LONG TERM HISTORICAL TRENDS EMERGE IN THE PRESENT
The subject we are going to talk about today is the importance of history. It has been said that he who controls the past controls the future. That's not necessarily clear but the manipulation of history for political purposes has been an issue throughout history and throughout history there has been efforts to create a fake past and erase that past to justify political realities in the present.
SHORT TERM TRENDS IN TODAY’S WORLD
Now looking at today's world, we have to confront the reality of Western imperialism after World War II, to imperialist forces dominating the world, American imperialism and Soviet imperialism which succeeded in installing a communist government in China.
THE COLLAPSE OF SOVIET IMPERIALISM IN RUSSIA
For a variety of reasons, the whole structure of Soviet imperialism collapsed... Just totally collapsed. However Marxist imperialism in China did not collapse. In 1989, Russia basically surrendered in the face of protests. Ironically, one of the reasons why Gorbachev ordered the surrender was his horror at the crackdown of the Chinese government against protesters in Tienanmen Square. Michael Gorbachev was in China at that time. However, the verdict of history shows whether it was good or bad—we're not going to get into a discussion about that—but the Chinese destruction of the protester movement in Tienanmen Square was a huge success. It was a huge success for the state and there's also a question as to how much the protesters actually represented real Chinese opinion and so on. We shall leave that issue for other people to debate, but the after the collapse of the Soviet Union, America assumed a dominant position in the world
CHINA DOESN’T BUY INTO AMERICAN IMPERIALISM
AMERICAN LEADERS SELL OUT TO CHINA
However, while American imperialist leaders like Clinton came up with this plan of integrating China into their world plan( indeed China was Bill Clinton's “strategic partner”), the Chinese did not buy into American concepts of what America likes to believe democracy is, what America likes to believe human rights is. And China remained a totalitarian state. The end result of Bill Clinton's “engagement” with China was advantage China. Part of this was due to the huge levels of corruption in America where the US business communities sold out American workers and took vitally needed factories out of America and set them up in China. The end result was that from a relative position of balance, the trade deficit between China and America had ballooned to about $400 billion. A staggering figure under Obama. Obviously this was a serious problem. Barack Obama tried to whitewash the whole thing. He said that was just the old economy and nobody really needed worry about what people didn't need to worry about, such as the American workers who lost their jobs. They had a great deal to worry about, yes they did. And in 2016, a person many people consider to be a mentally deranged lunatic—Donald Trump—was elected president of the United States. One of the biggest reasons why he was elected was the wholesale devastation of the trade policies for American workers.
FAILED ANGLO-AMERICAN ATTEMPTS TO
SHOW THAT THEY ARE THE END PRODUCT OF HISTORY
So this is a big picture of where we are right now. A key problem here is that American and Western imperialist forces want to believe that they are the be all and end all of history and after World War II (particularly in England and America) academics produced all sorts of nonsense, scholarly nonsense, with thousands of footnotes and also to long-winded histories trying to prove that the ultimate culmination of world history for India or China or everybody else was the Anglo-American concept of democracy and the Anglo-American concepts of human rights.
Now this was obviously a massive study in hypocrisy since England had presided over one of the most ruthless and brutal empires in history, murdering millions and millions of people, America was founded on the principle of genocide against the Native Americans who were forced off their land and so on and so forth and the issue of slavery for black America. So this was not a very savory situation, but these kinds of thoughts are not presented in American imperialist propaganda, so there was an effort to portray all history moving towards Anglo-American imperialist ideas and this was widely accepted, and is very bipartisan on both the left and the right. Indeed Roosevelt and people like Woodrow Wilson represented a Democratic version of Western imperialism and this would later morph into the human rights campaigns and would later morph into the humanitarian imperialism such as Obama where America would arrogate itself the right to go to war with countries to supposedly help them with their human rights and so on and so forth, this led to a total disaster in Libya under Obama and hundreds of thousands of people dead in Syria and other horror shows and so on and so forth. Now when you look at the whole situation, this whole Anglo-American vision is a fraud. And the history of the various areas of the world is different. They are not all evolving to become Western-style democracies with Western-style human rights.
