The End of US and EU Hegemony and Hubris?
After the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989, the ensuing self-liberation of Stalin’s Eastern Europe and the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the United States of America came to dominate the world. US-led Capitalism, the ‘democratic freedom’ to be rich or poor, had triumphed over ‘the evil empire’. ‘The end of history’ had arrived and Mr Bush’s ‘new world order’, that is, the imperial diktat of the USA, was to be enforced globally.
So thought triumphalist Western imperialists, especially after the first victorious war to free Kuwait from Iraq. However, pride always goes before the fall and the fall always comes after pride. Within a few years of 1991, US hegemony was challenged by Islam. On the feast of the Beheading of St John the Baptist came the murderous attacks of the CIA-trained Bin Laden. And later, on the feast of the Nativity of St John the Baptist, would come a murderous attack in London on President Bush’s most loyal ally, Mr Blair.
The USA decided to attack the CIA-installed Saddam Hussein and capture oil-rich Iraq. Then came further irony. The USA and some of its NATO allies tried through a puppet government to control Afghanistan, where in the nineteenth century the British Empire and in the twentieth century the Soviet Empire had already been defeated. Ignoring these clear warnings, so the leaderships of the USA and its allies fell of their own free will into the traps of the disastrous invasions and lost wars of Afghanistan and Iraq, its new Vietnams. (What are ‘North Atlantic’ forces doing on the borders of the Himalayas?). Thus Baghdad, which means ‘God-given’, became the scene of the fall of Babylon once more.
These hopeless wars have cost the US over 4,000 American lives and, so say the experts, three trillion dollars. Now the heavily-indebted US economy is collapsing into recession, sustained only by huge amounts of Chinese money. EU economies, dominated by irresponsibly greedy banking corporations, are falling together with the US. The final curtain on US (and EU) hubris and its hegemonistic illusion of a unipolar world is now perhaps being lowered. The fall of this ‘new world order’ is taking place in Georgia, whose pipelines, on which the EU is partially dependent, are coveted by the US.
With the same hubris as Washington, the pro-NATO puppet government of the US-educated and orchestrated President of Georgia foolishly dared to invade South Ossetia. All this has been carried out by this Georgian warlord, with his very dubious human rights record and who is much disliked by his own people, so that his country could become a member of NATO. His forces, as reported even by the heavily-biased Western media, killed over 1,600 citizens with Russian passports. Little wonder that there have been calls for the Georgian leader to be tried for war crimes. The inevitable has happened. After making abundantly clear what would happen in the Caucasus if the US, aided by its puppet, the EU, invaded and took over the Kosovo and Metochia regions of southern Serbia, Russia has reacted. It has now used the provocation of allowing a part of the sovereign State of Serbia to declare independence and that of the Georgian invasion to retaliate against the American puppet in Tiflis. A Russian takeover is under way.
The US administration has been led into decline for eight years by the disastrously unpopular George Bush. His mandate, moreover, was only ever dubious, unlike that of the youthful and democratically-elected Russian Presidents Putin and now Medvedev. Sadly, the puppet President Bush and his neocon string-pullers have yet to understand that the twentieth century is over. Just as the eighteenth century was that of Imperial France, the nineteenth century that of Imperial Great Britain and the twentieth century that of the Imperial United States, so the twenty-first century belongs to others. Every Empire has its day, but it is no more than a day. Yesterday, Great Britain, today the USA, but tomorrow, the Lord knows. We fully expect resurgent Russia to oust the US puppets who have in the last fifteen years attempted to take over countries which have been in the Russian sphere of influence for centuries.
