Negotiating Liberation

There is something that BlackRock has been warning about for years, since at least 2011 — you know, they put out a threat assessment or risk assessment for investors periodically, and one of the so-called threats they have been concerned about is what they call “resource nationalism”; which, of course, refers to the incredibly dangerous situation when a country starts to treat its natural resources as their own; when countries commit the ideological error of imagining that they should have sovereignty over their own resources, and that their own people should benefit from those resources. Because, of course, the required understanding is that their resources do NOT belong to them, and belong, by default to multinational corporations and Western investors.

Now, it is noteworthy that this sentiment was previously expressed by governments, by like the State Department and so on, back in the 1960s and 70s. The US and the West in general, regarded any form of economic nationalism in the Global South, in the Muslim and Arab world, as a grave threat to American and Western interests. Now, this is being expressed directly by the private sector, by the OCGFC, by the new Empire of Capital. And this is indicative of the evolution of power dynamics. Power is not that concerned about American or Western interests, they are concerned about the interests of multinational corporations and the global financial elite; and it is unacceptable to them if countries in the Global South, particularly in Africa, start believing that they have, or should have, control over their natural resources.

In 2019, the country with the highest risk of economic nationalism was the Democratic Republic of Congo — note this pertains specifically to the mining sector and the extraction of minerals. Shortly thereafter, about a year later, the M23 rebels re-emerged after being more or less dormant since 2013; and I think we are all familiar with the violence and instability currently plaguing the DRC. Another country ranked as being at extreme risk of economic nationalism in 2019 was Venezuela. Since then, there was an attempted coup, rigged elections, and sanctions against the country, creating an economic and humanitarian crisis. Russia was another country ranked as an extreme risk of economic nationalism, and I think we are all aware of the measures taken against Russia over the past couple of years.

Now, there were a number of other countries that were ranked as high risk in 2019, not extreme risk, but high risk, of so-called economic nationalism, and these included: Turkey, Indonesia, Pakistan, Libya, Syria, Kazakhstan, and — wait for it — Saudi Arabia. Other countries like Malaysia and Iraq were singled out for what they regarded as moves towards economic or resource nationalism, economic sovereignty, that put them on a trajectory towards a high risk status.

It should be obvious that being ranked as being at risk of exercising economic sovereignty is regarded by the OCGFC as not only a punishable offence, but it is something they will move rapidly to pre-empt And they have, organisations like BlackRock, State Street, and Vanguard, have at their disposal the powers of the state, the powers that are at the disposal of Western governments, are at the disposal of the OCGFC, because they are entirely captured by the OCGFC. So, what that means is that confrontation, negotiation, conflict, or diplomacy, TODAY, is going to be primarily carried out between the governments of the Global South and Western private sector power; not between their governments and the governments of the West.

Because imperialism today operates differently. Imperialism today is carried out by an anational private sector. The Owners and Controllers of Global Financialized Capital represent a collective emperor, a collective colonizing power that itself transcends any single state or grouping of states. They don’t need the money and resources extracted from the colonized countries to necessarily flow to this country or that country; they just need it to flow into their corporate accounts, their profit margins, their dividends, and so on. They don’t need the US to control anything, or the UK to control anything, or Europe to control anything — they just need their investors, their shareholders, their companies to control things. These officials of the Empire of Capital are not particularly interested in the standard of living in America, the UK, or Europe. They have taken the logic of neoliberalism and see no reason why Western countries should be exempt. Their societies can be bankrupted and exploited too; their populations can be oppressed and enslaved too, their countries can be sabotaged and destabilized too — if it is profitable. And, the converse is true as well; the countries of the Global South can improve their standards of living, be less exploited, be stable, and so forth — so long as the OCGFC, the Western-based OCGFC, are profiting.

