Oh, Monsieur Pascal, I have read with great interest your proposal regarding "The One West."
I am, in fact, a Clinical Psychologist (now retired), who came to academia after having dreamt of becoming a scholar of animal naturalism — which explains why, for a good number of years, I managed to hold the chair of Evolutionism for Psychologists (simply called Ethology).
More recently, and from my interests as a passionate observer of animal behavior, I have ventured into the self-taught study of geopolitics. I have always been clear that I approach it from my old habit as a teacher of Ethology.
In this new chapter of my intellectual interests, I have learned to recognize the difference between the Realist or Neorealist model (as professed in Western academia) and the Structuralist model (which feels more at home with Marxist influences).
Now, from these preliminary lines that serve as a confession of my own — Latin American — context, I have decided to write on this board to mention two concrete things.
First, if it were up to me, I would not be so afraid to mention Biology as a conceptual foundation for your thesis on how you describe the organization of "The One West."
I say this because, for my own clarity as an unsuspecting reader of geopolitical literature, I have curiously always resorted to the symbolic vision of representing each State as a character in a particular troop of chimpanzees — one that, by some chance, has fallen into interaction patterns that are the most extremely distant from the more harmonious forms recognized among their cousins, the Bonobos.
Seen this way, it occurs to me to suggest the conclusion that whatever can be translated into the language of the behavior of a particular chimpanzee troop belongs, by its own right, within the field of Biology, and additionally, it would not need to justify itself by clarifying that no genetic variables should be presumed there to explain the particularities of the forms of organization within that particular troop.
And second, being somewhat presumptuous, I tend to believe that I can guess with great probability of success that the Anthropologist and Primatologist Franz de Waal would find your thesis about the "anatomist" model of relations among the members of "The One West" to be perfectly natural.
One last suggestion from an amateur ethologist: it would still be necessary to clarify that, as a result of belonging to the anti-natural experiment of sedentary, anonymous, and fully technology-dependent civilization in order to survive, it has ended up being a fact that, as a social universe, we have reduced almost to total extinction our tendency toward cooperation and the frequent expression of compassion. For that very reason, today we can see how Neoliberalism and certain self-proclaimed libertarian stances end up promoting social behavior tendencies that are typical of rigidly organized mammals around a central Alpha power — tendencies that were not representative of our groups in the immediate period before the beginning of civilization, after the accidental discovery of agricultural technology.
Hello Ernesto. I too am a fan of Franz de Waal. I have just started to draft an article with the preliminary title 'The Iranian war is driven by chimpanzee logic'. The plan for the article is to illuminate global politics by contrasting chimpanzee politics with the politics of our other closest primate relative, bonobos. I adapt the word logic from the meta-theory of institutional logics (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institutional_logic). My variation from institutional logics theory is to explicitly recognise that our behaviour is shaped by both logics (nurture) as well as nature.
An interesting concept of the One West, but the use of an organism metaphor seems to me to be a bit over-egged. Certainly, there is an underlying civilisation dimension but a proper understanding of why the West behaves the way it does (politically and socially) cannot be fathomed from inside the Western glass bowl, with Lotaz and Sakwa being on the inside.
One needs to see the West from the outside. Read How the World Thinks by Julian Baggini or even How the World Made the West by Josephine Quinn. The West is different from the East (essentially Chinese), the South East (mainly Indian), the Sub-Saharan African and the various indigenous peoples in the colonised peripheries in the way they think. Over the last 500 years, the West's thinking became entrenched along scientific lines, that everything can be experimented and a proof can be discovered. The thinking in the Rest is not so linear and there are things in life, including knowledge, that cannot be fully understood by scientific and rational means. Due to the 'success' of colonisation and later capitalistic domination of the Rest, the West became intolerant of any difference, including different races, cultures and norms. Wars killing the others, phobias and anti immigration stances fit well with this thinking. Russphobia is slightly more nuanced. The Mongol invasion of Russia and the Black Death from Crimea may be responsible for conjuring a view of the Russian culture infected by the Asian, hence the political phobia.