Georgia is only one country where nationalistic sentiments have been manipulated by the US administration with its twin propaganda myths of ‘democracy’ and ‘prosperity’. For democracy only means the freedom to choose between two products of the same political mafia, and prosperity only means the possibility of enslaving oneself to Mammon. After the warning given to Georgia, we expect the Ukraine, with its remote-controlled Russophobe President and his American spouse, to be the next to be liberated by Russian forces. Certainly for seven-eighths of the Ukraine and Carpatho-Russia (‘Transcarpathia’ as Ukrainian chauvinism calls it) a Russian takeover would indeed be liberation. Carpatho-Russia’s spiritual leader, Fr Dimitry Sidor, arrested, interrogated and harrassed by the Ukarinian secret police, would be freed. Only the heavily-Polonised far west Ukraine around Lvov would resent a Russian takeover. Perhaps that small area of Galicia, confiscated by Stalin in 1945, should be returned to Poland. In that case the Ukrainian problem would largely be solved at a stroke.
After this, we might also see Russian solutions to the problems of ex-Yugoslavia, which have most certainly not been provided by US and EU meddling. What has been triggered by the hypocritically American-organised provocation in South Ossetia is only a beginning. In an Eastern Europe saddled by borders fixed in the aftermaths of 1918 and 1945, we have already seen the disappearance of Czechoslovakia and the first round in the disappearance of ex-Yugoslavia. The borders fixed by the disastrous Treaty of Versailles in 1919 and those fixed in 1945 mean that irredentist minorities can be found all over Europe, East and West.
Even the break-up of the utterly artificial Belgium, a failed nineteenth-century invention of the Treaty of London, seems ever more likely: it is now considering separating into its component parts of Holland (Flanders) and France (Wallonia). And what of absurd borders in Western Europe, where a small area of Austria was long ago occupied by Italy and areas of Germany taken over by Belgium and France? Then there is Spain, where Basques, Catalans and Galicians want independence or at least a full federal constitution. Italians might well follow. That would surely also trigger further regionalisation in centralist France.
As for the absurd ‘United Kingdom’, a compromise-invention in the aftermath of the First World War, it is time that its component peoples were finally allowed self-determination and freedom. At last, long-suffering Ireland will be united and Wales, Scotland and England freed from the machinations of the foreign Establishment elite which has controlled them for centuries. As regards most of Western and Central Europe and parts of Eastern Europe, we would also expect great changes to the absurdly-named ‘European Union’, another elitist Tower of Babel, which its Brussels headquarters resembles. The EU has been rejected time and time again by its peoples, whenever, rarely, they have actually been allowed to express themselves freely. For the moment only Denmark, Ireland, France, Holland have been allowed to say an unrecognised No.
August 1914 marked the end of Europe as a world power. Twenty-five years and a month later, September 1939 marked the beginning of the Second European suicide, become truly worldwide. Twenty-five years and a month later, October 1964 marked the first large-scale US involvement in Vietnam and an onslaught on the remaining spiritual and moral values of the Western world. Twenty-five years and a month later, November 1989 marked the fall of the Berlin Wall. Its consequences are still being played out on the world scene today. If the generational sequence continues, twenty-five years and a month from November 1989, December 2014 will mark further changes, perhaps connected with the reshaping of Europe, as outlined above. The first present events in Georgia must be seen in the light of greater forthcoming geopolitical movements.
Many are disturbed by the fact that two ‘Orthodox countries’, Russia and Georgia, are at war. Both their spiritual leaders, the Patriarch of Moscow and the Catholicos of Georgia, have called for peace and negotiations, ‘jaw not war’. But they are unlikely to be heeded by war-mongering Washington. Symbolically, one town reportedly visited yesterday by Russian troops is that of Gori, the birthplace of the Hitler of the Caucasus, Stalin. Indeed, until a few days ago his statue still stood on the main square of the town. Perhaps this war will at last exorcise the demons released by this evil monster, born in Gori in 1879 and dead these fifty-five years. For his ghost still haunts some Georgian politicians as well as the war-mongers of the West. Stalin is dead, but his spirit has not yet everywhere gone down to hell.
We are all disturbed by the events now taking place in the Caucasus. But those who have Faith are not fatalists. We know that although man proposes, God disposes. Everything remains possible, if only we pray for all the innocent victims, past, present and future, Ossetian, Georgian and Russian, of the political intriguers and powerbrokers of this world.
Fr Andrew
29 July/11 August 2008
St Eustathius of Mtskhet in Georgia
