What is happening?

What is happening in the world?  What is going on?

The best guide to the present and future is the past.  The past tells us that it is the relations between states that have the biggest effect on the UK.  The UK is not just a rock in the ocean lashed by Atlantic gales, it is also sandwiched between the New and Old Worlds and between liberty and tyranny.  The history of the last century showed this very clearly.

At the start of the last century the UK was prosperous and confident and then German expansionism wrecked the whole of Europe in the First World War. WWI was followed by US and British economic dominance but US economic growth collapsed in 1929 taking the world with it but the UK made a fairly rapid recovery by reducing its dependence on foreign trade. 

The lesson for the UK was that highly interconnected trade and banking was unstable.  Once international trade was halved after 1931 the UK embarked on strong growth.

In Italy Mussolini left the Socialists and invented fascism and this steadily grew in Europe. Socialism was also growing in the Russian Empire.  Hitler, an admirer of Mussolini,  changed his socialist party to fascism. Germany recovered strongly from the 1929 crash and in 1933 fascism triumphed in Germany and the National Socialist Movement swept across Europe. Even in England Oswald Moseley, a Labour Minister, founded a fascist party.  The Socialists developed a pact to divide the East of Europe between National Socialist and Communist states.

The lesson from this was that National Socialism develops from socialism. Middle class socialist commentators, teachers and academics have spent the best part of a century denying that National Socialism develops from socialism.  It was this denial that caused us to miss the otherwise obviously inevitable change in Russia and China from Communism to National Socialism.

It took only 6 years for Germany and Italy to re-arm and become global superpowers despite the League of Nations agreements to disarm.  In global politics an enemy can rise from insignificance to an existential threat in under a decade.  In 1939 the Socialist pact resulted in the partition of Poland and war.  The French and British decided to declare war on Germany first, hoping to divide them from the Russians.  The UK and Europe were wrecked after WWII.  The huge British military forces meant there was Anglo-American hegemony until the early 1950s but the economic damage to the UK had been too great and the USA was de-facto world power.  However, the communists, those who had helped trigger the Second World War by invading Poland, managed to avoid Anglo-American conquest and the Cold War began within a decade.

The lesson for the UK was that resting on your laurels is not possible in International Relations. The UK was still dismantling its armed forces in 1937 when anyone looking at the re-armament of Germany and Italy could see that war was looming.  Another, unpopular lesson today, is that we should be wary of Germany.

At the end of WWII the Anglo-American plan was to convert the entire world to "Western" values by establishing an array of International Organisations.  It was believed that with capitalism and prosperity the world would become democratic and a safer place.  However, this was an age of asymmetric warfare and the communists devoted massive resources and effort to developing fifth column activities in Europe, especially in the UK.  They used the "old school tie" method of requiring sympathisers to recruit sympathisers.  This was highly effective in academia, art schools and the media and UK Trade Unions were heavily penetrated with senior members reporting to the Soviet Union.

The lesson for the UK is that asymmetric warfare can be more dangerous than open war.  We have still not learnt that the penetration of academia and the media must be reversed.

The communists resisted the West until 1989 when the Russian Empire rejected communism and around the same time China permitted private enterprise.  China began to boom economically once freed from Marxism.  They sent hundreds of thousands of their brightest citizens to the West to acquire modern technology and bring it back to China.  The Cold War led European socialists to formulate techniques for continuous disruption of Western society which, after the fall of communism, became the "Postisms" - Postmodernism, Poststructuralism and Postmarxism - which have as a goal the destruction of social and economic order.  Destruction is the goal.  The mode of operation is to identify "freedoms" and "rights" that can be taken too far and to use these to polarise society.  The communists used the right to strike but the Postmarxists probe for any weak spot and scratch it to destruction.

There are multiple lessons from the end of the Cold War.  The most important is that capitalism and prosperity does not convert socialists to democrats, it converts them to National Socialists.  Another lesson is that unless we guard the roots of democracy such as Free Speech and open debate its enemies will erode them.  Some lessons have not been learnt, the infiltration and subversion of public appointments in education and the media by political groups must be stopped and government money must not be used to finance the undoing of the nation.

In 2007-8 the global financial trading and banking system became so interconnected that a worldwide economic collapse occurred as a result of problems in the USA.

We had already learnt the lesson in 1929 that excessive inter-connectedness leads to global collapses but repeated the mistake.

In the past 15 years we have seen the apparatus of American hegemony turned on the West.  The Anglo-Americans mistakenly saw globalisation as the answer to world peace and harmony and so they empowered combinations of large Corporations and giant "philanthropic" Foundations to work at the grass roots level to achieve this.  They achieved relative global prosperity but the result is that National Socialism has risen again.  The combinations of big business and the various "Foundations" have now turned on the US and UK as these democratic states desperately row back from globalisation.

The lesson from this is that non-governmental alliances of big business must be dismantled.  The Foundations such as the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations (which used to work for the CIA) and the Corporate organisations such as the Bilderberg Group, Council on Foreign Relations and Trilateral Commission seem to have little idea that by pursuing their globalizing purpose they are now favouring National Socialism.  The same mistake was committed in the 1930s when the Nazis received considerable support from the same Foundations and Corporates.

The Corporate soft power offensive has been so successful that young British and Americans believe that globalisation is an inevitable change as the world matures rather than a weapon of Western power.  They believe that our political and economic stability is permanent.

The conquest of most of the world by the USA and UK in 1945 might have succeeded in securing global peace but it has failed.  The reason it failed is the hubris of the West. Not only did the West mistakenly believe that capitalism would bring democracy but they thought everyone wanted the US model of government.  We saw this in Iraq where the USA truly believed that the solution for the future of Iraq was an American style of government.  We saw this hubris after the fall of communism in 1989 when the US gambled on complete Western victory instead of pursuing structures that would foster global peace.  We are now back in 1933 with a rapidly growing set of powerful enemies and no international method to prevent conflict.

China now represents a greater threat to the West and democracy than there has been in a century.  China is such a fearsome enemy with a political culture that is so alien to human liberty and happiness that the inevitable future conflict will be terminal for either China or The West.

The coming decade is a pivotal moment in global history and the big question is: can the West stand?  If it can stand we will face down the Chinese and Russians as we did in the Cold War.  Sadly our Media and Corporations are siding with the enemy having been subverted by postism so I doubt we will stand and power will pass to China so that humanity will suffer a dark age for a millennium.  I hope I am wrong.

31/3/2020