The solution for the West, by that I mean the ordinary people in the West, needs to be more tolerant and not be afraid of other cultures. All cultures can adopt useful elements from each other for their greater benefit. The world's greatest civilizations learnt from each other. Diversity of people is the greatest gift of natural evolution. Diversity needs to be embraced, including cultural diversity. Look at China and India (pre Modi) and see how different ethnic cultures live and let live.
The East has learnt a lot from the West. It's time for the West to ditch it's manufactured superiority and learn from the East. We all need to be able to live with each other and live in harmony. Wars and phobias are for the weak.
Thanks, Pascal. The One West body is an excellent metaphor and 'visual' explanation for the otherwise incoherent positions and inexplicable behaviors listed at the beginning of your article-- the true questions we should all ask ourselves. More than the biological metaphor, however, I find the One West heuristic power in the similarity with the 'deep', 'third' level of the tripartite state described by Aaron Good. Similarly to what you say for world politics, the behaviors of single states cannot be explained by remaining confined in the 'unrealistic' and buffoonish levels one (politicians, military) and two (secret services tightly merged with underground dealers of drugs, arms, people, animals). A third and deeper level of prime movers-- the sources of financial deals and extra-large, colonial wars-- is down there to orient and direct the first two at will. In this sense, I'd say that people like Merz and Epstein are the bubbles that -- once in a while -- burp out and allow a perception of the monster below. And your One West is the monster-- a deep, inter-state third level where amorphous, unfeeling and senseless corporations act as prime movers of the comedies and tragedies above. So, thanks again for the very useful metaphor. If I may, I'd love if you could share your reflections about the role of militarism in all this (my compact definition of militarism is the "glorification, endless expansion and use of military means and violence").
I myself consider since long that the very idea of the Roman Empire is still alive let’s paraphrase the famous quote by Marx « a ghost is haunting Europe : Rome »
you can describe the European history through the reccurent resurgence of the imperial idea : Charlemagne, the catholic church the Holy Roman Empire, the habsburg, Napoleon and in their ´style » The nazis and their Gross Europa fighting for the European civilization
Now the center of the West has shifted to washington
Thank you for this concept but you have left out the crucial factor, the power of Capital and its relentless search for ever increasing profit which is why "The One West" can be best described as a kleptocracy preying upon the greed and stupidity of those they foist into state power. Thus the growth of colonialism and slavery by the One West over the past centuries which has transmogrified from military control to financialisation of the over arching economy of the One West. By contrast, modern China positions the State above Capital putting the welfare of its citizens above personal profit.
Capital plays the long game and will profit from destruction of markets and industry as stranded assets are cheaply hoovered up and distressed populations become compliant to greater control.
I think the author's analogy is a good one. I also agree that the 'realist' school of international relations, despite its considerable explanatory power, may not adequately describe the West's current geopolitical formulation.
It's a human trait to use metaphors, analogies and similes to help describe something that we can't (or don't wish) to put in plain language. But it may be possible to offer a useful description of the One West/Collective West in a direct rather than oblique way. For this I suggest a term that has a number of devotees in the modern scientific community: "emergence."
Emergence, in this usage, is strictly a collective property that sometimes arises in a complex system. The remarkable thing about emergence is that it is not deterministic. In other words, though one may understand the individual elements of the system very well, when they are combined they may produce novel actions that were not predictable simply by considering the individual elements. Alter the system - say, take away a sufficient number of the elements - and the property disappears. The remaining elements of the system then become discreet and show only those behaviors that are intrinsic to them alone.
In the cognitive sciences, some people regard consciousness as an emergent property. By that is meant that one can (with effort) understand the biological underpinnings of human consciousness. Yet there is no known reason, principle or theory that predicts consciousness would arise from a collection of neurons, senses and chemical neurotransmitters. It is an unpredictable outcome of a collective.
In physics, certain fundamental properties also exhibit this emergent behavior. We can predict with great precision what individual particles will do because we know their inherent properties so well. But when aggregated in sufficient quantities, even if they're all the identical particle, a new property can emerge, one which was not predicted by that precise knowledge we have. As long as that collective of particles continues, so does the property.
