Tuesday, February 11, 2025

Polaris of Enlightenment

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How the Belt and Road Initiative will connect the world

The new multipolar world order

  • The Belt and Road Initiative is the largest infrastructure project in the world today, involving over 150 countries.
  • This year's BRI Media Forum in Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan Province, is currently being attended by leading media organizations from 76 countries.
  • The Nordic Times is participating in the forum as one of the first media outlets from the Western bloc to report on the event and the developments surrounding it.
Published 30 August 2024
– By Editorial Staff

The name of the project, the “Belt and Road Initiative” or less formally “New Silk Road”, abbreviated to BRI, refers to the historic trade route linking China, Europe and Africa that ran from Roman times for a millennium and a half until the 15th century.

The initiative was originally launched by Chinese President Xi Jinping in 2013. The stated basic premise on which the project is based is so-called multilateralism, which in looser terms refers to opening up voluntary cooperation opportunities between independent actors by promoting dialogue. The BRI project is generally described as an expression of the essence of China’s foreign policy, by some even as an indirect Chinese response to Western globalism.

Main international meeting point

A cornerstone of the project is the ambition to link the countries of the world with modern transportation and trade routes, in particular by building new high-speed railways between all continents. In a broader sense, the BRI’s purpose is also described as promoting communication and exchange between nations and different cultures “to contribute to mutual benefits and understanding” and, by doing so, improve the conditions for peace and long-term global stability.

Alongside the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, which is more focused on senior policymakers of the BRICS countries, the New Silk Road’s various forums are often described as the most significant international meeting place in China at the moment. The Nordic Times is covering this year’s media-themed Belt and Road Forum, which is taking place in Sichuan, Southwest China, from August 28 to September 3. A total of 191 media organizations from 76 different countries are present, with many leading media mainly from South America, Eastern Europe and Asia.

The project is receiving a lot of attention in China’s public sphere, with a television report from part of a session of the media forum in Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan province, being highlighted on the country’s largest news program, CCTV.

Pictures from the construction of the railroad to Laos’ capital Vientiane. Photo: Christophe95/CC BY-SA 4.0

Hungary and Serbia first in Europe

The Belt and Road Initiative is currently a worldwide initiative with a number of ongoing projects. Among the most famous infrastructure projects already completed are the railroad from China to Laos and on Indonesia’s main island of Java, and the ports of Hambantota International in Sri Lanka and Gawadar in Pakistan.

Hungary and Serbia have been the first in Europe to embrace the initiative on both an infrastructural and political level, with a high-speed railway currently being built by Chinese engineers between the countries’ capitals Budapest and Belgrade. Among Western European countries, the only participant at the moment is Luxembourg, which with its large airport has significant air traffic to China.

Western countries are left out

The Nordic countries are among a small number of countries, mainly from the US-dominated Western bloc, that have still chosen not to join the initiative.

From the US side, the project is generally described as a “fraud” by China to put countries in debt, enable corruption and violate human rights on an international scale.

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The miracle in the land of the Savior

The new multipolar world order

In just a few years, El Salvador defeated the brutal gang crime that had plagued the country for decades. President Nayib Bukele has been accused of being “undemocratic” by his globalist opponents, but among Salvadorans themselves he has achieved near-heroic status and is now spearheading a Bitcoin revolution.

Published 2 February 2025
– By Editorial Staff

El Salvador, literally “the Savior” or in other words “the land of the Savior”, formally became an independent country in 1842. The liberation of the Latin American country came after a civil war in the relatively newly formed country of the Central American Federation, which in 1823 had freed itself from the Mexican Empire, a Mexico that just two years earlier, in 1821, had proclaimed its independence from the Spanish crown.

Despite its name, the tiny nation would have to wait patiently for its salvation. El Salvador would come to be dominated by corrupt forces and has been known more than any other in modern times as part of Central America’s so-called “banana republics”, not only because of the presence of US-based corporate giants where the country went so far as to adopt the US dollar as its own currency, but also because El Salvador has long been known as a particular den of brutal and literally devil-worshipping criminal gangs, such as MS-13 and Barrio 18, which still have a strong presence even in the organized crime world.