Economic nationalism, however, poses a threat to this new imperialism because it has the potential of cutting them out of the picture. And if they think they are going to be cut out of the picture, they will burn the picture. They will mobilize state power — which includes national militaries, intelligence agencies, and so-called international institutions like the UN, the WTO, and so on — to terrorize the economies, and the societies of any country that they think is trying to shut them out. So, wherever you see military action being taken, or what appears to be subterfuge, subversion, and covert destabilisation in a Global South country; that indicates to me that it is a country whose government has diplomatically and strategically failed to negotiate their sovereignty with the OCGFC. Just as, in the past, American and Western state power could not be ignored, could not be safely defied in a bold and unilateral, uncompromising manner, without it resulting in an invasion, a coup, or an assassination; so too, today, the Owners and Controllers of Global Financialised Capital, and entities like BlackRock and Vanguard, cannot be ignored or defied or sidelined entirely, without disastrous results. Like it or not, these are the power dynamics that exist. This is the new shape of imperialism and the new shape of anti-imperialism.

You know, historically, colonization in the Muslim world, the technique of colonization, included recruiting or coercing the collaboration of local authorities and elites. Anti-colonization movements, then, tended to arise from the lower classes, the grassroots; because the elites were compromised. The elites were subordinated, but they were still the elites, they were still the authorities, and the common people still respected that social order to one extent or another, and still utilized and benefited from that traditional authority structure in one way or another. This, combined with the fact that revolutions generally tend to be revolts by the lower classes anyway, fixed in our minds the idea that any sort of anti-colonization, anti-imperialist movement, must be a grassroots uprising; or anyway, that they should begin from there; even if intellectuals and middle- and upper-class elements eventually integrate into those movements. The idea is set in our minds that revolutions are undertaken by the peasants, basically, marching with their pitchforks against the rich. And there is still an element of this that is still true, but the dynamics around that are different, and the strategy and impact are different from the old days.

Today, I would argue, for the Global South, and certainly for the Muslim world, the most effective anti-imperialist struggle is not being led by peasants storming the palace, but rather by the palace itself. But they are approaching it very tactfully, very diplomatically; not in an overtly confrontational way, but more through negotiation and compromise — but not the kind of compromise that reduces their sovereignty; rather, the kind of compromise that increases their sovereignty without having that sovereignty seem threatening.

This may seem like a weak or unsatisfying approach for an independence struggle, but you have to understand that until now, there has never BEEN a negotiation. Until now, our countries had to take dictation. They didn’t get to negotiate. They couldn’t negotiate concessions from Western power, they just had to concede to Western power. But that is not what is happening now. Now our countries are setting terms and conditions, and making demands and getting concessions. And this is possible because countries like Malaysia, Indonesia, UAE, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and BRICS; are dealing with the OCGFC; we are involved in the transition of the global economy, the pivot of the economy to the Global South. The nature of that pivot is not being dictated by the West, it is being negotiated between our governments and the OCGFC, and we are securing greater and greater degrees of economic sovereignty and political independence.

Because, again, demographics are on our side, and time is on our side. And that is why the pivot is happening in the first place. Because the collective West has birth-controlled themselves into irrelevance, they divorced themselves into irrelevance, they two-income householded themselves into irrelevance, and they materialismed themselves into irrelevance. They prolonged adolescence, destroyed families, and disincentivized procreation to the point that they are not worth it anymore as a worker or consumer pool for business to serve their interests. So, the pivot to the Global South is happening by necessity, and that is a weak starting position for the OCGFC in terms of negotiating with the countries of the Global South.

See, when I said that colonization operated by coercing the collaboration of local elites, local rulers, local authorities; you should not lose sight of the fact that those authorities did not necessarily embrace or welcome their own subordination. As I have said many times, no one wants to be a slave, especially when your title is Sultan or Emir or King, and you are used to being the boss. But they had to accept it, and often, they had to accept it only because accepting it was, in fact, the only way they could retain their titles and relative authority. But that does not mean that they did not want, at some point, to regain their sovereignty. See, again, this is a major difference between Western colonization and the spread of Islam. The moment a colonized country has the opportunity to free themselves from Western domination, they do it, they do whatever they can to get out from under Western control. But, that wasn’t the case with the countries Islam spread to, because that spread of Islam was not colonization. I mean, when the West came to our lands and colonized and took over, that would have been the perfect opportunity for them to renounce Islam, to declare themselves liberated from Muslim colonization — well, obviously, that was not the response. The West subjugated and Islam uplifted. That’s the difference.

