Does Russia offer a way forward?
Emanuel Pastreich
Does Russia offer a way forward?
Response to President Putin’s St. Petersburg’s speech
June 22, 2022
When Russia’s President Vladimir Putin delivered a speech at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum a few days ago, he gave a response to the push by corrupt and militaristic elements in the United States, and in the NATO countries, and elsewhere, to tear Russia apart, and Ukraine, and to them sell off to the highest bidder.
President Putin made it clear that history is back and that speeches of profound import, rather than the homogenized mush ground out by public relations firms, are possible again.
President Putin also identified, correctly, the scale of the current danger, the threat of world war, and he spoke bluntly, honestly, about the hypocrisy of the sanctions against Russia and the bans on Russians being forced upon the nations of the world. The bans on Russian athletes and artists, Russian music and food, and even on Russian cats, are best described as fascistic.
Many, around the world and in the United States, took heart, found inspiration, in President Putin’s speech, and they passed it around to friends and family. Here was the leader of a major nation standing up to the authoritarian corporate state that has seized control of the United States, and of most of the countries around. Here was a leader speaking confidently and decisively.
No other country has stood up to the United States in this manner, as the decaying angel lurches, possessed by demons, towards the gates of World War. No other country has been able to withstand such sanctions and still play a major role in the global economy.
Sadly, few Americans heard the speech, because only tiny parts of it were reported in the media. Moreover, the majority of citizens have had their minds ravished by banal movies and games on their smartphones, their souls degraded by the constant repetition of corporate advertising, seen and unseen. They did not even know about this historic speech.
We should give President Putin the benefit of a doubt. The fact that he came to power with the support of billionaires and that he engaged in corrupt Russian politics in order to consolidate his power is not important for us at this moment. Just as President John F. Kennedy was able to move beyond the corrupt politics that brought him to power, so also we hope President Putin will find the necessary courage.
But the speech had flaws in it that raise doubts as to whether President Putin, or Russia, offer an alternative to the cancer that has metastasized across the United States, across the “West.”
Or whether we are looking at a battle between the titans, between the elites who stand on piles of loot in each great power, and who battle for personal advantage using the lives of their citizens.
Although it has been over one hundred years, there is still value in reviewing the process that led up to the First World War.
At that time, Germany, or more precisely the elites of German business and politics, was deeply frustrated that France and England had contrived to limit its potential to expand, to develop its own colonial system, and to play the role in global governance appropriate to a country of its size and wealth, its strengths in mechanical and chemical engineering.
Germany’s discontent in 1913 was justified, but Germany itself was just as much a rapacious empire as were France and England. Germany was driven by the same logic of constant expansion, overproduction and its intellectuals were seized by dreams of global domination that led Germany towards militarism, and eventually towards war.
I am not saying that Russia’s position today is the same as Germany’s was then.
It is clear that Russia has been treated unfairly according the conventions of diplomacy and also according to international law. It is clear that the strategy on the part of the United States, my country, which I represent, was to lure Russia, to force Russia, to intervene in the Ukraine.
Similar efforts are underway, today, at this moment, to force Russia to intervene in Lithuania as a response to Lithuania’s sanctions on the Russian port of Kaliningrad.
Take on the real enemies of humanity!
As much as I want to find inspiration in what President Putin said, as much as I hope that there will be a leader in the midst of the growing chaos, the gathering dusk, I choked over every third sentence in President Putin’s speech.
To start with, President Putin began his speech with the notorious COVID-19 pandemic. Although President Putin has expressed publicly skepticism about the COVID-19 vaccines — and he deserves credit for that — he has not taken a public stand against this massive fraud that gave a shot in the arm to multinational corporations. Russia, under his guidance, has not rejected this agenda.
Of course, you might say that President Putin had no choice, that he had to go along with this massive crime if he wanted to stay president, if he wanted to stay alive.
You might say that he has to work with the World Economic Forum, to shake hands with war criminals like Klaus Schaub, and to speak at Davos because he is president of Russia.
That may seem true from his perspective, but we do not accept that assumption.
The mass murder of COVID-19 has been so enormous, so unconscionable, that everyone must take a stand, whatever the risk involved, whatever the position he or she may hold. That includes the president of the Russian Federation.
I could have been paid well, and treated well, if I had gone along with this fraud. But I refused. We refused.
President Putin should have been clear from the start. He should have condemned this atrocity two years ago.
President Putin assumes that global institutions are legitimate, hinting only that they have broken down because of the actions of the United States, and “the West.”
He describes a fairy tale. The World Bank, the United Nations, and institutions like the World Health Organization were limited from the start because of flaws in the approach to global governance in the 1950s, and they have been taken over completely by billionaires and private equity players over the last five years. They would be better referred to as criminal syndicates.
