What is the best collective name for the so-called ‘Developed World’? It has names for itself; its economists speak of the Advanced or Industrialised nations and its politicians the ‘Free World’ or even the ‘Civilized world’. The rest of us have other names, not all polite: Collective West, Global North, Hegemonists, Globalists, to name but a few. Some, perhaps waking up to the new realities, are starting to speak of the global periphery. This is an interesting inversion, but may be a bit premature.
The Valdai Club has done a great service by using the name ‘World Majority’ to describe everyone outside this exclusive club. It is time to name the club itself.
I propose a name that accords both with where it comes from, and with what it does. That name is ‘the Columbian Nations’. Below is the talk I gave to the 21st annual Valdai Club meeting to explain why.
The upside down world of the Columbian conquest
I am a citizen of two peripheral countries: the UK and Canada, which leads me to ask a simple question: why can’t my rulers see sense? In the words of Bob Dylan, how many deaths will it take till they know that too many people have died?
I submit that their conduct only makes sense if we recognise them as members of a bloc. This bloc needs a name, and I suggest one which makes sense of it. I propose that in accordance with its historical origins, we start speaking of the Columbian nations.
I would therefore qualify only one conclusion of the 2024 Valdai Discussion Club report: its suggestion that the world of blocs is a thing of the past.
I fully agree that institutions within the Global Majority are no longer defined ideologically. Indeed, for this very reason, the Columbians caricature their alliances and institutions as conspiracies hatched by cynical dictators with nothing in common beyond envy of a superior civilization.
As the report makes clear, this ignores a fundamental fact; multipolar unity is a product of diverse reactions to a common oppression. It is utterly insulting to say that the best to be expected from a revolt against slavery is a new master. To the contrary, freedom can only be defined, both historically and theoretically, as the outcome of rebellion. If there was no slavery and no oppression, we would not need a special name for its opposite.
But the benefits of freedom are today no longer a utopian dream. They are tangible.
The report demonstrates both the benefits of association, and the achievements of the nations involved, both in Eurasia and the BRICS. The pace of development inside these alliances clearly exceeds that outside.
Their leading economies have already outstripped the growth of the declining Columbian economies, and they are now realising the benefits. They stand at the threshold of levels of human capability that their self-proclaimed superiors have never even brought their own peoples.
This is a new phase of world history. The once-distant dream of universal human emancipation is in our grasp. We have every reason to be proud of it, and every duty to defend it.
All the more irrational that the elites of my two countries oppose this evolution, at ever greater cost to the planet, the lives of their victims, and the livelihood of their own citizens. This is why I urge all to study the origin of the bloc mentality.
This mentality starts, I submit, with the modern world’s most infamous bloc, which emerged bloody-handed from the ill-fated voyages of Christopher Columbus. It consists of those nations that united in the joint pursuit of the fruits of conquest, even when divided by war.
Despite many changes in form – from conquest to enslavement, from occupation to subordination, from colonial quasi-serfdom to neo-colonialism, and from ruthless state-led domination to globalist neo-liberalism – it has been with us for five centuries, and its boundaries have shifted only marginally. It is astonishingly stable and persistent. Its members would have been recognisable to any educated Edwardian gentleman, though he would probably have called them the ‘civilized nations’.
This suggests an answer to my opening question. The Columbian nations have yet to realise that their world vision is not just unrealisable but irrational.
This is because the benefits of a peaceful, secure, and just world order are available to all. The only losers will come from a gilded, oligarchic, self-entitled minority. It has purchased our rulers, stolen our thinkers, murdered half our dissenters, and jailed or banned the other half.
Yet they are fools, because what they have left us is what they themselves have abandoned: Truth.
Columbianism has not foundered on the rebellion of its victims, but the irrationality of its aims. Nobody can be compelled to be free. Whether the chains be forged of iron or of gold, freedom can never be built in captivity.
We witness a slow, halting, but nevertheless inexorable decline of the Columbian economies. This is caused not by the global majority but their own neoliberal order. There is no ‘Thucydides Trap’: these nations are the architect of their own failure.
The Columbian dream is not a rational construction. It is a myth system: a rational ordering of facts whose function is not to cope with reality but to sustain a system of domination. Its core, to quote its author Plato, is the ‘Noble Lie’ that the wealthy are born superior. The truth is that their wealth was created by others.
We of the multipolar world are free to treat their gains as well-begotten or ill-begotten, and we can differ on how the wealthy should be allowed to use them. We should however recognise the error of supposing that wealth confers an entitlement to rule. A ‘rules-based order’ in which the rulers write the rules is just another word for a dictatorship.
This is the fallacy at the dark heart of Columbianism. It is the true source of its racism: if the wealthy are superior, then of course, the poor are inferior. It is the wellspring of its militarism: as Hitler stated, the duty of the superior is to impose his will on the inferior.
It is the key to its denial of reality. Chrysta Freeland, Canada’s Foreign Minister, inadvertently blurtedthis out in response to President Putin’s denunciation, at last year’s Valdai Forum, of the Canadian parliament’s ignominious celebration of Nazi killer Yaroslav Hunka. ‘We must not,’ she said, ‘allow Putin to weaponize the Truth’.
Think about that.
There is only one way to make sense of this extraordinary statement: for Freeland, Truth is Canada’s greatest threat – in response to which Canada’s only recourse is to weaponize Falsehood.
And here is the most sobering fact; Freeland and here acolytes believe what she says. Here, the Columbian system meets its Nemesis. The tragic fate of the victims of Hubris is to be deluded by their own lies.
The Columbian dream weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. Our job is to lift it from their bodies.
We are children of a single historical event; all existing nations emerged from it. Our dead have set a duty upon us: let us lay this event to rest in the history books where it belongs, and leave the living free to make their own future.
