, the Saudis, Pakistanis, and Americans created Al-Qaeda and turned then Communist Afghanistan into the ungovernable Islamist warzone it is today. Then Saddam annexed Kuwait, and the West invaded. Several atrocities against Shi’a and Kurds later he remained in power. The pundits screamed loudest after September 11th, 2001 and the Global War on Terror began. Russian atrocities in Chechnya in the 1990s where one in seven Chechens was killed were replied to with the 2002 Beslan and 2004 Ord Nost Hostage crisis. Hundreds of innocent Russian hostages died in both events. An estimated 240,000 people had died in Chechnya in two wars that leveled the separatist state. Most regimes including Israel saw waves of protest in 2011 over domestic grievances and inequality during the Arab Spring. Virtually all regimes besides Tunisia quelled the uprisings. Civil War broke out in Libya and Syria. By 2014 Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Yemen, and Syria were all in total unrest, ashes, and anarchy. The corrupt military dictatorship of Egypt had been overthrown, then restored with U.S. intervention. Saudi Arabia and Iran were fighting proxy wars all over the region.
ABU HAMZA:
“Turkey has clearly logistically enabled the creation of a Sunni-oriented, Wahhabi Salafist ultra-fundamentalist Jihadist entity which took the world by complete surprise. Saudi Arabia has long provided it with a hateful Sunni version of Islam. Qatari actors gave their sophisticated propaganda and branding. Pakistani intelligence coordinated it as they had in Yemen and Afghanistan.”
Then, the so-called “Islamic State” took dozens of Syrian and Iraqi cities including Mosul, which had come dangerously close to taking Baghdad, before being turned back by Iranian coordinated militias and Kurdish Democratic Confederalists. The Peshmerga and the Iraqi military had fled in varying ways exposing civilians to atrocity. But allegedly quite a lot of these Sunni tribes people liked living under the Islamic State’s brand of non-state governance! It validated their identity, it gave them something big and powerful to believe in. But, now they are near the brink of annihilation. It is actually not important to indict who thought up the Islamic State, and who planned it. Some say the Gulf States, some say Iran, Israel, and the West. The evidence though is clear that Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar all fueled its development and Pakistan has the only intelligence service capable of working out the variables. It is pretty fucking childlike to believe it was created by Islamists and Ba’athist officers in U.S. custody.
It can be difficult to figure out what’s happening out here in the Middle East. It can become an abstraction of alien cultures, conflicts, and ethnic configurations that are easily blurred to an uncaring or untrained eye. It is hard to get your head around how the alleged cradle of human civilization became such an everlasting intractable bloodbath. Perhaps it is only the responsibility of the Western audience to know what is happening because the collateral of the carnage is spilling over into their European and American cities. No one will perhaps admit that, but yes. And it is also important to render the Middle East more human because the weapons distributed here are from the West or Russia. The oil being pumped is being bought and sold by Western or Russian firms. Most people living in the West don’t actually know what Kurdistan is, but that doesn’t say so much as most people in the West don’t know where a lot of things are. I would go so far as to say the majority don’t care.
Most probably won’t admit that they didn’t know that the Kurdish ethnic group existed until 2014. It was not until various pundits made it clear “the Kurds” were actively fighting the Islamic State did anyone ever hear about things like the Peshmerga, the People’s Protection Units (YPG), or about Kurds in general. The perversity and violence of ISIS kept it in the headlines for the past three years and the Kurdish issue has increasingly been at the forefront of understating geopolitics in the region. Particularly because Iraqi Kurdistan, administered by the Kurdish Regional Government as an autonomous area since 2003 is set to hold its next referendum vote for independence on September 27th, 2017. And it is sitting on top of the fifth-largest proven crude oil reserve on earth. No one should totally wash their hands of what happens in the Middle East because its conflicts are fought with Western and Russian weapons, paid for by American and Russian tax dollars. The companies pumping out the oil are largely Western or Russian-based firms.
JUSTINE:
There are in fact a lot of players, but all of them fall into four big tents; Western Allies led by the United States Military and Coalition forces. Russian Allies most prominently Syria and Iran. Gulf Sunni Client States claim they are Western Allies but can be linked to the Islamic State through one or two acts of deductive reasoning. And the 40 million Kurds spread across Turkey, Iran, Iraq, and Syria. The Kurds, who are the world’s largest stateless people are seeking some viable means to safeguard their long-abused community and of course, get rich off the oil under their Iraqi territory.
“I plan to be very repetitive with names and places that matter.”
Or places that have more than one name so the reader can try and learn them. There are a lot of overlapping players, a lot of acronyms, national interests, international interests, and underlying religious and ethnic antagonisms that go back thousands of years. There is a very long history of desert prophecy. This is certainly the land of Zoroaster, Abraham, Bab & Bahaullah (Iran); Moses (Egypt), Jesus (Israel/Palestine), and Muhammed (Saudi Arabia). Well documented and repetitive ethnic killing is the reality of life here for over 4,000 years punctuated by foreign occupations, colonies, and Islamic empires. Devastating foreign invasions on behalf of Mongolia and Europe altered the entire composition of the region; culturally, politically, and genetically. There is deep-rooted tribalism which has to be understood as a means of both loyalty and social organization. There are monarchies created by Europeans to crown their favored Bedouins as oil clients. There was the re-birth of the Jewish State for the third time in three thousand years. There was the re-birth of the revolutionary Shi’a State in Iran which carries a similar sense of Messianic optimism and zealous indoctrination to preserve for Shi’a what the Jewish one does for Jews. There is absolutely a more recent history since 1947 of several large and also small wars and protracted atrocities. Such as those experienced by the Palestinians at the hands of almost everyone in the region. You could rightfully say with a straight face that since the collapse of the Ottoman Empire in 1919; there has been a constant war playing out inside every single country in the region.
The Western Media’s linguistic and cultural detachment from these antagonistic protagonists borders on being crude Orientalism. An anti-Islamism mixed with a thirst for covering and sensationalizing bloodshed. The fact that suicide bombs are regularly going off in Western cities has made everything more immediate, more visceral. But it is undeniable now that some of the biggest beneficiaries of being Western petro-colony clients (Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Bahrain, and Oman) can be linked to funding and supporting Wahhabi Salafist doctrines when not being caught outright funding the Islamic State. Frankly, the enduring miserable heat doesn’t help anything. While obsessing, that is the word I would use; obsessing about the regions 5 million Jews and 7 million Palestinians of Greater Israel, West Bank and Gaza take up a lot of printed word on the subject. The enduring issue, the issue that everyone needs to become more fluent in, is the question of Kurdistan.
Beyond the wars, the ceaseless violence and the conservative, most intolerant, male-dominated nature of Middle Eastern society in general; and Arab, Kurdish and Persian society in particular. All anthropological and political variants are made worse by what I would call claustrophobia. A feeling of being trapped in small spaces disguised as holy lands with nowhere to really go. Or fear of impending genocide, which affects all the players out here, and there are many. As I did not write this article for academics, let me paint with broad brushstrokes a paragraph on demographics.
ABU HAMZA:
There are 35-40 million Kurds mostly spread across Turkey, Iran, Iraq, and Syria. They are mostly Sunni Muslims., There are two primary types of Muslims; Sunni and Shi’a which differ in a range of practices and beliefs, but are mostly divided over who was the rightful successor of the Prophet Muhamad. The Shi’a declare it was Muhammad’s cousin and son-in-law Ali and have been historically persecuted by the Sunni caliphates and rulers. Sunni Islam, which is the majority sectarian faction of global Islam (say 70-90%) Shi’ism is the smaller (say 10-20%) faction of the Ummah or Global Muslim community which is about 1/3 of the human race.
Kurds are also the world’s largest stateless people. Linguistically, culturally, spiritually, and often militarily Kurds are a great deal like Persians.
The nation of Iran has been a Revolutionary Shiite Islamic State since 1979, and is about 65% Persian, or say 50% of its 80 million people. There are also 9-10 million Kurds living there. While they are certainly not free from Iranian Sharia law; they are generally better treated than everywhere else in their historic lands of settlement. In Iraq, a genocide called Anfal happened in 1988 which brutally killed 180,000 Kurds. In Turkey Kurds and Turks have been in an open civil war since 1984. In Syria, Arabization campaigns and forced resettlement made them third-class citizens. Iran had an anti-Western, anti-Shah revolution in 1979. The United States promptly armed U.S. client Saddam Hussain to the teeth. Then sold guns secretly to Iran in the Iran-Contra Affair. While North Korea, Libya, and Israel all sold arms and also secretly advised the Iranians. An 8-year war occurred in the style of World War I with trenches and poison gas where over a million people were killed. In the last days of the war, Saddam Hussain ordered Al-Anfal or the systematic killing of 180,000 Kurdish Iraqis.
The nation that used to be Iraq was ruled by Saddam Hussain and the Ba’ath Party until 2003 when the US successfully “liberated” the nation. Only the Kurds would call it liberation as both the Shi’a and Sunni Iraqi Arabs both for the most part hate the United States. The Ba’ath party which was nominally Arab-Socialism but really a one-man dictatorship is also found in Syria. It is the political party of President Bashar al-Assad, who is an Alawite, but we will come back to that. It is certainly neither irrational nor poorly documented that historically everyone out here has at one point tried to annihilate each other. As most of the groups out here have at one point or are actively today trying to obliterate each other. None of this is helped by the obvious fact that the biggest Western powers & Russia cannot and will not allow control of natural resources under Iraq, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the Gulf States to go unspoken for. Or be nationalized. Or be made inaccessible by virtually endless conflict.
Sometime around 0-400 there were the mechanized sounds, the rumbling of the hord, the incursion. Followed by death from above. The coalition airstrikes light up the wastelands. These Cheta scum, these ISIS bandits are blown apart just sixteen kilomters from the outer most ring road. Unbeknownst to them the city was virtully defenseless, all the Pesh Merga and most of the civilians had fled. If not for the Coalitio nairstrikes Erbil would have fallen in hours.
Alan Medved, an intellectual, also a Ukrainian gangster.
Dmitry Khulushin, a businessman.
Maria Silverstova, “a journalist”, perhaps also a spy.
Shoresh Kesk, an anarchist.
Anya Campbell, a lovely martyr.
Errdal Old Newey, A poltical prisoner.
Peter Saint Reed, a dead colonial marine.
Anna Belle Rhubarb, a courtisan and mystic.
Abu Hamza, an intrepid fixer. A Kurdish Patriot.
Cormade Mountain Rock, a Professional soldier.
Comrade Spirit of War, a Georgian guerrilla.
Daria, sometimes called Dasha, sometimes called Goldy, “a consort and a Courtesan.”
“A MIDDLE EASTERN WESTERN”
ACT ONE
SCENE 1
SET IN:
NEWYORKGRAD
Sebastian Adonaev enters the Tavern. A place of refuge! The double doors swing shut and seal him inside. The place is entirely deserted. Music plays lightly. He is a fugitive and a soldier returning from a forgotten foreign war. He is losing his mind. A shot girl, Maria Silverstova with forty bullet shots, sells Vodka based drinks. They meet eyes.
SONG PLAYS:
Well I guess I didn’t die in the war!
I’m alive!
But my friends are dead.
I survived to say the most and do the least.
We are the ones who held the barricades
I just returned,
On a shuttle from the fires of the Middle East,
I survived, I survived by happenstance,
This I know!
When dozens that I slept beside are now in coffins,
In the ground below.
This revolution is a first, and perhaps also the last chance.
Their fearless faces,
Are now martyr posters on a wall,
Reports are now coming in, the Turkish Army is fast advancing;
Rojava will most likely fall!
Well I guess I didn’t die in the war!
I’m alive!
But my friends are dead.
I walk in concentric circles, I try to tell our story,
A story etched upon my brain.
I tell the tale to many scared civilians, they look at me like a mad man,
A foreign person. A person gone insane!
Thanks to the fallen, the Islamic State is now defeated.
Thanks to the YPG and YPJ these bandits have retreated.
Now raise the glass or the flag!
For what we’ve done!
American thanks, still it remains unsaid.
There was a clear and present danger,
A vile Jihadist menace,
Lives lost, flags flown high, the dead cannot mourn the dead.
Thanks to my training:
I can stay awake for days,
Here I am!
Here I am.
I’m alive, I’m alive but my friends are dead,
Find me the means, count me in all the ways!
Back in this fortress of a city,
In the heart of the Empire,
Make a stand;
You know the way!
This is your land.
What we gave and what we lost is a nightmare that forever will replay!
On the very soil of my homeland,
the total safety of this place,
I beg my God, I beg my family and my lovers,
Give me bullets!
Let me not die in disgrace!
In my adopted not-a-country Kurdistan,
The enemy advances
The Turkish Army kills my people, burns our cities,
Aims to defeat our revolution,
What are the odds,
What are the chances?
I know forever I will carry, the faces of my dead friends, dagger etched inside me the on the innermost compartment of my mind,
There was so much hurry up and waiting, there were bodies on the road,
40,000 died for Kurdistan!
Everything around you could explode!
There was fire on the mountains there, there was bloody murder in the streets,
There was marching, there was dying,
And defeating
There was attacking,
There was terror,
There was going forward then retreating.
Thanks to my training,
I can take apart a rifle. I can put it back together.
Thanks to my training,
I can engage in democracy, I can believe we can do better.
Well I guess I didn’t die in the war!
I’m alive! I’m alive!
But my friends are dead.
I was hiding in that Tavern,
then Adonaev said:
ADONAEV:
During our border reentry run from Rojava back into here, most of our column was blown apart in missile strikes. We hid in a P.K.K. dugout bunker for two days. I was covered in piss, shit, blood, mostly other people’s blood, mostly my own piss. Heval Jansher, my mentor and immediate commander, I think he died in a drone strike. Died getting us out of Rojava before the Turkish invasion began. I turned 33. An Armenian volunteer bought me an oriental woman. But all I wanted to do was take a long hot shower. Wash the filth and death off of me. Get out of that fucking uniform forever, and get on the next evacuation shuttle. Get back to Daria alive!
I spent the evening of my 33rd birthday in a Chinese bathhouse on the outskirts of Sulaimaniya. Yet, not one thing in it was made clean. Or for bathing. “Suly”, or also called “Slemani”, is the more libertine of the Kurdish cities in liberated North Western Iraq. A liberated, but unrecognized country politically divided by two city states.
The Chinese sex worker bore witness to a madness that would soon follow. My colleague, balls deep in something carnal his way come. I just kept washing myself vigorously. The filth I felt of cowardice. The shame of retreat. She put her hands on me for only a moment and I shuddered. Pushed her away. I then fell on my knees and I cried. I picked myself up, and the Armenian volunteer paid our bill. We had a beer in the adjacent bar. Right before midnight we took a cab back to the safehouse. They went through our bags to make sure nothing would flag us at an airport. Some party men put us in a van with tinted windows then we were hustled through security. My magic carpet landed in Baghdad. Then a 24 hour layover in Cairo. Almost fell out of the sky over the Atlantic several times. Then with no questions asked I was in JFK.
Now! I am back in Newyorkgrad, far from the war raging in Iraq, Syria, and Yemen. But! The war and the ghosts never leave me. I ride the train with plump and ignorant civilians. Some Chornay put on an obnoxious ‘show time’.
By way of Baghdad then Cairo, now I am back. My mind isn’t where I had thought I’d left it and neither are any of my friends and family. Is it March? It’s March or it’s April. I have just done an eighty-day bid in the hospital. Might have been eighty with a two-day run for the mountains in between. I might be facing an assault charge. I might be tailed. I hide in the only place I think I can fit in. A Tavern on Ludlow street. I call Sasho from a pay phone. He says to lay low and head to the Tavern right before nightfall. I don’t know what the hospitals did to me, actually. I just want to kill myself.
I showed up at the Tavern very early. The place is empty. The owner Sasho isn’t around nor is my friend and associate, the Gangster Medved. On the wire, I heard Ms. Daria will get married tomorrow on her 29th birthday, right after the curtain call on a play she sings in, in Midtown. She wrote to me every day during the war. I think I’m just too late.
I think I’m being followed. I threw my phone in the river. Now I don’t have a phone. I’m either chasing myself in a circle around the Isle of Man, or the follow-follow men are trailing me. Seeing who I meet with before they pick me up again.
Well anyway, there’s only one way in, but four ways out of this Bulgarian tavern.Other than a pity coffee here and there, everyone is nervous about me and giving me tons of space. Avoiding me that is to say. Not Medved, he’s buying me a drink. Out in the wide open. Like he doesn’t give a fuck!
