After 3 big wins - 1815, 1945, 1991 - is the Anglophone empire finally losing?

'You know who I blame? The old Ayatollah, for calling us the Great Satan. It’s like he put the evil eye on us and we shrank.' - John Updike

“I wasn’t thinking of me, I was thinking of the country. You know who I blame? The old Ayatollah, for calling us the Great Satan. It’s like he put the evil eye on us and we shrank. He really stuck it to us, somehow.”

• John Updike, Rabbit At Rest, 1990

It can’t be denied that the English-American worldview/alliance was the sole victor of all three of the most impactful revolutions in modern history.

In the French anti-monarchical revolution, the WWI and WWII liberal- and social-democratic revolutions and the Soviet socialist-democratic revolution the only winner of all three was the Anglo-American world. This fact-based historical analysis was proffered in 1996 by Italian communist historian Domenico Losurdo, and can be found in English in War and Revolution: Rethinking the 20th Century.

“The sole political entity to emerge regularly victorious from all three conflicts was the Anglo-American world. The transfiguration of the Anglo-American political tradition and, in particular, of the USA is the consecration of this fact,” he wrote.

He doesn’t specifically clarify, but when he writes “consecration of this fact” I assume he means to make it universal, permanent and sacred (unchallengeable).

This would describe the role of any contemporary historian regularly found in the mainstream media. Niall Ferguson, to give one example, has risen to prominence by demanding world domination for Anglophone (English-speaking) culture. It’s a theme constantly echoed in ever-reactionary publications like The Economist. Eugenics is out, post-Hitler - supremacy is now linguistic.

Even though the United Kingdom left the European Union, English is still its bureaucratic lingua franca.

In 2013 whistleblower Edward Snowden’s intelligence leaks brought the Five Eyes spy ring to the fore - Anglophone collusion between Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the UK and the US. We can bookend these revelations with the 2021 “stab in the back” of France by Australia on a €50 billion defense deal scotched by the US - the Anglophones stick together, for as much as the French rail against the “Anglo-Saxon world”.

Since they can’t rely on eugenics anymore it’s the English-speaking world which is now elevated, and this helps explain Losurdo’s essential thesis: The Anglophone world engages in revisionist history to elevate the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and the US Revolution of 1776 while falsely and immorally attempting to liquidate humankind’s “revolutionary tradition” for everyone after. Liquidation of the revolutionary tradition - what year does it stop for you?

It’s a superb and obviously true analysis: From the French Revolution, to the completely ignored yet undoubtedly revolutionary American abolitionists (William Lloyd Garrison on the 1787 US Constitution, which codified the racial state: “a covenant with death and an agreement with hell”.) to the Bolsheviks, all revolutionaries post-1776 are inevitably labelled by Anglophones as a “virus” or “madmen”. Over and over, the problem is biological. Today, not speaking English is to be as excised from intellectual existence as a doomed pagan in 5th century Byzantium.

While the two Anglophone revolutions were advancements - away from absolute monarchy and towards democracy, if only partially - Losurdo notes (in an analysis which is now branded as “wokeism” by political conservatives) the only way the US and English Revolutions can appear in a positive light is if the experiences of the Native Americans, Blacks, Irish and Scottish are written out of the history of these revolutions. Similarly, World Wars I and II only appears like a Wilsonian crusade to make the world “safe for democracy” if all of colonialism - Anglophone, French and, crucially, Hitler’s openly-declared plan for colonisation of Eastern Europe - is written out of history.

Such is the sham “history” taught in liberal democracies in order to continually liquidate the revolutionary tradition.

Prophet Mohammad’s insistence on replacing Byzantium’s liquidation of pagans with tolerance for those not called by God to Islam is one of the many political revolutions he’s responsible for, but that’s another column, and it’s one certainly will never find in a liberal democratic syllabus either. The point is: we see why Western history is so unpersuasive to the latter half described in Ferguson’s book, The West and The Rest.

What Ferguson mostly rails about now - to profitable Anglophone acclaim - is the alleged threat of Islam. But this is many decades after the evil eye of Khomeini - who continued the incredibly shocking honesty and unflinching bravery of fellow Muslim Malcolm X - so what’s the connection?

Just as Losurdo joined the small but plausible chorus calling WWI and WWII the “Second Thirty Years’ War”, we can see now - as Losurdo could not, especially as he was writing 5 years before 9/11 - that the Iranians kicked off the fourth major multi-decade historical trend.

