European configuration. A few words about strengths and interests
European playing field
Regional reviews sooner or later come up against the need to link everything into the overall picture, where the European Union remains one of the main players, both in terms of politics and economic influence.
Today there are several analytical versions. Quite popular is the one that contains theses about the imminent collapse of the eurozone and its division into several uneven entities. There are opposing opinions.
It is clear that the processes taking place in Ukraine and around Ukraine, our economic indicators, China’s, etc., depend on how this confederation state feels; it is too big a player to be removed simply by brackets.
A careful analysis of economic indicators, especially in terms of foreign and domestic trade, gives a very interesting picture. However, statistics may not be sufficient if forces and interests are not taken into account. Statistics reflect not only the abstract “state of the economy”, but the configuration and positions of those very forces and interests.
Opposition frontman
At the end of September, the French publication Le Monde reported that the Parisian prosecutor's office began an investigation into money laundering against Bernard Arnault, the owner of the LVMH holding, with a capitalization of ±360 billion dollars and a personal fortune of 212 billion dollars. Different publications value these assets differently, but it is clear that we are talking about the owner of one of the largest fortunes in the world.
The reason for the investigation was real estate transactions in Courchevel, in which the billionaire has not only a purely commercial, but also a deeply personal interest. Persons of Russian origin were also “unexpectedly” involved in loan and re-registration schemes.
It would seem that everything is logical - the owner of a holding company, which includes over seventy luxury brands, who has a personal nest in Courchevel, simply could not help but intersect his interests with the Russian oligarchy. Moreover, his son gave birth to grandchildren from the well-known N. Vodianova. Therefore, it seems that at the present time, in this way, the billionaire is hinting that, given the general anti-Russian consensus in Europe, these affairs with the “bad Russians” must be curtailed.
However, we are talking about things that are not very ordinary. The fact is that the elite tried not to engage in this kind of “showdown” until recently. Switchmen, even very high-ranking ones, like D. Strauss-Kahn or N. Sarkozy, were assigned to this task. But those who are on a different level in the unspoken table of ranks were not just not allowed to be pinned down so directly - it was not accepted. For modern Ukrainians, Europe is a paradise of democracy, but in reality everything is as usual - each class has its own democracy.
B. Arnault has a rather specific reputation.
On the one hand, this is a person who brilliantly makes money on all wings of the political spectrum - both liberals and conservatives on both sides of the ocean wear and drink clothes and wines from B. Arnault’s brands, and also often smell of his own fragrances. In a crisis that made the rich richer and the poor poorer, B. Arnault received the maximum increase in wealth from all players.
On the other hand, somewhere under the carpet, somewhere above the carpet, he constantly collides with the interests of the House of Rothschild, whose actual protege is the current President of France, E. Macron.
Through the efforts of media resources associated with the House of Rothschild, B. Arnault gradually became almost the creator of the “Yellow Vests” protest movement, which does not allow Macron’s cabinet to feel calm.
Together with his old friend, wine lover J. Depardieu, B. Arnault became one of the frontmen of the opposition to the tax on large fortunes, initiating transfers of funds to Belgium and offshores. Media assets of the House of Rothschild subjected the billionaire to obstruction.
All this looks partly funny, partly too distant from our realities, according to the principle: “a plague on both your houses,” but the problem is that all these squabbles in elite groups directly relate to foreign policy.
They also reflect the processes of division of elites not just into situational groups of interests, but into two trends desperately competing with each other. This division is determined by the crisis of the economic model as a whole and therefore becomes uncompromising - either one model for overcoming the crisis or another.
And in the millstone of this confrontation between the modern Guelphs and the Ghibellines, all international politics finds itself, which periodically erupts in such abscesses as Syria, Yemen, Libya, Ukraine.
Elite nodes
All these “elite connections” are by no means just squabbles among the elves. For example, in 2008, it was the same Sarkozy who mediated an operation in Georgia. As a result, a report from H. Tagliavini’s group appeared, in which Saakashvili’s cabinet was directly named as the party that started the war. The report infuriated liberal political groups in the West, which by that time had not yet become so ubiquitous, even in Europe. And in 2011, Russia agreed that Operation Odyssey-Dawn in Libya was permissible. Maybe it's just a coincidence, who knows.