The key to emergent behavior is that it's collective. An individual element of a system may have no direct connection to the emergent properties we see. Remove an individual element from a vast system and the same system behavior may continue. However once a threshold is reached where the number of elements is below a minimum, the collective behavior disappears.
For those looking for a non-metaphorical way to describe the West, this viewpoint may have some merit. Though we can with varying degrees predict what states alone would or should do, when they merge into a single entity, unpredictable behaviors can arise. The collective whole may create actions that are fundamentally disconnected from the individual parts of the system. Indeed, the collective may even do things that are detrimental to parts of itself.
There is some friction between this view and the biological metaphor of international relations. Biology is deterministic. If the individual parts of an organism are healthy, then so is the organism and it will keep functioning within the parameters of its evolutionary path. That's to say, the collective parts of a human will not reassemble themselves into a giraffe or tree. Emergence, on the other hand, is not deterministic. One would fully expect to see collective behavior that veers significantly from what might expect from a single element of the system, or even of a majority of the elements.
Pascal, I’m so glad I found your work. What a great article. Can I ask if you’d be willing to consider a neighboring metaphor for those who speak of “the Decline of the West” and the end of the dollar? “When Time ends, we’re all going to be in big trouble.” This sentence is nonsensical to any English speaker because Time is a precondition for reality. There is nothing outside of spacetime; nothing outside of the market, which America controls the parameters of via the Federal Reserve and the Treasury. If the market is a tool of the West, and the market is itself an abstraction of civilizational reality, then it is logical that those who have control over the parameters of reality choose to alter them when trouble arises. The End of the West/dollar narrative is a category error: When Time ends, there will be no longer any trouble for anybody because that’s the end of the show.
One West = Eurocolonial empire. Currently controlled by the faction of its oligarchy that could be described as Zionintern. And now you know why it is not only the European states that are acting against their own self interest. HR 1229 shows that even what people would have described as the hegemon, is "nordstreaming" itself:
BTW "Organs, Functions, and Distributed Power" is perhaps missing a George Galloway reference, as he often says: Israel and the US are "two cheeks of the same arse".
However, I believe the level that picture is fixed to is wrong. In my opinion it is not the nations or states that form "one west". These constructs do not have volition of their own. Rather it is the people manning the desks of power in these nations.
Not so much the politicians, they are likely corrupted puppets serving their own best interests - which of course can also mean that they are simply fighting for their survival on the political floor, a clean slate on criminal registers or literally their physical survival by following orders thus receiving money, jobs, a live among the jet set (example : IStGH).
But the bureaucrats. Those not elected but hired. Being pushed into their positions by interests above than the "one west" level. Those who really make the decisions their politicans then sign. They form the network across nation-boundaries and it is them - with the help of their hidden masters - who define the maniacal and destructive policies we see today.
This provocative piece, to my amazement, presented a framework of Zionist and white supremacist ideologies (and learned behaviors), without having to refer directly to either. I was reminded, as I digested the finely laid out proposition, that the One West is self-aware and unapologetically ruthless. It could never survive without the profound mind manipulation of its own publics.
The One West, I assume, was the devolved renewal of the liberal democratic state that championed the rights of the individual above all else. This is the only available path to ensure a sustained recognition and acceptance of the inherent unfairness of life...and the policies of the western powers were always displaying that. In this sense, the One West is fiercely opposed to legalistic solutions through the decisions of autonomous agents of equal statures. Hence, the animus toward communism. I think this is why there is a total refusal to fashion a security arrangement involving Russia and the West.
I would be interested in hearing the reactions to Pascal's essay of some Black radical proponents, because this is a picture of 'self and other' logic.
I want average Americans and their closest companions to recall their upbringings, and explain how they were introduced to communism and slavery, as familial conversations and scholastic inquiries. The messaging was ubiquitous and pervasive...and monotonal. LIFE IS UNFAIR. God wants us to love our fellow humans, but...