In walks a newly hired shot girl Maria Silverstova. A chesty young thing. She says she is “from Moscow” but is actually from the glorious nation of Bulgaria.
ADONAEV
Zdrastvistia.
SILVERSTOVA
Why hello my very strange one! My wayward and my leeward Amerikanski. You can say Privet to me, my old new friend. For I do know you naked.
ADONAEV
I had met Ms. Maria at the Bulgarian Bar the very night I got off the evacuation plane. I first met her again on international working women’s day.
She gave me a good price. There are 70 Rubles in Dollar. Her shots cost 280. Her body is far more. Her mind is not for sale.
SILVERSTOVA
I tell people “I’m from Moscow”, though of course I am not.
My waist is tight and breasts are quite ample. It is all contained under a little black cocktail dress. Holding around forty plastic bullets of Vodka; I sell them in the Tavern for 70 Rubles apiece. Ethnically speaking I am clearly one of Russia’s 157 sub-ethnicities, perhaps a Chechen, perhaps part Tajik or Uzbek. I think I am a very good listener.
Sasho said you were coming to hide out with us.
ADONAEV
I’m looking for Medved.
SILVERSTOVA
And Medved, he looks for you, droogy.
SILVERSTOVA:
Sasho said, “try and make him happy”.
Sasho has a long history with him. Aiding and abetting a terrorist. The Bulgarians have never really expelled him from that ugly little tavern. In an on-scene kind of way, maybe they encourage him. Giving him a refuge.
Adonaev doesn’t remember meeting me 80 days ago. He came here right from the airport. Had Sasho the Voorhi sort him out some work and some papers.
He looked and still looks like a terrifying person, a real mad man.
He had just gotten that very same night in a stupid fist fight, beat a Chornay half to death yelling racial epitaphs. And almost was asked to exit, relinquishing his tavern card last Saturday.
I draw him over to a small table, though on duty as a shot girl I remain an inquisitive journalist.
ADONAEV
Maria, Tovarish Maria how goes the life of night?
SILVERSTOVA:
I’m alive. It’s a start from which all options can follow. Would you like a drink?
ADONAEV
Not on your ruble.
SILVERSTOVA:
There are other Rubles to pour from. Let’s sit. Tell me about the Civil War. A little bit, enough to have a sense of what anyone is supposed to do about you or your friends who came back to us.
ADONAEV:
More good was done than any evil. By my Otriad anyway. I’m sure the others killed more Jihadists and I did more medical care, but it was all a group effort. But really, few of my single serving friends have survived the war. The Arabs and Kurds are just going to grind away until Turkey rolls in to squash the entire revolution.
SILVERSTOVA:
What Otriad did you serve in? I’m a little familiar with actors.
ADONAEV:
I served in the Shahid Firat Tabor of the People’s Protection Units, the Y.P.G.
SILVERSTOVA:
Ye-Peh-Gay? Or WHY-PEE-GEE?
ADONAEV:
The Kurdish Militia received American support to defeat the Islamic State.
SILVERSTOVA:
Freedom fighting and or U.S. Imperialism, maybe both? Same, same; not different?
ADONAEV:
We were defending the only alleged Democracy in the Middle East, besides the alleged democracy in Israel. Turkey was bombing us from the North, Al Qaeda attacking from Idlib in the West, the Hashid Shaabi Popular Mobilization forces from the East, and ISIS from the south.
You take guns from who offers them in that kind of situation, nu.
SILVERSTOVA:
So, on the news tonight. Turkey has begun a new Operation against Rojava. You are aware Afrin Canton is almost completely overrun and Mambij is next and the Turkish army will probably undo all if any progress you all had made out there, against whoever it was the Americans had you fighting? And have now abandoned.
ADONAEV:
I don’t sleep well anymore. I use combinations of masturbation, drinking, and drugs to put the lights out, I guess some emphasis on the drinking too. I get it. We all died or almost died or didn’t die and it was all for nothing. I get it. And Goldy and I will never see each other again, and I writhe in pain avoiding my face in the mirror.
I need help from you or Medved. A different kind of bullet.
SILVERSTOVA:
Prosto! You just need a new whore! Excuse me, I mean muse. Someone to pay to love you even better than before. Not me, I’m too much for you too. I too want luxury carrots to remember. Not paintings or any poems. The couple times we eye to eyed, we french kissed, it all just makes me pity you a lot.
You’re basically not a man to me or your Goldy. You have no car, no good job, no property, and for right now no ability to move beyond your own paralysis. I and she and others like us have to think about papers.
ADONAEV:
Ne-yet Prosto. Not simple. I need a revolver so I can restively and decisively shoot myself in the head like a man! Or turn it on her fat ugly Patron. That will be enough. I should have died with my friends in Afrin.
Do you even possess the understanding to know what is on the table there? Do you even have the care? They were liberating the women, they were instituting democracy and they were planting trees. I feel like I briefly defended a utopia, only to be cast out.
Sent back here where I am less than a man. Less than a criminal!
SILVERSTOVA:
Prosto! (Simple) Go back to the beginning of the narrative and explain to me your motivation!
Tell me how your valiant and slightly suicidal mission began and the connection between your ideas on free life versus a meaningful life in motion. Be, fucking linear! Tell the tale from beginning to end instead of dancing around like a crazy person.
ADONAEV:
Tovarish Maria,I would like a dance from you first. I will pay the full amount in green dollars.
SILVERSTOVA:
Your money Tovarish, they say is no good here. You can’t pay for a bullet or a dance. You can’t pay in Rubles, Dollars, or the now faceless Dinars.
You can buy time with or without sympathy.
ADONAEV:
Sympathies with the resistance?
SILVERSTOVA:
Sympathy with an American Mayakovsky, and those who enjoy his performances. Shamelessly flailing, shamelessly throwing himself in front of armies and trains, over what?
ADONAEV:
You do in fact know what!
SILVERSTOVA:
You know I don’t partake in the lapland for free. Don’t you have a forest wife in Nizhny Novgorod as well as a son somewhere? It will cost you nine hundred dollars to degrade yourself and me tonight. That is actually 64,800 Rubles an hour. Supply and demand. I don’t think you even have enough for a bullet. Certainly not enough to buy the only thing you really want.
ADONAEV:
I don’t have 100 Rubles to my name.
SILVERSTOVA:
Then you get what you pay for! Which are nothingly nothings.
ADONAEV:
What is my story worth?
SILVERSTOVA:
It’s worth less than a lap dance.
ADONAEV:
I need her, you know.
SILVERSTOVA:
Oh that we all know that story.
“It doesn’t take a weather man or woman to know which way the winds blow.” Old American saying?
ADONAEV:
I don’t follow your pretty little allegory.
SILVERSTOVA:
Old Russian saying, “I want to dance on your face until your mask falls off.”
ADONAEV:
That one I understood, perfectly.
SILVERSTOVA:
As if I was making reports in Russian, or Turkish.
“He has just returned from Syria. The duration of the self-deployment was around nine months were we to include Cuba and Russia and also Iraq, Turkey, and Egypt. He is haunted. And despondent, a veteran of the People’s Protection Units; called the Y.P.G, you pronounce the G as ‘gay’. He has been without any doubt ideologically indoctrinated by the Kurdistan Workers Party and given some basic military training. Brainwashing. He is to be watched if necessary: eliminated.”
Well I guess you didn’t die in the war.
ADONAEV:
Well I guess I didn’t die in the war.
There was a lot of shame in that. I was mysteriously back in New York, trapped and totally useless. All my best efforts were forgotten and amounted to less than one nothing.
SILVERSTOVA:
Stop talking and thinking only about yourself for a minute, blat… Tell me about your murdered Comrade Anya Campbell. Tell me about your soon-to-be-dead Kurdish friends. Confirm a little rumor I heard?
ADONAEV:
A rumor?
SILVERSTOVA:
Stop talking and thinking only about yourself for a minute, blat..now I heard a rumor. It’s a, how do you say, doozy, of a rumor.
ADONAEV:
Go on.
SILVERSTOVA:
I heard that the same people that did 9.11 basically created the Islamic State from scratch.
Enter the Gangster Medved, Sebastian and Medved bearhug embrace.
MEDVED:
Loose hips sink ships! Say no more serious things to this chesty one, my one old friend! Maria, call up some of your friends! This man needs a serious distraction.
But Sebastian Adonaev, being the Sebastian Adonaev, who I invest too much time and energy in; hopes to fully convolute the narrative. Blur apart the story of war and Islamic militancy and revolutionary fervor with busty sexcapades, pornographic poems, and perhaps some borrowed prophecy and Haitians. Chornay dancing about the room waving their flags in the air!
SILVERSTOVA:
A simple patriotic task.
MEDVED:
One night at the tavern, about one week after Sebastian arrived home. I was sure he was being followed. Shortly after our reunion, he was taken.
Shall I call them “American secret police?”
His voyage, quest perhaps, which began in Cuba, then to Russia, then Iraq, Turkey, Iraq, Turkey, Iraq, and then finally Syria, then out via Baghdad and Cairo. The detention lasted 80 days. All were behind him for now. He tries to tell me about his time in Kurdistan. In the end, the sad conversation always goes back to Ms. Daria.
ADONAEV:
What news do you have about Daria?
MEDVED:
Listen, man, not again. She’s all cleaned up. Singing on Broad Street. Has a nice place in Midtown.
ADONAEV:
She wrote to me…
MEDVED:
…every single day of the war?
ADONAEV:
Da.
MEDVED:
They have apps that can do that now. Robots can also write to you every single day too. You don’t even need to pay them, or sponsor their citizenship.
ADONAEV:
She loves me. And I love her. And the rest of the details can get figured out. For nine months she urged me to stay alive and come home. I need to find her.
Medved:
You can’t even consider supporting Daria, look at the state you’re in.
Even if you were rolling in it, why would you support a woman and her son, who isn’t your son, to stay here? Out of made-up imagined duty to act? A perverse Russian American lovesickness?
The kind that sent you to Syria in the first place. You can’t even be your own damn Patron. She’s taken anyway, man. Someone else has been paying her rent, credit cards, and keeping her papers in order.
ADONAEV:
Sergei? Dmitry? The Chubby Brahman? Corporate Robert Bruce?
MEDVED:
What does it matter? Other people’s property now. Other people’s problems.
ADONAEV:
I need to see her tonight.
MEDVED:
Impossible. She’s a kept woman. Kept a lot closer now.
ADONAEV:
Well, I have her tower address. Maybe leaning towards possibly, possible.
MEDVED:
Leave her alone. If you know what’s good for her. Also for yourself.
ADONAEV:
I need to do this. She wrote to me every day during the war.
MEDVED:
Nope. You do not! In a month, or less, you’ll have another woman. Or girl if you want. In the meantime is Daria even talking to you?
ADONAEV:
No, she is not. She cut the letters off a couple of weeks ago.
MEDVED:
Prosto, that’s it. You too were an okay team once. You supported each other, in a very strange way. But really, that Suka is a curse.
ADONAEV:
She’s only with whoever she is with for some money and the green card.
MEDVED:
And you actually want a paperwork marriage and a world of work?! You’re not stupid Sebastian, but your head is not on the right path, again. Go slap yourself in the bathroom. Go jump on the shot girl for a ride.
You have less than 100 Rubles. Two whole fucking American dollars.
You cannot afford a woman like Daria, I will just come out and say that. You do not have enough shiny gold things.
ADONAEV:
Not yet.
MEDVED:
Not yet. What do you plan to do when this is all over?
With additional statements or reports and writings from Polina Mazaeva, Bahaa Ilyas, Roza Saeed Al-Qaidi,Gareth Bronwne, Ismet Kayhan, Rebecca Grant, Agah Hazir & Heval Macer Gifford.
Dedicated to the Martyrs of Rojava
Dedicated to Shahid Peter Reed
Written 2017-2018
An Introductory Email from Friends
Dem Baş Heval,
We are glad to hear that you want to come to Rojava and support the YPG.
This is a standard procedure we follow in order to determine whether you seriously consider coming here. In order to proceed to our communication, you are expected to answer the questions below. If we know you better, we would figure out how you would help us during your stay here. This is not a one sided phase. The more we know you, the more you will be informed about our principles, our expectations and about the challenges you will face. We do not want you to be disappointed and frustrated here. We highly value those who want to offer their solidarity and struggle with us shoulder to shoulder against the enemies of humanity in the name of freedom and justice.
The YPG strives for a democratic, ecologic, and anti-patriarchal system of self-organization; it takes its power from the people and fights for the people. We struggle to defend the dignity of being a human when there is no one around to defend it and to create an ethico-political society in order to realize ideals of equality, justice, freedom, and self-determination. We wage a war against all forms of fascism and capitalist hegemony that try to enslave the peoples and destroy the nature. We get our inspiration from the philosophy of Serok APO whose ideas have become a torch in the jungle of oppression for the poor and the downtrodden; not only in Kurdistan but also in all around the world.
The YPG is more than a military force. It is a revolutionary organization that protects the transformation towards the ethical-political society against its external and internal enemies in accordance with the principles of democratic confederalism. So its fundamental mission is to defend the people and the Rojava Revolution. Based on the philosophy of Serok APO, the YPG struggles for a free and democratic Syria where tolerance towards other political views, religions, sects, ethnicities, cultures, and languages is a fundamental value. In this sense the YPG is democratic and legitimate self-defense force against hegemonic assaults of capitalist modernity and against pathological ideologies such as ISIS that had been produced by capitalist modernity itself along with a deep crisis in the Middle East.
The YPG is one of the forces in the Middle East that offers an alternative to capitalist modernity and its freakish products: the solution of democratic modernity. This alternative solution is not an abstract formulation; nor is it a salaried speculation. It offers ‘economic community’ as an alternative to capitalism. It confronts the industrialism of capitalism through an ecological-economic community. It contests nation-statism through an ethical-political society. This, however, radical and realistic position the YPG defends militarily, creates enemies more than it creates friends. The Turkish state in the north for example is cooperating with ISIS. The KDP as the representative of the primitive-nationalist and petty-bourgeois line in the Middle Eastern political spectrum cooperates with the Turkish state, and tries to suffocate.
Rojava with closed borders and with embargoes, and even attacks to Kurdish people in collaboration with the Turkish state. If the Assad regime does not attack the YPG now, it is because it has powerful enemies around itself that wait for an opportunity to strangle
it. Despite the defensive position of ISIS, it seems that it will take more time to defeat these murderers completely. But that the YPG struggles with enemies of humanity and defends the transformation of Rojava in the direction of a democratic modernity is being appreciated every day more and more by many. Dozens of the YPG martyrs from Germany to Australia and of the internationalist revolutionaries who fell fighting shoulder to shoulder with the red star of the YPG and of the YPJ are proof that the Rojava Revolution has already become an internationalist revolution that would never be extinguished.
To achieve a revolution is hard work, to protect it is harder; if not the hardest of all ethical-political activities. If a revolution does not gain a global dimension by establishing a network of solidarities everywhere, it is bound to be defeated by the reactionary forces and byproducts of capitalist modernity. Hence, as Serok Apo points out in “Democratic Confederalism” that has been translated by International Initiative, “We need to put up a platform of national civil societies in terms of a confederate assembly to oppose the United Nations as an association of nation-states under the leadership of the superpowers”. So, people from all around the world, those who think that another world is possible and that one has to fight and confront the monsters to make another world possible, would contribute to the platform that would spread the revolution of peace and justice.
You can download the books below and learn more about Serok APO’s ideas that inspire us. Please let us know about your opinions on the books that are expressed in the four works by Serok Apo we are sending you below.
If you want to support the YPG in Rojava you should then do this for the values of humanity, and not only for your own agenda. You won’t be fighting here for money. We won’t tolerate those who only seek fame through our struggle. What we can offer you is the possibility to join an honorable struggle for the values of humanity in the search for the truth and the right way of life and the possibility to learn more about the most important progressive revolution and struggle right now on the planet.
We prefer to have people here who want to be part of this for the right reasons. We don’t need people who think that they are Rambo – and please no Fascists. Rojava is not an adventure park, this war is not a Hollywood film and the YPG is not a PR-Agency. The YPG is not a place for people who like to kill people because of their beliefs and identities. We won’t tolerate people here among us in the YPG who are actual members of police, army or intelligence services. There are other channels for these institutions to contact with the political and military institutions of the Rojava Revolution.
