Køvíd - 1204-2020 (2)
English translation - Ayant traduit en anglais quelques chapitres de mon livre Køvíd, je les soumets ici à l'attention du lecteur anglophone
Spoiler: A brief history of the end of the West
"Let us consider history in its outward form: it serves to trace the events that have marked the course of centuries and dynasties (...); it teaches us about the revolutions undergone by all created beings. It offers a vast field in which we can see empires completing their careers; it shows us how all the various peoples have filled the earth until the hour of departure was announced to them, and the time to leave existence had arrived for them".
Ibn Khaldun, Muqaddima, Introduction
"All this terror is not serious. It's the terror of a world that's finished, but doesn't want to finish. It's an empty will to last. It is at the mercy of a burst of laughter that would end up spreading too contagiously (...) The terror it creates is the terror it feels.
Manifeste conspirationniste, Seuil, January 2022, p. 16
The basic facts of the problem are well known – as they will perhaps be recapitulated by the historians of the year 2050, assuming that the ultimately very Western genre of causal historiography survives us.
Since its post-Neolithic emergence, the Chinese Empire has dominated the world – first in isolation, simply by virtue of orders of magnitude, and then – particularly since its connection to the "ancient world" via the Sassanid Empire – interdependently, as part of a pre-Western Eurasian globalisation.
It was at this point – after the fall of the Sassanids and the beginnings of Islamic decadence – that the West emerged. At first, in the Middle Ages, its peripheral originality (as compared with all other cultural systems worldwide) was characterised by a relaxation of the Khaldunian rules that governed the emergence and functioning of empires: universal taxation, mercenary armies, total centralisation of power (one empire = one capital). With its small, deep-rooted, tax-exempt aristocracy and free cities, the medieval West stood out. This exception to Khaldunian rules also provides an explanation for its national fragmentation.
Then, between the 15th and 18th centuries, the West "made up for lost time" by retroimporting the imperial model via "absolutist monarchies". It is an irony of cultural history that this de facto orientalisation of the Western model took place under the guise of an ideology of reclaiming the heritage of a fantasised Antiquity, which included recycling the Greek discourse on Eastern barbarism.
Nevertheless, instead of becoming stable again by "turning back to the East", the system proved to be as dynamically fragile, crumbling under the weight of its inherent contradictions: between the authoritarianism of the Classical age and the "republican" legacy of the pseudo-antique revived by the Renaissance, but also and above all between this de facto reorientation and the medieval legacy of freedoms.
As a consequence of the resulting instability, the West, while beginning to dominate the world through colonisation, gave birth to the modern democratic regime, centred on the figure of the citizen/producer/soldier, which has endured since the great mobilisation under the French Revolution until the last conscription systems were abolished in the 1990s.
In the meantime, this democratic system, which the West abandoned in the second half of the twentieth centurye , became predominant in most of the post-tribal world outside the West – in various late and mutant forms inspired by the (fundamentally Western) totalitarian experiences of the 20th century, and adapted to the specificities of local cultures.
During the long century in which the West had a monopoly on the democratic model, it brought to its knees all the Khaldunian empires that had survived into modern times, starting with China, which was humiliated and partially occupied during the 19th century. The last two empires standing (the Ottoman and the Russian) were characterised by late attempts at Westernising aggiornamento, and collapsed in the run-up to and during the First World War. But this “last of all wars”[1], by giving birth to European pacifism, also sealed the death sentence of the paradoxical Western empire – an exception to all Khaldunian rules: never unified, it virtually never drew from its tribal margins the new blood needed for the renewal of the warrior elites, preferring to combine two social functions (war and production) that the Age of empires had kept rigorously separated in all post-tribal societies. In the mutant neo-tribalism of Western societies, the Nation (neo-tribe) resists imperial reflexes through a kind of as'abiya2.0: an as'abiya2 turned abstract, with little or no underlying blood ties. And this is what made possible the emergence of pacifist individualism and class analysis.
