President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's address to the U.N. General Assembly had the characteristics of a roadmap not only for Turkey, but also for many developing and underdeveloped countries in Asia.
Following World War II, the U.N. General Assembly witnessed many important and historic speeches that narrated the Cold War period. Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat's oration in 1974, Cuban Prime Minister Fidel Castro's harangue in which he harshly chastised U.S. presidents John Kennedy and Richard Nixon in 1960, Soviet politician Nikita Khrushchev's offensive speech in which he took his shoe off and hit it on the lectern while talking about U.S. imperialism and the hard-hitting allocutions of Latin American leaders who were stimulated by the wave of revolutions in the 1980s are the first examples that spring to my mind. But, of course, there must have been many other ardent speeches that rocked the 1990s with the potential to make history. Even though they were verbalized by figures from different background and nationalities, they were all one and the same in that they criticized the U.S.'s and the West's brutal, occupant and neo-colonial policies that polarized the world of that time.
In this period as a whole, from 1947 to the 1990s, the two main poles of the world, the U.S. and the Soviet Union, as well as secondary countries that escaped from the Cold War paradigm, determined the world political map. The Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), which is considered to have emerged with the Havana Declaration in 1970, fizzled out due to its cosmopolitan nature. This movement, which incorporated 55 percent of the world's population and two-thirds of U.N. member countries, failed to gather such incompatible countries as Cuba and Saudi Arabia under the same roof. When we consider the fact that the five main victors of World War II (China, France, Russia, the U.K. and the U.S.) became the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council (UNSC), it is not that difficult to see how and under what circumstances the U.N. was established. This alliance, which was formed for the sake of global balance and status quo, is also the mainspring of current economic and political crises.
While the U.S. was reconstructing Europe after World War II in line with its neo-colonial politics, it was well aware that it would encounter a bankrupt economy in the 1990s as a result of the Balkanization and fragmentation in Eastern European countries as well as its burgeoning ageing population. When we look at the overall picture of Europe today, we see that the U.K. is striving to get away from the EU and even Germany is on the verge of secession, not to mention eastern and southern Europe. China, a self-styled communist country, has been employing people for a mere hundred dollars and thus financing the U.S. for many years with its trade surplus.
What did the U.S. do with this Asian capital? It manufactured stealth aircraft, intercontinental missiles and nuclear warheads, declaring itself the "police" of the world. When President Nixon, who was demonized by Fidel at the U.N. General Assembly, could not handle the heavy burden imposed by the Vietnam War in 1971, he removed the dollar's dependence on gold in order to issue money freely. From that day onward, the dollar became a currency that depended on the blood of the poor rather than on gold. Until Nixon, one ounce of gold used to be valued at $35 (TL 79.11). However, after the Nixon administration and the Vietnam War, $1 was made equal to thousands of liters of Vietnamese, Latin American, Afghan, Bosnian, Kurdish and Turkish blood. The more blood was shed, the more valuable the dollar became.
If you look at the periods in which the dollar hit the highest levels after World War II, you will see that these are the periods when the U.S. invaded Asia and Latin America. Since Nixon, the U.S. has functioned as the greatest counterfeiter in the world. The dollar is worth the blood of Asian people, who were killed by the military industrial complex thanks to Asian money. This is what China and Asian members of the UNSC were made to do by the U.S., the U.K. and France.
Well, what did the aforementioned Western partners of the council do in Russia? They inherited the tremendous industrial infrastructure and space technology of the Soviet Union. They entrusted this heritage to a dictatorship of oligarchs who formed a "balance of terror" in China and Russia. Today, Russian President Vladimir Putin's new strategy is hinting at this awareness to some extent. However, as long as Russia remains in this balance of terror, we should approach Russia's Eurasian union project with suspicion. If Russia remains in this balance of terror and continues its clandestine partnership with Germany, this will work to its own detriment. So, how to tackle this balance of terror? How can we get rid of this economic structure and the reserve currency of the dollar that depends on bloodshed? Erdoğan's speech at the U.N. General Assembly was important in this context. Turkey, beyond any doubt, is offering a new path out of this system. This is not an approach that polarizes the world strictly like the Cold War period and nourishes itself politically and ideologically through polarization. Rather, it offers the idea of a new Europe, new Asia and a fair international order. The motto "the world is bigger than five," which was also reiterated by Erdoğan, does not only imply a way out from this unfair structure of the U.N., but also from the aforementioned balance of terror and dollar-oriented economic system. This balance of terror is based on hypocrisy and double standards just as we witnessed when those pretending to be democratic accepted coup-maker Abdel Fattah el-Sissi as the legitimate political leader of Egypt. They created Islamophobia with organizations such as ISIS, which are essentially the products of their own policies, while complaining about anti-Semitism at the same time. That is why Erdoğan pointed to the Egyptian military coup and stressed that he is against both Islamophobia and anti-Semitism. Beyond any doubt, this is a new outlet that will leave its mark on the 21st century.
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