Supporting the YPG in Rojava is hard work, and you will need much effort and patience. Rojava is not a place for exotic holiday trips or for adventures. Supporting the YPG is not a game, and no fun activity for bored people. Read this text carefully, these are the most important basics that you have to know and understand if you want to support the YPG in Rojava. When you have read this text and you are still willing to come to Rojava to support the YPG then you should answer the questions below.
These are the characteristics that people should have who wish to support the YPG in Rojava:
1. Serious in thinking, speaking and acting.
2. Honest and determined.
3. Respectful for different ways of thinking and living, cultures and beliefs of the people in the Middle East and ethical and cultural values of the YPG.
4. Willing to integrate into the system of the YPG and willing to learn, work, and live in a collective way.
5. Disciplined, sincere, and modest.
6. Patient and able to build up strong social relationships.
7. Open-Minded and ready to criticize and to be criticized.
8. Positive thinking and constructive acting.
9. Respecting the idea of womens’ liberation and its practical organizations.
10. Willing to embrace defending and serving the people as the most important principle.
You do not need to be ex-special forces, even not a former soldier, but of course military experience would be helpful. We appreciate people who share their tactical and technical knowledge and people with experiences and constructive criticism, but you should keep in mind that we are not amateurs. Our six years of experience against our enemies would easily prove this. However, we are always open to learn new things, to develop ourselves, to work with a self-critical approach, and to overcome our failures for better outcomes.
People with special skills and knowledge would do a plethora of things here in Rojava and in the YPG, but to be able to do that you have to learn a basic level of Kurdish and you have to understand some basic things about the Rojava Revolution and culture, history, ethical values and mentality of the people of the Middle East. Besides, you should have some understanding of political, economical, social, and military situation of Rojava, Kurdistan and the Middle East. You will find a completely different reality here. Without a certain level of understanding of all this, a sense of frustration would be inevitable. In order to prevent this, basic training will be provided for you.
If you are physically and mentally fit and healthy, open-minded and patient, willing to respect our culture and values, and ready to learn, to work, and to fight constantly for a minimum of 6 months in a war-torn Middle East country; then you would support the YPG in Rojava. Do not expect Western standards of material luxury and prepare for a life without internet and smart-phones. Do expect harsh conditions concerning food and sleep. Be aware of the fact that you will have to adapt to a foreign cultural and ideological context and military standards and rules.
What we want to know about you:
The following questions can be a help for you to write a text which is able to show us how serious and realistic you are with your decision to support the YPG in Rojava. The last part of the questions, you just have to answer with yes or no. Copy and paste and write your answers next to the questions.
UNDERSTANDING ANTAGONISMS BETWEEN THE RUSSIAN FEDERATION, UNITED STATES OF AMERICA AND THE PEOPLE’S REPUBLIC OF CHINA POST-2015.
Walter Sebastian Adler, NREMT-P
Development Analyst
Heller School for Social Policy & Management,
Brandies University
1
Contents
PROFILE
GAME THEORY
P A R T 1
POWER BLOC PROFILES
POLITICAL, ECONOMIC, SOCIO-CULTURAL CONTEXT WHAT IS THE NATION STATE
WHAT IS THE WORLD SYSTEM
WHAT IS THE CORE
WHO ARE THE CORE CONTENDERS
WHAT IS THE SEMI-PERIPHERY
WHAT IS THE PERIPHERY
WHAT IS A FAILING STATE
WHAT IS A FAILED STATE
WHAT IS THE WILDERNESS
WHAT IS THE ABYSS
P A R T 2
WHAT ARE THE EMERGENT ISSUES
POLITICAL ISSUES
ECONOMIC ISSUES
SOCIAL ISSUES
ACTORS
USA
RF
PRC
OUTLIERS
IS THERE A HISTORY OF CONFLICT
WHAT ARE THE CONFLICT AFFECTED AREAS PROXIMATE CAUSES
TRIGGERS
DYNAMICS
TRENDS
FACTORS PROLONGING CONFLICT
FACTORS FOR POSSIBLE PEACE
CONCLUSIONS
ANNNEX
2
Profile
The wide array of structural problems within the intrinsically interconnected fields of development, humanitarian relief, human rights advocacy, peace building and coexistence work are rooted in that they attempt to treat a disease [conflict, war and endemic global poverty] by diagnosing wrongly and then prescribing inadequately remedies for singular systems of the global body; namely the states. They proscribe their treatments as if the national unit was an isolated system that needed critical care in imagined isolation. As sub-system after sub-system are sucked into a violent pathology it is still wrongly presumed in the West that this collectively atrocious mass behavior is in our very nature (Konner, 2000); that it is the normative clash of civilizations and states (Huntington, 1993); or that policy premeditation of this planned atrocity on behalf of poly oligarchic elites is not a feasible hypothesis (Fitzduff, 2014). This analysis attempts to provide the reader with a more holistic diagnosis of the world conflict. For if any nation and its people are to ever be healthy and secure we must frame our interventions on relevant causality; not provide treatment based on partial data and imagined regional motive. Nor on faith in national particularity or the misunderstanding that the parts of a whole are supposedly independent of each other.
Game Theory
It is my hypothesis not that some oligarchic collective controls all world events, instead that three competing poligarchic blocks (Oligarical Collectives) unleash war and trade policy into a world system that synergistically amplifies their carnage throughout the state system. This theory of [ inverse consiationalist republicanism ] runs as follows; within each nation state a
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hierarchy of local oligarchs called dismissively as elites forms a network around shared culture, educational experience, business ventures, military and or family ties. The more developed a nation is has less do with the actual wealth of this national oligarch collective than how much it can leverage the state architecture to enrich itself and how efficiently it can shield its wealth from taxes and scrutiny (Winters, 2011). As well as how it can accumulate that wealth in assets and amassed capital. On the state level these oligarchs are all in conflict with each other to control means of capital accumulation and they vie for control as well over politicians, opinion makers and religious leaders. According to inverse consiationalist theory; eventually the arch oligarchs arrive at a collective bargain where by sectors of the population and special interests within a nation are pitted against each other to keep the social sphere of a society unstable, unable to effectively coalesce into a resistance movement.
Taken to the world system level we arrive at three particular groupings with particular interests at stake. The Euro-American Oligarchy, the Post-Soviet Petro-KGB Oligarchy and the Princelings Oligarchy; all of which function under the basic rules of this nine principle theory1.
1. Elite groupings in each nation form combines to enhance wealth and pit population ethnicities and value groups against each other.
2. Elite groupings diversify their portfolios by washing their money in foreign banks and investing in venture capital, infrastructure, real estate and extra-legal enterprises.
3. Elite groupings utilize their wealth to control overt political authorities.
4. Elite groupings from Oligarical Collective frameworks to direct state policy to their advantage and default high degrees of control over states and power blocks.
5. These three paramount Oligarchic Collectives are in direct competition with each other but there are relative bounds to the degree that they will destabilize each other’s domains, rules to the game as it were.
6. All major conflict hostilities will be limited for the most part to a resource control axis that falls within the under-developed and developing world and fought through proxy whenever possible. Incursions and terror attacks outside of that zone are to be avoided.
7. All Oligarical Collectives are rational actors with power and profit as their uncomplicated bottom-line. Ideologically, ethnically and ethically dissimilar they do not all share normative values about property rights, collateral damage and social policy. They are all however alarmed by Jihadist tendencies of Political Islam2 which is an adversarial ideology not compatible with any of the three block interests that threatens all three blocks asset controls.
8. All of the blocks encourage and amplify conflict violence on a variety of levels. Violence as psycho-social methodology directed outward at rivals interests and inward towards each other’s populations is implicitly linked to the conduct of each block.
9. Crucial to the maintenance of power inside each core and core contender’s powerbase is the paramouncy out the Westphalian state system. More important than any other identity variable the belief in the sovereignty of nations and nationalism fuels all other subordinations.
1 The Euro-America Oligarchy being oldest is more traditional. It’s organized in social clubs and exercises the most control via campaign finance, control of banking and media sectors and longevity of control. The predominant coordination points for this Oligarchy are Bohemian Grove, Bilderberg Group and Davos. The Princeling Oligarchy is a direct familial link between blood descendants of the Eight Immortals called princelings; an estimated 147 people in charge of the most important aspects of the Chinese political and economic architecture. The Russian Petro-KGB Oligarchy is the newest grouping based upon various KGB
2 Which can be loosely sub-divided into Sunni Wahabi-Salafism (Spread by Saudi Arabia and Pakistan) and Revolutionary Shi’ism (Spread by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps).
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BRIEFING PART ONE
Power Bloc Profile
There are three major power blocs that while they differ in their development theories, national cultures, state ideology and psycho-social interpretations of international relations as well as each other; they are all firmly vying for core dominance of the global economic system. They are via their foreign policies, trade relationships, consumer cultures, militaries and intelligence services responsible for virtually all ongoing 35 medium-large scale armed conflicts3. They fuel the vast planetary degradation via their rapid and massive scale industrialization drives. They have in differing capacities triggered the underdevelopment of half of the human species; 3,500,000,000 people living today at and below $3.00 a day. At least 1.2 billion on less than $1.25 a day (World Bank, 2014) (UNDP, 2014).
The political leaderships of these blocs are pragmatic and non-ideological, even if their political classes are varying degrees to the left or right of center in embrace of liberal democracy, democratic oligarchy and state capitalism with a socialist face. They cannot be purely referred to by the respective nation state that officially marshals them: The United States of America (the declining Core hegemon) is financially coupled with the European Union, Switzerland, the Holy Sea, New Zealand, South Korea4, Australia and Japan. The Russian Federation (the defeated core Contender) relies on a co-dependent fusion of resource clientalism and extra-legal mafia cronyism rooted in the now defunct KGB to exert varying degrees of control over former Soviet nations and former satellite states. The People’s Republic of China (the emergent Core hegemon) has massively invested in African nations, trade relationships in the Pacific and $ 11 trillion of US bonds and debt. Simplifying as such would be a gross minimization of the US’s integral allies, especially in the European Union & Switzerland. Or the more nuanced post-Cold War cooperation between RF its Post-soviet former satellites where 20 million ethnic Russians reside (cite); and its Middle Eastern allies like Egypt (prior to 1971), Syria, Iran, and before the US invasion and its complete disintegration; Iraq. Or even more significantly the PRC’s investment in nearly every country in Africa regardless of political tendency or crime against humanity5. These blocs cannot also be purely gauged by their military alliances, trade pacts, or proclaimed ideologies as repeatedly stated. For while the US-EU-NATO alliance is normatively neoliberal, democratic and pro-market its participating governments have funded overtly and covertly all manner of dictatorship, non-aligned oligarchy such as arming Saddam Hussein against the Islamic Revolution in Iran (1980-1988); as well as helping to establish the training bases, weapons supply and advanced training of proto-Al Qaeda Mujahidin formations attacking the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan (1979-1989).
The Russian Federation is a vast oligarchic transnational mafia state. Over the course of the Cold Wars Russian provided a wide array of military and technical aid to numerous
3 See annex for listing of the 35 Conflicts, casualty counts & durations.
4 The USA has been invited to occupy Japan since 1945 serving as its default army and the Korean peninsula since 1950 buffering the South from the massive North Korea army.
5 Chinese oil purchases and arms shipments to Sudan are directly responsible for the Darfur & Khortofan genocides.
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developing countries fostering incredible regional loyalty particularly in Cuba, Angola, Ethiopia, Tanzania, Mozambique, Syria, Iraq and Iran.
The People’s Republic of China is state capitalist authoritarian regime lead by the Communist Party. It’s interventions in North Korea and Vietnam played pivotal roles in both nation’s independence. It has intermittently provided military and intelligence aid to a wide range of Asian and African groups. Each block rarely has aligned foreign policy except perhaps in regards to Islamic terrorism and the environment. Each core tender also faces long running internal ethnic antagonisms with minority groups at their country core; African Americans & Caucasians in the USA, North African & Turkish immigrants in the EU, Tibetans and Uyghurs in China and a wide range of Turkic and Central Asia minorities in Russia [notably Chechnya].
Each block is governed quite differently with varying adherence to rule of constitutional law. Kleptocratically in Russia, Nepotistcally in China and via Legislative Capture6in the USA. Through a variety of arrangements rule by a diffuse elite of oligarchic collectives networked around shared financial interests as stated, but each extracts wealth and exerts influence quite differently (Princeton, 2013)(Winters, 2011). As well as direct accesses chains to the the national policy makers. In the USA and EU they utilize campaign finance structures quite overtly and constitutionally allowing state sanctioned bribery. In the RF a more direct cronyism based on shared Soviet networks is in place. In China elite privilege is enabled by direct family relations. The elites are all beneficiaries of the existing financial order regardless for the most part of which of any of the three existing blocs hold the core. A critical core shift from USA to China will not radically effect the holdings of the most prominent oligarchs.
It was estimated that 85 members of this elite are worth cumulatively what that bottom 3.5 billion poorest of humanity are worth combined (Oxfam, 2014) and this bears some repeating because state relations between the USA, the RF the PRC and their allies, proxies and clients are not beholden purely to political interests; but by it is this Oligarchical Collectivism that governs the world system and drives its subsequent carnage (Piketty, 2014). While it is highly tempting to believe these oligarchies cannot properly coordinate nor can the governments they set up in power; it is crucial to understand that what a government perceives it is doing in its own national interest is often a directive, a pre-written policy package drawn up by the national oligarch collective. Or individual oligarch with the means to do so.
The fundamental question is what are the likely chain of conflict, development and economic events that will result in the next ten years due to the core shift from USA to PRC. It is those predictions that is subject of this analysis. And while the US-EU media and political apparatus has been quick to declare the irrelevance of Russian Federation; this defeated core contender is an integral player in upcoming core transition and conflict.
Political, Economic and Socio-Cultural Context
The World System Analysis, as developed by Immanuel Wallerstien posits that the world’s nation state system as an arbitrary socio-political patchwork of cultivated identities that divide humanity presently into 206 manageable, unmanageable and mismanaged units for the purpose of aligning their economies to the benefit of the Core Hegemonic power block. Before
6 Legislative capture is a system of elite control via campaign financing.
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1500 CE it was impossible for any singular national unit to completely dominate. The globalization of trade and warfare via industrialization, slavery, colonization and the World War had by 1945 erected an architecture of trade regulations, protectionism, direct foreign investment, banking, lending, development and ensuing dependency that all but two Superpowers; the USA and the USSR were aligned in varying semi peripheral and peripheral dependencies back to either power. With the exception of the People’s Republic of China which after its 1949 Revolution, Cultural Revolution and 1978 economic realignment has emerged as the logical core contender after a period of unipolar USA hyperpower hegemony which lasted from 1991-2001. A mere ten years.
The 1945-1989 Cold War was a global engagement between the intelligence, development and military forces of these two blocks which the PRC for strategic and practical reasons did not align directly or over commit to the subsequent proxy wars. After directly engaging the USA on the battlefield in the 1950-1953 Korean War proxy struggle the PRC has quietly built its formidable base via the non-aligned movement, all of whose members over the course of the Cold War aligned, realigned or disintegrated. The key conflicts in checking the United States were Vietnam (1950-1975), Afghanistan (2001-ongoing) and Iraq (2003-2012). The key conflicts for checking the RF (then USSR) were Afghanistan (1980-1989) and Chechnya (1994-2010). The PRC has not had to pay for a costly confrontation since the Korean War in which it instead had to long term subsidize a costly and inefficient failed state.
Let us for analysis remove the national borders of the Peter’s world map the one where all things are represented at their actual presumed size. Let us examine it inverted. Let us look at it East on top West, then South on top of North. Note the arbitrary placement of not only national borders but also spatial embarkations and hemispheric directions. As if the sun still was through to revolve around the earth or that the earth was clearly fat. Let us again for analysis abolish those markings too. Let us turn it from a two dimensional boundary maven into a three dimensional sphere, then pull up like a hand on a cloth the developed northern nations as if into a the shape of a mountain, a mountain where the OECD countries are the core on top and down the mountain are arrayed the middle income than low income town the bottom of this precipice.