Before that, the country was mainly associated with the protracted civil war that raged there for 13 long years between 1979 and 1992 in one of the many Cold War proxy conflicts between pro-American and pro-Soviet forces in the country.

Two years after the outbreak of the Salvadoran civil war, Nayib Bukele was born in 1981 in the capital, San Salvador. His father, Armando Bukele Kattán, was a prominent Palestinian businessman and Muslim leader who arranged for his first-born son to study law at the Central American University in El Salvador. Nayib never completed his degree, however, and instead went into business. According to him, this experience would allow him to develop two skills that he later described as crucial to his political career – communicating and leading with clarity.

Bukeles’ political career began in earnest in 2012 when he was elected mayor of Nuevo Cuscatlán, a small municipality outside the capital San Salvador. His successes there – including economic reforms and social programs – led him to become mayor of the capital San Salvador in 2015. During this time, he distinguished himself as a simultaneously pragmatic, outspoken and visionary leader.

Despite the enormous risks involved in challenging the political establishment, which was completely infested by the tentacles of gang crime, Bukele came to increasingly openly criticize them for destroying the country and for betraying their voters.

Bukele meets the people.

In 2017, Bukele was expelled from his then-party, the FMLN, following internal conflicts, and founded his own party, Nuevas Ideas, which would become the platform for his daring campaign to run for president on a message of renewal and modernization. Despite difficult obstacles put in his way by political opponents, Bukele eventually won the 2019 elections by a historic margin, becoming the first president since 1992 not to belong to the two dominant parties, the socialist-oriented FMLN or the more bourgeois-conservative ARENA.

“They can kill anybody”

However, the difficulties were not over despite the electoral victory of the Salvadoran president, with his opponents sparing no means to stop him. They still controlled the Supreme Court and 90% of the legislature.

– I had to veto everything, and they override my vetoes. And they enact, they approved over 70 laws that I veto, Bukele explains in an interview with American journalist Tucker Carlson.

The only solution Bukele saw was to also win a majority in the country’s Congress, which he would also succeed in doing. Today, only the electoral court, controlled by the liberal opposition, tried unsuccessfully to have the president impeached and jailed, which Bukele himself believes failed only because of the establishment’s fear of a large-scale popular revolt if he were to be removed from office.

Bukele tells Carlson that his first priority was to fulfill his election promise to tackle organized crime once and for all.

– You can’t do anything unless you have peace. And once you achieve peace, then you can struggle for the other things, like infrastructure, wealth, well being, quality of life. So we had to start with peace. And in the case of El Salvador, we were literally the murder capital of the world, says Bukele.

Bukele salutes the Salvadoran army.

One of the first things he did was to double the number of soldiers in the country’s army, equip them with modern equipment and then systematically deploy them to fight organized crime with a determination that had previously been lacking. The gangs, understandably, did not appreciate this and tried to fight back including a murder wave that killed 87 people in the small country in just three days.

– They can kill anybody. And if the state goes after them, the state has no intention of killing or harming anybody but the gang members. So you have 70,000 objectives, which were the 70,000 gang members, but they have 6 million possible targets (the population of the country). So it was almost an impossible task, said the president.

El Salvador’s new high-security prison CECOT, Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo or “terrorist prison” in English, houses the most serious gang members with a capacity for 40,000 prisoners. Life in the prison is extremely strict, with the only leisure time consisting of simple exercise and services by priests.

Even independent analysts point out that El Salvador is a very different country today than it was when Mr. Bukeles took office and that, according to the country’s official statistics, it has become the least crime-ridden of the American continents, including Canada and the United States.

– We’re safer than any other country in the western hemisphere. If I would have said that five years ago, they would say that I was crazy, right?

