The Ukraine and the Collapse of the West

Few could have guessed that when Russia decided to put an end to the massacre of Russians in the eastern part of the Ukraine, it would hasten the collapse of the West. Actually, we are talking about a process that began in the 1980s with the embrace of neoliberalism as the main ideology in the Anglosphere and the wider US Empire.

One can say a lot about neoliberalism, but the main point is that it destroys all normal human interaction and thus society. Neoliberalism’s proponents and adherents always seem to fail to grasp this. In other words, under neoliberalism, literally everything is given a monetary value, a price. When everything has a price, there remains nothing of value. In the Western manufacturing industry, it has led to the practice of engineering consumer products according to the principle of planned obsolescence. As a matter of fact, the entire economy in the West has been transformed into a system that can no longer function independently, that is, without tax cuts, special benefits and privileges, subsidies and exceptions, and good old-fashioned corruption.

Needless to say, this system has been yielding fabulous profits to banks and assorted financial businesses, most notably asset management companies such as Blackrock, Vanguard, State Street, Carlyle and KKR, as well as a handful of individuals with the right attitude and the right connections. These people – the likes of Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates and George Soros – are the modern equivalent of the “robber barons” of the US around 1900.

One might say the West has seen the full development of what more than a century ago the Austrian Marxist Rudolf Hilferding predicted in his book Financial Capitalism (1910). Foreseeing that a small moneyed elite would become very powerful, Hilferding wrote that they would make the state entirely subservient to them. Of course, he saw this happening in the US in his own days, but Hilferding predicted the phenomenon would extend over the entire world. Indeed, this is exactly what we see today. Hiding behind neutral facades, such as the WHO and WEF, billionaires masquerading as “philanthropists” are busy lining their pockets even more, while trying to force the rest of humanity into owning nothing, eating insects and submitting to medical experiments.

All of this is especially evident in what is now often called “the collective West,” the group of nations that are part of the US Empire and that all have imposed sanctions on Russia after it began its Special Military Operation in the Ukraine in 2022. Acting on behalf of the latter-day robber barons, the small clique of zealots known as neocons has taken over the government in the US and is now calling the shots everywhere in the West. By enacting elaborate psyops such as 9/11, creating artificial perils such as Islamic terrorism, and staging international health emergencies such as the recent Covid plandemic, these powerful interests were well on the way of turning a sizable chunk of humanity into obedient slaves.

Until 2022, everything seemed going according to plan, but then, due to events in the Ukraine, cracks began to show in the elaborate structure that was supposed to make the hold on much of humanity by the robber barons permanent.

Whoever relies on the standard media in the West will not easily perceive what is going on in the Ukraine and what implications for everyday life events there are bound to have. Not a day passes when the public in the West is not being told how superior, sophisticated Western armaments are eventually going to turn the tables in the Ukraine. Not a word, however, on the estimated 300,000 KIAs on the Ukrainian side, and the wounded, calculated to number at least 600,000. Not a word, not a hint, nothing. But lots of details on how good all those almost antique weapons are that Western nations are now supplying to the Ukrainians. Those tanks supposedly finding their way to the front lines, from the US Abrams to the German Leopard 2 and the English Chieftain, were designed at least half a century ago and they are far from being the Wunderwaffen they are purported to be. The small batches of F-16 fighters that are about to be delivered to the Ukraine are also half a century old, as are all those Patriot missiles. To believe that the Ukrainians can defeat the Russian army with obsolete weaponry borders on lunacy because Russian equipment is more modern, more efficient and just superior, sometimes even vastly so. Even more recent Western arms such as HIMARS are outdated compared to their Russian counterparts. During the past half century, the US and its Western vassals have been engaged in numerous conflicts, never against a peer enemy, but always against “towel heads” and other adversaries they looked down upon. The expectations concerning the performance of the hardware delivered to the Ukrainians are wildly exaggerated and completely unfounded, but the average news consumer in the West will not grasp this basic fact.