On this mountain and its foothills live roughly 7 billion humans broken into 206 national plantations. Identity driven work camps each with their own flag and imagined identities. Half (3.5 billion) are living below 2.50 a day in a range of miserable impoverishment. While extreme poverty according to Millennium Development goals has been halved via China and India; extreme poverty is actually expanding in Sub-Saharan African and Central Asia. A full 5 billion humans live at around and below 10 dollars a day bound for most of their lives to their wage slavery in a range of industrial or agricultural tasks (World Bank Data). The rate of environmental exploitation and pollution have gotten so egregious that disastrous climate change has begun resulting in more catastrophic climate disasters than any time in recorded history( ). Over the course of the Cold War there were no less than 17 documented genocides and 23 major proxy war engagements (cite) as well as 37 democidal purges7. In 35 of 206 plantations violent conflicts have broken out and are spreading, but only at the base of the mountain. They
7 Please see attached annex of Proxy War listings and Democide Listing. A democide is defined as a state unleashing it’s military against its own people in ethno-political purge of civilians. While the Jewish Holocaust in Europe is the oft cited example there have 17 subsequent genocides (such as Former Yugoslav Rwanda & East Timor) and 37 total including Democides (Duvalierist Haiti & Argentine Dirty Wars)
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increasingly are to be fought intra-state with ethnic cleansing, criminal profiteering, and the targeting their own repressive and failing state systems (Kaldor, 2013).
In the year 1492 CE the Catholic monarchs Isabella and Ferdinand of what would become the nation of Spain instituted a massive purge coupled with torture, expulsion, and general atrocity directed against the Muslim and Jewish populations of that emerging nation. Simultaneously they sponsored the imperial expedition of Christopher Columbus which would alongside the Portuguese conquests of Brazil and West Africa would trigger an unprecedented bloodletting over the next 500 years of slavery, colonization, decolonization, World War, Cold War and Global Jihad. All of these manifestations based on manufactured identities (Anderson, 1983) as well as local greed and grievance variables ( ). Most importantly these endless conflicts were harnessed for the control of the means of local production and the profiteering off of trade routes. All of which raised the capital necessary for the formation of the nation state system.
By 1500 CE the social, economic and environmental underpinnings of human civilization were consolidating around the dominance of a world system (Wallerstien, 1974). The globalization of markets with an ever more authoritarian institution of sovereign states were the logical evolution of capital accumulation (Marx, 1887). Humanity would be subjugated, brutalized and reduced via these emerging nation states into more manageable social units for economic exploitation and administrative consistency. Although ideology, normative rights, cultures and religious mobilizations would vary tremendously by the year 2014 the World System had in affect crystalized around three primary trade & power blocks or hegemons; USA EU, Russian Federation, and the People’s Republic of China. The Global Core, under a steady evolution of socio-political justifications has passed from Netherlands, to England, then finally to the United States of America. After the defeat of the German contestation for core power in 1945 a series of unending proxy conflicts began under the mantle of decolonization, but were more particularly a battle over markets, extractive resources, commodities and trade relations between the USSR lead by Russia and NATO allies lead by USA. The Chinese experiments with Maoist communism via their 1966-1976 Cultural Revolution resulted in the deaths, starvation and purge of and x and removed them from hegemonic position until in 1978 when Deng Xiaoping and the Party embraced state capitalism (Gao, 2008). After the economic defeat of the USSR in 1989 American neo-conservatives posited a strategy for a New American Century (CITE ) which involved amongst other things redrawing the map of the Middle East and by default controlling the life blood of the globalized transport system; oil & natural gas. By 2001 directly advising the Bush Presidency in USA they began implementing this reconsolidation package. As the Russian Federation accelerated theirs under President Putin (Politkovskaya, 2005). However, by 2001 the US-EU had reached Peak Hegemony.
All nations have their national mythologies and state ideological narratives in varying doses and degrees. The world system is based on which ever power or power block can marshal the supply lines and coerce with aid and trade all other powers into economic dependency. According to Immanuel Wallerstien; the architect of world system analysis there are core nations that via conflict, development and hegemony impose an economic order which sub serves semi peripheral and peripheral national oligarchies to organize their economies around core needs and enrichments. Semi peripheral nations such Cuba, Israel, South Africa, Brazil, and Iran have achieved moderate independence through some strategic action or relationship but remain irrelevant to shaping the world systems supply lines, trade relations and core economic demand.
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Peripheral nations such as Sudan, Egypt, Ecuador, and Bangladesh are organized to supply labor and commodities for the economic wellbeing of the core.
What is the Nation State
The Nation state is the macro unit of global economic harvest (Proudhon, 1876). The natural resources, the commodities, the manufactured goods and most importantly the human capital; their labor and their tax base are bound via this system into manageable units for exploitation. (Gellner, 2008). Under the guise of order the state system crystalized dynamic ethnic relationships and power differentials into control zones. As of 1 January, 2015 there are 206 such units, loosely organized into three major power blocs; divided into five world system dependency zones claiming sovereignty over shifting swaths of geographic turf. The cultivation of false consciousness (Engles, 1893) subsequently divides humanity further into dominant and subservient genders, ethnic groups, religions, nationalisms, political tendencies and sexual orientations; all with imagined identities that are wholly constructed via socialization and neuroscience for the purpose of disunity.
While almost all nation states have relative sovereignty; constant and repeated foreign and domestic assaults on this sovereignty lock each unit into a dynamic hierarchy of the world system. The metaphor of the world system; the mountain is subject to power shifts; thus via culture, warfare and economics the dominance of the core has shifted. Each nation state’s Oligarical collective controls its political leadership with few outliers regardless of proclaimed ideological tendency. Nation state level oligarchs enrich themselves by aligning the human and resource capital of their nation with economic prerogatives set by the core nations at both international forums such as Bretton Woods, Davos and the United Nations. As well as at closed meetings for oligarch coordination such as the Bilderberg Group and the Bohemian Grove. Ultimately whether the nation state takes the guise of authoritarian, theocratic, military junta, or trapping of socialism or democracy; via elite consensus, think tanks, policy groups, campaign contributions, as well as encouragement of soft or hard repression; the elite cluster in each of the 206 nation states formulates their capital accumulation in relation to taxes, labor management and trade relations with other states. The three power blocks; US-EU-NATO, PRC and Russian Federation have since 1945 engaged in ceaseless proxy conflict at the semi-periphery and periphery (Lebow, 1994). Endless coups, interventions, wars, genocides and clientalisms have ensued. Their antagonism has led to vast destabilization of the state system. Because the nation state unit harnesses the competing identities of its implied constituents; those within its border are locked in combative contradiction between the citizens and the immigrant others; as well as a hierarchy of access, alienation and proscribed benefit ascribed to the citizens based again on arbitrary privileges; male over female, dominant ethnic identity over proclaimed outsider ethnic groups, citizen over foreigner an so on. With very few outlying examples most of these alienations and privileges have mutated or been purged via conquest, revolution and ethnic cleansings and have largely solidified their false conscious paradigm since 1945. Because every aspect of the world system is inherently an architecture for reducing us down to a profitable economic unit and telling us that our hard ‘work will set us free’.
The nation state rests its legitimacy on being a protector and provider for its citizens. It’s justification for being no matter upon what superstructure of ideology or identity it rests upon is
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to fulfill the obligations spelled out normatively in the nine human rights instruments. In reality it has to meet two more basic characteristics; secure collective needs, enable satisfaction of individual wants and provide security. If any of those elements begin to drastically disintegrate via warfare, invasion, occupation or pervasive corruption and impoverishment the nation state government loses legitimacy to rule.
The Nation state is predicated on the cultivated false conscious belief that the state of nature is inherent self-interest and that security for a minority from some necessitates endless war for the majority.
What is the World System
The World System Analysis as conceived by Immanuel Wallerstein consists of a core,
semi-periphery and periphery; shifting zones that are defined by their economic relationships to each other. As stated in his volumes of analysis Wallerstein outlines a multi-disciplinary modal that tracks the formation of the world system between 1500 and the present day (Wallerstien, 1974). While previous empires such as the Romans, Persians, Islamic Caliphates, Mughals, Aztecs and Chinese Han dynasties had been trans-regional powers capable of expansive influence and trade; none had, until the construction of the world system, been able to fully project hegemony upon the full mass of the species living in all continents. Advanced weapons, epidemiological resistance and industrialization allowed the Europeans a competitive advantage in outward conquest (Diamond, 2005). The epochs of conquest, slavery and colonialism allowed an unprecedented capital accumulation to take place in Europe. The Industrial Revolution had modernized these societies and subsequently organized their social hierarchy into that of global power administrators. This is not to say class and race and gender were not thoroughly established in internal hierarchies. The conquest of the rest of the world was an outward disposal of the mediocre into pursuits of war and profiteering. Inevitably according to this analysis the hegemonic power passed from Spain, to the Netherlands, to England and after a series of World Wars ultimately between Germany and the United States to a bipolar world of the US-NATO Block against the USSR. While the 1989-1991 implosion of the Soviet Union defeated authoritarian Communism. The Russian Federation, with the world’s second most powerful military, a comparable stockpile of nuclear weapons and the largest reserves of natural gas and oil on the planet is checked but not defeated. As stated the People’s Republic of China was only a minor antagonist within this struggle for core control, but is emerging as the most serious contender.
To understand the world system beyond the allegory of the mountain we must break apart the zones Wallerstien and dependency development theorists categorized to establish what is it is these ceaseless proxy wars, all this diplomacy, defense and development spending seeks to acquire. A false construct such as nationalism or ideology is a superstructure disguise for it means to acquire core control. As stated, the Oligarical collectives have a limited range of coordination and span of control. While an oligarch in the core may in fact collude with an oligarchy in the semi-periphery or periphery; the closer asset control and resources allocation is exerted to a core political and economic process; the richer and more powerful the fruits of the gain.
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What is the Core
The guiding features of the core include a unified financial architecture and banking system, stable governance which can safe guard property rights and currency valuation and can upkeep the impressive military and intelligence forces needed to coerce compliance to its economic directives. Out of these 26 nations, 1 Religious City State and 1 newly re-absorbed financial hub (back into PRC two-systems one state in 1997); all participants align their economic and political directives with the OECD, North Atlantic Treaty Organization, International Monetary Fund and World Bank; The United States is the dominant hegemon in this block, supported by the financial prowess of the European Union lead by German and the economic strength of Japan. Interestingly these nations are all of the primary belligerents of the World Wars and hold all seats of the United Nations Security Council; excluding the Russian Federation and People’s Republic of China.
The following nations, under the stewardship of the United States of America compose the modern nucleolus of core control according to Babones and Alvarez-Rivadulla (2007). Logical incorporation of South Korea and Taiwan have been amended to listing.
Australia Austria Belgium Canada Denmark Finland France Germany Greece8 Hong Kong9Iceland Ireland Israel10 Italy Japan Luxembourg Netherlands New Zealand Norway Singapore Spain Sweden Switzerland United Kingdom United States
Taiwan South Korea Vatican City
Who are the Core Contenders
People’s Republic of China (Emerging)
Russian Federation (Defeated)
8 Greece went bankrupt and was bailed out twice in 2010 and 2012. Greece is only a core country by virtue of its inclusion in the European Union.
9 Hong Kong was territorially reabsorbed in 1997 into the PRC, but will retain financial linkages and independence until 2047.
10 Israel due to its military and intelligence linkages to the United States since 1976 is more nuanced in that is an independent state possessing no hegemonic capacity, however under direct US Clientalism projects vast region power on behalf of an in tandem with the USA.
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A Core contender is an economic and military block lead by a robust, well populated and resource endowed nation state with the military, diplomatic and economic capacity to challenge the hegemony of the current core block central power.
From 1945-1989 there was a bi-polar world dominated by the US and the USSR each with their own competing systems of dependency. After the 1950-1952 Korean War in which the PRC directly battled the US-NATO block a combination of the Cultural Revolution and Den Xiaoping’s embrace of state capitalism pulled the PRC largely out of Cold War confrontations.
The economists of all great power craft highly competing narratives of both history and financial prescription. Although evidence now clearly debunks the Washington Consensus which held sway from 1980 to 2001; encouraging deregulation, privatization, structural adjustment and integration into the globalized Western core market; it cannot be said that the effects of these policies did not enrich the core deliberately. The purpose of the proxy wars was of course a battle to control the resource flows.
As of 2014; the logical core contender is the People’s Republic of China. The financial mechanism it has deployed to support this claim is called the BRICS Bank; a counterbalance to the World Bank facilitating development lending from Brazil, Russian Federation, India, China and South Africa.
What is the Semi-Periphery
The elements of the semi-periphery include; on-going and expanding industrialization; modernization of political architecture in that whatever system is place efficiently provides critical aspects of governance; participation as intermediaries between periphery and core; manufacture and export of goods and are typically able to act as region hegemons over peripheral powers. Excellent examples of semi-peripheral states are Brazil, Colombia, Argentina, Mexico, Cuba, Vietnam, India, Poland, South Korea, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Iran, and South Africa. Colombia is slowly emerging from a civil war raging since 1964 that have taken the lives of between 4,744,046–5,712,506 people (Silva, 2011). Mexico has been recently plagued with drug cartel killings that are directly related to its proximity to the Southern US border. However, trade relations with the US have made both integral parts of the semi-periphery albeit unstable ones.
All of these nations are middle-income developing nations that have vital intermediary roles in global trade or possess vital energy resources. China which prior to 1949 was a peripheral nation largely of peasants has advanced progressively since to assume a position of semi-peripheral transition to core contention. Russia which was a feudal semi-peripheral monarchy (Czardom) until its socialist revolution in 1917 has fallen something short of a super power contender but is still with is military and oil reserves a far more formidable power than any listed above. Interestingly as yet another death blow to the neo-liberal Washington consensus; of the nations listed above; only Argentina and Mexico followed much of the IMF/World Bank policies. The primary success stories are the four Asian Tigers; South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore and Hong Kong. China and India which cumulatively halved global extreme poverty by some 680 million persons and rapidly increased their economic growth did not follow nearly any of the consensus policy.
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The key element of the semi-periphery is that enables the relationships of trade and mediates between core contenders as well as between periphery and core. While semi-peripheral counties (so-called middle income) may in face have largely impoverished populations, the semi periphery does not depend as completely upon the core as the periphery does and can make a range of independent policy decisions. Cuba is particularly good example through its interventions in Angola and Ethiopia as well as its current policies of medical diplomacy. So is Saudi Arabia in its international support of fundamentalist Wahabi-Salafist Islamic terror groups.
The Semi-periphery (like all of the five zones) compose a spread. There are nations such as India and Brazil that are quickly closing economic ground on core contenders Russia and China. There are relatively independent semi-peripheral powers such as Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates that utilize their extractive resource wealth to further ideological policies of their respective elites. There are other nominally nation’s such as Jamaica and Trinidad & Tobago that play little important role in international relations.
The semi-periphery is ultimately a structural buffer zone that unlike the illusion of the middle class described above, does not actually experience significant differentials in mass development. Most of the world’s 1.2 billion living below $1.25 a day live in middle income countries and within the semi-periphery. The local oligarchy of a given state if it can position the political elite of its nation to arrange the economic activity favorably can expect exponential capital increases but their nation achieving a semi-peripheral zone standing. Suffice to say in the 2014 list of Forbes billionaires Carlos Slim, a Mexican citizen is second from the top right below American Bill Gates. Here is listing of Semi-Peripheral states:
India
Brazil
Colombia
Argentina
Mexico
Cuba11
Iran12
Vietnam
Poland
Turkey
Pakistan
Saudi Arabia
What is the Periphery
What was once called the third & fourth world13, or currently the developing world is a legacy of the colonial system. It lacks infrastructure, it is poorly industrialized and its governance
11 Cuba is an anomaly in that it is one of only five surviving Communist states and the only one that still largely applies full Socialist policies. That has made it a semi-peripheral power is its unusual projection of development technology particularly in the Healthcare sector to be a ‘Medical Internationalist’ power abroad disproportionate to size or resources.
12 Iran is a second interesting anomaly as it is the only Shi’a Islamic State and been locked in proxy warfare with the United States since its Revolution in 1979.
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systems are little better than a mix of dictatorship, military rule and out right corrupt practice. The peripheral nations should not be counted as such by GDP or HDI because they are peripheral in their importance to the world systems functioning. According to Collier there are fifty nine states (Sudan and South Sudan were not separated when he wrote his Bottom Billion report) in Sub-Saharan Africa, Central Asia and Haiti which show decline and dysfunction. Global economic convergence, the convergence of the developed and developing world has not proven itself as a valid reality.
