WE LIVE IN A DANGEROUS PLACE AND TIME – PART ONE, by Scipio

Everyone lives in their own history, but not everyone lives in historical times. Historical times are recorded as remembrances of significant events in the past. We are living in historical times; except they haven’t passed. If trouble is not knocking on your front door, or in your neighborhood, or down your street, it will be soon. The once vaunted and respected America is quickly becoming an object of derision and disdain around the world, and bewilderment by Americans at home.

The West in general and America in particular have become drunk in its unchecked powers since the collapse of the Soviet Union around 1990. The US thinks it can continue to steam roll over the rest of the world with its self-made “Rules Based Order” which tramples on long standing International Law. The old Soviet “Evil Empire” has been replaced with the new American “Empire of Lies”.

THE WEST IS BEYOND DECLINE, IT IS IN THE EARLY STAGES OF COLLAPSE

The West is beyond decline, it is in the early stages of collapse.  The rest of the world smells blood in the water, and is turning away from the United States. New agreements and alliances are being made in Tehran, Beijing, Moscow, Budapest, Minsk, Dubai, Riyad, Khartoum, Caracas, Pretoria, Brasilia, Islamabad, Damascus, New Delhi, the Houtis in Yemen and most of the Global South, all bypassing the US.

When Ukraine’s Zelensky first entertained the idea of a cease fire a month ago, he first turned to China, not America. When Saudi Arabia sought reconciliation with Iran, it turned to China. The Arab League welcomed Syria back into their house against the protests of America. These nations and other alliances are reshaping the world order we have lived in for the last eighty years.

China, for example, has offered 23 interest free loans to 17 African countries. The US offers IMF suffocating debt loans meanwhile.  China’s vision has been global, America’s has been provincial. It’s more like the little Dutch boy with his fingers plugging holes in leaking dikes and spending his energy on a failing structure.

THEY HAVE NOT FORGOTTEN

Regardless of what you think of these countries, their religion, and their culture, they are lining up in opposition to the declining American Empire. They saw Iraq and Afghanistan and are now watching Ukraine noting the US may no longer be able to militarily protect them.  In addition, many in the Middle East; Iraq, Libya, Syria, Afghanistan, etc. who have seen their countries destroyed and families killed as the result of military “collateral damage”, want their day of payback.  Americans say, “Never Forget” 911, and rightly so.  Well, these people can multiply that sentiment on their part by one thousand times because of their dead husbands, wives, children, parents, relatives and friends and destruction of their way of life. They have not forgotten. They don’t think targeting families with death from above as being “righteous”, Gen. Milley.  They see an American Marine who questioned those responsible for it go to jail. They haven’t seen anyone responsible for it go punished. It is as a moral standard they do not want to live by.

THE IMMIGRATION CRISIS IN EUROPE

The entire immigration crisis in Europe is the result of America’s wars of imperialism in the Middle East and North Africa.  If Americans think they will get a fair hearing with these people in the newly forming multipolar world that is shaping up, they are delusional. The world is rapidly changing and, unfortunately, not in America’s favor.

COOPERATION vs COERCION

The new geo-political world order forming today is based on areas of cooperation rather than the current system of threats, coercion, financial blackmail, and violence of the American led collective West.  The muscle behind the West’s threats is the projected power of the American Navy with its eleven aircraft carriers. As a reminder, those carriers can be sunk by eleven Russian Kh-47M2 Kinzhal hypersonic missiles. It was Kinzhal missiles that took out a Patriot Battery in the Kiev. The Patriot Battery fired all its 32 missiles in two minutes, $150 million dollars’ worth, and could not stop the Kinzhals.  America’s risks are demonstratively no longer theoretical.

EXTRACTION AND IMPOVERISHMENT

Neither are any of these country’s economic systems patterned after the West’s current system of resource extraction resulting in the impoverishment of the locals all the while lining the pockets of the world’s ruling one percent.  (Notice how that same strategy was applied domestically during COVID retractions resulting in the 1% getting richer the rest of the nation getting poorer?).

In the meantime, America’s numerous internal cancers such as; greed, narcissism, arrogance, ethnocentrism, “exceptionalism”, wokeness, cancel culture, stakeholder capitalism, institutional corruption, DEI, and left and right paradigms rots the West from the inside. The putridity of the situation can no longer be ignored or swept under the rug.  The stench is smelled around the world.