Mr. Bukele himself stresses that his government has not had access to any magic recipes, but that it has been able to solve the problem of gang crime because it had the political will and determination to actually do it.

– There’s always going to be crime, people breaking laws, but violent crime, people murdering and raping each other, is a voluntary decision that a government makes. Why would a government choose to have that? he asks.

Massive popular support

Politically, Bukeles’ El Salvador has also broken the mold on covid policy, with the government choosing to encourage healthy eating and exercise, rather than forcing the controversial covid vaccines on the population with covid passes. It was also one of the few countries to offer the drug hydroxychloroquine as an alternative treatment for COVID-19, something that Bukele pointed out was used by most world leaders themselves.

The focus of Bukele’s policies has been to push for economic reforms and, as part of this, he has made El Salvador the first country in the world to accept Bitcoin as legal tender meaning that it will be accepted as valid payment for all forms of debt and transactions. Enthusiasts of the new crypto-economy are now gathering in El Salvador, which many believe could become a new “tiger economy” in the Americas.

In the Western media, Bukele has been portrayed as something of a “dictator” who has rejected “human rights” in the context of mass arrests of suspected gang members and periods of prolonged military surveillance of specific areas of the country. Both domestic and international critics have accused the president of trying to centralize power, create a police state and undermine so-called democratic institutions and principles.

When he was re-elected in 2024 in a spectacular landslide with 84.6% of the vote, he responded to these criticisms in his much-publicized acceptance speech to the population by putting their rights before those of organized criminals.

– We are the safest country in the American continent. And what did they tell us? “You’re violating human rights”. Whose human rights? The rights of honest people? No. Perhaps we have prioritized the rights of the honest people over the criminals’ rights. That is all we have done, and that’s what you say is a human rights violation, Bukele declared.

Bukele with his wife Gabriela Roberta Rodríguez de Bukele. Photo: Casa Presidencial El Salvador

In an ironic response to similar epithets directed at him, he has referred to himself on Twitter/X as the “World’s coolest dictator”. The President has also become known for his extensive use of social media, particularly X, which he uses to communicate directly with the people, and sometimes to consult with the public on his decision-making.

This digital presence has made him very popular also among younger generations, who often see him as a modern leader of a very different type than the political establishment that ruled the country in the past.

The warning to the West

Bukele expresses personal criticism of the soft approach to criminals in the West, of which he considers El Salvador to be a part, pointing out that they are often seen as individuals with rights that need to be protected even if they are violent killers and organized gang members. This attitude, according to Bukele, ultimately leads to a point where civilization itself begins to crumble.

– So western civilization reached the peak. We can all agree that we’re in the decline. So that is happening because we’re not maintaining, we’re not giving the correct maintenance to the civilization, he says, explaining that we are no longer striving to do things as well and grandly as possible.

– Democracy works, but if you don’t maintain it, it will fall like the wall. So what we have right now is a huge erosion of Western civilization, Bukele concludes.

He points out that governments today seem mostly interested in appeasing individual constituencies to get their votes – for example, by giving them large sums of money or other generous promises, and that they no longer seem to care about what is good for the nation as a whole.

– You cannot go on. I mean, it’s like obvious. It’s like somebody eats too much, right? I mean, you can be a little fat, right? It’s fine. But then if somebody’s morbidly fat, somebody will come and say, okay, you mean you have to stop, right? Because, you know, your heart would. Your heart can’t take it anymore.

 

One focus for the outspoken president, now that the gangs have been defeated, is to attract investors and tourists to the country rather than being a haven for murderers and violent criminals. “There is enough money when no one steals is one of many similar quotes that sum up Bukele’s vision for the country’s future and have made him so popular with his own people.

Bukele often posts pictures showing how the country’s military and police fight organized crime. Photo: Nayib Bukele/FB

Many also argue that the success is an expression of the rise of a new generation of national populist leaders in a near-global revolt against the globalist “rainbow empire” characterized by gender ideology, demographic upheaval, coddling of violent criminals, and a huge gap between the political establishment and the population at large.