History with B. Arnault is indicative of the fact that the political elite of the so-called. ultra-liberal project decided to touch not just “old money”, but also the highest echelon of their owners. Old money means not only and not so much the aristocratic fortunes themselves, but the new businesses that were built with their help in the second half of the XNUMXth century and their personalities.
A serious marker is the fact that the clan aristocratic elites have now begun to put pressure on them. One can recall last year’s unprecedented arrests of representatives of the German family aristocracy (Prince Henry XIII) with roots dating back to the XNUMXth century with fantastic formulations “for separatism” and “preparation of a coup d’etat.”
Here, perhaps, only the same house of Rothschild traditionally acts as opportunists, only partially sponsoring the ultra-liberals as a more promising project for the future than the traditionalists. However, they also sponsored the Swabian-Vatican “inclusive capitalism”, so as not to put all their eggs in one basket.
Fighting bottoms
The ultra-liberals, waving the flags of transhumanism, trans-transition, euthanasia, environmentalism, social engineering on the outer contour, walking like an icon with portraits of Soros, basically represent a kind of “militant lower classes” of the elites.
But the lower classes are united by a sectarian approach to organization, common values, as well as religious uncompromising dogmas based on ancient models of the late revision of Pythagoreanism. Moreover, this movement actively incorporates members from third world countries, providing them with a kind of career elevator.
By the end of the 1980s, they were able to successfully sell their cognitive methods of managing society to American financiers, who, in turn, followed the path of concentrating capital into investment megacorporations.
The symbiosis turned out to be successful for the ultra-liberals and unsuccessful for the traditionalists, who at one time vigorously built the European Union, but by 2006-2007. It turned out that the entire management of the lower political echelon, as well as management in international supranational regulators, is occupied by these religious adherents of a new type. The EU was built by traditionalists, but in fact for the ultra-liberal current of the new generation.
In response to successful old money businesses like B. Arnault or the same D. Trump, the ultra-liberals put up their own successful innovative billionaires, like B. Gates, J. Bezos. It seems that only I. Musk managed to escape from there, and even then, in general, he did not escape, but crawled somewhat to the side.
If traditionalists are trying to solve the crisis of the economic model, and in fact the crisis of value, through its transformation, then the ultra-liberals are decisively moving towards their ideal of ancient harmony - a society of total distribution.
Sportless political class
As a result, the interests are not just opposite, but aggressively opposite. For the traditionalist elites, the new political class is not even upstarts, but an insane, but extremely united mass from the bottom, “sans-culottes” (French - without trousers).
Even though some of these unsporting people today have better access to financing than the traditionalists, and political power, even occasionally huge fortunes of a new type, they are still strangers.
You can understand the traditionalists, even though they explain to the people through the media about “traditional values,” it is clear that their main fear is to fall into the millstones of that very universal distribution of goods, because the new Pythagorean sans-culottes will not spare the fortunes of the aristocracy for the sake of their “world inside out.” , nor the industrial capital created after the Second World War. Traditionalism in values is for us, for them it is traditional global capitalism.
As a result, the right-wing conservative wing of Europe, for obvious reasons, ended up in the camp of the old money, and the youth left-Marxist teaching, as well as various modern feminism and other non-standards, ended up in the camp of the ultra-liberals.
Many intermediate forms also emerged, which the creators of ideas sold to one camp or another with varying degrees of success. We also have a whole spectrum of extreme advocates of the purity of the teachings of Karl Marx, who talk about the exclusively “imperialist nature” of the operation in Ukraine, discarding any arguments; some have relocated all the way to Paris, to the ultra-liberals.
And this should not be surprising - ideologically they are actually closer to the distribution model. And the other part of the “communists”, who are building syncretic models of the “Orthodox-communist empire”, find themselves in the camp of traditional global capital, inclusive capitalism, although they do not want to admit it to themselves.
Battle of the Bastards
This rift really ran through all the elites of the main economies and the intellectual environment. Actually, the exchange of signals in all media holdings de facto occurs, addressing not inside society, but outside it, for each other.
