The Hegemon is calculating for a World War to halt multipolarity. It supports Israel’s Gaza genocide as a necessary evil to win hard in West Asia, figuring who’s going to care once the war goes global?

The St Petersburg Economic Forum (SPIEF) takes place this week. It’s one of the go-to annual meetings across Eurasia. The overall theme in 2024 is “multipolarity,” quite fitting considering this is the year of the Russian presidency of BRICS. The BRICS summit next October in Kazan will be crucial in drawing the contours of the road map towards multipolarity going forward.

Ay, there’s the rub. Taking us to arguably the key question facing the Global Majority: How can we afford to dream about multipolarity when we are plunged into The Unthinkable, reduced to the role of mere spectators, watching a genocide broadcast 24/7 on every smartphone on the planet?

The – avowedly imperfect – International Court of Justice (ICJ) at least ordered the biblical genocidals to stop bombing Rafah. Israel’s response? They bombed Rafah. Worse, they burned children alive in refugee tents. With American missiles.

And the genocide will continue at least until the end of this multipolar year, as boasted by Israeli intel. The Global Majority at least clearly sees how the “rules-based international order” works. Yet that’s not much of a comfort.

The ICJ order to stop the carnage in Rafah, plus the ICC drive to seek warrants for the arrest of top Israeli leaders for serial war crimes in Gaza, predictably sent the Israel–US joined at-the-hip combo into a hysterical frenzy.

The heart of the matter concerns the real masters and managers of the Empire of Chaos and Plunder – much more than their lowly emissaries. The masters cannot allow any institution to loosen their grip on the official narrative.

The official narrative is “there’s no genocide in Gaza” and no “red lines” have been trespassed. This is the official diktat of the collective west. No breaches are allowed. They will go to unconstitutional extremes to enforce total narrative control, with an ironclad public relations operation to envelop the whole planet in layer after layer of propaganda stupor.

Slightly contradicting Mao Zedong, real power does not come from the barrel of a gun (or from a hypersonic nuclear missile); it comes from narrative control, or what we used to call “soft power.” The difference now is that the Hegemon does not control soft power anymore. The Global Majority is perfecting, in real-time, its own soft power counterpunches.

A systemically sociopathic society

The narrative controllers may still be able to obliterate key facts from western public opinion, for instance, on ethnic cleansing. Christian Arabs have been systematically ethnic-cleansed in Palestine. In the early 1950s, Bethlehem was 86 percent Christian, a figure that has since plummeted to a dismal 12 percent today. The biblical psychopaths built a wall around Bethlehem, annexed land for the benefit of armed Jewish settlers, and ethnically cleansed Christians.

Serious studies on hyper-ethnocentrism or the systemically sociopathic character of Israeli society do not offer much solace when it comes to stopping a genocide.

Because the wound is much deeper. Alastair Crooke, a former diplomat with vast on-the-ground experience, is peerless among westerners when it comes to understanding the intricacies of West Asia.

In his columns and podcasts, he touches on the major wound laid bare by the war/genocide in Gaza: the schism, at the heart of the west, between an “illiberal social engineering project” posing as liberalism and a project to “recover the ‘eternal’ values (however imperfect) that once lay behind European civilization.”

Adding to the problem, the US–Israel power structures are joined at the hip. And they work under a sort of complementary logic. While Israel’s version of plunder is embodied in settler colonialism, the Hegemon – as brilliantly explained by Michael Hudson – has been on an orgy of rent-seeking financialized colonialism since the end of WWII.

And what Michael Hudson qualifies as the FIRE (finance–insurance–real estate) racket has calcified, as Alastair notes, into “a permanent framework to the Western political and geopolitical system.”

Thus, it’s no wonder that the Global Majority instinctively sees the Israel–US combo – bearing different forms of exploitation/plunder all the way to genocide – as the epitome of colonialism, now “softened” by a narrative control op into a meaningless “rules-based international order.”

It’s also no wonder that the Gaza genocide has sparked a renewed Global Majority-wide, anti-colonial wave.

Still, that’s not enough. No one is actually stopping the genocide. That would only be practically possible by inflicting a devastating military defeat on Israel – with the victors dictating the terms of capitulation. That’s not feasible – at least not yet – and contributes to the biblical psychopaths believing they can get away with anything.

‘A new horizon of human sacrifice’

Andrea Zhok is a professor of Ethical Philosophy at the University of Milan and one of the foremost independent Italian intellectuals. Zhok takes us further into the – appropriately tragic – dead-end now contemplated by the collective west.

The west under the Hegemon, he says, only ever had a Plan A. There was no Plan B. That implies the west will continue to apply all forms of Divide and Rule against the major Eurasian powers – Russia, China, and Iran. Zhok notes, correctly, that India is substantially under control.

That’s the crossroads scenario we’re in right now. Looking ahead, it’s either an Open Hot War or an array of Hybrid Wars between major powers and their vassals – essentially, the Third World War.

Zhok shows how the west under the Hegemon is now obsessed with creating “systemic wounds” capable of cyclical destruction. To open these “wounds,” there are two main procedures: war and pandemics.

He argues that only “a new horizon of human sacrifice” is capable of allowing the west’s “Ultimate Truth” to continue standing on its clay feet.

In fact, it is this “new horizon of human sacrifice” that is conditioning the west’s non-response – or worse, legitimization – of the Gaza genocide. And that is inexorably corroding the European psyche from the inside. What used to be called European civilization – now completely vassalized by the Hegemon – may not ever be cured of the cancer.

If these trials and tribulations were not enough, irrational messengers – under orders – are busy bringing us closer day after day to a nuclear war.

And some lowly functionaries even admit it, point blank.

It’s all here, in a conversation between Judge Andrew Napolitano and analysts Larry Johnson and Ray McGovern, during which the former refers to an email he received from a military/intel source. This is what the source told him:

Today, I listened to an extensive interview with an IDF ex-intelligence officer. His position was clear: ‘We are,’ he said, ‘aiming towards a world war’ (italics mine). Israel, therefore, shouldn’t stop itself from implementing some of the most radical measures because its actions will be measured retroactively in the context of the brutal world conflict to come.

This should be seen as the ultimate explanation for the Hegemon/Vassals’ nonstop frantic escalation in the intertwined Forever Wars front – from Gaza to Novorossiya.

That includes genocide – and genocide spin-offs, such as the $320 million ‘aid’ pier scam now turned into junk on the Gaza shore, bringing it all back to genocide all over again as the breadcrumb ploy of expelling/shipping Palestinians abroad has miserably failed.

“Aiming towards a world war” makes it all so clear who’s really running the show. And the whole multipolar world is still being held hostage.

Pepe Escobar is a columnist at The Cradle, editor-at-large at Asia Times and an independent geopolitical analyst focused on Eurasia. Since the mid-1980s he has lived and worked as a foreign correspondent in London, Paris, Milan, Los Angeles, Singapore and Bangkok. He is the author of countless books; his latest one is Raging Twenties.