The economist Richard Wolff has talked about how the liberal sacred cow, democracy, has been defined to exactly describe the profile of the American state. And that is anti-democratic in its roots. In an 1886 U.S. Supreme Court case, Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad, it was ruled that corporations possess constitutional standing similar to how individual persons do. It glossed over the detail, that propertied individuals have standing, but poor individual persons have far less. So this is the lore of individual primacy writ large.
From the pulpits on Sundays, the bombastic conjurings of the robed hucksters remind the parishioners that they are so lucky to live in the land of freedom, when so many others work to take that freedom away. Communism was bad, and slavery was unfortunate, but neither communism nor slavery, and especially not capitalism were ever clearly defined to the children who had their brains pounded with the simple messaging. And so post WWII Americans experienced living inside a corporation, posing as a state.
Despite all of the trappings of a real, democratic state, the boomers were inside a corporate hierarchical system which was devised specifically to marginalize thinkers and especially defiant ones. Initially, the defiant thinkers found a home in the academy, but as writer Gabriel Rockhill has outlined, Marxism in the West was simultaneously distorted and championed, to forestall international consensus that would threaten the One West homogeneity.
In 1972, Richard Nixon appointed a former Chamber of Commerce operative named Lewis Powell to the U.S. Supreme Court, and Powell's Memorandum, penned in 1971, which was a mission statement for corporate domination in a country (where corporations were dominant), was probably the deal clincher. 1971 was a precarious moment in America, because the media was not yet solely a corporate tool, and the televised, brutal sordidness of the American aggression in Vietnam was waking up the American public. So assassinations were up and democratic practices were down. Jim Crow, was still breathing, and public cynicism and outrage was climbing. The elected president, who had won his reelection handily, had to resign from office barely a year into his second term. Liberals claimed that only a democracy could have averted a constitutional crisis under such institutional perfidy. But a year after that, the deep pockets spoke. The Trilateral Commission convened to produce a paper which outlined the threat of too much democracy. So the corporation had to adapt to an unfortunate consequence of its liberal rhetoric: an increasingly informed public.
I heard someone argue that, America. in its 250th year this year has only had nineteen years where it wasn't waging war. So, by my calculation, eight of those nineteen years of abstinence occurred from the end of the Vietnam War and the skirmish in Grenada in 1983. If we discount Grenada as an actual war, that kicks the number to fifteen years of suspended American aggression because it didn't confidently have the public onside. Crisis of democracy, indeed.
So here we are in 2026, and American aggression is on steroids. The media is an overt megaphone for regime rules and orders. The world has seen and felt the caprice and death grip of the One West. It has invested heavily in logistical legitimacy, but now it can no longer sustain the appearance of reasonableness. The glue that holds the One West together is tacit public approval, and that is as safe as the ecosphere that is spasming spontaneously after unfathomable industrial, mostly military, contamination for the better part of a century. Watch Earth's Greatest Enemy for a sense of the breadth of the One West's excremental emanations.
Pascal's description of global divisions and its various allegiances and meanings, is a great theoretical reference, but to me, it is more outstanding as a brilliant example of the journalism that the One West invented and can no longer abide. The publics inside the One West must be emancipated from their unconscious and their bubbles. If it isn't clear that the One West is a death march, that its current opponents are the light to follow, then many more will die to achieve a new equilibrium.
What an excellent article. Yes, it certainly explains how the separation of Germany was viewed as a wound on Europe, while the separation of Korea and China was and is viewed as completely normal. The hypocrisy is cultural.
Strong piece on the One West. Though Japan strikes me as performative participant only—not part at the deeper civilizational level. Are slavery, colonialism, and empire causes or symptoms? I think they're symptoms—else why are these trademarks of the One West? Should we not look for deeper underlying commonalities among the core group?
Oh, Monsieur Pascal, I have read with great interest your proposal regarding "The One West."
I am, in fact, a Clinical Psychologist (now retired), who came to academia after having dreamt of becoming a scholar of animal naturalism — which explains why, for a good number of years, I managed to hold the chair of Evolutionism for Psychologists (simply called Ethology).