The periphery has a disproportionately small share of global wealth and most of its capital and resources flow out of the country. Agriculture, cheap expendable labor and natural resource extraction make up most of its economic activity. Most of its population lives in extreme or relative poverty. Some peripheral states might be middle income, but do have and substantial role to play in the functioning of the world system. Peripheral state political systems are weak and they are often easily sucked into lengthy conflicts to control domestic uprisings or fight drawn out wars with their neighbors. A key element is their relative powerlessness to the rest of the state system. Most if not all of the periphery were former colonial holdings of the European powers. Their GDP and HDI often, although not always have improved the earlier they were liberated from the colonial system; Latin American countries are all much more developed than their African counterparts except for the Republic of Haiti which exhibits health and development indicators closer to Sub-Saharan Africa.
The following is a listing of Peripheral states:
13 Those without their own recognized states such as the Kurds, Basque, Yazids or Palestinians.
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Africa:
Togo
Gambia
Burkina Faso
Namibia
Benin
Kenya
São Tomé/ Príncipe Uganda
Zambia
Asia& Pacific
Palau
Mongolia
Papua New Guinea
Fiji
Post-Soviet/ Former Socialist
Belarus
Macedonia
Bulgaria
Montenegro
Kazakhstan
Abkhazia
Georgia
Uzbekistan
Latvia
Transnistria
Hungary
Kyrgyzstan
Kosovo
Estonia
Turkmenistan
Croatia
Bosnia and
Ghana
The Gambia
Botswana
Senegal
Zimbabwe
Cameroon
Congo
Gabon
Guinea
Bhutan
Thailand
Indonesia
Laos
Herzegovina
Albania
Romania
Czech Republic Moldova
Lithuania
Nagorno-Karabakh Tajikistan
Serbia
Mozambique Ethiopia
Tanzania
Angola
Vanuatu Nepal
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Middle East & Maghreb Jordan
Morocco
Kuwait
Algeria
UAR
Oman
Qatar
Tunisia
Northern Cyprus Cyprus
Latin America &
Caribbean
Grenada
Suriname
T&T
Bolivia
Belize
Dominica
Costa Rica
Paraguay
Ecuador Dominican Republic Panama
Saint Vincent
Saint Lucia
Saint Kitts and Nevis Venezuela
Barbados
Chile
Guyana
Antigua and Barbuda
What is a Failing State
In a failing state conflict is combined with under development to set in motion a series of degenerations. During this period, interventions of core and semi-peripheral powers will largely shape what social and economic orders emerges from the chaos. Periodically such as in the cases of Somalia and Yugoslavia the state collapses completely in recognizable form into total anarchy and long term dissolution.
Ukraine is currently a failing state. It is an ethnically divided energy pipeline hub for pumping Russian energy resources into Europe. Its (recently annexed Crimea) region is a major warm water strategic port for the Russian Navy; it has highly fertile soil, it is linguistically and ethnically similar to Eurasia not Europe; and it was until 1991 an integral part of the former Soviet Union. As part of the Second World (former Soviet Socialist States) Ukrainians have enjoyed economic, social and cultural rights markedly higher than the developing world even after collapse of the USSR in 1989-1991. However, following political re-ordering and oligarchic expropriation of energy assets and infrastructure across the former Soviet world; President Putin began a low intensity war to reclaim what in the Russian political consciousness
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is within the obvious and legitimate sphere of interests of those who run the Russian Federation. Specially all of the former Soviet Union and former Russian client states such as Cuba and Syria. After the uprising in Maiden Square which looked likely to topple the pro-Russian president Russian military and intelligence operatives seized and annexed Crimea and triggered separatist warfare in the three eastern provinces. Organizing via its intelligence service the FSB (former KGB) the United Russia Party of Vladimir Putin is replicating the exact tactics it had previously used in Moldova, Chechnya, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan and Georgia to eliminate political order that sought to align those countries with NATO and the West. As there are 20 million ethnic Russians living in a wide range of former Soviet states such a rubric of ferment sedition, infiltrate intelligence operatives and fighters, provoke crisis, occupy and annex has spread to Ukraine made even more valuable because of numerous pipelines and the Crimea Naval base.
Because of these escalating actions heavy sanctions have been applied against Russia, but over 1/3 of Ukraine remains by default in Russian control. As in the cases of Moldova and Georgia, it is highly unlikely that any Ukrainian government will ever take back that territory. Russian Oligarchs and President Putin and his advisors have very little respect for the nation state system which due to Cold War strains, crippled Russia temporarily as a super power and core contender.
A failing state is state that due to corruption, bankruptcy and fiscal-social mismanagement an internal revolt or foreign intervention is predictably about to cause collapse state collapse and failure. A long running low intensity insurgency is not criteria for this classification. That insurgency, internal unrest or foreign invasion must produce a high likelihood of the citizens being left without a coherent political leadership and social services. In the cases of CAR civil unrest has developed into ethnic civil war ravaging large swaths of the population and leading to heavy violence against civilians. In Nigeria and Egypt mounting corrupt practices coupled with long running insurgencies place them here. In states like Malawi, Burundi, Chad, Niger, Mali and Lesotho government corruption on such an endemic level have deprived the populations of even the most basic services. A failed state is caught not in a “poverty trap” by Collier or Sachs description of such they are deliberately placed into a downward cycle of under development. Peripheral and failing states slip into failed state status based on the following twelve variables.
The Failed State Index (FDI) weighs in via twelve major indicators found within a territory indicating state failure:
1. Mounting Demographic Pressures 2. Massive Movement of Refugees or Internally Displaced Persons
3. Vengeance Seeking Group Grievance 4. Chronic and Sustained Human Flight 5. Uneven Economic Development
6. Poverty, Sharp or Severe Economic Decline
7. Legitimacy of the State
8. Progressive Deterioration of Public Services 9. Violation of Human Rights and Rule of Law 10. Expansive Security Apparatus
11. Rise of Factionalized Elites
12. Intervention of External Actors
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Failing States include:
Myanmar
Mauritania
CAR
Egypt
Lesotho
Mali
Cote d’Ivoire
Ukraine
Chad
Guinea-Bissau
Sri Lanka
Niger
Yemen
Nigeria
Honduras
Malawi
Burundi
Lebanon
Bahrain
What is a Failed State
A state where its government has collapsed expect perhaps for diplomatic purposes in the capital and a few major cities; lost control of its territory; has ceased to provide social services and is at war with its own population can be described as failing state.. A secondary arrangement of this scenario zoning is when the state fully and indiscriminately unleashes its military against its population as occurred in Rwanda, Sudan and Syria. Where and when this occurs the population is at the full mercy of invading armies, militia groups and banditry. A sustained condition of state failure results in conditions best described in Thomas Hobbes book the Leviathan; a nasty, brutish and short life truncated by extreme violence and early death. The deployment of peacekeepers and NGOs can prolong the existence of a government presence; but the inevitable result of state failure is lasting underdevelopment coupled by internal human rights violation on a massive scale, war and atrocity (Rotberg, 2010). Failed State are also hot beds of opportunism for both oligarchs and criminal middle men to utilize the defunct governmental infrastructure to launder money and serve as transshipment hubs for bulk currency, narcotics, weapons, conflict minerals, expropriated oils and human cargo. Haiti is a primary port of illegal transshipment into the United States (Farmer, 1994). North Korea operates the largest and most sophisticated printing operation of duplicated $20 bills. Failed states are also breeding grounds for terrorist organizations and revolutionaries (Rotberg, 2002).
The following is a list of failed states:
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North Korea14
Yugoslavia (collapsed in 1991)
Rwanda15
Sudan
South Sudan
Sierra Leone
Liberia
Haiti (collapsed 2004)
Palestine16
Libya
Syrian Arab Republic
What is the Wilderness
The Wilderness is a state of anarchic non-governance differentiated from failed state in that large swaths of its territory are no longer under the control of government or under rule of law. The people unfortunate to live in these regions are not only severely impoverished they are subject to arbitrary and criminal attack and rights violation by marauding bands, rival militias, warlords and various social predators. Currently large swaths of the following failed states meet this description; the Democratic Republic of Congo (former Zaire) since 1998, 1/3 of Syria since 2012, 1/3 of Iraq, Afghanistan and Somalia which has not had a central government since 1992.
Somalia (collapsed in 1992)
Afghanistan
Iraq
DRC17
The United States invaded Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 1991 and 2003. Rwanda along with a variety of other African countries invaded Zaire (DRC) in 1998. Somalia collapsed after a CIA funded insurgency topped its government in 1991. Afghanistan was previously occupied by the Soviet Union from 1979-1989 where mujahedeen and political Islamists recruited trained and financed by the CIA, Pakistani ISI and Saudi Arabia (including Osama Bin Laden) were sent to give the USSR ‘its own Vietnam’. This pivotal military intelligence
14 North Korea in whatever ideological rendering it casts itself is little more than a criminal oligarchy exerting pure authoritarian control over its citizens imposing massive deprivation, famine and human rights violations while maintaining the fourth largest standing army, nuclear weapons and active participating in global counterfeiting and human trafficking.
15 Rwanda experienced a much analyzed genocide in 1998 where a Tutsi invasion triggered a Hutu launched genocide that cumulatively killed over 800,000 civilians over three months. What is less understood is that Rwanda’s newly victorious Tutsi minority then spear headed an invasion of neighboring Zaire which toppled the Mobutu government, provoked the African World War which sucked in over 17 countries and left an estimated 5.6 million dead; followed by Rwanda’s exploitation of the genocide, Western guilt and strategic placement to profit off of the conflict mineral trade flowing out war ravaged DRC.
16 Palestine has never been recognized officially as a State but both the Fatah government’s corruption and Hamas government’s refusal to recognize Israel have facilitated the continued occupation of Palestine. 17 It is estimated that 5.5 million citizens of the former nation Zaire have perished horrifically since 1998.
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operation was critical to both the collapse of the Soviet Union and the spread of Wahabi-Salafist Islamic militant ideology which would later in 2011 culminate in Arab Spring (bringing down the governments of Egypt, Tunisia, Libya and Syria); ultimately resulting in the Islamic State (ISIS)’s control of vast swaths of Iraq and Syria. (Blum, 2003). Since most of these states collapse near the fault lines of hegemon power proxy struggle or near and around energy resource fields another term for the failed state wilderness is a killing field where those that don’t die of poverty will perish in war.
What is the Abyss
The Abyss is in essence what all development and progressive resistance to the callous greed of the oligarch collectives are attempting to avert; the total collapse of the world system with no alternative in place, disastrous climate change that results in famine and displacement and all-out war between Core powers like what occurred between 1914-1945. In essence the
Abyss can be likened to Peak Development; a point of core hyperdevelopment that overloads and overwhelms our social, economic and environmental thresholds to the point where irreversible trauma is inflicted upon the human & planetary condition (Adler, 2015). In Peak Development the governments of the core trigger any of three probably catastrophic events; all of which are likely if the World System continues on the current trajectory.
1. (Environmental) Disastrous, irreversible climate change proceeding until a 5 degree rise in global temperatures raising sea levels and triggering massive climate migrations, causing wide spread famine as a result of crop failure and exacerbate the periodically growing list of climate disasters.
2. (Economic) Peak Oil which we are expected to hit in 2020 levels off petroleum production paralyzing global trade and military function last, but first dramatically affecting the means in which we are supplied energy; which in turn leads to less power availability; which in turn limits internet connectivity. Peak Water which occurs in 2050 leads to new destructive conflicts over decreasing supplies. Wealth accumulation continues along the lines of Thomas Piketty’s analysis and the rise of an overtly elite class subsumes new levels of power and privilege. Critical divergence occurs with a micro-faction of the arch-oligarchic collectives gathering in secure citadels with a global degeneration of development reverting most of the human race to barbaric living conditions.
3. (Social) Multipolarity expands creating a more equalized power differential between the three primary core blocks. Proxy war heightens in the semi-periphery and periphery over resource scarcity. Inevitably all three of the core contender get sucked into a more direct confrontation which results in nuclear exchanges, genocides and democides.
The result of any of these catastrophic events being allowed to occur; permanent environmental damage, unmitigated oligarchic capital accumulation and or a more grisly and protracted series of World Wars will irrevocable trigger the degeneration of our species to sub-human conditions and inevitable extinction.
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BREIFING PART 2
What are Emergent Political, Economic and Social Issues?
• POLITICAL ISSUES
Because of incredible, unprecedented access to media and data on a global level via mobile phones and the internet; a wide range of global communities can coordinate their economic and political participation circumventing traditional, government controlled forums.
Democracy has been broadly exposed to be as prone to oligarchic control as authoritarian one party state (Winters, 2011). Civilians no longer have to rely on one or two corporate news sources to distil the events of the day. Ideological bankruptcy has caused widespread contempt and condemnation of political tendencies that have hardly ever reflected domestic or international conduct. While it has been said democracies don’t go to war with each other (because largely of intertwined financial systems); nothing has stopped them from going to war with their own populations or fueling war through a proxy or series of proxies.
The current political context is that history doesn’t repeat itself at all. It structurally evolves the world system with each major disturbance. Since the critical year of 1789 following the revolution in France and its parallel manifestations in the USA (1776), Haiti (1791), Latin America (1810), Europe (1848); a violent and expansive ideological confrontation began between proponents of [normative human rights] liberal or leftist and [realist authoritarian state sovereignty] monarchist, theocratic, authoritarian or fascist. This political battle was merely a rhetorical explanation of economic systems that by 1968 had established themselves rather evenly over half the world’s nations; command economy socialism, free market capitalism and theocratic amalgams. The World War from 1914 to 1945 had solidified USA as the Core Hegemon of the free market system. But that core status was thoroughly contested until the end of the Cold War(s)18 which went on from 1945 to 1989 resulting in the defeat of the Revolutionary Socialist USSR; the primary ideological and structural core contender. It has also resulted in a supra-national confrontation between various proxy and emerging powers whose oligarchic elites and revolutionaries declared themselves any number of political shades in the process. Nationified best in the form of the People’s Republic of China which became a Socialist nation in 1949, attempted Communism in 1967 and in 1978 made the shift from failed Communism into State Capitalism. Subsequently pulled 680 million humans out of poverty (UNDP, 2014) as well as enhanced semi-peripheral power like India, South Africa and Brazil.
China is the clearest contender for control of the global core (French, 2014). While it has long been described as an unlikely probability of some meaningful alliance to emerge between Russian Federation and the PRC; BRICS is making that more and more likely. Should they succeed in coordinating a development bank they would not be a far cry from better coordinating a military pact.
18 Both Immanuel Wallerstein and other historians agree the Cold War was a series of ongoing concurrent wars not a singular static period.
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• ECONOMIC
Trade has driven the World System since 1500 CE. Trade, Humanitarian Imperatives and Imperial Warfare have been used to justify subjugating vast segments of the human race to extract their labor for free [or inexpensively] as well as to bring to the Global Core goods unavailable to the upper middle classes and elites of those nations. After the World Wars19 the Bretton Woods Institutions notably the World Bank erected a vast financial architecture that would craft dependency in deep and intrinsic ways. Preferential access into semi-peripheral and peripheral nations for Core firms; heavy loans and debt; literal structural adjustment of economic systems and of course flows of raw materials and near slave labor of the export processing zones.
The current economic context is that as Core power dominance is slowly re-aligning axis from the USA to the People’s Republic of China. In all nations regardless of development, regardless of world system supply placement’ capitalism have triumphed as the dominant economic order. The BRIC economic alliance and development bank is as of 2014 the only counterbalance to the Bretton Woods institutions (World Bank/ IMF). This Multipolarity will simply be a far more sophisticated hegemony organized by China and implemented via regional hegemons Brazil, South Africa, India and the Russian Federation. This alliance represents nearly 3 billion people, a combined GDP of US 16.039 trillion, and 18% of the global economy (French, 2014).
In a very limited reconsolidation window there is a unique possibility of severing the control lines of dependency, re aligning local economies to allow greater indigenous planning and utilizing development as means to break dependency from Europe and the USA, without realigning with China and BRICS.
This idea of self-reliance cannot take the form of inefficient command economies but instead rely heavily on shared economy modals. The informal sectors that manage resource exchanges while circumventing taxes. The tax base of most countries excluding the advanced welfare states is a means of extracting wealth from citizens without compensating them adequately in social services or political representation. An economic re-alignment behind the BRICS Bank and China will not mean a more just and equitable world. China and Russia have never shown moral scruples about arming human rights violators. India manages a state where 74% of the population is living below $1 a day and 24.9% of Dalits and tribal minorities are exploited as fourth class citizens. Brazil and South Africa both struggle from deep ethnic divides, rampant corrupt practices and meaningless populist sloganeering. What is crucial in the economic context is to divest as much tax base from governments as possible and block trade policies which take resources out of peripheral nations fare below value. Or reduce peripheral and semi-peripheral populations to race to the bottom wage slaves turning out consumer goods for the North West and soon China.
