"European Mutiny?" Arab Solidarity? "Illiberalism" Monday with Crooke and Escobar

A great many events occurred over the past several days along with some important writings. On the Friday Putin delivered his legal brief and pathway for concluding the Ukraine conflict, Alastair Crooke’s very thought-provoking essay “European mutiny at the illiberal order” was published by Strategic Culture Foundation, which was followed on Saturday by Pepe Escobar’s “The BRICS weigh in on Palestine” published by The Cradle. In Europe, the spectacle consisted of the disastrous defeats of the establishment parties in the MEP elections which caused a spate a snap-election declarations and a few outright resignations which served to bury the G-7 Summit in Italy, while Putin’s Friday speech and election chaos served to further undermine the so-called Swiss Peace Conference that was shunned by more nations, while some attendees refusing to sign the joint statement. Putin’s legal brief that cemented the illegitimacy of Zelensky was very hard for anyone to ignore, which IMO was the main point of the exercise. Meanwhile, further fallout from the BRICS+ FM Conference and its joint statement also served to teardown the fragile Establishment Narrative over Palestine. In their own ways, the two writers and their subject matters struck at the core of the longstanding Globalist plan to control society and use it for their own selfish purposes. And as usual for Monday’s, Crooke had his half-hour chat with Judge Napolitano that exclusively dealt with the European and Ukraine situations. Let’s now look at the essay that fueled part of their discussion:

I have been writing for some time that Europe (and the U.S.) are in a period of alternate revolution and civil war. History warns us that such conflicts tend to be extended, with peak episodes which are revolutionary (as the prevailing paradigm first cracks); yet which, in reality, are but alternate modes of the same – a ‘toggling’ between revolutionary peaks and the slow ‘slog’ of intense cultural war.

We are, I believe, in such an era.

I also have suggested that a nascent counter-revolution was slowly gathering – one defiantly unwilling to recant traditionalist moral values, nor prepared to submit to an oppressive illiberal international order posing as liberal.

What I had not expected was that the ‘first shoe to drop’ would occur in Europe – that it would be France that would be the first to break the illiberal mould. (I had thought that it would break first in the U.S.)

The European MEP election outcome may come to be viewed as the ‘first swallow’ signalling a substantive change in the weather. There are to be snap elections in Britain and France, and Germany (and well as much of Europe) is in a state of political disarray.

Have no illusions though! The cold reality is that western ‘Power Structures’ own the wealth, the key institutions in society and the levers of enforcement. To be plain: they hold the ‘commanding heights’. How will they manage a West edging towards moral, political and possibly financial collapse? Most likely by doubling-down, with no compromise.

And that predictable ‘doubling down’ will not necessarily be confined to fights within the ‘Colosseum’ arena. It will certainly impinge into high-risk geo-politics.

Undoubtedly, U.S. ‘structures’ will have been deeply disconcerted by the European election portent. What does the European anti-Establishment mutiny imply for those Ruling Structures in Washington, especially at a time when all the world sees Joe Biden visibly wobbling?

How will they distract ‘us’ from this first crack to their international Structural Edifice?

Already, there is U.S.-led military escalation – ostensibly connected to Ukraine – but whose objective clearly is to provoke Russia into retaliation. By incrementally escalating NATO violations of Russia’s strategic ‘red lines’, it seems that the U.S. hawks seek to gain the escalatory advantage over Moscow, leaving to Moscow the dilemma of how far to retaliate. The western élites do not fully believe the warnings from Moscow.

This provocation ploy might conceivably offer either a crafted image of the U.S. ‘winning’ (‘staring down Putin’), or alternatively, come to provide a pretext to postpone U.S. Presidential elections (as global tensions spike) – thereby giving the permanent state time to get its ‘ducks in lined up’ to manage an early Biden succession.

This calculus however, is contingent on how soon Ukraine implodes either militarily, or politically.

An earlier than expected Ukraine implosion might become the staging for a U.S. pivot to the Taiwan ‘front’ – a contingency that already is being prepared.

Why is Europe in mutiny? [Joint emphasis]

The mutiny has arisen because many in the West now see only too clearly that the western ruling structure is no liberal project per se, but rather is an avowedly illiberal mechanical ‘control system’ (managerial technocracy) – that fraudulently poses as liberalism.