More recently, and from my interests as a passionate observer of animal behavior, I have ventured into the self-taught study of geopolitics. I have always been clear that I approach it from my old habit as a teacher of Ethology.
In this new chapter of my intellectual interests, I have learned to recognize the difference between the Realist or Neorealist model (as professed in Western academia) and the Structuralist model (which feels more at home with Marxist influences).
Now, from these preliminary lines that serve as a confession of my own — Latin American — context, I have decided to write on this board to mention two concrete things.
First, if it were up to me, I would not be so afraid to mention Biology as a conceptual foundation for your thesis on how you describe the organization of "The One West."
I say this because, for my own clarity as an unsuspecting reader of geopolitical literature, I have curiously always resorted to the symbolic vision of representing each State as a character in a particular troop of chimpanzees — one that, by some chance, has fallen into interaction patterns that are the most extremely distant from the more harmonious forms recognized among their cousins, the Bonobos.
Seen this way, it occurs to me to suggest the conclusion that whatever can be translated into the language of the behavior of a particular chimpanzee troop belongs, by its own right, within the field of Biology, and additionally, it would not need to justify itself by clarifying that no genetic variables should be presumed there to explain the particularities of the forms of organization within that particular troop.
And second, being somewhat presumptuous, I tend to believe that I can guess with great probability of success that the Anthropologist and Primatologist Franz de Waal would find your thesis about the "anatomist" model of relations among the members of "The One West" to be perfectly natural.
One last suggestion from an amateur ethologist: it would still be necessary to clarify that, as a result of belonging to the anti-natural experiment of sedentary, anonymous, and fully technology-dependent civilization in order to survive, it has ended up being a fact that, as a social universe, we have reduced almost to total extinction our tendency toward cooperation and the frequent expression of compassion. For that very reason, today we can see how Neoliberalism and certain self-proclaimed libertarian stances end up promoting social behavior tendencies that are typical of rigidly organized mammals around a central Alpha power — tendencies that were not representative of our groups in the immediate period before the beginning of civilization, after the accidental discovery of agricultural technology.
From Colombia, with immense respect.
Hello Ernesto. I too am a fan of Franz de Waal. I have just started to draft an article with the preliminary title 'The Iranian war is driven by chimpanzee logic'. The plan for the article is to illuminate global politics by contrasting chimpanzee politics with the politics of our other closest primate relative, bonobos. I adapt the word logic from the meta-theory of institutional logics (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institutional_logic). My variation from institutional logics theory is to explicitly recognise that our behaviour is shaped by both logics (nurture) as well as nature.
An interesting concept of the One West, but the use of an organism metaphor seems to me to be a bit over-egged. Certainly, there is an underlying civilisation dimension but a proper understanding of why the West behaves the way it does (politically and socially) cannot be fathomed from inside the Western glass bowl, with Lotaz and Sakwa being on the inside.
One needs to see the West from the outside. Read How the World Thinks by Julian Baggini or even How the World Made the West by Josephine Quinn. The West is different from the East (essentially Chinese), the South East (mainly Indian), the Sub-Saharan African and the various indigenous peoples in the colonised peripheries in the way they think. Over the last 500 years, the West's thinking became entrenched along scientific lines, that everything can be experimented and a proof can be discovered. The thinking in the Rest is not so linear and there are things in life, including knowledge, that cannot be fully understood by scientific and rational means. Due to the 'success' of colonisation and later capitalistic domination of the Rest, the West became intolerant of any difference, including different races, cultures and norms. Wars killing the others, phobias and anti immigration stances fit well with this thinking. Russphobia is slightly more nuanced. The Mongol invasion of Russia and the Black Death from Crimea may be responsible for conjuring a view of the Russian culture infected by the Asian, hence the political phobia.