• SOCIO-CULTRUAL
The socio-cultural context is that a considerable majority of the human race has not ever left its nation of birth, but a mass exodus has begun away from the violence prone periphery (Collier, 2013). Macro-level political and economic systems mean very little in the face of the
19 Wallerstein argues in his Analysis that it is inconsistent to separate World I and World War II into separate events because they involved the same core belligerents triggering the worldwide warfare for Core Control transfer from England to either Germany or the USA.
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daily battle for survival that half of humanity is facing, yet the economic and the political drivers shape every single regional conflict now ongoing. It is the common person not the economist or ideologue that suffers under the mounting global attrition. The basis of false consciousness is that imagined identity and nationalism subsume human solidarity. Profoundly different from the issue of class consciousness is human solidarity founded on conscious thinking. Because of incredible deprivation and imposed scarcity; race, religion and gender become key instruments the local Oligarchic Collective uses to impose meaning on socio-cultural bonds. Male supremacy over women. Ethnic pride and power over ethnic other. The use of unseen, imaginary deities based on written testaments transcribed at times before objective data was possible encouraging the murder and subjugation of whole other groups of non-believers20.
Because most of humanity is physically fighting to survive, breaking down these imagined identities has been highly difficult and outside major cities it is uncommon to have poly-ethnic communities living in peace. However, rapid urbanization and climate migrations will increasingly thrust new groups into greater proximity. This will not necessarily result in the aggressive coexistences of places like New York or London, each secured by a small armies worth of police and precarious at best.
It is integral though to any successful element of resistance to the intended re-alignment to foster deeper bonds of human to human solidarity thus coupling efforts of development to those of resistance. As can been seen in Russia, China and India; an elite ethnic configuration has in each country clearly denoted the extent of privileges based on race and ethnicity. The Han in China, the Slavs in Russia and the Brahman Caste in India.
ACTORS
United States of America (U.S.A.)
Population: 319.2 million people
Primary Strategic Alliance: North Atlantic Treaty Organization (N.A.T.O.) Active US Direct interventions: Iraq, Libya, Yemen, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Syria. US Total Economic & Military Assistance: $50.6 Billion, FY 2013.
US Proxy Conflicts: Israel (directed against & Iran), Saudi Arabia (directed against Iran), Colombia (directed against Cuba & leftist insurgency ELN & FARC-EP), South Korea (directed against PRC); numerous via War on Terror.
US Sanctions/ Embargo: North Korea, Syria, Russian Federation, Iran & Cuba21.
20 Certainly tendencies within Christianity, Islam and Hinduism are by the far the most aggressive. 21 Lifted by President Obama on 16 December, 2014.
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Primary US development & military aid recipients (FY 2012 highest to lowest): Afghanistan, Israel, Iraq, Egypt, Pakistan, Jordan, Ethiopia, Kenya, Colombia, Haiti, Palestine, South Sudan, Russia, Somalia, Tanzania, Congo (Kinshasa), Uganda, Nigeria, Sudan, South Africa, Mozambique, Ukraine, Yemen, Bangladesh and Liberia.
Strategic Allies: England & Israel.
Primary Clients: Israel, Egypt, South Korea, Taiwan, Colombia.
Russian Federation (RF)
Population: 144 million people
Primary Strategic Alliances: Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO).
Active Russian Direct Interventions: Ukraine & Georgia.
Russian Proxy Conflicts: Syria (against Israel& Saudi Arabia), Eastern Ukraine (against EU), South Ossetia (against Georgia)
Russian Sanctions/ Embargo: none.
Primary Russian development & military aid recipients: Cuba, Syria, Belarus, Turkmenistan, other former Soviet states.
Primary Clients: Armenia, Belarus, Transnistria, Turkmenistan, South Ossetia, Abkhazia, Uzbekistan, Serbia and Syria.
People’s Republic of China (PRC)
Population: 1.36 Billion
Primary Strategic Alliance: Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO)/ Shanghai Pact (SP) Total Economic & Military Assistance: $ 189.3 billion FY 2011, (RAND estimate) in 93 different countries.
Chinese Direct Interventions: [ None openly, regular clashes with neighbors over South China Sea]
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Chinese Proxy Conflicts: none openly.
Current Chinese development & military aid recipients: Pakistan, Myanmar, North Korea & 93 countries predominantly in Latin America & Africa.
Primary Strategic Allies: Pakistan, Russia & India
Primary Clients: North Korea & Myanmar.
Outliers
Cuba: A former Russian client turned into a Medical Superpower now has over 38,000 MDs working in its International Medical Brigades with comparable numbers of teachers, nurses and construction workers on infrastructure projects. Cuba alongside Venezuela are attempting to build ALBA as a counter weight to the hegemony of the three blocks.
Iran: Is beholden to no great power’s full influence though it is a nominal ally of RF and PRC. It is the only Shi’a Majority Shari’ah State. It is exporting revolutionary violence systematically throughout the Shi’a world particularly Bahrain and Lebanon. It has a long view of history and remembers clearly the US-English Coup against Mosaddeq, US-Israeli support for the Shah and US support for Iraq during the grisly Iran-Iraq War. It trusts none of the three power blocs but is clearly willing to sell oil to Russia and China. Iran has the most potential to disrupt or collaborate with the upcoming core shift and is integral to the Middle East’s strategic dimensions; it contains Syria, props up the Lebanese, Syrian and Iraqi states; and is the only regional force besides Israel that can stand up to ISIS (Baer, 2008)(Nasr, 2007).
India: Alongside China as a possible future Core Contender, India is far more unstable. 74% of its population lives belie $1.25 a day. Over 16% of its population is classified as Dalit untouchable and marginalized & exploited. It has a growing Maoist insurgency to its Center East and an ongoing Islamist Insurgency to its North West fueled by Kashmiri occupation and its natural antagonist Pakistan. India will likely work closely with China, but it is the most serious of the economic and demographic contenders besides those listed.
CAUSES
• What are the structural causes of conflict?
The structural cause of the conflict as stated in oligarchic greed and their influence upon political leadership to expand foreign markets for goods/ resources; and dominate the weaker powers of the semi-periphery and periphery. Nominally each Core power seeks to protect and enrich the middle classes and upper classes of their respective nations. Nominally each seeks to exert maximal leverage over the rest of the global populace to adopt its stated ideology, state ideology. To that end these is only a finite amount of resources to fuel industrialization and expansion. Natural resource completion is only a factor, albeit an important one. Market expansion allows stronger powers to off load goods upon weaker ones. While the World Bank has held an almost undisputed monopoly on lending to peripheral and semi-peripheral nations BRICS Bank will make a far less invasive lending base available, certainly less interested in the trappings of human rights and democracy.
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Therefore structural competition is also about banking. Who can lend the money the developing world needs to industrialize effectively.
A third structural source is arms sales. The resources such as fossil fuels, natural gas, extractive metals, coal and soon water might be a driver. As is the ability to loan the billions the developing world requires without debt to the North West. Arms sales however are drivers for those oligarchs with shares and control of the arms industries which sell to every developing nation to fuel the relentless conflicts throughout the world.
A fourth structural cause is inequality. As Thomas Piketty has illustrated in his work Capital in the 21st Century; the rich are getting much richer. Salary wealth is out pacing inheritance. Conspicuous consumption and corrupt practices have fueled demonstrations and uprising across the world. The internet now connects people like never for and the Arab Spring has emboldened students, unions and radicals all over the world to confront their state systems. It has not ended well so far. The government of Tunisia merely tinkered with the constitution. The US backed Egyptian dictator Mubarak was toppled, but shortly after a coup brought the military back to power in Egypt. The Libyan people with Western backing through airstrikes toppled and executed Kaddafi and plunged Libya into anarchy, nothing functioning well except besides the oil wells. Protests in the United States were suppressed. In Brazil and Bulgaria coopted. Yemen has become a low intensity civil war. Protests in Ukraine over the former President Yanukovych’s subservience to the Russian Federation have devolved into a Separatist war in the three eastern states and the Russian annexation of the Crimea. Non-violent protests in Syria have erupted into nearly 3 years of civil war with over 202,354-282,354 dead (December 2014 SOHR estimate) and the emergence in July of 2014 of the Islamic State which as conquered 1/3 of Syria, 1/3 of Iraq and has declared an Islamic Caliphate and is now just twenty miles from Baghdad, holding back largely because of the Shi’a Militias backed by Iran (Nasr, 2006). In newly independent South Sudan the US backed embattled Salva Kir government is fighting rival ethnic militias and waging low intensity war with the Bashir government of the north fully armed with Chinese bought weapons and advisors.
The fighting now present in all of these struggles is based on similar lists of grievances, but fueled by very different alignments of state interests. The PRC has refrained from being involved overtly in any of the above conflicts, the US and PRC have sold arms and clandestinely supported via their intelligence communities the client of choice in each conflict. Syria has been a Russian client since X; Russian arms shipments have firmly buttressed the Bashar Assad regime even after he used chemical weapons against his people.
Structurally we can dedact the world system in 2015 to the following six primary structural causes:
1. Legislative Capture & Oligarchic Control
2. Resource & Market Competition
3. Imposed Scarcity
4. Control of Economic Development Banks
5. Arms Proliferation
6. Rampant multilateral Human Rights violations
7. Rapidly growing inequality
• What issues can be considered as proximate causes of conflict?
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While it is highly unlikely any of the nuclear armed super powers or core contenders will engage in direct warfare, each has Bar Lev line that will unnegotiable trigger another World War. Because no power is irrational, and each is very familiar with the losses that would result in such a confrontation; each will continue to fight each other via proxy and intelligence operations. These Bar Lev lines are inflexible, however proxy war in the resource axis will intensify. Here is a summary of the proximate cause of conflict for each bloc.
USA-EU: The Bar Lev line for the US is the most flexible. After the quagmires of Iraq and Afghanistan the American people are war adverse. Their adversity is flexible. Large scale terror attacks on US soil are certain to trigger counter strikes and imperial reprisal. The policy course of the period since 2001 is all most a play book reconstruction of war plans drafted by the Project for a New American Century. It called for aggressive American action abroad after a “Pearl Harbor type event” and for conquest of Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Syria and assertive action abroad to safe guard the Jewish Colony Israel. Israel has been completely reliant on US aid since 1976 and could not maintain its sophisticated army and nuclear arsenal without such aid. Israel has long provided the US with sophisticated weapons and communications systems, as well as valuable intelligence. The Bar Lev line for the US is existential threats to Israel, terror attacks on US soil above 100 casualties and any invasion of Europe. The US-EU is largely underinvested in Africa and is unconcerned what transpires there. It’s investment in South Sudan is a foil to China who’s ally Sudan supplies it with oil. It’s investment in Rwanda is in relation to Rwanda’s regional intelligence and its role as an export point for critical minerals coming out of the DRC conflict. The USA-EU has invested a good deal of money in Colombia not falling to its Marxist rebels the ELN & FARC-EP. It has largely succeeded in supporting the right wing Colombian government, making Colombia the primary US ally in all of Latin America. While the CIA did everything in its power to halt the rise of Latin American Socialism through coup, right wing paramilitaries, torture and assignation of leadership (Blum, CITE)(Silva, 2011). This hasn’t done much to actually stop the spread of left wing ideology. The US is a fading imperial core power and it is propping up a European elite that doesn’t have the population or the military strength to defend itself.
What Conflict Prone/ Affected Areas can be situated within the Context?
Following the World Wars even the staunchest hawks of NATO (US-EU) and the Warsaw Pact sought to avoid direct confrontation between superpowers understanding that nuclear weapons would result in a zero sum game of mutually assured destruction. Therefore warfare beyond espionage would focus on proxy conflict. The metathesis of the Cold War strategy into the modern framework of international relations still adheres to basic set of rules:
a) Avoidance of any direct military confrontation with another power block, particularly those with weapons of mass destruction.
b) Prevention of semi-peripheral powers from acquiring nuclear weapons or other technology to prevent interdiction in their affairs by core powers.
c) Propagation of continuous violence at the peripheral level via proxy.
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The economic realignment of China in 1978 and Russia in 1989 have not affected this conflict variable. The misunderestimation of ethnic and identity and the sheer level of extreme poverty found in the peripheral nations have resulted in the so-called New Wars; the civil conflicts unleashed since the Cold War ended. But these so-called low-intensity conflicts that are spreading so explosively are still fueled by economic prerogatives of the contested core.
The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) remains the predominant global military alliance but recent discussions in Dushanbe in June of 2014 to merge the Collective Security Treaty Organization22 with the Shanghai Cooperation Organization/ Shanghai Pact23 an alliance which at its core will unite the military responses of Russian Federation, PRC and tentatively Iran and India.
History of Conflict
The following conflicts listed on International Alert & UCDP/PRIO Armed Conflict Database have been grouped around their continental geography, resource supply and patron axis. Some state that there are 35 ongoing conflicts. We have tabled up a minimum total of 64 major sub-state conflicts. Surely many are under-covered or overlapping. Each warrants a rigorous examination of drivers, spoilers, causes, grievances and psycho-social motivations, and
22 Russia, Armenia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan—signed the Collective Security Treaty. Three other post- Soviet states—Azerbaijan, Belarus, and Georgia—signed the next year and the treaty took effect in 1994. Five years later, six of the nine—all but Azerbaijan, Georgia, and Uzbekistan—agreed to renew the treaty for five more years, and in 2002 those six formally agreed to create the Collective Security Treaty Organization as a military alliance. Uzbekistan rejoined the CSTO in 2005 but withdrew in 2012.
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such have been conducted at length. What this micro-briefing will seek to demonstrate is that each is a result of Core and Core contender planning. Examining each we note that while triggered by basic human rights violations each conflict expanded most dramatically when Core support or intervention occurred. This is not to suggest none of these conflicts could not have occurred in isolation based on grievances present; they could not have however resulted in such massive loss of life and functional infrastructure.
Where a causality chain is present the conflicts have been linked into a Conflict Axis.
North America & Europe
The War on Socialism [Red Terror & Cold Wars]: During the 20th century, peaking in the 1950s-1980s anti-Socialist hysteria reached a high pitch in the United States. Politicians, particularly Nixon and Reagan utilized the US Military and CIA in previously unprecedented destabilizations of foreign governments thought to be Socialist, or Socialist leaning. Why this is relevant in 2015 where all but 4 Communist governments remain in power (China, Vietnam, Laos & Cuba); is that to achieve that political result the US gave aid to some of the most unsavory, human rights violating regimes throughout the world appearing flatly hypercritical as a proponent of democracy. And fostering a multi-generational hatred for the USA that would result in the terrorist attacks of 11 September, 2001.
War on Terror [Wahabi-Salafist Islamic Jihad]: It is actually impossible to declare war on a tactic of war, but in 2001 this is exactly what then President George Bush, Jr. and his Neoconservative cadre of advisors did as they unleashed a global war against Wahabi-Salafist Jihadists. This War has expanded to the full invasion and occupations and state collapse of Afghanistan & Iraq resulted in x casualties and resulted in widespread domestic surveillance under PATRIOT ACT 1 & 2. Allegations of widespread use of torture and drone strikes against civilians have stoked anti-American sentiment across the world.
War on Drugs, Crime & Illegal Immigration [Minorities in the USA ]: The underlying grievance is that throughout the rise of the US Empire Native Indigenous American Indians, African Americans, People of Color and newly arrived Immigrants have all been shut out of patronage networks and lack basic social services granted to the Euro-American majority. Undocumented immigrants have been periodically exploited for cheap labor as well as rounded up and deported. Various pretexts of terrorism, criminal justice, policing, drugs and human trafficking have all been used to militarize the police force in America. While all of the roughly three dozen low-casualty domestic terror attacks were home grown operations; none appear to have been financed or directed by foreign operatives with the exception of the highly irregular 2013 Boston Bombing Recently. Against the back drop of mass incarceration, NSA mass surveillance and the alleged killing of a person of color by police violence every 72 hours; a new civil rights movement has catalyzed in the months after the shooting of Ferguson, Missouri resident Michael Brown (cite).