Clearly many in Europe are alienated from the Establishment. The causes may be multiple – Ukraine, immigration or falling living standards – yet all Europeans are versed in the narrative that history has bent to the long arc of liberalism (in the post-Cold War period).

Yet that has proved illusory. The reality has been control, surveillance, censorship, technocracy, lockdowns and climate emergency. Illiberalism, even quasi totalitarianism, in short. (von der Leyen took things further recently, arguing that “If you think of information manipulation as a virus, instead of treating an infection once it has taken hold … it is much better to vaccinate so that the body is inoculated”).

When then, did traditional liberalism (in the loosest definition) turn illiberal?

The ‘about-face’ came in the 1970s.

In 1970, Zbig Brzezinski (who was to become National Security Adviser to President Carter) published a book entitled: Between Two Ages: America’s Role in the Technetronic Era. In it, Brzezinski argued:

“The technetronic era involves the gradual appearance of a more controlled society. Such a society…dominated by an élite, unrestrained by traditional values…[and practicing] continuous surveillance over every citizen … [together with] manipulation of the behaviour and intellectual functioning of all people … [would become the new norm].”

Elsewhere he argued that “the nation-state as a fundamental unit of man’s organised life has ceased to be the principal creative force: International banks and multinational corporations are acting and planning in terms that are far in advance of the political concepts of the nation-state”. (i.e. Business cosmopolitanism as the future.)

David Rockefeller and the power brokers around him – together with his Bilderberg grouping – seized on Brzezinski’s insight to represent the third leg to ensuring that the 21^st century would indeed be the ‘American Century’. The other two legs were control of oil resources and dollar hegemony.

Then followed a key report, Limits to Growth, (1971, Club of Rome (again a Rockefeller creation), which provided the deeply flawed ‘scientific’ underpinning to Brzezinski: It predicted an end to civilization, owing to population growth, combined with depleting resources (including, and especially, depleting energy resources).

This dire prediction was imputed to say that only economic experts, tech experts, leaders of multinational corporations and banks had the foresight and technological understanding to manage society – subject to the complexity of Limits to Growth.

Limits to Growth was a mistake. It was flawed, yet that did not matter: President Clinton’s adviser to the UN Rio Conference, Tim Wirth, admitted the error, yet cheerfully added: “We have got to ride the global warming issue. Even if the theory is wrong, we will be doing the ‘right thing’ in terms of economic policy”.

The proposition was wrong – but the policy was right! Economic policy was upended, based on faulty analysis.

The ‘godfather’ to the further pivot to totalitarianism (apart from David Rockefeller), was his protégé (and later, Klaus Schwab’s ‘indispensable adviser’), Maurice Strong. William Engdahl has written how “circles directly tied to David Rockefeller and Strong in the 1970s birthed a dazzling array of élite (private-invitation) organizations and think tanks”.

“These included the neo-Malthusian Club of Rome; the MIT-authored study: ‘Limits to Growth’, and the Trilateral Commission”.

The Trilateral Commission however, was the secretive heart to the matrix. “When Carter took office in January 1976, his Cabinet was drawn almost entirely from the ranks of Rockefeller’s Trilateral Commission – to such an astonishing degree that some Washington insiders called it the ‘Rockefeller Presidency’”, Engdahl writes.

Craig Karpel, in 1977, also wrote:

“The presidency of the U.S. and the key cabinet departments of the federal government have been taken over by a private organization dedicated to the subordination of the domestic interests of the United States to the international interests of the multi-national banks and corporations. It would be unfair to say that the Trilateral Commission dominates the Carter Administration. The Trilateral Commission is the Carter Administration”. [Emphasis original]

“Every key U.S. Government foreign and economic policy post, since Carter, has been held by a Trilateral”, Engdahl writes. And so it continues – a matrix of overlapping membership that is little visible to the public, and which very loosely may be said to have constituted the ‘permanent state’.

Did it exist in Europe? Yes, branches across Europe.

Here lies the root to last weekend’s European ‘mutiny’: Many Europeans refuse the concept of a controlled universe. Many are defiantly unwilling to recant their traditional ways of life or their national allegiances.

