The world is on the verge of chaos and global riots. How many such prophecies and apocalyptic predictions have we heard?
While in the past they were mainly propagated by fortune tellers and conspiracy theorists through the tabloids, nowadays such predictions are made by respected think tanks based on economic deductions and mathematical analysis.
For example, a lot of noise has just been made by the Economist, which, using data from the IMF and several Western institutions, has built its statistical model that predicts riots and unrest in many countries over the next year, especially in Africa, Asia and Latin America. According to this analysis, Turkmenistan, Egypt, Vietnam and Myanmar will face the most violent upheavals. Uzbekistan, Colombia, Nicaragua, Mauritania, Botswana and others follow.
The Economist based this rather controversial model on a country’s dependence on fuel and food prices. Since the prognoses for these commodities are not good, we are told to expect protests in the countries that are most dependent on shortages. The truth is, no sooner had the latest issue appeared on newsstands than mass protests erupted in dozens of US cities. And these protests were connected not with food prices, but with the scandalous decision of the Supreme Court, which abolished the constitutional right of women to abortion. This proved once again the inaccuracy of The Economist’s forecasts, which do not take into account political and media factors determining the protest agenda.
But, of course, the record-breaking inflation that is now taking hold in various parts of the world will have an impact on the overall backdrop. Rising energy and food prices, of course, create favourable conditions for the growth of protest moods in societies and certainly do not contribute to political stability.
We see what this has led to in, say, Sri Lanka, where the government rashly followed the green agenda of the West and introduced a ban on the use of inorganic fertilizers and agrochemicals. This, in turn, caused a dramatic drop in the yield of tea and rice, the basis of the island nation’s exports. The protests resulted in burning vehicles, storming of administrative buildings, a state of emergency, violence against protesters, the country’s first-ever default, and the resignation of the government. But even after this, the protests have not subsided, sometimes escalating into violent clashes with the police.
The US media blames Russia – it was allegedly the “war in Ukraine” that fuelled the crisis in Sri Lanka. It is strange that the mindless green policies of the outgoing government have not yet been explained as a result of Moscow’s actions, as if it was not the West and the same US media has been spinning the subject for the past decades. Judging by the fact that Greta Thunberg, a recent favourite of the Western public, has already been declared a “Kremlin agent”, it is not long before the green economy is declared a machination of Moscow, which decided to destroy its competitors this way.
Equally large scale protests have recently rocked Peru. There too it ended in clashes with the police and casualties amongst the protesters. The reasons were the same: soaring fuel prices and a shortage of fertiliser caused by mindless Western sanctions against Russia. These protests have spilled over into neighbouring countries. For example, at least five demonstrators in Ecuador were killed last week in clashes with police.
Anti-government protests in African countries are gaining momentum. In Uganda, where people already spend up to half of their income on food, rising food prices led to mass protests and casualties among protesters. The country’s President Yoweri Museveni’s remarks, which made him feel like Marie Antoinette, caused particular outrage as he told protesters: “If there is no bread, eat manioc.” The most striking thing about this scandal is the reaction of the Western media. The British BBC, for example, failing to see the analogy with the French Revolution, took Museveni’s call quite seriously and supported it, saying that eating cassava in Africa was the perfect solution to the global food crisis. Somehow the BBC did not advise the British to solve their problems in this way.
Their problems are not so different from those faced by the most impoverished countries in Africa. Clearly, life is much richer in the Kingdom, and so people are not starving to death. But the number of people asking for free food rations (so-called food banks) is growing exponentially in Britain. The country is now gripped by the sad story of 59-year-old Scottish farmer Carl Hughes, father of three, who was forced to sell his home and move to a trailer set up in his sheep pasture because of unaffordable fuel prices.
The result of rampant inflation and a significant fall in living standards is the biggest strike by British railway workers in 30 years, which threatens to become the first general strike since 1926. The first days of the strike have been fairly peaceful, although they have led to big problems for passengers. According to the Financial Times, this was partly due to the fact that many Britons and their employers benefited from the experience of the pandemic, during which they adapted to working from home. But teachers, pilots, lawyers, local government civil servants threaten to join the strike, which could lead to much bigger problems for the whole country. It is no coincidence that Britain’s Home Office is drafting legislation to strengthen the powers of the police in dispersing mass protests.
Returning to The Economist’s predictions, it is worth noting that the magazine has planned riots related to rising food and fuel prices exclusively in poor countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America for the coming year. Other western media outlets, while predicting riots in these same countries, seem not to notice the protests that have already started in developed countries.
For example, last week the roads in the Netherlands were blocked by thousands of tractors of local farmers. And if you look at the protesters’ demands and concerns, they are not much different from the causes of the protests in Sri Lanka. Dutch farmers rebelled against yet another green decision by their government requiring them to reduce their harmful emissions by 70 (and in some cases 95) per cent. Against the background of rising fuel prices and artificial fertiliser shortages, many Dutch farmers now face the threat of ruin. They are very determined, threatening more serious protests – the NRC newspaper is already drawing a Kalashnikov with a pitchfork instead of a bayonet – citing the words of one protest leader that The Hague “is at war with the Farmer’s People’s Republic”.
So what’s wrong with The Economist’s statistical model? It doesn’t say so explicitly, but from the article describing it, the danger of riots was assessed not only in terms of claimed economic indicators, but also in terms of demographics. The magazine explains: “Violent protests are more likely in places where there are a lot of unemployed single young people”, because those “have nothing to lose by joining in the riots”. Apparently for this reason the magazine excluded the elderly in Britain and the Netherlands from the list of countries where global riots are likely to break out.
Curiously, the magazine titled its article “Hungry and Angry. A wave of unrest is coming. We tell you how to prevent some of them”. But the only practical advice given is a call to reduce the use of biofuel products (again, a blow to the green agenda). But to address the real cause of many of the problems (in particular, Western sanctions against Russian fertiliser and transport producers, which have led to shortages), The Economist’s analysts do not advise. In their analysis, they simply substitute these causes for the effects.
For example, the magazine unhesitatingly writes that Russia is to blame for the rise in fertilizer prices. And laments: “Though Mr. Putin is responsible for a large part of the global inflation, people tend to blame their own governments. <…> At the very moment when the economy was recovering, Mr Putin’s war blocked the supply of fertilisers. So it wasn’t the West that cut off supplies, it was “Mr Putin’s war”. And irrational farmers in the West and the developing world are not revolting against “the real culprit”, but against those who created the problems through sanctions. Yes, we remember Joe Biden: “Putin’s price increases” are to blame for all America’s woes.
In this connection it is simply amazing that the White House administration has not yet guessed to blame Russia for the new protests sweeping America. We are waiting for Biden to make a speech about “Putin’s decision by the US Supreme Court. After all, there has been no other reason for riots in the world for a long time; everything must be the Russians’ fault. That is why the West cannot solve any global problem, because it is looking for causes in Russia, not in itself. A dead-end road which really only leads to revolts and upheavals.
Vladimir Kornilov, RIA
Due to censorship and blocking of all media and alternative views, stay tuned to our Telegram channel