You’re listening to Back in the USSR on CFRU 93.3 FM, I am Siegfried and I’ve got some good news and bad news tonight. I’ll start with the good news and that concerns the recent BRICS summit which just concluded in Johannesburg, South Africa last Friday. Now, if you haven’t been following international politics that much, you’d be forgiven for not knowing what the BRICS organization is. The name BRICS is an acronym for its member states: Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa. These five states, all fast-growing economies, originally came together in 2009 in a loose association based on economic cooperation and have since moved to create a full-fledged alternative to Western-led international economic institutions like the IMF and World Bank. This process of creating an alternative system was on the slow-track for a long time, but was accelerated to a remarkable degree after the U.S. and the European Union seized Russian assets and placed unprecedented sanctions on that country in response to the Ukraine War. With 1/3rd of the world living under Western sanctions, even traditional U.S. allies like Saudi Arabia have come to realize that the U.S.-led economic order is not safe for them and that alternatives are needed. This has led to six new countries joining the BRICS organization at the recent summit in South Africa: Argentina, Egypt, Ethiopia, Saudi Arabia, Iran and the United Arab Emirates. Other countries are set to join next year when Russia hosts the next BRICS summit in 2024. What these very diverse countries, some of which are U.S. allies, have in common is that they no longer wish to rely on the U.S. dollar for international trade and seek to conduct trade in multiple currencies in order to secure their financial and economic independence so they won’t have to worry about the U.S. coming in, imposing sanctions and destroying their economy because they don’t like the actions of this or that government. This is really all about self-determination and the fact that so many countries are seeking to secure their independence by cooperating economically under a common international organization like the BRICS is a major step forward in undermining and counteracting the forces of imperialism and empire. In short, it’s good news, VERY good news.
I said that I also had some bad news in addition to the good news about the BRICS summit and the advancement of self-determination among Global South countries. The bad news is that the Ukraine War continues and that the U.S. and its Western allies are likely to try to keep it going until after the U.S. presidential elections in November 2024. In June 2023 Ukraine launched what it called a “counter-offensive” against Russia which has now burned on for nearly three months with almost nothing to show for it. The Western media is openly calling it a failure, while outlining the tens of thousands of casualties that Ukraine has suffered for minimal territorial gains. For a brief period in mid-August the media even entertained the resumption of peace talks as a way out of the war. But that seems to have ended and the West is now pressing Ukraine to keep throwing itself at the Russians even as manpower and ammunition reserves are dwindling. In other words, the imperial overlords in Washington want to fight this war to the last Ukrainian and don’t really care about the Ukrainian people at all. So, while the cause of self-determination is advancing with the BRICS summit, the imperialists haven’t given up either.