The Rockefeller Faustian bargain of the 1970s had one narrow segment of the American ruling cadre seceding from the American nation to occupy a separate reality in which they disassembled an organic economy to the benefit of the oligarchy, with ‘compensation’ coming only from their embrace of identity politics and the ‘just’ rotation of some diversity into corporate executive suites.

Looked at in this way, the Rockefeller deal can be viewed as a parallel to the South African ‘arrangement’ that ended Apartheid: the Anglo-élites held onto economic resources and power, whilst the ANC, on the other side of the equation, got a Potemkin façade of their taking political power.

For Europeans, this Faustian ‘arrangement’ degrades Humans down to identity units occupying the spaces between markets, rather than markets being the ancillary to an organic human-centred economy, as Karl Polanyi wrote some 80 years ago in The Great Transformation.

He traced the turmoil of his era down to one cause: the belief that society can, and should, be organised through self-regulating markets. For him, this represented nothing less than an ontological break with much of human history. Prior to the 19th century, he insisted, the human economy had always been “embedded” in society: it was subordinated to local politics, customs, religion and social relations.

The converse (Rockefeller’s technocratic illiberal cum identity paradigm) leads only to the attenuation of social bonds; the atomisation of community; to the lack of metaphysical content and thus to an absence of existential purpose and meaning.

Illiberalism is unfulfilling. It says: You don’t count. You don’t belong. Many Europeans evidently now get it.

Which somehow takes us back to the question of how the western strata will react to the nascent mutiny against the International Order that has been accelerating across the globe – and which has now surfaced in Europe, albeit with diverse colorations and some ideological baggage.

It is not likely – for now – that the Ruling Strata will compromise. Those who dominate tend to fear existentially: Either they keep dominating, or they lose all. They see only a zero sum game. Each side’s status becomes frozen. People increasingly meet only as ‘adversaries’. Co-citizens become dangerous threats, who must be opposed.

So, consider the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Leaders in the U.S. ruling strata comprise many zealous supporters of a Zionist Israel. As the International Order starts to crack, this segment of structural power in the U.S. is likely to be uncompromising too, fearing a zero-sum outcome.

There is an Israeli narrative to the war and a ‘rest of world narrative’ – and they don’t really meet. How to arrange things? The transformative effect of seeing ‘others’ differently – Israelis and Palestinians – presently is not on the table.

That conflict has the potential to get much worse – and for longer.

Might the ‘Ruling Strata’ – desperate for a certain outcome – seek to fold (and try to conceal) the horrors of this west-Asian struggle within a wider geo-strategic war? One in which greater multitudes become displaced (thus dwarfing a regional horror)? [My Emphasis]

And so, we read Crooke including the ultimate illiberal notion floated recently to hide all the current War Crimes under the skirts of an even more gruesome global war. The Technocratic Globalist Dystopia envisioned by Neocons in the late 1960s differs very little from the agenda embraced by Hitler and his supporters in Germany, Europe, and the USA. There was great belief in the Neo-Malthusian predictions which were promoted by corporate media that were then used as tools to further divide and rule. Taking a sober look back to the start of it all as I was becoming a teenager in the late 1960s, I can see the correctness of my anti-establishmentism and now understand more completely why. And now it’s possible to see policy continuity going back even farther as it all relates to the Age of Plunder’s logic. Today, we’re at the end of that Age, which contributes to the panic of Globalists as they see no exit where they can continue to keep control. IMO, the Chinese and Russians have seen the paradigm change problem and are trying to show that there’s another path where elites can keep their wealth but lose political control over Humanity.

Now, let’s look at Escobar’s revelatory essay, “The BRICS weigh in on Palestine:”

Something of extraordinary magnitude happened in Moscow on 23 May. Bahrain's King Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa personally asked Russian President Vladimir Putin to help organize a peace conference on Palestine, at which Russia would be the first non-Arab nation invited.

Al-Khalifa and Putin had two rounds of discussions - one of them closed - during which the main focus was always Palestine. The Bahraini monarch noted that in a rare show of unity, the Arab world had finally come together in agreement to end the war in Gaza. It was implied that Russia was subsequently chosen as the most reliable mediator to end the brutal conflict. 