The solution for the West, by that I mean the ordinary people in the West, needs to be more tolerant and not be afraid of other cultures. All cultures can adopt useful elements from each other for their greater benefit. The world's greatest civilizations learnt from each other. Diversity of people is the greatest gift of natural evolution. Diversity needs to be embraced, including cultural diversity. Look at China and India (pre Modi) and see how different ethnic cultures live and let live.
The East has learnt a lot from the West. It's time for the West to ditch it's manufactured superiority and learn from the East. We all need to be able to live with each other and live in harmony. Wars and phobias are for the weak.
Thanks, Pascal. The One West body is an excellent metaphor and 'visual' explanation for the otherwise incoherent positions and inexplicable behaviors listed at the beginning of your article-- the true questions we should all ask ourselves. More than the biological metaphor, however, I find the One West heuristic power in the similarity with the 'deep', 'third' level of the tripartite state described by Aaron Good. Similarly to what you say for world politics, the behaviors of single states cannot be explained by remaining confined in the 'unrealistic' and buffoonish levels one (politicians, military) and two (secret services tightly merged with underground dealers of drugs, arms, people, animals). A third and deeper level of prime movers-- the sources of financial deals and extra-large, colonial wars-- is down there to orient and direct the first two at will. In this sense, I'd say that people like Merz and Epstein are the bubbles that -- once in a while -- burp out and allow a perception of the monster below. And your One West is the monster-- a deep, inter-state third level where amorphous, unfeeling and senseless corporations act as prime movers of the comedies and tragedies above. So, thanks again for the very useful metaphor. If I may, I'd love if you could share your reflections about the role of militarism in all this (my compact definition of militarism is the "glorification, endless expansion and use of military means and violence").
Excellent
I myself consider since long that the very idea of the Roman Empire is still alive let’s paraphrase the famous quote by Marx « a ghost is haunting Europe : Rome »
you can describe the European history through the reccurent resurgence of the imperial idea : Charlemagne, the catholic church the Holy Roman Empire, the habsburg, Napoleon and in their ´style » The nazis and their Gross Europa fighting for the European civilization
Now the center of the West has shifted to washington
Thank you for this concept but you have left out the crucial factor, the power of Capital and its relentless search for ever increasing profit which is why "The One West" can be best described as a kleptocracy preying upon the greed and stupidity of those they foist into state power. Thus the growth of colonialism and slavery by the One West over the past centuries which has transmogrified from military control to financialisation of the over arching economy of the One West. By contrast, modern China positions the State above Capital putting the welfare of its citizens above personal profit.
Capital plays the long game and will profit from destruction of markets and industry as stranded assets are cheaply hoovered up and distressed populations become compliant to greater control.
I think the author's analogy is a good one. I also agree that the 'realist' school of international relations, despite its considerable explanatory power, may not adequately describe the West's current geopolitical formulation.
It's a human trait to use metaphors, analogies and similes to help describe something that we can't (or don't wish) to put in plain language. But it may be possible to offer a useful description of the One West/Collective West in a direct rather than oblique way. For this I suggest a term that has a number of devotees in the modern scientific community: "emergence."
Emergence, in this usage, is strictly a collective property that sometimes arises in a complex system. The remarkable thing about emergence is that it is not deterministic. In other words, though one may understand the individual elements of the system very well, when they are combined they may produce novel actions that were not predictable simply by considering the individual elements. Alter the system - say, take away a sufficient number of the elements - and the property disappears. The remaining elements of the system then become discreet and show only those behaviors that are intrinsic to them alone.
In the cognitive sciences, some people regard consciousness as an emergent property. By that is meant that one can (with effort) understand the biological underpinnings of human consciousness. Yet there is no known reason, principle or theory that predicts consciousness would arise from a collection of neurons, senses and chemical neurotransmitters. It is an unpredictable outcome of a collective.
In physics, certain fundamental properties also exhibit this emergent behavior. We can predict with great precision what individual particles will do because we know their inherent properties so well. But when aggregated in sufficient quantities, even if they're all the identical particle, a new property can emerge, one which was not predicted by that precise knowledge we have. As long as that collective of particles continues, so does the property.