LONG TERM HISTORICAL TRENDS RE-EMERGE IN INDIA
A particularly disgusting and grotesque aspect of Western scholastic imperialism is India where England conducted an absolute reign of terror and killed millions of people including 3 million in World War II who were murdered by Churchill in the Bengal famine situation and when England left, which was a bloodbath due to English incompetence, English and American scholars and leadership elites always patted themselves on the back, that they had created the largest democracy in history and the Congress party was always a great source of comfort to Western elites because they could say, “Look, there are some people who represent our views, and indeed they did. Unfortunately, this whole fairytale has been falling apart with the emergence of Hindu nationalism and Mr. Modi. We are not saying Mr. Modi is good. We're not saying Mr. Modi is bad. But what we will say about Mr. Modi is that he is far more representative of long-term trends in in Indian history than people like Nehru.
HISTORICAL TRENDS RE-EMERGE IN IRAN
So that's the reality. Now around the world, particularly starting in 1979 with the Iranian Revolution, there has been a series of uprisings against the Anglo American vision. In our view, the Ayatollah Khomeini was a monster, but his ideas were very much more in tune with Islamic history and Iranian history than the Western ideas of the human rights reformers and other people in the West. So that's a reality.
RUSSIA BREAKS AWAY FROM WEST
EMERGES AS AN INDEPENDENT POWER UNDER PUTIN
Meanwhile in Russia, much to the fury of Western elites, Putin was able to gain control of the country and prevent Western elites from continuing their looting of the country the way they did back in the 1990s, and he was able to build Russia back up as an independent power, much to the fury of people in the West. Putin represents a particular serious problem to these people because Russia has the power to wipe America off the map from a nuclear point of view, but it is showing the derangement of the Obama foreign policy lunatics, such as Samantha Power that they are willing to push Russia towards a nuclear apocalypse to fulfill their deranged delusions of imperialist.
THE MOVE TOWARD AUTHORITARIANISM IN AMERICA
Now as the Coronavirus disaster makes the world much more unhinged, the following trends are going to be taking place more and more. Pressure is going to be developed for the creation of authoritarian governments and indeed in America there's been a huge trend towards authoritarianism since 9/11 and since the series of disasters that ensued such as the catastrophe in Iraq and the total collapse of the American political consensus in the elections of 2016. Indeed, Obama probably did more than Bush to push authoritarian ideas, and much more effectively, because he was able to sell them to the to the liberal elites much more effectively than Bush was able to do. Bush put through the Patriot Act, but Obama put through the most ruthless persecution of dissidents seen in a long time and the National Defense Authorization Act, which gave enormous powers for the detention of US citizens and so on and so forth under Obama and Mr. Clapper who lied about the situation under oath before Congress. A national surveillance state was set up of truly breathtaking dimensions. Meanwhile, today, many key aspects of the Democratic Party and the so-called left are calling for massive censorship of the Internet.
GLOBAL TRENDS TOWARD AUTHORITARIANISM
So you see, there are trends all around the world toward authoritarianism. It's important to understand that history is multicultural from a political ideological point of view and this will gradually unfold as time goes on. The view of the world from Western imperialism is receding and America is losing its grip. However, that's not necessarily automatically a good thing. On one level, it's a good thing, but it's likely to lead to a lot of turmoil and struggle. Particularly dangerous is Trump's efforts to accelerate a conflict with China and Trump's efforts to attack the Chinese economy are verging on acts of war.
So stay tuned, put your tray table in the upright position, fasten your seatbelt a lot of turmoil is ahead and history is going to return to more traditional lines.
The government in China is much more representative of Chinese history for better or worse than the idiotic delusions of a lot of Western “reformers” Likewise, the government in India and so on and so forth. So the age of American imperialism and Anglo-American imperialism is coming to an end. In America, you have someone who is considered a mentally deranged lunatic in the form of Donald Trump in a series of disasters. In England you had the total lunatic madness of Brexit and so on and so forth,
So the Anglo-American model isn't working. It’s not. So people will look to other models. They will go back into their historical traditions and the details of this we have discussed in other lectures, but we will add more lectures to come to go over the full implications of what this means.