Russia, Free Speech, and Europe
After the implosion of the bureaucratic system of the Soviet Union in 1991, the privatization forced on Boris Yeltsin by advisors from the US government, the IMF and the World Bank shook Russia to its very foundations.
There was a systematic pillage of Russia’s public assets in what followed. The newly-emerged oligarchs and corporations of the US, Britain, and Germany made a killing in short time with the direct support of the IMF, the World Bank, Western governments, and major private banks.
The oligarchs used brutal and criminal methods like those used by the “robber barons” in the United States in the 19th century. A part of the booty was invested in the West and laundered, and so it got out of the reach of the law.
Russia was forced into debt by the IMF and a large part of the loans were embezzled and went back to the West.
The economist, Joseph Stiglitz who was chief economist of the World Bank during 1997–2000, denounced the culpability of the IMF and the US Treasury, who had guided the Russian bureaucrats in converting to the capitalist system. Writing in 2002, he said [1]: “The government, pressured by the United States, the World Bank and the IMF to privatize rapidly, had turned over its State assets for a pittance.” He claims that the IMF and the Russians knew that the billions of dollars that it had given (loaned) Russia was showing up in Swiss and Cypriot bank accounts just days after the loan was made, but didn’t want to officially admit it.
Joseph Stiglitz adds that the directors of the World Bank forbade him to meet the Inspector General of the Russian Parliament (Duma) and tell him what he knew about the corruption “lest we give credence to his charges”.
The US was acting like the sole hegemon and was scheming to push NATO to Russia’s borders without caring for Russia’s security concerns. After promising not to expand NATO “one inch eastward” in 1990, the US has added sixteen countries to its NATO empire.
Good and bad oligarchs
Although Vladimir Putin was elected with the help of oligarchs in 2000, he reported called them to a meeting and told them that the past will be forgiven if they cleaned up the act and bent to the power of the state. They could keep the mansions, superyachts, private jets, and their corporations that, just a few years before, had been owned by the Russian government.
The oligarchs who accepted this reset became the funders for the president and have remained his allies. Those who reneged on this deal and undermined Putin were thrown into prison or forced into exile.
The exile of the Putin-opposed oligarchs has been a sore point with the West. When Russia invaded Ukraine, Western governments not only sanctioned the Russian State but also over a dozen oligarchs connected to Putin. The White House said: “[They] sit atop Russia’s largest companies and are responsible for providing the resources necessary to support Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.”
Western governments chose not to make peace with the Russian government, and pushing forward of EU and NATO were one way of keeping the pressure on Putin.
The impatience of bankers often leads to war. After the war broke out in 2022, the West was surprised by the resilience of the Russian economy and how it soon built up its war machine.
The woke revolution in the US
Much before this, in late 2000s, US shifted left and the Democratic party thought it had built a permanent majority based on women and ethnic and gender minorities, with only the white males as the bad guys.
It thought such a majority using thought and speech control will make the US more competitive and guarantee primacy in the globalized world despite the white population shrinking further and increasingly a minority in urban areas. The ruling class believed that in the vision of the post-racial globalized world continuing mass migration was a good thing. It was essential to erode distinctive sense of identity, values, history, collective memory, and ways of life [2].
Donald Trump’s idea of economic nationalism and use of commonsense is the antithesis of this globalization project, which is why the globalists have been against him from the beginning, and why he has been reviled by them.
EU as an ideological project
The EU is an ideological project, governed top-down by a bureaucracy. This explains why European ruling class have acted as good boys, doing whatever the Americans demanded of them. If the Americans said that there are 73 genders, the Europeans nodded in assent. The Europeans have been even louder than the Americans in support of the Ukraine war.
Europe’s strength vis-à-vis the US has ebbed as its economy has shrunk to about 40% of the American one since the financial crisis of 2008. Europe wants to take the hard line on Russia, but it has little industry, no military, little technological innovation, no cultural pride.
Germany sacrificed energy security on the altar of ideology by shutting down its final three nuclear reactors in 2023. For the same reason it has shown no interest in finding out who destroyed the Nord Stream Pipeline in 2022.
From the perspective of Europe, the unthinkable happened in November 2024, and the Europeans who were copying and even outdoing the Americans in censorship and thought-control were blindsided.
Those who are emotionally invested in the analytical categories associated with the top-down European project find Trump’s pivot away from ideology to realism very painful.
Europe has lectured others about democratic rights while suppressing dissent and rights at home, including instrumentalizing the judiciary, eroding freedom of speech, and annulling elections (as in Romania). It calls farmers in Europe as “the far right”, and it has imposed Net Zero and ESG policies with little consultation with the public.
This is why Europe was shocked by the JD Vance speech, “the threat that I worry the most about vis-a-vis Europe is not Russia, it’s not China, it’s not any other external actor. What I worry about is the threat from within. The retreat of Europe from some of its most fundamental values: values shared with the United States of America.”
When JD Vance said: “Europe does not accept free speech.”
Europe countered: “The Vance speech is not acceptable.”
Europe proved a theorem without being aware that they had done so.
References
- J. Stiglitz, Globalization and Its Discontents. W.W. Norton (2003)
- S. Kak, The Age of Artificial Intelligence. Garuda (2024)