The key to emergent behavior is that it's collective. An individual element of a system may have no direct connection to the emergent properties we see. Remove an individual element from a vast system and the same system behavior may continue. However once a threshold is reached where the number of elements is below a minimum, the collective behavior disappears.
For those looking for a non-metaphorical way to describe the West, this viewpoint may have some merit. Though we can with varying degrees predict what states alone would or should do, when they merge into a single entity, unpredictable behaviors can arise. The collective whole may create actions that are fundamentally disconnected from the individual parts of the system. Indeed, the collective may even do things that are detrimental to parts of itself.
There is some friction between this view and the biological metaphor of international relations. Biology is deterministic. If the individual parts of an organism are healthy, then so is the organism and it will keep functioning within the parameters of its evolutionary path. That's to say, the collective parts of a human will not reassemble themselves into a giraffe or tree. Emergence, on the other hand, is not deterministic. One would fully expect to see collective behavior that veers significantly from what might expect from a single element of the system, or even of a majority of the elements.
Pascal, I’m so glad I found your work. What a great article. Can I ask if you’d be willing to consider a neighboring metaphor for those who speak of “the Decline of the West” and the end of the dollar? “When Time ends, we’re all going to be in big trouble.” This sentence is nonsensical to any English speaker because Time is a precondition for reality. There is nothing outside of spacetime; nothing outside of the market, which America controls the parameters of via the Federal Reserve and the Treasury. If the market is a tool of the West, and the market is itself an abstraction of civilizational reality, then it is logical that those who have control over the parameters of reality choose to alter them when trouble arises. The End of the West/dollar narrative is a category error: When Time ends, there will be no longer any trouble for anybody because that’s the end of the show.
One West = Eurocolonial empire. Currently controlled by the faction of its oligarchy that could be described as Zionintern. And now you know why it is not only the European states that are acting against their own self interest. HR 1229 shows that even what people would have described as the hegemon, is "nordstreaming" itself:
https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-bill/1229
BTW "Organs, Functions, and Distributed Power" is perhaps missing a George Galloway reference, as he often says: Israel and the US are "two cheeks of the same arse".
"One West" as a body at first glance hits home.
However, I believe the level that picture is fixed to is wrong. In my opinion it is not the nations or states that form "one west". These constructs do not have volition of their own. Rather it is the people manning the desks of power in these nations.
Not so much the politicians, they are likely corrupted puppets serving their own best interests - which of course can also mean that they are simply fighting for their survival on the political floor, a clean slate on criminal registers or literally their physical survival by following orders thus receiving money, jobs, a live among the jet set (example : IStGH).
But the bureaucrats. Those not elected but hired. Being pushed into their positions by interests above than the "one west" level. Those who really make the decisions their politicans then sign. They form the network across nation-boundaries and it is them - with the help of their hidden masters - who define the maniacal and destructive policies we see today.
What a wonderful image - a multiple Leviathan. I wonder what Thomas Hobbes would think about it.
Further to my earlier comment, this article just published by Karl Sanchez reinforces my position. Please read it
https://karlof1.substack.com/p/world-war-three-the-war-to-end-hegemony?r=i8hr0&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=post%20viewer
This provocative piece, to my amazement, presented a framework of Zionist and white supremacist ideologies (and learned behaviors), without having to refer directly to either. I was reminded, as I digested the finely laid out proposition, that the One West is self-aware and unapologetically ruthless. It could never survive without the profound mind manipulation of its own publics.
The One West, I assume, was the devolved renewal of the liberal democratic state that championed the rights of the individual above all else. This is the only available path to ensure a sustained recognition and acceptance of the inherent unfairness of life...and the policies of the western powers were always displaying that. In this sense, the One West is fiercely opposed to legalistic solutions through the decisions of autonomous agents of equal statures. Hence, the animus toward communism. I think this is why there is a total refusal to fashion a security arrangement involving Russia and the West.
I would be interested in hearing the reactions to Pascal's essay of some Black radical proponents, because this is a picture of 'self and other' logic.