Minorities in European Union: In the capitals and cities of the Old Empire the populations are aging and birth rates are declining. Debt crises and the War on Terror have heightened tensions against Muslim minorities from Turkey and North Africa, as well as to the Roma Gypsy population. Terror attacks in London, Madrid and Paris have heightened xenophobia against
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Muslim communities as have regular riots in the suburbs of Paris over police violence against North Africans.
Eastern Europe & Central Asia
Russia (North Caucasus Insurgency): Since 1994 Russia has been fighting a protracted to put down separatists movements in the Caucuses. There have been two atrocious wars in Chechnya and a range of rebel incursions and terror attacks post-2000 throughout the Russian Federation including the grisly school Siege at Beslan and the Nord Theatre (insert dates). The insurgency has been largely neutralized
Russia & Moldova (1992): Since its independence from the Soviet Union, the Russian military has held onto a defacto independent strip of Eastern Moldova called Transnistria running along the Eastern bank of the Dniester River.
Russia, Armenia & Azerbaijan (1993): The Nagorno-Karabakh Oblast: a defacto, mostly unrecognized independent state within a region which is majority Armenian & land locked inside Azerbaijan has been a long running low intensity war that the RF has generally backed Armenia militarily which is Orthodox Christian like itself although attempted mediation on behalf of both former Soviets.
Russia & Georgia (2008): Russia invaded Georgia in 2008 and occupied two States; South Ossetia and Abkhazia. Russia continues to occupy both states which are nominally ‘independent’ but now for all intents an purposes annexed to the Russian Federation.
Russia & Ukraine (2014): After pro-western demonstrations and a national uprising toppled the pro-Moscow regime Russian Special Forces and military have sense annexed Crimea; and set up separatist governments in Ukraine’s three Eastern provinces.
Asia & Pacific
PRC-Hong Kong: Hong Kong will remain fiscally tied to the North Western economic order until 2047. That has not stopped it from being the new epicenter of Pro-Democracy, Arab Spring-Occupy Wall Street tactics which have surged since September of 2014. The PRC must maintain a tight grip over this global economic mega-city in such a way that it can suppress the protests without hurting economic activity or creating Martyrs.
PRC-Tibet-Uighurs: The PRC has been waging a rather brutal campaign of repression to secure it two Western provinces. The Tibetan Buddhists have largely embraced exile, immolation, social media, passive resistance and leader worship of the Dali Lama. The Muslim Uighurs have declared a Separatist Jihad and been actively exchanging violence with the Chinese State. Both provinces which make up more than 2/5 of PRC territory also contain energy reserves the Core Contender will need to sustain growth. The Tibetans and the Uyghurs are two of several hundred ethnic minorities in the PRC; they are the two most likely to cause protracted difficulty in differing tactical capacities for the Han dominated Chinese state.
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PRC & Taiwan: US Client and home to the Chinese Nationalist Kuomintang; the defeated politico-military party which retreated to the island in 1949. Over 2 Million defeated soldiers, sailors, intellectuals and business elites fled there from the mainland advance of Mao Zedong’s Communist Revolutionary Armed forces. They took with them most of China’s gold and foreign currency reserves (Dunbabin, 2008).
PRC & Vietnam, Cambodia & Laos: PRC helped facilitate the 1975 American defeat in Vietnam but now regularly clashes with communist leaderships in Vietnam and Laos which are wary of the explosive growth of their longtime patron. Vietnam invaded and occupied Cambodia from 1978-1989 removing the ultra-violent, democidal regime of Khmer Rouge; a then Chinese proxy which killed over a million of its own citizens. China and Vietnam fought a War in 1979; the third Indochina War. Currently all three of these nations fall into the Chinese sphere.
PRC& Nepal: China has quietly aided the Maoist guerrillas which after a lengthy war are taking part in the newly allowed elections and hold 239 of 575 seats in the Nepalese Constituent Assembly (largest party). This has been the PRC’s intelligence and supply line to supply Indian Maoists with weapons and support via proxy.
PRC & Myanmar (Burma): Due to internal Buddhist pressures, ethnic strife, 2008 Cyclone Nargis which may have killed upwards of 200,000 Burmese; the highly isolationist Chinese backed military Junta collapsed and elections were held in 2010. The Union for Solidarity & Development (liked to the Military and China) ruled until 2014 when power supposedly changed top the National League for Democracy. Civil Wars have long raged in Burma; particularly the Kachin & Rohingya tribes against the various governments. As well as the Shan, Lahu and Karen ethnic groups. Two of the three biggest parties (in opposition) are funded by the military. Both China and India have been heavily invested in the Myanmar energy sector before the advent of ‘democracy’.
PRC & Bangladesh: The Bangladeshi oligarchy maintains a precarious balancing act between India, China and the US companies it manufactures and assembles textiles for. Bangladesh is highly strategic leverage point for China on India because when occupied it can easily sever India into two zones. Bangladesh also deploys more UN Peacekeepers than any other nation and while supposedly non-aligned is often ideologically in the Socialist camp.
North & South Korea: In 1950 the US pulled its war allies into a direct confrontation with the PRC in the Korea Peninsula; by 1953 USSR, China and the North Koreas had lost an estimated 367,283-750,282 soldiers; the US lead international coalition had lost 178,426 soldiers and over
2.5 million Korean civilians were slaughtered. North Korea under PRC protection built the 4th largest army on earth and 29,000 US troops are still stationed along the 38th Parallel line. The North is a nuclear armed failed state that cannot feed its own people without Chinese support. The South is vibrant developed nation that is an integral US ally.
India-Kashmir-Pakistan: India has occupied Muslim majority Kashmir since 1948 and despite innumerous rounds of overt & covert war with Pakistan; it remains a veritable breeding ground for Islamist insurgency directed against India from the North West.
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India-Naxalites (Communist Party of India); in 2004 a coalition of Maoist and Communist groups emerged in Central India; they now effectively control most of Central & Eastern India’s red corridor, the poorest most densely populated area of the country. The insurgency is regarded by the Indian government as its greatest existential threat (after the Pakistani ISI & the Kashmir rebel groups); the Naxalites are operating in an estimated 77-83 districts across 10 Indian states with an estimated resistance army of 47,000 volunteer fighters and are supply networked to the Nepalese Maoists & Chinese intelligence services.
Afghanistan: Has largely been a full blown war zone under British imperial rule, Russian communist occupation, War Lord Feudalism, Taliban Sharia and now a bloody US military occupation. This ungovernable country appears to have its insurgency fed via Pakistan’s intelligence service the ISI.
Pakistan: There is something truly alarming about a nuclear armed, terrorist training ground, with a sophisticated intelligence service, with war time excesses against India and Bangladesh that amount to genocide; fully run by its military; a major recipient of US aid money; but strategically aligned to PRC overtly. China is Pakistan’s largest supplier of weapons and third largest trading partner. The ISI aids China in combatting its internal Tibetan, Taiwanese and Uyghur threats. There is a free trade agreement between the two countries.
Latin America & Caribbean
Latin America is a highly important theatre of this core shift because it is a comparatively stable group of nations with middle income growth, far fewer active insurgencies yet with growing Socialist power in almost all countries. The Mexican-Cartel Wars are getting increasingly bloody along the traffic routes into the USA. The Honduran-Cartel Wars are the bloodiest and Honduras may have the highest non-political conflict related homicide rate on earth. US-Venezuela antagonisms are growing and sanctions may be immanent. Venezuela is Cuba’s energy supplier and life line. The Colombian Civil War may be winding down with renewed peace mediation talks in Havana. Brazil has emerged as the regional power and will be the BRICS continental player. ALBA (Bolivarian Alliance for the People of Our America) launched in 2004; is the Venezuelan & Cuban led alliance between Antigua & Barbuda, Bolivia, Dominica, Ecuador, Nicaragua, Saint Vincent & the Grenadines and Saint Lucia with Suriname & Haiti pending entry and with Syria & Iran as observers. Honduras was dissuaded by the US from joining the emerging bloc bilateral trade deals are conducted in a cyber-currency known as the SUCRE. NAFTA, ALBA and BRICS will all be competing for Latin American hearts, minds, dollars and Oligarch support.
The government of Nicaragua has just authorized the Hong Kong Nicaragua Canal Development Investment Company (HKND Group) to build a “new Panama canal” that will be in direct completion with the US controlled Panama Canal in just five years (2020). The US can expect a great deal of competition in a region already very hostile to it.
Sub-Saharan Africa
Both RF and USA, because of cultural legacies of racism have limited military and strategic ties with African nations. Russian Federation is seen more favorably due to its Cold War support of anti-colonial Independence movements. PRC is the dominant power.
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The PRC & Africa generally have seen unprecedented growth in development aid and trade. China is involved in the economic affairs of virtually every country on the continent. In Sudan the Chinese military support has led to the genocides in Darfur, Khordofan & South Sudan. Ethiopia has moved from a USSR client to after its war with Eritrea; a current US client. Somalia, a former USSR client has been without a government since 1992; Puntland & Somaliland are defacto independent states. Somali piracy is on the rise throughout the shipping lanes of the African horn. Central African Republic has devolved in Christian-Muslim ethnic warfare. Endemic corruption is exacerbating the Nigerian Boko Haram Islamist insurgency.
South Africa has been tapped by BRICS to be the focal point of development. USA Rwandan relations enable the protracted genocide that has killed up to 6 million people in the Democratic Republic of Congo; fuel by extractive metals being moved out of Rwanda on the black market (Nzongola-Ntalaja, 2002).
Middle East & North Africa
Israel & Palestine though getting a great deal of attention is minor conflict which exacerbates all regional tensions, but doesn’t cause them. The more serious antagonism is a Sunni-Shi’a one between Iran and Saudi Arabia. Jordan is a pliant US client and military staging area alongside Israel. It is 74% Palestinian and would collapse quickly without US and Israeli intelligence and aid. Libya has completely unraveled into low intensity civil war. Egypt, another unusual US client has broken the back of its secular revolution and Islamist electoral victories and returned to defacto military rule and full US dependency. The Muslim Brotherhood and local opposition has by no means been destroyed. In Lebanon Iranian proxy Hezbollah governs much of the country and has been instrumental in the invasion of Syria to shore up the Assad regime. Bahrain with its Shi’a majority is well within Iranian influence and its Sunni leadership will eventually crumble. Iraq for all intents and purposes is a proto-Kurdish para state, a Shi’a Arab adjunct to Iran and an ISIS control zone. Saudi Arabia the birth place of virulent Wahabi-Salafist, fundamentalist Islam is using its US backer to protect it from Iran while spreading that money across the region to Jihadists. United Arab Emirates, Qatar and Oman surely wish they could build higher walls and sit things out. Yemen is amid civil war, Syria as stated has gone from being a multi-ethnic, developed Russian client state to a civil war zone with over one hundred factions fighting. Iran continues to develop nuclear weapons as leverage but also a pragmatic safe guard from Israel and Saudi Arabia. Turkey continues to be a staging point for Syrian opposition to Assad and Kurdish revolutionary nationalism.
What Triggers Could Contribute to the Outbreak/ Further Escalation of Conflict?
Major Flashpoints:
Israel Palestine; is a demographic, nuclear armed time bomb. Arab Israeli Palestinians now make up over 20% of the total Israeli population and that number is growing. Regardless of outcomes of Statehood for the West Bank of the ongoing Hamas-IDF battles in Gaza; time is running out on the Jewish state by birthrates. Over the next fifty years the Jewish Colony will get uncomfortably authoritarian as they attempt to hold the apartheid. This will place a pressure upon the American Jewry to lean harder to protect Israel despite its mutation into a racial
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apartheid regime oppressive and bankrupt; neither fully Jewish nor able to sustain the mythology of Post-Holocaust impunity (Chompsky, 1983)(Blumenthal, 2013).
Syria; Syria is Russia’s Cuba of the Middle East one of its longest regional allies. Syria supplies Russia with its only Mediterranean port and naval base. It is also a long running recipient of Russian aid and weapons. Although the Assad government has control over only 1/3 of Syria. There is no way the RF will let that regime fall. In the meantime Syria and Iraq will escalate as multi-state proxy battlefield and dozens of combatant groupings. RF will continue to arm Assad’s government; Iran will continue to support its ally Assad via Hezbollah and the IRGC; Qatar and Saudi Arabia will back various constellations of Sunni Militants; the US and Israel will back the Kurds and Turkey will back the Syrian Free Army. This will be a quagmire that continues for some time Lebanon in the 1980’s x ten.
Ukraine; the Russian Federation is interested in restoring as much of the USSR territory under its hegemony as it can. It sees piecemeal engagements as a means to retake territory; especially warm water port or resource rich territory. As with Syria, the Russian Federation will not lose warm water ports. It is far easier to rely on the 20 million Russians abroad for intelligence and operational support than to realistically think the world will accept these conquests. However, while RF may succeed in getting defacto control of Crimean and the three eastern provinces; a combination of sanctions and general antagonism will drive RF into closer collaboration with the PRC.
ISIS & Iraq; is now effectively three para states. Kurdish North autonomous and under siege from ISIS. The Shi’a majority region directly collaborating with Iran. And the Sunni Triangle now largely under the control of ISIS. Iraq and Syria will effectively cease to be states as warlords, Jihadists and proxy armies’ battle for control of the oil. If Baghdad falls the following scenarios are likely:
1. Give ISIS claim Statehood
2. Trigger previously unimagined sectarian warfare in the Islamic world.
3. Give ISIS theocratic legitimacy as a Caliphate.
4. Trigger a Sunni Jihadist convergence around its Wahabi-Salafist World view 5. Everything between Israel, Kurdistan and Iran will fall shortly after24.
Taiwan; any assault on Taiwan would likely trigger a direct US PRC confrontation. It is however an integral objective of the PRC to recapture the island and they believe they can do so in 48 hours. This assault would have to take place while the USA was occupied with a conflict which ties down its navy. Or would be negotiated beforehand.
North-South Korea; the regime in North Korea is a Chinese client. But it is reckless and heavily armed. It fails at even the most basic dietary needs of its population. It has recently acquired nuclear weapons and acted erratically amid its third dynasty change. M53ost problematic is that it is the precise fault line where the USA and PRC fought a war between 1950-1953. 48,000 troops so close to China is an ongoing irritation.
24 These are the general observations of political scientist Thomas Poole
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Shi’a Revival: The central hypothesis of political theorist Vali Nasr is that the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps will build up Hezbollah type para state organizations in the Shi’a communities of Syria, Lebanon, Yemen, Azerbaijan, Pakistan, and Afghnistan and will successfully merge Bahrain and 1/3 of Iraq into a larger Shi’a Islamic State. Iran will develop a nuclear weapon deterrent to the core powers and trigger a larger, more organized Islamic revival to match the three Blocks already formed. It will defeat its regional nemesis Saudi Arabia and come to terms of detente with US backed Israel, largely because both will possess nuclear weapons and have equal antipathy for ISIS. Sunni Jihadist ideology will slowly lose ground as it has been a bankrupt tactical failure and a Shi’a Revival will occur in Islam (Nasr, 2006).
African Spring: as unlikely as it sounds there is a rumbling from the continent that the Chinese will trigger with their investments and speculations. African spring may be several decades away but when it comes it will serve to cut every outsider off from the resources in the continent. Likely trigger locations for African Spring are incredibly hard to predict since most of Africa is already caught in a combination of conflict and poverty traps not leaving much room for non violent opposition anti-oligarch movements to form. However, South Africa, Nigeria, Botswana, Zambia & Ethiopia would be good bets as they have larger more educated Middle classes.
What New Factors Contribute to Prolong the Conflict Dynamics?
The United Nations: While it may appear that the United Nations is an incredible outlet for ongoing negotiations towards human rights and global governance; it is in fact an enormous charade. While there are certain benefits to having several alternative channels open for alternative track negotiations; the UN, its development mechanisms as well as its Peacekeeping forces are a mockery of the values it claims to be upholding. All three Power Blocks hold veto votes as Permanent members of the Security Council; China, Russia, and the Great Powers of the World Wars USA, United Kingdom and France. 10 non-permanent members are hardly any kind of counterbalance. Peacekeeping missions in Haiti25 Kuwait, Namibia, Cambodia, Bosnia, Rwanda, Somalia, Sudan and the DRC can only be described in highly nonacademic terms as ‘a series of fubar shit shows.’