The Salvadoran president has also not been shy about explicitly criticizing influential globalists such as George Soros and others who he says have pushed for these kinds of developments in the West, and still have too much power over politics in many countries.

In his victory speech to the people in 2024, Bukele also articulated the importance for small nations to be alert to the actors of global politics, with El Salvador being just one example of many nations that have suffered in the wake of various factions of globalist-oriented actors and great powers.

– The civil war in El Salvador, which officially left over 85,000 Salvadorans dead, and displaced over 1 million people, was sponsored by two separate powers. There was a conflict between the West and the Soviet Union, and they wanted to fight, but not on their own soil. They didn’t want to provide the cannon fodder. So they decided to fight in other places around the world, and one of those places that they chose to fight was here in El Salvador. They tricked us. They told us to kill each other and we did as they said.

Bukele concluded by adding his view that there are now powerful players on the global stage who fear the example El Salvador has already shown.

We will continue to do the impossible, and El Salvador will continue to set an example for the world.

 

Nigeria to be next BRICS partner country

The new multipolar world order

Published 21 January 2025
– By Editorial Staff
Brazilian President Lula da Silva and Nigerian President Bola Tinubu are now members of the same club.

Nigeria, Africa’s most populous nation with over 228 million inhabitants, has officially joined BRICS as a partner country, the Brazilian presidency announced. The organization now has ten members and nine official partner countries.

The Brazilian Ministry of Foreign Affairs announced on Friday that Nigeria has now become the ninth official BRICS partner. The nation thus joins Belarus, Bolivia, Cuba, Kazakhstan, Malaysia, Thailand, Uganda and Uzbekistan.

In exercising its pro tempore presidency of BRICS, the Brazilian government announces today, January 17, 2025, the formal admission of Nigeria as a partner country of the grouping”, reads a formal statement.

BRICS now 10 member countries

In addition to the original five countries Brazil, Russia, India, South Africa and China Iran, Egypt, Ethiopia, the United Arab Emirates and Indonesia have recently become full members.

Among other things, the organization has stepped up efforts to develop an alternative payment system to reduce dependence on the US dollar. The initiative has faced opposition from US President Donald Trump, who has threatened to increase tariffs on member countries.

“Nigeria shares convergent interests with other members of BRICS. It plays an active role in strengthening South-South cooperation and in reforming global governance – issues that are top priorities during Brazil’s current presidency”, the official statement concludes.

Indonesia becomes the tenth BRICS member state

The new multipolar world order

Published 7 January 2025
– By Editorial Staff
Indonesia's president Prabowo Subianto.

Indonesia has formally joined the BRICS intergovernmental cooperation organization. This was announced by the current chair, Brazil.

As the largest economy and most populous nation in Southeast Asia, Indonesia shares with other BRICS members the support for the reform of the global governance institutions and contributes significantly to the deepening of Global South cooperation”, the Brazilian government wrote in a statement.

Priorities that align with Brazil’s theme for its presidency: ‘Enhancing Global South Cooperation for a More Inclusive and Sustainable Governance‘”, it continues.

Indonesia’s candidacy was originally approved by BRICS leaders in 2023, but the country of more than 270 million people chose to join the group only after a new national government took office.

Brics was founded in 2009 by Brazil, Russia, India and China – and South Africa joined two years later. Last year, the group was expanded to include Iran, Egypt, Ethiopia and the United Arab Emirates as full members – and countries such as Belarus, Bolivia, Kazakhstan, Thailand, Cuba, Uganda, Malaysia and Uzbekistan are expected to become official partners in 2025.

According to Russian political representatives, around 25 additional unnamed countries have expressed interest in cooperating with the BRICS group in various ways going forward.

China warns US: “A new Cold War cannot be won”

The new multipolar world order

Published 18 November 2024
– By Editorial Staff
China's leader says he is ready to work with Donald Trump's administration.