Bahrain – and the Arab League – recognize that the Russian position centers around what Putin had previously defined as the “UN formula”: an independent Palestinian state with its capital in East Jerusalem. 

That happens to be the position of the BRICS-10 nations and virtually the whole Global Majority. Crucially, it is also the common position of China and the Arab world, reaffirmed in Beijing only one week after the Russia-Bahrain meeting. 

The problem is how to implement the “formula” when the US hegemon, Israel's unconditional ally, has a virtual stranglehold on the United Nations. 

By 2020, as Tel Aviv was openly announcing the inevitable annexation of the West Bank, the Abraham Accords were smashing a major Arab taboo on openly supporting Israel, via the normalization agreements signed in Washington DC by Bahrain, the UAE, Morocco, and Sudan. 

Nine months ago, Palestine was virtually isolated, and destined to extinction via quiet Israeli policies to incrementally force expulsion. But never underestimate the power of a genocide committed in broad daylight, on video. Today, the Russia-China strategic partnership, BRICS, and the Global Majority have been mobilized to enshrine Palestine as a sovereign state – faithful to the recent super-majority UN General Assembly vote to accept Palestine as a UN member. 

It will be a long, winding, and thorny road that has the potential to split the world in two.

Lavrov lays it all out 

The St. Petersburg forum last week offered three crucial messages to the Global Majority, focused around BRICS. The crux of the sessions may have been geoeconomics, but a now-unavoidable message of support to Palestine crept into the sidelines. 

After a panel ostensibly debating the supply and demand of oil and gas, and which touched upon the principled role of Yemen in the Red Sea directed against the Gaza genocide, support for Palestine, amidst friendly smiles (but off the record), was emphatic from everyone - from OPEC secretary-general Haitham al-Ghais to the UAE’s Minister of Energy Suhail Mohamed al-Mazrouei. 

Same on a Russia-Oman  panel, coming from Minister of Commerce Qais bin Mohammed bin Moosa al-Yousef. 

Earlier this week, the Palestine tragedy was addressed in detail – on points 34 and 35 – in the joint statement of the BRICS 10 Ministers of Foreign Affairs, who sat at the same table for the first time in Nizhny Novgorod, preparing for the extremely important annual BRICS summit next October in Kazan, under the Russian presidency. Three very important points were made there: 

First, the Ministers “reaffirmed their rejection of any attempt aiming at forcefully displacing, expelling or transferring the Palestinian people from their land.” Second, they collectively “expressed serious concern at Israel’s continued blatant disregard of international law, the UN Charter, UN resolutions and Court orders.” And third, the ten foreign ministers: 

“Reaffirmed their support for Palestine’s full membership in the United Nations and reiterated their unwavering commitment to the vision of the two-state solution based on international law including relevant UNSC and UNGA resolutions and the Arab Peace Initiative that includes the establishment of a sovereign, independent and viable State of Palestine in line with internationally recognized borders of June 1967 with East Jerusalem as its capital living side by side in peace and security with Israel.”

This is BRICS speaking with one voice – including, crucially, representatives of major Muslim-majority states: Iran, Saudi Arabia, the UAE. and Egypt.   

Then Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, at an expanded BRICS session defined as BRICS+/BRICS Outreach, offered extra, important, context.

“We held an intra-Palestinian meeting in Moscow. We did this repeatedly. The last time it was held in late February and early March of this year, all Palestinian factions, including Hamas and Fatah, were present. For the first time, an event of this kind ended with the adoption of a joint statement in which everyone, including Hamas, expressed their readiness to unite the Palestinian ranks on the basis of the platform of the Palestine Liberation Organization. Previously, it was not possible to achieve this.”

Lavrov explained why, for Russia, it is essential to restore Palestinian unity: 

“Only a united Palestine can be a partner in negotiations aimed at achieving the maximum desired outcome. As long as the Palestinians are divided, this is unlikely to work. Now, without any Palestinians, they are beginning to think about what to do with the Gaza Strip next: either to establish some kind of protectorate of Arab countries, or to introduce some kind of peacekeeping force, or to artificially declare that these will be territories governed by the Palestinian National Authority. These are all initiatives that are imposed by external players.”

