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This week provided an instructive juxtaposition of summits. In Italy, the United States and its Western allies convened the Group of Seven (G7) talking shop, while in Russia the BRICS nations held a workmanlike summit for their foreign ministers.

The G7 has become a shorthand term for elitist Western dominance over the world economy. On the other hand, the relatively new group known as BRICS can be seen as a progressive forum and voice for the global majority. While the former is shrivelling with irrelevance, the latter is steadily growing in importance for authentic international development.

There was a time when the U.S. and a clique of Western capitalist nations (including Japan) were viewed with respectability and an aura of global leadership. The heyday of Western economic and political power has waned in line with the systemic failing of U.S.-led capitalism as a model for the rest of the world to emulate. The presumed moral authority of these nations has also diminished as their reputation for hypocrisy and insufferable arrogance has burgeoned.

Indeed, the G7 has become a caricature of power. The United States, Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Canada and Japan are seen as being ruled by self-serving extortionists, contributing little to global development. Their presumed superiority is untenable and looks ridiculous. The group represents a neocolonialist clique whose exploitation of finance and natural resources of other nations is an obscenity and shackle on the abundant potential for world development.

By contrast, the BRICS coalition of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa plus a growing number of other nations, collectively known as the Global South, is a living harbinger of a more just and equitable international order. The multipolar world that the BRICS represent and advocate has become the practical roadmap for proper international development. It is based on cooperation, partnership, and mutual respect grounded in a genuine commitment to the principles of the United Nations Charter.

The BRICS summit this week held in the beautiful city of Nizhny Novgorod on the Volga River was a convening of foreign ministers. In October, the national leaders of the BRICS will gather in the Russian city of Kazan. The list of nations seeking to join the group has reached 50, representing every continent. In terms of combined economic power and population, the BRICS Plus has far surpassed the G7.

At the G7 confab, the leaders of that motley crew look like yesterday’s men. U.S. President Joe Biden is languishing in record-low poll numbers among his citizens while Britain’s Sunak, France’s Macron, and Germany’s Scholz are clinging onto power by their fingernails. European Union elections this week showed a cratering in voter support for Macron and Scholz. No doubt their slavish pandering to Uncle Sam’s warmongering in Ukraine while their citizens endure hardship and poverty rightly took a toll.

The G7 has dispensed with any pretense of standing for international economic development. The entire summit in Italy can be summed up as a gathering for warmongering and theft. The disreputable clique could henceforth be labeled the “economic wing of NATO”. Guest of honor was the corrupt dictator of Ukraine, Vladimir Zelensky, wearing his pantomime military fatigues and being ladled with tens of billions more dollars. His G7 patrons pledged $50 billion a year for the NeoNazi Kiev regime to buy more weapons “until it prevails” in the proxy war against Russia. This is despite Russia winning decisively in that two-and-half-year conflict and the Kiev regime facing oblivion from corruption and alienation from a war-sickened population.

Now should be a time of diplomacy to bring the NATO proxy war madness in Ukraine to an end, as Brazil, Russia, India, China, and others are urging. But the warmongers of the U.S., EU, G7 and NATO have no such qualms about escalating the futile hostilities to a nuclear apocalypse. The war racket is an addiction for psychopaths and the crony capitalism of the military-industrial complex at the heart of Western economies. It is beyond reason and diplomacy.

How much more Western taxpayer money can be thrown at the veritable black hole that is the NATO war racket? Already, the U.S. and its Western partners in crime have shelled out the order of $200-300 billion into this mafia state. Now they are to funnel another $50 billion a year. To make that seem more respectable, the NATO powers have come up with the cover that the funds are to be provided by interest from the $300 billion of Russia’s wealth that was illegally seized by Western powers at the start of the proxy war in Ukraine back in February 2022. The latest move is outright theft on an unprecedented scale. This will boomerang badly for the European nations in particular. Moscow said in response to the looting of its sovereign wealth that the assets of European nations held in Russia would be appropriated in retaliation.

The G7 is an anachronism of a bygone era of Western colonialism and imperialist “might is right” modus operandi. Under the laughable guise of “rules-based order”, the United States and its hegemonic vassals are seen for what they really are by the rest of the world. They stand for nothing progressive or productive. The only thing consistent with this Western disorder is unilateralist warmongering and looting imposed on the rest of the planet. From the European empires to the American Empire of Lies, an era spanning about 500 years is coming to an end.

Fortunately, the historical charade of Western villainy wearing virtuous clothing is unravelling at a quickening speed. The proverbial emperor has no clothes, he is naked and grotesque. The Western system is shattering under the weight of its internal political and economic crises. All the G7 promises made this week in the Italian port city of Bari are empty and bankrupt. In forthcoming elections, Britain, France and the U.S. are set for major disruption reflecting growing popular contempt for the incumbent office holders. In that case, all bets are off.

The Western disorder embodied by the G7 circus clowns has created a world mess. Hunger, war, conflict, poverty and genocide in Gaza are the symptoms. To those afflictions, we may add the insane threat of nuclear annihilation against Russia and China that the Western imperialists are relentlessly and recklessly pushing. Because war is always the ultimate function of neocolonialist capitalism. Peaceful coexistence and development are impossible under this despicable system and its fraudulent pretensions.

When all is said and done, humanity will have to work together – indeed is already working together – to harness its prodigious resources of natural wealth and innovation in partnership for a viable world. A world that is fit for the vast majority of its people to enjoy in material and spiritual harmony. Mutual respect is the key, and the BRICS hold that key.

The destruction and criminality of the G7 clique should not militate against the very real prospect of international solidarity, development and peaceful coexistence.

The BRICS and the majority of nations are striving for a way forward. The G7 is the relic of an unfortunate world that needs to be eventually overcome and left behind as a failed era.