Henry Kissinger famously applied the dictum that “information is power” to a theory of global economic and political systems. His understanding of geopolitics and global economies and the interconnected global world can be summarized with the triad: Control food, you control the populations; control energy, you control whole continents; control currency, you control the world.
What Kissinger meant is that the most important factor to exert control, is information – because currency is the information of the comparative relative value of everything. Currency is not a product, but it’s the information layer on which everything else is moved around. So to control currencies, and to make everybody subscribe to the system of those currency exchanges, is to control the world.
This was the paradigm of globalism, but what we are finding now is that, with the Ukrainian conflict, those first two factors are actually much more important. It looks increasingly like that controlling food and energy is actually to control the world – and to take command of even a small amount of the production of food and energy, in a system that is at capacity, is to disrupt everything else.
What we have seen in the past few months is that the system of globalism espoused by Kissinger is cracking, and that the currency order that once did control the world may be fragmenting.
So certain were the globalists in the West in this notion that information is power, and that to have control of the information layer – ie the system of currencies – was to have power over all the world, that they gambled that Russia would crumble with sanctions on financial services. This was the “nuclear strike” that was implemented within two weeks of Russia’s military invasion of Ukraine.
Joe Biden famously said that “the Rouble will be Rubble”. Russia was denied access to international banking services and the SWIFT system. SWIFT is, in effect, a system where commodities and instructions can be securely moved around the globe through the exchange of information in ledgers.
It doesn’t produce anything other than information, and it was assumed that if permission to utilise this information was taken from the Russians, Russia would collapse. The old conceit that Russia was just a petrol station masquerading as a country was deeply embedded in this notion.
As it turned out the world is far more dependent on food and energy than it is on financial services and banking. Events are pointing to a new reality: that new currency options can be initiated and new trade systems set up so that now we can see a multipolar network of global systems of trade developing. So in forcing the hands of the Russians with the “nuclear strike” of banking sanctions, the western powers may have hastened the fragmentation of a world-dominating financial system.
When this outcome was foretold in March, the establishment insisted that the Russian economy wouldn’t last. People still maintained the fantasy, which in fairness was based on two decades of propaganda, that Europe could rely increasingly on renewable energy. But the truth is that an economy is its energy. The ability to produce is tied to nothing more unequivocally than it is to energy. To have a GDP at all is dependent on cheap energy. This is an inescapable truth.
Energy is the primary input of an economy, and the price of energy – cheap energy – is the most essential input for an economy to function. It is even more essential than the other commodities that are fed into a production economy; such as steel, concrete and copper. As for the mining of precious, rare earth minerals that we are going to need to massively increase to achieve this perfect renewable future; its very doubtful that that is going to happen in this fragmented global future.
So in the meantime we’re stuck, we haven’t enough energy and we are in a crisis. The demand for energy is inelastic. That means that even if you are short of money you still need the same energy to heat space, drive vehicles, pump water, turn on the lights. The same goes for food, and if you cripple the ability to produce food, the inescapable result is that you will go hungry.
Our dear leaders have decided that we need to use less energy and less food, so in effect they have decided for us that we will shiver with the cold and be hungry.
This is the new reality that awaits us now. Europe is in crisis and despite all that, they are still insisting that they were right about this gamble; that information is power and that the economy and society will continue to operate so long as you control the narrative. But you can pump money and you can pump a media campaign, such as has been done with the renewable propaganda and the news from Ukraine, but that doesn’t put food on the shelves or energy in the system.
Energy and food, whose importance has been long disregarded by the elites – and its producers long demonised by the greens as some sort of parasitical force on the planet – are now belatedly being recognised as the most essential things. The things that will keep society going; the things that will keep economies running and societies from breaking down. In the meantime, while Van Der Leyden and Biden and other hacks who launder money to the arms industry can talk all they like about standing with Ukraine and their “western liberal values” we are now in crisis. And this is not like the covid crisis; a media campaign of fear that can be turned up and down with a saturation PR campaign won’t address people’s difficulties.
Reality, and food and energy shortages – the real physical realities – don’t respond in the same way as a panicked public to a set of media driven fantasies. Sure, you can get the public to become jumpy and anxious and to accept any form of government overreach with a campaign of fear, but you can’t turn the lights on with the same strategies. You can’t stock the shelves with food with a carefully managed media messaging campaign. Unlike food and energy, the demand side for fear is very elastic and the supply side is infinite.
Just because this tactic served one purpose before and PR campaigns are the only thing our hapless government know how to do, and are very adept at using up vast swathes of the public finances to do so, it doesn’t mean that it’s a tactic to fit every circumstance. A public info campaign won’t turn the lights on.
Some of the commentators over at the Irish Times would contest this.
Europe is now buying gas from China believe it or not. China, however, is not a net producer of gas. China imports gas from Russia. Our sanctions against Russia are creating a whole new layer of middlemen who are adding a surcharge to the Russian gas we use. The gas is going by a circuitous route of middle men from Russia to Europe, only it is costing so much more. Once again, European households are the main targets of European sanctions on Russia.
„We don't buy Russian gas, we buy gas from countries who may or may not buy it from Russia and put a mark-up on it. But we don't buy from Russia directly.
Take that, Putin!"– EU pic.twitter.com/pzmuQEGvsD
— SuzeeB🙂 (@NatalieSuB) September 3, 2022
Here is the lesson. Just because our leaders want reality to conform to a pipe dream it doesn’t mean it is going to do that. We need energy and we are using Russian energy whether we like it or not. We will continue to use it, but will pay a massive premium for it.
As for fossil fuels! Everybody that shouts “leave it in the ground” and the old yuppies in extinction rebellion who lie down in front of commuters are learning. The leaders of the West, I suspect, are learning that they need to amp up the scapegoating media campaign. Expect ominous warnings of the far right and plenty of riot police when the cold and hungry take to the streets this winter.