As I wrote in my latest book on the Yellow Vests: it is revisionist, liberal democratic folly to separate the Wars of the French Revolution from the wars of the Napoleonic era: 1789-1815 saw seven different European coalitions to topple revolutionary France. Twenty-four years to subdue the first modern revolution, and only reactionary England fought in all of them.

The Cold War lasted from 1945-1991. The US abolitionist movement effectively lasted over a hundred years - it’s not as if US Blacks actually got liberal democratic rights in 1865, but more like 1965. The Palestinians may take as long as this, as they are nearly as disenfranchised, debilitated and dominated as the Blacks in the US were.

The battle for modern human rights in the Muslim world - which has the misfortune of being placed on the site of today’s Potosi mines… but only if 16th century ships ran on silver - first counter-attacked the Anglophone hegemon in 1979. In 2017 the tide began to turn against the imposition of puppets in Syria, and with Russian assistance. Today, Hamas has counter-attacked the West’s colonial outpost of Israel - more Israelis (85%) speak English than Canadians (83%).

The eventual victory of Palestine is certainly assured, but we are seeing now - as Losurdo could not - that it will coincide with the certain rise of China, the certain establishment of Russia’s insistence on a multipolar world and the likely failure of the Anglophone-led liberal democratic project of the European Union.

2023 may be the tipping point - the end of the Anglophone run of success in the most important global political trends. How can they be on the right side of history when they’re still in favor of not just monarchy and colonialism but even an unregulated 1%? Perhaps history will say this year’s failure of the Ukrainian counter-offensive - which revealed the military-industrial-technological demise of the West - was the start of the end?

But to go beyond the military to the cultural-political - and thus the start of the beginning - we require a successful popular revolution: thus, the global political trend was kicked off by the 1979 Iranian Islamic Revolution, which reasserted the primacy of morality in government.

Iran is not insisting that this morality in your government be Islamic, simply that there be some morality: “No more 1%-led, Great Satan-type of behavior, at least over here and at least by us.” Oligarchic, elitist liberal democracy fails - has always failed, will always fail - this test.

Socialist democracies don’t fail this test because they are truly revolutionary - finally overturning the tip of the pyramid via intellectual calls to morality which end eugenics-based or ancestor-based privileges, both of which are mere inheritances.

Indeed, modern secularists would rail against Robespierre for saying, “The sole foundation of civil society is morality. All the societies waging war against us are based on crime.” This was indeed true of those fighting the French Revolution just as much as it was true of those fighting the Iranian, Cuban or Chinese Revolutions.

More is to be said on Losurdo, superb critic of liberal democracy, but Updike’s Rabbit at Rest won the Pulitzer Prize in 1990 and he’s often considered the greatest postwar American writer. I like his dialogue, but can do without his tedious, essentially sensual-superficial narration of American suburban life (unlike Nabokov there are countless unessential sentences), and especially his depressing, morally empty worldview. He might be so domestically esteemed because his world is totally of the encapsulated (entombed?) individual and never social - so how can he be a revolutionary? If a personal sacrifice is called for then liquidate away, Rabbit would surely say.

The main character of Rabbit would be resurrected - in name only, as there is zero connection between the two characters - in what is nevertheless the best “white trash” movie of its era, 8 Mile, starring the trailer-park character Eminem.

Updike isn’t all that funny, but when he is it’s mostly in the American “cringe humour” type of way: we cringe at Rabbit’s awful “innocent” self-centredness, his shameless unwillingness to change and his perpetual immaturity, finally laid bare by a Japanese Toyota work superior. Writing in 1990 it’s seems likely that Updike was unaware that the 1985 Plaza Accord cemented Japan as part of the West, i.e. a nation where one’s leaders engage in the colonisation of their own people for the benefit of themselves and the international 1% of Marx.

However, Updike certainly was astute in grasping the American cultural impact of the Iranian Revolution, and I did appreciate his take on France:

“A computer is like a Frenchman. It seems real smart until you know the language. Once you know the language, you realise it’s dumb as hell. Quick, sure. But quick ain’t the same as smart.”

<—>

Ramin Mazaheri is the chief correspondent in Paris for PressTV and has lived in France since 2009. He has been a daily newspaper reporter in the US, and has reported from Iran, Cuba, Egypt, Tunisia, South Korea and elsewhere. His latest book is France's Yellow Vests: Western Repression of the West's Best Values. He is also the author of ‘Socialism’s Ignored Success: Iranian Islamic Socialism’ as well as ‘I’ll Ruin Everything You Are: Ending Western Propaganda on Red China’, which is also available in simplified and traditional Chinese.