Stephen Sefton, Internationalist 360º, April 9th 2023
https://libya360.wordpress.com/2023/04/16/a-multipolar-world-between-pride-and-shame/
We often focus more than anything else on the concrete and material aspects of political, economic and social life, giving less importance to the spiritual and affective aspects of living. However, these aspects in the lives of peoples and societies can have a decisive impact on the development of world events and international relations. Hero of Peace, comrade Brian Willson, a veteran of the U.S. war against the people of Vietnam, speaks of the emotional inability of U.S. society to face the shame of its bloody racist and imperialist history. And this comment by Brian has much to do with the progressive collapse of the power, prestige and influence of the West.
The crisis of the West is due in large part to the inability of its societies to face, accept and assimilate the shame they feel consciously or unconsciously for their centuries of crimes against humanity. This fundamental failure on the part of the United States, and by implication, Europe, prevents their societies and their leaders from confronting their own history and current affairs with humility, frankness and sincerity. It is a political-affective weakness that keeps its societies and governments locked in a highly dangerous and disastrous spiral of self-harm, addiction and fantasy that now leads them not only to attack vulnerable countries but also to attack themselves.
In relation to self-harm, the United States is characterized by its culture of violence expressed in countless incidents of killings in schools and colleges, the routine use of lethal force by law enforcement, its odious criminal justice system that forces innocent people to accept guilt because they cannot trust the legal system and are threatened with long years of incarceration. The U.S. prison system holds more than 2.3 million people, one-third of the population of Nicaragua and more than 20% of the total number of people incarcerated in the world. The U.S. prison industry is worth more than $75 billion each year.
Apart from these obvious self-destructive problems, the neoliberal capitalist system in these countries damages their societies by prioritizing the greed of large corporations and not focusing on the needs and aspirations of the people, the human being. As our Comandante Daniel has repeatedly pointed out, it is the North American and European societies that cause the evils of organized crime related to drug trafficking. And it has been demonstrated that the addiction dependence of their populations corresponds to a parallel dependence of their financial systems on illicit funds. Notoriously, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime confirmed in 2010 that the banking system processed more than $350 billion in drug trafficking funds.
Large international banks treat the fines they have been subject to for laundering illicit money as the mere cost of doing business. Illicit financial flows of hundreds of billions of dollars each year continue to be a major source of liquidity for the international banking system. These flows have their sources in various activities such as illegal markets, tax evasion, illegal business practices, corruption and the direct proceeds of criminal activity. Some estimates put the annual value of these illicit flows at more than US$1 trillion.
On the other hand, Venezuela's authorities, for example, have repeatedly found the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) to be merely another cartel in the drug trafficking industry. In Bolivia, the government of Evo Morales succeeded in reducing organized crime activity after expelling the DEA from the country. In Mexico, the DEA has been accused in several cases of colluding with one cartel or another to attack rival cartels. In Colombia two years ago, the case of DEA agent Jose Irizarry revealed a deep-rooted culture of corruption in the agency and collusion of its agents with Colombian cartels. All of this points to the profound social and moral crisis that drug trafficking provokes in the United States, as it does in European countries.
Accompanying this reality of self-destruction and addiction is the shared fantasy among North American and European societies of their moral and social superiority and the superiority of their economic, justice and health systems, their armed forces, their electoral systems, their institutions of governance and politics. Despite all the destruction their countries have inflicted on the world for centuries and the constant aggressions they continue to promote, the elites who run the United States and its allied countries insist that they promote justice, democracy and freedom. They represent the classic profile of narcissistic people. They deny the harm they have done, or if they cannot deny it they minimize it, and they seek at all costs to avoid blame for what they have done by shifting the blame to their victims. We see this everywhere in the world, from Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela, to Palestine, Syria and Iran, to Ukraine, Korea and Taiwan.
In contrast, the leading countries of the majority world such as China and Russia and their allies like Cuba, Iran and Syria, Nicaragua and Venezuela strengthen their influence and world prestige becuse they have been able to face that history and overcome it with the pride of being free, sovereign and independent. While the corporate elites that govern the countries of North America and Europe plunge their populations into greater insecurity, poverty and economic repression, the governments committed to a multipolar world defend their peoples, reduce poverty and guarantee their security. So the contrast could not be greater between the true commitment to justice, democracy and peace promoted by China, Russia and their allies and the false democracy, and economic and military aggression of the United States and its accomplices against the peoples of the majority world.
The political-affective element has become an important aspect of the developing reality in the historical moments we live in. The United States and its allies continue to project onto the rest of the world the shame they do their best to erase, deny, minimize and evade, the product of their history of many centuries of crimes against humanity, but it no longer works. Their narcissism clashes both with the pride and firmness of independent and sovereign peoples, and with the reality of their own self-destruction. Their economic system is not sustainable. Their political system is a sinister farce. Their justice system is a cruel jest. Their own self-image is completely false.
President Vladimir Putin commented in October last year, “The unipolar world is leaving. We are facing a historic milestone. The most dangerous, unpredictable and at the same time important decade since the end of World War II is coming. The West is incapable of ruling humanity on its own, but it is trying desperately to do so. And most of the world’s peoples are no longer willing to put up with it. This is the main contradiction of the new era.”
And two years ago our Comandante Daniel commented, “Don’t think that the Empire only sets out to dominate us here in Nicaragua and throw all kinds of lies, slander, infamy at us, they also do it with the Russian Federation, which is a great Power, and they do it with the People’s Republic of China, which is another enormous Power, and they do it even with their European allies…. Yes! …They are accustomed to not respecting Sovereignty, but they will have to learn to respect Sovereignty, because the decision of the Peoples is to defend Peace, and to defend Peace in the World, which is so lacking, it is fundamental that we respect the Sovereignty of all the Peoples, of all the Nations, where each People and each Nation will know how to administer their own house, will know how to develop Programs to combat Poverty, Extreme Poverty, as we have been doing here in Nicaragua.”
Translation by Internationalist 360°