When it comes to what has been happening since 2019, I think that I’m ready to share what I know. First of all, what has been happening comes as no surprise to me. I’ve already made a few posts of my own about what has been happening in the West and about what will happen. My first post about the goings-on in Western Civilization is from 2019. My post about the goings-on in Russian Civilization is already several years old because it’s from 2017. In these two posts, I applied the knowledge that I have gained when I read Carroll Quigley’s books. Explaining what has been happening in Russia was easier than explaining what has been happening in the West. When it comes to the West, I wrote that what is happening is the continuing decline of American political domination of the West. It has been 2 years since then, and I can say that my opinion about what is happening in the West hasn’t changed. I think that this process of decline of American political domination will possibly last for several more decades. I compared the USA to the Abbasid Caliphate not because I think that American power will decline exactly like Abbasid power did but because I think that the process is similar. That is, I think that the USA won’t quickly collapse like the Soviet Union did. In the case of the USA, the decline and loss of power has been, and will be, more prolonged, in my opinion. Western Civilization will still have its ups and downs in the future, but the major policies will no longer be set by Washington. At the moment, people in the West are simply living through one of the downs. It appears to me that the COVID-19 pandemic is a reality, but it has been blown out of proportion by the authorities in Western states and by the authorities in the many other states in the world that can be called economic and cultural colonies of the West. The establishment is taking advantage of the pandemic and lying to the masses. This isn’t really anything new. They’ve always been deceiving the masses about many things, but the measures that are being taken now haven’t been seen for quite some time in the West. COVID-19 itself may not have originated in China. Some people say that it’s a creation of the Americans. Conspiracy theorists, anti-Semites, and other right-wing reactionaries have been having a field day because of the COVID-19 pandemic. They finally have something that they can scream about, while thinking up new conspiracies, because what has been happening is very unusual. The COVID-19 pandemic is probably the biggest thing since the “September 11 attacks”. The measures that have been imposed by the authorities upon the masses are unpleasant. Anyway, I’m not really surprised by any of this. All of this is just another detail of the crisis that has been developing since 2008. All of this is just a part of the continuing decline of American political domination of the West. As Quigley explained in his books, the latest major crisis in Western Civilization began in 1929, when industrial capitalism became a structure of vested interests. If the current Age of Conflict in Western Civilization continues, and I think that it will, more severe things than the COVID-19 pandemic will follow. Here’s a passage from Quigley’s book ‘Tragedy and Hope’, in which he mentions what happened during the first Age of Conflict in Western Civilization, when feudalism became a structure of vested interests:
“From all this came the first period of expansion of Western Civilization, covering the years 970-1270. At the end of this period, the organization of society was becoming a petrified collection of vested interests, investment was decreasing, and the rate of expansion was beginning to fall. Accordingly, Western Civilization, for the first time, entered upon the Age of Conflict. This period, the time of the Hundred Years’ War, the Black Death, the great heresies, and severe class conflicts, lasted from about 1270 to 1420. By the end of it, efforts were arising from England and Burgundy to conquer the core of Western Civilization.”
The crisis that began in 1929 was alleviated for several decades after 1945 because of the gains of American monopoly capitalism during and after World War II and because the USA began to dominate Western Civilization politically. Because of the two so-called world wars, British political domination of Western Civilization had been replaced by American political domination. But, since industrial capitalism hasn’t been functioning as an instrument of expansion since 1929 in the West, these gains of the USA were only temporary because a real instrument of expansion no longer exists in Western Civilization. American imperialism hasn’t been bringing big profits to the West since the plundering of the former Soviet Union in the 1990s. If the USA has no big imperialist gains, if it doesn’t impose its institutionalized capitalist system upon new territories, it goes into an economic depression, along with the rest of the West. I suppose that this is why I call the USA an empire, and the USA has been functioning like this since the 1930s. Reaganomics, for example, didn’t benefit the USA in any big way, and it actually harmed the USA in several ways. The economic crisis that became evident in the 1970s continued when Ronald Reagan was president, and the reason why things weren’t as bad as they could have been is because the national debt of the USA tripled during Reagan’s presidency. The money was borrowed primarily from Japan at that time. This is something that Immanuel Wallerstein mentioned in his books. I don’t consider Wallerstein to be as good a writer and thinker as Quigley, but his books are still worth reading. Information about this is also available in Paul Kennedy’s book ‘The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers’. Nowadays, the national debt of the USA is much larger, thus making the USA the largest debtor in the world by far. What really helped the USA for a few decades after Reagan’s presidency was the collapse of the Soviet Union. Of course, you won’t find such information in the USA because of all of the censorship and propaganda.
The blog of Igor Boyar 