So much to do, so little time. May 2026 be the year of the Rebirth of the Pre-Socratics. As well as the year of the Rebirth of the Cool: reflection, introspection, silence, the search for inner equilibrium and when music is needed, an environment, physical and mental, equivalent to the Japanese jazz-kissa ethos.

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The desire of power in excess caused the angels to fall; the desire of knowledge in excess caused man to fall: but in charity there is no excess; neither can angel or man come in danger by it.

Francis Bacon

NAPOLI and PALERMO – Criss-crossing Italy, from Friuli and Piemonte to Tuscany, Umbria, Rome and the south – Napoli and Sicily – one cannot shake off that nagging feeling of a stunning anthropological/cultural blindness taking over what is and remains, without a doubt, the definitive civilization-state of the whole West (no competition).

How would Godard, if he was still alive, film this malaise, permeating Fritz Lang’s reinterpretation of Homer’s Odyssey at the Vila Malaparte in Capri, but without Brigitte Bardot’s lethal beauty? Alas, all of that is just memories – fragments shored against our ruins, to quote T.S.Eliot.

The stage in ruins, today, certainly has nothing Homeric about it, featuring the West, a puny ghost with an inflated chest, wallowing in its own irrelevance, superficiality, social fragmentation, absence of Spirit and absence of Logos, boosting its obsession for a Forever War, a tragedy treated like it was a child’s game, and not as what it really is: an abyss. No wonder Poseidon couldn’t care less about these stupid mortals.

In conversations with my Italian hosts, friends and new acquaintances, the cowardice and absence of political acumen among the “ruling” European classes was rendered crystal clear, along with their lack of courage to understand the rise of a new multipolar century (the title of my latest book, Il Secolo Multipolare, published in Italy earlier this month).

This artificial “Europe” wants by all means to keep an exhausted – politically and economically – paradigm, an archaic, anachronistic status quo that is forcing it to clam up, an empty shell, with extremely destructive consequences.

The blinding beauty of the Costa Esmeralda, between Amalfi and Ravello, barely disguises the fact that what prevails across the EU spectrum is a physical and metaphysical void, because the West has killed everything – even Beauty – and replaced it with Nothing. Nihilism Reigns.

Yet it’s a shallow Eurocentrism to believe that the Chaos prevailing in this little Western peninsula of Eurasia is convulsing the world. Eurasia – and East Asia – are living to the full in an extra dimension of optimism and cultural affirmation.

In the future, Europe may eventually adhere to paradigms from other cultures and in spite of itself even absorb them in a syncretism of acceptance. Just like Europe imposed on the whole Global Majority its paradigms and “values” since the middle of the 18th century.

The moral collapse of Western “civilization”

So across the West, 2025 was a legitimate Annus Horribilis in more ways than one. Future historians will remember it as the year when the old “order” based on easily twisted “rules” that governed the world for decades has been shattered as an organizing principle, even if it still exists as an apparatus. Institutions are still “functioning” – so to speak. Alliances have not crumbled – yet. “Rules” continue to be invoked and defended. Yet they don’t produce any discernible effects.

Francesca Albanese summed it all up, referring to the most horrible instance of total, moral collapse of Western “civilization”:

“Never would I have imagined seeing European leaders turn against their own citizens – crushing protest, free journalism, academic freedom – all to avoid holding a genocidal state to account.”

Yes: History rarely announces itself as barbarism. It often shows up disguised as “civilization”.

What we have now is a tawdry, indiscriminate US-Zionist axis land grab criminallly setting up the new normal, from the “Western Hemisphere” (Venezuela is just the beginning) to West Asia (Palestine, Lebanon, Syria) and soon, possibly, Greenland.

US think tanks actually believe that controlling Greenland, apart from the obvious imperial appropriation of extra natural resources, could interfere with the Russian Northern Sea Route – which the Chinese qualify as the Arctic Silk Road.

Not geoeconomically, but certainly in military terms: Greenland in this case could become an ideal base for American ISR assets, to be used to “support” – as in leading from behind – the Europeans in their Forever War in Ukraine, and to also threaten China.

Essentially, this would be a diversionist tactic to install Divide and Rule in the Russia-China strategic partnership while Trump 2.0 buys much needed time to reshape and upgrade the American industrial-military complex and fight the tech war on the AI front.

Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt – controlling tech companies  directly implicated in the Ukraine war, against Russia – is obsessed with the AI race. The Big Tech bet in the US is that the race will be defined by the 2040s (the Chinese are sure it will be much earlier). The winner will then make its mark in the 21st century. The stakes could not be higher: this is a race, essentially, between US Hegemony and the Russia-China-driven multi-nodal, multipolar world.

Mr. Oreshnik ready to distribute business cards

In 2025 the Forever Wars, predictably, continued unabated. Ukraine and Gaza morphed into the same war.