I want average Americans and their closest companions to recall their upbringings, and explain how they were introduced to communism and slavery, as familial conversations and scholastic inquiries. The messaging was ubiquitous and pervasive...and monotonal. LIFE IS UNFAIR. God wants us to love our fellow humans, but...
The economist Richard Wolff has talked about how the liberal sacred cow, democracy, has been defined to exactly describe the profile of the American state. And that is anti-democratic in its roots. In an 1886 U.S. Supreme Court case, Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad, it was ruled that corporations possess constitutional standing similar to how individual persons do. It glossed over the detail, that propertied individuals have standing, but poor individual persons have far less. So this is the lore of individual primacy writ large.
From the pulpits on Sundays, the bombastic conjurings of the robed hucksters remind the parishioners that they are so lucky to live in the land of freedom, when so many others work to take that freedom away. Communism was bad, and slavery was unfortunate, but neither communism nor slavery, and especially not capitalism were ever clearly defined to the children who had their brains pounded with the simple messaging. And so post WWII Americans experienced living inside a corporation, posing as a state.
Despite all of the trappings of a real, democratic state, the boomers were inside a corporate hierarchical system which was devised specifically to marginalize thinkers and especially defiant ones. Initially, the defiant thinkers found a home in the academy, but as writer Gabriel Rockhill has outlined, Marxism in the West was simultaneously distorted and championed, to forestall international consensus that would threaten the One West homogeneity.
In 1972, Richard Nixon appointed a former Chamber of Commerce operative named Lewis Powell to the U.S. Supreme Court, and Powell's Memorandum, penned in 1971, which was a mission statement for corporate domination in a country (where corporations were dominant), was probably the deal clincher. 1971 was a precarious moment in America, because the media was not yet solely a corporate tool, and the televised, brutal sordidness of the American aggression in Vietnam was waking up the American public. So assassinations were up and democratic practices were down. Jim Crow, was still breathing, and public cynicism and outrage was climbing. The elected president, who had won his reelection handily, had to resign from office barely a year into his second term. Liberals claimed that only a democracy could have averted a constitutional crisis under such institutional perfidy. But a year after that, the deep pockets spoke. The Trilateral Commission convened to produce a paper which outlined the threat of too much democracy. So the corporation had to adapt to an unfortunate consequence of its liberal rhetoric: an increasingly informed public.
I heard someone argue that, America. in its 250th year this year has only had nineteen years where it wasn't waging war. So, by my calculation, eight of those nineteen years of abstinence occurred from the end of the Vietnam War and the skirmish in Grenada in 1983. If we discount Grenada as an actual war, that kicks the number to fifteen years of suspended American aggression because it didn't confidently have the public onside. Crisis of democracy, indeed.
So here we are in 2026, and American aggression is on steroids. The media is an overt megaphone for regime rules and orders. The world has seen and felt the caprice and death grip of the One West. It has invested heavily in logistical legitimacy, but now it can no longer sustain the appearance of reasonableness. The glue that holds the One West together is tacit public approval, and that is as safe as the ecosphere that is spasming spontaneously after unfathomable industrial, mostly military, contamination for the better part of a century. Watch Earth's Greatest Enemy for a sense of the breadth of the One West's excremental emanations.
Pascal's description of global divisions and its various allegiances and meanings, is a great theoretical reference, but to me, it is more outstanding as a brilliant example of the journalism that the One West invented and can no longer abide. The publics inside the One West must be emancipated from their unconscious and their bubbles. If it isn't clear that the One West is a death march, that its current opponents are the light to follow, then many more will die to achieve a new equilibrium.
What an excellent article. Yes, it certainly explains how the separation of Germany was viewed as a wound on Europe, while the separation of Korea and China was and is viewed as completely normal. The hypocrisy is cultural.
excellent
Great essay, thank you Pascal.
Strong piece on the One West. Though Japan strikes me as performative participant only—not part at the deeper civilizational level. Are slavery, colonialism, and empire causes or symptoms? I think they're symptoms—else why are these trademarks of the One West? Should we not look for deeper underlying commonalities among the core group?