How to defeat the 'Collective West'? Take a look at the pie representing the money spent on the military worldwide, and you'll find Russia squeezed in between France and the UK, with a modest three percent of GDP flowing to the military budget in 2021. The country is a midget in those terms. China recently pumped up the volume, but it is still nowhere near the gargantuan amount spent on military matters by the 'Collective West' and their client states around the world.
Yet we know from past experience that money doesn't buy victories. 'Davids' defeating 'Goliaths' do exist, although 'Davids' rarely emerge as posting a decisive victory. 'Goliath' may withdraw, but he is not dead and buried. The only fairly recent example of such a victory would be the defeat of the Soviet Union in Afghanistan in the eighties, leading to the implosion of that challenger to the 'Collective West', even though Saudi money and American weapons played a decisive role.
The Soviet Union unravelled, and 'observers' around the world heralded the 'End of History', with 'Capitalism' prevailing as the only 'system' capable of keeping the people fed and happy, thus securing the peace. Interestingly those 'observers' ignored 'Communist China', because it had already been absorbed as a 'Market Oriented' powerhouse, lightyears away from the teachings of Marx and traumatised by a Trotskist 'Cultural Revolution' imposed on it by the ruling party, with Mao's wife as the most sadistic among the leading revolutionaries.
On these pages, and on my Dutch language blog, I pointed out that we missed the opportunity to complete Adam Smith's dream, as the 'Collective West' reverted to feudalism, promoting a tiny elite to rule our world through the 'money press', suffocating the entire world in debt, which was the opposite of what Smith envisioned. We lost it. We defeated ourselves, without outside help. We sold the business to the bankers and associated predators who were unable to supervise production, or logistic processes, and with no useful skills to produce anything of value. The only industry kept alive was devoted to the production of weapon systems for our wars, as we 'outsourced' the rest. Even as we increased the money spent on weapons and wars, we were not paying attention to developments elsewhere. NATO and the EU transformed into organisations which needed enemies to 'grow' the need for more money and more weapons.
The money wasn't spent on weapons and shooting wars exclusively. We 'earned' money through taxing the productive countries, and imposing various 'rent seeking' constructions on them, and we 'impressed' them, or so we thought, by developing our 'Culture of Leisure'. Movies, music, shows, and 'human sciences' which went from being 'interesting', to becoming 'total berserk' in twenty to thirty years. The 'Culture Wars' provided a pretext to start shooting wars, while the 'Collective West' plundered entire countries, taking their natural resources while claiming to 'protect' them. It was a self-defeating proposition from the 'Get Go'. Increasingly so as we needed 'Proxies' to fight our wars, since our expertise was in producing Bullshit, organising Songfestivals, Gay-Pride parades, the 'Oscars', soccer- and MMA-competitions, generating piles of exotic 'Safe Space' experiments, and throwing money after overtly losing propositions, including the provision of drugs to addicts and offering 'therapy' to people with a wide range of anxieties. 'He looked at me in this 'funny' way!' Quick! Bring in the subsidised therapist! Role out the Red Carpet for yet another victim!
This contribution serves as a (necessary) introduction for 'Part II', in which I will focus on the 'meaning' of the 'Minsk Accords' against this backdrop.