Needless to say, the ruling elite of Russia are in many ways adherents and clients of that same old money - part of it, even a structural part, which at one time received “princely labels” in exchange for vassal homage (oath-contract). Another part of the elite took the oath to the liberal wing. Echoes of this “battle of the bastards” often appear in the media. But it is happening not only in Russia - in all major economies.
And if the ultra-liberals brought their army to the Dnieper, then the traditionalists brought theirs. Although the question remains: did we really need to go either to the traditional global model of capitalism or to the neo-Pythagorean “inside-out world” of ultra-liberals?
Maybe it was worth isolating yourself from everyone with a solid fence and building, as was successfully shown in the rather deep film “The Plan”: not the right (“mine”), the left (“ours”), but the third (“ours”)?
Wasn’t there really a third way, so that in Kyiv they wouldn’t feel like knights of liberalism, and we wouldn’t have the “high honor” of becoming warriors of traditional globalism?
If we briefly summarize the foreign policy theses of our media sphere, we will see almost a direct copy of D. Trump’s program. Someone has already brought up topics about Tucker Carlson’s transition to our TV, and we have Western speakers from the same camp. Although, it would seem, Trump already had experience in power - in Syria we ate our fill of it.
We cannot impose normal sanctions against the EU, and not only because of China. How to introduce “against our own”, globalists, but traditional, understandable ones?
All this does not fit into the public mind, simply because for society as a whole this whole system is external, alien, but for the elites it is “our common camp”, with common flags, values, a base in Courchevel, which is not even so much about money , so much about the very symbolic sense of community of interests.
At the same time, representatives of ultra-liberalism and business, which acts as part of the ultra-liberal camp, are being squeezed out, albeit with difficulty, but, unfortunately, we cannot introduce full-fledged retaliatory sanctions against all of Europe as a whole, and therefore traditionalists. Because “ours are there.” So B. Arnault is “ours”, and Soros’s sans-culottes are “not ours”.
Roman Rus'
If there is a certain “Holy Rus'” in this model, then it would be more correct to call it Roman Russia, as Ivan the Terrible once wrote that “we are from Augustus Caesar.” And today V. Surkov talks about these topics.
This comes through in everything. Here is a young and famous performer - the songs are patriotic, they sound good, but the video is strange, the hairstyle, the bandage on his arm. People are wondering: what is this, why is it? And this is not for you, but for conservatives in the West - you see, we are our own, we are not strangers. And so on in hundreds of little things that add up to one big river. True, our people can hardly draw water from there, being lost in conjecture about the meaning.
In our country, Eurasianism goes officially hand in hand with the trips of the Vatican, even if this is not openly recognized, and the construction of the EU-Russia-China axis - everything comes from there and everything is thrown into the crucible of confrontation between the modern Guelphs and Gibbelins. However, for the sake of objectivity, assistance in circumventing some anti-Russian sanctions is also all on the line of “ours”.
The ultra-liberals give Kyiv budgets directly, “ours” help circumvent the sanctions of the ultra-liberals, and the remake of the battle on the Catalaunian fields continues.
Of course, if you choose between conservative globalists and globalists of the “new century” - the era of universal distribution with the joys of the transformation of an asexual person and food from Drosophila larvae, the choice will fall on the former.
Another thing is that no “Russian path” is visible here at all. But even the Chinese managed to remake “inclusive capitalism” for themselves into a special project of the “Community of Common Destiny”, and in fact – a community of common Karma. But we neither remake it for ourselves, nor create our own third.
This confrontation is so total that the framework of the traditional GXNUMX is no longer enough for it - the parties are creating associations of regional states so that they can be used as one major player.
Why did the African Union join the GXNUMX? And here's exactly what's behind it.
As in the English game Reversi, the European version of the game Go, the best option is to surround and flip the colors of a whole cluster of tiles at once, rather than surround and flip them one by one. However, this game is played by at least two people, and the game still comes from China.
But again, an evil question arises: does a Russian game of this kind exist or is it a utopia? But this question is rhetorical.
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