In the West, everybody is still convinced of its absolute superiority in all fields of human endeavor: in science, the arts, education, research, medicine, and of course military technology. A brief look at the Lockheed Martin F-35 Lightning II will provide a case in point. This “all-weather stealth multirole combat aircraft” was launched as a project in the 1980s, ripening in the mid-nineties. First known as the JSF (Joint Strike Fighter), it made its long overdue first flight only in 2006. From the start, the F-35 had been plagued by so many and such serious flaws and breakdowns that it may be called a miracle it can actually take off and fly around a bit. When the JSF project was publicly announced in the mid-1990s, French philosopher Philippe Grasset predicted it would ultimately lead to the demise of NATO. Here was an aircraft that only existed on the drawing board, but that was claimed to become the best air superiority fighter, the best fighter-bomber, the best reconnaissance plane and invisible to enemy radar. In other words, here was a super weapon such as it only existed in science fiction. Eventually, it turned out to be more of a flying (or rather non-flying) headache. Never before has there been an aircraft that was so beset by a bewildering set of problems. Almost three decades after it was initiated, the F-35 is unable to perform satisfactorily any of the tasks that it was designed for. Thus, the F-35 is a fitting symbol for the rather mediocre state of NATO and Western military technology. In a broader sense, the F-35 also symbolizes the inviability of neoliberalism because the failure of the project is a result of hubris, conceitedness, technological incapacity, ignorance and truly massive corruption, which are caused by making money the measure for everything.

Although in Russia it is prohibited to call the SMO in the Ukraine a war, it is nevertheless as true a war as can be. On account of its duration, force deployment, casualties and fighting intensity, it is the first real war since the Iran-Iraq war of 1980-1988. Obviously the Ukraine war is different in that it involves two of the world’s great powers, namely the US (through NATO) and Russia. Therefore what happens on the battlefield is interpreted in the light of this antagonistic relationship and the conclusions are in turn used for broader analyses. It is good to keep in mind that wars have always been catalysts, accelerating processes that are already under way.

So far, the conclusion is warranted that the fundamental weaknesses of the West, as dominated by neoliberalism, are becoming ever more apparent. Fortunately, it will prove futile to try and redress these flaws and weaknesses because they are built into the very DNA of the system. If corruption is the perennial concomitant of politics always and everywhere, it is more serious in the West, for the simple reason that it has embraced neoliberalism. Therefore, money has been made the one and only yardstick because it has become the cornerstone of the entire system. Money, but not principles, not ideas, not ideals, not religion, not values, just money plain and simple. The “Western values” many refer to, such as democracy and civil liberties, have been thrown by the wayside during the Great Covid Show and are no more than hollow words. Other “values,” such as “inclusion” and gender lunacy, are no values but actually psychiatric conditions or, at best, tools to control the gullible.

The absence of true values may also explain why it is in the West that people are more worried about anthropogenic climate change than elsewhere in the world. Might that be the reason why so many people in the West glue themselves to pavements, throw paint at artworks or chain themselves to them because they want to pacify the “weather gods” they are venerating without realizing it? The anthropogenic climate change believers do not realize that the West no longer has any values and that they are useful idiots at best. The West is doomed, but most people in the West are unaware of it.

As things now stand, in the second year of the Russian SMO in the Ukraine, it is becoming clear that it is more than just a US/NATO proxy war against Russia. The conflict involves two radically different opponents: one has values, the other does not. One has a comprehensive world view and a sense of history, the other is interested in money and profit only. One cherishes human values and truth, the other believes that lies are capable of covering up the truth.

The longer the war lasts, the sharper these differences will appear and the more differences will emerge. The longer the war lasts, the faster NATO and the EU will collapse, and with it the entire West, including the US. In other words, the Ukraine war will introduce a New World Order, a Great Reset. But these will be different from what, respectively, President Bush I and WEF boss Klaus Schwab had in mind when they first used those expressions.