The 'golden billion': Putin's populist manifesto against globalism
The Russians are reviving Cold War rhetoric as we all ramp up for World War III
Those normies must be getting sore legs by now with all that standing for Ukraine.
They’re paying higher prices for Ukraine. They’re finding fewer and fewer goods in the shops for Ukraine. Pretty soon, they or their kids will be fighting for Ukraine. Will they then be ready to lie down and burn in their beds for Ukraine?
The Americans have announced they are sending long-range HIMARS rocket systems to the Ukrainians. That’s on top of the US$50 billion already poured into the conflict, and despite which the Ukrainians are losing on every front by any metric.
The HIMARS systems being sent to Ukraine, made possible for use by NATO intelligence and reconnaissance support for targeting, won’t turn the tide of the conflict. What they will do, however, is hit Russian targets on newly conquered Russian territory.
That’s a provocation intended to draw the Russians into a greater conflict against NATO in Europe. Russian strategic nuclear doctrine states that nuclear action is possible if Russian soil is targeted.
Step by step we’re getting closer to the unthinkable, all thanks to the inability of the Western elite to accept that their debt-based economic system has run its course and the ‘unipolar moment’ of the post-Cold War period has come to an end.
They’ve got bunkers and they don’t care that we don’t. Better to let Russia and China nuke us proles anyway before we realise the wealth we all thought we had was just a bunch of IOUs and we party like a mob of Sri Lankans on their yachts.
The Russians are well aware of all this context, and it is interesting to see the extent to which Putin’s rhetoric to the Russian people lines up with populist thinking in the West.
Putin on Wednesday gave a speech to the Strong Ideas for a New Time Forum, run by a think tank in Moscow called the Agency for Strategic Initiatives. They support and promote the 2030 development goals Russia has, which interestingly have nothing to do with owning nothing and being happy, eating bugs, getting jabbed to get paid or celebrating transvestite-led child literacy initiatives.
Putin’s speech was centred on a phrase and concept that Westerners should note. That phrase is the ‘golden billion’; a term made popular by a book published in 1990 as the Soviet Union collapsed. The book, ‘The Plot of World Government: Russia and the Golden Billion’, outlined a conspiracy by the financial elite in New York and London to trigger a world crisis that would bring the resources of all the world, and particularly those of Russia, under their direct control alongside mass depopulation.
Sounds a bit like a Great Reset, don’t you think?
The golden billion refers to us, the people of the Western liberal democratic sphere who have benefited most from international capitalism for so long. Although the Russians see the Western elite as the problem, we’re the ones they’re going to have to fight to defend themselves against it. Or at least, the normies ‘standing with Ukraine’ are.
From Putin’s address:
The model of total domination by the so-called golden billion is unfair. Why should this golden billion, which is only part of the global population, dominate everyone else and enforce its rules of conduct that are based on the illusion of exceptionalism? It divides the world into first and second-class people and is therefore essentially racist and neo-colonial. The underlying globalist and pseudo-liberal ideology is becoming increasingly more like totalitarianism and is restraining creative endeavour and free historical creation.
There are several clever elements to this angle. Putin is clearly calling out the doctrine of American exceptionalism, which underpins the liberal world order. He’s critiquing it from an angle that has a long history in the Sino-Soviet world. We’re so used to hearing mentally ill Marxists in the media and academia call white Westerners racist that we’ve forgotten it was always a communist criticism of the West. Cultural Marxist intellectuals in the West spread the meme here because they were reading the same books as the apparatchiks in Moscow and Beijing.
One gets the impression that the West is simply unable to offer the world a model for the future of its own. Indeed, it was no accident that the golden billion attained its gold and achieved quite a lot, but it got there not because it implemented certain concepts. It mainly got to where it is by robbing other peoples in Asia and Africa. That is how it was. India was robbed for an extensive period of time. This is why the elite of the golden billion are terrified of other global development centres potentially coming up with their own development alternatives.
This guy sounds like my old professors at uni. He’s drawing on well-worn postcolonial narratives here. Ho Chi Minh and Pol Pot would be proud of you, comrade Putin!
No matter how much the West and the supranational elite strive to preserve the existing order, a new era and a new stage in world history are coming. Only genuinely sovereign states are in a position to ensure a high growth dynamic and become a role model for others in terms of standards of living and quality of life, the protection of traditional values and high humanistic ideals, and development models where an individual is not a means, but the ultimate goal.
The Russians know the Western debt model of economic growth has come to an end. They know that the Euro-American deep state is struggling to replace the weaponry already sent to Ukraine, let alone gear up for an imminent conflict with both Russia and China simultaneously.
The US military-industrial complex for decades has prioritised flashy and outdated weapons production for domestic political purposes without a realistic appraisal of what World War III will require. Our manufacturing was offshored decades ago thanks to Henry Kissinger and Bill Clinton’s neoliberal economic policies. Our strength was squandered in the sands of the Middle East thanks to the delusional foreign policy of the neoconservatives after 9/11.
The West is weak, divided, corrupt and demoralised. Russia and China know it. Other power blocs around the world are also sensing it. Our ideologically-possessed ruling elite think they can just call Putin Hitler and 1945 will magically repeat.
They should have learnt more facts and less ideology at school. The US defeated Japan in the Pacific, along with our help. They did not defeat Germany in Europe, however.
The Russians won that war.