On Ukraine, the kabuki of the “peace” negotiations will keep rolling in 2026. Facts on the ground though are immutable. Russia will continue with its steady military advance. Moscow will increasingly devastate Ukrainian infrastructure. “Europe”, broken from the inside, is a dead continent walking. The US will not supply extra weapons. Moscow is in absolutely no hurry, as it has coldly calculated that the West will exhaust itself sooner rather than later.

Russia can get all of the “criminal organization” leadership in Kiev and beyond, including NATO/MI6 handlers, Oreshniked in a matter of a few minutes. As Andrei Martyanov has noted, Russian Resurs-series satellites conduct 24/7 scan of Earth’s surface “with resolutions which allow to track anyone, anywhere” as well as “provide targeting.” So why not go for the head of the snake? Because “Europe kills itself and 404 better than Russians ever imagined.”

Meawhile, the Russian snail offensive technique, combined with the mincing machine technique, has already, gradually, knocked out the extensive bunker system set up by NATO in Donbass, superior to the Maginot Line. These methods achieved a ten for one kill ratio in favor of Russia in relation to Ukraine. That’s another immutable fact on the battlefield. Only unredeemable fools deride Russia as “slow” and “weak”. The snail offensive will extend into 2026.

As for the Forever War, it is now a monopoly of European banking and finance. Plan A – with no plan B – was always to inflict a strategic defeat on Russia. It failed miserably – and the losses are immense. Enter, finally, Plan B, which is not even a plan: it’s War, which – like diamonds – is Forever, as a means to recover those mind-boggling sunk costs, restructure – unpayable – European deb and justify further financial scams branded as “security”.

When in doubt, consult Empedocles

Back to the kabuki. The new American tactic, in place by the end of 2025, is basically to ditch Europe – which is already a geopolitical corpse – and try to “seduce” Russia with a few diplo/economic carrots with the appearance of being mutually beneficial, at the same time persuading Moscow that Washington wants to integrate itself into the multipolar world.

Both Moscow and Beijing are wily enough to see what crude game is being played here. They will proceed with extreme caution – and in synch.

Russia will reach a Taoist paroxym of patience, explaining it has always been ready to negotiate – but only by respecting facts on the battlefield; digging deep to solve the root causes of the NATO/Ukraine/Russia drama; and aiming for a settlement that definitively ends the massive NATO proxy scam.

For their part, European mutts will keep piling up on conceptual garbage, defining Putin’s project as “Promethean” and “ideological”. Nonsense. It’s all about mutual respect, and indivisibility of security.

The US National Security Strategy, meanwhile, will keep advancing its Hybrid War attack on selected, perceived to be weak Global South nodes – especially on the “Western Hemisphere”, as in the Caribbean and Latin America.

All the more essential for BRICS to finally consolidate their act together – way before the annual summit in India in late 2026. BRICS needs to step up all the economic/financial experiments in what I previously named the “BRICs lab” on the way to build a really alternative, post-West independent payment system, free from the Western sanction dementia.

Russia, India and China are finally remixing the original “RIC” Primakov triangle, with their interlocking strategic partnerships and ever increasing cooperation on trade, agriculture, tech and de facto de-dollarization (no need to spell it out). BRICS already produces over 42% of world’s oil; controls over 20% – and up – of golden reserves (Russia-China have 14% – and rising); and accounts for over 30% of global GDP.

Back to the light at the end of the dark Western tunnel: Italy. Only two months ago Philosophy grandmaster Massimo Cacciari delivered a magisterial lecture in Agrigento – the Italian capital of culture in 2025. Empedocles, the Greek pre-socratic master, was born nearby. Empedocles coined the cosmogonic theory of the four classical elements – air, water, earth and fire –, with Love and Strife mixing them non-stop.

Empedocles, influenced among others by the great Heraclitus and Parmenides, in the end influenced none other that Aristotle, Nietzsche, Holderlin and Francis Bacon.

We should re-learn, like Bacon, as Cacciari observes, what Empedocles taught – so to better deconstruct the Anglo-American dogma of positivity: that magic formula that gave birth to unbridled consumerism and the marketization of life, copied and recopied ad infinitum by the periphery of the Empire of Chaos, eliminating any ethical, philosophical, semantic, sociological, historical and political reflection over notions such as “democracy” and “freedom”.

So much to do, so little time. May 2026 be the year of the Rebirth of the Pre-Socratics. As well as the year of the Rebirth of the Cool: reflection, introspection, silence, the search for inner equilibrium and when music is needed, an environment, physical and mental, equivalent to the Japanese jazz-kissa ethos.

As we’re closing an Annus Horribilis, let’s hear it for the Man of the Year – who made it less horrible: Burkina Faso’s Ibrahim Traore. A lovely dictum is currently permeating historically multipolar Sicily’s selected intellectual circles: We want to be the north of Burkina Faso, not the south of Lithuania. Blessed should be all that Magna Grecia, Mare Nostrum wisdom.