And that brings us to the kernel of the Russian position: “The most important component of our long-term policy in this area will be to support the movement for the creation of a Palestinian state in full compliance with UN resolutions.”

How to respond “symmetrically”

All of the above sums up the carefully calibrated, official Russian position. Moscow abhors Israel's non-stop, irrational escalation while ceasefire proposals are on hand galore. At the same time, it won’t take sides – either with Hamas or with Yemen's Ansarallah. It is a consensus diplomats and Russia analysts routinely express: Russia will not get into a war thousands of kilometers away when it is fighting a US/NATO existential threat right at its western border. 

After Putin’s answers in the Q&A following his address to the plenary session in St. Petersburg, debate raged on what sort of “symmetrical” responses Russia's ministry of defense would come up with to counterpunch NATO’s green light for strikes with long-range missiles inside the Russian Federation.   

West Asia, predictably, features in the favorite scenario: advanced strike weapons deployed in Syria, described as “Syrian weapons” to mirror the west's “Ukrainian weapons” subterfuge. These would supplement arms already deployed at Russia's Khmeimim and Tartus bases – covering the Eastern Mediterranean, Lebanon, Israel, and US bases in Jordan, occupied Syria and occupied Iraq - and would be operated by Russian personnel, much as US/NATO personnel operate "Ukrainian" weapons.

A BRICS thorn 

Now we come to the thorn in the BRICS flower arrangement - Saudi Arabia.

A discombobulated White House and US Deep State seem to have found a formula to wean Riyadh away from its new role as strong BRICS player: a landmark defense treaty, dubbed the Strategic Alliance Agreement, in the wings awaiting Riyadh's formalization of relations with Tel Aviv. 

The Strategic Alliance Agreement would need to get a two-thirds majority vote in the US Senate. Yet insistence on “normalization with Israel” may well kill the deal, as Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman (MbS) now has options to carefully consider, not only regarding the Gaza tragedy, but over his new BRICS alliances. 

Riyadh’s official position on Palestine is tied up with BRICS; end of the war/genocide in Gaza, and the establishment of a Palestinian state. And every grain of sand in the lands of Islam is fully aware that a Tel Aviv ruled by an ethnocentric mob of extremists won’t accept a two-state solution. 

Moreover, a Saudi-US military alliance is totally incompatible with Riyadh becoming an influential member of BRICS. Chessboard moves are instead pointing to sooner or later a possible Global Majority military alliance to counterpunch the escalating US/NATO war -  Hybrid and otherwise – against the dawning of a multinodal, polycentric, and in Putin’s terminology in St. Peterburg, “harmonic” multipolar world.   

Add to it the expiration earlier this week of the US-Saudi agreement signed 50 years ago to establish the petrodollar, essentially in exchange for US military protection. 

Already last year Riyadh made it clear the agreement would not be renewed when it clinched a deal with China based on energy trade using the petroyuan. 

So in theory we are advancing further on down the road towards the demise of the petrodollar, coupled with the expansion of the digital yuan. The Central Bank of Saudi Arabia is now a “full participant” of Project mBridge, which unites the BIS Innovation Hub, the Central Bank of Thailand, the Central Bank of the UAE, the People's Bank of China, and the Hong Kong Monetary Authority.

Essentially, mBridge is a multi-Central Bank digital currency (CBDC) platform shared among Central Banks and commercial banks, and enabling instant cross-border payments and settlement. Thailand, for instance, is buying oil from the UAE using mBridge.

There are no less than 26 mBridge observers – quite a mixed bag, including the China-led Asia Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), the European Central Bank, the IMF, and the World Bank. 

As Saudi Arabia joins mBridge, Saudi Aramco - after opening itself to foreign investors with a huge IPO - has just ceded an extra 0.64 percent of its capital, with 60 percent of the buyers American. Aramco is a humongous fountain of dividends for shareholders: this year, that will amount to a whopping $141 billion. 

Guess who are the top new investors? The Big Three – Vanguard, BlackRock, and State Street - now all wallowing in Saudi oil. 

Arabs, CENTCOM, and Israel: in bed together? 