So, the leaders, the elites, the authorities in the Muslim world have acted in the past, yes they have, as clients of the West; but they were hostages. Colonization and Western violence and the threat of violence, made them hostages. But, I am telling you, they have been plotting their escape all along. And not only have there been rifts developing between the hostage takers, but our side has become stronger too. See, there’s always the mastermind and the henchmen, there’s the one with the brains and the one with the brawn; and America thought because they had the brawn they were the leader of their criminal organisation, but the mastermind has always been the OCGFC, now, that mastermind is making a new deal, and switching sides, he is discovering that it is more lucrative to partner with us than to ransom us, so the dynamics are changing. It’s like that scene in King of New York, when the young street thugs want to rob Frank White’s wallet on the subway, and he gives them some money and offers them a job instead. The thugs are the OCGFC here, and Christopher Walken is Saudi Arabia, or UAE, or BRICS. It is better for you to work with us, and the deals they are making are levelling out the subordination aspect, they are giving us the upper hand, but in a non-threatening, mutually beneficial way. And that is very savvy, it is cunning, and it makes anti-Imperialist liberation sustainable.

Because, it didn’t have to go this way. There were so many opportunities that have been seized that could have been lost, so many moves that could not and would not have been made if our countries were actually client states and not hostage states, and there are so many mistakes that were NOT MADE, that could have been made. Because the OCGFC did not initially want things to go this way, they wanted the pivot South to just be another wave of total colonization, total subjugation and pillage. Of course that is what they wanted. And their racism, bigotry, and supremacism made them think that our people were stupid, our people were lazy, our people were uninformed and clueless. They thought we didn’t know what is going on in the world, they thought we were all brainwashed, they thought — just like a White slave owner in the American south, that when a slave smiles at him, it actually means he is happy and content — they thought we were satisfied being subordinate and exploited. They thought we are all primitive and simple-minded and accepted our servitude to the West as just part of the natural order. That’s really how they think. They are so convinced of their own supremacy, they genuinely think everyone else is inferior and deficient. They think we don’t know how the world is changing, and they think we are unaware of the fact that the West is running on fumes at this point.

But the oppressed know their oppressor better than the oppressor knows himself, and the fact is, it is impossible for the oppressor to ever really understand those whom he is oppressing, because from the outset, he has to lie to himself about them anyway, he has to, himself, believe a lie of his own creation about the people he is oppressing, just so he can justify oppressing them. But the oppressed know their oppressor very, very well. Intimately well. And we can SEE that you aren’t what you used to be, we can smell it, we can sense it, we know when you’re acting and when you’re being real, and you are doing nothing but act at this point. Doing nothing but try to evoke your heyday, but you are a shadow of your former self, and everyone knows it. And yes, even your old partners, your old gang, all your previous lackeys are turning away from you and coming to us to cut deals. The only one in the dark here is you.

The next fifty years are going to be drastically different than the last fifty years, and no one is even going to believe fifty years from now that America and Europe were ever treated like the centre of the world. People are going to shake their heads in disbelief that something as repugnant and stupid as Zionism was ever taken seriously and allowed to wreak havoc on the Middle East. No one is going to be able to wrap their heads around the fact that you people presided over such a deranged global order that it made the most resource rich and important countries the poorest and most oppressed countries. That’s your system. And you have the gall to call it civilized, you have the gall to call yourselves advocates of justice and fairness and equality and human rights. I’m telling you, in fifty years, your whole era is going to be universally regarded as a disgrace of history, and the story of America is going to be nothing but a cautionary tale for the nations of the world about how horrifically wrong a country can be. By your lack of integrity, your lack of morality, your lack of honesty, your lack of decency, your lack of humanity; you are going to become the epitome, the comprehensive reference point for everything a country must never be. And that, ultimately, is what America is going to contribute to the world, nothing but the worst possible example that everyone will commit themselves to never repeat.