Elite Lobbies: A fundamental problem is access. The Oligarchs via their wealth have incredible access to politicians and policy manufacturing. As PRC rises it will avoid being sucked into major wars but remains by far the most stable Oligarical Collective with princeling blood networks founded on the mass understanding the eight immortals and their policies brought incredible progress to China. China is also a one party Communist state that values meritocracy and efficiency despite numerous allegations of inside dealing and corrupt practice. The Oligarchic Collective in the USA is less stable than China, but more than capable of buying off the politicians they need to keep things in their favor. The Russian Oligarchy is unstable but ruthless and access to United Russia Party is not as certain as the American oligarch’s ability to purchase Republicans and Democrats. Periodically the Russian inner Oligarical circle those most
25 Haiti is the only UN Peacekeeping Mission in place without any formal ceasefire in place. It is now widely understood that the Nepalese contingent of the MINUSTAH UN Peacekeeping operation introduced Cholera to the Republic of Haiti.
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tied to the old guard KGB network will kill or imprison and Oligarch previously thought to be untouchable. The European oligarchy will be most vulnerable. China will encroach on numerous post-colonial African holdings, its influence will wade as its population ages, its socialist benefits are lost to increased austerity and USA becomes less willing to engage on its behalf. Expect Fortress Europe and bunker mentality that will involve drafting or recruiting foreign legions to do its dirty work.
The Russian Reclamation: The RF will continue to go after countries from the former USSR leaning towards the West to restore what it believes to be its sphere. It will not be able to re exert power over Poland, Lithuanian, Estonia, and Latvia but gradually via FSB intelligence, Special Forces operations, and interventions on behalf of its ethnic diaspora; or via proxy it will restore its USSR era hegemonic sphere for similar reasons that China will annex Taiwan. Access to warm water ports, historic fear of devastating Eastern (Mongol), Western (French & German) and Southern (Tartar) and demographic dispersion propel Russian foreign policy, not ideology.
The Chinese Expansion: The PRC will act recklessly. It understands America is in decline and understands Russia’s economic disarray and lack of cohesive political identity. Post 1978 the first phase was internal; uplifting 680 million of its own citizens and reestablishing it’s oligarchy of princelings. The second stage was investment in Africa where over 45% of its foreign aid goes. The third stage is BRICS; leveraging a major economic power on each continent (Brazil, Russia, India and South Africa) to break the monopoly of the World Bank/ IMF. The fourth stage will be to assert financial hegemony in Asia & the Pacific. The fifth stage will be to annex Taiwan and humiliate Japan concurrently or in stages. Make no mistake that the Chinese Political elites will wait until there is no way the US can intervene militarily or with sanctions, but the Chinese are running a dangerous long game that views Taiwan and Japan as enduring humiliations that will be dealt with in time. Unless the USA is awash in domestic crisis, civil war or simply exhausted as world power the PRC will not risk striking at two integral US allies in the Asia/ Pacific region.
The Second American Civil War: There will be another civil war in the United States prior to the physical expansion of the PRC into other Asian countries. It will result in the disintegration of the union into Northeastern, Western, Texan, Mormon, Southern and Middle American states
which will devolve the USA into something between Yugoslavia’s collapse and the USSR’s. The chain reaction of such a civil war will be rapid Chinese conquest and annexation of Hong Kong, Singapore Taiwan, South Korea and Japan. Whatever is left of the country after the Second American Civil war will be isolationist. Europe will be wide open to RF expansion. The Global Core will switch to Beijing.
Energy Demands: While all three core contenders have vast energy reserves, industrialization, urbanization and continued modernization and fueling sophisticated armies; USA, RF, and PRC control require a level of energy supply that can only maintained with outward expansion to secure energy fields. That has been a driver of conflict since the World Wars. As we know there is a finite amount of fossil fuels and all of the developing world relies heavily upon them for basic matters of maintain developed world standards of living such as 24 hour electricity, cars and nearly every aspect of the high tech society. While Peak Oil might be 2020 or 2050 or further; energy resources; oil and natural gas in particular will propel conflict. As violence in the
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Middle East escalates the USA will rely more on fracking and shale; Russia (largest energy exporter and reserves on earth) will push further to exploit Siberian field and sell to rising core contender China; driving Europe to be more nuclear dependent. This spells a more isolationist USA and closer economic co-dependency between PRC and RF.
Water Demands & Climates Refugees: Peak Water is theory that by 2025 we will be unable to meet the clean water demands of the earth’s population due to structural supply configurations (Palaniappan, 2008). This will result in wars for water similar to the current wars for extractive energy. This will be less problematic for Russia; a major beneficiary of global warming trends alongside Canada; large swaths of barely habitable tundra will become farmland. This will be a huge issue for the developing world triggering climate migrations of unprecended scale particularly towards Australia and Europe. The net result of the Climate Refugee scenario will be boarder defenses in Europe similar to what exists between Israel and Palestine. By 2050 there will be literal citadel security states throughout what we call the Global North. PRC, USA and RF will absorb some of small percentage these refugees but not to any extent that will alter fundamentally core ethnic demographics.
Drones: Before long PRC and USA will have the capacity to operate mechanized drone infantries when projecting power abroad. Few powers will have this ability but it will be integral to Chinese policing of its African holdings. The PRC will avoid direct military confrontations by any means necessary except in any scenario of US-EU weakness to capture Taiwan. Drones remove a great deal of political pressure of war making. The Chinese ability to use them effectively will be an element of Chinese Neo-Colonialism. The USA will step up drones of all kinds because of how sensitive the US population is to protracted wars. If you are uncomfortable with the volume of drone strikes currently occurring; imagine tanks without drivers.
State Failure: State collapse will rapidly proceed in the Middle East followed by Africa. The New War phenomenon of protracted irregular, semi-or-overtly criminally connected ethnic purging will expand in vile new directions particularly in Sub-Saharan Africa. Entities such as ISIS will emerge and hold new amorphous territories.
What Factors can contribute to peace?
Aging & Mixing Population: The European World population is greying as are the ethnic majority populations of Russia and Japan. Developed world populations simply have less children. The short life span in Russian Federation for men is comparable to Sub-Saharan Africa. The Russian State is having to provide large financial incentives to induce couples to even have children. What will occur is that populations of Developed countries will become even less ethnically homogenous and the leading ethnic demographics will begin to die out or be sub subsumed via mixed-ethnicity couples. The USA will become increasingly Hispanic and lean left towards Latin America; the EU will become increasingly Muslim and lean towards the Middle East; this phenomenon will create coexistence linkages and diaspora connections that are vital to Cosmopolitanism. The RF will become slowly more Muslim, more Turkic and more Central Asian. Japan with a highly aging population and smallest demographic of integrated minorities will face the greatest challenge and eventually be conquered by the PRC during whatever period of hostilities allows for conquest and annexation of Taiwan. In short, the demographic of the
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American and European Oligarchic; white and Christian is slowly receding. Regardless, the grandfathers of the existing world order must pass and the new generations must be further intermixed. This will effect Africa & PRC the least.
Peak Oil: When the Oil runs out, unless cold fusion or a green alternative emerges such as solar charging more advanced lithium batteries; freighter tanker traffic will slow to bare essentials and most modern armies will revert to warfare strategies closer to the World Wars. Fracking on a mass scale will occur first as well as more extensive use of nuclear power at the core. Because modern armies are so reliant on petroleum, the closer we get past Peak Oil without arriving at an alternative energy source will force a slow down on modern war machines. Although Kaldor makes a very strong case for the rising violent tide of civil wars and intra state killing; the sheer ability of the three blocks to project power and manage trade routes is for now completely tied to a finite supply of natural gas and oil.
Advanced Communications: For the first time in history we are getting real time data about conflicts and political events that would never have been on our radar two decades before. Of course in the developed world this is increasingly part of the state control and socialization system. But, as with the next item these advanced communications allow us to achieve unprecedented solidarity of action and freedom of information.
Shared Macro-Economies: In the same way that technology is letting civilians cut out middle persons and avoid taxes, there is no reason to assume this cannot be done with all kinds of financial matters; as transnational criminals have used BITCOIN and TOR to do for years. The internet is not only a communications, knowledge and data repository; it is of course a means to organize our lives without big banks or big states. Shared Economies, removed from all the escalating conflicts are shown well in organizations such as BRAC; the world’s largest so-called NGO. BRAC couples microfinance with social programs and extends a fascinating array of services to the poor in 14 nations. Coupling together Shared Economic principles with good non state intuitions allows the poorest of the poor the option to sit out some of the upcoming new and old wars.
Core Shift: Any time there has been a previous Core Shift there has generally been incredible interstate warfare between European powers. This will be the first time that the Core is shifting to a non-Caucasian country. The Chinese were once the Middle Kingdom and will be again, but they do not have an historical precedent of slavery or genocide as the Europeans do. This is not to say China will bring an era of tranquil global dominance; simply put it will bring an opening for change in the structures of the World System itself.
Multipolarity: At least until the Core decline of the USA an equilibrium will set in where all three Blocs are relatively equal and own enough of each other’s assets to make interstate war between them unlikely. For whatever period this lasts for; likely until 2100 or the slowdown
effects of Peak Oil; willingness to fight conventional Old Wars will continue to decrease. US-EU will decline and PRC- BRICS will rise.
Supply Side Resistance: SSR is about breaking dependencies from developing nations to semi peripheral and core nations, by shutting down labor and supply routes. Social movements in the
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Resource Axis Zones; the Developing World so-called will have a limited window of 200 years during core shift to either align with PRC-BRICS, remain tied to decline Euro-American powers or fight for self-reliance. Grievances in the developing world are many. Arab Spring is occurring
and African Spring is inevitable. However, whether these continue via armed struggle or other means will decide to what degree the carnage occurs and to who these economies will depend on.
Peacefare: Is militant nonviolence. Quite literally making use of nonlethal weapons against oppressors. Against modern armies this will fail. Against police forces and irregular New War armies this tactic will bring regional oligarchies to their knees. Peacefare is an understanding that developing nations must bring down their own corrupt oligarchic collectives before they can affect those of the three power blocs (Ackerman & DuVall, 2001).
Core Blockade: The final stage of a Peacefare Campaign is to cut the core powers off from a cheap flow of labor, natural resources and commodities of any kind. Starving the core occurs when this is happening throughout the Resource Axis zone and Core nation minority and subversive groups use the reverse sanctions to trigger revolts there.
Parallel States: Throughout the world via solidarity networks, shared economies, deterioration of state social services and as survival mechanism; a variety of Zionist universalisms will come to take shape. Armed entities like ISIS and Hezbollah; non-violent development actors like BRAC and IRC; religious formations like Scientology, Mormons, Baha’i and the Holy Sea; break away states like Puntland; all will better establish Parallel State mechanisms as unrest spreads, new war intensifies and the existing 206 states cannot justify themselves indefinitely.
Conclusion
This is a desperate time and future does look quite bleak if human kind refuses to act in solidarity with its specifies instead of it’s state.
Described over seventy years ago by political scientist George Orwell as Oceania, Eurasia and East Asia (Orwell, 1984) there are three block locked in vicious conflict. The only difference to his futurist predictions is that the USSR never took control of main land Europe.
• What are current conflict trends?
China will rise and US-EU will decline as the Russian Federation profiteers. Few if any developing nations will meet their so-called 2015 Millennium development goals and the proxy wars as new wars will expand. The BRICS will rise the Bretton Woods Intuitions will decline. ISIS will expand, Kurdistan will emerge, Israel will decline and Arab Spring will be joined by African Spring. ALBA will consolidate in Latin America and US will dissolve into a civil war.
• What are windows of opportunity?
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The future rests in the people’s ability to achieve solidarity and utilize new technologies to circumvent states. ALBA represents a fertile ground for a truly multi ethnic civilization to thrive in the dark days ahead, but surely any para state configuration will be aligned to one bloc or another. The best window of opportunity will be in the next 200 years. Either core shift will means opportunity to break dependency or it will usher in one of the most protracted periods of authoritarian rule in history presiding over the death of the planet and human life.
• What actors can be identified as spoilers? Why? Are they inadvertent or intentional spoilers?
The Oligarchs are the worst spoilers of all. They pay for the all the terrible things in this world and reduce us to nothing, powerless wretched nothing. Were it only so simple as to murder them as they in the millions murder us; then we do have a good list. Alas, violence has only bred greater violence and the Oligarchy is so diffuse you would not catch them all easily. Instead of violence we must harness development to be our liberation not our chains. We cannot obsess over the details of the micro-conflict when most conflict has but three primary sources.
Our human objective must be to coordinate a means to support para state development coupled with the objective of starving the core. No matter which power bloc takes control know they will exploit us in various guises. The only solution is to be able to be self-reliant for when the time comes to shut them off from energy, labor and resource flows up mountain. The World System is a killing machine that strips on of their humanity and reduces you to faceless number to work out your life as a slave.
Between an Eagle, a Dragon and a Bear lies our future.
Let us not be left with scraps.
REFERENCES & FURTHER READING:
Ackerman, P., & DuVall, J. (2001). A force more powerful: a century of non-violent conflict. Palgrave Macmillan. Alexander, M. (2012). The new Jim Crow: Mass incarceration in the age of colorblindness. The New Press. Amin, S. (2012). Neo-Colonialism in West Africa.
Anderson, B. (2006). Imagined Communities: Reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism. Verso Books. Baer, R. (2008). The Devil We Know: dealing with the new Iranian superpower. Random House LLC.
Biermann, F., & Boas, I. (2010). Preparing for a warmer world: Towards a global governance system to protect climate refugees. Global Environmental Politics, 10(1), 60-88.
Bills, S. (1986): The world deployed: US and Soviet military intervention and proxy wars in the Third World since 1945. From: Robert W. Clawson (Ed.): East West rivalry in the Third World. Wilmington 1986, p. 77-101.
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Bloom, A. D. (Ed.). (1991). The Republic of Plato. Basic Books.
Blum, W. (2003). Killing hope: US military and CIA interventions since World War II. Zed Books. Blumenthal, M. (2013). Goliath: Life and Loathing in Greater Israel. Nation Books.
Brown, L. R. (2009). Plan, B. 4.0: Mobilizing to save civilization. Earth Policy Institute.
Cornell, S. & Jonsson, M. (2014). Conflict, Crime, and the State in Post-Communist Eurasia. University of Pennsylvania Press
Chomsky, N. (1983). Fateful Triangle: The United States, Israel and the Palestinians. India Research Press. Collier, P. (2013). Exodus: How migration is changing our world. Oxford University Press. Deffeyes, K. S. (2006). Beyond oil: The view from Hubbert’s peak. Macmillan.
Diamond, J. M., & Ordunio, D. (2005). Guns, germs, and steel. National Geographic.
Dunbabin, J. P. D. (2014). The Cold War: The great powers and their allies. Routledge. Engels, F. (1893). Letter to Mehring. Marxists internet archive, available online.
Escobar, A. (1995), Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Fanon, F. (1965). The wretched of the earth (Vol. 390). Grove Press.
Farmer, P. (1994). The uses of Haiti (Vol. 3). Monroe, ME: Common Courage Press.
Foucault, M. (1977). Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Pantheon).
Freire, P. (1970). Pedagogy of the Oppressed, trans. Myra Bergman Ramos. New York: Continuum.
Gao, M. (2008). The battle for China’s past: Mao and the Cultural Revolution. The China Quarterly, 195, 691-718. Gellner, E. (2008). Nations and nationalism. Cornell University Press.
Herman, E. S., & Chomsky, N. (2008). Manufacturing consent: The political economy of the mass media. Random House.
Huxley, A. (2007). Brave new world. Ernst Klett Sprachen.
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ANNEX 1: Resource Axis Distribution
ANNEX 2: Proxy Wars since 1945
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ANNEX 3: Chinese Aid
ANNEX 4: Economic Pacts
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ANNEX 5: Conflict Map A
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ANNEX 6: Conflict Map B
ANNEX 7: Listing of Genocides & Democides since 1945
ANNEX 8: Listing of Major Oligarchs & Highest Net Worth Individuals ANNEX 9: Listing of Major Oligarical Collectives by State
Australia 
Austria 
Belgium 
Canada 
Denmark 
Finland 
France 
Germany 
Greece8 Hong Kong9 
Iceland 
Ireland 
Israel10 Italy Japan Luxembourg Netherlands New Zealand Norway Singapore Spain Sweden Switzerland United Kingdom United States 
WALTER SEBASTIAN ADLER 