And now for the ultimate complicating factor. 

On Monday, military officers from Bahrain, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Jordan – which includes three BRICS members and Russia-friendly Bahrain - met with Herzi Halevi, the IDF’s Chief of General Staff to discuss…defense cooperation.

The meeting was facilitated by none other than the US CENTCOM. Although as low-profile as it gets, the meeting still leaked, given the juxtaposition of the Gaza genocide alongside a meeting of top Arab leaders sitting with the Arab world's worst enemies.

A post-modern epigone of the cynics dwelling in the Agora in Ancient Greece would remark that with CENTCOM Arab “friends” like these – three of them BRICS members - Palestine does not need enemies.

Meanwhile, the tragedy persists on so many levels. As Chinese high school students all across the civilization-state show their support for Palestine after taking their university entrance exams, the US-Israel axis homogenizes terrorism, linked to the debacle of Project Ukraine, coupled with the non-stop killing of Palestinians.

Everything is being sucked into the black hole of terrorism – complete with NATO now openly re-arming the neo-Nazi Azov Battalion, and Kiev targeting civilians in Belgorod with drones and scattering mines in parks where kids play.

All the components of the Hegemon-fed Terror Foreign Legion are coming together, in lockstep with Israel, which is essentially ISIS with nuclear weapons. But for all their lofty ideals and sacred belief in the UN, the BRICS still have not come up with a solid, practical strategy to fight the horror. [My Emphasis bolded italics]

Pepe reiterates THE major dilemma: The Global Majority agrees on what must be done for Palestine and by extension for Eurasian security; but even if the UNSC path wasn’t blocked, force will need to be used to oust the illegal settlers and impose Palestine onto a Zionist polity that favors genocide and stealing all Palestine, and Russia has declared that until it solves its NATO problem it won’t/can’t be the main enforcer. However, the situation is better today than when Al-Aqsa Flood began, although that’s come at a very high cost: It appears for the first time since Nasser the Arabs and Palestinians are all on the same page, although there remain question marks as to the solidity of the solidarity.

In Putin’s Friday speech, he again called for the creation of an Eurasian security system as part of the Greater Eurasian Partnership which Lavrov further explained meant that the Euro-Atlantic security system is now dead because of the Outlaw US Empire’s attack on and subjugation of Europe via the NATO/EU mechanism. For Eurasian security to be obtained initially, both Ukraine and Palestine must be solved; the issue of NATO can wait as solving Ukraine will do much to dissolve NATO. The Global Majority understands that Ukraine is for Russia so solve, but Palestine is for the Global Majority to solve. The siege is finally making marks on the Zionist economy and the Arc of Resistance’s attrition strategy is also putting pressure on the Zionist government with Netanyahu disbanding the War Cabinet and fissures in the overall coalition deepening. Netanyahu continues to threaten an offensive against Hezbollah but the only thing happening is an escalation of Zionists losses in the region and the destruction of Zionist surveillance and detection systems. Hezbollah has also surprised the Zionists by demonstrating it has sophisticated AD systems that are well beyond manpads. And Ansarallah showed it can keep the USN rather far away with its missiles. Finally, when you look at the maps provided in the Africa Front article, you’ll see how the Sahel band terminates at the Horn of Africa and new BRICS+ member Ethiopia with Yemen on the other side of the Red Sea. Chess anyone?

So, how does the Global majority keep the Zionisisits with nukes from causing further mayhem to the world? Are they fanatical enough to strap on the baddest of all bomb vests and detonate it? Would Netanyahu rather do that than serve his prison term? And what of the other Zionisis war criminals? Would Hitler have blown himself up if he had the tools? Have the Outlaw US Empire’s Zionisists contemplated any of those questions and if so? Some have speculated that Russia’s Spetsnaz knows where the bombs are stored and would move to capture them if Russia felt they would be utilized; is that just fanciful thought or a reality? Might the Zionists finally succumb to Global Majority political pressure combined with the economic siege and the Resistance’s attrition plan to finally give up on their Genocidal Project and rejoin Humanity? And with Palestine and Ukraine solved, will the Globalists finally abandon their project so peace can reign over the planet for the first time in centuries?

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