At the end of the Cold War, having reached the end of the process of self-digestion of the nation-state[2] , the West had become utterly schizophrenic, combining a de facto political structure based on existing nation-states[3] with an ideology called Globalism: reaching its supreme stage, economic progressivism decided to pretend that this de facto structure did not exist. In reality, it is above all a mental secession from reality: secession of the elites, to whom cosmopolitanism (freedom to travel, etc.) gives the impression of being "citizens of the world", but also secession of the masses, spoiled by states created by national solidarity – but those very states, by spoiling them, made the masses forget whom they owe their material well-being to. Detached from History, said material well-being is now considered, on the one hand, (under the name of happiness) as the very object of their earthly existence, and, on the other hand, (under the name of social justice) as a divine right.
Meanwhile, post-Mao China has given birth to a new type of society. Economically open enough to attract "investment" (i.e. industrial desertion) by culturally suicidal Westerners, it relies on national solidarity, organised by a Leninist one-party state which – notably by controlling the currency – protects Chinese society from suffering external predation and, increasingly, enables it to exercise external predation.
Without prejudging subsequent structural developments in the world-system, from the 1990s onwards, it should have been easy to foresee a transitio imperiorum marked by Europe’s return to the peripheral condition that constitutes its major trend in post-Neolithic history, and China’s return to its usual centrality.
In February 2020, following the "health disaster" staged in the streets of Wuhan, the Chinese government, in a brilliant replay of the Rothschilds’ Waterloo coup, inflicted a two-trillion-dollar devaluation on the shares of the partly Western-owned companies operating on its soil, and immediately bought out a large part of China’s industrial apparatus, at a two-trillion-dollar discount.
Of course, as soon as these companies were set up (subject – let’s not forget it – to the condition of Chinese participation), it was clear that "what happens in China will stay in China". And, in the worst case scenario, the Chinese Communist Party could also have used the instrument of expropriation, which it had at its disposal – the use of the latter, however, would have "made a mess", on the one hand by blurring the turbo-capitalist / alter-liberal image said CCP has been striving to give itself since Comrade Deng, and on the other hand, by humiliating the West, which would then have been "supposed" to come and defend its sacrosanct private property[4] at gunpoint[5]. From this point of view too, "the virus" has saved a lot of smart people a lot trouble.
This event – an eerily inconspicuous one, given its size – is merely the acceleration of a process of reorientation of the world economy[6] that started long before the "Covid crisis". By the time of the launching of the psy-op, Chinese diplomacy[7] had already been taking place for years under Xi’s banner of One Belt One Road. In the usual understanding of this policy, the West has once more fallen for China's duplicity: far too used to consider itself the centre of a world of which, a thousand years ago, we were still an obscure periphery, we have assumed that the main purpose of the New Silk Roads was to reach us, in order to bring even more Asian goods to our Western paradise of idle consumers.
Such view of things is, in my opinion, deeply mistaken. Beside securing access to its new African colonies, China actually wants above all to provide its own Central Asian Hinterland with transport infrastructure – i.e. connect its industrial mainland of Eastern China with Western China and the 'Stans' (Central Asian Countries in the process of being economically annexed by China).
The misunderstanding could hardly be bigger. While the West kept reasoning in a Euro-centric way, at the beginning of the 21st century, no less than two thousand years earlier, the existence of silk roads between China and Europe still betrays (or rather: once again betrays) China's centrality in the World-system.
Of course, in a spirit of empiricist opportunism totally in keeping with the managerial attitude fashionable in Davos, One Belt One Road can certainly help bypass Thalassocratic maritime blockades.[8] But the short-term success of such international aspects of the project is certainly not Beijing's number one concern. The main concern is to prepare China for the reorientation – already underway – of its production apparatus towards the domestic market. Many of the goods loaded in Guangzhou on transcontinental high-speed trains might actually be unloaded before they reach the Kazakh border, and many will most certainly be unloaded before they reach Europe – a continent where, after currency readjustment, the population of eligible consumers will not necessarily be much bigger than in Indochina or the 'Stans'...
What do I mean by "monetary readjustment"? Let's briefly explain this concept.[9]