An Insightful Historical Analogy

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The war for world dominance is well and truly under way. The West is seeking to maintain its hold over the world, that it has had for some time. The East is seeking to cast those chains off and achieve self-determination. Which is ironic to think about, because westerners often use the rhetoric of the importance for nations to have self-determination. This is a lie, and has been so pretty much all along. Self-determination is only the right of nations that agree with the western elite. 

The West has dominated the world, and westerners have benefited from this dominance, just as Romans benefited from Rome's dominance, or Carthaginians from Phoenicia's dominance, or Mongols from Mongolian dominance, etc. This is the way of things. Though it did not have such complete dominance until after the collapse of the Berlin wall. 

One of the more interesting commentators on this growing conflict is Michael Hudson, who along with Vox Day and others has noted that the world is breaking up into two competing networks and markets; the Great Bifurcation. The world is returning to its usual status quo of a balance of powers across the globe, rather than the unipolar dominance of post Soviet collapse, USA. 

In this piece Hudson explains what is happening via an interesting analogy with the era of the Crusades. Another point in history, where a fracturing globalist power sought to maintain its dominance. Its quite a long piece, and I've included just a small part of it, however I recommend reading the whole thing there. Hudson's take is interesting: 

"Sometimes it is easier to understand today’s dynamics by stepping away from one’s own immediate situation to look at historical examples of the kind of political diplomacy that one sees splitting today’s world. The closest parallel that I can find is medieval Europe’s fight by the Roman papacy against German kings – the Holy Roman Emperors – in the 13^th century. That conflict split Europe along lines much like those of today. A series of popes excommunicated Frederick II and other German kings and mobilized allies to fight against Germany and its control of southern Italy and Sicily.

Western antagonism against the East was incited by the Crusades (1095-1291), just as today’s Cold War is a crusade against economies threatening U.S. dominance of the world. The medieval war against Germany was over who should control Christian Europe: the papacy, with the popes becoming worldly emperors, or secular rulers of individual kingdoms by claiming the power to morally legitimize and accept them.

Medieval Europe’s analogue to America’s New Cold War against China and Russia was the Great Schism in 1054. Demanding unipolar control over Christendom, Leo IX excommunicated the Orthodox Church centered in Constantinople and the entire Christian population that belonged to it. A single bishopric, Rome, cut itself off from the entire Christian world of the time, including the ancient Patriarchates of Alexandria, Antioch, Constantinople and Jerusalem.

This break-away created a political problem for Roman diplomacy: How to hold all the Western European kingdoms under its control and claim the right for financial subsidy from them. That aim required subordinating secular kings to papal religious authority. In 1074, Gregory VII, Hildebrand, announced 27 Papal Dictates outlining the administrative strategy for Rome to lock in its power over Europe.

These papal demands are strikingly parallel to today’s U.S. diplomacy. In both cases military and worldly interests require a sublimation in the form of an ideological crusading spirit to cement the sense of solidarity that any system of imperial domination requires. The logic is timeless and universal.

The Papal Dictates were radical in two major ways. First of all, they elevated the bishop of Rome above all other bishoprics, creating the modern papacy. Clause 3 ruled that the pope alone had the power of investiture to appoint bishops or to depose or reinstate them. Reinforcing this, Clause 25 gave the right of appointing (or deposing) bishops to the pope, not to local rulers. And Clause 12 gave the pope the right to depose emperors, following Clause 9, obliging “all princes to kiss the feet of the Pope alone” in order to be deemed legitimate rulers.

Likewise today, U.S. diplomats claim the right to name who should be recognized as a nation’s head of state. In 1953 they overthrew Iran’s elected leader and replaced him with the Shah’s military dictatorship. That principle gives U.S. diplomats the right to sponsor “color revolutions” for regime-change, such as their sponsorship of Latin American military dictatorships creating client oligarchies to serve U.S. corporate and financial interests. The 2014 coup in Ukraine is just the latest exercise of this U.S. right to appoint and depose leaders.

More recently, U.S. diplomats have appointed Juan Guaidó as Venezuela’s head of state instead of its elected president, and turned over that country’s gold reserves to him. President Biden has insisted that Russia must remove Putin and put a more pro-U.S. leader in his place. This “right” to select heads of state has been a constant in U.S. policy spanning its long history of political meddling in European political affairs since World War II.

The second radical feature of the Papal Dictates was their exclusion of all ideology and policy that diverged from papal authority. Clause 2 stated that only the Pope could be called “Universal.” Any disagreement was, by definition, heretical. Clause 17 stated that no chapter or book could be considered canonical without papal authority.

A similar demand as is being made by today’s U.S.- sponsored ideology of financialized and privatized “free markets,” meaning deregulation of government power to shape economies in interests other than those of U.S.-centered financial and corporate elites."

History doesn't repeat, but it rhymes. It's remarkable how orthodoxies build, of various kinds, and then stack the deck to try and maintain their exclusive dominance. And it is equally fascinating how the corruption this causes brings the whole edifice down, again and again. 

It's a modern heresy to question the goodness of the West, democracy, free trade, and more. And because evidence is mounting against all these things, force needs to be brought to bear to keep people and nations in line.

But no empire or power lasts forever, the great bifurcation is as inevitable as the failure of the Crusading state of Jerusalem, and for much the same reason; rule over foreigners is illegitimate and inherently fragile. This is the lesson every imperial pursuit teaches and every pursuer of empire believes will not apply to theirs.