We cannot go along with fantasies and fairy tales any longer. President Putin, please tell your people the truth.
President Putin gave a full-throated commitment to global trade regimes, to consumption-based economic policies, and to the cult of growth.
His speech takes at face value the debased pseudoscience of economics as practiced by the butchers at the International Monetary Fund, Stanford Business School, and Goldman Sachs.
Any economic system demanding that growth, consumption, and profits define success, one that does not address overproduction, pollution, or the concentration of wealth, is a fraud.
I listened anxiously for President Putin to condemn the cult of growth, but those words never came.
No, the solution is not going back to some rules-based trade and investment system of ten years ago. That flawed system is precisely what has impoverished us, what has made war such a profitable business and led to the ruthless economic exploitation we see all around us.
Yes, the United States is out of control. But the entire world is also out of control. It is a collapse of civilization and Russia is most certainly not exempt.
Call to Action
I invite President Putin to join me in opposing the rule of global finance, in defending an equitable society in which the rich have no say in economic policy for the common man.
President Putin mentions the current food crisis, but lacked the bravery that this age demands. He assumes that the West has created a food crisis for the world by sanctioning Russia, and by mining the ports of the Ukraine.
This point is 100% true. But the citizens of the Earth need to be self-sufficient agriculturally, to be assured of food security. Dependence on imported grain, on food imports, is a threat to citizens sponsored by multinational banks in search of profit.
Please, President Putin, throw you support behind organic farming and end this ruthless push for dependency on imported food.
And then there is the question of Russia’s gas and petroleum exports. The problem is similar.
I say, leave the gas in the ground!
Reliance on exports of petroleum and natural gas damage the Russian economy in that they concentrate wealth in the hands of the few, reduce the vitality of the local economies, and encourage a dependency on energy sources that are damaging to the environment.
Russia, the Ukraine, and other nations need healthy local manufacturing that meets the real needs of the people, not artificial needs created by advertisers. If we get back to an economy based on morality and frugality, we will find this energy crisis far easier to solve.
President Putin did not have much to say about the radical alteration of our climate, of our environment, brought about by emissions from the burning of petroleum, coal, and the production of natural gas.
These days, the scientific community’s decision to back the COVID-19 fraud has done so much damage that most anything that scientists say is assumed to dishonest.
Moreover, so many of the scientists involved in climate policy have sold their souls to corporations in return for juicy budgets and they readily endorse useless carbon trading, carbon credit systems intended to enslave the population, and they back counterproductive technologies like electric cars because the kickbacks are so great.
The debate on climate change is a fraud, but climate change itself is no hoax. I wish it were a hoax.
The transformation of the atmosphere by emissions from factories and automobiles — and from geoengineering and chemtrail experiments — is plenty real. The death of the oceans from acidification, overfishing, and ocean bed mining is no fraud.
Any concept of the economy, of human happiness, that forces people to consume massive amounts of energy is a death warrant for humanity. President Putin, please take a firm stand because the issue is at least as serious as the infiltration of Ukraine by foreign interests — in fact, they are linked.
I was excited to hear President Putin use the word “revolution” repeatedly, but ultimately his concepts of economics, politics and diplomacy are dangerously conventional. We welcome the “end of the unipolar world order” but if we do not address the issue of class, the abuse of technology to control and manipulate the population, and the use of medicine to annihilate much of humanity, are we making progress?
We need global governance that is directly tied the needs of the people. If reform means merely that a new network of governments run by multinational corporations takes the place of the United States, Great Britain, Japan and France, that would not be a success, but rather a betrayal of the people.
President Putin, please condemn the World Economic Forum, pull Russia out of the World Economic Forum’s Centre for the Fourth Industrial Revolution, out of the World Health Organization, and condemn the entire COVID-19 operation.
Finally, President Putin, ask yourself whether the fall of the United States will usher in a utopia.
Is the United States, as a nation state, the source of the horrific class conflicts that we witness today?
Or, has the United States degenerated into an attack dog that does the bidding for billionaires, American, or otherwise?
Could it be that the Globalist agenda includes the controlled demolition of the United States?
Could it be that Goldman Sachs and Blackrock are already calculating the profits to be made from the selloff of American assets?
The United States must take responsibility for what happened over the last twenty years in its name. Those responsible, in the United States, in Europe, in Israel, or in Russia and China, should be held accountable.
My deepest apologies to all who have suffered so grievously because of the United States. I pledge to do my best, unto death, to set things right.
If, however, the globalists are pinning all sins on the United States, on the “West,” as a way to avoid their responsibility, we Americans, we Russians, we citizens of the Earth must stand up and assert that this will not stand.
