Ramin Mazaheri wonders whether the EU-cide is suicide or homicide, asks why its demise is so underreported, ponders Emmanuel Todd’s book The Defeat of the West, investigates the collapse of liberalism, and celebrates the good things happening in Mexico.
Ramin Mazaheri is longtime Paris chief correspondent for PressTV and the author of three books on socialism. His latest book is France’s Yellow Vests: Western Repression of the West’s Best Values.
Excerpt:
I think we can just start by saying that there is so much going on in the world. We are sort of at a historical turning point, something that we haven't been at since maybe the implosion from above of the USSR. There are just so many things going on and it's just such an exciting time to be alive, because so many positive things are happening in so many ways.
And there are things that we are hopeful that will be happening but aren't really happening. Like, for example, this petrodollar fall. The petrodollar, as you said, is the underpinning of United States dominance. It is the underpinning of the Western financial system. I have seen that stuff online, too. And I said, oh, my God, this is the greatest news…And then I looked more into it, and it doesn't seem like it is (real). It seems like fake news. But the fact that it's possible, that it's close to happening, and that it probably will happen, i.e. the Saudis will start selling their oil in something other than dollars and start doing it in yuan and maybe even euros—we all see this (eventually) happening.
Nobody thought Bitcoin was going to be something in 2017. Nobody thought that Syria would be able to survive. And then it turns out that starting in 2017 Russian military technology is actually superior to Western and NATO technology. And they started proving that in in Syria.
Nobody would have thought—well I think people thought in 2017 that the EU was a failed project but you know we just fast forward to seven years later and it's just unbelievable how much the world has changed in so many ways. There are just so many things that we could be talking about.
We could be talking about Mexico and their leftist sweep. Leftists have not just won the presidency. They have a super majority in both houses of Congress. They have a super majority of state legislatures. They have a super majority of state governorships. So we're talking about not a leftist victory. This is this is a leftist sweep. And we can expand it further. We can remind ourselves that five of the six largest Latin American economies are run by leftists. And the sixth is run by the libertarian left, Milei, down in Argentina.
So there is tremendous change in Latin America, and tremendous change in the middle East, starting with the successful defense of Syria. Then you have the US leaving Afghanistan. And then you have a little conflict going on in a small part of the world that's somewhat important called Palestine, and the spectacular victory of the counteroffensive on October 7th. Who would have thought that that could happen?
And then to kind of wrap this up, this sort of preamble, it really is such an amazing, exciting time where there's so many wonderful things going on. And it is basically predicated on the collapse of the European Union. Emmanuel Todd wrote—and I wrote that I didn't agree with it–that Europe's crisis is the world's crisis. I said that's not really true. Europe's crisis is the obstacle, the annoyance of the world…
Ramin Mazaheri on Defeat of the West